Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 26, 2025
In vain the wise Bras-de-Fer warned his generation that glory and strength of limb were of short duration, while knowledge was the only immortal quality. As long as parents saw that the honours at Court went to handsome horsemen, they thought it mistaken policy to waste money on book-learning for their sons.
Basil was laid in ruins. The Church of St. Donatian, which had stood since the days of Baldwin Bras-de-Fer, was pulled down and disappeared entirely. Notre Dame, St. Sauveur, and other places of worship, narrowly escaped destruction; and it was not till the middle of the nineteenth century that the town recovered, in some measure, from these disasters.
As in France, the successors of the Sullys and Du Plessis Mornays had become the coxcombs of the Fronde, and the grandson of Bras-de-Fer was known as Bras-de-Laine, so the character and conduct of men like Hyde, Ormonde, and Falkland furnished no example to such as Villiers and Wilmot, whose only ideal of imitation was scurrilous mimicry.
Among other celebrated persons in history endowed with uncommon strength were Edmund "Ironsides," King of England; the Caliph Mostasem-Billah; Baudouin, "Bras-de-Fer," Count of Flanders; William IV, called by the French "Fier-a-Bras," Duke of Aquitaine; Christopher, son of Albert the Pious, Duke of Bavaria; Godefroy of Bouillon; the Emperor Charles IV; Scanderbeg; Leonardo da Vinci; Marshal Saxe; and the recently deceased Czar of Russia, Alexander III.
It is to the steel-clad Baldwin Bras-de-Fer that the Counts of Flanders trace the origin of their title; and he was, moreover, the real founder of that Bruges which rose to such glory in the Middle Ages, and is still, though fallen from its high estate, the picturesque capital of West Flanders, whither artists flock to wander about amidst the canals and bridges, the dismantled ramparts, the narrow streets with their curious houses, and the old buildings which bear such eloquent testimony to the ruin which long ago overtook what was once an opulent and powerful city.
Charles the Bald, King of the Franks, at this crisis called to his aid the strong arm of Baldwin, a Flemish chief of whose ancestry we know little, but who soon became famous as Baldwin Bras-de-Fer Baldwin of the Iron Arm, so called because, in peace or war, he was never seen without his coat of mail.
The present ogival structure is built on the remains of a Romanesque church erected by a famous Bishop of Coutances, Geoffroy de Montbray, with funds supplied by Guillaume Bras-de-Fer, Odon, Roger, Onfroy, and Robert, sons of Tancrede-de-Hauteville, the Norman conquerors of Sicily and Calabria, whose names have been given fabled prominence in more than one epic poem.
To walk from Nieuport Ville to the Digue de Mer at Nieuport-Bains is to pass in a few minutes from the old Flanders, the home of so much romance, the scene of so many stirring deeds, from the market-places with the narrow gables heaped up in piles around them, from the belfries soaring to the sky, from the winding streets and the narrow lanes, in which the houses almost touch each other from the tumble-down old hostelries, from the solemn aisles where the candles glimmer and the dim red light glows before the altar, from the land of Bras-de-Fer, and Thierry d'Alsace, and Memlinc, and Van Eyck, and Rubens, the land which was at once the Temple and the Golgotha of Europe, into the clear, broad light of modern days.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking