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Urban chronicle writing in late medieval Flanders: the case of Bruges during the Flemish Revolt of 1482–1490

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 March 2015

LISA DEMETS  and
JAN DUMOLYN
LISA DEMETS
Affiliation:
Ghent University, Department of History, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 35, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
JAN DUMOLYN
Affiliation:
Ghent University, Department of History, Sint-Pietersnieuwstraat 35, 9000 Ghent, Belgium
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Abstract:

The absence of a ‘real’ urban chronicle tradition in fifteenth-century Flanders similar to the Italian or German models has raised questions among scholars. However, there is also no satisfactory consensus on the exact meaning or contents of medieval ‘urban historiography’. Some were ‘official’ city chronicles, while others lauded patrician lineages or took the viewpoint of specific social groups or corporate organizations and reinforced construction of the groups’ collective memories. Some seem to express the literary aspirations of individual city officials or clerics with strong connections to their towns. We propose an analytical framework to identify and measure the ‘urbanity’ of late medieval chronicles, taking into account the authorship and thematic emphasis of historiographical texts, but focusing on the social environment of their circulation and the ideological strategies at work.

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Research Article
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Urban History , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , February 2016 , pp. 28 - 45
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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2015 

Medieval urban historiography

There is no consensus on the exact meaning of the commonly used phrase ‘medieval urban historiography’.Footnote 1 Although strict dichotomies between ‘urban’ and ‘court’ or ‘noble culture’, or between ‘lay’ and ‘clerical’ culture are now generally dismissed, the question of whether there was a specifically ‘urban’ form of historical writing is of considerable importance. We propose an integrated analytical framework to identify and measure the ‘urbanity’ of late medieval chronicles, taking into account the authorship and thematic emphasis of historiographical texts, but focusing on the social environment of their circulation and the ideological strategies at work.

Although cities were dominant in medieval Flemish society, there are few early texts which can be described as ‘urban chronicles’, especially in comparison to the ubiquitous texts surviving in the German and Italian cities.Footnote 2 The two oldest narrative sources that focus on urban events are isolated and atypical. Both were written by well-educated clerics who lived in towns. The chronicle of Galbert of Bruges, a cleric of the collegiate church of St Donatian, about the political struggle in Flanders after the murder of Count Charles the Good in 1127, is one of the most well-known and fascinating historiographical documents of the twelfth century.Footnote 3 The Annales Gandenses, written by an anonymous Greyfriar in Ghent, has received less international scholarly attention, but offers an equally interesting analysis of the political events in the county between 1296 and 1310, a period of French occupation, urban revolts and liberation in 1302.Footnote 4 Both texts show a thorough familiarity with urban society and politics, thus demonstrating that clerical authors were not always ‘outsiders’ hostile to the worldview, actions and aspirations of city-dwellers. However, neither of these two chronicles circulated widely, because there are few surviving manuscripts, and neither had appreciable influence on other historical narratives. They are exceptions to the Flemish historiographical tradition of monastic annals and chronicles and ‘national’ narratives organized around the genealogies of the counts.Footnote 5 It initially seems difficult to locate a specifically ‘urban character’, or ‘urban point of view’ in historical writing before the fifteenth century. The same is true for the neighbouring principalities of Brabant, Holland and Hainaut.Footnote 6

Authorship, worldviews and interpretative communities

There are a number of criteria competing to define the category of ‘urban’ medieval historiography. Trio defined it as ‘a genre in which the history's own town is strongly accentuated and which – at the same time – strongly expresses an urban self-consciousness’. Trio's definition is a useful one to start with but may perhaps be further elaborated upon.Footnote 7 One issue is authorship: was the text written by a burgher or a group of city residents when the text is a collective work with continuations, additions or interpolations? Distinguishing among ‘authors’, ‘continuators’, ‘scribes’ and ‘copyists’ is problematic for medieval texts.Footnote 8 Chronicles were textual ‘traditions’ that included translating a Latin text into the vernacular, or adding to the previous narrative, often with revisions to suit certain powerful men, social circles or institutions. When there were multiple authors of a text, they may have been ‘city residents’ of various kinds: clerics, city officials or ordinary burghers.

