In November 2016 I spent one month on an Erasmus+ scholarship in Spain. A very valuable visit as the main focus of my research is the architectural commissions of Charles of Croÿ (1560-1612), one of the highest ranking nobleman of the Low Countries and the only Grande de España outside of the Spanish territory at the time. A lot of the archives concerning his military exploits are kept in archives scattered around the Iberian peninsula. I started my visit in Madrid, where I visited the Biblioteca Nacional de España, Real Biblioteca, Biblioteca y archivo del Fundación Francisco Zabálburu, Archivo del Instituto Valencia de Don Juan and the Archivo de la Fundación Casa de Alba. From Madrid I went on an excursion to Toledo, visiting the Sección Nobleza del Archivo Histórico Nacional and the cathedral of Toledo, where a portrait of William of Croÿ – archbishop of Toledo- is decorating the walls. I concluded my stay in Madrid with a research seminar on the residential system of the high nobility in the Habsburg Low Countries at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (included in the course Crítica y edición de textos históricos, organized by Dr. Bernardo J. García García).

This mobility greatly improved the quality of the research and my own research skills, as I gained experience with foreign archives and international perspective on the relation between Spain and the Low Countries at the turn of the sixteenth century. I became acquainted with different methodologic approaches and strengthened my international competence and research methods, mainly through the contacts established at the research group on early modern history of the Universidad de Complutense.

I continued my travel, going from Madrid to Valladolid, the capital of the region Castille & León. There I spent one week visiting the Archivo General de Simancas, looking for information concerning the Croÿ residences in France and the boundary regions.

October 21-23 we held our second international expert meeting in Bruges, reflecting on the progress of the project. After a short introduction to the project and general state of the art by Professor Krista De Jonge, we continued with a progress report of the PhD project “Residential systems in the Habsburg Low Countries: the Croÿ case”. The presentation focused on how we can determine the relative importance of residences within the broad network (often spanning the entire southern part of the Low Countries), applied to the Croÿ residences in Brussels and Beaumont.

The expert meeting was combined with visits to some of the noble residences, still existing within Bruges. On Friday we started with a visit to Hof van Watervliet (Oude Burg 27), the former residence of Jan III de Baenst (????-1486). The family de Baenst was originally part of the lower nobility, but in the fifteenth century they manage to climb in social status under the Burgundian dukes in the county of Flanders. Not only was he one of the most influential political figures of Bruges, he also played a very important role in the development of the cultural life in Bruges.

For a complete history of the building: http://www.hofvanwatervliet.be  

The second day of the expert meeting started with a presentation by Pieter Martens, post-doc on the project. He explained how his expertise in military architecture will contribute to the project, as many of the residences were situated in important border areas. After a vivid discussion we continued the day with visits to the noble residences within the city. The Hof van Bladelin (Naaldenstraat 19-21) belonged to Pieter Bladelin, counsellor to Duke Philip of Burgundy and treasurer of the Order of the Gulden Fleece. Befor the 1440s, Bladelin owned another house near the Prince’s Court – Princenhof-, which served as bachelors residence to the duke’s heir, Charles (count of Charolais, later known as Charles the Bold).

The original house was built by Pieter Bladelin before 1451, after which the consecutive owners made several adjustments or enlargements. In 1466 it was Piero de Medici who owned the palace and his arms and emblem can be found in the portico along the street. On the courtyard façade of this portico, two medallions with the busts of Lorenzo de Medici and his wife Clarice Orsini were added (possibly in 1469). However the Medici bank in Bruges quickly declined after Charles the Bold’s death in Nancy in 1477. There have been several restoration campaigns, which makes it not easy to determine the actual building phases on site.

In the afternoon we visited Hof van Adornes and the Jerusalem Chapel (Peperstaraat 1-3). The residence , built by Pieter Adornes, consists of two superposed halls and chambers at the front with a spiral staircase connecting the different floors. The dimensions of this wing express the  high aspirations of the commissioner, as important figure in the Bruges politics and intimus of the Burgundian dukes. Perpendicular to these great halls was the service wing, connected to the chapel by a gallery supported on an arcade. This gallery arrives at the upper sanctuary of the church and is flanked by the family oratory, looking out over the two sanctuaries (upper and lower) of the Jerusalem church. This church was added to the site by Anselm Adornes (son of Pieter), after his voyage to Jerusalem in 1470. The tomb of Anselm Adornes and his wife Margareta Van der Bank stands in the middle of the main space.

From the Adornes residence we moved to Hof van Gruuthuse, the city museum that is currently under restoration. Thanks to the cooperation of the city of Bruges we could enter the former residence of the lords of Gruuthuse as well as their oratory looking out over the altar of the church of Our Lady. The lords of Gruuthuse obtained the monopoly on gruit, the mix of herbs at the basis of beer (before hops were used), maybe before the fourteenth century. This constituted the basis of their fortune. Louis of Gruuthuse belonged to the higher strata of the Burgundian court both under Philip the Good and Charles the Bold, receiving the order of the Golden Fleece in 1461. He married Margaret, countess of Borssele and a member of one of the most important families of Zealand in 1455. While renovating his ancestral house, from 1463 to 1477 Louis served as lieutenant‐general of the counties of Holland, Zealand and Frisia (the latter not actually part of the Low Countries, but it had an important role in the image‐building of the Burgundian dukes as successors to the mythical Frisian kings). In the winter of 1470‐1471 he gave sanctuary to Edward IV and his brother Richard, and was rewarded with the hereditary title of earl of Winchester, a rare honour to be bestowed upon a foreigner. He negotiated Mary of Burgundy’s marriage to Archduke Maximilian of Habsburg, becoming chamberlain to their son Philip at his birth in 1478. He turned against Maximilian like many noblemen after Mary’s death, dying in disgrace in 1492.

