In September 1356, Edward of Woodstock, Prince of Wales, was deep inside France with an army that had spent weeks doing almost everything a commander should avoid if he expected to fight a much larger enemy.
His men were tired.
Many horses were worn down.
Food was becoming harder to find.
The army had been moving through hostile country, burning, raiding, collecting supplies, and trying to return toward the English-held territories of southwestern France.
Then the French king found him.
King John II of France had assembled a much larger force and moved aggressively to cut off Edward's retreat.
By September 18, the English-Gascon army was near Poitiers with French forces closing from the north.
The routes back toward Bordeaux were becoming dangerous.
The prince's army was too small to welcome a general battle.
It was also too close to the enemy to escape easily.
On paper, the situation looked exactly like the kind of campaign that ends with a surrounded army surrendering.
Edward had perhaps six thousand men, although medieval numbers are uncertain and surviving sources disagree.
The French possessed substantially more.
Some estimates place the French army at roughly twice Edward's strength or more.
More importantly, the French army included the king himself, royal princes, major nobles, and thousands of men-at-arms who believed they had finally cornered the English raiding force responsible for devastating large areas of France.
The French wanted battle.
Edward had been trying to avoid one.
Then he found terrain that changed the calculation.
Near the villages and fields south of Poitiers, hedges, vineyards, uneven ground, narrow approaches, and cultivated land made it difficult for a large army to deploy all its strength at once.
The English had seen this kind of opportunity before.
Ten years earlier, at Crécy, Edward's father had defeated a larger French army partly because the French attacked into a position that prevented them from converting numbers into coordinated power.
Poitiers would not simply repeat Crécy.
The battlefield was different.
The armies were different.
The French had learned lessons too.
But one principle remained.
A large army is only superior if it can bring that superiority to bear.
Edward began arranging his men so that the landscape itself would help narrow the fight.
English and Gascon men-at-arms dismounted.
Archers occupied positions where the restricted approaches could expose advancing troops and horses to concentrated missile fire.
The prince did not need to destroy the entire French army at once.
He needed to survive one attack at a time.
The French, meanwhile, made an important adjustment of their own.
Many of their men-at-arms would advance on foot.
The experience of previous battles had shown what English archery could do to massed cavalry.
Dismounted men would be harder to disrupt through wounded horses and chaotic charges.
For a moment, the French solution appeared logical.
Then the battlefield began to expose the hidden cost.
Thousands of armored men walking forward through restricted ground cannot easily maintain perfect formation.
The first ranks slow.
The rear ranks push.
Hedges force men inward.
Vineyards disrupt footing.
Arrows do not need to penetrate every piece of armor to have an effect.
They can wound exposed faces and limbs.
They can strike lightly protected troops.
They can injure horses.
They can make men lower their heads and compress toward cover.
And perhaps most importantly, every pause in the French advance gave Edward's smaller army another moment to remain organized.
For hours, neither side could produce the clean breakthrough it wanted.
French divisions advanced.
English and Gascon archers fired.
Men-at-arms fought at close range.
French formations that had looked enormous before the battle entered the narrow approaches in pieces.
Some units became exhausted.
Others lost contact.
Commands became difficult to carry through the noise and confusion.
Then Edward saw something changing.
The French still had more men.
King John still remained on the field.
But the French army was no longer operating as one overwhelming mass.
Different divisions had attacked at different times.
Some troops were withdrawing.
Others were still coming forward.
The battlefield was beginning to separate the French king from the numerical advantage that should have protected him.
This was the moment when Edward faced the decision that would define Poitiers.
He could continue defending.
That was the safer choice.
His men had held.
The position still worked.
If darkness came before the French broke through, perhaps he could disengage.
But remaining passive created another danger.
Eventually the French might reorganize.
Fresh troops might find another approach.
The English might run short of arrows.
A defensive position that survives three attacks does not automatically survive a fourth.
Edward could wait for the French to solve their problems.
Or he could act while those problems were at their worst.
The prince chose to attack.
And once the smaller army came forward, the Battle of Poitiers changed from a desperate defense into one of the most astonishing royal disasters in medieval French history.
The Prince History Remembers as the Black Prince Was Still a Young Man
Edward of Woodstock was twenty-six years old at Poitiers.
The famous name Black Prince was not the usual contemporary title by which the men around him would have known him.
The nickname became common much later, and historians continue debating exactly how it originated.
To the army in 1356, he was Edward, Prince of Wales, the eldest son of King Edward III of England.
He was already an experienced commander.
He had fought at Crécy as a teenager.
That battle helped create the military reputation that surrounded him.
Yet Poitiers placed him in a very different position.
At Crécy, his father had commanded the larger strategic situation.
At Poitiers, Edward himself carried responsibility for an army hundreds of miles from England.
He had to decide where to march.
What to destroy.
How long to remain in enemy territory.
When to avoid battle.
When to stop retreating.
And eventually when to gamble everything on attack.
The campaign had begun not as an attempt to capture the king of France but as a chevauchée.
That word describes one of the most destructive forms of warfare used during the Hundred Years' War.
An army moved through enemy territory rapidly.
It burned crops and settlements.
Destroyed economic resources.
Seized goods.
Provoked local rulers.
Demonstrated that the enemy king could not protect his own subjects.
The objective could be partly military, partly economic, and partly political.
If the French army refused battle, the raiders devastated the countryside.
If the French army pursued too aggressively, the raiders might choose favorable terrain and fight.
This style of warfare was brutal for civilians.
The romantic image of knights meeting honorably in open fields captures only a small part of medieval war.
For many ordinary people, the Hundred Years' War meant burned grain, stolen animals, damaged villages, taxation, displacement, and fear.
Edward's 1356 campaign was part of that reality.
His army was effective because it moved.
Movement was protection.
Then King John II removed that protection.
The Hundred Years' War Had Already Changed the Meaning of Chivalry
The conflict between the English and French crowns had begun decades earlier.
Edward III claimed rights to the French throne through his mother, Isabella of France.
French political leaders supported the Valois line instead.
That dynastic dispute became entangled with territorial conflicts, alliances, economics, and regional loyalties.
The war did not proceed continuously for exactly one hundred years.
It came in phases.
Campaigns paused.
Truces appeared.
Fighting resumed.
Armies changed.
Political circumstances shifted.
By the 1350s, both sides had already experienced dramatic victories and disasters.
The English possessed territories in southwestern France, especially in and around Gascony.
Those lands were not simply foreign English colonies populated by English soldiers.
Local Gascon nobles and troops played major roles in the English war effort.
When Edward marched in 1356, his army therefore contained both English and Gascon forces.