Antwerp: The Richest Port in Europe
In Flanders, in Charles's youth, trade had grown too much for the decline of scattered industries to matter. Bruges and Ghent were not prosperous, Brussels mattered because it was the capital of Flanders, Louvain offered theology and brewed beer, and Antwerp was expanding its commerce. Commercial prosperity had made Antwerp, by about 1550, the richest and busiest port in Europe. The city, which lay on the broad, navigable Scheldt, became a trading port and a center of international finance by levying only a light duty on imports, by using its political tie with Spain, and by dedicating its exchange to the use of "merchants of every land and language," as the inscription put it. Trade there was free of guild restrictions and of protection of local industry by city authorities, which held medieval industries back from growth. Italian bankers opened offices in the city, English "Merchant Adventurers" made it their warehouse, the Fugger family concentrated its business there, and the Hanseatic League built its great "Easterling House" in the city (1564, the book's date). Five hundred merchant ships a day came and went at Antwerp, and five thousand merchants traded goods. Antwerp's money became the most widely used international currency.
Lisbon, the leading spice port of Europe, lost its importance and yielded to Antwerp. Antwerp's agents brought the merchant ships bound for Lisbon straight to Antwerp and distributed their cargo across northern Europe. The Venetian ambassador wrote that he was sorry to have seen Antwerp, because he saw that it had left Venice behind. His words reveal a historic shift: the move of Europe's commercial center from the Mediterranean to the northern shores of the Atlantic. The commercial boom enlarged Flemish industry, even in Ghent, and gave Charles V an income of 1,500,000 livres, about half of his annual revenue. (I leave out the book's dollar conversion.)
Charles's Rule over Flanders and Holland
Charles V rewarded Flanders and Holland, which had made him rich and strong, with a good government that friends and enemies found unbelievable. The people felt cramped only in religion. Charles did not interfere in their laws and regulations; city and provincial affairs were settled by local authorities, provincial and financial councils, and the court of appeal, which was part of the central administration. Charles governed the land indirectly, through regents with whom the people were content. He first appointed his aunt, nurse and guardian, Margaret of Austria, and after her his sister Mary, former queen of Hungary, as regent of Flanders and Holland. But the growth of Charles's empire gradually made him hard and domineering. He stationed Spanish garrisons in the proud cities of this land and crushed by force any opposition to his world policy. When Ghent refused to pay part of the military cost that other cities paid him, Charles broke the city's disobedience and resistance by force and, besides the military cost, collected a sum as damages; he trampled the city's old, historic liberties and put his own officials in place of the elected local authorities (1540). But this severity, exceptional as it was, did not lessen Charles's popularity with the people of the Low Countries. They credited the political stability and social order that had made their economy prosper to his wise policy, and they held his affection so dear that almost the whole of Holland mourned when he gave up the empire.
Heresy Spreads: Lutherans, Anabaptists, Calvinists
Following the view of that age that religious unity was essential to the calm and strength of every nation, and fearing that the spread of Protestantism in the Low Countries would endanger his army, busy fighting France and Lutheran Germany, Charles pressed the Church to persecute Protestants. The reform movement had made little progress in Holland before Luther's rising; but after 1517 the ideas of Luther and the Anabaptists reached the Low Countries from Germany, and those of Zwingli and Calvin from Geneva, Alsace and France. Luther's writings were translated into Dutch, and fervent preachers spread his ideas in Antwerp, Ghent, Dordrecht, Utrecht, Zwolle and The Hague. The Dominican friars opposed Luther's ideas, and one of them said he was ready to sink his teeth into Luther's throat and attend the Eucharist with a bloody mouth.
The emperor, still young, at the pope's urging issued notices banning the reading of Luther's writings. The same year he ordered all provincial courts to enforce the edict of Worms against Luther's followers. As a result, on 1 July 1523 two Augustinian friars, Henry Voes and Johann Esch, were burned in Flanders; they were the first Protestant martyrs of the Low Countries. Henry of Zütphen, prior of the Augustinian house in Antwerp, a friend and pupil of Luther, was jailed, escaped, was caught some time later in Holstein and was burned (1524). These killings spread the reform movement further.
