Talk:Counts of Leuven

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[edit] Linguistic question

1. Although the County was a fee of the Holy Roman Empire, the functional lordships were principally subject to Angevin hegemony during this time: the Kings of England would spend one year in England and the next administering Flanders, and their control of the trade routes was a much more immediate influence than the Emperor in Aachen or Cologne, separated by the entire width of the Ardennes in between. The administration only returned to Germany after the Battle of Bouvines (1205).

2. The consequence was that although the local population and administration used Early Flemish (see Brabantse Yeesten, a 1444 chronology of the Duchy by the Town Clerk of Antwerp, whose family was from a village a couple of miles south of Brussels), the governance was in Mediaeval French/Latin.

3. "Leuven" is a modern anachronism encouraged by Flemish Nationalists as a matter of political pressure to improve their claim on what was for much of its life a French-speaking town (as demonstrated in the historical names of the older establishments listed on the Leuven page). This also shows a number of forms which would certainly have been pronounced similarly to the French Louvain: the Brabantse Yeesten itself uses the older Loven form. I therefore suggest that an NPOV would prefer the French form, with Leuven as a secondary index.

[edit] County of Brussels

What is the attribution for a separate County of Brussels? In 1000 the place was at best a few houses and a chapel by a bridge over the river Senne. Although local tradition suggests there may have been a small ducal keep erected nearby during the eleventh century, no trace of it in either documentation or archaeological digging has thus far been found. As there is, however, evidence of a castrum belonging to the Count's Chatelain, tentatively identified as founders of the de Montfort family, on the ridgeline of the plateau overlooking the river plain a mile to the south-east, just north of the fifteenth-century Ducal Aula Magna: the current thinking among the local specialists is that it would have been highly unusual to have had two keeps in such close proximity in such a small town, and there is consequently considerable doubt of the one in town.

By 1300, it had a population of only around 8000, despite having been the seat of the Duchy of Brabant for a hundred years. In point of fact, even the term Brussels is inaccurate prior to then, as the general term was an earlier form, Bruocsela. It is also quite clear that the County of Loven reached as far as the Dender and Schelde, leaving no room for an odd little County of No-where in between. I therefore think that "Count of Louvain and Brussels" simply covers a single county with two towns of note in it, rather than two counties, as is suggested here. Jel 11:55, 16 July 2007 (UTC)