Hello you're very welcome to Long Reed's a Jacobin podcast where we look in depth at political topics and thinkers.

My name's Daniel Finn and the features editor here at Jacobin and I'll be presenting the show. If anyone thinks about medieval Flanders today,

it's most likely because they have an interest in the history of art. The work of painters like

Breugel and Rubens is still a touchstone for modern critics.

But Flanders also pioneered the art of class warfare. There was nowhere else in Europe during the Middle Ages where the popular classes posed such an effective challenge to aristocratic power.

At its high point during the early 14th century, this wave of popular mobilization defeated

some of Europe's most powerful armies.

Jan Dumoline is a professor of history at Ghent University. I spoke to him about the social

conditions that made Flanders into the epicenter of class conflict from medieval Europe. What made Flanders distinctive in terms of it social and economic structure in the wider context of medieval Europe?

To avoid any confusion, first of all, we should be clear on the geographical terms.

What we call Flanders in the Middle Ages is the county of Flanders,

and that is just one part of a broader geographical area you could call the low countries.

It's the county of Flanders but also later you would have the County of Brabant and also the northern low countries or Netherlands or northern Netherlands with the county of Holland and Zealand etc.

In this broader region which could be considered a kind of socio-economic area in medieval Europe,

Flanders is just the earliest developed part.

The low countries in general are a kind of lowly situated, as the name goes, course delta area with several great rivers flowing into this flatlands

so the Rhine theuse, the Schelds, and they are situated, if you will, at the crossroads of

northwestern Europe between what we would today call France, Germany, then of course the Holy Roman Empire and the British Isles.

Very well connected as well to the North Sea area, the North Sea economy.

And what is quite distinctive about especially Flanders, the

Northern Coastal Area, which is today part of Belgium is that this was a very undeveloped swampy

moorland kind of poorly developed area with not as much, well the north of it at least the coastal flounders,

...