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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 |