On 7 August 1479, near the village of Guinegate in Artois, the army of Archduke Maximilian of Austria, made up mostly of Flemish infantry, fought the French army of King Louis XI under Philippe de Crèvecœur, lord des Cordes, who had come to relieve the besieged town of Thérouanne. The French cavalry routed Maximilian's horse, but his infantry held its ground, and the French archers who fell to plundering the baggage were cut down. Maximilian kept the field. The battle is often read as an early victory of pike-armed infantry over an army built on archers.
The Burgundian inheritance
In 1477 Maximilian of Habsburg married Mary, daughter and heir of Charles the Bold, duke of Burgundy, and with her came the Burgundian lands in the Netherlands, which he had to defend against Louis XI of France. The conflict is known as the war of the Burgundian succession. The historian M. Krasoń calls the battle that followed a minor episode in a war of succession that was in the end settled by diplomacy, but one with a large tactical legacy.1
In the summer of 1479 Maximilian, with the Flemings under his command, besieged Thérouanne. Philippe de Commynes, the French king's counselor, wrote in his memoirs that the lord des Cordes, Louis's lieutenant in Picardy, gathered all the forces of the province and its frontier towns, with eight thousand franc-archers, and marched to relieve the town; Maximilian raised the siege and advanced to meet him at Guinegate.2
Cavalry and pikes
Commynes, who admitted he wrote only from hearsay, gave Maximilian twenty thousand men or more from Flanders, a few Germans and about three hundred English, and the French some eleven hundred men-at-arms of the king's standing companies. The more numerous French cavalry broke Maximilian's horse at once and chased it, with its commander Philip of Ravenstein, as far as Aire. Des Cordes himself joined the pursuit, which Commynes thought no commander should do.3
The infantry decided the day. Maximilian fought on foot with it, and Commynes credits some two hundred noblemen, among them the Count of Romont and the Count of Nassau, with holding the Flemish ranks together after the cavalry had gone. The memoirs' 19th-century editor adds, from the Burgundian chronicler Jean Molinet, stories of Maximilian's own prowess in the fight. Meanwhile the French franc-archers fell to plundering the Burgundian wagons and were cut down in large numbers.4
A costly victory
By Commynes's account Maximilian lost more men and more prisoners than the French, but he remained master of the field. Commynes believed that if the archduke had turned straight back to Thérouanne, or even to Arras, he would have met no resistance, but he did not dare. Louis XI, Commynes writes, was badly shaken by the news, forbade any further battle without his consent, and from then on worked for a peace on his own terms, which came with the Treaty of Arras in December 1482.5
Historians have seen the battle as a turning point in infantry tactics. Britannica credits Maximilian's military innovations, and the pikemen trained after the Swiss model who later grew into the Landsknechte, with saving him at Guinegate. Krasoń argues that the defeat turned the French away from large corps of archers toward infantry armed with polearms, and that Maximilian's success laid the ground for the Landsknecht formations of the 16th century. On the same ground in 1513 the French were beaten again, by the English, in the battle known as the Battle of the Spurs.6
