Hof van Savoye

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hof van Savoye stands in Mechelen, Belgium, and it carries more history within its walls than almost any building of its era in the region. Built in the early years of the sixteenth century, it was one of the first Renaissance buildings in all of Northern Europe. That alone would make it worth knowing. But the palace is also the place where a young woman named Anne Boleyn came of age, where a future Holy Roman Emperor spent his childhood, and where a governor of the Netherlands shaped the destiny of a continent. What made this building a magnet for so much pivotal history? And what became of it after the great figures who filled its rooms were gone?

• 2. Margaret's Ambition

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  Margaret of Austria arrived in Mechelen holding two powerful titles: Duchess of Savoy and Governor of the Netherlands. She had been granted a house on the Korte Maagdenstraat, the street whose name translates as Virgins Short Street, but she found it too small for her purposes. In 1507, she launched an ambitious expansion campaign. From 1517 to 1530, the architect Rombout II Keldermans carried the project forward along the Keizerstraat, the Emperor Street, reshaping what became the rear wing of the complex. That rear wing faces the Palace of Margaret of York, her step-grandmother, who had died in 1503. The project was personal as well as political. Margaret raised her nephew Charles in this palace, the boy who would become the Holy Roman Emperor. She lived in the palace until her death in 1530, the same year Keldermans completed his work.

• 3. Anne Boleyn's World

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  Historian Eric Ives describes the inner courtyard and southern wing of the palace as still much like Anne Boleyn must have seen them during the years she spent at Margaret's court. The young Anne Boleyn passed through Mechelen as part of her upbringing, moving in the same corridors and courtyards that remain today. What she absorbed in that setting left a lasting mark. The palace stood as a model for the rebuilding of the Palace of Whitehall, undertaken for Anne in the 1530s. A building in Belgium, shaped by a Habsburg governor, became the template for one of England's most famous royal residences.

• 4. Damage, Ownership, New Purpose

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  In 1546, the city's Zandpoort, the Sand Gate, exploded. The gate had been used to store gunpowder, and when it went up, the palace suffered repairable damage. The city had been the building's owner up to that point, and it held onto the property until 1561. That year brought a new chapter: the palace became the residence of Granvelle, the first Archbishop of Mechelen and right-hand man of Philip II. The building had shifted from a governor's seat to an ecclesiastical one, placing it once again at the center of power in the Spanish Netherlands.

• 5. Council and Courts

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  In 1609, the city of Mechelen bought the building back. Seven years later, in 1616, it became the headquarters of the Great Council of the Netherlands, a role it held until 1795. After nearly two centuries as an administrative center, the building took on yet another identity. It became known as the Gerechtshof, the Court of Justice, because it came to house the lower courts: the Criminal and Civil Court, the Justice of the Peace, and the Police Court. A palace built by a Renaissance governor became, in time, the place where ordinary citizens faced ordinary justice.