[e] In this period, cities such as Ghent and Bruges of the historic County of Flanders, and later Antwerp of the Duchy of Brabant made it one of the richest and most urbanised parts of Europe, trading, and weaving the wool of neighbouring lands into cloth for both domestic use and export.

In the history of art and other fields, the adjectives Flemish and Netherlandish are commonly used to designate all the artistic production in this area before about 1580, after which it refers specifically to the southern Netherlands.

Within this Dutch-speaking part of Belgium, French has never ceased to be spoken by some citizens, and Jewish groups have been speaking Yiddish in Antwerp for centuries.

Regardless of nationality or linguistic background, according to Belgian Law education in schools located in the Flemish Region must be mainly in the Dutch language.

In the future county of Flanders, the main Belgic tribe in early Roman times was the Menapii, but also on the coast were the Marsacii and Morini.

Another notable group were the Toxandrians who appear to have lived in the Kempen region, in the northern parts of both the Nervian and Tungrian districts, probably stretching into the modern Netherlands.

Brabant appears to have been separated from the Tungri by a relatively unpopulated forest area, the Silva Carbonaria, forming a natural boundary between northeast and southwest Belgium.

As Roman influence waned, Frankish populations settled in the Tungiran area east of the Silva Carbonaria, and eventually pushed through it under Chlodio.

While its trading cities remained strong, it was weakened and divided when districts fell under direct French royal rule in the late 12th century.

During the late Middle Ages, Flanders's trading towns (notably Ghent, Bruges and Ypres) 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.

The entire area, straddling the ancient boundary of France and the Holy Roman Empire, later passed to Philip the Bold in 1384, the Duke of Burgundy, with his capital in Brussels.

The County of Loon, approximately the modern Flemish province of Limburg, remained independent of France, forming a part of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège until the French Revolution, but surrounded by the Burgundians, and under their influence.

[12] Charles V issued the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549, which 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.

The Beeldenstorm started in what is now French Flanders, with open-air sermons (Dutch: hagepreken) that spread through the Low Countries, first to Antwerp and Ghent, and from there further east and north.

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.

During the war with England, the rebels from the north, strengthened by refugees from the south, started a campaign to reclaim areas lost to Philip 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.

Although arts remained relatively impressive for another century with Peter Paul Rubens (1577–1640) and Anthony van Dyck, Flanders lost its former economic and intellectual power under Spanish, Austrian, and French rule.

On 25 August 1830 (after the showing of the opera 'La Muette de Portici' of Daniel Auber in Brussels) the Belgian Revolution sparked.

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.

Roughly, the Flemish Region is responsible for territorial issues in a broad sense, including economy, employment, agriculture, water policy, housing, public works, energy, transport, the environment, town and country planning, nature conservation, credit, and foreign trade.

According to a survey conducted by the University of Louvain (UCLouvain) in Louvain-la-Neuve and published in June 2006, 51% of respondents from Brussels claimed to be bilingual, even if they do not have Dutch as their first language.

With similar soils along the lowermost Scheldt basin starts the central plain, a smooth, slowly rising fertile area irrigated by many waterways that reaches an average height of about five metres (16 feet) above sea level with wide valleys of its rivers upstream as well as the Campine region to the east having sandy soils at altitudes around thirty metres.

[g] Near its southern edges close to Wallonia one can find slightly rougher land, richer in calcium, with low hills reaching up to 150 m (490 ft) and small valleys, and at the eastern border with the Netherlands, in the Meuse basin, there are marl caves (mergelgrotten).

Subsidised schools are also free to determine their own teaching and examination methods, but in exchange, they must be able to prove that certain minimal terms are achieved by keeping records of the given lessons and exams.

Resulting in the ethnic differences and the well-known waterfall system: pupils start high in the perceived hierarchy, and then drop towards more professional oriented directions or "easier" schools when they can't handle the pressure any longer.

Some famous Flemish writers of the early 20th century wrote in French, including Nobel Prize winners (1911) Maurice Maeterlinck and Emile Verhaeren.

[51] Still widely read and translated into other languages (including English) are the novels of authors such as Willem Elsschot, Louis Paul Boon and Hugo Claus.

The public radio and television broadcaster in Flanders is VRT, which operates the TV channels één, Canvas, Ketnet, OP12 and (together with the Netherlands) BVN.

Eddy Merckx is widely regarded as the greatest cyclist of all time, with five victories in the Tour de France and numerous other cycling records.