Ezelpoort

This guide to the Ezelpoort in Bruges starts on a market morning in seventeen eighty-two, with carts and pack-donkeys converging on a toll house built out on the water to collect the city's octrooi, its excise duty on incoming goods. It traces how that unglamorous land tax, more than the famous cargoes off ships from the Zwin, kept the medieval treasury full, and follows the gate's rebuilding in the thirteen sixties by masons Jan Slabbaerd and Mathijs Saghen. By the seventeen eighties the fortifications could no longer stop cannon fire, forcing a choice about what to keep and what to strip away. Stand at the brick towers and picture the queue of wagons waiting to pay.