Brussels’ history

From early times through to the present day, the history of Brussels has been played out within a physical framework remarkably well-suited to ushering in the birth of a major urban conurbation.
Born at the point where two contrasting regions - one, to the west, made up of marshy plains and the other, to the east, comprising hills and low plateaux - come together, the city was able to take advantage of its central location. Firstly, by supplanting Louvain as the residential and political centre of the Duchy of Brabant, then by receiving confirmation of its political functions down the years under successive regimes and, finally, by ascending to the rank of European capital. 

Origins
From what date onwards can Brussels be considered to have accumulated each of the features that made it a city? This question is the subject of great debate among historians. Brussels is one of the most intractable and irritating of enigmas. Excavations have revealed that the region was home, in turn, to Neolithic settlements, Roman villas and Merovingian farms. But it was in the second half of the 10th century that the village is said to have gradually stepped out of the shadows. In 977, Charles of France became Duke of Lower Lothringen (Lorraine). Two years later, he is said to have had a castle built on an island in the Senne, with a chapel dedicated to Saint Géry.
But the texts that assert this are not from before the 14th century. Modern historical analysis suggests that this theory was invented to highlight the filial bond between Emperor Charlemagne and the Dukes of Brabant, through Charles of France. Ascribing an important role to Brussels in this line of descent only makes sense from the time when the city won an important residential and political role, which was precisely the case … in the 14th century.

 The mediaeval city

It was probably the Counts of Louvain who gave a decisive boost to the urban development when, in the mid-11th century, they built a castle and created a chapter of monks devoted to Sainte-Gudule (Saint Gudula). Sources then mention port facilities on the river. In the early 12th century, the Counts of Louvain became Dukes of Brabant. Around that time, they erected watermills on the river and, to that end, reorganised the hydrography of the place.

It is likely that, from the 11th century, the Counts of Louvain had to compromise and share their power with the local noblemen, in particular the “de Bruxelles” family, hereditarily vested with the responsibility of lord of the manor. In the 12th century, the city emerged as a demarcated territory, governed by a special law, which differed from that of the countryside. Deputy burgomasters were appointed by the Duke to enforce that law. In 1229 the Duke promulgated a charter law (“keure”), with the aim of regulating social relations. In 1302 the trades tried to take power with the help of the common people but this attempt was crushed by the Duke in 1306. From then on, the city magistracy consisted of the ‘Amman’, the Duke’s representative, and of seven deputy burgomasters from the seven lineages grouping together the patrician families of the town. In the early 13th century, the town protected itself with a surrounding wall. In the middle of the following century, a second wall, along the line of the current ‘Petite Ceinture’ (inner ring road) followed. Within the two walls, each lineage was entrusted with guarding one of the seven gateways. It wasn’t until the rebellion of 1421 that a share of the power returned to the trade corporations, grouped together into nine nations. From then on, responsibility for guarding the gateways was shared among lineages and nations. The sharing of power between the members of the patriciate and the tradesmen, although leaving the lion’s share to the former, was to endure, somehow or other, until the end of the Ancien Régime.

 From the House of Louvain to the Burgundians and the Habsburgs

The death of Duke Henri III in 1261 led to a dynastic crisis in Brabant. In this context, the Dowager Duchess Alice of Burgundy left Louvain to settle in Brussels. She succeeded in having the power passed to her second son, Jean I, who, with his ancestor Henri I, was one of the two most important Dukes of Brabant of the House of Louvain. Thus began the story of the residential and political dimension of Brussels. Although, in this respect, the beginnings were slow to come and modest in scale, the ascent that followed was extremely rapid.

 When Duke Jean III died without a male heir in 1355, the Count of Flanders stepped into the breach to undermine his troublesome neighbour. After the rout of the Brabant troops, the banner of Louis de Maele flew over Brussels. The Count’s victory was short-lived, however. Two months later, a hundred or so men led by Everard ‘t Serclaes succeeded in driving out the Flemish garrison.

