The Historical Geography of Europe, Vol. I, Text

by Edward A. Freeman

The south-western frontier was thus fixed; but meanwhile the new state had advanced in other directions. ♦Luxemburg. 1443.♦ Philip’s last great acquisition was the duchy of Luxemburg. He now possessed the greater part of the Netherlands; but his dominions were still intersected by the bishoprics of Utrecht and Lüttich and the duchy of Geldern. ♦Geldern and Zutphen. 1472.♦ The duchy of Geldern and county of Zutphen were added by Charles the Bold. ♦Final annexation. 1543.♦ But they formed a precarious possession, lost and won more than once, down to their final annexation under Charles the Fifth. ♦Bishopric of Lüttich never annexed.♦ Of the two great ecclesiastical principalities by which the Burgundian possessions in the Netherlands were cut asunder, the bishopric of Lüttich, though its history is much mixed up with that of the Burgundian Dukes, and though it came largely under their influence, was never formally annexed. ♦Annexation of the bishopric of Utrecht, 1531; and Friesland, 1515.♦ But the temporal principality of the Bishop of Utrecht was secularized under Charles the Fifth. Friesland, the Friesland immediately east of the Zuyder Zee, was already reincorporated with the dominions of the prince who represented the ancient counts of Holland. ♦Dominions of Charles the Fifth.♦ The whole Netherlands were thus consolidated under the rule of Charles the Fifth. They were united with the far distant county of Burgundy, and with it they formed the Burgundian circle in the new division of the Empire. The bishopric of Lüttich, which intersected the whole southern part of the country, remained in the circle of Westfalia. ♦The seventeen provinces.♦ Seventeen provinces, each keeping much of separate being, were united under a single prince, and, since the treaty of Madrid, they were free from any pretensions on the part of foreign powers. The Netherlands formed one of the most compact and important parts of the scattered dominions of the Emperor who was also lord of Burgundy and Castile. ♦Their separation from the Empire.♦ But the final union of these lands under the direct dominion of an Emperor at once led to their practical separation from the Empire. ♦The possessions of Philip of Spain. 1555.♦ They passed, with all the remaining possessions and claims of the Burgundian House, to Philip of Spain, and they were reckoned among the crowd of distant dependencies which had come under the rule of the crowns of Castile and Aragon. In Spanish hands they acted less as a middle state than as a power which helped to hem in France on both sides. Had the great revolt of the Netherlands ended in the final liberation of the whole seventeen provinces, the middle state would have been formed in its full strength. ♦The War of Independence. 1568-1609.♦ As it was, the work of the War of Independence was imperfect. The northern provinces won their freedom in the form of a federal commonwealth. The southern provinces remained dependencies of Spain, to become the chosen fighting ground of European armies, the chosen plaything of European diplomacy.

♦The Seven United Provinces. 1578.♦

The end of the long war of independence waged by the northern provinces was the establishment of the famous federal commonwealth of the Seven United Provinces, Holland, Zealand, Utrecht, Gelderland, Over-Yssel, Friesland, and Groningen. These answered nearly to the dominions of the Counts of Holland and Bishops of Utrecht in earlier times. ♦Gelderland.♦ But besides these, part of the duchy of Geldern formed one of the United Provinces, while its southern part shared the fate of the southern provinces. But, besides the United Seven, the Confederation also kept parts of Brabant, Geldern, and Flanders as common possessions. ♦Formal independence of the Empire. 1648.♦ The power thus formed, one which so long held an European importance quite disproportioned to its geographical extent, had under Burgundian rule become practically independent of the Empire, but it was only by the Peace of Westfalia that its independence was formally acknowledged. The maritime strength of the Confederation made it more than an European power. It became a colonizing power in three parts of the world. ♦Colonies of the Netherlands.♦ In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Seven Provinces extended their dominion over many points on the continent of India and over the neighbouring island of Ceylon, over the great equatorial islands of Java, Sumatra, and the Moluccas, over many points in Guinea and southern Africa, and over part of Guiana in South America. ♦New Netherland passes to England. 1664.♦ But the great North American settlement of New Netherland passed to England, and New Amsterdam became New York. ♦No real name for the county.♦ Singularly enough, this great power never had any strict geographical name. Netherlands was too large, as it took in the whole of the Low Countries and not the emancipated provinces only. Holland was too small, as being the name of one province only, though the greatest. ♦Use of the name Dutch.♦ And, by one of the oddest cases of caprice of language, in common English usage the name of the whole Teutonic race settled down on this one small part of it, and the men of the Seven Provinces came to be exclusively spoken of as Dutch.

