A short history of Belgium

by Léon van der Essen

Brabant, the central part of Belgium, remained for a long time purely agricultural. In the middle of the twelfth century, however, a highroad was constructed between Cologne and Bruges, passing through Maestricht, Saint-Trond, Léau, Louvain, Brussels, Alost, and Ghent. Trade now flowed, not only from south to north by the Scheldt and the Meuse, but also from east to west along the new commercial road.

This remarkable development of trade and industry was mainly responsible for the origin and growth of the communes. Of course, for many centuries episcopal residences (civitates), castles and manors (castra), churches and monasteries had been centers of civilization and an attraction for the population of the neighborhood. And under the protection of their walls were grouped many wealthy villages. The latter, however, would probably never have developed into cities except for the presence of a colony of merchants and craftsmen. These colonies established themselves in neighborhoods where they could find favorable conditions for trading as well as protection for their commerce. Naturally, therefore, they settled in the vicinity of castles and convents (the castles affording military and the convents moral protection), at the confluence of two or more rivers, along a commercial highroad, in the curve of a gulf, or at the mouth of a stream. In this manner the cities of Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, Louvain, Liège, Malines, etc., were born, for it is an interesting point of Belgian history that nearly all the cities originated during the Middle Ages, very few of them dating back to the Roman times. Those colonies of merchants and craftsmen grouped together in professional and religious associations were called “guilds,” and introduced an entirely new spirit among the people of the growing town. The unfree population dependent upon the convent, the church, or the castle had no means of changing its conditions of life, bound as it was by the numerous ties of feudal and other obligations. But the traders had to secure for themselves a certain degree of liberty, safety, and autonomy. The feudal régime or the rules of the manor were intolerable to them. The operation of the system was too tyrannous; it acted too much as a restraint on private liberty and would have rendered the free development of commercial and industrial enterprises impossible.

The guilds, therefore, formerly purely professional associations, soon began to meddle in politics and to become political organizations as well. Their members discussed in their guild-halls, built for their business meetings, the changes desired in the existing social, economic, and political conditions of the community, and carried on propaganda in support of their demands.

At the same time the members of the guilds began to build walls around the settlement, in order to protect the new city against attack from the outside. Such a fortified town was called burgus, bourg, “borough,” and the inhabitants were called burgenses, bourgeois, “burgesses.”

When the burgesses began to work for changes in the existing régime of the territory in which the town had developed, the princes and landlords to which that territory belonged naturally showed opposition. In some cases they resisted the demands of the guild, but the people were frequently induced to rebel and, by a revolutionary method, to wrest from their overlords the rights they demanded. In most cases the princes recognized the justice of the claims and granted the burgesses a new law, better suited to the needs of commerce and industry. This new law, the city law, different from the feudal law and the law of the manor, was called Keure in Flemish, charte de commune in French. It contained the political, social, and financial privileges granted by the landlord and the prince to the burgesses. When the city law was granted, the commune came into existence. One of the most important privileges of the commune was a special tribunal, called échevinage, schepenhank, composed of citizens and presided over by an officer appointed by the lord.

The commune possessed political and judicial autonomy and its inhabitants were personally free. A man from a neighboring country or a foreigner who had dwelt in the city for one year and one day became a burgess and enjoyed all the privileges of citizenship. Although politically autonomous, the commune still owed certain obligations to its lord. These were mainly an oath of allegiance and the duty of assisting the lord with its army of citizens. This latter duty sometimes created curious situations. At the battle of the Golden Spurs in 1302, when King Philip IV of France was defeated by the Flemish communists, the inhabitants of Louvain fought on the side of the French King against their Flemish brethren, because their lord, the Duke of Brabant, was a partisan of Philip.

Although the commune owed certain duties to the lord, it had also, as a politically autonomous body, some important rights: the right to have a special seal to be appended to the official documents issued by the commune; the right to build a city hall and a belfry, the belfry being a tower, usually erected in the market-place, where the bell that called the burgesses to arms was hung, and where the archives of the city were carefully kept in iron safes. As the commune exercised the right of life and death over its members, it erected as symbols of that right the pillory and the gallows, generally at the gate or outside the city wall.

The development of the communes was not quite the same in the various sections of Belgium. In the principality of Liège, the cities of Dinant, Huy, and Saint-Trond obtained their privileges sooner than Liège itself. The charter of freedom for Huy dates from 1066. In the ecclesiastical principality of Cambrai the commune was established by violently revolutionary means in 1077. The merchants of Cambrai suffered from the tyranny of the officers appointed by the bishops, and a conspiracy was organized. On a certain day when Bishop Gerard left the town, the citizens ran to arms, under the leadership of the prominent merchants, and proclaimed the commune. But the bishop returned unexpectedly and his knights killed many of the people and pillaged the houses of the leaders. The supremacy of the bishop was restored for a long period.

In Flanders, the counts were sincere protectors of the communes; they regarded them as a mighty resource of their treasury and early recognized the claims of the mercatores. From the end of the eleventh century the main demands contained in the propaganda of the guilds were accepted and special privileges were granted to the cities. From the time of Count Charles the Good (1119-27), each city had its own échevins (sheriffs), chosen from among the burgesses; the president alone, the bailli, was an officer of the lord, and responsible only to him. The house of the counts of Alsace (1128) owed its accession to the communes and therefore protected the cities in a special manner. They gave to all of them the same municipal charter, a copy of the charter of Arras, and both the Flemish and the Walloon communes of Flanders enjoyed identically the same privileges.

In the duchy of Brabant, the communes developed more slowly, owing to the fact that conditions for the development of trade and industry were not so much advanced here. From the time when the commercial highroad between Cologne and Bruges was constructed the municipal movement was participated in more actively by the princes. Here, also, the princes came to assume the same sympathetic attitude as in Flanders, but there was no general organization granting the same type of constitution for all the cities. The privileges of each city were recognized and granted separately.