BELGIUM. History. xxiii At the divisions of the Merovingian possessions in the 6th cent., the country to the W. of the Scheldt fell to Neustria, that on the E. to Austrasia. By the treaty of Verdun (843) the western pro- vinces, Flanders and Artois, became part of France, while the eastern, Brabant, Hainault, Namur, and Luxembourg, fell to the share of Germany and down to the 11th cent. formed the duchy of Lower Alsace. With the further development of the feudal system various hereditary principalities were established here as elsewhere. Thus arose the countships of Flanders, Artois, Hainault, Namur, the duchies of Brabant and Limburg, the episcopal prin- cipality of Liége, the margraviate of Antwerp, and the barony of Malines. Flanders, which attained to great prosperity by means of its manufactures and commercial enterprise (Ghent, Bruges, Ypres), carried on a long-continued struggle against France, the result of which was the establishment of a merely temporary independence. On the extinction of the male line of the Counts of Flanders in 1384, Flanders became annexed to Burgundy by the marriage of Philip the Bold with a daughter of the Flemish princely race, and by the beginning of the 15th cent. most of the other states were also united, by means of later marriages and other contracts, in- heritance, etc., under the supremacy of the Dukes of Burgundy. This change of dynasty was most favourable to the growth of art in the Netherlands. The splendour-loving Philip the Bold (d. 1404) employed artists of every kind, particularly goldsmiths, while the name of his grandson Philip the Good (1419-1467), to whom Jan van Eyck was court-painter, is inseparably connected with the first bloom of Flemish painting. In 1477 the Netherlands came into the possession of the House of Hapsburg by the marriage of Mary of Burgundy (p. 30), the daughter of Charles the Bold, the last Duke of Burgundy, with Mazimilian, afterwards Emperor of Germany. The children of this marriage were Philip the Handsome (d. 1506), Duke of Burgundy and King of Castile (in right of his wife, Johanna the Mad), and Margaret of Austria, regent of the Netherlands from 1507 to her death in 1530. Philip’s son, Charles V., who was born at Ghent in 1500, and sub- sequently became King of Spain (1516) and Emperor of Germany (1519), compelled Francis I. of France, by the Treaty of Madrid in 1526 and the ‘Paix des Dames’ at Cambrai in 1529, to renounce finally his claims upon Flanders, which, along with the rest of the 3urgundian inheritance, had passed to the German empire in 1512. On the abdication of Charles V. in 1555, the Netherlands came under the sway of his son Philip IJ., and were thenceforward sub- ject to Spanish Supremacy. Philip appointed his half-sister, Mar- garet of Parma, regent of the Netherlands (1559-67), and selected Archbishop G@ranvella (p. 159), as her counsellor and assistant. Religious agitations, the excessive increase of the number of the bishops (1559), the burdensome presence and the outrages of the