The Dutch Declaration of Independence - July 26th, 1581

The political division of Atlantic Europe into a balance of seven separate but equal states was largely complete by the second decade of the thirteenth century. The battles of Murat and Bouvines in the year 1214 confirmed in broad outline the relative position of France and the Empire, Castile, Aragon and Portugal, Scotland and England. Although there were minor territorial changes over the succeeding centuries, the integrity of each polity was never again seriously called into question. But the allegiance of one area remained in question – the very region in which the battle of Bouvines had been fought: the Low Countries.

During the Carolingian period, the northward march of the Franks, speaking French, met the southward advance of the Saxons, speaking Low German, more or less along a line from Dunkirk to Cologne. Although the exact linguistic frontier was eventually determined by such practical consideration as the presence of forests or marshes, from the beginning, the existence of two separate language groups and cultures at the north-western rim of Europe presented a powerful initial obstacle to unification. The economic fragmentation of the region presented a second: a natural crossroads where the produce of France and England could be exchanged with that of Italy and Germany, the area was able to support an unusual concentration of prosperous towns and cities, especially in the provinces of Flanders and Brabant, and that economic power was used for political ends. The burghers of these provinces resisted attempts both by their own rulers - the dukes of Brabant were saddled with a Magna Carta of civil liberties from 1356 – and by foreign powers to dominate them – a French army was routed, with the loss of numerous knights and nobles, by the townsmen of Flanders in 1302. Sheltered by the rugged independence of these two provinces, the rest of the Netherlands also managed to maintain its autonomy against Valois France. But in the fifteenth century, the Valois took over most of the Low Countries by a different route. In 1384, the Duke of Burgundy, brother to the French King, inherited the county of Flanders and he and his descendants set about acquiring the neighbouring provinces by either purchase or matrimony: Namur in 1421; Hainaut, Holland and Zealand in 1428; Brabant and Limburg in 1430; Luxemburg in 1451. This considerable bloc of territories, ruled from Brussels, the capital of Brabant, passed in its entirety to the House of Habsburg, by marriage, in 1477.