Aalst

Aalst grew as a town and river port where the road from Bruges to Cologne crossed the Dender. Once a dependency of the abbey of Lobbes, it became a centre of Imperial Flanders, on the frontier with Brabant. Its old town hall, begun in the twelfth century, speaks to the long life of its civic institutions, while the weavers' guild helped make cloth the foundation of its prosperity.

Fire devastated Aalst in 1360, but the town was rebuilt and acquired a Gothic belfry in the following century. In 1473 Dirk Martens established a printing shop here, among the earliest in the southern Low Countries. Aalst suffered during the Eighty Years' War and was taken by the French under Turenne in 1667. French occupation lasted until the aftermath of the Battle of Ramillies in 1706; the town's textile economy nevertheless continued to thrive.