the groups of foreign merchants were called, makes curious reading at the present day. There were English, Scotch, French, Lusitanians, Castilians, Venetians, Genoans, Florentines; merchants from Aragon, Biscay, Lucca, Milan, Lombardy and Navarre. The German merchants from the Hanseatic towns of Lubeck, Hamburg, Cologne, Dantzig and Bremen numbered no less than forty houses in the year 1362, while the Italian and Spanish firms resident in the city were still more numerous. Many of these concerns were among the foremost trading and banking houses of the Middle Ages, with mercantile transactions extending into every part of the known world and strong enough financially to loan money to princes. When the Duke of Pembroke was captured by Du Guesclin in the Hundred Years’ War between England and France it was in Bruges that his countrymen borrowed the seventy thousand pounds demanded as ransom.
As befitted the first mercantile city in the world, business methods were more advanced at Bruges than anywhere else. It is claimed that the first insurance policies ever drawn up were devised and signed in Bruges about the year 1300. A form of registration of land titles was in use there as early as the fifteenth century. Its Bourse, or central exchange for merchandise of all kinds, is claimed to have been the first ever established.
In a single day in the year 1456 no less than 150 foreign vessels arrived at Bruges through its canals and the River Zwyn, and while these were, of course, small craft as compared to those of the present day there was then no port in the world that could boast of an equal quantity of shipping. Industrially, the town was no less important, having some fifty thousand artisans belonging to fifty-two different guilds.
The silting up of the Zwyn, rendering the approach and departure of shipping difficult and uncertain, started a downward movement that in less than a century destroyed all of this great activity and prosperity. Had it come alone it is probable that the sturdy merchants of Bruges would have found a way to overcome this adverse factor to their continued success, either by digging a new channel to the sea or by dredging, but misfortunes—as is their proverbial wont—did not come singly. In 1488, as a result of a conflict between the city and Maximilian, the stores and exchanges were closed for three months and all business came to a standstill. Seven years later it was said that nearly five thousand houses stood vacant and abandoned, no one caring either to buy or rent them. One by one the great merchants of the city closed their counting-rooms and went away; one by one the artisans departed. The last of the “Nations” to desert the declining city was the Hanseatic League, which stood by it loyally until 1516, when it removed its offices to Antwerp, by that time the acknowledged metropolis of the North.
The Minnewater, or Lac d’Amour, is—apart from its exquisite beauty—of interest as another memento of the city’s former commerce. This was the chief harbour for shipping, and, no doubt, was thronged with sailing craft, while its banks must have swarmed with merchants checking their arriving or departing cargoes, stevedores carrying bales and boxes to and fro, clumsy wagons and carts for transporting merchandise to the warehouses of the city and all the varied noise and bustle of a great seaport. It is strangely silent and deserted now, and the grass grows tall around the round tower built in 1398 by Jan van Oudenaarde, and the white swans float slowly and majestically beneath the black arches of the adjoining bridge which is eight years older than the tower. It is said that he, or she, who stands on the central arch of this bridge at midnight and expresses a desire will have the wish fulfilled, but we did not try it. Before leaving this charming spot, however, we went along the banks of the little lake to a point where, looking back, we had the round tower and the bridge in the middle distance, the lake in the foreground, and the towers of the city on the horizon. This view is, without doubt, the finest the old town affords.
The visitor to Bruges who is interested in the past should devote at least half a day to a pilgrimage to Damme, distant about an hour’s walk along the canal that leads from the new port of Bruges to the sea. In 1180 this now all but forgotten town was made an independent commune with two burgomasters, and for two centuries thereafter it enjoyed a great and increasing prosperity. It became the chief entrepôt for the great commercial city of Bruges during its period of splendour, and most of the leading merchants maintained offices there. Its warehouses were crowded with merchandise from every corner of Europe—wines from France and Spain, beer from England, wool from Scotland, silk from Italy, all manner of cloths and stuffs, spices of all kinds, metals of every variety known to the metal workers of those days, rare and precious goods of every description.
To-day the very scene of all this mercantile activity has vanished. Gone are the busy warehouses, the docks and wharves, even the very harbour in which—according to ancient chroniclers—a score of ships of the largest size then built could anchor easily. All that remains is a diminutive Grande Place surrounded by several ancient edifices, and the ruins of a huge church. In the centre of the Place is a modern statue of Jacob van Maerlant, called “the Father of Flemish Poets.” Fame has surely never played any more astounding trick than that out of the great host who lived in this busy commercial town in the days of its prosperity—portly burgomasters, skilled in winning the plaudits of the populace; shrewd, far-sighted merchants grown rich from the commerce with distant lands; skilled artisans and craftsmen in a hundred guilds—all, all are forgotten, while an obscure poet, whom very likely many of those who knew him derided as a fool, is alone remembered as the one great man of Damme.
Facing the Grande Place is the ancient Hotel de Ville, which, in addition to being the most notable monument of the dead town, is also an estaminet where the living can get a little refreshment. The main floor of this edifice is divided into three large rooms. The first one is the estaminet, with its array of bottles and its beer pump contrasting most incongruously with the remaining vestiges of its ancient grandeur.
Adjoining this is a large, irregular and unfurnished room, bare of ornamentation save for two corbels, or Gothic brackets, which support the main rafters of the ceiling. These are of wood, elaborately carved. One represents Van Maerlant in his study, seated at a desk, with what M. Havard calls a “chaste Suzanne” bathing in a tub over his head. The other shows King David with his harp, and is embellished with sundry other figures.
The remaining room is by far the most interesting, for it was here that Charles the Bold publicly betrothed Margaret of York. The room, which is officially termed the Salle des Délibérations, or Council Hall, has a fine old fireplace said to have been restored during the seventeenth century. It is decorated with two female figures in hoop skirts and bears the motto “Parcere subjectis et debellare superbos.” This quotation from Vergil (Æneid 6:853) sounds rather pompous and out of place in the council chamber of this now completely vanquished and ruined city, and must have seemed so even in the seventeenth century, but it may have been a survival of an inscription placed over the original fireplace in the days when Damme dared to close its gates even against the men from Bruges itself, and the puissant Counts of Flanders had to use force to compel it to open them.
It was in the year 1468 that this room in which we are now standing had its one great day and became, for a brief space, the setting of one of those splendid mediæval scenes that bards and novelists so fondly recall, and that—in our age of up-to-date inventions—the moving-picture men are so busily reconstructing and re-enacting. The Princess had landed at Sluys, near the mouth of the River Zwyn, where the Duke of Burgundy paid her a brief visit in secret—possibly to see what she looked like, for this was a marriage of state and intended to further his far-reaching ambitions. Probably if she had been as homely as a witch the wedding would have taken place just the same, but as the reverse was the case the preliminary inspection must have been very gratifying. The following day the royal lady and her company rode to Damme in a fleet of barges gorgeously decorated with gold, rich velvets and rare silks. Here she was lodged in this very Council Chamber of the Hotel de Ville, and here the Duke came in great state to perform the public ceremony of betrothal. The wedding ring was given in the presence of the English Bishop who had accompanied the Princess, and Charles announced that he would await her presence on the morrow at Bruges, where the wedding itself was to be celebrated in the Cathedral.
The wedding procession as it departed for Bruges the next day must have been another brave sight for the proud
