Belgium is of all countries in Europe the best calculated for railroads; its vast alluvial plains, hardly presenting a perceptible inequality. From Ostend to Ghent, I scarcely noticed a single cutting or an embankment, the rails being laid upon the natural surface of the ground, and the direction as straight as the flight of an arrow, without the necessity of a curve or inclination, except to approach some village station on the road.
The old mode of conveyance by the Trekschuit, on the Canal de Bruges, though not discontinued, is comparatively deserted for the railroad. It is, however, by no means disagreeable, the boats being drawn along at the rate of nearly six miles an hour, the accommodation excellent and unique, and the only drawback, the effluvia which in summer arises from the almost stagnant waters of the canal, occasionally heightened by the poisoned streams in which flax had been steeped by the farmers, which is instantly fatal to the fish.
The air and general appearance of Bruges, on entering it by the railroad, which passes direct into the centre of the town, cannot fail to arrest the interest and attention of a stranger. It is unlike any place that one has been accustomed to before, and is certainly the most perfect specimen of a town of the middle ages on this side the Rhine. Its houses have not been rebuilt in modern times, and with their ample fronts, vast arched entrances and sculptured ornaments, and fantastic gables, are all in keeping with our stately impressions of its feudal counts and affluent but turbulent burghers. “Le voyageur,” says its historian, M. Ferrier, “au milieu de ces vieux hôtels, de ces pierres féodales encore debout, espère toujours qu’une noble dame au chaperon de velours et au vertugadin élargi, va sortir des portes basses en ogives le faucon au poign, la queue retroussée par un page.”
Instead of the narrow, dingy passages which occur in cities of similar antiquity and renown, there is an air peculiarly gay and imposing in the broad and cheerful streets of Bruges; its streets enlivened by long lines of lindens and oriental plane trees, and traversed by canals, not sluggish and stagnant, but flowing with an active current through the city. Upon these, the wealthier mansions open to the rear, a little ornamented “pleasance” separating them from the river, laid out in angular walks, and ornamented with evergreens, clipped en quenouille, and here and there a statue or an antique vase. The squares maintain the same character of dignity and gravity, overshadowed with “old ancestral trees,” and flanked by their municipal halls and towers—the monuments of a time when Bruges was the Tyre of Western Europe, and her Counts and citizens combined the enterprize and wealth of the merchant with the fiery bearing of the soldier. These edifices, too, exhibit in their style something of the sturdy pride of their founders, presenting less of ornament and decoration than of domineering height and massive solidity, and striking the visitor rather by their strength than their elegance. On the whole, Bruges reminded me strongly of Pisa, and some of the towns of northern Italy, whose history and decline are singularly similar to its own. The air of its edifices and buildings is the same, and there is around it a similar appearance of desertion rather than decay—though in Bruges the retirement and solitude which was, till recently, its characteristic, has been much invaded by the concourse of strangers whom the railroad brings hourly to visit it.
Bruges, in the olden time, was indebted for its political importance to its being the most ancient capital of the Low Countries, and one of the residences of the old “Foresters of Flanders,” and of that illustrious line of sovereign Counts and Dukes, whose dynasty extends almost from Charlemagne to Charles V, and whose exploits enrich the annals of the crusades and form the theme of the romancers and minstrels of the middle ages. Of the palaces of these stormy potentates, scarcely a vestige now remains, except a few dilapidated walls of the “Princenhof,” in which Charles le Téméraire espoused Margaret of York, the sister of our Edward IV, and in which, also, his interesting daughter, Mary of Valois, Duchess of Burgundy, married Maximilian of Austria, son to Frederick IV—that “portentous alliance,” which subsequently brought the Netherlands under the dominion of the Emperor, and consigned them, on the abdication of Charles V, to the tender mercies of the sanguinary Philip of Spain. At her nuptials, the Duke of Bavaria acted as proxy for the imperial bridegroom, and according to the custom of the period, passed the night with the young duchess, each reposing in full dress, with a sword placed between them, and in the presence of four armed archers of the guard.
On the opposite side of the same square, stands, likewise, the house, now an estaminet, in which her husband, Maximilian, then King of the Romans, was, after her death, confined by the citizens of Bruges, in 1487, in consequence of a dispute as to the custody of his two children, in whom, by the death of their mother, was vested the right to the sovereignty of Flanders. In spite of the fulminations of the Pope, and the march of the Emperor, his father, with an army of forty thousand men, the undaunted burghers held him a prisoner for six weeks, till he submitted to their terms and took an oath to respect their rights, and exact no vengeance for their violent demonstration in their assertion.
Bruges was, likewise, upon two occasions the asylum of the exiled monarchs of England; once when Edward IV took refuge there, when flying from the Earl of Warwick’s rebellion; and, again, when Charles II, in his exile, occupied a house in the Place d’Armes, at the corner of the Rue St. Amand. It is now the shop of a tailor.
But all our recollections of Bruges are crowded with associations of the poetry of history; and the very names of her chieftains, Baldwin of the Iron Arm, Robert of Jerusalem, Margaret of Constantinople, Philip the Handsome, and Louis of Crecy, call up associations of chivalry, gallantry and romance.
From the thirteenth century to the close of the sixteenth, Bruges was at once in the plentitude of her political power and the height of her commercial prosperity. As the furs and iron of the north were not yet carried by sea round the Baltic, and the wealth of India still poured through the Red Sea into Genoa and Venice, Bruges became one of the great entrepots where they were collected, in order to be again distributed over Western Europe; and with Dantzic, Lubeck, Hamburg, and a few other trading cities of the west, Bruges became one of the leading commandaries of the Hanseatic League. The idea of marine insurances was first acted upon at Bruges in the thirteenth century, and the first exchange for the convenience of merchants was built there in the century following.
Her manufactures were equally celebrated with her traffic and her trade. Her tapestries were the models, and, indeed, the progenitors of the Gobelins, which were established in France by a native of Bruges, under the patronage of Henry IV; and the fame of her woolstaplers and weavers has been perpetuated in the order of the Golden Fleece, the emblem of which was selected by Philip the Good in honour of the artizans of Bruges.