The Spell of Flanders

Returning to Flanders, Charles bitterly denounced the cautious policy of the burghers in refusing to pay tax levies for his armies unless they knew how the money was to be spent. “Heavy and hard Flemish heads that you are,” he cried to a delegation from Ghent, “you always remain fixed in your bad opinions, but know that others are as wise as you. You Flemings, with your hard heads, have always either despised or hated your princes. I prefer being hated to being despised. Take care to attempt nothing against my highness and lordship, for I am powerful enough to resist you. It would be the story of the iron and the earthen pots.”

Presently Louis, repudiating the recent treaty as being extorted by force, invaded Charles’ dominions and captured several cities on the Somme. Charles sought to retake them and was repulsed both at Amiens and Beauvais, the defenders at the latter place being urged to stronger resistance by Jeanne Hachette, one of the heroic figures of French history. Charles now turned his attention to the German side of his dominions, and here also the implacable enmity of Louis stirred up enemies for him in every direction. In Alsace the people rose in revolt and slew the cruel governor Charles had set over them, while the Swiss defeated the Marshal of Burgundy. Charles set forth to re-establish his authority with an army of thirty thousand men, the flower of his feudal levies. The Swiss, alarmed, sued for peace, assuring the powerful Duke that there was more gold in the spurs and bridles of his horsemen than could be found in all of Switzerland.

Charles, however, was bent on punishing these impudent mountaineers and ordered the invasion of their country. The defenders of the little fortress of Granson surrendered on the approach of his army, but in flagrant violation of the terms he had just granted the Duke of Burgundy ordered the entire garrison to be hanged. This act was speedily avenged, for the Swiss a few days later utterly routed the Burgundian forces just outside of Granson. The mountaineers in this battle advanced in a solid phalanx against which Charles’ horsemen and archers could make no impression. The blow to the pride and prestige of the Duke was far more serious than the loss of the engagement and the scattering of his army. With great difficulty he raised fresh levies, the Flemish communes granting aid only on condition that no further subsidies should be demanded for six years to come. The battle of Granson took place March 2, 1476. By June he had raised another and a larger army, and on the 22nd met the Swiss again at Morat. On reviewing his host before the battle, Charles is said to have exclaimed, “By St. George, we shall now have vengeance!” but the vengeance was not to be always on one side, for the Swiss, making their battle-cry “Granson! Granson!” in remembrance of their countrymen, whom Charles had treacherously slain, almost annihilated his army. The Swiss showed no mercy and took no prisoners, while the number of killed on the Burgundian side amounted to eighteen thousand. Charles escaped with his life, accompanied by a small body of his knights.

For a time it seemed as if his rage and despair at these two defeats would cause the proud Duke to lose his reason, nor could his threats or entreaties secure more assistance from Flanders. He managed, however, to keep the field, and with a small force sat down to besiege Nancy—which had been lost to him again after Morat. The town held out stubbornly, as all towns did, now that Charles’ cruelty and treachery to those who surrendered were known, and the Burgundian forces suffered much hardship from the cold, for it was now mid-winter. On January 5th Charles gave battle to an advancing force of Swiss, was again crushed and the greater part of his little army killed. After the battle the Duke could not be found, and no man knew what had become of him. The following day a page reported that he had seen his master fall, and could find the place. He led the searchers to a little pond called the Etang de St. Jean. Here, by the border of a little stream, they found a dozen despoiled bodies, naked and frozen in the mud and ice. One by one they turned these over. “Alas,” said the little page presently, “here is my good master!” Disfigured, with two fearful death wounds, and with part of his face eaten by wolves, it was indeed the body of the great Duke.

Even his enemies did honour to the dead prince. Clothed in a robe of white satin, with a crimson satin mantle, his body was borne in state into the town he had vainly sought to conquer, and placed in a velvet bed under a canopy of black satin. His remains were interred in the church of St. George at Nancy, where they remained for more than fifty years. The Emperor, Charles V, then had them brought to Bruges and placed in the church of St. Donatian. His son, Philip II, removed them, five years later, to the wonderful shrine in the Church of Notre Dame where they remained until the French Revolution, when they were scattered to the winds as the bones of a tyrant. The sarcophagus, however, of the Duke and his gentle daughter, Marie, still remain, as we have seen, and are among the finest in existence.

