by Simon Winder
His most valuable provinces were Holland, Brabant and Flanders, the most densely urban part of Europe, and he worked to accumulate other provinces around them – taking over Utrecht in 1527–8, conquering Gelderland in 1543 and, by giving this whole block of territory its own identity as the ‘Burgundian Circle’ within the Empire, unwittingly creating the basis for its later independence. His long-suffering sister Mary of Hungary, who ruled the Habsburg Netherlands in Brussels after her aunt Margaret died, was always having to organize another whip-round for troops and cash, cutting back thriftily on her tapestry purchases only to get a letter from Charles announcing a fun new plan to invade North Africa. Antwerp became the key port linking the Baltic trade to the Mediterranean, taking over from Bruges as the furthest point reachable by Italian galleys (with Anabaptists the increasingly fashionable choice as rowing slaves). The pace of change was extraordinary. For example, Portuguese ships from the Moluccas would now arrive in Antwerp to sell their cargo of spice and then buy copper from Carpathian mines which had been shipped up the Vistula and across the Baltic, which would then be sold in Indian ports en route to the Moluccas again. The sums of money were enormous and their sources glamorous, but irregular and tending to melt away before they got to Charles. Indignities were always lurking. On one ceremonial trip to Speyer his mounted bodyguard simply refused to move until their arrears were paid and several of his huge ‘enterprises’ went completely wrong, both through money bottlenecks and woeful planning.
By the time he had spent years of action and adventure in various foreign parts, Protestantism was simply too well dug in. He had spent too long ignoring priests who urged him to treat the Protestants as Charlemagne had treated the Saxons: i.e., not well. Following past form, nobody was going to be so stupid as to take on the Swiss, but in the 1540s Charles at last attacked the Schmalkaldic League, an association of proselytizing German territories, allied with France. The League was easily defeated, but there was no serious means any more to dismantle Protestantism and the patchwork religious structure of the Empire was enshrined in agreements that left the Rhine, for example, an absurd theological grille mixte.
In their treacherous dealings with France, the Schmalkaldic League had offered a fatal bribe: the territories of ‘the Three Bishoprics’ (Metz, Tull and Wirten), clearly part of the Empire, but now swallowed by the French and becoming Metz (but pronounced Mess to make it sound less German), Toul and Verdun. Charles vowed to get them back and laid siege to Metz in October 1552, late in the season and against all advice. Thousands of his troops were killed by dysentery, typhus and scurvy. In a further instance of his oddness, he remarked to the Duke of Alva, who was standing next to him, that all these dead troops were like mere grasshoppers or caterpillars ‘which eat the buds and other good things of the earth’. He felt that ‘if they were men of worth they would not be in [my] camp for [a pitiable] six livres a month’. He wearily lifted the siege in January, almost exactly seventy-six years after the traumatized remnants of Charles the Bold’s army had stood on Metz’s frozen moat pleading to be let in. Exhausted, ill and run ragged, Charles began to consider retirement, a gaunt, battered figure no longer recognizable as the slightly plump, complacent man in the Freiburg stained-glass window. He would leave his boggling piles of debt and religiously mayhemic western empire to his son Philip II and, as it turned out, to the Duke of Alva, who would soon find himself converted from a tough and thoughtful general into one of the greatest of all monsters in the Protestant bestiary.
The Oranges
I had been noodling around online to find out more about Louis II of Chalon-Arlay, victor in 1430 of the Battle of Anthon, which I mention briefly in the introduction – at which a fleeing Burgundian was entombed inside a tree. It is very easy to become a lost soul once plunged into these electronic realms. Too much emphasis has been given to the internet’s degradation of life through the access it gives to porn and human horrors, and too little to its fearful role in genealogical tables. It used to be a tortuous and demanding process to trace family trees, let alone find out interesting information. But now there are websites – created through the tireless labour of various anonymous sociopathic dungeon-masters – into which it is possible simply to disappear. The entire course of European history, across a near infinity of noble and royal families, can now be traced up, down and side to side, from the early Middle Ages to the present. The sheer richness of information and the way it proliferates like dandelion seeds (‘Oh dear God they had sixteen children’) gives it the compulsive flavour of Tetris or Super Mario, with Mario’s challenges taking on much of the same flavour as the ins and outs of, for instance, the Princes of Salm-Salm.
