History, Wonder Tales, Fairy Tales, Myths and Legends The Flemish | Page 21

1581–1795: THE SOUTHERN NETHERLANDS
1609 map of the county of Flanders
Although arts remained at a relatively
impressive level for another century
with Peter Paul Rubens (1577–
1640), Flanders experienced a loss
of its former economic and
intellectual power under Spanish,
Austrian, and French rule, with heavy
taxation and rigid imperial political
control compounding the effects of
industrial stagnation and SpanishDutch and Franco-Austrian conflict.
1795–1815: FRENCH REVOLUTION AND NAPOLEONIC FRANCE
In 1794 the French Republican Army started using Antwerp as the northernmost naval
port of France,[5] which country officially annexed Flanders the following year as the
départements of Lys, Escaut, Deux-Nèthes, Meuse-Inférieure and Dyle. Obligatory
(French) army service for all men aged 16–25 was one of the main reasons for the
people's uprise against the French in 1798, known as the Boerenkrijg (Peasants'
War), with heaviest fights in the Campine area.
1815–1830: UNITED KINGDOM OF THE NETHERLANDS
After the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte at the 1815 Battle of Waterloo in Waterloo,
Brabant, sovereignty over the Austrian Netherlands – Belgium minus the East
Cantons and Luxembourg – was given by the Congress of Vienna (1815) to the United
Netherlands (Dutch: Verenigde Nederlanden), the state that briefly existed under
Sovereign Prince William I of Orange Nassau, the latter King William I of the United
Kingdom of the Netherlands, after the French Empire was driven out of the Dutch
territories. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands was born. The Protestant King of
the Netherlands, William I rapidly started F