1463: The Noisy Arrival of the Dominicans

The year was 1308. Pope Clement V issued an order after an intervention from the council of Brussels and the Chapter of St. Gudula to forbid the Dominican friars from setting up in the city. The city did not welcome such a fanatic group of ambulant monks who were seen as intolerant and extremist in their condemnation of heresy. Founded in 1215 by Saint Dominic de Guzmán, a Castilian priest, the Dominicans place much importance on active preaching and arguing, hence their Dutch name “Predikheren“, as compared to a more contemplative existence of other orders.

In 1371, there was a city palace called the “Hof van Rummen” located north of the Mint (De Munt). Due to arrears in rent, it was seized by the city’s aldermen from Arnold van Urle (or Oreye) and awarded to the Count of Namur Guillaume who gave it to his son Jean. Somehow the property passed to the knight Wouter Vandernoot whose son Geldolf and daughter Maria gave it in 1463 to Duchess Isabelle de Portugal (1397–1471), third wife of Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good (1396–1467).

The pious Infanta immediately took to securing the founding the Dominican monastery in Brussels despite the more than a century of opposition.

She first obtained the permission from Pope Calixtus III, then her husband ordered the city council and the priests of St Gudula to allow the erection of this monastery notwithstanding any contrary ordinances of his predecessors. The Dominican friar Jan van Harlenne was appointed the vicar of the new monastery and was charged by the Duchess herself to take possession of the Hof van Rummen. Not forgetting that Infanta Isabella was the daughter of Queen of Portugal Philippa of Lancaster, the Duchess also got the Bishop of Salisbury, Simon of Laude, to give in 1463, a hundred gold crowns to the monastery for its establishment.

The Dominican monastery of Brussels was thus founded on 16 December 1463 with the following inscription above its gate: INCARNATIONIS ANNO MCCCCLXIII XVI DECEMBRIS CONVENTUS ISTE CEPIT INITION.

The ducal support really gave the Dominicans a lot of power right from the start. They started collecting alms one year after their founding and the vicar made an agreement with the St Gudula chapter about parish rights. The next Duke of Burgundy (son of Philip and Isabella), Charles the Bold, took them under his direct protection. The Lords of Cleves-Ravenstein Adolf and his son Philip not only ceded some of their property adjacent to the monastery, they also housed their impressive mausoleums in the Dominican church, a Gothic building with three naves. The order grew larger with land acquisitions in 1477 (on the Wolvengracht) and 1480 (including the Wit Huys).

Brussels’ Dominicans also maintained a close tie with the University of Leuven, and renowned theologians such as Domingo de Soto and his brother Pedro resided there. It is therefore not surprising that the Dominican friars were a mainstay of the Inquisition.

Banished and destroyed by the Calvinists (1576-1585)

With the successful takeover by William of Orange, Brussels was briefly ruled as a ‘republic’ out of the hands of the Catholic Habsburg Empire. Initially, there was a level of tolerance for the religious institutions such as the Predikherenklooster. But with the arrival of Antoon Ruyskensvelt, after he was banished by the Ghent Republic (1577-1584), to head the Dominicans in Brussels.

Following his incendiary sermons against the Calvinists in 1581, an uprising against the Dominicans took place, leading to the immediate banishment of Ruyskensvelt and all the Dominican friars on 22 April. The Predikherenklooster as sacked and pillaged. The bronze pillars of the tabernacle, weighing 844 pounds, were sold on 8 December. The following year, another 4,912 pounds of metal from the church were sold and 2,000 pounds that had been removed from the Ravenstein mausoleum. Finally, the receiver of church and ecclesiastical property, Hendrik Gaillaert, was ordered to sell the woodwork, metalwork, cut stone and tombs, which had until then escaped destruction; it is reported that the parchments put up for sale weighed 248 pounds, the library books totalled 2,914, and the broken marble and alabaster weighed 8,351 pounds. Except for the church, the whole monastery was demolished in 1583, and there was talk of demolishing the church to make way for a street. It was only the great expense that would have entailed caused the plan to be abandoned.

