1. The Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries

The boundaries of the Low Countries are geographically ill defined and historically fluid.^[1] Inhabitants of the region today speak languages descended from those heard in Erasmus’s time: Frisian in Friesland, Dutch in the rest of the Netherlands and in northern Belgium, French in southern Belgium, and a form of Low German in Luxemburg. Speakers of Netherlandish and French dialects in the sixteenth century were divided not by territorial borders but by a linguistic frontier that followed the old Roman road from Boulogne to Cologne. That different language communities converged on this area was not without influence in making the region a meeting place for merchants from all over Europe by the late Middle Ages.^[2]

Political unification of the region was attempted more than once but never fully achieved. Between 1384 and 1477 the dukes of Burgundy brought most of the important territories under their control, including the three largely Netherlandish-speaking provinces of Flanders, Brabant, and Holland. But as the last duke lay dying on the field of battle in 1477 he left behind provinces and towns chafing under his hasty centralization.^[3] The new Habsburg dynasty in the person of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor from 1495 to 1519, had to proceed cautiously in lands that he ruled only by right of his late wife (d. 1484), the daughter of the last duke of Burgundy. Maximilian was obliged to treat the distinct institutions of his separate Lowlands territories with respect, and it was in this era that Erasmus grew to manhood. Maximilian’s son, Archduke Philip the Handsome (reigned 1494–1506), was succeeded by his son, best known to history as the emperor Charles V (reigned in the Low Countries 1514–1555). As Charles was mostly absent from his native country, his authority was represented there by his aunt, Margaret of Austria (1506–1514, 1517–1530), and later by his sister, Mary of Hungary (1531–1555). These capable Habsburg women and their advisors made considerable progress in building national institutions.^[4] Still, the people of this nation in process of formation had no proper name for their country, and if they had a collective name for themselves it was “Burgundian,” in honor of the now-vanished dynasty.^[5] Under Charles’s successor, Philip II of Spain, the northern provinces, led by Holland, rebelled against Habsburg state building (1572–1648) and formed themselves into a new nation known to history as the Dutch Republic.

Politically fragmented, the Low Countries counted among Europe’s great powers only at intervals—under the fifteenth-century dukes of Burgundy or during the seventeenth-century era of Dutch naval supremacy. Yet as the patient work of economic and social historians has shown, the people of this region were often at the forefront of major transformations in European history. What defines the Low Countries geographically is the omnipresence of water: the North Sea, from Friesland to the Pas de Calais, and the Zuider Zee (South Sea); the Maas (Meuse), combining with the Scheldt and its tributaries to form a great delta; the Rhine, with branches running into the Zuider Zee, the North Sea, and the Maas delta; and the canals, which since Roman times have facilitated drainage and travel.^[6] By comparison with slow and costly methods of land travel, seas and rivers were the high roads of communication. This “exceptionally favorable geographic position” made the Low Countries in the late Middle Ages, along with northern Italy, “the most densely populated area in the world.” ^[7]

Urbanization is one ready index of social and economic development, and in this respect only northern Italy can be compared with the western Low Countries, especially Flanders and Holland. The great industrial city of Ghent (Flanders), with an estimated 64,000 people in the fourteenth century, was then surpassed in northern Europe only by Paris. In Erasmus’s native Holland urbanization was slower and cities were smaller, but nonetheless in the early sixteenth century a province no larger than the state of Delaware could boast of no fewer than twenty-five walled towns. Calculating the percentage of population living in cities over 10,000, Jan De Vries creates a scale of urbanization for various modern nations in 1550, fourteen years after Erasmus’s death; the highest figures are for Belgium (21 percent), the Netherlands (15.8 percent), and northern Italy (15.1 percent).^[8] If one lowers the threshold to include agglomerations of 5,000 or more, Flanders was 36 percent urban by 1500 and southern Holland, from the north bank of the Maas to the south shore of the Zuider Zee, 54 percent. By this measure Erasmus’s home ground was perhaps the single most urbanized region of Europe.^[9]

