Leuven

Leuven grew on the Dijle near the stronghold of the dukes of Brabant and, between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries, was the duchy's greatest centre of trade, famous for its cloth. Around 1300 it had some 20,000 inhabitants, but after 1340 numbers fell, social tension rose, and Brussels outgrew it. When the Brabantine War of Succession broke out in 1355 the city had to find the money for a new rampart, completed in 1360 and more than seven kilometres long.

New crafts such as linen weaving and leatherwork gave a recovery around 1400, and the town hall was built between 1439 and 1469. In 1425 Duke John IV founded the university, approved by Pope Martin V, the oldest in the Low Countries and funded largely by the city. Thomas More's Utopia was printed here in 1516, and in 1517 Busleyden's will founded the Collegium Trilingue for Latin, Greek and Hebrew, where Erasmus worked. Then prices soared, the plague of 1578 struck, and between 1526 and 1579 the number of inhabited houses halved; the city was besieged repeatedly between 1542 and 1582. In 1691, under French siege, the townspeople fired in the night on shapes that turned out to be a herd of cows.