The above may pass as a sketch of the fluctuations along the borderland in their European aspect. It is needless to go through every small shifting of frontier, or to recount in detail the history of small border principalities like _Saint Pol_ and _Bouillon_. The main historical aspect of these countries is their tendency, in all ages, to form somewhat of a middle system between two greater powers on either side of them. The guaranteed neutrality of Belgium and the guaranteed neutrality of Switzerland are alike survivals or revivals—it is hard to say which they should be called—of the instinctive feeling which, in the ninth century, called the Lotharingian kingdom into being. The modern form of this thousand-year old idea was made possible through the growth of the power of the Burgundian Dukes of the House of Valois. The real historical work of those dukes was thus done in those parts of their dominions from which they did not take their name, but which took their name from them. The history of their other dominions may be told in a few words; indeed a great part of it has been told already. ♦Schemes of Charles the Bold.♦ The schemes of Charles the Bold for uniting his scattered dominions by the conquest of the duchy of Lorraine, for extending the power thus formed to the sea-board of the royal Burgundy, for forming in short a middle kingdom stretching from the Ocean to the Mediterranean, acting as a barrier alike between France and Germany and between France and Italy, remained mere schemes. They are important only as showing how deeply the idea or the memory of a middle state was still fixed in men’s minds. The conquests of Charles in Lorraine, his purchases in Elsass, were momentary possessions which hardly touch geography. But the fall of Charles, by causing the break-up of the southern dominion of his house, helped to give greater importance to its northern dominion. While the Netherlands grew together, the Burgundies split asunder. After the fall of Charles the fate of the two Burgundies was much the same as the fate of Flanders and Artois. Both were for a while seized by France; but the county, like Artois, was afterwards recovered for a season. The duchy of Burgundy was lost for ever; the county, along with the outlying county of Charolois, remained to those who by female succession represented the Burgundian Dukes, that is to Charles the Fifth and his Spanish son. The annexation of the Burgundian county, and with it of the city of Besançon, by Lewis the Fourteenth has been recorded in an earlier section. § 9. _The Dominions of Austria._