Bouvines Sunday: July 27, 1214: The War in the Middle Ages

Bouvines, July 27, 1214: Although it is Sunday, the day that should be entirely dedicated to God and on which no blood may be shed, the troops of the French king Philip Augustus battle in Flanders with the armies of the German Emperor Otto IV and his allies.
The Battle of Bouvines, which the French king managed to decide in his favour, is considered in traditional French historiography as one of the series of important battles that played a decisive role in the emergence of the French monarchy, as one of the heroic deeds of a courageous ancestry destined to become the proud French nation.
In this book, the French Amales historian Georges Duby breaks with this tradition. He does not describe the Battle of Bouvines as a military historian, who scrutinizes the military course, or as a political historian, who tries to trace the power-political implications of the event, but as an anthropologist. His approach focuses on the question of how medieval people experienced the military and what place war and peace occupied in medieval society. The Sunday of Bouvines therefore not only gives an account of the duel I between two princes and their knights, but also offers a good insight into one of the most important social phenomena that still occupies us today: war.