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Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 119 (2004)

Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden. Deel 119

(2004)– [tijdschrift] Bijdragen en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap–rechtenstatus Auteursrechtelijk beschermd

Vorige Volgende

The Elusive Netherlands. The question of national identity in the Early Modern Low Countries on the Eve of the Revolt1
Alastair Duke

When in the Comedy of Errors Dromio of Syracuse compares the ghastly fat kitchenwench, whom he's thinking of marrying, to ‘a globe’, on which he ‘could find out countries in her’, his master Antipholus demands particulars. Having asked him to locate on the anatomy of this female atlas Ireland, Scotland, France, England, Spain and the Americas, Antipholus concludes his inquisition by enquiring, ‘Where stood Belgia, the Netherlands?’ to which the slave replies, ‘O sir! I did not look so low.’2 Antipholus' question was, of course, mischievous, intended simply to produce a good belly laugh from the groundlings, yet it deserves more serious consideration for uncertainty enveloped the early modern Low Countries.3 Erasmus once jested that because of where he was born, he did not know whether he was ‘Gallus’ or ‘Germanus’; on that account he could be considered as two-headed, ‘anceps’,4 and he was not alone in his agnosticism.

The obstacles to the construction of a durable and comprehensive national identity for the early modern Low Countries were formidable. In the first place, the Burgundian- Habsburg state was a dynastic state ‘par excellence’: the Burgundian dukes had put it together piecemeal and though they had created central institutions, the autonomy of the individual provinces was protected by extensive and distinctive privileges. Nor were the provinces themselves cohesive political units. It was, for example, only in the late fifteenth century that the States of Holland became a representative body with which the ruler could do business.5 Moreover insofar as the prince owed fealty to the king of France and to the Empire and his subjects could appeal to ‘foreign’ courts, his position as the fount of justice was notionally compromised.

The identity of the Low Countries was also muddied by contemporary debates about the correspondence between ‘Gallia’ and France and between ‘Germania’ and

‘Deutschland’. In Antiquity the Rhine had separated Roman Gaul from ‘Germania Magna’, and the memory of that boundary survived into the sixteenth century, perpetuated by cartographers, who took Ptolemy as their guide. When French scholars claimed that the mantle of ancient Gaul had fallen on contemporary France,6 patriotic German humanists riposted by defining ‘Deutschland’ in cultural terms, as the lands where the German language was spoken, thus staking a claim to those west of the Rhine. The blurring between the Holy Roman Empire and ‘Deutschland’ also had repercussions for the Low Countries. If the Dutch-speaking region could readily be reckoned to the ‘deutsche Landen’, the position of provinces like Namur and Hainaut, which indisputably belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, was far from clear. Language provided a plausible basis for the construction of nationality in late medieval England,7 but it was especially unhelpful in the case of the Low Countries, which sat astride the Romance-Germanic linguistic fault line.

It is then scarcely surprising that the Habsburg Low Countries failed to develop a robust national identity. Nevertheless the state-building of Charles V and the regency government in Brussels, in combination with a humanist patriotic rhetoric, ensured that by the eve of the Revolt the profile of the country and its inhabitants had become sharper, or at least less elusive. Ironically, one important element of Habsburg policy, namely the preservation of religious uniformity, provoked the first countrywide protest with the formation of the Compromise of the Nobility. At the same time, anxieties about the Spanish Inquisition, the misconduct of Spanish soldiers and sensitivities among the native high nobility, who felt excluded from the seat of power, sowed the seeds of mistrust between Spain and the Low Countries.

I

The nomenclature for the Low Countries provides the most obvious sign of the region's relatively weak sense of identity. Instead of a single specific name for the country or its inhabitants, there was a surfeit of descriptions.8 By the 1560s anyone wishing to refer to the Low Countries was apparently spoilt for choice, for the eight basic options might be supplemented by combining names.9 Yet not one name was entirely

satisfactory. Some only had a limited circulation, others were ambiguous, and yet others contentious. Nor were they easy to use. With few exceptions, they did not come trippingly off the tongue and occasionally the ‘country name’ failed to supply matching adjectives to describe the inhabitants or their cultures.

