Everything about Silva Carbonaria totally explained
Silva Carbonaria, the "charcoal forest", was the dense
old-growth forest of
beech and
oak that formed a natural boundary during the Late Iron Age through Roman times into the
Early Middle Ages across what is now
Belgium, thinning out in the open sandy stretches to the north and forming a barrier—trackless to the outsider—on the heavier soils to the south. Further to the south the higher elevation and deep river valleys were covered by the even less penetrable ancient
Arduenna Silva, the deeply folded
Ardennes, which are still forested to this day. The Silva Carbonaria was a vast forest that stretched from the rivers
Senne and the
Dijle in the north to the the
Sambre river in the south. To the east Silva Carbonaria extended to the
Rhine, where near Cologne in 388 CE the
magistri militum praesentalis Nannienus and Quintinus counterattacked a Frankish incursion across the Rhine in the Silva Carbonaria. Its northern outliers reached the then marshy site of modern
Brussels. When the
Franks settled on the left bank of the Rhine in the fourth century, the
Salian Franks rapidly occupied the flat open country with its coastal marshes, and the mixed tribal groups that Romans called
Belgae withdrew to the wooded south, where the Romanized Celts—the "Wala" or "strangers" to the Germanic Franks—continued speaking a
Late Latin. The Romance-Germanic linguistic division that marks Belgium to this day has been perhaps too facilely linked in the past to these geographic parameters.
A great
Roman road linked the Rhine crossing at
Cologne in a "strategic axe" with
Maastricht, where it crossed the
Maas at the head of navigation. Skirting the northern edges of the Silva Carbonaria, it passed through
Tongres,
Courtrai/Kortrijk and
Cambrai to reach the sea at
Boulogne. The highway was the main east–west route in a landscape where the river valleys, tributaries of the
Meuse and the
Scheldt, tended southwest to northeast. It remained viable through the
Early Middle Ages as the
chausée Brunehaut, the "Road of Brunehaut". As a public work its scale had become unimaginable in the Middle Ages: the chronicler
Jean d'Outremeuse solemnly related in 1398 that
Brunehaut, wife of
Sigebert I, had built this wide paved road in 526, and that it was completed in a single night with the devil's aid.
The Silva Carbonaria is mentioned in the
Salic Law of the Franks, where it marked "the boundary of the territories occupied by the Frankish people". For a time in the sixth century, the Silva Carbonaria formed a barrier between the West Frankish kingdom of
Clovis and the East Frankish kingdom of
Sigebert the Lame, centred on Cologne, until he was defeated some time after 507, and Clovis joined the two kingdoms, which however retained their separate identities throughout the rule of the
Merovingians.
Extensive tracts of the untamed woodlands belonged to monasteries. The Benedictine
Abbey of Lobbes was in the Silva Carbonaria and that of
Saint Foillan, in the
Forêt de Soignes/Zoniënwoud not far from
Nevele.
The
charcoal—which gave the forest its name and into which the once seeming inexhaustible woods were slowly converted—was required to fuel the scattered smelting furnaces that forged the plentiful iron found in outcroppings laid bare by riverside erosion. Even before the Romans arrived, iron weapons forged in the Silva Carbonaria were traded by the Belgae to their cousins in the southeast of
Britain. In the High Middle Ages further woodlands were cleared. Today all that remains of the Silva Carbonaria is the
Forêt de Soignes/Zoniënwoud, preserved because it had been set aside as a noble hunt. At the start of the nineteenth century the area of this remnant of the primeval forest still covered about 100 square kilometres, but due to timber cutting its area has diminished to its current protected area of 44.21 km².
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