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By Root 1578 0

Edward’s war, he violated Flemish sentiments of homage. He proposed that the King’s eldest son, Edward, Prince of Wales, later known as the Black Prince, should supplant the Count of Flanders’ eldest son, Louis de Male, as heir and future ruler of Flanders. This was too much for the good Flemish towns. To disinherit their natural lord in favor of the English prince, they stoutly told Artevelde, was “a thing they would surely never agree unto.” Moreover the Pope, under King Philip’s pressure, had already excommunicated them for deserting their sovereign, causing much uneasiness and damage to business. Resentment rose against Artevelde, combined with suspicion that he had embezzled funds for his own use.

“Then every man began to murmur against Jacques” (Jacob) and when he rode through Ghent, “trusting so much in his greatness that he thought soon to reduce them to his pleasure,” angry crowds followed him to his house, demanding an accounting for all the revenues of Flanders. Then he began to fear and on entering his house, closed fast the gates, doors, and windows against the mob shouting in the street. Coming to the window “in great humilitie,” Artevelde defended his nine years’ governorship and promised a full account next day if the crowd would disperse. “Then they all cryed with one voyse, Come down to us and preche not so hyghe, and gyve us an account of the great treasure of Flaunders!” Now in terror, Artevelde shut the window and attempted to escape out the back door to an adjoining church, but the mob of 400 men broke down the doors, seized and slew him on the spot. Thus in July 1345 Fortune’s Wheel brought down the great master of Flanders.

Afterward representatives of the Flemish towns hurried to England to appease King Edward, who was in a great wrath at the event. Assuring him of the alliance, they suggested a way in which his line could still inherit Flanders without dispossessing the rightful lord. Let Edward’s eldest daughter, Isabella, then aged thirteen, marry the Count of Flanders’ fourteen-year-old son Louis, who was in the communes’ custody, “so that ever after the county of Flaunders shall be in the issue of your chylde.” Edward was much taken with the scheme, although the prospective bridegroom, out of loyalty to France, was not. When Edward tried to force the betrothal on him two years later, the Count’s escape, leaving behind an unwed princess, was to impinge indirectly but decisively on the life of Enguerrand de Coucy.

To contemporaries the power of the King of England seemed puny compared with that of the King of France; Villani referred to him as “il piccolo re d’Inghilterra” (the little King of England). It is doubtful if he actually intended to conquer France. Medieval wars between Europeans were not aimed at strategic conquest but rather at seizure of dynastic rule at the top by inflicting enough damage to bring about downfall of the opponent. Something like this was probably Edward’s aim, and owing to his base in Guienne and his footholds in Flanders and northern France, it would not have seemed unrealizable.

The first abortive phase had been so costly as to have been ruinous if Edward had absorbed the cost; instead, he passed on the ruin to others. He had financed the war through loans underwritten by the great Florentine banking firms of the Bardi and Peruzzi. The sums, according to Villani, amounted to between 600,000 and 900,000 gold florins owed to the Bardi and two-thirds as much to the Peruzzi, secured on expected revenue from the wool tax. When this brought in too little and Edward could not repay, the drain on the Italian companies bankrupted them. The Peruzzi failed in 1343, the Bardi suspended a year later, and their crash brought down a third firm, the Acciaiuioli. Capital vanished, stores and workshops closed, wages and purchases stopped. When, by the malignant chance that seemed to hound the 14th century, economic devastation in Florence and Siena was followed first by famine in 1347 and then by plague, it could not but seem to the unfortunate people that the anger of God