Belgium

The territory which the Bishops had governed was now merged in four of the nine departments into which the National Convention divided the annexed Austrian Netherlands. The depa...

When Napoleon was at Antwerp in 1803, he spoke to the Communal Council about the miserable condition of the place. 'It is little better,' he said, 'than a heap of ruins. It is s...

To the west of Bruges the wide plain of Flanders extends to the French frontier. Church spires and windmills are the most prominent objects in the landscape; but though the flat...

To walk from Nieuport Ville to the Digue de Mer at Nieuport-Bains is to pass in a few minutes from the old Flanders, the home of so much romance, the scene of so many stirring d...

They call it 'Bruges la Morte,' and at every turn there is something to remind us of the deadly blight which fell upon the city when its trade was lost. The faded colours, the t...

A few miles to the south-west of Alost, on the borders of East Flanders, the River Dendre, on its way to join the Scheldt, forms the boundary of Brabant. From Denderleeuw, the f...

The whole story of Liége and the Ardennes is full of episodes, like the war of the cow of Ciney. It would be easy to fill volumes with tales of adventures in the Valley of the M...

Bruges is one of the most Catholic towns in Catholic Flanders. Convents and religious houses of all sorts have always flourished there, and at present there are no less than for...

As to the town of Liége in early times, the story goes that one day St. Monulphe, Bishop of Tongres, being on a journey from Maestricht to Dinant, came to a rising ground, from...

'C'est la Belgique,' said Danton, 'qui comblera le déficit de la Révolution.' The Convention at Paris saw in the riches of the Austrian Netherlands a means of filling its treasu...

The sixteenth century closes with the cession by Philip II. of the Spanish Netherlands to his daughter Isabella, as a dowry on her marriage to the Archduke Albert of Austria. Th...

Damme, where the patriots mustered on the eve of the Bruges Matins, is within a short hour's stroll from the east end of the town. The Roya, which disappears from view, as we ha...

Jean de Horne was Bishop of Liége for twenty-three years, during which the diocese was seldom free from party warfare. At the time of his death, in 1506, the family of Arenberg...

Ferdinand of Bavaria's reign was one long quarrel with the magistrates of Liége. He soon found that during his uncle's frequent absences in Germany the burgomasters had usurped...

From Bruges, the capital of West Flanders, to Ghent, the capital of East Flanders, it is only half an hour's journey by rail; but the contrast between them is remarkable. Bruges...

Towards the end of the ninth and at the beginning of the tenth century great changes took place on the banks of the Roya, and the foundations of Bruges as we know it now were la...

Though the churches and the houses of the clergy had been left standing, in accordance with the orders given by Charles the Bold in 1468, the town of Liége was ruined. After a t...

On the morning of July 2, in the year 1600, two armies--Spaniards, under the Archduke Albert, and Dutchmen, under Prince Maurice of Nassau--stood face to face amongst the dunes...

One day, soon after the Battle of Waterloo, the Tsar Alexander was at La Belle Alliance with William, King of the Netherlands, and his son the Prince of Orange. He asked for a g...

It was difficult to follow an Empress like Maria Theresa, or to find a successor to Charles of Lorraine in the government of the Austrian Netherlands. But if ever a Sovereign ca...

The traveller wandering amongst the towns and villages in this corner of West Flanders is apt to feel that he is on a kind of sentimental journey as he moves from place to place...

During most of that time the armies of almost every nation in Europe swept like a flood over the Principality; but the most important transaction of Maximilian's reign was the e...

The visitor to Bruges is reminded, wherever he goes, of the stirring events which fill the chronicles of the town for several centuries. Opposite the Belfry, in the middle of th...

The whole of the coast-line is within the province of West Flanders, and its development in recent years is the most striking fact in the modern history of the part of Belgium w...

Every visitor to 'the quaint old Flemish city' goes first to the Market-Place. On Saturday mornings the wide space beneath the mighty Belfry is full of stalls, with white canvas...

The map of Belgium during the Middle Ages, and down to the period of the French Revolution, shows the outlines of a large territory lying to the south of Brabant. On the west it...