Of the Flemish towns, Ypres has the clearest ‘urban’ chronicle tradition for the fifteenth century. A chronicle traditionally attributed to ‘(pseudo-)Olivier van Dixmude’ seems to have been written by several city aldermen (possibly Olivier himself, Joris de Rijke and Joos Bryde) and was continued by at least one other author, Pieter van de Letewe.Footnote 9 Although the Ypres-tradition versions emphasize the views of the city's patricians and rulers, they are not as tied to the ‘official’ point of view as other urban historical narratives composed by clerks employed by the city council, such as the German town chronicles, the Amtsbücher or Ratsbücher.Footnote 10 The ‘Diary of Ghent’ (Dagboek van Ghent) has one hand that narrated political developments between 1447 and 1470 and a second that covered 1477 through 1515, both periods characterized – not coincidentally – by revolts and civic strife. Its hybrid text combines a few historiographical passages with many official documents and reports from the Collacie, the ‘great council’ of the city.Footnote 11 Since the annalistic Van De Letewe account from Ypres also contains copies of letters and charters, other combined texts might have existed at one time. An anonymous historical narrative, the ‘Book of Everything that Happened in Bruges between 1477 and 1491’, emphasizes crime and scandal.Footnote 12 As the writer was well informed about cases, he may have been a clerk of the criminal court.

A related text type is the memorieboeken, or ‘memorial books’: annalistic manuscripts organized around the annual lists of urban magistrates, with comments on the year's events. In addition to the carefully studied Ghent texts, in approximately 40 late medieval and early modern versions, there are similar manuscripts in Bruges and smaller Flemish towns, and in fact Van de Letewe's chronicle and several other ones also contain such lists. Because some are linked to elite lineages, they could be categorized as ‘family’ rather than ‘urban’ chronicles, along with the Italian Libri di Ricordanza, many German Städtechroniken and some London chronicles.Footnote 13 Transmitting urban history in Flanders was not a monopoly of the patrician elites. Forms of collective memory were also maintained by urban corporate groups, such as craft and shooting guilds, in their membership registers and cartularies.Footnote 14 Middle-class artisan families also kept alive the memories of their forefathers’ participation in earlier political and social struggles.Footnote 15

The most important fifteenth-century Flemish vernacular chronicle tradition does not initially seem to be ‘urban’. The Middle-Dutch translation of the Flandria Generosa C, a branch of a Latin genealogy of the Flemish counts beginning around 1160, presents itself as a chronicle of the entire county.Footnote 16 The Flandria Generosa, the principal Latin chronicle tradition circulating in Flanders between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, was probably translated into the vernacular by urban ‘rhetoricians’.Footnote 17 The cultural environments surrounding the corporately organized rederijkerskamers, or ‘chambers of rhetoricians’, whose members were literate artisans from the upper levels of the craft guilds, as well as merchants, schoolmasters and urban clerics, were the sites of production of many copies and adaptations of the text.Footnote 18 Although it is not clear who was responsible for the first Dutch version of the Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen (Excellent Chronicle of Flanders), that initial version grew into a sizeable corpus of late medieval manuscripts, followed by a printed version in 1531. A Bruges cluster of chronicle texts is attributed to Anthonis de Roovere and one or more continuators. A master stone mason from Bruges and the most famous Flemish rhetorician Anthonis de Roovere authored the largest portion of the Dutch addition to the translated chronicle, from the Calais siege during the reign of Philip the Good (1436) until the death of Mary of Burgundy (1482). The narratives that these Bruges continuators added to the translated segments mainly deal with the events in their hometown. In several manuscripts, the authors also added rhetorical poems.Footnote 19

In addition to authorship, a second accepted criterion for a ‘city chronicle’ considers the ‘worldview’ of the text, including its geographical scope, topics and ideology. Does the version focus on events in a single city, on a certain principality or on the wider Christian world? Does it identify with a set of values typical of urban society? The Ypres chronicle tradition, for instance, takes a clear partisan, Ypres-centred view, but covers the county as a whole. Although all versions from the Excellente Cronike tradition cover the ‘high politics’ of the Burgundian dynasty, some centre on the Ghent point of view, and seven manuscripts, similar in content and style and all authored by Anthonis de Roovere, identify strongly with the city of Bruges.Footnote 20

Late medieval ‘urban ideologies’ were systematic political and social discourses, featuring elements specific to urban life and representing the balance of power within the city and in the outside world.Footnote 21 The precise form of each urban political discourse varied by favouring certain urban groups. While the Ypres chronicle tradition was written from an elite point of view and condemned the dangerous populace, the parts of the Excellente Cronike written by De Roovere show a great deal of sympathy for the political activities of the Bruges middle classes.Footnote 22 Political sympathies are less clear in other manuscripts of the Excellente Cronike. This ‘variance’ in ideological content is not exceptional. Transmission of medieval texts was generally unstable, because writers did not believe that a text was the intellectual property of one, or even several, authors. Developing new versions of a historiographical tradition, ‘authors’, ‘copyists’ or ‘scribes’ (distinction among these terms is unproductive for the medieval period) emphasized, enlarged, reduced or omitted specific passages. Different manuscript versions of the Excellente Cronike clearly show this process of réécriture or ‘rewriting’, a fundamental feature of chronicles as a genre.Footnote 23

