Such an array of fine dresses, jewels, and riches, excited a woman's jealousy in the Queen of France: "There is none but queens," quoth she, "to be seen in Bruges; I had thought that there was none but I who had a right to royal state." But the people of Bruges remained dumb; and their silence scared Philip the Handsome, who vainly attempted to attract a concourse of people about him by the proclamation of brilliant jousts.

"These galas," says the historian Villani, who was going through Flanders at this very time, "were the last whereof the French knew aught in our time, for Fortune, who till then had shown such favor to the King of France, on a sudden turned her wheel, and the cause thereof lay in the unrighteous captivity of the innocent maid of Flanders, and in the treason whereof the Count of Flanders and his sons had been the victims." There were causes, however, for this new turn of events of a more general and more profound character than the personal woes of Flemish princes.

James de Chiltillon, the governor assigned by Philip the Handsome to Flanders, was a greedy oppressor of it; the municipal authorities whom the victories or the gold of Philip had demoralized became the objects of popular hatred; and there was an outburst of violent sedition.

A simple weaver, obscure, poor, undersized, and one-eyed, but valiant, and eloquent in his Flemish tongue, one Peter Deconing, became the leader of revolt in Bruges; accomplices flocked to him from nearly all the towns of Flanders; and he found allies amongst their neighbors.

In 1302 war again broke out; but it was no longer a war between Philip the Handsome and Guy de Dampierre: it was a war between the Flemish communes and their foreign oppressors.
Everywhere resounded the cry of insurrection: "Our bucklers and our friends for the lion of Flanders! Death to all Walloons! "Philip the Handsome precipitately levied an army of sixty thousand men, says Villani, and gave the command of it to Count Robert of Artois, the hero of Furnes.