County of Hainaut

A Low Countries county that was joined to Holland and Zeeland by inheritance and pulled apart by a war between an aunt and a niece. Hainaut sat on the linguistic border of the medieval Netherlands, French-speaking in the south and Dutch in the north, and was a fief of the Empire rather than of France, which gave its counts room to manoeuvre between the two. In 1299 it came into union with Holland and Zeeland, and the three were governed together for a century and a half. Philippa of Hainaut, daughter of one of its counts, married Edward III of England in 1328, and the Hainauter chronicler Jean Froissart came to her court and wrote the account of the Hundred Years' War that shaped how Europe remembered it. Jacqueline inherited the three territories at seventeen in 1417 and spent nineteen years losing them. She was married four times to men chosen for her, imprisoned by one of them, escaped in men's clothes, and fought a civil war against her uncle in which the towns took sides by faction. Philip the Good of Burgundy backed the uncle, then took the inheritance for himself; Jacqueline was forced to name him her heir in 1428 and abdicated in 1433. Hainaut went into the Burgundian Netherlands and from there to the Habsburgs, was divided between France and Austria in the seventeenth century, and ended as provinces of Belgium and France. Hainaut's other export was people. Its lesser nobility served as mercenaries across Europe, its stonemasons worked on cathedrals from Cambrai to Cologne, and its towns wove wool brought from England into cloth. The coalfield under the same ground made the Borinage one of the first industrial districts on the continent in the nineteenth century, and one of the poorest - which is what Van Gogh went there to preach to, and where he decided to become a painter.

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