Seventeen Provinces

• 1. Introduction

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  The Seventeen Provinces carried their name in three languages at once: Zeventien Provinciën in Dutch, Dix-Sept Provinces in French, Diecisiete Provincias in Spanish. On the 15th of October 1506, in the palace of Mechelen, the future Charles V was recognized as Heer der Nederlanden. The title translates as Lord of the Netherlands. The territory it described covered what is today the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, and parts of northern France. That span of land had spent decades being assembled, piece by piece, under a single dynasty. How had such a varied patchwork come to be governed as one? And what would happen when those pieces finally refused to stay together?

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• 2. A Dynasty Assembled

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  Mary I of Valois, Duchess of Burgundy, was the last ruler of her house. She married Archduke Maximilian in 1477, and her death in 1482 passed the provinces to the House of Habsburg. The inheritance had a notable gap. The Duchy of Burgundy itself had been the original heartland of the family's power. On the death of Mary's father, Charles the Bold, France reabsorbed it. The French crown cited Salic law to justify the claim.

  Most of the remaining provinces were fiefs of the Holy Roman Empire. Two provinces, the County of Flanders and the County of Artois, were French fiefs. That distinction was resolved in 1529, when the Treaty of Cambrai transferred sovereignty over both to the Empire.

  Mary and Maximilian's grandson, Charles V, ruled as Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain. He completed the assembly in 1543, adding the Duchy of Guelders as the last of the seventeen territories. In 1549, he issued a decree giving the collection a legal foundation. It declared that the provinces should remain united and pass to the same heir.

  When Charles abdicated in 1555, his realms were divided. The seventeen provinces went to his son Philip II of Spain. His brother Ferdinand I received the Holy Roman title. Philip II governed the seventeen provinces from 1555 until conflicts with his Dutch subjects erupted into open war in 1568.

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• 3. The Problem of Seventeen

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  The Pragmatic Sanction of 1549 lists fifteen provinces by name. That is two short of the famous number, and the gap reveals how loosely the term 'seventeen' had been applied. Scholars believe the total arose from counting Zutphen and Groningen as separate provinces, rather than as parts of larger units. Others have suggested the number carries Christian symbolism rather than a precise territorial count.

  Charles V's officials applied the word 'province' differently from one document to the next. It named no specific administrative unit in this era. Different chroniclers made sense of the same patchwork of territories in different ways, and modern historians have not settled on a single definitive list.

  The Margraviate of Antwerp illustrates the confusion. Some sources treat it as a full province. Others fold it into the Duchy of Brabant. The Tournaisis appears as a separate province in some records. Other lists group it with Lille, Douai, and Orchies under the label 'Walloon Flanders.' No 16th-century source appears to have actually used that label.

  Contemporary sources disagreed on both the composition and the total number of provinces. The figure seventeen was, as historians note, a rather arbitrary one. It described not a precise administrative structure but a political claim: these territories, however counted, belonged under one sovereign. That claim would be tested when Philip II's governance pushed his subjects too far.

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• 4. War and Division

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  Conflicts between Philip II and his subjects broke into open warfare in 1568. Seven northern provinces eventually declared independence: Groningen, Friesland, Overijssel, Guelders with Zutphen, Utrecht, Holland, and Zeeland. They formed the Seven United Provinces in 1581, the republic that would eventually become the modern Netherlands.

  The Duke of Parma's military and political skill restored Habsburg authority over the southern provinces. Flanders, Brabant, Namur, Hainaut, and Luxembourg all returned to Spanish control. His campaign culminated in the Siege of Antwerp, which ran from 1584 to 1585. Those southern territories became known as the Spanish Netherlands.

  The County of Drenthe sat geographically inside the ring of northern provinces and became part of the new republic in practice. It held no voting rights in the Union of Utrecht, however, and was not officially counted as one of the seven provinces.

  During the war, the northern republic held on to sections of Limburg, Brabant, and Flanders. These were called the Generality Lands. The Eighty Years' War ended with the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648. Artois, along with parts of Flanders and Hainaut, then moved to France over the course of the following century.

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• 5. Cities Won and Lost

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  By the mid-16th century, the Margraviate of Antwerp had become the economic, political, and cultural centre of the Netherlands. It was part of the Duchy of Brabant, and the region's administrative capital had shifted from the Lordship of Mechelen to Brussels.

  Bruges, in the County of Flanders, had already lost its earlier position as northern Europe's commercial engine. Holland was building commercial importance through the 15th and 16th centuries.

  The Sack of Antwerp in 1576 began a sharp reversal of southern prosperity. The closure of the Scheldt river to navigation cut Antwerp from sea trade. Large numbers of people from the southern provinces then moved northward to the new republic. The centre of prosperity shifted from Bruges, Antwerp, Ghent, and Brussels to Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam.

  Amsterdam, The Hague, and Rotterdam absorbed the capital and expertise that the south had lost. The word those northern cities used to describe their country, Netherlands, had once named a much larger territory than the one they occupied.

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• 6. Names That Outlived Borders

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  Nederland, in Dutch, names the current country of the Netherlands. De Nederlanden, in the plural, names the historic domain of Charles V. Dutch speakers have kept those two forms apart. Other languages have not widely adopted the distinction, and English often uses 'the Low Countries' to describe the wider historical area.

  Composers from the 16th century are commonly grouped under the heading 'Dutch School,' the Nederlandse School. That label suited the era in which they worked. Yet those composers were almost exclusively from what is now Belgium. A modern listener hearing 'Dutch School' would likely picture a different country from the one those musicians actually came from.

  The County of Flanders historically covered roughly what are now West Flanders, East Flanders, and French Flanders. In the 19th century, the Dutch-speaking population of Belgium used the name Flanders to describe a larger territory. It was now applied to Dutch-speaking Belgium as a whole. That region contains only part of the old county.

  French Flanders was part of the old county but now belongs to France. Zeelandic Flanders was also part of the county but now lies within the Netherlands. The Belgian province of Flemish Brabant belongs to modern Flanders but was historically part of the Duchy of Brabant. The province of Limburg belongs to modern Flanders but was once part of the Prince-Bishopric of Liège. These layered overlaps explain why East Flanders is not located in the east of present-day Flanders.

  The Belgian province of Antwerp belongs to modern Flanders as well, even though it was historically part of the Duchy of Brabant. The name carries no trace of that history.

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