STM32F1 - Using master SPI on bare metal

I've been trying to port some of my AVR code to drive a simple SPI LCD to ARM as a learning exercise (I'm very new to ARM in general). For this I just need to use SPI in master mode.

I looked in the datasheet for my device (STM32F103C8) and found that the SPI1 pins I need, SCK and MOSI are mapped as alternative functions of PA5 and PA7, respectively, along with other peripherals (pg.29). My understanding is that in order to use the SPI function on these pins, I need to make sure that anything else mapped to the same pin is disabled. When looking at the defaults for the peripheral clock control register, however, it looks like the other features are already disabled.

I looked at the SPI section in the reference manual, including section 25.3.3 - Configuring the SPI in master mode. First I enabled the SPI1 master clock in APB2ENR and followed the steps in this section to configure SPI1 to my needs. I also changed the settings for PA5/7 to set their mode to "Alternate Function Output push-pull" (9.1.4). Finally, I enabled SPI1 by setting CR1_SPE.

From my reading, I had thought that by loading a value into the SPI1 data register after configuring SPI as above, the data would be shifted out. However, after writing the data, the TXE flag in the SPI status register never becomes set, indicating that the data I wrote into it is just sat there.

At this point, I'm assuming that there is something else I've failed to configure correctly. For example, I'm not 100% sure about what to do with the PA5/7 pins. I've tried to understand what I can from the datasheets, but I'm not getting anywhere. Is there anything else that needs to be done before it'll work?

I'm almost certain that you did not set SSM and SSI bits in SPIx->CR1 register. SPI in these chips is pretty simple, for the polled transfers you need to set SSM, SSI, SPE, MSTR, correct format (LSBFIRST, CPOL, CPHA) and proper baudrate (BR) in SPIx->CR1 and you're good to go.