Belgium

From the cloth towns of Flanders to the heart of Europe, a young kingdom carved from the old Low Countries.

Belgium occupies the southern half of the historic Low Countries, a crossroads of Germanic and Latin Europe that has been one of the continent's wealthiest and most fought-over corners. In the Middle Ages its cloth towns, Bruges, Ghent and Ypres, were among the richest cities north of the Alps, and the County of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant were dense with self-governing burghers. Through marriage and inheritance these provinces passed to the dukes of Burgundy, then to the Habsburgs, becoming in turn the Spanish and the Austrian Netherlands; the revolt against Spain split the Low Countries permanently into a Protestant north and a Catholic south. After French annexation and a brief union with the Dutch, the southern provinces rose in the Belgian Revolution of 1830 and won independence under King Leopold I, their borders and perpetual neutrality guaranteed by the great powers in the Treaty of London of 1839. That neutrality, dismissed in 1914 by Germany as a 'scrap of paper', made Belgium the first battlefield of both World Wars. King Leopold II's brutal private rule over the Congo Free State, the slow federalization of a country divided by language, and Brussels' role as the seat of the European Union and NATO have all shaped the modern Belgian state.