Louis of Chalon-Arlay was a typically truculent semi-important ruler who exemplified the way that the borders between Burgundy and France were in a near-permanent state of crumbling. This could weaken either France or Burgundy – but it also created a zone in which figures such as Louis could thrive for a while, whose allegiances could move back and forth between the two super-powers from his own modest power-base in the Franche-Comté. I was interested in him because he was not only Lord of Chalon-Arlay, but also Prince of Orange. How did this title, so closely associated with the Netherlands, move from the hot, dusty world of the French south-east to the altogether soggier landscapes on the North Sea?
The Lords of Chalon-Arlay emerged from the aftermath of the fragmentation of the old Kingdom of Arles. They had the happy luck of many small rulers in having one terrific source of revenue – in this case the major salt works at Salins – as well as a series of castles and towns scattered through the Franche-Comté. Their formidable-sounding founder, John, lived through a huge chunk of the thirteenth century producing industrial numbers of heirs and a dynasty that safely made it through the following century, all its men seemingly named Hugh or John. The enjoyably named Baux-Orange family were less fecund and had run out. Their last member, Marie, married John III of Chalon-Arlay in 1396, splicing her territories with the Chalon-Arlay family, and making her husband John I of Orange, just a tiny principality of a hundred square miles or so in the south of France, but a principality nonetheless, carrying the rank that came with it. Their son was the same turbulent (or truculent) Louis of Chalon-Arlay, who enjoyed himself switching back and forth between the increasingly annoyed French and Burgundians.
Louis’s son William then took over, then William’s son John. John IV of Chalon-Arlay, who lived through the second half of the fifteenth century, became near-fatally entangled in the revival of the French monarchy under Louis XI and the related implosion of Burgundy. The nadir of his existence was probably being defeated while fighting in Brittany, pretending to be dead on the battlefield and then being unfortunately recognized. It is one of the problems with history that we have no means by which we can measure the perhaps permanent loss of self-esteem generated on such occasions. He had one son, Philibert, but now the sequence of luck which had taken the House of Chalon-Arlay through sons or at worst nephews from 1237 to 1530 (an amazing run) ended. Philibert, aside from being shackled with a borderline comic name, was a leading commander in the chaotic and discreditable Italian Wars of the 1520s, taking part in the Sack of Rome and being killed at the subsequent, ruinous Siege of Florence. His death would have ended the dynasty but fortunately he had a sister, Claudia, who had herself died very young, some years before Philibert, but not before marrying Count Henry III of Nassau-Dillenburg-Dietz and giving birth to one son: René. Claudia’s marriage linked the quite separate Chalon-Arlay family into the Counts of Nassau – with Henry, as Lord of Breda, initiating the tombs in the Great Church there, including a sculptural marvel, the memorial to his uncle and predecessor Engelbert II. René inherited on the condition that he pretended to be a Chalon-Arlay, even though he was strictly (i.e. actually) a dynastic member of the Nassau family.
This is really just an opportunity to celebrate my own ignorance – but this René of Chalon-Arlay, to my delight and surprise, turns out to be the sam
e man who is commemorated in Bar-le-Duc by Ligier Richier’s astounding Flayed Man monument.1 The Flayed Man is mysterious in all kinds of ways – but it marks the end of the danse macabre tradition, just as Engelbert II’s tomb is squarely Renaissance and new. René’s death also marks the end of the house of Chalon-Arlay. René only had a daughter and she died shortly after she was born. He was killed aged twenty-five while commanding an army for the Emperor Charles V (as had Philibert only fourteen years before). The Emperor was at his commander’s side as René lay dying, an honour of sorts but also a basis for some posthumous bitter laughter, given René’s successors’ undying enmity towards Charles’s successors. Unknown to anybody present, one of the great wobbles in European history had just happened. As the last member of his dynasty, René left all his titles and lands to his father’s brother’s son, the young William of Nassau, on the condition that he be raised a Catholic (his family had become Lutheran). The Emperor promised to look after William until he reached his majority. In scenes reminiscent of the end of a Star Wars movie, William is taken under the imperial wing, inheriting René’s lands (and therefore becoming Prince William of Orange, soon to be more familiarly known as William the Silent), the rich Nassau territories in Germany and vast expanses of the Netherlands. Once grown up he would proceed to rip apart the Habsburg Empire, create what became a new independent state and found the same Dutch royal family that is still in charge in 2019.