♦The Spanish Netherlands. 1578-1706.♦

Meanwhile the southern provinces, the greater part of Brabant and Flanders, with Artois, Hennegau or Hainault, Namur, Limburg, Luxemburg, and the southern part of Geldern,—taking in Antwerp at one end and Cambray at the other—remained under the sovereignty of the representatives of the Burgundian Dukes. That is, they remained an outlying dependency of the Spanish monarchy. But their southern frontier was open to constant aggressions on the part of France. ♦Dunkirk held by England. 1658-1662.♦ Dunkirk indeed was for a moment held by England, as Calais and Boulogne had been in earlier times. ♦Cession of parts of Artois and of Gravelines, 1659;♦ By the Peace of the Pyrenees France obtained Arras and the greater part of Artois, leaving Saint Omer to Spain. ♦Dunkirk, 1662;♦ France also began to work her way up along the coast of Flanders, taking Gravelines by virtue of the treaty, and presently adding Dunkirk by purchase from England. ♦Philippeville, Marienburg, Thionville.♦ The treaty also added to France several points along the frontiers of Hainault, Liège, and Luxemburg, including the detached fortresses of Philippeville and Marienburg, and Thionville famous in far earlier days. During the endless wars of Lewis’ reign, the boundary fluctuated with each treaty. ♦1668.
1677.♦ Acquisitions were made by France at the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, some of which were surrendered, and others gained, by the Peace of Nimwegen. ♦Boundary fixed by the Peace of Utrecht. 1713.♦ At last the boundary was finally fixed by the Peace of Utrecht in the last days of Lewis. Parts of Flanders and Hainault were finally confirmed to France, which thus kept Lille, Cambray, and Valenciennes. ♦The Spanish Netherlands pass to Austria.♦ The provinces which had hitherto been Spanish now passed to the only surviving branch of the House of Austria, that which reigned in the archduchy and supplied the hereditary candidates for the Empire. ♦Annexed by France. 1792.♦ The first wars of the French Revolution added the Austrian Netherlands to France, and with them the bishopric of Lüttich which still so oddly divided them. ♦Kingdom of Holland. 1806-1810.♦ A later stage of the days of confusion changed the Seven United Provinces, enlarged by the addition of East Friesland, into a Kingdom of Holland, one of the states which the new conqueror carved out for the benefit of his kinsfolk. ♦Holland annexed by France. 1810-1813.♦ Presently the new kingdom was incorporated with the new ‘Empire,’ along with the German lands to the north-east of it. The Corsican had at last carried out the schemes of the Valois kings, and the whole Burgundian heritage formed for a moment part of France.

At the general settlement of Europe, after the long wars with France, the restoration of the Low Countries as a middle state was a main object. ♦Kingdom of the Netherlands. 1814.♦ This was brought about by the union of the whole Netherlands into a single kingdom bearing that name. The southern boundary did not differ very greatly from that fixed by the Peace of Utrecht. ♦The boundaries.♦ As in the case of the Savoyard frontier, France kept a little more by the arrangements of 1814 than she finally kept by those of 1815. To the east, East-Friesland passed to Hannover, leaving the boundary of the new kingdom not very different from that of the two earlier powers which it represented, gaining only a small territory on the banks of the Maes. ♦Incorporation of Lüttich.♦ But the bishopric of Lüttich was incorporated with the lands which it had once parted asunder, and so ceased altogether to be German ground. ♦Grand Duchy of Luxemburg.♦ The new king, as we have already seen, entered the German confederation in his character of Grand Duke of Luxemburg, the duchy being somewhat shortened to the east in favour of Prussia. Lastly, after fifteen years of union, the new kingdom again split asunder. ♦Kingdom of Belgium. 1830-1831.♦ It was now divided into the kingdom of the Netherlands, answering to the old United Provinces, and the kingdom of Belgium, answering to the old Spanish or Austrian Netherlands. ♦Luxemburg divided.♦ But part of Limburg remained to the northern kingdom, and its sovereign also kept part of Luxemburg, as a district state, forming part of the German confederation. The western part of the duchy formed part of the kingdom of Belgium. ♦1867.♦ Later events, as has been already recorded, have severed the last tie between Germany and the Netherlands; they have wiped out the last survival of the days when the Counts of Holland and of Luxemburg were alike princes of the German kingdom.

♦Effects of Burgundian rule.♦

The above may pass as a sketch of the fluctuations along the borderland in their European aspect. It is needless to go through every small shifting of frontier, or to recount in detail the history of small border principalities like Saint Pol and Bouillon. The main historical aspect of these countries is their tendency, in all ages, to form somewhat of a middle system between two greater powers on either side of them. The guaranteed neutrality of Belgium and the guaranteed neutrality of Switzerland are alike survivals or revivals—it is hard to say which they should be called—of the instinctive feeling which, in the ninth century, called the Lotharingian kingdom into being. The modern form of this thousand-year old idea was made possible through the growth of the power of the Burgundian Dukes of the House of Valois.

The real historical work of those dukes was thus done in those parts of their dominions from which they did not take their name, but which took their name from them. The history of their other dominions may be told in a few words; indeed a great part of it has been told already. ♦Schemes of Charles the Bold.♦ The schemes of Charles the Bold for uniting his scattered dominions by the conquest of the duchy of Lorraine, for extending the power thus formed to the sea-board of the royal Burgundy, for forming in short a middle kingdom stretching from the Ocean to the Mediterranean, acting as a barrier alike between France and Germany and between France and Italy, remained mere schemes. They are important only as showing how deeply the idea or the memory of a middle state was still fixed in men’s minds. The conquests of Charles in Lorraine, his purchases in Elsass, were momentary possessions which hardly touch geography. But the fall of Charles, by causing the break-up of the southern dominion of his house, helped to give greater importance to its northern dominion. While the Netherlands grew together, the Burgundies split asunder. After the fall of Charles the fate of the two Burgundies was much the same as the fate of Flanders and Artois. Both were for a while seized by France; but the county, like Artois, was afterwards recovered for a season. The duchy of Burgundy was lost for ever; the county, along with the outlying county of Charolois, remained to those who by female succession represented the Burgundian Dukes, that is to Charles the Fifth and his Spanish son. The annexation of the Burgundian county, and with it of the city of Besançon, by Lewis the Fourteenth has been recorded in an earlier section.