Local scribes, usually anonymous, adapted the works for the social milieu in which they were written and circulated. The texts might have been read in private or aloud to an audience, at official city government events, in the domestic sphere of important families, or in literary circles, corporations and religious confraternities.Footnote 24 For this reason, the text of an ‘urban chronicle’ should be considered as a social product designated for a specific milieu, created and recreated through the rewriting strategies of the different ‘hands’ or ‘voices’ who worked on the various manuscripts.Footnote 25 Therefore, the third, and arguably most important, criterion of a text's ‘urbanity’ is the extent to which it reveals the intended audience and its expectations.Footnote 26 Which social milieu was intended as the ‘interpretative community’ who shared the text as an object of interpretation?Footnote 27 Answering these questions, when the sources permit, requires combining ideological comparison of specific versions, material-philologist analysis of the manuscripts and reconstruction of the social networks in which the texts circulated.

Cultural and political networks in late fifteenth-century Bruges

The manuscript of the Excellente Cronike tradition preserved in the City Library of Douai is the only one of the ‘Bruges cluster’ for which the name of the scribe and continuator, Jacob van Malen, is known. In the epilogue, after attributing the contemporary part of the text to Anthonis de Roovere, Jacob van Malen wrote that he had begun writing his manuscript in 1485 in ‘the Tower of Burgundy’ at Sluis, a fortification which also served as a prison. He finished the work in Bruges on 25 October 1490.Footnote 28 Although nothing was known previously about Jacob van Malen, paleographical comparison identifies his hand in one of the manuscripts in the City Library of Bruges as well. This identification directly connects two of the seven ‘Bruges’ manuscripts of the Excellente Cronike.Footnote 29 The Douai manuscript is particularly interesting because the codex also contains a late sixteenth-century Middle-Dutch adaptation of another Latin chronicle by Rombout de Doppere, a member of the Holy Spirit Chamber of Rhetoric, the oldest in Bruges. This text completes the story of the Excellente Cronike from the death of Mary of Burgundy (1482) until the death of her son Philip the Fair (1506).Footnote 30 This manuscript's scribe also added a De Labye family tree, from two fifteenth-century brothers, Colaert and Pieter, up to their late sixteenth-century descendants.Footnote 31 As members of this family probably owned the book, we have a rare opportunity to reconstruct the ‘production’ and ‘consumption’ contexts of this version.

Archival research produced only a few traces of political, economic and cultural activities of Jacob van Malen. He sat on the city council of Bruges, but only once.Footnote 32 He did not rank, therefore, among the high economic or political elites. However, as a cloth salesman and the dean of several commissions charged with inspecting the quality of textiles, he certainly belonged to the more prosperous burghers of Bruges.Footnote 33 Since he copied two manuscripts and added poems, even in the parts of the chronicle not associated with Anthonis de Roovere, Jacob van Malen was clearly a rhetorician himself. So were Colaert and Pieter De Labye. The two brothers founded the second chamber of rhetoric in Bruges, the Drie Santinnen, or ‘Three Female Saints’ (Catherine, Mary Magdalene and Barbara). In 1471, Pieter De Labye was the ‘headman’ of the Our Lady zestendeel, one of the six administrative sections of Bruges.Footnote 34 He was a mercer and several times appointed dean of the urban control commission overseeing the mercery market.Footnote 35 His brother, Colaert, also served as headman of the Our Lady section.Footnote 36 Like Pieter, Colaert was a mercer and dean of several quality-control commissions. On various occasions, he sold expensive textiles to the city government.Footnote 37 Colaert was appointed alderman of Bruges after the death of Charles the Bold on 19 April 1477, and again after the death of Mary of Burgundy on 17 April 1482.Footnote 38 That year, Colaert De Labye was one of the deputies who represented Bruges at the Estates General of the Burgundian lands held in Ghent, along with the notorious Bruges rebel leader, Willem Moreel.Footnote 39 The De Labye brothers belonged to the economic elite of Bruges, and Colaert De Labye held important political offices as well.

