"Battle of Courtrai" Topic

"The fourteenth century opened with a series of wars of succession and of territorial aggrandizement. In Scandinavia, the worst situation was in Sweden, where King Birger II (1290–1318) executed two princeling rivals to his throne, thus propelling the kingdom into a civil war that lasted almost throughout the second decade of the century. Contemporaneously, Danes and Poles joined together in 1316 to invade the Brandenburg lands in order to contain German expansionism into their own spheres of influence in the eastern Baltic. A double election, that of Ludwig of Bavaria and Frederick of Austria, to the German imperial throne in 1314 resulted in a decade of destructive war in that already war-weary kingdom. Ultimately, Ludwig emerged the victor, but at the price of arrested economic development, political repression and other forms of civic regression in Germany.

The period was also one of border wars: Anglo-Scottish, Franco-Flemish and Anglo-French. For years the English had claimed a vague overlordship over Scotland, and the Scots at various times resisted. As English interference became more insistent and more brutal, the Scots reacted with ever greater violence and brutality themselves. They were not successful against King Edward I and he was not entirely effective against them, but they delivered what seemed to be a crushing blow to his successor Edward II (1307–27) at the battle of Bannockburn in 1314. Because the English were unwilling to withdraw their claims or concede territory the Scots believed was rightfully theirs, the aftermath of Bannockburn developed into a prolonged period of guerrilla warfare in the borderlands of the two kingdoms. This, in turn, precipitated an almost total collapse of economic production in the war-ravaged regions during the Great Famine.

The Scots under Robert Bruce and his brother Edward Bruce opened a major second front in the savage war by using the small northern islands as a jumping-off point and invading Ireland. They expected an Irish rebellion against that people's English overlords, but like Scotland, if not more so, Ireland was suffering from famine, and no great national uprising took place. The English and Scots, besides inflicting harm on each other, harried the Irish, living off the land by plunder and disciplining enemies of their cause by peremptory and barbaric punishments. The situation, though precarious for the invading Scots, still held promise because the native population of southern Wales rebelled against their English overlords at about the same time, in the wake, that is, of the death of the region's principal English marcher lord at Bannockburn. The power vacuum created by this death and by English commitments against Scotland and in Ireland furnished the Welsh with a unique opportunity. Yet, in the event, the English put down the Welsh rebellion and, helped by a Scottish withdrawal from Ireland, re-established a modicum of control there by 1320. Nevertheless, border raiding and guerrilla warfare, much to English disadvantage, continued in the main theatre of confrontation, the Anglo-Scottish frontier…"
Full article here
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Amicalement
Armand

Roosebeke, where the French got full revenge for the "battle of the Golden Spurs"….

Glad you enjoyed it my friend!. (smile)

Amicalement
Armand