ABSTRACT
The mercantile settlement hypothesis of medieval urban origins made famous by Henri Pirenne and his disciples was based on the example of Flanders and particularly Ghent, its largest city. Pirenne saw the cities developing in the post-Viking age as merchant agglomerations centered around a fortification and expanding by a European-wide trade in fine woollen textiles. In northwestern Flanders there was primary settlement around the count's fortress at Bruges, which was made a port only by coastal flooding in the early eleventh century. Elaboration of these settlement patterns between the tenth and thirteenth centuries also has important implications for the early history of urban functions and suggests that parts of Flanders were already experiencing a version of an overheated economy by the eleventh century. The great elements of capital formation in Ghent in the fourteenth century, just as in the period when the city began to transcend its immediate hinterland, continued to be grain merchandising and textile manufacturing.
