Leon van der Essen (1883–1963) was a Belgian historian, professor at the Catholic University of Leuven.

[1] After graduating from a Jesuit secondary school in Antwerp he studied in Leuven under Alfred Cauchie, obtaining his doctorate in 1907 with a thesis on the lives of Merovingian saints.

After the war he was an adviser to the Belgian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference, 1919, and he was appointed a full professor at the university.

After the Second World War he published a series of short studies of aspects of the organisation and activities of the sixteenth-century Army of Flanders.

A Festschrift was published in his honour in 1947: Miscellanea historica in honorem Leonis van der Essen.