The seven Bruges manuscripts were deeply embedded in the urban cultural networks of the chambers of rhetoric. The clear link between the De Labye family and the Douai manuscript suggests that there was also a connection between the urban circulation of the Excellente Cronike and the Three Female Saints Chamber. Few sources from this literary guild survive, but its late fifteenth-century cartulary does list the De Labye brothers and a few other members.Footnote 40 Moreover, Jacob van Malen and Pieter and Colaert De Labye also belonged to a religious confraternity, the ‘Our Lady of the Snow’ guild, which was closely related to the Three Female Saints.Footnote 41 Palaeographical comparison of the hands who wrote the confraternity's accounts and the Excellente Cronike manuscripts reveals that the signature of an overziender or warden, Hendrik Bollekin, matches a signature in the New York manuscript of the Excellente Cronike.Footnote 42

The Three Female Saints Chamber of Rhetoric and the devotional confraternity of Our Lady of the Snow were closely connected. The foundational charter of the Three Female Saints, containing a clause about the devotion to Barbara, Mary Magdalene and Catherine at the altar of Our Lady of the Snow, is one of the first deeds recorded in the confraternity's cartulary.Footnote 43 In addition to Pieter and Colaert De Labye, many prominent members of Our Lady of the Snow were tied in some way to the Three Female Saints, including Pieter van Muelenbeke who helped found the confraternity. His funeral inscription contains a poem by Anthonis de Roovere.Footnote 44 At the Our Lady of the Snow guild feasts miracle plays were occasionally performed, usually organized by Aliamus de Groote, a member of the Holy Spirit, the other Bruges chamber of rhetoric.Footnote 45 However in 1474, the initial year of Three Female Saints, Anthonis de Roovere organized the play. He might have been a member of both chambers. Moreover, from 1495 onwards, the confraternity accounts list payments to ‘those of the Three Saints’ for performing plays at the guild feasts.Footnote 46

Our Lady of the Snow was a very open confraternity with few restrictions on membership. As a result, there were several hundred members from various social backgrounds.Footnote 47 More than half of the members were women. The cult of Our Lady of the Snow was not limited to any single parish, craft, or social group.Footnote 48 Nevertheless, the most prominent members and leaders of the confraternity came from the top layer of Bruges society.Footnote 49 These officials also had strong connections to city government. Among them were Pieter De Labye, who was overziender, warden, for five years, until the foundation of the Three Female Saints,Footnote 50 and Jan de Blasere, dean of the confraternity for more than 13 years and one of the ghedeputeerde, financial commissioners, of the city after the death of Duke Charles the Bold.Footnote 51 Other financial commissioners in 1477 were Pieter van Muelenbeke and Willem Moreel, also members of the confraternity.Footnote 52

The Excellente Cronike and the Moreel faction

Four wardens of Our Lady of the Snow confraternity were also aldermen in the rebellious city government of 1488, during the Flemish revolt against Maximilian of Austria (1482–92). After his son Philip the Fair inherited the Burgundian Netherlands, the Habsburg Prince and future Emperor Maximilian faced opposition from his subjects and was even taken hostage by Bruges rebels.Footnote 53 In the most radical phase of the uprising, between 1488 and 1491, Willem Zoete was appointed clerk of Our Lady of the Snow.Footnote 54 Zoete, a Ghent city clerk, pensionary of both Bruges and Ghent and a principal spokesman of the Flemish rebels, delivered two rousing speeches at the 1488 Estates General condemning Maximilian's regency.Footnote 55 The association of this Bruges cluster to prominent members of Our Lady of the Snow connects the Excellente Cronike to the anti-Habsburg faction in Bruges during the Flemish Revolt of 1482–92.

After the death of the unpopular Duke Charles the Bold in 1477, a widespread revolt broke out as his daughter Mary of Burgundy took power and the king of France invaded the duchy of Burgundy and the counties of Flanders and Artois. In Bruges, a coalition of artisans, generally excluded from power in preceding decades, and the patrician faction of the wealthy spice merchant Willem Moreel, demanded restoration of city privileges. Because of her precarious situation, the young duchess had to comply with these demands.Footnote 56 However, in 1481, supporters of her husband Maximilian of Austria tried to increase state influence in urban government and limit urban autonomy and guild power. In partnership with the Bruges craft guilds, the Moreel faction plotted to take control of the city. On 10 December 1481, in order to prevent this coup, Maximilian had the faction's leading members imprisoned.Footnote 57 When Mary died in a hunting accident in 1482, her widower assumed guardianship of their son Philip the Fair, her legal successor as count of Flanders. The Flemish towns and nobles disputed Maximilian's claim and set up a regency council as guardian of the young Count Philip. The Moreel faction remained in power in Bruges until 1485, when they were excluded from city government and a new faction loyal to Maximilian imposed harsh repression under the leadership of the town sheriff (schout) Pieter Lanchals.Footnote 58 In 1488, a new guild revolt broke out and the Bruges rebels imprisoned the Habsburg prince, who had by then become Holy Roman Emperor. This event shocked the whole Christian world. Bruges was finally subdued in early 1490, the ‘peace of Damme’ was sealed on 6 December of that year. Ghent followed suit two years later.Footnote 59

