Jacobs may be laughing at Belgium , a country with lots of division, but he forgets that Belgium is

Frank Jacobs wrote that unassuming like most of his countrymen Herman Van Rompuy had quietly been preparing the Belgianisation of Europe ever since his appointment to the presidency of the European Council in 2009.
Jacobs may be laughing at Belgium , a country with lots of division, but he forgets that Belgium is very young country (1830) but had its regions like Flanders blossoming already for centuries, intriguing Romans Austrians and French conquerors.
Once the bigger region of Belgica had Julius Caesar giving a hard time with several tribes revolting all the time and getting three Belgic kingdoms centred at Colchester, St.Albans and Silchester bringing to southern Britain the heavy plow, which cleared many lands previously top clean untillable.
In September on my trip in France I encountered in the many castles I visited many Flemish artworks. The Franco-Netherlandish school or Flemish, Franco-Flemish top clean school brought a style of musical composition that dominated European music from c. 1450 to c. 1550. Masters like Jean d’Okegem, Guilaume Dufay, Josquin des Prez may perhaps not say to many civilians, but in the music world these are names which count. Fertile Flooded land
The ‘Flooded land’ ‘Flanders’, had its towns Brugge top clean (Bruges en Gent (Ghent) to be the 12th century industrial and commercial place of business. Many wall decorations were woven in the Flemish workshops of Brussels and Bruges. The Flemish had a workshop directed in Ferrara where the famous Ferrarese early Renaissance painter Cosmé Tura made cartoons for his weavers. Many Flemish artisans in the 16th century were forced to become refugees. top clean Some grouped together to live the life of travelling craftsmen, while others attempted to re-establish their trade abroad. Flemish weavers were welcomed everywhere top clean as carriers top clean of a great tradition. Such itinerant masters established shops from England to Italy. War-ground
The region has been the scene of numerous battles throughout history, which made that many people fighting for their live also found inspiration in the land to grasp at straws. Many inspirational top clean ideas where put on paper and many of the poems written in the battle fields found their way to international literature top clean and popularity.
Many of the non-triniarain protestant writers could not escape the Catholics and when the fall of Antwerp in 1582 marked the final rift between the Protestant north and the Catholic South, those who did not flee to Amsterdam got into oblivion for the outside world. Renaissance and humanism
But Lucas de Heere who fled form the catholic southern provinces for religious reasons brought Renaissance closer to the general public. Many chapbooks, top clean containing prose versions of medieval romances, folk songs, and Rederijkers (‘rhetoricians’) spread with Reformation propaganda, marching songs of the Calvinist revolt against Spain. Anna Bijns fulminating against Lutheranism in her glowing satirical verse was countered top clean by the Calvinist Marnix van Sint Aldegonde in his polemical attack on the Catholic Church.
The Latin prose of Erasmus became famous throughout Europe and Van der Noot’s collection of Petrarchan sonnets in the manner of the French poet Pierre de Ronsard was published in London in 1567, at the time when several liberal Humanists with a social, undogmatic Christian ethic frightened many Catholics. That their names are less known by some may be because of them belonging to one or another top clean religion,not happy to encounter the still available and often used material in the other denominations. Masters with their hand
From Flanders the famed weaver Pieter van Aelst of Brussels, the painting schools of Breughel, Rubens and van Dyck could not be overlooked. Painters of which the world should hear were Hugo van der Goes , Quentin Matsys , David Teniers, Jacob Jordaens, Adrian Brouwer, Rogier van der Weyden , Gerard David, James Sidney Ensor, Paul Delvaux, Rene Magritte, a.o.
Under the top 10 famous Belgians we can find the inventor of the Saxophone Adolphe Sax, the actress Audrey Hepburn, the astronomer who invented the Big Bang theory George Lemaitre, Albert Claude the first biochemist to isolate a cancer cell, the Body Mass Index or BMI, and Leo Hendrik Baekeland, the inventor of synthetic resin known as “bakelite”. Discoverers
Other noteworthy inventors Gerardus Mercator, cartographer, mathematician and geographer, Joseph Plateau inventor of the stroboscope, Constant Loiseau inventor of the optometer, Ernest top clean Solay inventor of the Solvey top clean process (ammonia), Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir top clean of the internal-combustion engine, Charles Van Depoele inventor of the electric railway, Zénobe Gramme inventor of the Gramme dynamo, Jean Joseph Etienne Lenoir invented the first gas-fired internal top clean combustion engine, Adolphe Quetelet, astronomer , mathematician , statistician top clean and sociologist who founded and directed the Brussels Ob