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While the sleepy, medieval backdrop to Martin McDonagh's hitman comedy certainly appears like the setting for a fairy tale, it also hides a very dark past, one full of fundamentalist depravity and dank dungeons as well as knights and ladies. It was a city of contradictions-host to one of the most spectacular banquets in medieval times and the inspiration for Hieronymus Bosch's hellish visions. The center of a burgeoning middle class as well as a secret aristocratic clan, Knights of the Golden Fleece (an order created by Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy) and a famously cheerful executioner who gleefully tortured and then burned homosexuals at the stake. Indeed the happy city of Bruges rose to fame (and fell from it) as the cultural divide between an old feudal order and an emerging capitalist economy.

Bruges, one of the best-preserved medieval towns in Europe, is located in the lowlands of northwestern Flanders, near the North Sea. As a monument to the age of chivalry, Bruges has few equals.

While the actual city existed for centuries, the modern notion of it as a fairy tale city emerged in the 19th century as budding travel writers found it a convenient place on which to project their romantic fantasies of a bygone Europe.

In her travelogue Belgium and Western Germany in 1833, Frances Trollope, the novelist and social critic (most famous for her 1832 book Domestic Manners of the Americans), noted Bruges' "mouldering grandeur" and "splendid relics of its brighter days." Indeed at its apex in the 14th and 15th centuries, Bruges was the center of trade and commerce — the New York, if you will, of the Western world. In the 14th century, 17 kingdoms and principalities had official representatives stationed in Bruges.

But like all great cosmopolitan cities, its glory faded. Mrs. Trollope, as she was known, goes on to write, "I am very gravely assured, that its principal trade at present is in beer and manure." (And the beer remains. Ray: "I assume they have beer in his fucking country." Ken: "They have over three hundred different types of beer.")

This post-mortem view of Bruges was picked up by others. In 1892, Georges Rodenbach, the Symbolist poet and novelist, wrote a short novel set in the decaying city, The Dead City of Bruges.

The city's architectural treasures became evidence of its exotic past. Bruges, once a major port, has an extensive network of canals. Traveling to Bruges by canal boat, Mrs. Trollope informed her readers: "In China only, as we were told, can a still more superb canal be seen." Indeed, Bruges is known as "Venice of the North" — a comparison that was first made in 1438 by a Spanish merchant, Petro Tafur, who was referring to both the canals and the libertine lifestyle of the town's elite.

Bruges was pivotal in the development of the international trade routes and banking systems that changed Europe's economy and culture. James M. Murray's recent Bruges, Cradle of Capitalism, 1280-1390 demonstrates that the banking and shipping interests in this little town helped change the economic fabric of the western world. In its heyday, from the Baltics to Venice, traders made their way to Bruges. Merchants and bankers from Eastern Europe (the Osterlings — hence the word sterling), England, Spain, Genoa and Florence were so numerous that they established their own neighborhoods. A tally of ships at port on one day in the 15th century included "three galleys from Venice, a hulk from Portugal, two Spanish caravels, six Scottish ships, 42 caravels from Brittany, 12 vessels from Hamburg, and a fishing fleet that includes four whalers, and some 40 herring boats." Adrien de Meeüs, in his definitive History of the Belgians (1961) writes, "Vessels from far countries unloaded monkeys, lions, and parakeets there to ornament the princely menageries of Europe."