Despite censorship of the press, a translation of Luther's New Testament was published in Holland and, even more, in Flanders. The people's eagerness to restore Christianity to its first form revived hope of Christ's early return and of the founding of a New Jerusalem where there would be no government, no marriage and no private property. This longing blended with some aspects of communism, such as the equality of human beings, mutual aid and even "free love." Anabaptists organized in Antwerp, Maastricht and Amsterdam. In 1531 Melchior Hoffman came to Amsterdam, and in 1534 Jan of Leiden visited him in turn, and the Anabaptist creed passed through him from Haarlem to Münster. It is estimated that two-thirds of the population of some towns in Holland and Flanders were Anabaptist. In Deventer even the mayor joined them. A famine turned the Anabaptist movement into social revolt. A friend of Erasmus wrote to him in 1534 that the Anabaptist stir in the province had everyone in a fever, for their movement flared like fire, and scarcely a town could be found without a flame rising from it. The regent Mary warned the emperor that the rebels meant to plunder the property of all nobles, clergy and merchant gentry and share the spoils out according to people's needs. In 1535 Jan of Leiden sent his delegates to lead the Anabaptist rising, which broke out at once in several major Dutch towns. The rebels fought with recklessness and devotion. A band of them took over a monastery in western Friesland and made it their base. The governor, with an army equipped with heavy artillery, besieged it, and eight hundred rebels fought in despair to the death (1535). Another band of Anabaptists seized Amsterdam's town hall on 11 May. The townspeople drove them out and took harsh revenge on their leaders (I leave out the details).
The Edict of 1550 and the Inquisition
Charles, who thought a communist revolution was about to tear the fabric of society apart, set up the Inquisition in the Netherlands and allowed its officers, even at the cost of destroying local liberties, to suppress with the utmost severity the Anabaptist revolt and any other movement against Catholicism. Between 1521 and 1555 he issued edicts one after another against social and religious dissenters.
The most reckless of these edicts, published on 25 September 1550, revealed the emperor's decline and prepared the ground for the Dutch revolt under his son. In summary, it forbade anyone to print, copy, keep, hide, buy, sell or distribute books or writings by Martin Luther, Oecolampadius, Ulrich Zwingli, Martin Bucer, John Calvin or any other heretic cast out of the holy Catholic Church; forbade anyone to destroy or damage images of the Virgin or other saints; forbade secret unlawful meetings in which the named heretics taught and baptized and plotted against the holy Church and the public interest; and forbade all laymen to discuss the Bible, or to read, teach or interpret it in public or in private, unless they had been properly trained in theology or approved by a recognized university. Anyone who accepted the heretics' views was to be put to death: if he did not persist in his views, by the sword if a man or by burial alive if a woman; if he persisted, by fire; and in both cases all his property went to the king. (I give the form of punishment only in outline.)
No one was allowed to shelter people accused of heresy or known as such, or to supply them with food, fire or clothing, on pain of the same penalties. Those who knew of heretics were bound to identify and deliver them to the authorities, and whoever denounced one would, on proof of guilt, receive half of the convicted person's property. So that judges would not, on the pretext of severity, sentence the guilty to lighter penalties than they deserved, the edict ruled that the penalties must be carried out in full; judges could not moderate them, and no one, of any rank, could ask the king or other authority for pardon or mitigation for heretics, exiles or fugitives. The penalties were binding, and altering them was beyond the competence of civil and military officials. In addition, those who traveled to the Low Countries had to pledge to stay faithful to the original Catholic faith.
This desperate edict made Holland and Flanders a battlefield between old Christianity and a new kind. By the estimate of the Venetian ambassador at Charles V's court, in 1546 close to 30,000 people, almost "all Anabaptists," were destroyed by enforcement of the emperor's edict; more cautious observers put the number of dead that year at 1,000. The Inquisition succeeded against the Dutch Anabaptists. Those who survived gave up resistance, and some fled to England and played an active part in the Protestant movement under Edward VI and Queen Elizabeth. Persecution, and the country's prosperity, quieted the communist movement.
