By the 13th century, the cities of the County of Flanders - Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, and the Franc of Bruges - had organized themselves into the Four Members, a kind of urban parliament that exercised real power over the count himself. They wove English wool into cloth that sold across the known world. They built cathedrals and belfries. Ghent in 1340 had perhaps 60,000 people, making it the second largest city north of the Alps after Paris. Bruges was wired into the financial circuits of the Mediterranean by Italian bankers. The wealth bought art. The 15th century produced the Van Eyck brothers, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling, and Petrus Christus - the painters European art historians once called the Flemish Primitives, now more commonly Early Netherlandish, whose technical mastery of oil paint would change Western art permanently.

Antwerp inherited the trade in the 16th century and for a few decades was probably the richest city in Europe, the place where Spanish silver from the Americas met Northern European credit. Then came the religious wars. In 1576 Spanish troops sacked Antwerp - the Spanish Fury - killing around 7,000 people. In 1585 the city fell to the Duke of Parma after a long siege. The northern Dutch rebels, retreating but holding the mouth of the river Scheldt, closed it. Antwerp was cut off from the sea, and the city's wealthy Calvinist merchants fled north to Amsterdam, where they helped build the Dutch Golden Age. Flanders entered three centuries of relative quiet under Spanish, then Austrian, then French, then Dutch rule. Peter Paul Rubens kept painting in Antwerp. The wool trade did not come back.

Belgium was created in 1830 as a French-speaking state run by a French-speaking elite, even though most of its citizens in the north spoke Dutch dialects collectively called Flemish. Public schools, courts, the army, and the bureaucracy all operated in French. For nineteenth-century Flemish farmers and workers, this meant their children were educated in a language not spoken at home, and their day in court was conducted in a language they could not understand. The Flemish Movement, born from this grievance, fought a century-long battle for linguistic equality. Dutch became an official language in public secondary schools in 1873. Dutch and French were declared equal in laws and royal orders in 1898. The first Flemish-language university opened in 1930. The Belgian constitution was not officially translated into Dutch until 1967. Each step was hard-won.

The First World War was fought, on the Western Front, largely in Flanders. Three battles of Ypres, the mud of Passchendaele, the gas attacks at Langemark - the names became shorthand for industrial slaughter. Flemish soldiers who served in the largely French-speaking Belgian army often did so under officers whose orders they could not understand. The Yser Tower memorial at Diksmuide, which holds the annual Yser pilgrimage, became a center of Flemish identity built around this grievance. In the Second World War, German occupation authorities promised greater Flemish rights, and some Flemish nationalists collaborated. After the war, collaborators were prosecuted and punished, and a stain attached to Flemish nationalism that has shaped Belgian politics ever since. The right-wing nationalist parties that emerged in subsequent decades - the Vlaams Blok, later Vlaams Belang, and more recently the more mainstream New Flemish Alliance - all operate in the long shadow of those years.

Modern Flanders is a federal state inside the federal state of Belgium. It has its own parliament, its own government, and exclusive authority over education, culture, language, economy, and most of the things that affect daily life. About 6.8 million people live in the Flemish Region as of January 2024 - 58 percent of Belgium's population on 45 percent of its land. The Flemish economy modernized late but thoroughly. After 1945, massive investment in port infrastructure - the Port of Antwerp is now the second-largest in Europe after Rotterdam - turned the region from a backwater into one of the wealthiest places on the planet, with per capita GDP roughly 20 percent above the European Union average. The Antwerp diamond district handles a tenth of Belgium's exports. BASF's Antwerp plant is the largest the German chemical giant operates outside Germany. Flanders DC, IMEC, VITO, and Flanders Make form a science and technology ecosystem that has produced semiconductor research punching far above the region's weight.

What Flanders wants to be is still being negotiated. Supporters of the Flemish Movement call it a nation. The New Flemish Alliance, the largest Flemish party in recent elections, advocates for steadily greater autonomy with eventual independence as a stated goal. Yet survey after survey suggests most people living in Flanders - around 75 percent - say they are proud to be Belgian and oppose breaking the country apart. The 2007 to 2011 Belgian political crisis included a record-setting 541 days without a federal government, partly over Flemish-Walloon disagreements. In 2025, Belgian Prime Minister Bart De Wever publicly mused about reuniting with the Netherlands, calling the 1830 Belgian separation a disaster. The geography is flat, the population is dense, the cycling paths are everywhere, the beer is excellent, and the question of what Flanders is - region, community, language area, nation - remains open. Belgians, as a rule, do not seem to mind.