Gent

Ghent rose at the confluence of the Scheldt and the Leie, around the abbeys of Saint Peter and Saint Bavo and the castle of the counts of Flanders. By the thirteenth century its woollen cloth industry, fed by English and Scottish wool and the flooded water-meadows around the rivers, made it the biggest city north of the Alps after Paris, with tens of thousands of people behind its walls. The belfry, the cloth hall and the towers of Saint Bavo's and Saint Nicholas' rose above a city of weavers and fullers whose guilds challenged the counts and the patricians.

The Hundred Years' War broke that trade. When France forbade commerce with England, the cloth merchant Jacob van Artevelde reopened the wool trade and ruled Ghent as a neutral ally of Edward III until a crowd killed him in 1345. Revolts against the counts of Flanders followed, and in 1382 Artevelde's son Philip died fighting the French at Roosebeke. Under the Burgundian dukes, high taxes led to a rising that Philip the Good crushed at Gavere in 1453. Charles V was born in the city in 1500, but when Ghent rebelled against his taxes in 1539 he forced its notables to walk in nooses, the origin of the nickname Stroppendragers, and replaced Saint Bavo's Abbey with a fortress.

The Pacification of Ghent was signed in 1576 against Spanish troops, but a Calvinist regime in the city fell to the Duke of Parma in 1584, and the Eighty Years' War ended Ghent's international role. In 1800 Lieven Bauwens introduced the first mechanical spinning machine on the Continent and revived the cotton industry, and the Treaty of Ghent, signed on Christmas Eve 1814, ended the War of 1812.