The Duchess Jeanne and her husband, Wenceslas of Luxembourg, were able to return to their capital. The death of the Duchess Jeanne, aged over 80, signalled the end of the venerable House of Louvain and left the way open for the ambitious House of Burgundy.

 In the course of a quarter of a century littered with civil and dynastic unrest, three Burgundians succeeded one another as rulers of the Duchy. In 1430 Philip the Good took possession of Brabant. Brussels, and not Dijon, became the true capital of the Burgundians, who had become the equals of kings and emperors. At the same time, Brussels underwent a remarkable economic transformation as it switched to the production of luxury goods. The work of unifying the Netherlands undertaken by the Burgundians benefited Brussels, which became home to a sumptuous court into which flocked the leading artists and craftsmen of the day.

The end of the fifteenth century was marked by further dynastic upheaval.

The fortunes of politics and marriage resulted in Charles Quint, succeeding the Burgundians. Heir to the Netherlands through his father, and to Spain, Naples and Sicily through his mother, not to mention a German emperor on his grandfather’s side, Charles took up residence in Brussels at the Coudenberg Palace. The city thus gained irreversible confirmation of its political and administrative pre-eminence at the head of the Netherlands. In turn, this triggered remarkably swift economic growth.

During his long absences, Charles Quint delegated his powers to Margaret of Austria, his aunt, then to Mary of Hungary, his sister. His successors would continue to be represented in Brussels by blood princes. And Brussels, more than any other city, was to benefit from the policy of centralisation pursued across territories under Habsburg rule.

All the more understandable, therefore, that Brussels once again became the leader of the uprising against the regime introduced from Madrid by Philip II. For eight years the city experienced the horrors of the Inquisition. The execution of the Counts of Egmont and Horne in 1568 on the Grand’Place was only the beginning. Completely won over to the cause of William of Orange and Calvinism, the city, bled dry by these years of struggle as fierce as they were unequal, only admitted defeat on 10 March 1585 when Alexandre Farnèse secured the city’s surrender. These years of sorrow delayed the moment when Brussels began to reap the benefits of the newly-opened Willebroeck canal, which was designed to provide the city with an indirect link to the sea.

Despite a minor renaissance in the reign of Arch Duke Albert and Isabella, throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries Brussels remained listless amid the decadence of the Spanish Habsburgs, although without its role as capital of the Spanish Netherlands ever coming under threat.When Europe once again rose up in anger, the armies of Louis XIV, commanded by Marshal de Villeroy, bombarded Brussels on 13 and 14 August 1695, destroying a great many buildings in the process. It took four years to restore the Grand’Place as one of Europe’s most resplendent architectural settings.When the Austrian Habsburgs replaced their Spanish cousins in 1716, the city was plagued by a wave of social unrest. This culminated in the beheading of the Dean of the Guilds, François Anneessens, three years later. Traumatised, Brussels would have to wait another 25 years before finding its feet again. It was the government of Charles of Lorraine which finally led the city out of the darkness and also improved it by making far-reaching changes to the urban landscape.

Brussels did not escape the cauldron of philosophical and political upheaval at the end of the eighteenth century. Converted to the ideas of the Enlightenment, Emperor Joseph II had promulgated a series of reforms. However, his intentions were as noble as their procedures were unwieldy. Resistance began to ferment in people’s minds. So, when Paris rose up in 1789, Brussels’ only thought was to rise up against its foreign rulers, all in the name of defending the ancient privileges of the Catholic Church and the bourgeois aristocracy.

 The long march to the future

Having quelled the revolt of their subjects in the Netherlands one last time, the Habsburgs had to bow to the might of France under the Directoire. After the battle of Waterloo and the fall of Napoleon, Brussels became one of the two capitals of the new Kingdom of the Netherlands, along with The Hague.

The 1830 Revolution, Belgian independence and the rejection of Dutch rule marked a decisive and irreversible point in Brussels’ ascension to the rank of major world city.

