Europe · High and late Middle Ages
Duchy of Brabant
1183/1190–15th century
Duché de Brabant; Dutch Hertogdom Brabant. Principal towns: Leuven (Louvain), Brussels, Antwerp, 's-Hertogenbosch.
- Existed
- 1183/1190–15th century
- Shown on the map
- 1260–1430
- Peak area
- 23k km²
- Region
- Europe
Overview
Duché de Brabant; Dutch Hertogdom Brabant. Principal towns: Leuven (Louvain), Brussels, Antwerp, 's-Hertogenbosch. An imperial fief; the landgraves of Leuven were raised to Dukes of Brabant (as successors to the ducal title of Lower Lorraine) around 1183/1190. A wealthy, heavily urbanized duchy whose towns rivalled those of Flanders, its great constitutional monument is the Joyous Entry (Blijde Inkomst) of 1356 — a charter sworn by the incoming duchess Joanna and her husband guaranteeing the rights of towns and estates and a right of resistance if the ruler violated them, a foundational text of Low Countries constitutionalism. Brabant passed to the Burgundian dukes in 1430 and thence to the Habsburgs, becoming a core province of the Burgundian and Habsburg Netherlands.
Common questions
- What was the Duchy of Brabant?
- Duché de Brabant; Dutch Hertogdom Brabant. Principal towns: Leuven (Louvain), Brussels, Antwerp, 's-Hertogenbosch.
- When did the Duchy of Brabant exist?
- The Duchy of Brabant existed 1183/1190–15th century. On this map it is drawn 1260–1430.
- How large was the Duchy of Brabant?
- At its greatest extent drawn on this map, the Duchy of Brabant covered about 23,000 km². That is the largest area the border data gives it across the years it is drawn, not necessarily its greatest extent in history.
Sources
This compendium cites its sources once for the whole document rather than per territory. Its bibliography names the English Wikipedia articles for each territory as the primary basis, cross-checked against Encyclopædia Britannica and specialist snippets, and flags entries built on unreliable foundations — the 911 treaty of Saint-Clair-sur-Epte known only from Dudo of Saint-Quentin, and Arnaud Amalric's alleged order at Béziers attested only decades after the fact. The article this entry is anchored on:
- Wikipedia — Duchy of Brabant en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duchy_of_Brabant
This entry was last updated .
This entry was researched and drafted with AI from the sources above, and has not been reviewed by a historian. How entries are made
Text available under CC BY-SA 4.0: reuse it with a credit to The World Through Time and a link to this page. Passages drawing on the Wikipedia articles listed above are also licensed CC BY-SA 4.0 by their contributors.
Border geometry for the map itself comes from Cliopatria v0.12 (Seshat Global History Databank, CC-BY-4.0).
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