Artois is a Medieval County based around Arras, a center of quality wool production dating back to Roman times and a center of coal mining in recent ones. The Medieval French Crown granted the wealthy city of Arras privileges to encourage its economic development, kickstarting the entire fabric industry throughout Flanders. Arras and Artois offer a spectacular, though incomplete, glimpse into the cityscapes of Renaissance Flanders.
Artois is a region of contrasts, with very little in the way of a consistent narrative. The starting point is the city of Arras, a genuinely remarkable cityscape of the Flemish Renaissance and Interwar Architecture. In contrast, is the industrial legacy of the great coalfields underneath the soil. The entire countryside is covered in its heritage, from innovative urban planning to preserved mine museums. Finally, we have the trenches of WWI, which devastated the region, and whose shadow is omnipresent throughout Northern France.
The borders of the County of Artois were set by medieval diplomacy, first being annexed to the County of Flanders in the Early Middle Ages. This made it an official part of the “lowlands” and thus set its course in a direction opposite of its neighboring region Picardy. It was traded back and forth via marriage and inheritance until it landed in the hands of the Kingdom of Burgundy in 1384. This means that with the death of Charles the Bold in 1477, it became part of Austria with the treaty of Senlis in 1492. Now part of the Austrian and later Spanish Lowlands, it participated in the religious conflicts in the region until finally reconquered by France in 1659.
Such a complex political history invariably means a less interesting economic one. Artois was the progenitor of the great fabric (also known as draperies in the literature) trade. Arras was the original center of the wool trade for Flanders before the Tournai and Bruges overtook Arras in wealth and importance. The Protestant Reformation and the subsequent religious turmoil started a centuries-long period of decline for Artois. The fabric industry became more global, and Flanders lost its edge as its ports silted up and competition from England grew. War and conflict devastated the region, with the French Revolution dealing the final blow. With the great monasteries of the region blown up and power increasingly centralized in Paris, Artois was impoverished.
The new age began with the discovery of coal. Though coal mines had been present in the region since the mid-17th century, it was in the mid-1830s that modern industrial mining operations opened in the region. The coal boom powered a massive increase in wealth and population. For the first time since the Middle Ages, Artois was again one of the wealthiest regions in France. Coal would power French industry until the end of the 20th century, and the last mine would close in 1990. The period of de-industrialization has not been kind to Artois. That said, Artois has fared better than French Flanders, which has a greater degree of urban concentration.