But it was not before long that the Dominicans were able to return and begin rebuilding. In 1585, the Duke of Parma, Alessandro Farnese, ended the Calvinist rule over Brussels.

The Rebuilding of the Predikherenklooster: The Rise of the Fanatical Spaniards

To help the reconstruction of the Predikherenklooster, the reinstalled Catholic Habsburg government granted them a subsidy of 300 florins in 1588. The Dominicans also received in 1598 an annual income of 100 florins, mortgaged on the Brussels canal and confiscated from a man named Augustijn Van Coninxloo, who died a Calvinist.

As the control over the Low Countries now belonged to the Spanish branch of the Habsburg Empire, there was a large population of soldiers, public and church officials from that part of the Habsburg Empire residing in Brussels. Due to its Iberian origin, the Predikherenklooster was particularly popular with them.

Thanks to the favour of the Governors of the Habsburg Netherlands, Albert VII Archduke of Austria (1559 – 1621) and his wife Isabella Clara Eugenia (1566 – 1633) who ruled the region from 1598 to 1621, a new era of glory soon dawned on the Dominicans.

During the rebuilding, paintings by renowned painters such as Rubens, Van Dyck, and De Crayer adorned the church interior.

A separate, extremely ornate chapel was even built in 1594 for the Iberians, known as the ‘Spaanse kapel van de Rozenkrans‘ (Spanish Chapel of the Rosary). Here, a statue of a weeping Virgin Mary in long black gown, called by her Castillian name “Nuestra Señora de la Soledad” – Our Lady of Sorrows – took centre stage (it is today in the Kapellekerk). Iberian soldiers who escaped the Calvinists on the island of Zaltbommel, a crucial battleground in the Eighty Years’ War (1566/1568–1648), came here to give thanks and attributed their survival to her.

This shift of power to the Iberian Peninsula within the empire gave the Dominicans even more power than before short Calvinist Protestant rule.

In 1635, the Predikherenklooster supposedly returned to their former strict observance of eating only fish when it came to meat. It also grew in size, when a large novitiate for new recruits was opened the following year. The sumptuous Spanish Chapel of the Rosary was the scene of a ceremony where all representatives of the (Catholic) States of Brabant swore by the Immaculate Conception of Virgin Mary on 8 December 1659, at the initiative of Brussels Governor Luis de Benavides Carillo. The Predikherenklooster also led many groups of laypersons called ‘confraternities’. The largest was the Confraternity of the Holy Rosary, which had more than thirty thousand (primarily Spanish) members.

The style of worship of the Dominicans was fanatical and extremist, something very foreign to the eyes of native Brabanters, or in the Low Countries and certainly in Northern Europe:

During the night of Holy Thursday, the Holy Sacrament was exposed all night in the church, where monks sang psalms; Spanish soldiers, with their halberds in hand, spent twenty-four hours there without eating or drinking.

On Good Friday, the Holy Sacrament was covered with black cloth and an altar adorned with large candelabras also covered with black cloth dotted with the emblems of the Passion embroidered in gold and silver was erected near the rood screen, on which were placed a crucifix, the weeping Virgin Mary, and a coffin covered with a black silk cloth embroidered with gold.

The ceremony began in the afternoon with a sermon in Castillian, followed by the Miserere. At the end of the sermon, all the monks, wearing black stoles embroidered with gold and silver around their necks, came barefoot to take Christ down from the cross and place him in the coffin.

The procession left at five o’clock: a Spanish nobleman, carrying a black banner, led the way; he was followed by several trumpeters and a timpanist dressed also in black. These played mournful sirs, and preceded several people carrying the instruments of the Passion; in front of each of them was a gentleman or a prelate, torch in hand, followed by his pages and servants.

Next came the weeping Virgin Mary, covered in black veil and carried by six monks; eight others supported the coffin surrounded by armed soldiers. The procession went to the Ducal Palace, in front of which a altar was set up, and it did not return until very late. On Easter Day, at daybreak, an altar hung in black was erected before the church door, on which the Virgin of Sorrows was placed; then Christ was removed from his coffin, the black veil of the Virgin was removed, and after receiving the blessing of the Holy Sacrament, the assistants mingled their cries of joy with the sound of trumpets, kettledrums, and an infinite number of other instruments.

