ancient cities

which it achieved around 1300. This was due in
part to the decline of the Champagne fairs and a
shift to seaborne freight. This trend accelerated during
the near-continuous war conditions that prevailed
across France after 1337 (Hundred Years’
War), which expanded the resident merchant communities
in Bruges, especially the English, Italians,
Spaniards, and Hanseatics. With committal grants
of extensive legal privileges and efficient means of
legal redress guaranteed by the local Bruges government,
the city became a good place to do business.
At the intersection of important industries and
flourishing trade, Bruges became the first northern
capital of banking and finance, which gave the city
considerable importance even as its trade declined
after 1480. Based upon a payment and credit system
developed by native money changers and hostellers,
Bruges integrated the various communities
of foreign merchants into a far-reaching network
of foreign and domestic exchange through bills of
exchange, book transfers, commission sales, and
credit operations. In the course of the fifteenth
century, this financial community acquired a formal
meeting place around a public square named
for a prominent commercial hostel, and the “place
de la Bourse” was born. Until supplanted by its
near neighbor and erstwhile commercial satellite,
Antwerp, which built its own bourse in 1531,
Bruges was a more important commercial center
than either Paris or London.
From the sixteenth to eighteenth century, Bruges
declined but did not cease being an important
urban center of the southern Low Countries. A
significant Spanish merchant colony remained
through the sixteenth century, and in the seventeenth
century there was a modest Renaissance in
the city’s importance as a shipping center with the
construction of new canals and the development of
Ostend as a major port with frequent ferry service
to England. But it was not until Bruges had
endured the waves of adversity stemming from the
French Revolution and Napoleonic era, the brief
incorporation into the Dutch state, and the Belgian
revolution of 1830 that a new direction for the city
was developed.
While some Belgian cities, notably Ghent,
industrialized, the Bruges economy slowly reoriented
itself toward attracting foreign visitors and
residents in search of an authentic experience of
the Middle Ages. Despite many changes through
Bruges, Belgium
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the years, Bruges had maintained its “medieval”
appearance, largely avoiding the massive destruction
of old neighborhoods so common in other
European cities. Attracted by the city’s architecture,
as well as its nearness to home and relative
cheapness, a significant English colony developed.
Numbering as many as 1,200 permanent residents
by around 1870 and hundreds more summer and
occasional visitors, the English established schools
and orphanages and drew many converts to
Roman Catholicism from among their compatriots,
who came to Flanders in search of the medieval
roots of their religion. Simultaneously,
Bruges’s canals and quaint squares and neighborhoods
attracted artists who sought to capture the
city’s Romantic allure on canvas. The literary
expression of this was Georges Rodenbach’s 1892
novel, Bruges-la-morte, the story of a griefstricken
widower who takes refuge in Bruges, only
to become obsessed with a ballet dancer who
resembles his late wife.
The efforts of artists, visitors, and long-term
English residents, especially art historian W. H.
James Weale and art collector John Steinmetz,
contributed to a movement to preserve Bruges’s
medieval patrimony while constructing new buildings
in harmony with the medieval past of the city.
Thus “neogothic” became the sometimes controversial
answer to all new construction in the city,
leading to, among many examples, the present
post office building on the central square, which
replaced an eighteenth-century classical style building
on the same site. Much like London with its
arts and crafts movement, Bruges became a center
of architecture, design, and crafts that sought to
restore the aesthetic and craftsmanship of the
Middle Ages to modern construction. Efforts at
historic preservation, meanwhile, led to the establishment
of an important historical society (Société
d’Emulation), a society for the preservation of
Christian art (Guild of St. Thomas and St. Luke),
and many others.
The international exposition of 1902 dedicated
to the fifteenth-century artists known collectively as
the Flemish Primitives marks the high point of this
new direction for Bruges as both tourist and artistic
city. Bringing together works from such artists as
Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hugo van
der Goes, Hans Memling, Dirk Bouts, and Gerard
David—many of them little known at the time—the