But once the Anabaptist uprising died down, a flood of stubborn Huguenots, Calvinists, poured from France into Holland and Flanders. With their zeal, firmness and belief in religious government, they found a way into the hearts of the heirs of the mystical tradition of the "Brethren of the Common Life." Calvinism, by honoring work and activity, respecting property and wealth, and guaranteeing republican principles, which satisfied the merchant class that had long suffered arbitrary government, spread among the different classes of Holland and Flanders. In 1555 we find Calvinist congregations in Ypres, Tournai, Valenciennes, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp. In the end it was the followers of Calvin, not the Anabaptists or the Lutherans, who under Charles's son freed the Netherlands from Spanish rule and made Holland one of the most important cradles of new thought in our time.
A Broken Emperor
In 1555 Charles V gave up all his ambitions except that of lying down to die in holiness. He abandoned hope of crushing the Protestants of Germany and the Low Countries, of reconciling Protestantism with the Roman Church at the Council of Trent, and of uniting Catholics and Protestants, French and Germans, under his lead against Suleiman the Magnificent and the Turks, whose attacks threatened all Christendom. Overindulgence in food and drink, his harsh campaigns and the crushing burden of rule, mixed with one revolt after another, broke his health, wrecked his policy and shattered his will. At thirty-three he had a stomach ulcer, at thirty-five he was old and worn, and at forty-five he suffered from gout, shortness of breath, digestive disorders and a stammer. He spent half his waking hours in pain, and shortness of breath kept him from sleep most nights. Swollen joints had made his fingers so weak that he could hardly hold the pen with which he signed the Peace of Crépy.
When Coligny handed him a letter from Henry II, Charles could hardly open it, and said to him: "Monsieur l'Amiral, what do you think of me? I can barely open this letter. Am I the knight who used to hurl the lance so deftly?" Perhaps the cruelty he sometimes showed and the savagery with which he put down the Protestants of Holland were the result of the pain that tormented him. Ignoring the intercession of his son, later Philip II, who ruled as harshly as his father, he ordered severe punishment of captive German mercenaries who had fought for France (I do not give the book's detail). He wept bitterly at the death of his beloved wife Isabella (1539), though in due season he turned to other company. (I soften the book's remark here.)
The Abdication at Brussels
In autumn 1555 Charles summoned the leaders of Holland and Flanders to a high assembly on 25 October and called Philip from England to attend. The representatives of the nobles and senior officials of the seventeen provinces, under the protection of armed soldiers, met in Brussels in the Dukes of Brabant's broad hall, whose walls were hung with tapestries. Charles V entered the hall leaning on the shoulder of William the Silent, Prince of Orange, his son's future enemy. Mary (the regent), Emmanuel Philibert (Duke of Savoy), the emperor's councilors, the knights of the Golden Fleece and Philip's notables escorted him. When all were seated, Philibert rose and in a long address pleasing to Charles announced that for reasons of health, mind and policy the emperor had decided to abdicate the rule of the Netherlands in favor of his son. Then Charles, still leaning on the shoulder of the tall, handsome Prince of Orange, stood, confirmed Philibert's words and briefly reminded the assembly how his dominions had grown and that he had given all his strength and ability to the burdens of government, noting that during his reign he had visited Germany nine times, Spain six, Italy seven, France four, England and Africa twice each, and had crossed the seas eleven times. He went on to say, in summary: this is the fourth time I return to Spain, leaving you; in all my experience no event has been so painful and sad as leaving you today without leaving behind the peace I had hoped for; but with the great weariness that has come over me I can no longer bear the burden of government without harming the country; the care and practice that rule requires and the extreme fatigue that comes from it have ruined my health and left me without the strength government needs; in this state, if I did not give up the throne I would answer for it to God and man; my son Philip is now old enough to govern you, and I firmly hope he will be a worthy ruler for my beloved subjects.
When, after these words, Charles sank painfully back into his seat, the company was so moved that all forgot the sins, the injuries, the defeats and failures of a man who for forty years, in the hardest conditions of the age, had struggled toward ends he judged right, and many wept. Philip was formally installed as ruler of Holland and Flanders and swore to uphold the traditional and historic laws and rights of the land. At the start of 1556 Charles handed his son the crown of Spain with all its rights and possessions on both sides of the world. Charles kept the title of emperor for himself, intending to give that, too, to his son. But when Ferdinand objected, in 1558 he gave it to his brother. On 17 September 1556 Charles left the port of Flushing and sailed for Spain.