In the Monty Python song “Finland,” Michael Palin referred
to that luminous and chilly country as “A poor second to Belgium / When go-ing
abroad.” If this is actually true, I suspect Belgium's possession of the city
of Bruges has much to do with its comparative attractiveness. Recently, your humble narrator was
lucky enough to visit this medieval port and UNESCO World Heritage site, in the company of my petite amie and some of the three million
tourists who descend on Bruges each year. I of course enjoyed the city's well-known charms:
its gabled and brightly-painted houses, the narrow canals and the swans that
nest by some of them, the cool green isolation of the Minnewater, the beautiful Church of Our Lady, the looming Belfry
containing Bruges' medieval charter, and the Groeninge Museum, with works by
Van Eyck and Bosch and James Ensor. Somehow I avoided sampling any Belgian
chocolate, a peculiar omission given that every second or third store in Bruges is a
chocolate shop. My gustatory adventures I limited to trying a glass of local lager,
which was palatable enough, and a plate of spaghetti bolognese, which was
filling. The local specialty is moules frites – fried mussels – but I
suspect many tourists choose to dine on Belgian waffles instead.
Bruges's story is a typical one in our post-industrial age,
though the city went through its stages of decline and revival much earlier
than most. It was a medieval cloth-making center whose merchants steadily built
up their capital and connections between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. By the late medieval era the port had become a leading
destination for ships from Italy and the Hanseatic cities, and by the 1400s its
merchants had acquired so much wealth and influence that, according to Fernand
Braudel, Bruges and London and Venice formed an axis of commercial power
dominating western Europe. Bruges suffered, however, from two geographical
problems: the river connecting it to the North Sea had silted up by the late
Middle Ages, and the city lay within the domain of the Duke of Burgundy, whose
principality fell into civil disorder in the late fifteenth century. Political
turmoil allowed the merchants of nearby Antwerp, which had greater political
stability and a better harbor, to grab Bruges' trade after 1500, just as
northern Europe began to benefit from commerce with the Americas and Africa.
(Braudel, The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism,
15th-18th Century [Harper and Row, 1984], 99-101, 124,
143-44.)
Local investors tried to turn Bruges into a lace-making
center in the seventeenth century, and lace remains a prized souvenir for tourists (imported though it now is from southeast Asia), but
the economy remained depressed into the 1800s. It was during that era of commodified
nostalgia that European and American travelers discovered Bruges, its medieval
buildings untouched by industrialization, and helped reinvent it as a tourist
destination. Not all foreign sojourners came with good intentions, however.
During the First World War, when Germany occupied Belgium, the German Army impressed laborers from Bruges and
other cities. The German Navy built a U-boat base in Bruges,
presumably because its inland location made it less vulnerable to shore
bombardment, and opened a canal connecting the base to the North Sea. In 1916
the Germans brought the captured Captain Charles Fryatt, whom they had condemned for piracy
after he rammed a U-boat the previous year, to Bruges and shot him. (Larry Zuckerman,
The Rape of Belgium [NYU Press, 2004], 158, 171-72.) During the Second World War the Germans
returned and, as the film The Monuments Men recounts, tried to plunder the
city of some of its artistic treasures. Time and a couple of hundred million tourists
have no doubt effaced most of these memories, but I wouldn't want to venture
into Bruges speaking only German.
**
(Images above are of the Minnewater, with the Sashuis [Guard House] in the distance; the Memling Museum; and the Belfry, a familiar landmark to viewers of the film In Bruges.)
