Brabant and Hainault had practically quite as much to do with France as with the Empire. ♦Walloon language.♦ And this French influence was of course helped by the fact that a considerable region in the south was, though not of French, yet not of Teutonic speech. Altogether, with much to unite them to the great powers on either side, with much to keep them apart from either of them, with much more to unite them to one another, the states of the Netherlands might almost seem to be designed by nature to be united under a single political head. ♦Union of the Netherlands under the Dukes of Burgundy.♦ Such a head was supplied by the Dukes of Burgundy and Counts of Flanders, by whom, in the course of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, nearly the whole of the Netherlands was united into a single power which was to be presently broken into two by the results of religious divisions. * * * * * Leaving then for the present the growth and fall of the Burgundian power in the lands more to the south, we will go on to trace the steps by which the provinces of the Low Countries were united under the Valois Dukes and their Austrian descendants. ♦Reign of Philip the Good. 1419-1467.♦ The great increase of territory in this region was made during the long reign of Philip the Good. ♦Namur. 1421-1429.♦ His first acquisition was the county of _Namur_, a small and outlying district, but one which, as small and outlying, would still more strongly suggest the rounding off of the scattered territory. ♦1429-1433.♦ A series of marriages and disputes next enabled Philip to make a much more important extension of his dominions. ♦1405.♦ Brabant and Limburg had passed to a younger branch of the Burgundian House. ♦1418.♦ John, Duke of Brabant, the cousin of Philip by a marriage with Jacqueline, Countess of Holland and Hainault, united those states for a moment. The disputes and confusions which followed on her marriages and divorces led to the annexation of her territories by the Duke of Burgundy, a process which was finally concluded by the formal cession of her dominions by Jacqueline. ♦Brabant and Limburg. 1430. | Holland and Hainault. 1433.♦ Meanwhile Philip had succeeded to Brabant and Limburg, and the union of Flanders, Brabant, Hainault, Zealand, and Holland, together made a dominion which took in all the greatest Netherland states, and formed a compact mass of territory. On this presently followed a great acquisition of territory which was more strictly French than the fiefs which Philip already held of the French crown in Flanders and Artois. The Treaty of Arras, by which Philip, hitherto the ally of England against France, made peace with his western overlord, gave him, under the form of mortgage, the lands on the Somme. ♦The towns on the Somme. 1435-1483.♦ The acquisition of these lands, _Ponthieu_, _Vermandois_, _Amiens_, and _Boulogne_, advanced the Burgundian frontier to a dangerous neighbourhood to Paris on this side