 From the beginning of the 19th century, the city quickly took on the attributes of a modern conurbation: conversion of the old city walls into boulevards; construction of railway stations (the first dating from 1835); foundation of a university in 1834, distribution of drinking water to homes, the laying of a network of sewers and the completion of ambitious urban building projects, including the covering of the river Senne, not simply as a public health measure but also as an opportunity to give the central boulevards the uniform aspect they still retain to this day.

In the process of attracting an ever increasing number of administrative, commercial and financial activities to its centre, the city gradually swallowed up the neighbouring communes. Quite naturally, this rapid growth brought with it a continuation into the twentieth century of further rounds of major building projects.

 As such, Brussels was plainly not immune to the general trends that were transforming all the great cities in the west. The city’s metro and tower blocks changed the traditional urban landscape. Mercifully, not all of Brussels’ architectural treasures were bulldozed; those that remain are now guarded more and more jealously. Meanwhile, the dynamism, which this city of some million inhabitants has demonstrated down the years, was rewarded by decisions to make the city the headquarters of the European Union, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and numerous other international organisations, both public and private.

 Brussels at the heart of Europe

Headquarters of the European Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (N.A.T.O.), Brussels is an international financial centre and home to the European headquarters of over two thousand multinationals. Brussels offers high-calibre scientific resources and has flexible economic infrastructures that have enabled it to keep pace with the great technological changes of the 21st century.

Brussels is an intersection for some of Europe’s major motorways:

E40: London - Brussels - Köln

E19: Amsterdam - Antwerp - Brussels - Paris

E411: Brussels - Namur - Luxembourg

The motorway network is the densest in Europe. Travel on motorways is free.

Belgium and its institutions

Belgium became an independent country in 1830, straddling the frontier between the Latin and Germanic halves of Europe and uniting citizens from a variety of cultures under the same national flag. To offer the various constituents of its population the autonomy they were demanding, the country has recently moved towards a federal model by means of a series of institutional reforms, which were introduced gradually to avoid destroying the national fabric. The complexity of Belgium’s social structure – which comprises Dutch (Flemish) speakers, French speakers and German speakers – is clearly the root cause of the difficulties in finding a definitive form. Belgium therefore has been compelled to divide itself up into both (geographical) regions and (linguistic) communities.

To know more: www.belgium.fgov.be

Brussels in figures

Like the Parisian arrondissements and the London boroughs, every Brussels commune is designated by a specific postcode: 1050 for Ixelles, 1180 for Uccle, etc. The Brussels-Capital region consists of 19 communes:

Anderlecht (1070), Auderghem (1160), Berchem-Sainte-Agathe (1082), Bruxelles-Ville (1000 and 1020), Etterbeek (1040), Evere (1140), Forest (1190), Ganshoren (1083), Ixelles (1050), Jette (1090), Koekelberg (1081), Molenbeek-Saint-Jean (1080), Saint-Gilles (1060), Saint-Josse-Ten-Noode (1210), Schaerbeek (1030), Uccle (1180), Watermael-Boitsfort (1170), Woluwe-Saint-Lambert (1200) and Woluwe-Saint-Pierre (1150).

The conurbation covers a total surface area of 16,179 ha

The population has around 1,000.000 inhabitants. Roughly a quarter of the city’s total population is foreign.

The city’s green spaces (parks - woods - gardens) account for 20.01% of the region’s territory.

The time is GMT +1 in winter GMT + 2 in summer

Brussels has a temperate, maritime climate.

The average temperature in summer is ± 16°Celsius (62° Fahrenheit).The average winter temperature is ± 3°Celsius (36° Fahrenheit).

Brussels is lying at an altitude of 15 m above sea level at the north end of the ‘Pentagon’ (the historical city centre) to up to 130 m near Soignes Forest (Chaussée de Waterloo).

A motorway ring road (RING) has been built roughly 6 km from the centre of Brussels to make both transit and entry into the city easier.