Ypres

Ypres grew on the little Ieperlee river in West Flanders and became the third city of the County of Flanders after Ghent and Bruges, an early industrial cloth town whose linen and woollen goods were sold as far as Novgorod. Around 1200 some 40,000 people lived there. Its vast Cloth Hall, raised in the thirteenth century, housed the trade, and during the festivities the townsfolk are said to have thrown cats from its tower.

The town's cloth guilds took part in the great struggles of Flanders, from the Battle of the Golden Spurs against France to the fighting at Cassel in 1328. In the later fourteenth century the industry began to decline, and Ypres was besieged from May to August 1383 by the English bishop Henry le Despenser's crusade, until a French relief army arrived. Walls built from 1385 shut in the shrunken town. After Thérouanne was destroyed in 1561, Ypres became a bishopric, and the church of Saint Martin turned into a cathedral. The Iconoclasm of the 1560s and the long Eighty Years' War then wrecked the town's wealth.

Louis XIV took Ypres on 25 March 1678, and Vauban rebuilt its defences as one of the great French fortresses. Marlborough thought of seizing it in 1709 but turned away from the poorly drained ground. The Treaty of Utrecht handed it to the Habsburgs in 1713, and Joseph II ordered parts of the walls torn down in 1782, which helped the French capture the city in 1794.