The death of the powerful Duke of Burgundy made a profound impression throughout Europe, and still remains, as Mr. Boulger in his admirable History of Belgium says, “one of the tragedies of all history.” His downfall was mainly due to the implacable hostility of Louis XI, whom he had once publicly humiliated at Péronne and affected at all times to despise. Many of the Swiss and Germans who fought against him in his last fatal campaign were hired mercenaries in the pay of the King of France, while some of his most trusted followers and advisers were traitors in constant correspondence with his wily and unscrupulous antagonist. Had Charles sought to conciliate his great Flemish communes instead of intimidate them his reign might have been prolonged by their powerful aid, and his dream of establishing a kingdom of Burgundy have been realised. As it was, he failed signally in most of his undertakings, and with all his fury and vainglory and cruelty lost in ten years the huge power that his father had taken fifty years to accumulate.

Marie, Charles’ only daughter, was left by his sudden and unexpected death “the greatest heiress in Christendom,” but also well-nigh helpless to rule over or even hold her widespread dominions. To prevent the King of France from taking advantage of this situation her Flemish counsellors advised her to accept an offer of marriage from Maximilian, son of the Emperor Frederick III, and in August of the same year that saw the battle of Granson they were quietly married at Bruges. This event made Flanders a still smaller unit than before in a vast aggregation of states that in the course of events was being combined under the rule of the House of Hapsburg, nor did Marie’s untimely death, less than five years later, in any wise delay the process of consolidation.

Bruges, during the stormy reign of Charles the Bold and the quarter of a century of anxiety and troubles for its burghers that followed after the battle of Nancy, was steadily losing its population and material prosperity, and, at the same time, acquiring its greatest claim to fame—for it was between the year 1462 and 1491 that Memling, the foremost of the early Flemish painters, executed the wonderful series of masterpieces that have come down to us. And it is to Bruges that the student of art must come to see the famous Fleming at his best, for there are more of his important works here than in all the rest of the world put together.

In common with many others in the early Gothic school very little is known of the early life of Hans Memling, but the recent discovery in an old manuscript of a note stating that he was born at or near Mayence gives a most interesting clue both as to his birthplace and the origin of his name. In the Rhineland district near Mayence there is a small tributary to the great river called Memling, and a village named Memlingen. It is probable, therefore, that—just as the brothers Van Eyck called themselves Hubert and Jean of Eyck—so their most famous successor called himself Hans of Memling. For lack of authentic details regarding his early career legend has supplied a most interesting history—that he was wild and dissolute in his younger days, was wounded while fighting with Charles the Bold at Nancy, dragged himself to the door of the hospital of St. Jean at Bruges, and was there tenderly nursed back to health and strength, in gratitude for which he painted for the kind sisters the little gallery of fine works that are still preserved in the original chapter house of the institution. All of this romance, and that of his love for one of the sisters, makes a charming background for many of the accounts of his life and work, but the painstaking scholarship of modern days has shown that at the time when he was supposed to be lying wounded and destitute at the hospital he was in fact very prosperous, having lately bought the house in which he lived and his name appearing as one of the leading citizens of whom the commune had borrowed money. It is perhaps pleasanter on the whole to think of the artist as rich and honoured instead of at the other extreme of the social scale—but the legend is, after all, so much more romantic that we cannot give it up without regret.

At Bruges the first spot for the admirer of Memling to visit is, of course, the hospital of St. Jean, and at the hospital the first thing to see is the world-famous shrine of St. Ursula. Little it is, yet beyond price in value. It was constructed as a casket to contain the relics of the Saint and was completed in 1489. In design it is a miniature Gothic chapel two feet ten inches high and three feet long, with three little panels on each side which contain Memling’s famous pictures setting forth the life and martyrdom of the Saint and the eleven thousand other virgins who shared her fate. The story of the famous pilgrimage to Rome and its melancholy ending at Cologne has been told so often that it need not be repeated here. Ask one of the sisters to tell it to you in her charming broken French—for they are Flemish, these sweet-faced sisters, and, as a rule, understand neither French nor English.