And that is the reason that the Netherlands national football team today play wearing an orange shirt.
Rebellion
Tournai is a gift that just goes on giving – endlessly interesting, with museums packed with curiosities left behind by wave after wave of emperors, artists and generals. A French enclave wedged between Flanders and Hainaut, Tournai’s territory (the Tournaisis) was only finally conquered by Charles V in 1521 and became part of the Spanish Netherlands. Oddly therefore its great status in early Netherlandish painting, home of both Robert Campin and his pupil Rogier van der Weyden, was as part of France. The stuff it still has though! Just one example: a set of immaculately maintained vestments owned by Thomas Becket and sent to a monastery, with which he had close links, as a keepsake after his murder. Sadly the town’s rich historical compost would ultimately allow to flower one of the worst painters of the nineteenth century (a proud claim in a crowded field): Louis Gallait. Gallait created many terrible pictures, with titles such as Tasso in Prison and A Monk Feeding the Poor, but he was a favourite son of Tournai and has a suitably terrible commemorative statue in the centre of town. What I did not realize was that the small but wonderful Musée des Beaux Arts in Tournai is the last resting place for his gigantic painting The Abdication of Charles V, as big as the side of a double-decker bus, but with only a fraction of the bus’s aesthetic pleasure.
The painting is often reproduced, as all the contemporary records of Charles’s abdication are unsatisfactorily banal – one engraving just shows him standing there before a skimpy little audience, as though he is giving a lecture on some minor but embarrassing aspect of public health. Gallait’s painting though, being so sprawling, murky and cluttered, is almost unreadable in shrunken, book reproduction and needs its vast scale. However ham-fisted the treatment, it does dramatize, in an acceptably Verdi-esque way, one of the supreme moments in the history of the Low Countries, with any of the dozens of painted figures seemingly on the verge of breaking into impassioned song. Here in Brussels is the palsied Charles V, leaning on the shoulder of his young protégé William of Orange as he blesses his only legitimate son and successor, Prince Philip. Looking on from a matching throne is the austere figure of Mary of Hungary, Charles’s sister and long-time ruler of the Netherlands, who had herself just resigned. In the audience, with varying degrees of historical accuracy, is a guest list of future actors in the disasters that would unfold across the Netherlands: the Counts of Hoorn and Egmont, Granvelle, Alva, Philippe de Croÿ. There too is the young Maria of Austria, Charles’s daughter, whose extraordinary future life would entangle her in the politics of much of Europe, with the survivors of her sixteen children defining the later sixteenth century.
Actually, even writing this makes it clear that it is a bit graceless to laugh at Gallait’s painting – it may not be very good, but it is a lot better than his egregious and equally vast The Plague of Tournai in 1095 on the opposite wall about which I would simply rather not elaborate. The virtue of his Abdication is that it does enshrine a moment of exceptional drama. Here, in 1555, is perhaps the most powerful man of the sixteenth century voluntarily surrendering power and retiring to spend the rest of his life in a monastery. The following year he will split his lands, among other things handing over the Holy Roman Empire to his younger brother Ferdinand, and the Spanish Empire to his son Philip. For the Low Countries the implications of this were simply staggering. It marked what proved to be the end of a great era: Charles V was born in Ghent, Mary in Brussels; their father Philip I was born in Bruges; Philip’s mother, Mary of Burgundy, was also born in Brussels. Like the Carolingians, they were basically Belgian. Even in retirement at his Spanish monastery, Charles would drink beer, to the horror of his Italian doctors. Prince Philip, however, was born in Spain – he and his descendants would rule from his newly founded imperial capital of Madrid.
