Introduction

The military system of a State is accounted for by various factors – the organisation of its society, the nature of its economy, the available resources, the structure of government, its administration, its technological level and so on. The way in which the State undertakes and conducts a war follows from the same factors. For this reason, the progress of military operations obeys logic and rules proper to the time. The task of the historian is to understand these broad principles so as to be able to interpret events without falling into the grave but all too easy sin of anachronism. Contamine has perfectly captured the method of warfare in the Middle Ages:

Following the work of Oman, Erben, Verbruggen and their successors, we know that the military commanders of medieval times not only possessed some notions of strategy and tactics, but also that they attempted to conduct their military operations in accordance with these principles. Here, I will analyse the example of Brabant in the second half of the fourteenth century. This should allow us to improve our still fragmentary knowledge of the art of war in the Middle Ages. The records at our disposal are abundant.