The Cambridge Modern History. R. Nisbet Bain
and even greater in misfortune. Whatsoever he did had its determined end, and that end was the greatness of France,—or, if the expression be preferred, of the French monarchy. The universal condemnation which he has incurred may be ascribed chiefly to two causes: the unrelenting sternness with which he visited treachery in the great, and the severity of the taxation which he found it necessary to impose. The world was shocked by the fate of Jean d’Armagnac, Jacques de Nemours, Louis de St Pol, Cardinal Balue, and by the cynical methods which achieved their ruin. Looking back without passion, we pronounce their sentence just. The burden of taxes was cruel, and the stories we read in Brantome and elsewhere of lawless and inhuman executions are probably not without foundation. These methods may be supposed to have been required to bring the enormous taxes in. The gabelle. We need not accept the number; the Estates believed many strange tales; but the suggestion is instructive, and helps to explain the legends of apparently meaningless slaughter wrought upon the humble. In the struggle for life and death in which France was engaged those taxes and perhaps those executions saved her; the King’s crimes were national crimes, and national crimes are not to be judged by the standards of domestic morality. The France of Louis XII is the justification of Louis XI.
CHAPTER XIII. THE NETHERLANDS, by Adolphus Ward
WHEN after the catastrophe of Nancy the cautious doubts of Louis XI as to the personal fate of his adversary had at last been set at rest, many of Charles the Hold’s former subjects refused to believe him dead; and from Burgundy to the Flemish communes the rumour ran that he but lay concealed in some sure retreat whence sooner or later he would issue forth in the full blaze of his accustomed grandeur. Some had seen him in Lorraine, others in Germany; others in Portugal, to whose nationality he had laid claim as descending to him from his mother, and in England, of whose throne he had loved to describe himself as the next heir; yet others in Jerusalem, which he and his father had vainly hoped to reach as crusaders, and in Rome. Men of business lent out large sums of money to one another to be repaid on the day of his return, on which strange to say even those fixed their hopes who had previously testified to having seen him dead in the snow and ice of his last battlefield. A delusion was upon them all, says the chronicler Molinet in his bombastic way, like that possessing the Jews who await the coming of the Messiah in Judasa, or the English who expect King Arthur back in their island; but what wonder, he asks, since there never was in the Burgundian dominions a duke more magnificent, more warlike, more terrible than he, the scourge of the rebels, the alarum of Germany, the exterminator of the folk of Liege, and the terror of France? Of so strong and splendid a prince it might indeed seem hard to understand so great a fall. Yet even more difficult to grasp than the fact of his personal overthrow was this other fact, that with him had been pulled down suddenly, and to all seeming irrecoverably, the mightiest and wealthiest monarchy known to the West in the fifteenth century. This vast inheritance, welded together by the policy of his ancestors and above all of his father, and augmented by his own ambition, to which Charles had allowed so many princes to aspire as suitors for his daughter’s hand, he had left to her precarious tenure as a mutilated, dislocated, and disorganised heap of territories. Furthermore, in those centres of civic life, whose mercantile and industrial prosperity had in the Europe of the later Middle Ages been the real source of the importance of the Netherlands and of the Burgundian monarchy, that prosperity was except in certain specially favoured seaports helplessly and hopelessly on the wane; and the great communes which had of old been its most favoured seats, were, in the truthful words of a modern historian, smitten to the heart.
I.
