328 
Indiana University 
virtually obtained in 1579, but full recognition did not come 
until the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. The heir of Charles 
the Bold was his daughter, Mary, who, the same year in which 
her father died, married Maximilian of Austria, a Hapsburger. 
In this way the Burgundian inheritance in the north became 
a possession of Austrian Hapsburgs, where it remained until 
liberation came in the Napoleonic period. 
The attempt of the dukes of Burgundy to set up a middle 
kingdom along the Rhine is the fourth landmark in the evo- 
lution of modern states in Europe. The independent states 
of Belgium and the Netherlands were the political results that 
followed the growth of the Burgundian power. Both of these 
states serve as middle kingdoms in present-day European pol- 
icy. With the death of Charles the Bold, the duchy of Bur- 
gundy was lost forever; the Netherlands and Belgium 
subsequently appear as sovereign states; the idea of a middle 
kingdom was so deeply fixed in men’s minds that it has re- 
mained even to our day. 
The Netherlands made no advances to the east at the ex- 
pense of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation. But 
France did. Richelieu (died in 1642) resolved to give France 
“the frontiers which Nature had designed for it”. His pol- 
icy was inherited by Mazarin, the able minister of Louis XIV 
(1634-1715) and by his successor, Louis XV. The natural 
limits seemed to be the Rhine on the north and northeast, the 
Jura and Alps on the east, the Mediterranean and the Pyrenees 
on the south, the Atlantic Ocean on the west and northwest. 
These Frenchmen were bent on restoring to their country 
“the neighboring territory formerly her own”. Whatever had 
been ancient Gaul “divided into three parts” was France; 
on the north it was the Rhine, the Rhine which marked the 
boundary between Caesar and Ariovistus. 
To reach the Rhine, France must, like the dukes of Bur- 
gundy, make annexations from what was formerly Lothair’s 
middle kingdom. This brought her in conflict with the Holy 
Roman Empire of the German Nation, the Spanish Nether- 
lands, and the Dutch. This was little matter to a state whose 
sovereign had resolved that “what once belonged to France 
continued to be by the right of inalienable possession of the 
French Crown, though it had been sold, exchanged, or given 
away”. “Rights” were asserted, alliances made, and war was 
