A short history of Belgium

by Léon van der Essen

The first king of the Franks known in history is Clodion, who conquered the countries of Tournai and Cambrai and established the seat of his realm in Tournai. It is in this town that his grave was discovered in 1653; the King was found buried, according to the customs of his people, together with his arms and royal ornaments; he was identified by the presence of a ring on which his likeness and his name were engraved.

It was from Tournai that the famous descendant of Clodion, King Clodovech, started his campaign of further conquest that gave him possession of Northern France and, after the war against the Burgundians and the West-goths (506), the control of nearly the whole of their country. From this time on, the Frankish kings established their capital at Paris. Belgium is no longer associated with the recollection of their glorious deeds.

Clodion and his successors, so far as we know by the general history of Europe, belonged to the so-called dynasty of the Merovingians. The kings of that dynasty, in the course of the seventh century, were weaklings, actually dominated by their powerful ministers, the mayors of the palace. One of these, Peppin, in 751, succeeded in becoming himself a king and was the founder of a new royal dynasty, the Carolingians.

The new dynasty was, geographically speaking, essentially a Belgian dynasty, for it had many possessions in Eastern Belgium and all its members had occupied influential offices at the court of the Austrasian kings, who, in the sixth and seventh centuries, ruled over that part of the country.

The most famous of the Carolingians is Charles the Great, who re-established the old Roman Empire (800) and who, by successful campaigns, succeeded in extending his domination over the territory lying between the river Elbe, the Bohemian mountains, and the Raab on the east, the sea on the west, the North Sea, and the Garigliano River in Italy and the Ebro River in Spain on the south.

The favorite residence of the great Emperor was at Aix, and this contributed largely to the development of Belgian trade and industry at the beginning of the ninth century. Politically abandoned by the Frankish kings when they moved to Paris, Belgium again became important in the time of Charles the Great as the most favorably located portion of the Frankish Empire.

Belgium is, indeed, for trade purposes, the natural meeting-ground of the West-European nations. Lying between England, France, Germany, and Holland, it has good water communications with each. Though not quite so near the English coast as a corner of France is, it has the great advantage of exactly fronting the mouth of the Thames. With France it is connected by the upper courses of the Lys, the Scheldt, the Sambre, and the Meuse, the last named being navigable by deep-draught vessels far into Lorraine. With Germany its connection is less direct, the outlet of the Rhine running of course through Holland.[6]

These geographical conditions played a large part in the development of Belgian trade in the time of Charles the Great. The presence of the imperial palace at Aix attracted a great deal of traffic: from every part of the empire merchants, soldiers, priests, in short all classes of people, came through Belgium in order to reach the residence of the Emperor, and their presence resulted in unparalleled prosperity in that part of the Carolingian empire. Charles the Great was not only a great soldier and legislator, but also a man who knew the importance of the Christian religion in cultural matters. During his reign the development of religious life in the different parts of the empire grew rapidly.

Something ought to be said concerning the introduction of the Christian religion into Belgium. The preaching of the gospel in Belgium goes back as far as the Roman occupation of the time of the Empire, but the religious organization of the church in the country dates from the middle of the fourth century. At that time we find in the city of Tongres the oldest historically known bishop of Belgium, St. Servatius. The historical origin of the bishoprics of Arras, Tournai, Boulogne, Cambrai—all of them at that time in Belgian territory—remains a matter of conjecture. The baptism of King Clodovech in 496 made the development of the Christian religion easier, although the conversion of the King to the Catholic faith did not at all mean the conversion of the whole people. Large parts of Belgium, especially the eastern part, remained heathen until the eighth century, and the introduction of the Christian religion in these sections of the country is mainly the work of missionaries. These missionaries worked on their own initiative, without any such prearranged plan as, for instance, existed for the introduction of Catholicism into England. It was mainly by Irish and Anglo-Saxon missionaries that the gospel was made known, and the most famous of those heralds of the Catholic religion was the Anglo-Saxon missionary Willibrord. The work of the missionaries was completed by the bishops, who visited large portions of their very extensive dioceses. Bishops Eligius, Amandus, Lambert, and Hubert are closely connected with the religious history of Belgium in the seventh and eighth centuries. The boundaries of the dioceses corresponded exactly with the limits of the old administrative circles of the Roman Empire, the provinces. In the eighth century, Belgium was divided into the dioceses of Noyon-Tournai, Térouanne (later Saint-Omer), Arras, Cambrai, Liège, and Utrecht. The dioceses of Utrecht and Liège were subject to the metropolitan church of Cologne, the others to the metropolitan church of Rheims.

These dioceses had been established without taking into account the racial differences existing between the inhabitants of the ecclesiastical territory. Including in the same diocese Gallo-Romans and Franks, the church, unconsciously of course, prepared the inhabitants of Belgium for the task of being intermediaries between the Latin and the Teutonic civilization. The seats of the bishoprics being mostly located in the Romance section of the country, the inhabitants of the Teutonic section were obliged to meet the Walloons: they had the same religious center. As a result of this action of the church, the national or racial differences were diminished and the linguistic frontier no more operated as a barrier in any real sense between the people it separated.