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The Low Countries, the historical region of de Nederlanden, are the countries (see "Country") on low-lying land around the delta of the Rhine, Scheldt, and Meuse (Maas) rivers. The term is not particularly current in modern contexts because the region does not very exactly correspond with the nation-states The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg, for which an alternate term, the Benelux was applied after World War II.
Prior to early modern nationbuilding, the Low Countries referred to a wide area of northern Europe roughly stretching from Dunkirk at its south-western point to the area of Schleswig-Holstein at its north-eastern point, from the estuary of the Scheldt in the south to Frisia in the north. The Low Countries were the scene of the early northern towns, built from scratch rather than developed from ancient centres, that mark the reawakening of Europe in the 12th century.
A collection of several regions rather then one homogenous region, all of the low countries still shared a great number of similarities.
- Most were coastal regions bounded by the north sea or the English channel. The countries not having access to the sea politically and economically linked to the ones that had so as to form one union of port and hinterland. A poetic description also calls the region "the Low Countries by the Sea"
- All spoke the medieval dietsch or middle-Dutch: the ancient proto-language out of which later would evolve Dutch, English and German.
- Most of them were depending on a lord or count in name only, the cities effectively being ruled by guilds and councils and although in theory part of one of a kingdom, their interaction with their rulers were regulated by a strict set of liberties describing what the latter could and could not expect from them.
- All of them depended on trade and manufacturing and encouraging the free flow of goods and craftsmen.
Of particular importance for the cities was the manufacture and trade of woollen cloth, Europe's first industry. Cities grown around this trade included Liège, Leuven, Mechelen, Antwerp, Brussels, Ypres, Ghent and Utrecht, to employ a list compiled by Henri Pirenne.
In 1477 the Burgundian holdings in the area, the Burgundian Netherlands passed through an heiress Mary of Burgundy to the Habsburgs. In the following century the "Low Countries" corresponded roughly to the Seventeen Provinces covered by the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 of Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, which freed the provinces from their archaic feudal obligations. After the Seventeen Provinces declared their independence from Habsburg Spain, the provinces of the Southern Netherlands were recaptured (1581) and are sometimes called the Spanish Netherlands.
In 1713, under the Treaty of Utrecht following the War of the Spanish Succession, what was left of the Spanish Netherlands was ceded to Austria and thus became known as the Austrian Netherlands. The United Kingdom of the Netherlands (1815-1830) temporarily united the Low Countries again.
In English, the plural form Netherlands is used for the present-day country, but in Dutch that plural has been dropped, with the pleasant side-effect that one can thus distinguish between the older, larger Netherlands and the current country. So Nederland (singular) is used for the modern nation and de Nederlanden (plural) for the domains of Charles V. However, the plural term "Koninkrijk der Nederlanden" (Kingdom of the Netherlands) still is the official Dutch name of the country.