Belgium historical timeline

Origins

Rome called the area Gallia Belgica. What mattered came later: by the thirteenth century the County of Flanders and the Duchy of Brabant were among the richest and most urbanised places in Europe, built on cloth, with Bruges, Ghent and Ypres running a trade that reached the Baltic and the Mediterranean. Burgundian, then Habsburg, then Spanish, then Austrian rule followed, and the Reformation split the Low Countries in two — the north went Protestant and independent, the south stayed Catholic and ruled from elsewhere.

Turning points

A revolution against Dutch rule in 1830 produced Belgium, and the powers guaranteed its neutrality. That guarantee is why the German invasion of 1914 brought Britain into the First World War, and why the Ypres salient became one of its worst killing grounds. Between 1885 and 1908 King Leopold II held the Congo as personal property, a regime of forced rubber collection whose death toll runs into the millions and which international outcry eventually forced the Belgian state to take over. Occupied again in 1940, Belgium came out of the war as a founding member of what became the European Union. From 1970 a series of state reforms turned a unitary country into a federal one along the language line; in 2010 and 2011 it went 541 days without a national government and functioned anyway.

Influential people

Jan van Eyck and Pieter Bruegel the Elder, then Rubens, who ran a workshop in Antwerp like a business. René Magritte in painting and Hergé in comics. Adolphe Sax, who invented the saxophone. Georges Lemaître, a priest and physicist, who proposed the expanding universe and what became the Big Bang. And Leopold II, whose statues are the subject of an ongoing national argument.

Cultural evolution

The language frontier runs across the country: Dutch-speaking Flanders to the north, French-speaking Wallonia to the south, a small German-speaking community in the east, and Brussels officially bilingual in the middle. Almost every institution is doubled to match. Comics are treated as a serious art form with a national museum. Beer culture, including the Trappist breweries, is on the UNESCO intangible heritage list, and the carnival at Binche is on it separately.

Present-day significance

Brussels houses the European Commission, the Council and NATO, which makes a mid-sized country the administrative centre of the continent. The reckoning with the Congo has moved in the last few years: the king expressed his deepest regrets in 2020, and Patrice Lumumba’s remains were returned to his family in 2022.