The bombardment was a diversion. King William III of Orange had besieged the French-held city of Namur and was refusing to lift the siege. Louis XIV, irritated, ordered Marshal Villeroi to destroy Bruges or Ghent in a surprise attack. Villeroi suggested Brussels instead. He requested twelve cannons, twenty-five mortars, four thousand cannonballs, and five thousand explosive shells - enough to break a fortified army, aimed at a city whose walls offered no defense.

A civilian massacre needed a justification. Villeroi invented one: the bombardment, he claimed, was a reprisal for English naval shelling of French Channel towns. He gave Brussels six hours' notice. When the Prince of Berghes, the city's governor, asked for twenty-four hours to negotiate, Villeroi refused. The one mercy in Villeroi's letter was a request to know the location of the Bavarian Electress, Theresa Kunegunda, so French gunners could avoid her. Everyone else in the city was a legitimate target.

Three Brussels batteries tried to return fire. They were short of powder, short of gunners, reduced eventually to firing cobblestones - and still managed to kill around thirty-five French soldiers before being overwhelmed. The rest of the city watched the fire from the heights east of the Senne valley, where a helpless crowd gathered in the gardens of the ducal palace and saw their homes turn to coals.

On the morning of 14 August, the French paused to resupply. Rumors flew that the gunners would aim somewhere new, so residents dragged their belongings back into already-hit districts. When the bombardment resumed, those belongings burned too. The bell of St. Nicholas' Church fell from its tower and crushed the houses below it. Four patients burned alive in St. John Hospital. Two lay brothers were buried in the rubble of their convent. The numbers killed were modest by the standards of the era's battles - the population had time to flee - but the people who died, died terribly: pinned, burned, suffocated. By the third morning, Maximilian II Emanuel, the Bavarian governor, was dynamiting buildings on the city's perimeter to create a firebreak and stop the inferno from devouring what remained.

Augustin Coppens lost his own house in the fire. A local artist with a draftsman's eye, he walked the smoking ruins of his hometown and drew what he saw. Twelve of his drawings were engraved with the help of his friend Richard van Orley and published that same year under the title Perspectives des Ruines de la Ville de Bruxelles. They show streets that no longer exist as streets - just contours of stone foundations under mounds of brick. The Town Hall stands gutted. The Breadhouse burns. The German engraver Peter Schenk the Elder copied them in Amsterdam, spreading images of the catastrophe across Europe.

Constantijn Huygens, William of Orange's Dutch secretary, visited a month later and wrote in his diary that the ruin was 'horrible.' The Papal nuncio put property losses at fifty million florins. The artistic loss was uncountable: Brusselois tapestries, archives reaching back centuries, paintings by Rogier van der Weyden, Rubens, Anthony van Dyck and Bernard van Orley - works that had hung in private houses and convent halls were now ash. The young Duke of Berwick, a French officer who would later become a Marshal of France himself, called what he had witnessed the closest thing to the sack of Troy.

The bombardment failed entirely. Namur surrendered to the allies on 1 September. Villeroi had killed thousands of civilians and burned an irreplaceable city for nothing - and Europe knew it. Napoleon, a century later, would call the operation 'as barbarous as it was useless.' Louis XIV's reputation took a wound that Versailles propaganda never quite healed.

Brussels chose to rebuild fast rather than rebuild grand. Maximilian II Emanuel, fresh from his trips to Vienna and Turin, dreamed of laying down a Baroque city of uniform Italian-style facades and broad straight avenues. The guilds and residents wanted their old footprint back, with their familiar gables and crafted stone. They won. Five years after the fire, the Grand-Place stood again, rebuilt by the guilds who lavished decades of debt on their guildhalls so that no two would look alike. The Gothic Town Hall went up first, then the Baker's, the Brewer's, the Boatmen's, the Tailors' - Gothic and Baroque and Louis XIV details elbowing each other on the same square, somehow harmonizing. On the La Louve guildhall today, a small relief shows a phoenix rising from its ashes. The square below it explains why.

Traces of August 1695 remain in Brussels for anyone who knows to look. A French cannonball is still embedded in the wall of St. Nicholas' Church near the Grand-Place - a deliberate memento mori, left in place during the rebuilding. The Town Hall's asymmetrical spire is the original from before the fire, but everything around it is post-1695. Many streets are wider than they were in 1695 because the city used the reconstruction to enforce regulations that had been on the books for years: no thatched roofs, no wooden canopies, no upper floors projecting over the road. What looks medieval in central Brussels is largely seventeenth-century reconstruction, executed in a medieval idiom by a people who had just watched their actual medieval city burn.