For the story of the primitive inhabitants of Belgium, we must consult the chronicles of the Belgae, a Gallic race extolled for their bravery by Julius Caesar, half a century before the birth of Christ. Long before the Romans came, the fair land bounded by the Atlantic, the Rhine, the Alps, the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees was occupied by the Gauls, who were called in their own language, “Celts.” Gaul, divided into three parts, was inhabited in the north by the Belgae; in the middle region by the Celts, or Gauls proper; and in the south by the Aquitani. This ancient race remained under the Roman yoke for more than five centuries. Meantime, a Frankish tribe came from across the Rhine to occupy what we know as the Flemish Plain. The western part of what was called Belgium in that day (and included the land known to us as Holland) was ceded to France; eastern provinces fell to Germany, and for three hundred years comprised the duchy of Lower Alsace. The Province of Liège, on the eastern border, existed for nearly a thousand years as a possession of the bishop-princes of the Holy Roman (or German-Roman) Empire, which began with Charlemagne in the year 800. The hereditary principalities of Flanders, Hainaut, Artois, Namur, Brabant, Limburg, Antwerp and Malines were established in the Middle Ages. The geographical divisions of these feudal states, with the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, were subjected to little change throughout succeeding centuries, and form the framework of the present-day kingdom of Belgium. When we read the romantic story of the Belgian countships, duchies and baronies, we discover how large a part their knights played in the chivalrous enterprises of Europe. The “Low Countries,” of which Belgium was the most important, were represented in the Crusades by such zealous warriors as Godfrey of Bouillon, Marquis of Antwerp, and that Count of Flanders who became the first King of Jerusalem. Another Count of Flanders, Baldwin IX, was crowned Emperor of the East when the Crusaders entered Constantinople in 1204. The rise of Belgian cities dates from the founding of the cloth markets in the tenth century. From the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries, hundreds of trading vessels entered Flemish ports, carrying away carpets, tapestries, cannon, lace, silks, linens, embroideries and metal-ware. Charles the Fifth, who was very vain of his Belgian possessions, boasted to Francis the First, of France, that he “could put Paris inside his Ghent.” The French word for glove is _gant_: the pun is obvious. In the sixteenth century Ghent surpassed London in population and trade. Belgian cities were supreme in Europe. Belgian provinces were at the zenith of their prosperity.