As Haemers has shown, Flemish urban political factions that united commercial elites and guilds, such as the Moreel faction, were informal and dynamic phenomena, built by personal relationships and fluid informal ties.Footnote 60 The social nucleus of the Moreel faction consisted of a few relatives and several distinct social networks.Footnote 61 The core members who governed Bruges during Mary's reign belonged to the commercial elite, but they also had several strong ties with artisan groups, who supported the faction because it was in their own class interest. Many of the social, political and professional ties among members existed before the 1477 revolt, but the political events during this revolt, Mary of Burgundy's reign and the period after her death consolidated these loosely allied members into a genuine political faction.Footnote 62

The economic and social profiles of the Moreel faction members mirror those of the core members of the Our Lady of the Snow confraternity. Marc van de Velde, dean of Our Lady of the Snow from 1486 until 1488, was related to Jan de Keyt, the brother-in-law of Willem Moreel.Footnote 63 Colaert De Labye married Maria, sister of Marc van de Velde.Footnote 64 As the De Labye family owned the Douai manuscript and Colaert, who held significant city offices during both dynastic crises, was directly tied to the rebels, the Three Female Saints Chamber of Rhetoric may have taken on a ‘political’ dimension during this period.Footnote 65 The connection to the broadly based confraternity of Our Lady of the Snow offered the new chamber of rhetoric a wide audience, including the most important urban elites, including the rebel faction.Footnote 66

A sentence written by Jacob van Malen in the Douai manuscript's epilogue, ‘and [this chronicle] was started in the Tower of Burgundy at Sluis in 1485 and finished the twenty-fifth day of October at Bruges in 1490’, adds to our understanding of this ‘political and cultural network’.Footnote 67 In 1485, Maximilian of Austria regained power in Bruges.Footnote 68 He appointed Pieter Lanchals, an ambitious and ruthless ducal official, as schout, the ‘sheriff’ representing princely authority, of his hometown Bruges.Footnote 69 Pieter Lanchals made sure all Maximilian's opponents were exiled, imprisoned or executed. When Jacob of Malen was in ‘the Tower of Sluis’ in 1485, he clearly was a political prisoner. Only a few years earlier, in 1481, Willem Moreel himself had been imprisoned there.Footnote 70 The exact circumstances of Jacob's imprisonment were recorded by Rombout de Doppere and included in the 1531 Vorsterman print of the Excellente Cronike. Under the Three Members of Flanders government, Jacob had been castellan of the same tower and was captured by Maximilian's troops in May 1485.Footnote 71

Our Lady of the Snow was a broad-based confraternity, not a single urban network, for it included members of opposing factions; both Pieter Lanchals and Willem Moreel were members. However, the core guild brothers, who monopolized the most important internal offices for some time, were connected to the anti-Habsburg faction of Willem Moreel, whose opponents had fled the city at the beginning of the uprising.Footnote 72 Since the ‘Bruges’ manuscripts of the Excellente Cronike apparently circulated within this small inner group related by familial, economic, political and cultural ties, analysis of the manuscripts may offer new insights into the ideology and aspirations of an urban faction that lost the civil war.

The Excellente Cronike and urban political ideologies

Although the lack of a ‘real’ urban chronicle tradition in fifteenth-century Flanders similar to the Italian or German models has raised questions among scholars, the rewriting of the ‘regional’ Flandria Generosa into a Middle-Dutch chronicle with a clear focus on Bruges affairs indicates that by the fifteenth century, Flemish urban chronicles with more continuous prose than the annalistic ‘memory books’ were developing from existing regional texts. This explains the popularity of the Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen as a tradition and its rewriting into more than 20 different surviving versions before it was set into print in 1531. Many more manuscripts must have been lost.Footnote 73 Since some manuscripts of the Bruges cluster were composed during the power struggle between their political faction and the prince, the manuscript circles used the text to articulate their political aspirations and ideologies in the regional history text.Footnote 74 Even though the text remains situated within the dynastic framework of the successive counts of Flanders, the Excellente Cronike takes a clearly ‘urban’ point of view on the county's history. Stories of the ‘exemplary’ or ‘non-exemplary’ Flemish counts and countesses in the Bruges versions primarily reflected political problems from the era of their composition.Footnote 75