Urbanization on such a scale presupposes a flourishing agricultural economy. New land was brought under the plough all over Europe during the High Middle Ages, but in the Low Countries this process was enhanced by the reclamation of land that was waterlogged or even covered by water. From an early date villagers in what later became the County of Holland were cutting parallel drainage ditches into fenlands that rose gently above settled bottomlands, and “Hollanders” are first mentioned in a contract for such work (1117) in northern Germany. Monasteries and noble landlords along the Flanders coast pioneered in the building of sturdy dikes to enclose land under water at high tide, thus creating polders. By 1300 Holland was ringed by a network of sea dikes which ranks as one of the engineering wonders of the medieval world.^[10] Moreover, because of the stimulus that urban markets and urban investment provided to the spread of intensive farming, agricultural productivity continued to improve in the Low Countries during the period ca. 1300–1450 when productivity declined or stagnated elsewhere. If the labor of four peasants was required to feed a town dweller in most of the rest of Europe, here it required only two. Since productivity growth resumed after 1500, following a brief lag, and continued without interruption, Europe’s “Agricultural Revolution” dates in the Low Countries from the sixteenth century, much earlier than in England.^[11]

From about 1300 galley fleets from Venice and Genoa called regularly at Bruges in Flanders; when the north German Hanseatic League established one of its principal depots here, Bruges became the main north European entrepôt for the exchange of goods and the settlement of merchant accounts. Silks and spices from the fabled Asian caravan routes, coming by way of Italy, were traded for the raw products of the Baltic, especially rye and wheat from the Polish plain and (somewhat later) copper from the mines of central Europe. Ships returning to the Baltic also carried the fine woolens in which the great cities of Flanders had long specialized, English woolens finished in Brabant, or, in the sixteenth century, lighter fabrics that came into favor as the old industry declined. By about 1500 Antwerp, in Brabant, had begun to outstrip Bruges as a European entrepôt. It was to Antwerp that the Fuggers and other great merchants of southern Germany brought their copper, and to Antwerp too came factors of the king of Portugal bringing spices from the new sea route from India, where, as it happened, copper could be sold for a premium. Because of far-flung exchanges of this kind, Antwerp, with a population of about 90,000 in 1550, may be considered the first world market. Erasmus Schets, perhaps the greatest merchant-banker of Antwerp, was heavily involved in refinement of copper, bid for the exclusive right to import Portuguese spices, and through his Lisbon contacts launched one of the early sugar mills in Portuguese Brazil. Schets was also an accomplished Latinist, proud to serve as personal banker to his friend Erasmus of Rotterdam.^[12]

The political development of the Low Countries territories was in some respects commensurate with their advanced economy. Representative assemblies are common throughout Latin Christian Europe in the late Middle Ages,^[13] but none met so frequently as the provincial states of the Low Countries and few if any have left such copious documentation for this period.^[14] During the sixteenth century a Habsburg government desperate for funds to fight its wars had to grant the provincial states a growing share of authority in such matters as the collection and disbursement of tax revenues.^[15] There is at least one link between this vigorous tradition of representative government and the precocious economic development of the region: communal and interest-group associations here had long had the habit of managing their own economic affairs, and such habits had political implications. From the late eleventh century owners of land reclaimed from water organized themselves into polder boards that had the power to levy assessments and that were in time only partially brought under the control of the territorial princes. Crafts guilds were common in the southern Netherlands (not in the north), and after about 1300 they were a potent force in the industrial towns of Flanders; even in Brabant, where patrician and merchant interests remained stronger, the craft component or “member” of a sixteenth-century town magistracy could by itself hold up consent to a tax demanded by the central government. Before procedures for gaining subjects’ consent to taxation had developed into unified parliaments or “states” for each province, towns and landowners (noble and non-noble) in this region commonly sent representatives to district meetings where requests for an extraordinary tax had to be approved. There were also ad hoc assemblies of municipalities involved in the same trade, such as the “towns and villages engaged in the herring fishery” in Holland. The burghers who represented their towns at such meetings also had social organizations to mark their own elevated status. Low Countries towns were part of a cultural zone extending into Germany in which prominent burghers formed “shooting guilds,” or honorific militias; they were also part of another cultural zone extending into France in which burghers formed “guilds of rhetoric” for the performance of plays both pious and satirical.^[16] Rather than combating this penchant for corporative organization, the dukes of Burgundy sought to make use of it for their own purposes; they encouraged the formation of a unified parliament or states in each province to simplify consultative procedures and they gathered the great nobles of the region into a ceremonial brotherhood, the Order of the Golden Fleece, sworn to uphold the dynasty.

