the real source of the importance of the Netherlands and of the Burgundian monarchy, that prosperity was except in certain specially favoured seaports helplessly and hopelessly on the wane; and the great communes which had of old been its most favoured seats, were, in the truthful words of a modern historian, smitten to the heart.
I.
The territories under the dominion of the House of Burgundy, which had formed part of the northern division of ancient Lotharingia, and were known to later political geography as the provinces of the Netherlands, were for the most part acquired by the fortune of marriage and inheritance; but a settled plan of policy had from an early date continuously directed and developed the process of annexation. The inheritance brought by Margaret of Maele to the French prince, who was the founder of the ducal dynasty, included the county of Artois, with its capital of Arras, a city of great mercantile prosperity as early as the thirteenth century, and the whole of Flanders. To the latter on the eastern side Malines (Mechlin) and Antwerp had been yielded by Brabant, and on the south certain Walloon districts, long united with France and including Lille and Douay, had been restored so as likewise to be left to his daughter by the last Count of Flanders of the native line. Without the support of the good towns of Flanders-Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres-Philip the Bold could not have secured the hand of the richest heiress in Europe; and of the political greatness achieved by his dynasty the true foundations are to be sought in the resources of the great communes themselves, with whom it was engaged in perennial conflict, and, in a less degree, of the other towns around them. There is no indication, on the other hand, that even during the Burgundian period agriculture, except perhaps pasture, reached a high level in Flanders; in a considerable proportion of its villages, the inhabitants gained their livelihood by manufacturing industry, the villages aiming at becoming small towns, and the small towns at becoming large in their turn.
Artois and Flanders remained fiefs of the French Crown, although by the Peace of Arras (1435) Philip the Good was relieved for his own person of all obligations of homage to his French overlord. The great acquisitions, which ensued in the course of his long reign, were not altogether due to his own resolution and statecraft. He shared the credit of them with his grandfather and namesake who had induced Joan, heiress of Brabant and aunt to his wife Margaret of Flanders, to designate his second son Anthony as her heir; and who married his daughter, another Margaret, to the future Count William VI of Hainault, Holland, Zeeland, and Friesland. But they could not have been actually accomplished except by the extraordinary strength of will