We do not know when this ceremony dates back to. All that could be found is that in 1549, on the evening of Maundy Thursday, a procession was seen leaving the Predikherenklooster in which a crowd of Latins flagellated themselves with such force that blood flowed, so to speak, onto the streets!

In 1642, this procession was accompanied by more than a thousand men! Several of them dragged along something: either a large cross or chains. Some of them had their backs bare and were flogged by their servants.

In 1696, the Archbishop forbade these parades on the grounds of them being unworthy of Christianity.

But this did not stop the drama-loving play-acting Spanish-speaking Dominicans:

On Ember Wednesday December, as early as six o’clock in the morning, they dressed up a child as an angel and lowered him from the vault (!) to tell a young girl the words by which the archangel Gabriel announced to the Virgin that she would become the mother of Jesus, and the girl had to reproduce Mary’s response as in the bible.

Another bizarre event was how from 1662, the Dominican friars went in procession from their monastery to the Collegiale kerk van Sint-Michiel en Sint-Goedele at midnight on New Year’s Eve to adore the Holy Sacrament there for an hour. As if it was considered not punishing enough, they postponed it to four in the morning in 1675!

After 1581: The Most Extravagant Monastery of Brussels

Not much is known about the appearance of the 15th century Predikherenklooster founded by Infanta Isabella in 1463, as it was destroyed by the Protestants in 1581, except the church.

The second life that the Dominicans received after that gave them both political and religious power to build the most powerful monastery in Brussels. We do know a lot more about the church. Dedicated to Saint Vincent Ferrer, a Dominican friar who previously preached in Brussels, the choir was not completed until 1529, and the nave vault until 1548. The façade, which was decorated in the Late Gothic style, opened onto the Lange Ridderstraat [today’s Leopoldstraat (Rue Léopold)].

Above the main altar, hanged a painting by Janssens representing a Duke of Cleves cured by the intercession of Saint Vincent Ferrer (it is today in the Sint-Katelijnekerk). In front of the rood screen were four paintings by De Crayer on Saint John the Evangelist, Saint John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene and Saint Peter.

The windows on the right side of the choir had been donated by the Council of Brabant, and some of those on the left side by Adolf de Clèves, Lord of Ravenstein. It was here that once stood his magnificent mausoleum after he died in 1492, and of his second wife, Anna of Burgundy, daughter of Philip the Good, who died in 1504. Destroyed by the Calvinists, this gilded iron monument, supported by columns at a height of five feet, was surmounted by cast iron statues of Adolf and Anna, and adorned with thirty-two coats of arms.

The whole domain was built against the first city walls of Brussels, above the Munt (the city mint) and the Sint-Lookapel (Chapel of Saint Eligius).

After 1695: A Third Lease of Life

The French bombardments of 1695 reduced the Predikherenklooster to rubble once again.

While every trace of the Cleves-Ravenstein mausoleum was destroyed, the chapel of his son Philip remained standing, as did the church facade. A new reconstruction followed: the choir was completed in 1704, the main cloister with forty arcades in 1705, the second cloister in 1709, and the novitiate in 1731.

The beautiful main cloister surrounded flowerbeds adorned with a gushing fountain, whose water came from a spring on the Arenbergstraat. Above the cloister were the dormitories where the friars slept. Further west, towards the area where today’s Muntplein (Place e la Monnaie), stood a large main building built in 1726. The ground floor of this building served as a refectory. Upstairs was the library, which contained many rare books.

The novitiate mentioned earlier was entirely separate from the friars’ quarters and they had their own chapel.

Site of the Belgian Revolution: From Riding School to Brussels’ Theatre

Through the 1782 Edict of Toleration, Habsburg Emperor Joseph II closed down virtually all the religious institutions throughout the empire. Surprisingly, the Predikherenklooster was allowed to remain. Momentarily. For reasons of urban planning, the order was to be moved to the vacant monastery of the Minimes. But shortly thereafter, the French invaded Brussels.

