Exasperated, King Philip decided to avenge the revolt and the offense against his authority. A mighty army again invaded the country. Immediately the sons of the Count, John of Namur and William of Gulick, together with Peter de Coninck, organized resistance. The struggle was no longer a merely economic one between patricians and their French protectors on one side and the poor, as partisans of the Count, on the other. It was now a really national struggle, for defeat of the Flemish communes would mean the annexation of Flanders by France. Under the walls of Courtrai, in the meadows of Groeninghe, the soldier-citizens of Bruges, assisted by many contingents of craftsmen from other parts of the country, met the flower of the French knighthood. The apparently impossible happened. The communes, fighting for the very existence of their country, defeated the army of the most powerful king in Christendom. That victory is called the “battle of the Golden Spurs,” because nearly six hundred golden spurs, belonging to the French knights, were found on the battlefield and suspended, as a token of thanks to God, in the vault of the basilica of Courtrai. The consequences of the battle of the Golden Spurs cannot be overestimated. From a political point of view it presents the same importance as the battle of Bouvines. It liberated Flanders from French influence and gave the first blow to the hegemony of France in Europe. In Rome, Pope Boniface VIII, a fierce enemy of King Philip, arose in the middle of the night in order to receive and rejoice over the news. Because the victory saved the national independence of Flanders and practically prevented the political absorption of the other Belgian principalities by Philip the Fair, the Flemings, on July 11 of each year, celebrate the anniversary of the battle of the Golden Spurs as a great event in Belgian history. The victory of Courtrai gave impetus to real national feeling: all classes, and not least the priests, contributed with all their power to organizing further resistance to the French armies. During the first twenty years of the fourteenth century Flanders, by its own forces, without foreign assistance, resisted the onslaughts of three successive French kings. After the battle of Mons-en-Pevèle (1303), which brought neither victory nor defeat for either side, the Flemings arrived with a new army, and Philip the Fair is quoted as having shouted in despair: “It rains Flemings!”