Ghent began at the meeting of the Scheldt and the Leie, two rivers whose grassy floodplains made perfect pasture for sheep. The old name Ganda, most historians believe, comes from a Celtic word meaning confluence - a name that turned out to be prophetic. Around 650, Saint Amandus founded two abbeys on the muddy banks: Saint Bavo's beside the rivers and Saint Peter's on the rise of the Blandijnberg. The settlement grew up between them. By the 13th century, only Paris was larger north of the Alps. Up to 65,000 people lived inside the walls, more than in Cologne, more than in Moscow. The wool of those grazing sheep, woven into Flemish cloth and shipped to half of Europe, had made a marsh into a metropolis.

Ghent's wealth was woven on looms. English wool arrived by the bale, was carded and spun and dyed in workshops along the Leie, and left as the finest broadcloth in Christendom. The weavers, fullers, and dyers were organized into guilds so powerful that the Counts of Flanders had to negotiate with them as equals. When the Hundred Years' War interrupted the English wool trade in the 1300s, Ghent didn't just suffer - it rebelled. Jacob van Artevelde led the city into open alliance with Edward III of England, a calculation about supply chains that reads as strikingly modern. The cloth halls and guild houses along the Graslei still announce, in their stepped gables and carved stone, who was running the place.

Charles V was born in Ghent in 1500, the most powerful European of his century, ruler of an empire on which the sun famously never set. None of that protected Ghent from him. The 1539 revolt over taxes brought down the imperial fist: the city's privileges revoked, the abbey of Saint Bavo demolished and replaced with a fortress for Spanish troops, and the noose ceremony that gave the people of Ghent a nickname they kept. The 16th century was the long dimming. The Eighty Years' War devastated Flanders, and political power drifted north to Antwerp and east to Brussels. By the time the dust settled, Ghent had lost its place at Europe's center - which is why so much of its medieval skyline survives. There was no money to tear it down and replace it with anything modern.

Industry returned in the 19th century thanks to one of history's stranger acts of corporate espionage. In 1800, the Ghent industrialist Lieven Bauwens smuggled a disassembled spinning mule out of England - the machine shipped in pieces concealed in crates - and reassembled the first mechanical weaving machines on the continent. Flemish cloth had a second life as factory output. Fourteen years later, in a residence on the Veldstraat, American and British diplomats signed the Treaty of Ghent on Christmas Eve, formally ending the War of 1812. American schoolchildren learn about the Battle of New Orleans; the treaty that made the battle technically unnecessary was negotiated in a city most of them never hear about.

In 2017, over the course of a single weekend, Ghent rewired itself. The city changed traffic patterns on more than eighty streets, repositioned 2,500 road signs, and more than doubled the size of its car-free historic center. The medieval core, the largest car-free zone in any major European city, now belongs to pedestrians and bikes. Nearly 400 kilometers of cycle paths run through the wider city. The skyline still belongs to the Belfry, Saint Bavo's, and Saint Nicholas - the three towers of the Middle Ages, with the Boekentoren rising as a 20th-century fourth. Below them, on a Thursday, you might notice the menus have changed: Donderdag Veggiedag, the city's official meat-free day, has been quietly running since 2009.