Gravensteen

The counts of Flanders built on a high sand dune with marshy banks, set among the arms of the river Lys. Count Baldwin I is said to have raised the first fortification there against Norse incursions, and by around 879 the site formed part of the army camp from which the Scheldt Vikings plundered the surrounding country. Under Arnulf I the works were rebuilt in earnest: a large central hall on a timber-reinforced platform, ringed by wooden outbuildings for grain and other stores. The mid-tenth-century Miracula Bavonis calls the place novum castellum, the new fortress.

Robert I the Frisian swept the timber away. In its place rose a stone donjon of 33 by 18.8 metres, three storeys high, with three great halls stacked one above the other and a monumental stone stair. A later phase heaped earth dug from the surrounding moat around the keep to form a motte, turning the old ground-floor hall into a cellar, with a stone gate dividing the upper court from a lower court of service buildings. In 1176 fire tore through the motte castle and the buildings of the lower court.

Four years later, in 1180, Philip of Alsace had an entirely new castle raised on the existing one. The motte was heightened and widened, and the central hall raised into a keep of some thirty metres. The gate gained a forebuilding and tied into an oval enceinte lined with 24 corbelled turrets, the whole ringed by a moat fed from the Lys, with stone of varying colour giving the military architecture a rich finish. Philip had ridden on the Second Crusade, and the crusader castles he saw there — Krak des Chevaliers above all — have been suggested as his model.

The walls faced inwards as much as out. Across the Lys stood the tall stone houses of Ghent's patricians, and the chronicler Gislebert of Mons recorded that the castle was meant not only for defence but equally to break the pride of the men of Ghent, haughty in their wealth and in their fortified dwellings that stood like towers. The thirteenth-century poet Jacob van Maerlant sang of it as the strongest castle in the land. The counts kept their residence there until 1353, when Louis of Male, finding the Gravensteen too comfortless, moved his household to the nearby Hof ten Walle.

Losing the court did not empty the castle. From 1353 Ghent's mint was moved inside, and struck coin there until 1491; from 1407 the Council of Flanders, the highest court in the county, sat within the walls, and the buildings served as a prison alongside. A wolf's foot, probably nailed to the gate as a trophy around 1700, is the last known archaeozoological evidence for the wolf in Flanders.

The Council used the castle until 1778, when it began to be sold off to private buyers. Jean-Denis Brismaille acquired the old upper court and turned it into an industrial complex; in 1807 a cotton spinning mill was installed in the donjon itself, with other buildings housing fifty workers' families. When the firms and their workers moved out to the edge of the city, the near-derelict Gravensteen was ready for demolition — and to most Ghent opinion it stood for abuse of power, feudal oppression, torture and the inquisition.

The state and the city bought the complex back out of private hands in stages, and the dismantling work stripped away almost everything that was not Tournai stone, bringing the medieval remains back to view. Restoration began in the 1890s under the architect Joseph de Waele, who followed Eugène Viollet-le-Duc in reaching for a romantic reading of the castle as it might have looked in Philip of Alsace's day; a good many details of what stands today, the flat roofs and the windows of the eastern outbuilding among them, go back to no real medieval arrangement. The restored castle was the centrepiece of the Ghent World Fair of 1913.