‘Origin myths’ in medieval chronicles often refer to contemporary politics and ideologies of legitimization. The popular legend of the foundation of the county of Flanders by the first forestier Liederik of Buc, originally developed for a courtly audience, was first recounted in the Latin Flandria Generosa C during the reign of Philip the Good (1419–67). However, the origin passage was dramatically shortened in some manuscripts of the Bruges cluster.Footnote 76 The story in the Excellente Cronike highlights the encounter between Liederik and his future wife Idonea, the daughter of the French king, the most ‘courtly’ part of the story, but also popular among urban audiences.Footnote 77 Only one of the Bruges cluster manuscripts kept the entire Latin original, which traced Liederik's descent and his conquest of Flanders from the legendary giant Finard.Footnote 78 The narrative continues with the people offering the victorious Liederik rulership over Flanders, and the legendary forester protecting merchants and founding several cities, including Bruges. While Liederik was portrayed as the ideal prince, the narrative that the people offered the county to Liederik was more significant from the late medieval urban perspective. The people's grant happened before the French king officially made Liederik a vassal after his marriage to the king's daughter.

This ‘contract’ between the prince and his subjects is a recurring theme in the Excellente Cronike.Footnote 79 All the Bruges manuscripts, except for the one that narrated the entire story, labelled Finard a ‘tyrant’. In medieval political thought, tyranny sometimes justified a revolt by subjects against a ruler.Footnote 80 This dichotomy between the ‘natural prince’ and the ‘tyrant’ was also an important discursive element in the 1488 speeches of Willem Zoete.Footnote 81 His speeches focused on a political contract of mutual respect, in which the peaceful and just ruler took into account the privileges of his subjects.Footnote 82 Just as Zoete directly attacked the politics of Maximilian, the manuscripts written by Jacob van Malen, who belonged to the same rebel faction, conveyed a similar message in his narrative of the county's origins.

Two early dynastic crises, the regency over Flanders by Richilde of Hainaut (1071–71), who like Maximilian ruled in the name of her minor son, and the murder of Charles the Good and installation of the new count, William Clito, over the opposition of many of his subjects (1127–28), feature a similar ideological discourse. The Latin Flandria Generosa tradition gave a negative cast to Richilde and William, troublesome figures in the history of the county. However, Middle-Dutch Bruges versions of the Excellente Cronike cleverly adapted the story to suit the late fifteenth-century context. The legitimacy of the counts depended on their relationship with the Flemish people. The Latin Flandria Generosa manuscripts note that Richilde opposed the clergy,Footnote 83 but the nature of this opposition was completely changed in the Excellente Cronike. The Douai manuscript relates: ‘She made herself very unloved both by the nobles and the “commune” of Flanders, and she came to Flanders and ordained new laws as she pleased, and as for those who had risen against her, she imprisoned them and beheaded them, because Robert the Frisian wanted to claim the county at the request of the Three Cities of Flanders.’Footnote 84

The most striking alteration is the appearance of the ‘Three Cities’, Ghent, Bruges and Ypres, in the earliest history, long before these cities formed the ‘Three Members of Flanders’, the representative institution that negotiated with the counts on matters of taxation, justice and politics.Footnote 85 Although the Latin Flandria Generosa C often mentioned Bruges, Ypres and Ghent, the Excellente Cronike anachronistically depicted them as an institutional entity maintaining a balance between the prince and his subjects. The Flandria Generosa B (c. 1164–94) states: ‘and then certain Flemings complained about Richilda to this Robert the Frisian and sent him letters about reclaiming his paternal inheritance’.Footnote 86 However, the Bruges Excellente Cronike reports: ‘These Three Cities, seeing the great excesses and injustices which the fierce Richilde imposed on the land, wrote to [Robert in] Holland.’Footnote 87 The Three Cities emerge as a deus ex machina, restoring order by calling for the rightful prince, a count willing to respect their privileges.

