I. Our Lady and Child, 1487 Frontispiece (Saint John’s Hospital, Bruges) II. Adoration of the Magi, 1479 14 (Saint John’s Hospital, Bruges) III. Saints Christopher, Maurus, and Giles, 1484 24 (Town Museum, Bruges) IV. Portrait of Nicholas di Forzore Spinelli, holding a medal 34 (Antwerp Museum) V. Portrait of Martin van Nieuwenhove, 1487 (companion to I.) 40 (Saint John’s Hospital, Bruges) VI. One Panel of the Shrine of Saint Ursula, 1489 50 (Saint John’s Hospital, Bruges) VII. Portrait of an Old Lady 60 (Louvre, Paris) VIII. The Blessed Virgin and Child, with Saint George and the Donor 70 (National Gallery, London, No. 686) MEMLINC I HANS MEMLINC Already, before the advent of the House of Burgundy, Bruges had attained the height of her prosperity. From a small military outpost of civilisation, built to stay the advance of the ravaging Northmen, she had developed through four short centuries of a strenuous existence into one of the three leading cities of northern Europe. Born to battle, fighting had been her abiding lot with but scant intervals of peace, and as it had been under the rule of her long line of Flemish counts, so it continued with increased vehemence during the century of French domination that followed, the incessant warring of suzerain and vassal being further complicated and embittered by internecine strife with the rival town of Ghent. But she emerged from the ordeal with her vitality unsapped, her industrial capabilities unabated, her commercial supremacy unshaken. Her population had reached the high total of a hundred and fifty thousand; she overlorded an outport with a further thirty thousand inhabitants, a seaport, and a number of subordinate townships. The staple of wool was established at her centre, and she was the chief emporium of the cities of the Hanseatic League. Vessels from all quarters of the globe crowded her harbours, her basins, and canals, as many as one hundred and fifty being entered inwards in the twenty-four hours. Factories of merchants from seventeen kingdoms were settled there as agents, and twenty foreign consuls had palatial residences within her walls. Her industrial life was a marvel of organisation, where fifty-four incorporated associations or guilds with a membership of many thousands found constant employment.