Before the expulsion of the last thirty-six friars on 12 November 1796, most of the valuables had already been smuggled out of the country.

The Predikherenklooster was auctioned off as national property in February 1797. The buyers sold the remaining materials and then proceeded to demolish the once most majestic monastery of Brussels.

On part of the land the Dominicans once occupied, the city built a riding school in 1812.

That soon disappeared, replaced by the city’s brand-new opera theatre called Muntschouwburg (Theatre de la Monnaie) in 1819, which still stands today. It was here in the Muntschouwburg on 4 October 1830 where a revolution started to get the Southern (Catholic) Netherlands broke away from the united (Protestant) Netherlands to form the Kingdom of Belgium.

Home to painter Jacques-Louis David

The other half of the land occupied by the Predikherenklooster was sold to private developers who built luxurious neo-classical houses and shops for the growing middle class.

In 1816, French painter Jacques-Louis David arrived in Brussels after choosing self-exile for having been accused to be a former revolutionary and Bonapartist and , and having played a role in the deaths of King Louis XVI and King Louis XVII even though he was granted amnesty.

In Brussels, he took up residence in one of the newly built houses at the back of the riding school along the Willemstraat (Rue Guillaume), where he continued to paint.

His last work ‘Mars Being Disarmed by Venus and the Three Graces’, was completed here in 1824 and is today housed in the Brussels’ Royal Museum of Fine Arts. In December 1823, he wrote:

“This is the last image I want to paint, but I want to surpass myself in it. I will put the date of my seventy-five years on it and afterwards I will never again pick up my brush.”

Jacques-Louis David died on 29 December 1825.

After his death, the house was named after him.

In the last decade, a luxurious boutique hotel opened up on the location, that not only incorporated neighbouring houses but also that of Jacques-Louis David. Called The Dominican, the hotel houses 150 rooms and pays tribute to the 15th century Predikherenklooster.

It is not known how much of the original features of the Predikherenklooster have been retained in the 19th century neo-classical buildings, but looking at the height of the hotel buildings, some of the hallways and windows, it is clear that not everything from the powerful and fanatical Dominicans have been lost to time. For those interested in the legacy of the Dominicans of the Predikherenklooster, go visit The Dominican Hotel today.

*Side note: If you visit the cookery shop beside the hotel at the beginning of the street, some parts of the exposed walls inside the shop show the 18th century brickwork that may have belonged to the Dominicans.

Tunnel under the Leopoldstraat

In 2018, during the construction of a tunnel under the Leopodstraat linking the workshops located beside The Dominican Hotel and the Theatre Muntschouwburg (La Monnaie), six graves were discovered containing the remains of four men and two women.

Sources:

Vannieuwenhuyze, B. (2011) “Brussel, de Ontwikkeling van een middeleeuwse stedelijke ruimte.” Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.
Henne, A. Wauters, A. (1845) “Histoire de la ville de Bruxelles. Volume I-III” Brussels: Librairie Encyclopédique de Périchon.
De Scheemaecker, A. (1922) “L’ancien Couvent des Dominicains à Bruxelles.” Gand: Père ARTS Dominicains S. Th. L.
https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predikherenklooster_(Brussel)
https://www.thedominican.be/about-us
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maison_de_Jacques-Louis_David
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Being_Disarmed_by_Venus
https://www.dhnet.be/regions/bruxelles/2018/11/26/bruxelles-six-squelettes-mis-au-jour-sous-le-chantier-du-theatre-de-la-monnaie-6C524SESDJDJPF3L4XQE7IE6MU/

1. Unknown. (1715) “Former Dominican monastery of Brussels in 1715” Wikipedia Commons (image)
2. Unknown. (1770) “Former Dominican monastery of Brussels in 1770” Wikipedia Commons (image)
3. Unknown. (1770) “Spanish Chapel of the Rosary” Wikipedia Commons (image)
4. David, Jacques-Louis. (1824) “Mars désarmé par Vénus” Wikipedia Commons (image)
5. Beliris. (2018) “Bruxelles : Six squelettes mis au jour sous le chantier du théâtre de La Monnaie” Beliris (image)