Then came the Spanish dominion over the whole territory, barring the duchy of Julich along the Rhine; the revolt of Holland and the severing of the United Netherlands north of the Rhine from the Spanish territories; finally, in 1715, after 160 years of ruinous domination, Spain was driven out and Austria succeeded in Flanders, Brabant, and Luxembourg, maintaining herself there until the time of Napoleon a century later, when for a few years everything as far as the Rhine, together with the Netherlands on the other side, was incorporated in France. With the fading of the splendid dream of a Napoleonic empire, Holland and Belgium, as we know them now, came into existence, the lands of the duchy of Julich went to Prussia, the Palatinate to Bavaria. Luxembourg was reduced to its existing area and the French frontier delimited as it is now, except for Alsace and Lorraine, which were lost in 1870. Between the upper and nether millstones of France and the Empire, the Heart of Europe for fifteen centuries has been ground into fragments of ever-changing form, never able to coalesce into unity, but producing ever in spite of political chaos and dynastic oppression great ideals of piety, righteousness, liberty; great art-manifestations of the vigour and nobility of race, great figures to uphold and enforce the lofty principles that have made so much of the brilliant history of mediæval Europe, and all centring around the lands of the many tribes who from earliest times were known as the Belgæ. They enter well into history, these Belgæ, in the fifty-seventh year before the birth of Christ, Nervii, Veromandri, Atrobates, from the valleys of the Meuse and the Sambre, as Cæsar found and declared, “that day against the Nervii,” when the battle for the winning of this new land was his by hardly more than a chance. The tribes were hard and free, and they died in the end almost to a man, five hundred remaining out of fifty thousand warriors. But Cæsar was magnanimous, as always, and by no means without appreciation of his adversaries, so Allies of Rome, with full claim on her protection, they became, with the rank and title of a free people, as they have remained at heart ever since. In seven years the last of the tribes had surrendered and Belgium became a flourishing colony as well as the advance-guard of Roman civilisation in its progress against the savage Germans of the Rhine. By the fall of the Empire a great and united people had come into being between Gaul and Germania, divided into four great sections with their several capitols at Trèves, Reims, Mainz, and Cologne.