Not surprisingly foreigners were baffled. So when the Leuven theologian Johannes Molanus (1533-1585) addressed his Natales Sanctorum Belgii to an international readership, he felt impelled to explain that ‘Belgium’ had become a synonym for ‘Germania inferior’, though Italians and other foreigners preferred ‘Flandria’.10 Likewise, when the Florentine Ludovico Guicciardini published his Italian chorography of the Low Countries in 1567, he tried in his introduction to dispel some of the semantic confusion.11 The English shared this puzzlement. In the fifteenth and in the first half of the sixteenth century they lumped aliens from the Germanic lands indiscriminately together as ‘Flemings’, ‘Theotonici’, ‘Doch’ or ‘Germani’.12 In the later 1560s many hundreds of mainly Protestant immigrants from the Low Countries took refuge in south-east England, and in particular London.13 This latest influx gave rise to several surveys of foreigners, who were classified on the basis of political allegiance, language and culture into nine or ten ‘national’ groupings. About threequarters of all the strangers found in London in 1568 and 1571 were categorised as ‘Dutch’,14 irrespective of whether they hailed from Antwerp, Königsberg, or Nuremberg.15 Before 1560 more immigrants from the Low Countries had come from

what was later to be the territories of the future United Provinces than from those of the subsequent Spanish Netherlands. This pattern changed in Elizabeth's reign when the immigrants came overwhelmingly from the southern provinces, and included a fair number of Walloons, who were usually also counted as ‘Douch’.16 Significantly, apart from a half-hearted attempt in May 1571 to classify strangers from the Habsburg Low Countries, whether Walloons or Dutch speakers, as ‘Burgundians’, the English officials did not treat the aliens from this region as a distinct ‘nation’.17 Whereas they recognised the border between France and the Low Countries, or rather between France and the Holy Roman Empire, aliens from, say, ‘High Douch land’, Friesland, and Cambrai were all seen as ‘Douchemen’ from the Holy Roman Empire.

Official Names

After the Burgundian dukes acquired lands in the Low Countries, they were forever travelling between their various territorial possessions and Paris. As feudal overlords the dukes naturally looked on all their lands as ‘noz pays’, and they therefore specified the region to which they wanted to send instructions by reference to where they were at the time of writing. If they were present in those territories, these became ‘noz pays de par deҫà’ or, if they were outside, as ‘noz pays de par delà’ and the Habsburgs continued to use this colourless formula as they moved around their scattered possessions.18 Though ‘landen van herwarts over’ eventually functioned as a synonym for the Low Countries,19 it failed to generate names for either the inhabitants or their cultures and it fell into disuse in the later sixteenth century. And that other dynastic term, ‘nos pays patrimoniaux’, which also gave no clue to the country's identity, beyond the matter of lordship, was no less unwieldy.

If this clumsy terminology were largely confined to the prince and his administration,20 a third dynastic description, ‘Burgundy,’ was more ‘user-friendly’. Despite, or perhaps in compensation for, the loss of the duchy of Burgundy in 1477,21 the first Habsburg rulers, including the young archduke Charles, continued to assert the links between the houses of Burgundy and Austria. But as Charles V became increasingly preoccupied with the defence of Catholic Christendom against the Turks and the Protestants, and with countering Valois ambitions in Italy, the recovery of the Burgundian homeland ceased to be a priority, and in 1544 the emperor allowed his territorial claim to the duchy to lapse.22 The identification of ‘Burgundy’ with the Low Countries did not however immediately cease. Natives from these parts were, as we have observed, still occasionally known as ‘Burgundians’ in Elizabethan England,23 while the membership of the Spanish Netherlands in the ‘circulus Burgundicus’ perpetuated the association for the duration of the Holy Roman Empire. Within the Low Countries the memory of ‘Burgundy’ survived most strongly in military circles: soldiers and civic militias continued to march behind banners incorporating motifs from the Burgundian flag, the red and white cross raguly of St. Andrew, well into the seventeenth century,24 martial songs encouraged ‘Bourgoensche herten’,25 while on the battlefield the cry remained ‘Vive Bourgogne’. For this reason troops from the Low Countries were known to friend and foe alike as ‘Burgundians’.26