For the most part the currents of devotion and reform that defined medieval religious history were not of local origin and swept into the Low Countries from France and Germany. Moreover, prior to Philip II’s controversial redrawing of diocesan boundaries in 1559, bishops here were answerable to superiors in France or Germany. It seems too that waves of religious enthusiasm, or religious fear, were in this area tempered by a certain moderation. During the era of Europe’s great witch-hunt (ca. 1450–1650), for example, there were witchcraft trials in the Low Countries but few examples of the witchcraft panics that took place in parts of France, Germany, and Switzerland. But moderation did not mean indifference. In particular, the energy and sophistication of lay society in the Low Countries was visible also in the degree to which laypeople appropriated the devotional practices and the spiritual outlook of the religious orders. From the thirteenth century pious nuns and monks penned Netherlandish treatises on the life of prayer and spiritual perfection, suggesting an audience for such works among devout layfolk (especially women) who could not read Latin. To accommodate the admiration of monastic piety, there were richly illuminated books of hours for ladies of the court and in important urban parishes endowments for choral singing of the zeven getijden, or seven hours of the monastic office. Parishes also had multiple brotherhoods and sisterhoods for specific purposes, such as nursing the sick or honoring the patron saint of the parish. If a special characteristic distinguished Low Countries religious life, it was in the prominence of movements having at least a partly lay character. The Beguines, religious communities of unmarried laywomen, were in the thirteenth century a movement of European scope, but only in this region did they survive the hostile scrutiny of church authorities suspicious of any such groups lacking the discipline of monastic vows; well into the sixteenth century every Low Countries town of any size had its beguinage or begijnhof. The Brothers and Sisters of the Common Life, founded by Gerard Groote (d. 1384), spread mainly through Groote’s native northern Low Countries and adjacent regions of Germany. Like the Beguines, members of these communities remained free to leave and to marry. But many houses converted themselves into religious communities in the more normal sense, adopting either the Franciscan or the Augustinian rule, and the remaining houses of the Brethren developed into communities mainly composed of priests, with a special focus on the spiritual instruction of youth.^[17]

The Low Countries might once again be compared with Italy in terms of the European fame and influence of local artists. To be sure, the international reputation of Low Countries musicians and painters profited from the patronage and prestige of the Burgundian court. The roster of leaders in the new polyphonic music of the fifteenth century includes a cluster of Low Countries composers who spent most of their careers at French or Italian courts. As for painting, the brothers Jan and Hubert van Eyck, pioneers in the ars nova with its stunning realism of detail, never left their native region, but what Italians called il dipingere di Fiandra soon commanded a good deal of interest in foreign art markets; in the next century, at least by the 1540s, Netherlands paintings were being exported to Spain by the crate.^[18] The sculptor Klaas Sluter, another creator of the ars nova and a contemporary of the Van Eycks, had no successors of comparable talent. But the elaborately carved polychrome wooden altarpiece, or retable, originating in the southern Netherlands around 1400, soon developed here a distinctive plasticity of form, and by 1500 retables too were an important export item. Save for Jan Borremans of Brussels, whose work can be found in places like Sweden and Estonia, no individual artist stands out. Rather, retables were known by the distinctive styles of the Brabant towns where they were mainly produced (Antwerp, Brussels, and Mechelen). Guilds of sculptors, cabinetmakers, and painters collaborated in the production of retables, and, in a form of quality control well known in other industries, guild masters affixed their trademark to each finished piece. After about 1480 the production of fine tapestries—yet another artistic export—was centered in Brussels and came under the stylistic influence of contemporary retables.^[19]

