Qualla: Laarne Castle

Laarne Castle: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donarreiskoffer, CC BY 4.0. On 22 September 1382, the castle caught fire. The scorch marks are still there - blackened patches in the medieval stonework, six hundred and forty-three years old and visible if you know where to look. Laarne Castle, a moated water castle sitting on the flat clay south-east of Ghent, has been burned, besieged, occupied by wandering bandits for six years, threatened by Louis XIV's troops, plundered by Sans-culottes, slowly ruined by absent owners, and very nearly given up for lost. Its survival is partly architectural luck and partly the stubbornness of a small line of people who refused to let it disappear. Today it holds one of the most important silver collections in Europe.

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Image: Donarreiskoffer | CC BY 4.0

Laarne Castle: A Knight Who Saw Magna Carta and the Fifth Crusade

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nicklasmark, CC BY-SA 3.0. The forerunner of the castle - a manor house called the hof van Laarne - was probably built shortly after 1228 by Giselbrecht van Zottegem, who had been granted the lordship through marriage to Mathilde van Bethune. His life is worth pausing on. In 1214 and 1215, with two of his ...

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Image: Nicklasmark | CC BY-SA 3.0

Laarne Castle: The Donjon and the Fire

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wikisid, CC BY 3.0. The current castle began in the early fourteenth century when the knight Gerard van Massemen built a gatehouse with a wooden bridge across the moat. Three round towers and a square keep - the donjon - followed shortly. Around 1350 a private chapel was carved into the keep itself....

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Image: Wikisid | CC BY 3.0

Laarne Castle: Rebellions and Wandering Bandits

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Demeester, CC BY-SA 3.0. The fifteenth century brought more trouble. In 1449 a salt tax provoked another uprising against Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy. The rebel militia called the White Hoods took Laarne along with three other castles. The lord of Laarne, Baldwin IV de Vos, was imprisoned in Ghent....

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Image: Demeester | CC BY-SA 3.0

Laarne Castle: The Sun King Spared It

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jean-Pol GRANDMONT, CC BY 3.0. Two passages of seventeenth and eighteenth-century luck kept the building standing. In 1675 the troops of Louis XIV burned the village houses and the church but spared the castle, because the Sun King himself intended to spend a night there during an inspection tour. In 1796 the ...

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Image: Jean-Pol GRANDMONT | CC BY 3.0

Laarne Castle: Silver and a Second Life

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ciprian Olteanu - Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0. Saving it took an organization. In 1953 Count Ribaucourt donated the nearly ruined castle to the Royal Association of Historic Residences and Gardens of Belgium. Restoration began in the 1960s under architect Paul Eeckhout, and the castle opened to the public in 1967. Around that...

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Image: Ciprian Olteanu - Photography | CC BY-SA 4.0