The Historical Geography of Europe, Vol. I, Text

by Edward A. Freeman

♦Position of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy.♦

Among all the powers which we have marked as having for their special characteristic that of being middle states, the one which came most nearly to an actual revival of the middle states of earlier days was the Duchy of Burgundy under the Valois Dukes. A great power was formed whose princes held no part of their dominions in wholly independent sovereignty. ♦Their twofold vassalage.♦ In practical power they were the peers of their Imperial and royal neighbours; but their formal character throughout every rood of their possessions was that of vassals of one or other of those neighbours. ♦Its effects.♦ Such a twofold vassalage naturally suggested, even more strongly than vassalage to a single lord could have done, the thought of emancipation from all vassalage, and of the gathering together of endless separate fiefs into a single kingdom. ♦Schemes for a Burgundian kingdom.♦ The gradual acquisitions of earlier princes, especially those of Philip the Good, naturally led up to the design, avowed by his son Charles the Bold, of exchanging the title of Duke for that of King. The memories of the older Burgundian and Lotharingian kingdoms had no doubt a share in shaping the schemes of a prince who possessed so large a share of the provinces which had formed those kingdoms. The schemes of Charles, one can hardly doubt, reached to the formation of a realm like that of the first Lothar, a realm stretching from the Ocean to the Mediterranean. His actual possessions, at their greatest extent, formed a power to which Burgundy gave its name, but which was historically at least as much Lotharingian as Burgundian. ♦Historical importance of the Burgundian power.♦ And though this actual dominion was only momentary, no power ever arose which fills a wider and more œcumenical place in history than the line of the Valois Dukes. Their power connects the earliest settlement of the European states with the latest. ♦1870.♦ It spans a thousand years, and connects the division of Verdun with the last treaty that guaranteed the neutrality of Belgium. The growth of their power was directly influenced by memories of the early Carolingian partitions; and, even in its fall, it has itself influenced the geography and politics of Europe ever since. As a Burgundian power, it was as ephemeral as all other Burgundian powers have ever been. As a Lotharingian power, it abides still in its effects. ♦History of the Low Countries.♦ The union of the greater part of the Low Countries under a single prince, and that a prince who was on the whole foreign to the Empire, strengthened that tendency to split off from the Empire which was already at work in some of those lands. Later events caused them to split off in two bodies instead of one. This last tendency became so strong that a modern attempt to unite them broke down, and their place in the modern polity of Europe is that of two distinct kingdoms. ♦Final result of the Burgundian dominion.♦ The existence of those two kingdoms is the final result of the growth of the Burgundian power in the fifteenth century. ♦Its effect on language.♦ And by leading to the separation of the northern Netherlands from the Empire, it has led to one result which could never have been reckoned on, the preservation of one branch of the Low-Dutch tongue as the acknowledged and literary speech of an independent nation. ♦The Netherlands and Belgium.♦ Its political results were the creation, in the shape of the northern Netherlands, of a power which once held a great place in the affairs of Europe and of the world, and the slower growth, in the shape of the southern Netherlands, of a state in which modern European policy still acknowledges the character of a middle kingdom. As the neutral confederation of Switzerland represents the middle kingdom of Burgundy, so the neutral kingdom of Belgium represents the middle kingdom of Lotharingia.

♦Ducal Burgundy a fief of the Western Kingdom.♦

The Duchy of Burgundy which gave its name to the Burgundian power of the fifteenth century was that one among the many lands bearing the Burgundian name which lay wholly outside the Burgundian kingdom of the Emperors. This Burgundy, the only one which has kept the name to our own time, the duchy of which Dijon is the capital, never was a fief of the Eastern Kingdom or of the Empire, after the final separation. It always acknowledged the supremacy of the kings of Laon and Paris. ♦Two lines of Dukes. 1032.♦ By these last the duchy was twice granted in fief to princes of their own house, once in the eleventh century and once in the fourteenth. ♦The Valois. 1363.♦ This last grant was the beginning of the Dukes of the House of Valois, with the growth of whose power we have now to deal. ♦Union of Flanders and Burgundy. 1369.
The county of Burgundy.♦ Philip the Hardy, the first Duke of this line, obtained, by his marriage with Margaret of Flanders, the counties of Flanders, Artois, Rhetel, and Nevers, all fiefs of the crown of France, together with the County Palatine of Burgundy as a fief of the Empire. The peculiar position of the Dukes of Burgundy of this line was at once established by this marriage. ♦Two masses of territory.♦ Duke Philip held of two lords, and his dominions lay in two distinct masses. The two Burgundies, duchy and county, and the county of Nevers, lay geographically together; Flanders and Artois lay together at a great distance; the small possession of Rhetel lay again detached between the two. Any princes who held such a territory as this could hardly fail to devote their main policy to the work of bringing about the geographical union of their scattered possessions. Nor was this all. The possession of the two Burgundies made their common sovereign a vassal at once of France and of the Empire. ♦Position of the Netherlands.♦ The possession of Flanders, Artois, and Rhetel further brought him into connexion with those border lands of the Empire and of the French kingdom where the authority of either over-lord was weakest, and which had long been tending to form themselves into a separate political system distinct from both. The results of this complicated position, as worked out, whether by the prudence of Philip the Good or by the daring of Charles the Bold, form the history of the Dukes of Burgundy of the House of Valois.

