Rebooting Discussion about the Ancestry of the First Counts of Loon

Abstract

A critical analysis is presented of the state of knowledge concerning the tenth-century origins of the medieval county of Loon, which was roughly equivalent to modern Belgian Limburg. The dominant hypothesis of Leon Vanderkindere, published in 1900, and the update by Jean Baerten in the 1960s, are compared to both the earlier writers who influenced them, and the latest understandings of the medieval evidence. Rather than conducting a systematic reappraisal of the evidence, Vanderkindere’s approach was fundamentally dependent upon a core assumption which is still unquestioned. This is that the counts of Loon must be heirs of the so-called Reginar family, ancestors of the later dukes of Brabant. The original proposal can be traced back to Christophe Butkens in the early seventeenth century. Although understandings of the medieval evidence have changed, published analyses of the origins of Loon have had difficulty breaking free from this old narrative. Several leads implied by ignored evidence will be outlined.