Many of the religious houses in the outlying country had been destroyed by the Ghent Calvinists, not a few in the immediate neighbourhood of Bruges by the burghers themselves, who, when the Gueux were threatening them in 1578, had caused all buildings within a mile of their walls to be razed to the ground, in order that the enemy might find no place for shelter. For fifty years after the settlement of 1582, even when the religious troubles were over, Flanders was the scene of continual warfare. Amid the coming and going of troops there was no guarantee of security outside the walls of the towns, and, as might be expected, the monks and nuns of the country-side flocked into the episcopal city. Amongst them were representatives of almost all the great religious orders--Benedictines, Carthusians, Dominicans, Augustinians, Carmelites, Capuchins, Jesuits, and, most noteworthy of all, Cistercians from the famous Abbey of St. Mary on the Dunes at Coxyde, and from the affiliated house called Ter Doest, at Lisseweghe. Of all the religious communities to which Bruges now offered an asylum, this was the mightiest and the most renowned. It was unsurpassed alike in wealth, in learning, in numbers, in dignity of life, in dignity of tradition, in spiritual and temporal achievements. St. Bernard was its founder. Some of the holiest and wisest men of the Middle Ages had been numbered among its members; the abbey at Coxyde was magnificent; its church was, perhaps, the most beautiful in the land; thanks to the patient toil of its monks, as one of their abbots used to boast, the barren dunes which surrounded it had become a fertile garden. [Illustration: BRUGES FROM THE RIVER YPERLET] A whirlwind of fanaticism swept them away, and now their vast domain is what it was before the white-robed brethren settled there--a wilderness of shifting sand. Bruges during the opening years of the sixteen hundreds was seething in misery. War had brought forth famine and pestilence, and the flight of commerce had left thousands of working men without any means of gaining their bread; but there was still gold in the city. The fortunes which had been made in trade, or at all events a certain proportion of them, remained after trade had departed, and the monastic immigrants, as we have seen, were not without resources, nor did the possessors of the mammon of unrighteousness suffer it to remain idle. They made to themselves friends with it. Churches and monasteries were restored; the monks and nuns from the country built for themselves new habitations; hospices and almshouses, _Godshuisen_ (God's Houses), as they are at Bruges picturesquely termed, were founded all over the city. Thus was work provided for those who were able to do it, and a permanent provision made for the aged and the infirm.