♦Imperial and French fiefs in the Netherlands.♦

The lands which we are accustomed to group together under the name of the Netherlands or Low Countries lay chiefly within the bounds of the Empire; but the county of Flanders had always been a fief of France. ♦Fief of the Counts of Flanders within the Empire.♦ Part however of the dominions of its counts, the north-eastern corner of their dominions, the lands of Alost and Waas, were held of the Empire. ♦Zealand.♦ These lands, together with the neighbouring islands of Zealand, formed a ground of endless disputes between the Counts of Flanders and their northern neighbours the Counts of Holland. ♦County of Holland.♦ This last county gradually disentangles itself from the general mass of the Frisian lands which lie along the whole coast from the mouth of the Scheld to the mouth of the Weser. ♦Inroads of the sea. 1219, 1282.♦ And those great inroads of the sea in the thirteenth century which gave the Zuyder-Zee its present extent helped to give the country a natural boundary, and to part it off from the Frisian lands to the north-east. ♦Disputes with the free Frisians.♦ Towards the end of the thirteenth century Friesland west of the Zuyder-Zee had become part of the dominions of the Counts. ♦Independence of West Friesland. 1417-1447.
County of East Friesland. 1454.♦ The land immediately east of the gulf established its freedom, while East Friesland passed to a line of counts, under whom its fortunes parted off from those of the Netherlands. Part of its later history has been already given in the character of a more purely German state. ♦The Bishops of Utrecht.♦ Both the counts and the free Frisians had also dangerous neighbours in the Bishops of Utrecht, the great ecclesiastical princes of this region, who held a large temporal sovereignty lying apart from their city on the eastern side of the gulf. These disputes went on, as also disputes with the Dukes of Geldern, without any final settlement, almost to the time when all these lands began to be united under the Burgundian power. But before this time, the Counts of Holland had become closely connected with lands much further to the south. ♦Duchy of Brabant.♦ Among a number of states in this region, the most powerful was the Duchy of Brabant, which represented the Duchy of the Lower Lotharingia, and whose princes held the mark of Antwerp and the cities of Brussels, Löwen or Louvain, and Mechlin. ♦County of Hennegau or Hainault united with Holland. 1299.♦ To the South of them lay the county of Hennegau or Hainault. At the end of the thirteenth century, this county was joined by marriage with that of Holland. Holland and Hainault were thus detached possessions of a common prince, with Brabant lying between them. ♦Mark of Namur.♦ South of Brabant lay the small mark or county of Namur, which, without being united to Flanders, was held by a branch of the princes of that house.