This fact is said to have served them in good stead on the terrible day when the bandit-soldiery of the French Republic clamoured at the doors of the hospital in 1494. “The shrine! the shrine!” they cried, “give us the shrine!” (“La châsse, la châsse, donnez nous la châsse!”) The nuns, who had never heard it called by that name, but knew it only by its Flemish name of Ryve, replied that they did not possess such a thing as a châsse, and their voices and expressions so clearly showed their truthfulness and innocence of any deceit that the rabble of soldiers went away and the shrine was saved. Early in the nineteenth century the Mother Superior refused a most tempting offer to purchase the shrine, replying, “We are poor, but the greatest riches in the world would not tempt us to part with it.”

While the paintings on the shrine are the most famous of Memling’s works, they are not regarded by the critics as being his best. As Mr. Rooses expresses it, “The artist seems to have been less intent on perfection of detail for each figure than on the marvellous polychromy of the whole.” The hospital of St. Jean possesses three of the master’s greatest works—two triptychs entitled “The Marriage of St. Catherine” and “The Adoration of the Magi,” and the diptych representing the Madonna and Martin Van Nieuwenhove. The museum at Bruges contains still another masterpiece, a picture showing in the centre St. Christopher, St. Maurus and St. Giles—the first bearing the Infant Christ upon his shoulders—while the two shutters contain the usual portraits of the donors. One of Memling’s most important works was a picture of “The Last Judgment” which was painted for an Italian, Jacopo Tani, and placed on board ship to be sent to Florence by sea. The ship was captured by privateers in the English Channel, and as its owners were citizens of Dantzig it was presented by them to the Church of Our Lady in that city, where it still remains. There are several admirable works by this master at the museums of Brussels and Antwerp, while others are scattered throughout Europe, and one particularly fine example of his art was brought to America by the late Benjamin Altman and now hangs in the Altman collection at the Metropolitan Museum at New York.

While the chief interest to the visitor at the hospital of St. Jean is the remarkable collection of works by Memling, the old buildings themselves merit more than a casual glance. Some of them date from the twelfth century, and the view looking back at the ancient waterfront from the bridge by which the rue St. Catherine here crosses the river is particularly picturesque. The old brick structures go down to the very water’s edge, and sometimes below it, and the entire pile from this side must look much as it did in Memling’s day.

Another artist whose work sheds lustre on the old town of Bruges was Gheerhardt David. For nearly four centuries his name and even his very existence were forgotten, his paintings being attributed to Memling—in itself a high evidence of their merit. Recent studies by James Weale and other scholars have given us quite a complete life of this artist, who lived between 1460 and 1523, and a number of his works have been identified. All of these seem to have been painted at Bruges, and some of the more notable ones still remain there. The municipal authorities commissioned him to paint two great pictures representing notable examples of justice such as Van der Weyden had done for the Hotel de Ville at Brussels. These depict the flaying alive of the unjust Judge Sisamnes by Cambyses, King of Persia, and are still preserved in the museum at Bruges. The museum also possesses another masterpiece by this artist, “The Baptism of Christ.” Others that have been identified through painstaking study of the old archives of the city and contemporary sources are located in the National Gallery at London and in the museum of Rouen.

The prosperity of Bruges was declining very fast while David was painting the last of his religious pictures and the merchants were steadily leaving the city for Antwerp, which was now rising into importance. The artists, whose prosperity depended upon the wealth of the burghers were also drifting to the new commercial metropolis on the Scheldt and the famous school of Bruges was near its end by the middle of the sixteenth century. The last artists who worked at Bruges were of minor interest. Adriaen Ysenbrant, Albert Cornelis and Jean Prévost belong to this period, and their most important works are still preserved in the city where they were executed. “The Virgin of the Seven Sorrows,” in the church of Notre Dame, is attributed to the first, a triptych in the church of St. Jacques to the second, while the museum has several pictures by Prévost, including an interesting “Last Judgment,” and another striking representation of the same subject by Pieter Pourbus, of which there is a copy in the Palais du Franc. The masterpieces by Jean Van Eyck in this museum have already been mentioned, and the small but exceedingly rich collection also includes a fine production entitled “The Death of the Virgin,” which is now generally attributed to Hugo Van der Goes—one of the comparatively few works by that master that have come down to us. There are also several other works by P. Pourbus, and a powerful allegorical picture by Jean Prévost representing Avarice and Death. There is undoubtedly no collection of paintings in the world of which the average value is so great as that of the little group in the hospital of St. Jean, and the one in the Bruges museum—while it has quite a few of minor interest and value—would also bring a very high average if subjected to the bidding of the world’s millionaire art lovers.

