Pocket Rough Guide Bruges & Ghent by Rough Guides

Author:Rough Guides
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Travel, Belgium
Publisher: Apa Publications
Published: 2023-11-29T10:10:15+00:00

The Stadhuis, Damme

Map

Markt 1, off Kerkstraat visitdamme.be. Free.

Funded by a special tax on barrels of herrings, the fifteenth-century Stadhuis is easily the best-looking building in Damme, its elegant, symmetrical facade balanced by the graceful lines of its exterior stairway. In one of the niches, you’ll spy Charles the Bold, the last duke of Burgundy, offering a wedding ring to Margaret of York, who stands in the next niche – appropriately enough, as the couple got hitched here in 1468, a prestige event that attracted aristocratic bigwigs from all over western Europe. It was Charles’s third marriage – his previous wives had died young – and it greatly irritated the French king: the last thing Louis XI wanted was to cement the alliance between England and his powerful vassal, the duke of Burgundy. Indeed, Louis sent a fleet to waylay Margaret on her way to Damme, but it failed to locate her. Margaret arrived at a time when Damme boasted a population of ten thousand and played a key strategic role in guarding the banks of the River Zwin, which gave Bruges direct access to the sea. The subsequent silting up of the river – and the decline of Damme – has been the subject of much historical debate: some have argued that the silting of the river led to Bruges’s decline, others that it was the city’s inability to pay for the continued dredging of the river that reflected the downturn.

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