There are similar discursive strategies in the account of the troubles after the death of Charles the Good in 1127. William Clito, incorrectly labelled ‘regent’ in the Excellente Cronike when his actual title was count, was portrayed as a terrible ruler, for similar reasons as Richilde. ‘The Three Cities’ took the lead by sending for the other contender for the throne, Thierry of Alsace, who became count of Flanders in 1128. A Latin version of the Flandria Generosa C (written c. 1440) said: ‘William of Normandy did many evil and burdensome things to Flanders, including destruction and fire, wars and troubles. . .And when William of Normandy returned from his travels, the people of Ypres expelled him using armed force and said that Thierry of Alsace would become their prince, as he was supported by the whole of Flanders.’Footnote 88 The Bruges version of the Excellente Cronike added details that resonated with contemporary experience:

This William (of Normandy) was a big spender. He placed great burdens on the lands of Flanders and he brought a lot of novelties and sold offices, for which he was not very loved in the whole land in those times. . .The Three Cities and the common land of Flanders. . .secretly sent messengers to Thierry, the count of Alsace, who was the rightful heir of the county of Flanders and a noble man of weapons.Footnote 89

For ‘William’ we may clearly read ‘Maximilian of Habsburg’, as the features attributed to William directly reflect the unpopular monetary and governmental policies of Maximilian.

The discursive strategies condemning the giant Finard, Richilde and William as unworthy rulers thus echoed the political ideas of the anti-Habsburg faction to which Jacob van Malen belonged. They also refer to the so-called ‘Great’ and ‘Flemish Privileges of 1477’ granted by Mary of Burgundy at the demand of urban rebels during the succession crisis.Footnote 90 These charters emphasized respect for security and fair justice and an end to commercial obstruction by the central government. The discourse of the Privileges drew on familiar themes of medieval urban political ideology such as the respect for local autonomy and a balanced relationship between the prince and his subjects.Footnote 91 After 1480, Maximilian was again attempting to limit the cities’ liberties and ignore the members of Flanders.Footnote 92

The dynastic framework of the Excellente Cronike may not only derive from the authoritative tradition of the Flandria Generosa. It might have been a political choice, reflecting the Moreel faction's views on the late medieval conflict. During the revolt, they remained loyal to their ‘natural prince’, Philip the Fair (descendant of Liederik of Buc, Robert the Frisian and Thierry of Alsace), and revolted against the ‘usurper’ Maximilian (equivalent to Finard, Richilde and William Clito).Footnote 93 Even the choice to write this ‘dynastic’ chronicle in Dutch may have been political as well as practical, because in 1482 the rebels demanded fair justice and government in Dutch instead of in French.Footnote 94 There is also a subtext about factional politics. As Willem Moreel had been involved in the political troubles of 1477, this conflict was incorporated into the chronicle. Clearly favouring Moreel, the Excellente Cronike depicts his 1481 arrest, ordered by Maximilian, as ‘partyelicke’ (‘partisan’) and ‘bij quader informacie’ (‘as a result of false information’).Footnote 95 The chronicle states that after Mary's death, the archduke freed Willem Moreel and his supporters and cleared them of all charges, as if the Excellente Cronike Bruges circle wanted to protect Moreel against future accusations about his influence in the 1477 conflict.Footnote 96 Even the poems added by Jacob van Malen, with their melancholy themes of death and true friendship,Footnote 97 allude to imprisonment and other political reprisals by Maximilian's allies in 1485.

The political participation in the Flemish Revolt of rhetoricians connected to the Three Female Saints might explain the conflict that erupted between the two chambers of rhetoric a few months after the end of the civil war and the severe actions of the new pro-Maximilian city council against the Three Female Saints.Footnote 98 Maximilian launched a cultural and religious propaganda programme after the revolt, devotion to Our Lady of the Seven Sorrows, which involved many chambers of rhetoric, especially in the ‘loyal’ duchy of Brabant.Footnote 99 This campaign appears to have been a response to the cultural and religious networks in Bruges and other rebellious cities in the Low Countries.

Conclusion

As studies of the Italian and German city chronicles have shown, there were a variety of ways in which chronicles could be ‘urban’. Some were ‘official’ town chronicles, while others lauded patrician lineages or took the viewpoint of specific social groups or corporate organizations and reinforced construction of the groups’ collective memories. Some seem to express the literary aspirations of individual city officials or clerics with strong connections to their urban environment. Flemish late medieval urban culture was dominated by corporate organizations: craft guilds, religious confraternities and rhetorician chambers. As urban self-consciousness increased in Flemish historiography after the end of the fourteenth century, these so-called ‘regional’ writings also reflected the ideological and political conflicts in Flemish cities. Composed in Maximilian's prison, Jacob van Malen's version of the Excellente Cronike defended the urban freedoms of Flanders as natural demands of long-standing tradition. This specific brand of ‘urban ideology’ was projected not only onto the county's distant past, but also onto recent events.

