On the opposite side of the same square, stands, likewise, the house, now an estaminet, in which her husband, Maximilian, then King of the Romans, was, after her death, confined by the citizens of Bruges, in 1487, in consequence of a dispute as to the custody of his two children, in whom, by the death of their mother, was vested the right to the sovereignty of Flanders. In spite of the fulminations of the Pope, and the march of the Emperor, his father, with an army of forty thousand men, the undaunted burghers held him a prisoner for six weeks, till he submitted to their terms and took an oath to respect their rights, and exact no vengeance for their violent demonstration in their assertion. Bruges was, likewise, upon two occasions the asylum of the exiled monarchs of England; once when Edward IV took refuge there, when flying from the Earl of Warwick’s rebellion; and, again, when Charles II, in his exile, occupied a house in the Place d’Armes, at the corner of the Rue St. Amand. It is now the shop of a tailor. But all our recollections of Bruges are crowded with associations of the poetry of history; and the very names of her chieftains, Baldwin of the Iron Arm, Robert of Jerusalem, Margaret of Constantinople, Philip the Handsome, and Louis of Crecy, call up associations of chivalry, gallantry and romance. From the thirteenth century to the close of the sixteenth, Bruges was at once in the plentitude of her political power and the height of her commercial prosperity. As the furs and iron of the north were not yet carried by sea round the Baltic, and the wealth of India still poured through the Red Sea into Genoa and Venice, Bruges became one of the great entrepots where they were collected, in order to be again distributed over Western Europe; and with Dantzic, Lubeck, Hamburg, and a few other trading cities of the west, Bruges became one of the leading commandaries of the Hanseatic League. The idea of marine insurances was first acted upon at Bruges in the thirteenth century, and the first exchange for the convenience of merchants was built there in the century following. Her manufactures were equally celebrated with her traffic and her trade. Her tapestries were the models, and, indeed, the progenitors of the Gobelins, which were established in France by a native of Bruges, under the patronage of Henry IV; and the fame of her woolstaplers and weavers has been perpetuated in the order of the Golden Fleece, the emblem of which was selected by Philip the Good in honour of the artizans of Bruges. It was a native of Bruges, Beham, who, fifty years before the enterprise of Columbus, ventured to “tempt the western main,” and having discovered the Azores, first led the way to the awakening of a new hemisphere.