The History of Belgium

The land that would become Belgium has been at the crossroads of European history for thousands of years. Celtic tribes, followed by Roman legions under Julius Caesar, shaped its earliest recorded chapters. Later it became the heart of Charlemagne's Carolingian empire, before feudal counties like Flanders and Brabant rose to become some of the wealthiest territories in medieval Europe, thriving on the cloth trade and banking. The Burgundian dukes brought these lands together under one court in the 15th century, a period of artistic flourishing seen in the paintings of Van Eyck and his contemporaries. Habsburg rule followed, and with it came the turmoil of the Reformation, the brutal suppression of religious revolt, and the long struggle of the Eighty Years War that divided the Low Countries between north and south. Austrian Enlightenment reforms sparked the Brabant Revolution, then France swept in under Napoleon and reshaped the entire region. After his defeat, the Congress of Vienna merged the southern and northern Netherlands, an uneasy union that lasted only fifteen years.