The 15th century witnessed the ascendancy of Bruges, whose wealth was founded on the cloth industry and on links with the Baltic and the Mediterranean. In 1460 the first European stock exchange was established in Antwerp. The Duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good (1419-1467), abandoned Dijon for Bruges. In 1428 he inherited Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland. Charles the Bold was Duke of Burgundy from 1467 to 1477 (in 1468 he married Margaret of York in Bruges). In 1477 Mary of Burgundy (d. 1482) married Maximilian of Austria. The Low Countries passed to the Habsburgs. Philip of Austria married Joanna the Mad of Castile, heir to the throne of Spain, in 1496.

Religion was imbued with a spirit of practical common sense. Thomas à Kempis (d. 1471) wrote the "Imitation of Christ"; Alain de la Roche (d. 1475), a Breton Dominican, introduced the use of rosary.

Intellectual life was rich; the university of Louvain was founded in 1426; it was a time of court chroniclers and rhetoricians (Georges Chastellain; O. de la Marche; Jean Molinet) and of humanism (Rodolphus Agricola, d. 1485). Printing may have developed in Haarlem (1423, where Laurens Koster perhaps used movable type), Antwerp (1472), Alost and Utrecht (1473), Bruges (1475), Louvain, etc.

A generation of polyphonic composers of Franco-Anglo-Iatalian origin appears in the south. Court musicians were Guillaume Dufay (1400-1474), Gilles de Binchois (d. 1460) and Pierre de la Rue (d. 1518). These were contemporaries of Joannes Ockeghem and Josquin Desprez in France.