In sum, corporative organization was the law of life in this highly urbanized society. In a sense the starting point for this conception of social order was the extended family. As elsewhere in Europe, people high and low depended on “kith and kin” (vrienden en magen) for protection and advancement.^[20] It was also a widespread European practice for people to band together at all levels to defend themselves against common foes and to further common economic interests, creating as it were an artificial family.^[21] Any society whose basic building blocks were the extended family and the sworn association, as was certainly true for the Low Countries, must be deemed “medieval” rather than “modern” in its principles of organization. Must we conclude, then, that the society in which Erasmus grew up was destined to decline, making way for modernity? Johan Huizinga’s Waning of the Middle Ages, still the most influential historical portrait of the Burgundian Netherlands, treats the late bloom of medieval ideals and institutions here as “overripe” and incapable of withstanding a challenge from the truly innovative spirit of the Italian Renaissance. Yet the question of what constitutes modernity has no simple answer. Huizinga’s argument holds up best in the case of religious literature, where subsequent and more thorough studies have found for the same period a widespread intensification of religious guilt, coupled with a timidity and anxiety in light of which the rebellious reaction of an Erasmus (or a Luther) is more readily comprehensible.^[22] But the case is not the same for aristocratic culture, not even for the ponderously ceremonious etiquette of the Burgundian court. We cannot, for example, dismiss as outdated and artificial an institution so useful to rulers as the Knights of the Golden Fleece.^[23] Guilds have likewise been found to have more vitality than was formerly thought, and even where guilds were not permitted, the impulse for collective solidarity could take other and equally impressive forms: it was precisely in the guild-free new industrial towns of Flanders that craftsmen formed the backbone for Calvinist or Anabaptist churches that flourished in the teeth of persecution by the Habsburg state. When the Dutch Revolt broke out not many years later, the rebellion was principally justified in the name of the cherished privileges or “liberties” that had always been a rallying point for local solidarity.^[24] Thus Burgundian culture was not about to collapse from its own weight and complexity; indeed the Low Countries pattern of continuous innovation within a traditional corporate framework turned out to have a promising future.

To come finally to learned literature in Latin, the aspect of Low Countries culture that bears most immediately on Erasmus’s intellectual formation, the traditional framework is here more in evidence than are any signs of innovation. The university of Leuven (Louvain), founded in 1427, was for some time under the shadow of its models, Paris and Cologne. The curriculum was dominated by scholastic logic and by a Latin that in the judgment of neo-Latin literature scholar Jozef IJsewijn had considerably declined from the achievements of medieval authors of earlier centuries; only occasionally did a professor of arts or theology show an interest in the new (Italian) humanist emphasis on classical Latin. The Brethren of the Common Life had scriptoria for copying manuscripts and often maintained a domus pauperum for poor boys enrolled in the town school, in order to encourage religious vocations. But the devotional treatises of the Brethren tended to be severely practical, discouraging intellectual curiosity as a form of sinful pride. By default, then, until the end of the fifteenth century monasteries were the main centers of a nascent humanist movement. The Premonstratensian abbey of Parc, outside Leuven, built a library rich in Italian humanist manuscripts, where Erasmus was to find Lorenzo Valla’s unpublished work on the New Testament, the Adnotationes (see chapter 6 below). The Cistercian abbey of Adwerth in Friesland was the meeting place for a circle of scholars that included Wessel Gansfort, a reformist theologian, and Rudolph Agricola (d. 1485), the earliest Low Countries humanist of any distinction, who felt more at home in Italy than in his native land. In Holland the most interesting early humanists were to be found in monasteries of Augustinian Canons Regular: Cornelis Gerard at Hemsdonk, near Schoonhoven, and at Steyn, near Gouda, Willem Hermans—and Erasmus of Rotterdam. This was a milieu in which the new humanist learning was understood mainly as an ornament to the study of theology.^[25] One certainly would not expect this milieu to produce a young man—the same Erasmus—whose goal was an intellectual revolution.

Notes