Bruges was built on cloth. Flemish weavers, fullers and dyers worked English wool into the finest cloth in Europe, and by about 1300 the town was one of the largest north of the Alps, with a population usually estimated at 40,000–45,000. The trades were organised in guilds, the guilds sat in the town’s government, and the town’s own charters, seal and treasury were locked in a stone room inside the belfry on the market square — which is why the belfry, not the cathedral, is the building the town put its identity in.
The port made it possible. Bruges is not on the sea; it reached the sea through the Zwin, a tidal inlet that storm floods opened up in the 12th century, with outports at Damme and later Sluis handling the deep-draught ships. Merchants from everywhere came to the money rather than the other way round: the German Hanse kept a house here, and so did the Genoese, the Florentines, the Venetians and the Lucchese. The Van der Beurze family’s inn on Vlamingstraat, where brokers met, gave its name to the bourse — the word for a stock exchange in half the languages of Europe.
Then the court arrived. The dukes of Burgundy made Bruges one of their principal residences in the 15th century, and Philip the Good founded the Order of the Golden Fleece here on 10 January 1430, during the celebrations of his marriage to Isabella of Portugal. Jan van Eyck lived and worked in the town until his death in 1441; Hans Memling settled here in 1465. Charles the Bold married Margaret of York in Bruges in 1468 and the town staged the Tournament of the Golden Tree for them. Charles and his daughter Mary of Burgundy, who died after a riding accident in 1482, are both buried in the Church of Our Lady.
The decline was fast and it is the reason for everything a visitor sees. The Zwin silted through the 15th century, the foreign merchants moved to Antwerp after the town’s disastrous revolt against Maximilian of Austria in 1488, and Bruges spent three centuries poor. Nothing was demolished for something grander because there was no money for something grander. The town was then rediscovered by 19th-century travellers and by Georges Rodenbach’s novel Bruges-la-Morte (1892), and rebuilt to look the way that century thought the Middle Ages should look: a good deal of what is photographed on the Markt and the Burg is neo-Gothic work of roughly 1877 onwards, most obviously the Provinciaal Hof. The historic centre was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage list in 2000. Knowing which half is which is the whole difference between a nice day out and an interesting one.
