Belgica As The Name of The Low Countries
Although the name "Belgica" is now reserved for Belgium, before the division of the Low Countries into a southern and a northern half in the 16th century, the name referred to the entire Low Countries. The Seventeen Provinces of the Low Countries were then divided into the independent Belgica Foederata or the federal Dutch Republic and the Belgica Regia or the royal Southern Netherlands under the Habsbourgian crown. For example, several contemporary maps of the Dutch Republic, which consisted of the Northern Netherlands, and therefore has almost no overlap with the country of Belgium, show the Latin title Belgium Foederatum.
In a Belgian Latin-French dictionary (edited in Brussels in 1826 by P. J. De Mat) the word "Belga" is translated as "Flamand" (Flemish).
Read more about this topic: Gallia Belgica
Famous quotes containing the words the and/or countries:
“Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit;Mnot to be reckoned one character;Mnot to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The American adolescent, then, is faced, as are the adolescents of all countries who have entered or are entering the machine age, with the question: freedom from what and at what price? The American feels so rich in his opportunities for free expression that he often no longer knows what it is he is free from. Neither does he know where he is not free; he does not recognize his native autocrats when he sees them.”
—Erik H. Erikson (1904–1994)