Elsewhere, however, ‘Burgundy’ slowly lost its relevance as the Low Countries drifted to the periphery of the Habsburg ‘multiple monarchy’.27 Not only was Charles a largely absentee ruler, but by admitting so many stranger knights to the Burgundian Order of the Golden Fleece, he diluted the special relationship between the ruling dynasty and the high nobility of the Low Countries.28 Charles needed a cosmopolitan and imperial iconography to convey Gattinara's plans for a ‘world monarchy’ and his humanist emblem of the Pillars of Hercules with its ambitious yet faintly enigmatic ‘Plus Ultra’ motto better served his imperial purposes than the defiant Burgundian devices of the fire-steel and flint stone.29 Margaret of Austria tried to resist these changes; shortly before her death she added a codicil to her will in which she pleaded that Franche-Comté and the Low Countries be united ‘pour non abolir ce nom de la Maison de Bourgogne’,30 but it was in vain. An emperor who was crowned by the pope at Bologna and whose most famous victories were won as far afield as Pavia, Tunis and Mühlberg had clearly outgrown ‘Burgundy’.31

Literary Names

For scholars and clerics who wrote in Latin ‘Gallia Belgica’, ‘Germania inferior’ and ‘Belgium’/‘Belgica’ became the synonyms of choice for the Low Countries. In the early sixteenth century the maps from Ptolemy's much reprinted Geography still shaped the way contemporaries viewed Europe, though this was soon to change. The memory of ‘Gallia Belgica’, one of the three parts of Caesar's Gaul, survived the middle ages, though the defective and conflicting testimonies of writers from the fifth century onwards cast doubt as to its precise location.32 According to the Ptolemaic tradition ‘Gallia Belgica’ was bounded by the Rhine, the Seine and the ‘Britannicus

Oceanus’,33 and in the fifteenth century this name was applied to the Burgundian lands. Yet the match between this ‘Gallia Belgica’ and the possessions of the Burgundian dukes was very imperfect for the former included a large slice of what was indubitably France. The late fifteenth-century Burgundian jurist, Jean d'Auffay, therefore redefined it as those ‘parties de Gaule hors les metes du royaume de France.’ This slimmed down ‘Gallia Belgica’ comprised the Lower Rhine and Lorraine as well as the Burgundian Low Countries; as such it recalled the ancient kingdom of Lotharingia.34 Hopes of resurrecting the Middle Kingdom might have inspired Charles the Bold, but such fantasies lost their appeal after 1477. Ludovico Guicciardini tackled the question quite dispassionately. What had once been ‘Gallia Belgica’, he tells us, was now shared between Philip II, the king of France, and sundry dukes and princebishops in the Lower Rhine, though Philip, of course, ruled ‘het edelste deel’.35

If ‘Gallia Belgica’ associated the Low Countries with romanized ‘Gallia’, ‘Germania inferior’ potentially opened up quite different perspectives. During the middle ages the Church had given the name of the former Roman frontier province of ‘Germania inferior’, whose headquarters had been at Cologne, to the territories of the Low Countries. The name was confusing insofar as this Roman province had in fact belonged to ‘Gallia’: ‘Germania Magna’, as the non-Romanized part was known, began on the eastern side of the Rhine. But in the early modern period German humanists equated Germany with the entire Germanic-speaking Holy Roman Empire, the ‘Heilige Romische Reich teutscher Nation’.36 From within this ‘Deutschland’, as Ulrich von Hutten called the German lands, two ill-defined, yet culturally distinctive, regions emerged, known as ‘Germania superior’ or the ‘Oberlandt’ and ‘Germania inferior’, called according to the local vernacular, ‘Nider teutschelant’, ‘Nederduytslant’ or ‘Niderlant’,37 In the Lower Rhine the notion of some such boundary, at

least on the west bank of the river, may have preserved the memory of the original Roman provinces, but even here opinions differed as to whether Cologne belonged to the ‘over’ or ‘nederland’.38 In their vernacular guise, these names drew attention to linguistic differences among Germanic speakers, to which we shall shortly return.

Guicciardini, like Erasmus, acknowledged that opinions differed as to whether the Low Countries formed part of ‘Germania’ or ‘Gallia’. The Florentine knew the country he was describing was commonly called ‘Germania inferiore o Alamagna Bassa’ - indeed this alternative name appeared in the title of his chorography - but out of deference for the Ancients,39 he preferred to assign the Low Countries, apart from Friesland, to ‘Gallia’.40 Yet, as he said, when he was writing in the 1560s, many of his contemporaries, including Gemma Frisius, thought of the Low Countries as belonging to ‘Alamagna Bassa’ because the language spoken by most of the inhabitants as well as their customs and laws closely resembled those of the High Germans.41 In constructing the identity of their country these ‘moderns’ gave more weight to cultural factors than to the authority of Caesar and Ptolemy, and for that reason, they reckoned the Low Countries to the ‘deutsche landen’, even though this left the Walloon provinces in limbo.

