Battle of Poitiers (1356)

On 19 September 1356, about eight kilometres south of Poitiers in western France, a small Anglo-Gascon army led by Edward, the Black Prince, defeated a much larger French force under King John II and took the king prisoner. Fought during the Hundred Years' War, the battle threw France into turmoil and led, four years later, to a peace that handed England a third of the French kingdom.

English kings had held lands in France since the Norman conquest, and by the fourteenth century the most important was Gascony, whose wine trade through Bordeaux earned the English crown more than all its other customs duties. In 1337 the French king declared these lands forfeit, opening a long war. After the English victory at Crécy and the capture of Calais in 1347, fighting slowed during the Black Death, but a peace drafted at Guînes in 1354 was never ratified, and both sides prepared for renewed war.

The Black Prince, eldest son of Edward III, arrived in Bordeaux in September 1355 and led a destructive mounted raid as far as Narbonne. On 4 August 1356 he set out again from Bergerac with about 6,000 fighting men, burning and looting across a wide band of territory as he moved north towards the Loire. His aim was to tempt the French into attacking him on ground of his choosing.

John II, delayed by a siege in Normandy, crossed the Loire on 10 September and tried to cut off the English retreat. A papal envoy, Cardinal Talleyrand, sought a truce. After a skirmish on 17 September the Anglo-Gascons took up a strong position on a wooded hill near Nouaillé, protected by hedges, a marsh, pits and trenches. With food and water running out, the prince offered generous terms in return for safe passage, but the French refused.

The French, between 14,000 and 16,000 strong, fought almost entirely on foot in four divisions. The first, with two small groups of armoured cavalry, attacked soon after dawn, apparently believing the English were withdrawing. English longbowmen, firing from the marsh and from behind a hedge, drove off the horsemen and the crossbowmen; both French marshals were killed or captured. A second division of 4,000 men-at-arms under the Dauphin Charles then fought for two hours at the hedge before falling back.

In the confusion, the king's brother, the Duke of Orléans, left the field with about half of the third division, and three of John's sons were also taken out of danger. Those who remained made a weak attack and were repulsed. John then led forward the last division, perhaps 4,000 men-at-arms, with the Oriflamme, the sacred banner signalling that no prisoners would be taken. The exhausted Anglo-Gascons were slowly giving ground when men returning from the pursuit reinforced them and a small mounted group of 160 under the Captal de Buch, sent around the flank, struck the French rear. The French broke. Surrounded in a loop of the River Miosson, John and his youngest son Philip surrendered.

Around 2,500 French men-at-arms were killed and between 2,000 and 3,000 captured, along with hundreds or thousands of common soldiers; accounts of the infantry losses differ widely. The dead included the constable of France, the Duke of Bourbon and the Oriflamme's bearer, Geoffroi de Charny. The Anglo-Gascons reported very light losses, figures that historians consider implausibly low; modern estimates suggest about 40 men-at-arms and a larger, unknown number of infantry.

The prince brought his royal prisoner to Bordeaux and in 1357 to London. Without its king, France slid into disorder, including the peasant rising known as the Jacquerie in 1358. After two draft treaties failed and Edward III's campaign of 1359 to 1360, the Treaty of Brétigny, agreed by 8 May 1360, gave England sovereignty over vast French lands and set John's ransom at three million gold écus. It did not last: war resumed in 1369, and France eventually won in 1453.

Our 1300 map shows the English holdings in Gascony within the Kingdom of France, and our 1400 map the situation after the French recovered much of the lost ground.