The territories under the dominion of the House of Burgundy, which had formed part of the northern division of ancient Lotharingia, and were known to later political geography as the provinces of the Netherlands, were for the most part acquired by the fortune of marriage and inheritance; but a settled plan of policy had from an early date continuously directed and developed the process of annexation. The inheritance brought by Margaret of Maele to the French prince, who was the founder of the ducal dynasty, included the county of Artois, with its capital of Arras, a city of great mercantile prosperity as early as the thirteenth century, and the whole of Flanders. To the latter on the eastern side Malines (Mechlin) and Antwerp had been yielded by Brabant, and on the south certain Walloon districts, long united with France and including Lille and Douay, had been restored so as likewise to be left to his daughter by the last Count of Flanders of the native line. Without the support of the good towns of Flanders-Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres-Philip the Bold could not have secured the hand of the richest heiress in Europe; and of the political greatness achieved by his dynasty the true foundations are to be sought in the resources of the great communes themselves, with whom it was engaged in perennial conflict, and, in a less degree, of the other towns around them. There is no indication, on the other hand, that even during the Burgundian period agriculture, except perhaps pasture, reached a high level in Flanders; in a considerable proportion of its villages, the inhabitants gained their livelihood by manufacturing industry, the villages aiming at becoming small towns, and the small towns at becoming large in their turn.
Artois and Flanders remained fiefs of the French Crown, although by the Peace of Arras (1435) Philip the Good was relieved for his own person of all obligations of homage to his French overlord. The great acquisitions, which ensued in the course of his long reign, were not altogether due to his own resolution and statecraft. He shared the credit of them with his grandfather and namesake who had induced Joan, heiress of Brabant and aunt to his wife Margaret of Flanders, to designate his second son Anthony as her heir; and who married his daughter, another Margaret, to the future Count William VI of Hainault, Holland, Zeeland, and Friesland. But they could not have been actually accomplished except by the extraordinary strength of will and perseverance displayed by Philip the Good in the course of the long and momentous struggle carried on by Jacqueline of Bavaria for the maintenance of her rights as William VTs heiress.
Philip began the systematic extension of his dominions by the business-like purchase of the county of Namur (Namen) (1422), of which he came into actual possession eight years later by the death of the last female representative of the House of Dampierre. This district was of some consequence by reason of its mining industry, whose products the Meuse carried north, after uniting the waters of the Sambre to its own at the capital. Brabant fell into his hands in 1430 on the death of the young Duke Philip, the brother of Jacqueline’s unhappy husband. To the duchy of Brabant that of Limburg had been annexed (1288), with its chief town of Maestricht, the “higher ford” of the Romans and the residence of many Caroling Kings, over which the Bishop of Liege claimed joint rights of sovereignty with the Dukes of Brabant. Unlike the Flemish Counts these Dukes had consistently remained on friendly terms with their towns, where the patriciate (geslachten) vigorously maintained itself throughout the fourteenth century. Ample and solid liberties were conceded to his towns and nobility by Duke John II in the compact known as the Letter of Cortenberg (1312), enlarged by later charters, and above all, when the accession of Wen-ceslas of Luxemburg offered an irresistible opportunity by the famous Joyeuse Entree (blyde inkomste) (1356), which remained the chief pillar of the liberties of the two united duchies down to the tempestuous times of Philip II of Spain. At the beginning of this century Louvain (Leuven) had still regarded herself as the foremost city of Brabant, mindful of the day when she had numbered a hundred thousand inhabitants, and the cloth-industry and the linen-trade had alike flourished within her walls. Soon, however, though she became the seat of the first Netherlands University (1426), a large emigration set in to Brussels, whither the Court likewise transferred its seat. Here the active lower town, and the residences of the nobility lining the descent from the Castle to St Gudule, together contained all the chief elements in the Brabancon population, while the French tastes and manners introduced together with the use of the French tongue by the new dynasty familiarised its favourite residence with an exotic license of life. But, owing to the decay of the cloth industry early in the century, the democratic ascendency of the trades was short-lived in the capital of Brabant; and, like the great Flemish cities themselves, Brussels, though other industries flourished here, was commercially distanced by Antwerp.
Over Hainault, Holland, Zeeland, and (more or less nominally) Friesland, Philip’s sovereignty was definitively established in 1433, five years after the resistance of Jacqueline had finally collapsed, at the very time when the fury of the Kabeljaauws had risen to fever-pitch against her supporters, the Hoeks; their last