Belgium Author:Grant Allen Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER II. THE HISTORY OF THE BELGIAN TOWNS IN the separate introductions to the various towns, dealing rather with origins than with history, I shall lay... more » stress chiefly on the industrial and municipal facts, which in Belgium, indeed, are all-important. I give here, however, a few general notes on the political history of the country as a whole, chiefly dynastic. These may serve for reference, or at least as reminders; and in particular they should be useful as giving some information about the originals of portraits in the various galleries. The two portions of the modern kingdom of Belgium with which we are most concerned in this Guide are the County of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant. The first was originally a fief of France ; the second, a competent member of the Empire. They were commerdally wealthier than the other portions of the Gallo-German borderland which is now Belgium; they were also the parts most affected by the Burgtindian princes; on both which accounts, they are still by far the richest in works of art, alike in architecture, in painting, and in sculpture. The vast Prankish dominions of the Merovingians and of the descendants of Charlemagne — of the Merwings and Karlings, to be more strictly Teutonic — showed at all times a tendency to break up into two distinct realms, known as the Eastern and Western Kingdoms (Austria — not, of course, in the modern sense — and Neustria). These kingdoms were not artificial, but based on a real difference of race and speech. The Eastern Kingdom (Franken or Franconia) where the Prankish and Teutonic blood was purest, became first the Empire, in the restricted sense, and later Germany and Austria (in part). The Western Kingdom (Neustria) where Celtic or Gallic blood predominated, and where the speech was Latin, or ...« less