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Today, the nearly 4,000 square miles of territory once ruled over by the medieval Counts of Flanders are split among three nations. Dutch Flanders is only a sliver at the bottom of Zeeland. French Flanders has largely lost its old identity with the rest of the province. But the spirit of the old County is still preserved almost intact in the present-day Belgian provinces of East and West Flanders, where ancient Flemish is still the main language, and Roman Catholicism the dominant faith.
Culture & Commerce. Rivaled perhaps only by Venice, the Flemish city of Bruges during the 14th and 15th centuries was, like modern Manhattan, a thriving center of culture and commerce to which all the world thronged. Wealthy Lombards, Venetians and Germans, English wool merchants and Russian fur traders jostled one another in its crowded, cobbled streets. Worsteds from England, cotton from Egypt, and silk threads from the Orient were spun and woven into fine fabrics in the busy mills of Bruges, Ghent and Ypres. Sturdy Flemish artists, among them Memling, Van Eyck, Bruegel, Bosch and Van der Weyden, learned there a trick of grinding pigments in oil that gave their paintings a shine which has not faded through the centuries. In the portraits of Renaissance Flanders, gallerygoers the world over can find living reflections of the ruggedly honest, hardfisted and hard-faced merchant kings of Flanders.
In time, Bruges' greatness passed away: the relentless sea silted up her harbor so that only smaller and smaller ships could come through. Today Bruges is a quiet market town of 52,000, grateful for the tourists who come to see the "Venice of the North" and cruise along her scenic canals. Ghent, her sister in glory, is now weaving fabrics of modern nylon and rayon, and is Europe's leading grower of camellias and azaleas. Ypres, the third great town of old Flanders, was so badly damaged in World War I that it took years to repair.
Stubborn People. "God made us Flemish; only politics made us Belgian," says a Bruges poet; and the inheritors of a turbulent and bloody history are combatively proud of their identity to this day, even to the point of threatening secession. Rivalry between the Flemings and the French-speaking Walloons still enlivens Belgian history. The people who were once called the Refugees have learned to find refuge in their own patience and persistence. This persistence was rewarded when, after years of offensive bilingualism, Belgian authorities consented to print all road signs and street markers in Flanders exclusively in Flemish.