The core of the actual Museum goes back to the fifteenth century but was thoroughly renovated by the noted architect Louis Delacenserie of Bruges in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (1883‐1895).

In 1472 Louis of Gruuthuse completes the oratory next to the ambulatory of the church of Our Lady, adjacent to the house to the south. Here some of the oldest preserved elements of the residence can be found. Under a pointed barrel vault the lords of Gruuthuse could go their praying bank while being confronted with their sins by little wooden creatures holding up mirrors. This small gallery and oratory must have been decorated very richly with the most exquisite colours and decorations.

1. Devliegher, De huizen te Brugge, Tielt: Lannoo, 1968 (revised edition in 1975).

The session questions the impact of the Burgundian court in the field of architecture within the broader reaches of court society in the Low Countries on the one hand and within the milieu of the urban élites on the other.

In the Low Countries of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the residences built for noble families such as the Croÿ, Lalaing, Arenberg and Nassau took up a central position in the architectural vanguard of the era. Canny acquisition tactics and well thought out marriage strategies had enabled them to build empires which extended across the different lands of the Burgundian federation. The first decades of the sixteenth century were characterized by a true building mania on the part of the new high nobility, which was an integral part of the ostentation and conspicuous spending expected from them.

The panel will address, specifically, the interaction with the court of the reigning prince as part of the broader question of transmission and transformation of value patterns within the social hierarchies, as expressed through architecture. Was there a Burgundian ‘model residence’? Can we indeed hypothesize a ‘trickle-down effect’ from the higher ranks to the lower, as is done implicitly in much of the current research production? Does the highly organized building sector at court interact at all with construction in the urban context, booming at the time as never before? To what extent does the urban culture of the Low Countries transpire in the residential patterns adopted at the Burgundian court during the fifteenth century and ‘modernized’ in the sixteenth? Can we differentiate, on the architectural plane, between the high nobility close to the reigning prince and to international court life, and the Netherlandish urban élites (merchants, bankers, councillors…) without whom the Burgundian and Habsburg courts could not function?

Krista De Jonge: ‘Burgundian palaces’? Urban residences of the nobility in the Low Countries (1450-1530)

The existence of an influential Burgundian model of court organization developed between France and the Low Countries in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries has been debated time and again, and its connection with the later Spanish Habsburg court, a powerful model in its own right, has been explored in various ways. On the architectural plane, we have shown earlier that the ‘manner of Brabant’ of the higher nobility (as defined in the early Habsburg Low Countries) was adopted as a royal style by monarchs as far apart as Philip II of Spain and Frederik II of Denmark in the later sixteenth century, generating widespread imitation by the local nobility. The constitution of this architectural model at the turn of the fifteenth century in the central Low Countries has not yet been fully charted, however.

In particular, the interaction with the urban milieu from the Burgundian residence cities (Bruges) to the early Habsburg ones (Mechelen) needs closer examination. Apart from a rare example such as the heavily restored Markiezenhof in Bergen op Zoom, the ‘urban palace’ around 1500 has not been studied this perspective. In this paper we will address questions of typology related with surviving noble residences such as those of Bladelin, Adornes and Watervliet in Bruges and lost ones such as those of York or Cambrai in Mechelen, and Croÿ and Nassau in Brussels, paying special attention to the similarities and discontinuities with contemporary court residences and to their place in the residential network of the nobility.

Merlijn Hurx: ‘To spend as little as possible’, the impact of bureaucratic procedures on architectural planning in the late Middle Ages in the Low Countries

Multiple studies that recognize the importance of administrative pre-conditions for architectural practice concern nineteenth- and twentieth-century developments. Although, the growing impact of bureaucratic procedures on architectural planning strikes us as typical modern, its origins go back to the late Middle Ages. To control the ever-increasing cost of building, the French and English courts introduced a centralised governance in the late fourteenth century. Other princes, among whom the Dukes of Burgundy, quickly followed them; the dukes introduced a centralised administration to effectively organise and control the many construction sites in their domains in the Low Countries.

I will argue in this paper that this was not only a financial reform, however; it also represented an important step towards a more rationalised architectural planning. Often, the medieval planning process is considered a process of improvisation and continuous redesign that extended well into the building process. The rediscovery of a vast part of the early sixteenth-century building administration of the Duchy of Brabant demonstrates that the new procedures introduced by the Burgundian dukes made it necessary to record decisions and agreements that were otherwise left implicit; it gave rise to a better documentation of the design and the construction process. The great number and wide range of documents that is preserved, which includes drawings, cost estimates, building specifications, contracts, allow to understand how meticulously well planned and monitored construction for the court was in the Low Countries.

Sanne Maekelberg: The Prince’s Court at Bruges (1395-1468), a Burgundian model for ducal residences?

The Prince’s Court in Bruges was one of the main residences of the dukes of Burgundy in the fifteenth century. There had been a residence on site ever since the fourteenth century, belonging to Lodewijk van Male, count of Flanders. Through the marriage of his daughter – Margareth of Male- with Philips the Bold, the residence becomes part of the Burgundian legacy. At the end of the fourteenth century the domain had been renovated by Philips the Bold, after which his grandson’s wife Isabella of Portugal commissioned several major adjustments. Based on the construction accounts covering a period from 1395 up until 1468 the culture of living at a fifteenth century Burgundian court were studied through the reconstruction of the buildings that were part of the complex. In this paper I argue that the Prince’s Court of Bruges served as a model for other Burgundian residences in the county of Flanders, despite the different urban contexts and particular building histories. Case in point being the Prince’s Court at Ghent (1422-1473) and the Palais Rihour at Lille (1453-1473).