The resulting Peace of Utrecht transferred the area back to Habsburg control, creating what is now known as the Austrian Netherlands. The area, long a Habsburg stronghold, briefly came under Bourbon control during the War of the Spanish Succession. Invasions from France under Louis XIV led to the loss of what is now Nord-Pas-de-Calais to France. This southern territory continued to be ruled by the Habsburg descendants of the Burgundian house, at first as the Spanish Netherlands. The Eighty Years' War (1568–1648) later led to the split between a northern Dutch Republic and the Southern Netherlands from which Belgium and Luxembourg developed. These lands straddled the ancient boundary of the Scheldt that had divided medieval France and Germany, but they were brought together under the House of Valois-Burgundy, and unified into one autonomous territory by their heir Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, in his Pragmatic Sanction of 1549. It is also remarkable as a European nation which contains, and is divided by, a language boundary between Latin-derived French and Germanic Dutch.īelgium's modern shape can be traced back at least as far as the southern core of the medieval Burgundian Netherlands. Due to its strategic location as a country of contact between different cultures, Belgium has been called the "crossroads of Europe" for the many armies fighting on its soil, it has also been called the "battlefield of Europe" or the " cockpit of Europe".
For most of its history, what is now Belgium was either a part of a larger territory, such as the Carolingian Empire, or divided into a number of smaller states, prominent among them being the Duchy of Brabant, the County of Flanders, the Prince-Bishopric of Liège and the County of Luxembourg. The history of Belgium extends before the founding of the modern state of that name in 1830, and is intertwined with those of its neighbors: the Netherlands, Germany, France and Luxembourg.
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