Brabant Duchy & Urban Charter City

Frankish/Carolingian power and the Holy Roman imperial order in Central Europe.

1 chapter

695 - 979

In the Lotharingian kingdom's frontier zone, a marsh settlement called 'broek zele' — marsh home — took root on the banks of the Senne/Zenne River. This watery origin gave Brussels its name and its first reason to exist: a river crossing on the trade route between Bruges and Cologne. The Île Saint-Géry/Sint-Gorikseiland, a river island, was the earliest nucleated settlement. Christianization followed Lotharingian political structures: by the 10th century, churches dedicated to Saint Géry and Saint Michael marked the landscape. Documentary evidence for this period is sparse — the settlement's existence is legible mainly through place-name evidence and the river itself, which still flows beneath the city. The Senne is Brussels' most literal continuity vault: every later era is built on top of it.

1356 - 1477

The Burgundian state absorbed Brabant into a larger political constellation, but Brussels' guilds seized civic power. From 1421, the Nine Nations of Brussels (Neuf Nations/Negen Naties) — craft guilds grouped by parish — shared city government with patrician lineages. This guild-ascendant era produced the Ommegang: in 1348, according to legend, a woman named Beatrijs Soetkens transported a miraculous statue of the Virgin from Antwerp to the Crossbowmen's chapel on the Sablon/Zavel. The Crossbowmen's Guild (Edele Serment der Kruisboogschutters) vowed to carry the statue annually — a lustral procession on the Sunday before Pentecost that circumambulated the city. Notre-Dame du Sablon/Onze-Lieve-Vrouw-ter-Zavelkerk became the procession's shrine. The Grand-Place/Grote Markt emerged as the guilds' architectural showcase, though the opulent guildhalls you see today date from later rebuilding.

1477 - 1555

Under Habsburg rule, Brussels became an imperial capital. The Coudenberg Palace, now accessible only through its archaeological site beneath Place Royale, hosted the 1549 Joyous Entry of Emperor Charles V and his son Philip II — the very event that the modern Ommegang would later reenact, substituting imperial pageantry for the original religious circumambulation. On 1 July 1523, Jan van Essen and Hendrik Vos were burned at the stake on the Grand-Place — the first Protestant martyrs of the Low Countries, an event that foreshadowed the Reformation wars to come. The Ommegang of 1549, when Charles V received a lavish procession, was the most spectacular iteration of the already-established ritual. The Habsburg era embedded imperial spectacle into Brussels' civic memory — a memory that would be selectively revived centuries later.

1555 - 1713

Brussels was a Calvinist republic from 1577 to 1585 before reconquest by Spain; this eight-year period of Protestant governance was followed by centuries of Counter-Reformation dominance that left little visible trace in the city's festival calendar or public memory. The French bombardment of 1695 destroyed most of the Grand-Place, and the guilds rebuilt it in the ornate Baroque style you see today — each guildhall a statement of corporate identity. The Manneken Pis statue was installed in 1619 by Jerome Duquesnoy, though the dressing tradition is documented from 1616 — three years earlier. The Friends of the Order of Manneken-Pis now maintain a wardrobe of over 1,200 costumes. The Ommegang continued as a religious lustral procession, but the Counter-Reformation recast it in a militant Catholic key. The original guild archives that might document this era in detail were destroyed when the guilds were suppressed in 1795 and their archives sold at public auction on the Grand-Place in August 1796 — a documentary gap that still haunts Brussels' ability to narrate its own festival history.