For educational purposes, historical findings are often presented in black and white terms and come to maintain themselves thus in the memory of the general public. One striking example of this is provided by the sequence of the chief trading centres of the Low Countries. In the common view, Bruges, the great market of the later Middle Ages, collapsed by the end of the fifteenth century, to be replaced in the sixteenth by the almost sudden, glorious emergence of Antwerp. A generation of historical research has revised this image. It appears now that the transfer of the market function from Bruges to Antwerp was a process of longer duration, extending over more than a century before the evidence of Bruges's complete decline was decisive. Less attention has been paid so far to the fortune of Bruges after this downfall. The present essay will argue that the Flemish town, instead of sinking outright into the oblivion of a dead city, maintained itself as a trading centre of some importance during the years of Antwerp's dominance, and also after the latter town had yielded to the supremacy of Amsterdam in the course of the Low Countries' War of Religion at the end of the sixteenth century.

Bruges played this part despite its difficult access to the high seas. Indeed, this was no novelty. Even before the time of its commercial flowering, when it inherited, from the end of the thirteenth century on, the central market function of the Champagne fairs, it had to cope with the unsatisfactory conditions of navigation resulting from the gradual silting-up of the Zwin River, which connected it with the coast.