Abstract

Between 1423 and 1435 the Flemish cities of Ypres and Ghent engaged in a protracted struggle over a waterway called the Ieperleet, which connected Ypres to the sea. The struggle was played out in the courtroom, in brawls along canal banks, and even in a quasi-military expedition. This series of legal battles and fistfights—what I will call the Ieperleet Affair—is a graphic example of the changing economic and political fortunes of the cities of Flanders during the unsettled conditions of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Recently Marc Boone has described the case to highlight the changing balance of ducal and urban power in late-fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Flanders. Willem Blockmans has used it to demonstrate how conflicting interests could paralyze efforts to govern Flanders by representative assembly and thereby favor the accretion of power by the central government. David Nicholas has cited it to illustrate Ghent's aggressive and successful struggle for economic survival, complementing Henri Pirenne's mention of the Affair in a discussion of the decline of fifteenth-century Ypres