Qualla: Wijnendale Castle

Wijnendale Castle: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donar Reiskoffer, CC BY 3.0. On a March morning in 1482, the Duchess of Burgundy went hawking in the woods around Wijnendale. She was twenty-five years old, ruler in her own right of one of the richest territorial blocks in Europe, mother of a four-year-old son named Philip, and pregnant again. Her horse stumbled in a ditch. The fall broke something inside her that the doctors of the age could not repair, and Mary of Burgundy died at the castle a few weeks later. Her widower Maximilian of Habsburg held what she had left him with both hands and did not let go. Three hundred years of Habsburg rule over the Low Countries began in the corridors of Wijnendale, because a saddle slipped in a Flemish wood.

Read more: Wijnendale Castle on Qualla

Image: Donar Reiskoffer | CC BY 3.0

Wijnendale Castle: A Count's Outpost

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Trougnouf (Benoit Brummer), CC BY 4.0. Robert I, Count of Flanders, raised the first castle at Wijnendale at the end of the 11th century as a military base, planted on a low rise in the West Flemish forests near what is now Torhout. By the 12th and 13th centuries it had softened into a residence, a place where the Cou...

Read more: Wijnendale Castle on Qualla

Image: Trougnouf (Benoit Brummer) | CC BY 4.0

Wijnendale Castle: Burgundy's Shadow

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Paul Hermans, CC BY-SA 4.0. In 1407, after a period of neglect, John III of Namur sold Wijnendale to John the Fearless, Duke of Burgundy, who promptly handed it to his son-in-law Adolph of Cleves as part of a dowry. The Burgundian dukes were the wealthiest court in Europe, and their tastes seeped into Wijne...

Read more: Wijnendale Castle on Qualla

Image: Paul Hermans | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wijnendale Castle: The Hawking Accident

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Jean-Pol GRANDMONT, CC BY 3.0. Mary of Burgundy was, by all accounts, fond of falconry. On 27 March 1482 she rode out with her birds. The fall - either from her horse, or with it - is recorded only in the dry medieval shorthand of chroniclers who did not yet understand what had just happened. She died on 27 Ma...

Read more: Wijnendale Castle on Qualla

Image: Jean-Pol GRANDMONT | CC BY 3.0

Wijnendale Castle: Wars Rolling Through

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wim Bladt, CC BY-SA 4.0. After Mary's death, Wijnendale kept changing hands the way Flemish castles do - by treaty, inheritance, and gunpowder. The Dukes of Cleves held it. Then, after the War of the Jülich Succession, it passed to the Counts Palatine of Neuburg. Louis XIV's armies blew up part of the ca...

Read more: Wijnendale Castle on Qualla

Image: Wim Bladt | CC BY-SA 4.0

Wijnendale Castle: May 1940

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ciprian Olteanu - Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0. The castle was rebuilt in romanticised medieval style by the Matthieu family between 1837 and 1877, and it stands in that form today. Its last great historical moment came on 25 May 1940. With the German army closing in and Belgium days away from capitulation, King Leopold III me...

Read more: Wijnendale Castle on Qualla

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