Low Countries
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- For information about the confusion between the Low Countries and the Netherlands, see Netherlands (terminology).
The Low Countries, the historical region of de Nederlanden, are the countries on low-lying land around the delta of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse (Maas) rivers. The term is not particularly current in modern contexts because the region does not very exactly correspond with the sovereign states of The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, for which an alternate term, the Benelux was applied after World War II.
Before early modern nation building, the Low Countries referred to a wide area of northern Europe roughly stretching from Dunkirk at its southwestern point to the area of Schleswig-Holstein at its northeastern point, from the estuary of the Scheldt in the south to Frisia in the north. The Low Countries were the scene of the early northern towns, built from scratch rather than developed from ancient centres, that mark the reawakening of Europe in the 12th century.
A collection of several regions rather than one homogeneous region, all of the low countries still shared a great number of similarities.
- Most were coastal regions bounded by the North Sea or the English Channel. The countries not having access to the sea politically and economically linked to the ones that had so as to form one union of port and hinterland. A poetic description also calls the region "the Low Countries by the Sea"
- Most spoke Middle Dutch out of which later would evolve Dutch. However some regions, such as the Bishopric of Liège or the Walloon Flanders around Cambrai, Lille, Mons and Namur, where French was the dominant language are often considered as part of the Low Countries as well.
- Most of them depended on a lord or count in name only, the cities effectively being ruled by guilds and councils and although in theory part of a kingdom, their interaction with their rulers was regulated by a strict set of liberties describing what the latter could and could not expect from them.
- All of them depended on trade and manufacturing and encouraging the free flow of goods and craftsmen.
Of particular importance for the cities was the manufacture and trade of woollen cloth, Europe's first industry. Cities that grew around this trade included Liège, Leuven, Mechelen, Antwerp, Brussels, Ypres, Ghent, Leiden and Utrecht.
In 1477 the Burgundian holdings in the area, the Burgundian Netherlands passed through an heiress Mary of Burgundy to the Habsburgs. In the following century the "Low Countries" corresponded roughly to the Seventeen Provinces covered by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, which freed the provinces from their archaic feudal obligations. After the Seventeen Provinces declared their independence from Habsburg Spain, the provinces of the Southern Netherlands were recaptured (1581) and are sometimes called the Spanish Netherlands.
In 1713, under the Treaty of Utrecht following the War of the Spanish Succession, what was left of the Spanish Netherlands was ceded to Austria and thus became known as the Austrian Netherlands. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815-1830) temporarily united the Low Countries again.
In English, the plural form Netherlands is used for the present-day country, but in Dutch that plural has been dropped; one can thus distinguish between the older, larger Netherlands and the current country. So Nederland (singular) is used for the modern nation and de Nederlanden (plural) for the domains of Charles V.
[edit] See also
da:Nederlandene is:Niðurlönd he:ארצות השפלה hu:Németalföld nl:Lage Landen (staatkunde) no:Nederlandene nn:Nederlanda pl:Niderlandy pt:Países Baixos (região)