Bruges possesses another museum of great interest which dates from the days of the last Dukes of Burgundy. This is the Gruuthuise mansion, of which the oldest wing was built in 1420, and much of the finer portion about 1470 by Louis, or Lodewyk, Van der Gruuthuise, who here entertained Charles the Bold and his pretty daughter—becoming one of the latter’s chief advisers on the death of her father and one of the two Flemish noblemen who witnessed her marriage. The stately old palace is therefore rich with historic associations. As we entered its broad courtyard, however, we were most unfavourably impressed by its rough-paved surface with the grass growing thick between the stones. Surely this must have looked very different in the days when knights and fair ladies swarmed here like bees, and the city, which has so carefully restored everything else, would do well to at least park this otherwise very pretty little enclosure. The interior is both pleasing and disappointing. The edifice itself is superb as a survival of a nobleman’s palace of the fifteenth century, and as an example of Flemish interior architecture. The grand stone staircase, the massive fireplaces, also in white stone, and one or two of the rooms in their entirety give a fine impression of the splendour of the establishment maintained by the great Lord of Gruuthuise in the days when he counted King Edward IV of England and Richard Crookback among his guests, and was engaged in collecting the marvellous library now in Paris. Everywhere, over the fireplaces, and in various stone carvings, one reads the proud motto of the powerful builders of this palace, Plus est en nous.

When the palace was in course of restoration some years ago the workmen uncovered a secret chamber behind the great stone fireplace in the kitchen, concealed within the masonry of the huge chimney, and within it the skeleton of a man. A secret staircase was also discovered here which led to two underground passages branching off in opposite directions. Strangely enough neither of them has ever been explored, but one is supposed to lead to the vaults beneath the adjoining church of Notre Dame, and the other to some point outside the city walls. Some have conjectured that it leads to the Château of Maele, some four miles distant, but probably it went to the manor of the Lords of Gruuthuise at Oostcamp. Within this mansion a modern Sir Walter Scott could easily conjure forth a new series of Waverley novels treating of the stirring days when Bruges was virtually the capital of Flanders and Flanders was the brightest jewel in the Burgundian crown.

All this is most fascinating, and, as far as it goes, helps us to reconstruct in fancy the great days of the past. The disappointing feature about the palace is the museum itself, which, although interesting and valuable, utterly spoils many of the fine rooms by converting them into mere exhibition places. In a measure the authorities have followed the admirable plan of the owners of the Hotel Merghelynck at Ypres, and the immense kitchen, for example, contains only kitchen utensils of the Middle Ages—a most complete and interesting collection. The same is also true of the large dining-room on the same floor, but as one proceeds farther the atmosphere of antiquity becomes lost and it is all nothing but museum. The palace contains a splendid collection of old lace, the gift of the Baroness Liedts, but it seemed to us that it would have been much better to have housed this and the various collections of antiquities in some less famous and historic structure and endeavoured to restore all of these rooms to approximately their condition when Charles the Bold stalked through them.

The period of Philip the Good and his terrible son was the one in which mediæval Bruges took on substantially its present form. In addition to the Gruuthuise Palace scores of important edifices, public and private, were built or rebuilt at this time, while hundreds of smaller houses were constructed—of which many remain in existence to-day. The greatest and most famous edifice dating in large part from this epoch is the cathedral of St. Sauveur whose grim, castle-like tower dominates the entire city. The lowest part of the tower dates from 1116-1127—as already related in the chapter on Bruges under Charles the Good—when the church was rebuilt after a fire that destroyed the primitive structure erected on the site a century or more earlier. Between 1250 and 1346, or for almost a century, the men of Bruges were slowly piling up a noble church in the early Gothic style, but another fire in 1358 necessitated rebuilding the nave and transept—a task which occupied the next ten or fifteen years. In 1480 work was begun upon the five chapels of the choir and nine years later the Pope, Innocent VIII, granted a special Bull of Indulgence in favour of benefactors of this work, which appears to have been delayed for lack of funds. Work of various kinds was continued until the middle of the sixteenth century, but, in the main, the great church was nearly as we see it now by the year 1511. The upper part of the tower is comparatively modern, dating from 1846, and the spire from 1871. While it has been criticised by some as ungainly and cumbrous, the effect of this tower, from whatever angle it may be viewed, is very pleasing. The high lights and shadows on a sunny morning, or late in the afternoon, make it far more beautiful than its sister of Notre Dame, while against the grey cloud masses of a typical Flemish sky its huge tawny mass stands out sharp and clear, the embodiment of majesty and strength.

