Douai

On the Scarpe, Douai became a flourishing market for textiles under the counts of Flanders. Its great belfry rose above a town whose merchants and craftsmen drew wealth from the cloth trade. Flanders passed to the dukes of Burgundy in 1384 and to the Habsburgs in 1477, bringing Douai into the changing political world of the Low Countries.

Philip II founded a university at Douai in 1559, making the town a centre of Catholic learning. In 1667 Louis XIV's troops captured it, and the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle ceded it to France the following year. The War of the Spanish Succession brought successive sieges between 1710 and 1712, with grave destruction. Douai later became the seat of the Parliament of Flanders, the French sovereign court for the province.