Brussels

Brussels grew along the Senne and up the hill of the Coudenberg, where the dukes of Brabant had their seat. The cathedral of St Michael and St Gudula was begun in 1225. In 1349 the Black Death and a pogrom against the Jews struck a city of some 40,000. When Louis of Male, count of Flanders, took Brussels in August 1356 during the Brabantine War of Succession, a hundred men under t'Serclaes drove his soldiers out in October, and a second ring of walls was raised between 1356 and 1383.

In 1430 Brabant passed to Philip the Good of Burgundy, who began to expand the Coudenberg castle into a palace, and Brussels became the princely capital of the Burgundian Netherlands. Mary of Burgundy, born here, granted the Great Privilege in 1477 and married Maximilian of Habsburg. Charles V was declared of age in the Coudenberg Palace in 1515 and abdicated in its great hall on 25 October 1555. In 1523 two Lutheran Augustinian friars, the first Protestant martyrs in Europe, were burned on the Grand Place. The city was a centre of lace and tapestry, and in 1695 Louis XIV bombarded it, destroying the Grand-Place and about 4,000 buildings, a third of the city.