In the middle ages the inhabitants of the Low Countries had often been called ‘Belgii’ or ‘Belgae’, but it was only towards the middle of the sixteenth century that ‘Belgium’ and ‘Belgica’ appeared as synonyms for ‘Gallia Belgica’.42 ‘Belgica’ marks a transitional stage in the metamorphosis of the region as it became slowly disentangled from ‘Gallia’ and ‘Germania’. But scarcely had the ‘Lady Belge’, as the poet Edmund

Spenser later called her, made her debut, than the slowly emerging national unity she represented began to disintegrate in the Revolt. Tutelary female figures had long personified the towns, and, more recently, the provinces, but visual representations of the national icon did not appear until the 1570s, and then only intermittently, when the rebel propagandists deployed ‘Belgica’ as the hapless victim of Spanish tyranny.43

In the mid-1560s a new name - the ‘XVII Nederlanden’ - suddenly emerged.44 Historians still argue whether the ‘seventeen’ here refers to the prince's feudal titles or the tally of individual provinces, for the two do not exactly coincide. Probably the titles came first, but the emphasis shifted over time to the territories.45 Almost a century ago Huizinga pointed out that late medieval authors used the number seventeen when they wanted to signify any large, but credible number, and had indeed already applied it in this sense to the lands of the Burgundian dukes.46 As ‘seventeen’ apparently retained this significance in the early modern period,47 it seems reasonable to interpret the ‘XVII Nederlanden’ symbolically, rather than to expect a precise constitutional explanation.

In 1548 a new Burgundian Circle was established, made up of five duchies, eight countships, one margraviate and nine lordships, in all twenty-three titles.48 Five of these, however, concerned lands or titles, which were either clearly outside the Low Countries, or subsumed in larger entities.49 Of the remaining eighteen, question marks

hung over two, namely the honorific titles of the ‘herzogtumb Lottrich’ and the ‘marggrafschat des heiligen Reichs’. If one or other of these were dropped, then the significant and memorable title of the ‘XVII Nederlanden’ could be justified. In an early enumeration of ‘les 17 provinces,’ made in 1569, ‘Lotharinge’ heads the list and the margraviate is conspicuously absent.50 Guicciardini disagreed: he discarded Lotharingia because ‘de staet ende de naem blyven waerachtichlijck in Lorreyne’, replacing it with the shadowy margraviate of the Holy Roman Empire, presumably on the grounds that, unlike Lorraine, this fell within the boundaries of the Low Countries ruled by Philip II. By this means he arrived at seventeen ‘oprechtighe Landtschappen’.51 Guicciardini's explanation quickly prevailed and the politically innocuous yet time-honoured margraviate became the makeweight title of choice.52 Quite apart from the symbolic significance of the ‘seventeen’, its overt pluralism neatly reconciled the growing political unity of the country around the mid-sixteenth century with the continued strength of provincial loyalties. The idea of the ‘XVII Nederlanden’ survived long after the Revolt had rendered it politically obsolete. Stylistic convention and a reluctance to accept the division of the Low Countries perhaps explain why fine linen damask with armorials of the seventeen provinces was still being woven at Kortrijk in the early seventeenth century, but it was probably the interest in the continual wars, often fought in the Spanish Netherlands, that ensured the enduring topicality of maps of the ‘XVII Nederlanden’ throughout the seventeenth century and beyond.53