The case-study of the Bruges version of the Excellente Cronike van Vlaenderen shows that determining the ‘urban character’ of a chronicle requires a multi-faceted approach that analyses its ‘production’, ‘circulation’ and ‘consumption’. Our methodology combines ‘new’ or ‘material’ philology (the codicological and paleographical analysis of all the existing manuscripts as multiple versions of a ‘rewritten’ text), social-network analysis (prosopographical study of the milieu in which the text was written, circulated and received) and discourse analysis (focusing on the ideological messages in the text and how these varied in the process of rewriting). Although this search for specific links among manuscripts, texts and historical actors is complex, labour-intensive and limited by the available sources, such an integrated approach is a necessary and fruitful method for determining the ‘urban’ character of a historiographical text.

References

1 We thank Marc Boone, Andrew Brown, Jelle Haemers, Shennan Hutton and Johan Oosterman for their comments.

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38 CAB, 114, RW 1468–1501, fols. 78 and 123v–124.

39 Gilliodts-Van Severen, Inventaire, 224. Colaert De Labye died on 4 Jun. 1493: Vermeersch, Grafmonumenten, 263.

40 CAB, 390, 1, fols. 3–6; S. Van de Cappelle, ‘De OLV-broederschap ter Sneeuw te Brugge gedurende de Late Middeleeuwen (ca. 1467–1536)’, Catholic University of Leuven MA thesis, 1997.

41 State Archives Bruges (StAB), Our Lady's Church Fabric (OLCF), 91, 1531, fols. 65v, 88v, 104v, 123v, 144r and 162v. Jacob van Malen was a member of the confraternity from 1470 onwards. On confraternities in Flanders, see P. Trio, ‘Les confréries comme expression de solidarité et de conscience urbaine aux Pays-Bas à la fin du Moyen Âge’, in Brand, Monnet and Staub (eds.), Memoria, 131–41.

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43 StAB, OLCF, 91, 1501, fols. 56r–57v.

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51 He was dean or overziender or zorger of the confraternity in 1468–71, 1473–85, 1488–91 and 1494–95. StAB, OLCF, 91, 1531, fols. 17r–288v; Haemers, J., For the Common Good. State Power and Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy (1477–1482) (Turnhout, 2009), 176CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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54 StAB, OLCF, 91, 1531, fols. 236v–267r.

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62 Ibid., 138.

63 Marc van de Velde was the son of Katrien de Keyt, the sister of Jan de Keyt who was the brother-in-law of Willem Moreel. Haemers, For the Common Good, 177.

64 Ibid., 177.

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67 Douai, CL, 1110, fol. 415v.

68 Haemers, ‘Factionalism’, 1014.

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71 Douai, CL, 1110, fols. 418v–419r. Vorsterman (ed.), Dits die Excellente Cronike, fols. 227v–228r. Moreover, the Tower of Burgundy in Sluis is portrayed in the Douai manuscript. Douai, CL, 1110, fol. 156r.

72 In 1484, Pieter Lanchals was banished from Bruges. Haemers, De strijd om het regentschap, 147.

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75 Schmidt, H.-J., ‘Spätmittelalterliche Fürstenspiegel und ihr Gebrauch in unterschiedlichen Kontexten’, in Lutz, E.C. (ed.), Text und Text in lateinischer und volkssprachiger Überlieferung des Mittelalters (Berlin, 2006), 377–97Google Scholar.

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80 The councillors of John the Fearless, an earlier Burgundian duke, had famously used the same discourse of ‘tyranny’ to justify the murder of the duke of Orleans. Guenée, B., Un meurtre, une société. L’assassinat du duc d’Orléans 23 novembre 1407 (Paris, 1992), 232–24Google Scholar.

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84 Douai, CL, 1110, fol. 37r.

85 Under the Burgundian dynasty, this representative institution was expanded with a rural district, the Liberty of Bruges, to become the ‘Four Members of Flanders’ but during the rebellion of the late fifteenth century, the cities had excluded the Liberty.

86 Quoted in Rider, ‘Vice’, 65.

87 Douai, CL, 1110, fol. 37v.

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91 Ibid., 156.

92 Haemers, ‘Factionalism’, 1014.

93 Haemers, De strijd om het regentschap, 68.

94 Ibid., 121–2.

95 Douai, CL, 1110, fol. 411v.

96 Ibid., fol. 414r.

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