The Romans were here first. They called the place Cortoriacum, a name that probably comes from a Gallo-Roman root meaning the settlement near the river bend, and parked a cavalry unit at the crossroads where the road from Tongeren to Cassel met the road from Tournai to Oudenburg. In 1950 archaeologists dug up three Roman funeral pyres, and the dates suggest the camp may have been used as a staging post during the invasion of Britain in AD 43. Baldwin II of Flanders fortified the town in the 9th century against Viking raids. In 1190 Philip of Alsace gave Kortrijk its city charter. The new walls left fragments you can still touch - the Broel Towers down by the Lys, the names of vanished gates buried in the streetplan.

In 1297, France's Philip the Fair annexed Flanders. The county did not take kindly to becoming a province. On 18 May 1302, in what came to be called the Bruges Matins, the city of Bruges rose at dawn and killed every French citizen and soldier its inhabitants could identify. The French response was a punitive army of mounted knights, the flower of European chivalry. The Flemish response, since they had no knights to speak of, was their own commoners. On 11 July, at the Groeningekouter outside Kortrijk, Flemish foot soldiers - armed with godendags, long iron-tipped clubs - waited behind streams and ditches. The French cavalry charged into the soft ground and bogged down. The militias closed in and killed the knights in their armour. The captured spurs gave the battle its name. Two years later France took its revenge at Mons-en-Pevele, and the war ground on, but 11 July is still the day Flanders chose to remember itself by.

Most of the 15th century was prosperous for Kortrijk under the Dukes of Burgundy. Linen and woollen cloth went out of the town in bales to fairs across Europe. Mary of Burgundy's death in 1482 ended that century with renewed warfare. The 16th brought the Protestant Reformation and the long Dutch revolt against Spain. Then came Louis XIV. Over sixty years the Sun King's armies occupied Kortrijk five separate times, smashing the old fortifications and leaving the town walls in heaps. The Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 finally handed the area to the Austrian Habsburgs. After the French Revolution, after Napoleon, the town's flax-based textile industry rebuilt itself again, and by the 1840s Kortrijk had 18,000 people.

Both World Wars passed through. In summer 1917 German artillery shelled the town heavily; British troops liberated it in 1918, the same Newfoundlanders whose caribou monument now stands at the edge of the city. In the Second World War, Kortrijk was a critical German railway hub, and on 21 July 1944 - the Belgian National Day, deliberately chosen - about 300 Avro Lancasters of RAF Bomber Command dropped more than 5,000 bombs on the centre of town. Many historical buildings around the Grote Markt were destroyed, along with the old railway station. The city centre that visitors walk through today is partly an extraordinary preservation effort and partly a careful postwar reconstruction. The Belfry, the City Hall, the Broel Towers, the beguinage - the old bones survived, even when the soft tissue of the city did not.

Modern Kortrijk turned its trade tradition into something newer. The belfry and the beguinage are both UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and in 2017 UNESCO recognised Kortrijk as a Design City, citing its design fairs and its furniture industry - the Interieur Biennale at Kortrijk Xpo draws thousands. The city centre is one of the largest car-free zones in Belgium. The Lys runs through the middle, lined since 2018 by lowered banks called the Leieboorden where people now sit with beers in summer. Cisco and Barco have headquarters here. The KU Leuven runs a campus on the south edge of town. The municipality is a stack of eight villages fused in 1977 - Kortrijk, Heule, Bissegem, Marke, Aalbeke, Rollegem, Bellegem, Kooigem - and the metro area spills across language and national borders into Lille and Tournai, the first European Grouping of Territorial Cooperation, signed in this town in January 2008. Two million people now live in that cross-border bloc. They share buses and shopping malls and the long memory of a battle fought in a soft summer field in 1302.