Flanders

The County of Flanders was a wealthy cloth-producing lordship centred on Bruges. In 1337 Louis I of the Dampierre dynasty held it as a French fief.

His granddaughter Margaret married the Burgundian duke Philip the Bold, and Flanders passed to the Valois dukes of Burgundy in 1384. It came to the Habsburgs in 1482 and became one of the Seventeen Provinces under the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549. Spain reconquered it during the Eighty Years' War; its southern strip went to France in 1678, while the remainder passed to Austria, then France in 1795 and Belgium after 1830.