♦Common character of these states.♦

All these states, though their princes held of two separate over-lords, had much in common, and were well fitted to be worked together into a single political system. They had much in common in the physical character of the country, and in the unusual number of great and flourishing cities which these countries contained. ♦Importance of the cities.♦ None of these cities indeed actually reached the position of free cities of the Empire; but their wealth, and the degree of practical independence which they possessed, forms a main feature in the history of the Low Countries. In point of language, the northern part of these states spoke various dialects of Low-Dutch, from Flemish to Frisian; in the southern lands of Hainault, Artois, and Namur, the language, though not French, was not Teutonic, but an independent Romance speech, the Walloon. ♦South-western group of states.♦ To the west of these states lay another group of small principalities connected with the former greater group in many ways, but not so closely as those which we have just gone through. ♦Bishopric of Lüttich.
Duchies of Luxemburg and Limburg.♦ The great ecclesiastical principality of Lüttich or Liège, lying in two detached parts, divided the lands of which we have been speaking from the counties, afterwards duchies, of Lüzelburg or Luxemburg and of Limburg. Of these the more distant Limburg passed in the fourteenth century to the Dukes of Brabant. ♦Luxemburg a Duchy. 1353.♦ Luxemburg is famous as having given a series of princes to the kingdom of Bohemia and to the Empire, and in their hands it rose to the rank of a duchy. ♦Geldern.♦ Lastly, to the north of Lüttich, forming a connecting link between this group of states and the more purely Frisian powers, lay the duchy of Geldern, of whose quarters the most northern portion stretched to the Zuyder Zee. These eastern states, though not so closely connected with one another as those to the west, were easily led into the same political system. ♦Middle position of all these states.♦ Without drawing any hard and fast line, we may say that all the states of this region formed, if not yet a middle state, yet a middle system, apart alike from France and the Empire, though in various ways connected with both. Mainly Imperial, mainly Teutonic, they were not wholly so. ♦French influence.♦ Besides the homage lawfully due to France from Flanders and Artois, French influence in various ways, in politics, in manners, and in language, had made great inroads in the southern Netherlands. Brabant and Hainault had practically quite as much to do with France as with the Empire. ♦Walloon language.♦ And this French influence was of course helped by the fact that a considerable region in the south was, though not of French, yet not of Teutonic speech. Altogether, with much to unite them to the great powers on either side, with much to keep them apart from either of them, with much more to unite them to one another, the states of the Netherlands might almost seem to be designed by nature to be united under a single political head. ♦Union of the Netherlands under the Dukes of Burgundy.♦ Such a head was supplied by the Dukes of Burgundy and Counts of Flanders, by whom, in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, nearly the whole of the Netherlands was united into a single power which was to be presently broken into two by the results of religious divisions.

Leaving then for the present the growth and fall of the Burgundian power in the lands more to the south, we will go on to trace the steps by which the provinces of the Low Countries were united under the Valois Dukes and their Austrian descendants. ♦Reign of Philip the Good. 1419-1467.♦ The great increase of territory in this region was made during the long reign of Philip the Good. ♦Namur. 1421-1429.♦ His first acquisition was the county of Namur, a small and outlying district, but one which, as small and outlying, would still more strongly suggest the rounding off of the scattered territory. ♦1429-1433.♦ A series of marriages and disputes next enabled Philip to make a much more important extension of his dominions. ♦1405.♦ Brabant and Limburg had passed to a younger branch of the Burgundian House. ♦1418.♦ John, Duke of Brabant, the cousin of Philip by a marriage with Jacqueline, Countess of Holland and Hainault, united those states for a moment. The disputes and confusions which followed on her marriages and divorces led to the annexation of her territories by the Duke of Burgundy, a process which was finally concluded by the formal cession of her dominions by Jacqueline. ♦Brabant and Limburg. 1430.
Holland and Hainault. 1433.♦ Meanwhile Philip had succeeded to Brabant and Limburg, and the union of Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, Zealand, and Holland, together made a dominion which took in all the greatest Netherland states, and formed a compact mass of territory. On this presently followed a great acquisition of territory which was more strictly French than the fiefs which Philip already held of the French crown in Flanders and Artois. The Treaty of Arras, by which Philip, hitherto the ally of England against France, made peace with his western overlord, gave him, under the form of mortgage, the lands on the Somme. ♦The towns on the Somme. 1435-1483.♦ The acquisition of these lands, Ponthieu, Vermandois, Amiens, and Boulogne, advanced the Burgundian frontier to a dangerous neighbourhood to Paris on this side as well as on the other. It had the further effect of keeping the small continental possessions which England still kept at Calais and Guisnes apart from the French territory. During the reigns of Philip and Charles the Bold, the continental neighbour of England was not France but Burgundy. But this great southern dominion was not lasting. The towns on the Somme, redeemed and again recovered, passed on the fall of Charles the Bold once more into French hands. ♦Recovered by France.♦ So did Artois itself, and, though Artois was won back, Amiens and the rest were not. Yet, if the towns on the Somme had stayed under the rule of the successive masters of the Low Countries, it might by this time have seemed as natural for Amiens to be Belgian as it now seems natural for Cambray and Valenciennes to be French. The Treaty of Madrid drew a definite boundary. ♦France resigns the homage of Flanders and Artois. 1526.♦ France gave up all claim to homage from Flanders and Artois, and Charles the Fifth, in his Burgundian, or rather in his Flemish, character, finally gave up all claim to the lands on the Somme.