History of Flanders
During several periods during the middle ages it was a powerful semi-independent state based within the Kingdom of France, but stretching into the neighbouring Holy Roman Empire.
It was influential in all neighbouring regions including England, and at its greatest extent its political hegemony stretched north into Zeelandic Flanders in what is now the Netherlands, and deep into French-speaking northern France.
Caesar described "Belgium" or "Gallia Belgica" as the northernmost of the three distinct parts of Gaul, and all definitions of Flanders are within this large Belgic area.
Within the Belgic region, the old County of Flanders was inhabited by the Menapii (and possibly also some of the Marsacii and Morini) whose territory stretched from the Rhine–Meuse–Scheldt delta to the modern Flemish coast.
Caesar describes tribes and individuals who had Celtic names, but also recalls a story that the majority of the Belgae had ancestors who had come from east of the Rhine, some time before the migrations of the Cimbri and Teutones in the second century BCE.
Inland parts of modern Flanders, Brabant and especially Limburg, came under pressure from the Frankish group of Germanic tribes, from across the Rhine.
Eventually the inland Salian Franks converted to Christianity and came to rule what is now northern France, and the entire Belgian area.
Flemish prosperity waned in the following century, however, owing to widespread European population decline following the Black Death of 1348, the disruption of trade during the Anglo-French Hundred Years' War (1338–1453), and increased English cloth production.
The entire area passed in 1384 to the dukes of Burgundy, who eventually united it politically with their Duchy of Brabant within the Holy Roman Empire.
During the late Middle Ages Flanders' trading towns (notably Ghent, Bruges and Ypres) once again made it one of the richest and most urbanized parts of Europe, weaving the wool of neighbouring lands into cloth for both domestic use and export.
[3] The Pragmatic Sanction of 1549, issued by Charles V, established the Low Countries as the Seventeen Provinces (or Spanish Netherlands in its broad sense) as an entity separate from the Holy Roman Empire and from France.
In 1566, the iconoclasm (Beeldenstorm) began as protest against Philip II and promoted the disfigurement of statues and paintings depicting saints.
On 10 August 1566, at the end of the pilgrimage from Hondschoote to Steenvoorde, the chapel of the Sint-Laurensklooster (Monastery of Saint Lawrence) was defaced by Protestants.
Alba recaptured the southern part of the Provinces, who signed the Union of Atrecht, which meant that they would accept the Spanish government on condition of more freedom.
While Spain was at war with England, the rebels from the north, strengthened by refugees from the south, started a campaign to reclaim areas lost to Philips II's Spanish troops.
The Dutch (as they later became known) had managed to reclaim enough of Spanish-controlled Flanders to close off the river Scheldt, effectively cutting Antwerp off from its trade routes.
[5] In the Northern Netherlands however, the mass emigration from Flanders and Brabant became an important driving force behind the Dutch Golden Age.
Although arts remained at a relatively impressive level for another century with Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Anthony van Dyck, Flanders experienced a loss of its former economic and intellectual power under Spanish, Austrian, and French rule, with heavy taxation and rigid imperial political control compounding the effects of industrial stagnation and Spanish-Dutch and Franco-Austrian conflict.
In 1794 the French Republican Army started using Antwerp as the northernmost naval port of France,[5] which country officially annexed Flanders the following year as the départements of Lys, Escaut, Deux-Nèthes, Meuse-Inférieure and Dyle.
The political system that was set up, however, slowly but surely failed to forge a true union between the northern and the southern parts of the Kingdom.
On 25 August 1830 (after the showing of the opera 'La Muette de Portici' of Daniel Auber in Brussels) the Belgian Revolution sparked off and became a fact.
Sovereignty over Zeelandic Flanders, south of the Westerscheldt river delta, was left with the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which was allowed to levy a toll on all traffic to Antwerp harbour until 1863.
[citation needed] In 1834, all people even remotely suspected of being "Flemish minded" or calling for the reunification of the Netherlands were prosecuted and their houses looted and burnt.
[citation needed] This led to a widespread poverty in Flanders, forcing roughly 300.000 Flemish to emigrate to Wallonia to start working there in the heavy industry.
Due to the hundreds of thousands of casualties at Ypres, the poppies that sprang up from the battlefield afterwards, later immortalised in the Canadian poem "In Flanders Fields", written by John McCrae, have become a symbol for lives lost in war.
Since these parties were promised more rights for the Flemish by the German government during World War II, some of them collaborated with the Nazi regime.
Nevertheless, many Flemish people were also involved in the resistance, joining local organizations like the Kempische Legioen (KL) in Limburg, and support from Flemish resistance members of the Witte Brigade and the Nationale Koninklijke Beweging (NKB) allowed the Allied armies to capture the vital port of Antwerp intact in 1944.
After World War II, the differences between Dutch-speaking and French-speaking Belgians became clear in a number of conflicts, such as the question whether King Leopold III should return (which most Flemings supported but not the Walloons) and the use of Dutch in the Catholic University of Leuven.
The 2009 regional elections have strengthened the parties in favor a significant increase of Flemish autonomy: CD&V and N-VA were the clear winners.
These victories for the advocates of much more Flemish autonomy are very much in parallel with opinion polls that show a structural increase in popular support for their agenda.