Charles’s decision to tie the Netherlands inheritance to Spain was an eccentric one and led to untold misery. It would result in an eight-decade-long war between elements in the provinces and the rest of the Spanish empire, fighting broken only by a single long truce. Most of the seventeen provinces were part of the Holy Roman Empire and therefore on the face of it part of Ferdinand’s new responsibility. Vienna was a long way off and Ferdinand distracted by possible Turkish annihilation, but then Madrid was hardly close by either. Charles had roped off the provinces by making them a separate ‘Burgundian circle’ (the empire was split into circles – blocks of territory mixing smaller and bigger for mutual defence) and, through the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549, made them indivisible. Perhaps the best explanation is a Burgundian one – that Charles saw these western lands (including the separate Franche-Comté) as part of a specific dynastic drama associated with his father and with Castile. The provinces’ wobbly identity can be seen in many of the figures scattered across Gallait’s painting – Granvelle was from the Franche-Comté and became Bishop of Arras, a thoroughly urgundian figure; William the Silent was from Nassau-Dillenburg; Egmont had married into the Palatinate-Simmern family – only Hoorn is thoroughly Dutch. The process by which the inhabitants of the Burgundian Circle would decide on their loyalties, religion, form of government, language even, would be a nightmarish one that lasted in some ways for over eighty years, but in other ways has continued to be played out ever since.
Philip left for Spain in 1559, saying farewell to his northern inheritance at the port of Vlissingen, never to return. His son, Philip III, and his grandson, Philip IV, would also never visit, although the last of these men would finally see the end of the rebellion. One problem came from the sheer wealth of the Netherlands. Antwerp was one of Europe’s greatest ports and countless well-run small and medium towns churned out everything an empire needed, from battleships to sewing-needles. It is customary to show a map of Charles’s global empire to give a sense of how massive it was – but much of this was an illusion. The Philippines (named for Philip while he was still a prince) are always coloured in as Spanish, but consisted of one or two small stockades filled with glassy-eyed fever-victims, clutching rosaries and rusty cutlasses and cursing their careers advisers. The same applied to South America, on which only a few, small, genuinely Spanish-coloured dabs should be coloured in. My favourite film, Herzog’s Aguirre, The Wrath of God, gets this perfectly – the conquistadors as an insane, dwindling band of fantasists on a raft filled with monkeys. Southern Italy was always a curse for whoever ruled it, with the hope that in a good year enough tax would be shaken out of it just to cover its garrison costs. Of course, immense piles of money
were coming out of South America with countless tons to come – but for a monarch building, scheming and praying in Madrid, the Netherlands was by a long way the most reliably taxable and sophisticated part of his entire inheritance and Philip required its obedience.
The accident of the spread of Calvinism gave an eventual focus for the rebellion against Spanish high-handedness and provoked some of Philip’s most unfortunate decision-making (e.g. ‘The Council of Blood’, which suppressed heresy and treason by executing hundreds) – but there were loads of sincere Catholics who were also anti-Spanish. The process by which seven of the seventeen provinces broke off to become the Kingdom of the Netherlands was a side effect of the high-water mark of Spanish success in the other ten provinces, with innumerable dramas and horrors in cities such as Antwerp or Ostend, which ended up in the Spanish Netherlands entirely against their will. Brabant ended up torn in half, with the north (Breda, ’s-Hertogenbosch) in Dutch hands and the south (Brussels, Leuven) in Spanish. Almost every town has a monument to the months when it suddenly became the focus of innumerable hopes and fears, heroism and disaster.
The density of the towns and the era’s military technology stretched the war over generations. A Dutch master-carpenter fighting in Brielle in 1572 broke a sluice with his axe and unleashed what would become the default, unbelievably enraging (for the Spanish) tactic of simply flooding huge areas of land. I had always assumed this was just a reckless throw, with the water engulfing everything, but it had its own art, with the water ideally controlled to be deep enough to be impossible to wade through (and filled with hidden ditches, spikes, etc.) but shallow enough to ground larger boats. Cities bristled with ingenious defences – not just walls and moats but immense thorn hedges (the Twelve Years Truce from 1609 was filled by what were effectively military gardeners maturing these). Maastricht defended itself with some thirty thousand six-foot wooden spikes. Sieges soaked up besiegers, with thousands of men spending months being rained on and convulsing with dysentery. Each epic needed astonishing efforts. The Duke of Parma’s Siege of Antwerp required building eight miles of canal and a gigantic fortified bridge to block the entire width of the Scheldt.