The interior of the church is very large, measuring three hundred and thirty-one feet by one hundred and twenty-five feet, with an extreme width of one hundred and seventy-four feet across the transepts. Its polychrome decorations and stained glass windows are modern. In another place the wealth of art treasures in this church would merit a chapter, but in Bruges they are so overshadowed by the many masterpieces to be seen elsewhere that we felt somewhat satiated after such a feast and spent very little time looking at the pictures here. The most famous one is a “Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus,” by Dierick Bouts, which is interesting because so few examples of this primitive master are in existence. It is a triptych, the central panel showing the saint about to be torn to pieces by wild horses, on the left an incident in the life of the saint, and on the right the donors. The last picture has been attributed by many critics to Hugo Van der Goes, and for many years the entire picture was thought to be the work of Memling. Bouts delighted in unpleasant subjects, which he depicted with great realism.

Dierick, or Thierry, Bouts settled at Louvain about the middle of the fifteenth century. Beyond the fact that he came from Haarlem nothing is known of his early life and training, but as Van der Weyden of Tournai had done some important work at Louvain it is likely that Bouts may have derived some of his inspiration from studying the methods of that master. He was a contemporary of Memling. Two of his paintings, “The Last Supper” and the gruesome “Martyrdom of St. Erasmus,” were executed for the wealthy brotherhood of the Holy Sacrament and were hung in the church of St. Peter.2 Bouts became the official painter for the city of Louvain and produced a “Last Judgment” for the hall of the échevins which has since been lost, and two panels for the council-room of the Hotel de Ville representing “The Judgment of Otho.” These are now in the museum at Brussels. The Queen having accused an earl of offending her honour, the latter is decapitated. The head is then given to his Countess, together with a glowing bar of iron. In the second panel she is shown triumphantly holding both, the hot iron refusing to burn her and thereby vindicating her husband’s innocence. The result of the ordeal is shown in the distance where the false Queen is being executed at the stake. These pictures were ordered, in imitation of those painted by Van der Weyden for the Hotel de Ville at Brussels, as part of a series of panels designed to instill the love of virtue and justice into the minds of the magistrates and people. The artist’s death prevented his completing two other panels that the archives of Louvain show had been ordered. Besides this “Martyrdom of St. Hippolytus” a comparatively small number of other works from his brush are listed in the catalogues of various European museums.

Of the other structures in Bruges of to-day there are a score that merit a visit from those who are interested in the city’s splendid past, and that date for the most part from the last years of the Burgundian period. In the rue des Aiguilles there still exists a fragment of the Hotel Bladelin, the town house of Peter Bladelin, who was for many years Controller-General of Finance, Treasurer of the Order of the Golden Fleece, and the trusted agent of the Dukes in all manner of business and private affairs. Peter subsequently built the town of Middleburg, for the church in which Van der Weyden painted one of his most famous pictures. The Ghistelhof in the same street also dates from this epoch, and was built by the Lords of Ghistelle. Then there is the Hotel d’Adornes and the church of Jerusalem, which was formerly the private chapel of the rich brothers Anselm and John Adornes. There is still a fine mediæval atmosphere lingering about this group of buildings, although much altered from what they were in their prime. The church itself is most curious, and beneath the choir is a crypt that leads to a reproduction of the Holy Sepulchre, said to be a facsimile of the one in the garden of Joseph of Arimathea. It would take a volume to cite all of the fine old structures of which traces still exist in this, the most picturesque of all the Flemish cities. The reader who desires to find them all cannot do better than to take Ernest Gilliat-Smith’s brilliant Story of Bruges with him and look for them, one by one. For those who cannot devote a week or more to this delightful task a quicker way to see the Bruges of Charles the Bold is to stroll slowly along the Quai Vert, the Quai des Marbriers and the Quai du Rosaire and let the beautiful vistas of the Vieux Bourg with its quaint red roofs and noble towers become engraved upon the memory, for here, more completely than anywhere else, one can see the Bruges of the past much as it looked in the day of its greatest splendour when it was about to sink into its long sleep.