On Sunday 27 July 1214 Philip II of France destroyed the coalition of Otto IV, the counts of Flanders and Boulogne and King John's English, deciding the fate of Normandy and the Empire and, within a year, bringing on Magna Carta.
The Battle of Bouvines was fought on Sunday 27 July 1214 on the plain beside the bridge over the Marque, between Lille and Tournai. Philip II of France defeated an allied army led by the emperor Otto IV, Count Ferdinand of Flanders, Renaud de Dammartin, Count of Boulogne, and William Longespée, Earl of Salisbury, who commanded the troops paid for by King John of England. Ferdinand, Renaud and Salisbury were all taken prisoner, and Otto escaped only because his knights found him another horse.
Few medieval battles settled so much at once. Bouvines confirmed Philip's conquest of Normandy, Anjou and Maine from the Angevins, ended Otto IV's hope of ruling the Empire in favour of the young Frederick II, and sent King John home, bankrupt and discredited, to the barons who forced him to seal Magna Carta less than a year later.
Between 1202 and 1204 Philip had taken Normandy, Anjou and Maine from King John, a conquest completed by the fall of Château Gaillard and the surrender of Rouen. John spent the next decade building a coalition to recover them. His nephew Otto IV, excommunicated and fighting the pope's candidate Frederick II for the imperial crown, needed English money. The counts of Flanders and Boulogne feared Philip on their borders: Ferdinand had been forced to cede Aire and Saint-Omer to Philip's son Louis in 1212, and Renaud de Dammartin had been stripped of his lands by the king.
The allied plan was a pincer. John landed at La Rochelle in February 1214 to attack from the south-west while the coalition gathered in Flanders, and its southern arm failed first: on 2 July, at La Roche-aux-Moines on the Loire, John's Poitevin barons refused to fight Prince Louis, and John retreated. Philip, who had taken the main royal army north, was left to face the allies alone. On 27 July, marching from Tournai toward Lille, he was caught as his army crossed the bridge at Bouvines, and turned to fight rather than be attacked strung out on the road.
Modern estimates give the two armies similar strength, perhaps 7,000 to 9,000 men each, with the French stronger in mounted knights and the allies in infantry, including Brabançon mercenaries. The French right, facing the Flemings, was organised by Guérin, a Knight Hospitaller and bishop-elect of Senlis who acted as Philip's chief minister; Duke Odo III of Burgundy and the knights of Champagne fought there. Philip held the centre with the militias of the northern communes in front of him, and the left, under Robert of Dreux and the Count of Ponthieu, faced Renaud and Salisbury.
The allies placed the Flemish knights opposite the French right, Otto IV with his German and Saxon contingents in the centre beneath his standard, a gilded eagle over a dragon mounted on a cart, and Renaud, Salisbury and the Brabançon infantry on their right. Philip's army had one commander. The coalition had three, each with his own grievance against the king of France and his own reasons for wanting him dead or captured.
The fighting began on the French right, where Guérin opened with a charge by about 150 mounted sergeants from Soissons, meant to disorder the Flemish knights before the French nobles engaged. The Flemish wing held for much of the afternoon before it broke, and Ferdinand, badly wounded, was captured.
In the centre the German infantry drove back the communal militias and reached the king. Soldiers with hooked lances dragged Philip from his horse, and he was saved when his knights closed around him, Pierre Tristan helped him to a fresh mount and Galon de Montigny raised and lowered the royal banner to call for help. The French knights counter-attacked; Otto's horse was wounded under him, the imperial standard was broken and taken, and Otto rode from the field.
The last allied force to resist was Renaud de Dammartin's. He had formed his Brabançon pikemen, 700 of them in William the Breton's figure, into a double ring, and rode out from it to charge and back inside to recover, until the French broke the ring and took him. Salisbury had already been struck down, by William the Breton's account by Philip of Dreux, bishop of Beauvais, who fought with a club. Philip II forbade a long pursuit, and the battle was over before nightfall.
Philip returned to Paris in triumph. William the Breton describes country people crowding the roads to jeer at the captive Count of Flanders, and the students of Paris celebrating for seven days and nights. Ferdinand spent twelve years imprisoned in the Louvre and was released only in 1227; Renaud de Dammartin died a prisoner the same year. The abbey of Notre-Dame de la Victoire was founded outside Senlis to give thanks for the day.
The truce of Chinon on 18 September 1214 left Philip's conquests in place, and the Angevin lands north of the Loire were never recovered. Otto IV, his army and prestige gone, lost the Empire to Frederick II, crowned at Aachen in 1215, and Philip sent Frederick the eagle from Otto's standard. In England, John's failure turned baronial resentment into rebellion: the barons forced him to seal Magna Carta at Runnymede in June 1215, and in 1216 some of them offered the English crown to Philip's son Louis.
The battle is known above all through William the Breton, Philip's chaplain, who stood behind the king during the fighting and described it twice, in prose in his continuation of the Gesta Philippi Augusti and in verse in the Philippide. Both are eyewitness testimony and royal propaganda at once: Philip prays before the battle, is the target of a plot to kill him, and wins by the judgment of God. An independent narrative comes from the Anonymous of Béthune, who wrote for a Flemish lord on the losing side.
In the nineteenth century Bouvines became a founding story of the French nation, taught in schoolbooks as the day when king and communes stood together against a foreign coalition. Georges Duby's The Legend of Bouvines (Le Dimanche de Bouvines, 1973) used that afterlife to show how each age remade a single Sunday for its own purposes. The village church at Bouvines, rebuilt at the end of the nineteenth century, tells the story of the battle in its stained glass.