Thirty years after, when Flanders, by the marriage of Margaret with Philip the Hardy, Duke of Burgundy, became united with that sovereignty, and the citizens were again at war amongst themselves, “the men of Ghent” elected Philip van Artevelde, godson of Queen Philippa, and her namesake, the son of their former favourite and victim, as their leader in their strifes with the burghers of Bruges, who were about to cut a canal from their city to Denys, which would have been injurious to the prosperity of Ghent, which had “the harvest of the river for her revenue,” when Philip defeated the army of Louis le Mael, entered Bruges in triumph, and carried off the Golden Dragon as large as an ox, which, till lately, surmounted the belfry of Ghent, and is said to have been brought home by the Flemings who followed Count Baldwin to Constantinople. For sometime, in the heyday of good fortune, “Van Artevelde in all things aped The state and bearing of a sovereign prince; Had bailiffs, masters of the horse, receivers, A chamber of accompt, a hall of audience; Off gold and silver eat, was clad in robes Of scarlet furred with minever, gave feasts With minstrelsy and dancing, night and day----” But the power of France leagued with his native sovereign was irresistible, and at the battle of Rosebeke, he laid down, at once, his usurped authority and his life. Under the Dukes of Burgundy, the annals of these remarkable military merchants is the same continued story of broils and battles, and the union of Flanders to Austria, by the marriage of Mary of Burgundy, only brought a fresh line of combatants into the Low Countries. In 1500, Charles V, the grandson of this ominous alliance, was born at Ghent, in the old château of the Counts of Flanders, the remains of which are still to be seen in the Place de St. Pharailde, converted into a cotton factory, the lofty chimney of which now pours its volume of smoke above the cradle of a monarch who made it his boast, that “the sun never set upon his dominions.” With the same fiery independence of their forefathers, the “men of Ghent,” resisted the despotism of the Emperor as sturdily as they had done the exactions of their Earls and Dukes; and it was after quelling one of these insurrections, that Charles, intent on devising a punishment for their contumacy, was advised by the Duke of Alva, the future Moloch of the Netherlands under Philip II, to raze it to its foundations, when Charles replied by pointing to its towers and palaces, and asking him in a repetition of his former witticism, “combien il croyait qu’il fallait de peaux (_villes_) d’Espagne, pour faire un _gant_ de cette grandeur.”