30.3 Europe: a.d. 1501 to 1600  (Page 17/29)

The netherlands and belgium

Throughout most of this century the Lowlands were a part of the Habsburg dominion. In the first half, Antwerp, by virtue of its crucial location, seemed to be the leading city commercially, with trade routes to Bergen, Stockholm, Reval, Danzig and all points south down even to Seville and Algiers. This was based greatly on a luxury trade, however, and with a shift of the European staple market and the rapid increase of seaborne trade, Amsterdam became the center of commerce. The sacking of Antwerp in 1576 by disgruntled Spanish soldiers, who had gone unpaid by the bankrupt King Philip II, certainly was a factor in this transition. (Ref. 279 ) Soldier and sailors, in those days, demanded gold for wages, not paper. Already in 1567, when the Duke of Alva arrived in the Netherlands with his army, the troops' pay and expenses were invariably settled in gold and gold alone. (Ref. 260 )

The Dutch Baltic fleet brought food supplies, chiefly grains from the Baltic, to Amsterdam and by 1500 that fleet had already equaled that of the Hanseatic League. Their business was free of guild restrictions and the Italian bankers, the Fuggers, and English merchants centered their commercial activities there. The area thus provided a great source of revenue to king and emperor, Charles V, who responded by giving the Dutch reasonably good government except in the matter of religious liberty. (Ref. 8 ) The Netherlands, along with Italy, remained the focus of European industrial activity until very late in the century. Contrary to what one found in a princely court, as in France, the wealthy of Holland were deliberately modest in both dress and decorum, so they could not be identified on a city street. (Ref. 292 )

NOTE: Insert Map 61. The Netherlands War of Independence

Erasmus, a bastard born in Rotterdam, but later a "citizen of the world", traveling, and living at times in England, France, Italy and Switzerland, was one of the original humanists. He became a priest and soon had a number of benefices all over western Europe, which supported him while he wrote, chiefly in Latin and usually adroitly criticizing the Church, including the concept of transubstantiation, as in his Praise of Folly. Somewhat anticipating Luther, the book was condemned only after Lutherism developed. After 1519 Lutheranism and Anabaptism came in from Germany. The latter particularly gained ground in Holland under the leadership of John of Leyden, with the idea of a return to the simple teaching of Jesus and belief in the early return of Christ to earth. These concepts were mingled with communistic theories of equality, mutual aid and even "free love". Various Anabaptist uprisings and rebellions were put down brutally by the emperor's soldiers and finally the Spanish Inquisition machinery was imported to liquidate the group. The Spanish kept 50 pieces of artillery in the Netherlands, these maintained at a monthly cost of over 40,000 ducats. To move these units required almost 5,000 horses and nearly 6,000 wagons. (Ref. 260 ) After publicly burning Luther's books, the Papal Nuncio, Aleander, had Erasmus expelled from the theological faculty at the University of Louvain, claiming that he had paved the way for Luther by his Greek New Testament and his jibes at the Church. (Ref. 291 )