ABSTRACT
The demolition of the parish church of St Saviour, situated in the ancient Benedictine enclave of St Bavo immediately adjacent to the city of Ghent, was only a small and rather accidental part of a larger punishment that Emperor Charles V (1500-58) imposed on his native city after a tax uprising in 1539. The parish church, together with a large part of the Benedictine abbey itself, had to make way for an Italian-style citadel that had to keep the Emperor’s
* This essay is based on research undertaken as part of the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders (FWO), project ‘The Church in the Middle. An Inquiry into the Urban Parish and Parish Church in the Southern Low Countries (ca. 1450-1700)’.
