Word: zoutleeuw
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...village of Zoutleeuw goes unmarked on most maps; it lies some 40 miles from Brussels. In the early Middle Ages, Zoutleeuw was a bustling commercial center, pitched at the intersection of trade routes between the Rhineland, the County of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant. Then alliances and frontiers shifted, and trade with them. By the end of the 16th century, Zoutleeuw was on the way to becoming a ghost town. Religious wars, famine, flood, fire and the plague almost finished it off, and it ended as an isolated country hamlet inhabited by about 2,600 people...
...What Zoutleeuw kept, however, was St. Leonard's Church, dating back to the 13th century, and in it an extraordinary collection of religious art. The treasure of St. Leonard's was saved by the obscurity of its village; it was not looted during the interminable wars that rolled back and forth across the lowlands from the 16th century to the 20th century, and it was spared the fury of Protestant iconoclasm. The result is the finest intact collection of religious Flemish carving from the 12th to the 16th centuries that can be found anywhere...