Why Some Historic Trade Cities Declined

The very physical geography that had once favored a trading city could later doom it. Bruges, the leading commercial city of medieval Flanders and home to one of Europe's earliest organized commodity and financial exchanges — the word "bourse" derives from the Van der Beurze family's inn in the city, where merchants gathered to trade — depended on the Zwin, a tidal inlet connecting it to the North Sea. From the 15th century, the Zwin progressively silted up, requiring ever longer and more costly overland or lighter transport to reach oceangoing vessels, and by the early 16th century commercial primacy in the region had shifted decisively to Antwerp, whose Scheldt estuary remained deep and navigable.