At the village we met our companions of the journey who had sat down there.  The good tourists get fatigued, stop ordinarily at the inn, take a substantial dinner, have a chair brought to the door, and digest while looking at the amphitheater, which from there appears about as high as a house.  After this they return, praising the sublime sight, and very glad that they have come to the Pyrenees.

VI

BELGIUM

BRUGES[A]

[Footnote A:  From “Cities of Belgium.”]

BY GRANT ALLEN

The Rhine constituted the great central waterway of medieval Europe; the Flemish towns were its ports and its manufacturing centers.  They filled in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries much the same place that Liverpool, Glasgow, Manchester, and Birmingham fill in the nineteenth.  Many causes contributed to this result.

Flanders, half independent under its own counts, occupied a middle position, geographically and politically, between France and the Empire; it was comparatively free from the disastrous wars which desolated both these countries, and in particular it largely escaped the long smouldering quarrel between French and English, which so long retarded the development of the former.  Its commercial towns, again, were not exposed on the open sea to the attacks of pirates or hostile fleets, but were safely ensconced in inland flats, reached by rivers or canals, almost inaccessible to maritime enemies.  Similar conditions elsewhere early ensured peace and prosperity for Venice.

The canal system of Holland and Belgium began to be developed as early as the twelfth century (at first for drainage), and was one leading cause of the commercial importance of the Flemish cities in the fourteenth.  In so flat a country, locks are all but unnecessary.  The two towns which earliest rose to greatness in the Belgian area were thus Bruges and Ghent; they possest in the highest degree the combined advantages of easy access to the sea and comparative inland security.

Bruges, in particular, was one of the chief stations of the Hanseatic League, which formed an essentially commercial alliance for the mutual protection of the northern trading centers.  By the fourteenth century Bruges had thus become in the north what Venice was in the south, the capital of commerce.  Trading companies from all the surrounding countries had their “factories” in the town, and every European king or prince of importance kept a resident minister accredited to the merchant republic.