A Low Country that industrialised Europe’s mainland first
Belgium packs more than 11.8 million people into 30,689 square kilometres of the Low Countries, between the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, France and the North Sea. Independent since 1830, it was the first country in continental Europe to industrialise, and today it splits power among Flemish, Walloon and Brussels regions.
Its population density ranks sixth in Europe, and Brussels is both capital and largest metropolitan area, with Antwerp, Ghent and Charleroi among the other major cities. A parliamentary constitutional monarchy, it runs an intricate federal system drawn on regional and linguistic lines: Dutch speakers of the Flemish Community make up about 60 per cent of the population, French speakers about 40, and there is also a small German-speaking community.
Julius Caesar called the Belgae, who held northern Gaul from the Seine and Marne to the Rhine, the bravest of the Gauls, crediting their distance from Roman luxuries and constant fighting with Germanic tribes. Rome annexed the area in the mid-first century BC as part of Gallia Belgica. Frankish Merovingian kings ruled it from the fifth century, then the Carolingians, whose power base included today's eastern Belgium; the Treaty of Verdun in 843 split their empire into three kingdoms.
Cloth and trade made the County of Flanders one of Europe's richest regions in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and in 1302 Flemish militias stunned French knights at the Battle of the Golden Spurs. The Dukes of Burgundy united much of the Low Countries in the fifteenth century, and Belgian-born Charles V bound the Seventeen Provinces together with the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549. The Eighty Years' War from 1568 split off the Protestant north, leaving the south under Spain until 1714 and Austria until 1794.
Revolutionary France annexed the region in 1794, and after Waterloo the Congress of Vienna folded it into the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. The Belgian Revolution of 1830 broke that union, and Leopold I's installation on 21 July 1831 is still celebrated as National Day. French dominated at first, but Dutch won official recognition in 1898 and a Dutch text of the constitution was accepted in 1967. Colonies including the Belgian Congo and Ruanda-Urundi became independent between 1960 and 1962.
Source: Belgium
