Provinces of Belgium
Most of the provinces take their name from earlier duchies and counties of similar location, while their territory is mostly based on the departments installed during French annexation. At the time of the creation of Belgium in 1830, only nine provinces existed, including the province of Brabant, which held the city of Brussels. In 1995, Brabant was split into three areas: Flemish Brabant, which became a part of the region of Flanders; Walloon Brabant, which became part of the region of Wallonia; and the Brussels-Capital Region, which became a third region. These divisions reflected political tensions between the French-speaking Walloons and the Dutch-speaking Flemish; the Brussels-Capital Region is officially bilingual.
Partition of Belgium
The territories corresponding to the modern Belgian, Dutch and Luxembourgish states are collectively called the Low Countries. They emerged at the end of the Middle Ages as a set of more or less independent fiefdoms loosely linked to the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire. The southern part of this region—the Southern Netherlands, the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, the Imperial Abbey of Stavelot-Malmedy and the Duchy of Bouillon—was partitioned both politically (into many fiefdoms), and linguistically (into the Romanic and Germanic Sprachräume). The feudal borders did not match the linguistic borders, and some fiefdoms were divided into Francophone and Germanic regions. However, the ruling aristocracy, which usually spoke languages other than the population, did not much bother about these language-related disparities. After the 1581 secession of the Dutch Republic in the northern Low Countries, French progressively emerged in the Southern Netherlands under the influence of the Habsburg nobility and, later, of the French invasions, as the upper class language, not only at the court but also in the administration and in the political circles.