Generic Names

The English, in common with Italians and Spaniards, had long employed ‘Flanders’ and ‘Fleming’ as synonyms for the Low Countries and their inhabitants and Fynes Moryson who travelled extensively in the 1590s in the United Provinces still habitually

used these terms.54 Even among the inhabitants of the Low Countries ‘Flamand’ was used generically: the Hainaut-born Charles de Lalaing once told Mary of Hungary, ‘Je ne suis, Madame, ne Ytalien, ne Espaignol, mais estimez moy le plus lourd Flameng qui soit.’55 Yet this ‘pars pro toto’ usage was contested by none other than Erasmus, who gave ‘Brabantia’ this role.56 The allodial status of the duchy, its famous charter of liberties, aptly described by one scholar as ‘de gedroomde grondwet voor de Nederlanden’,57 and Antwerp's meteoric rise as the commercial metropolis of northern Europe conferred on Brabant the position of ‘Hooft-provintie der Nederlanden’.58 The Dutch spoken in Brabant - ‘de gemeyne Brabantsche tale’ - outshone the vernacular of Flanders,59 and the duchy was eulogised in 1580 as ‘thoofd en t'hert, der strijbaer Nederlanden.’60 Yet ‘Brabander’ did not apparently challenge the supremacy of ‘Vlaming’ as a name for the Netherlanders. Foreigners certainly stood in awe of Antwerp, but perhaps its Golden Age faded too quickly for them to discard the traditional label of ‘Fleming’.

Of all the names considered here, that of the ‘Nederlanden’ was, with Flanders, probably the most widely used. French-speakers spoke about the ‘Pays-Bas’, Italians ‘Paesi Bassi’, and Germans, the ‘Niderlanden’. In German and Dutch both plural and singular forms vied with each other, while in French and English the plural predominated.61 Yet this name too was far from straightforward. Whereas ‘France’

‘England’ and arguably even ‘Germany’ had ethnic origins, ‘Nederlanden’ was a rather bland geographical term, and as such was shared with other low-lying regions across the Germanic-speaking world.62 Besides, the ‘Nederlanden’ embraced the entire region of the Schelde, Maas and Rhine estuaries including the Lower Rhineland, and could indeed be applied wherever ‘niederdeutsch’, or as it was occasionally called ‘nedderlendesch,’ were spoken.63 The three ‘lantsheeren ... geboren uut nederlant,’ whose pilgrimage to the Holy Land in 1450 was commemorated in song, came from ‘Cleve, Hoorne ende Batenborch.’64 And the Westphalian circle, created in 1512 and which included Jülich-Cleves and ‘die Niderlande hinab bis an die Maß’ (as viewed from the east), was also known as the ‘Nederlandich kreys’.65 For Thomas Murner (1475-1537) the Rhine entered ‘Niderland’ downstream from Bingen, some hundred and twenty kilometres as the crow flies from the borders of Luxemburg.66 And this perception was shared by scholars in the Low Countries. The full title of Van Vaernewijck's Den Spieghel der Nederlandscher audheyt, published in 1568, explicitly reckoned Westphalia and Jülich and Cleves to ‘die Nederlanden’.67 To avoid confusion, the ‘Nederlanden’ in question had to be qualified and people therefore referred to ‘die Erfnederlanden,’ ‘dese Nederlanden toebehoorende Coninck Philips,’ or ‘die kaiserliche Nidererbland.’68

Although ‘Nederland’/‘Niderland’ long retained, as a paper published at Cologne in the early seventeenth century with the title of Wochentliche Niderländische Post reminds us,69 its original sense, the name was slowly but surely monopolised by the

Burgundian-Habsburg state, which was by far the strongest regional power. As that state gradually became more integrated, Dutch chroniclers, without abandoning their local patriotisms, required a supra-provincial vocabulary to reflect the political realities, and from around 1490 they began to employ ‘Nederlanden’ to describe the dynastic state to which they belonged.70 At the same time the Maas, which had separated the original Burgundian and Westphalian circles, began to assume the function of a national boundary, as the Habsburg state grew more sturdily independent of the Empire.71 ‘Nederlanden’ in turn spawned ‘Nederlander,’72 which evolved in tandem: originally used of anyone from the Low Countries and the Lower Rhine (or from even further afield), it pertained particularly (though by means exclusively) to those inhabitants of the Habsburg state,73 who spoke ‘Nederlantsch’. Yet this supra-provincial identity remained frail. Significantly neither ‘Nederlander’ nor its French equivalent ‘Belge’ supplanted ‘Vlaming’, or later, ‘Hollander’ as comprehensive names for the inhabitants of the Low Countries.74 In English the proper noun ‘the Netherlands’ co-existed with the older ‘Low Countries’ and ‘Flanders’, and while ‘Netherlandish’ has led a sickly existence, the neologistic ‘Netherlandian’ was stillborn.75

In all this assortment of names scarcely one was universally serviceable. Burgundians proper had a superior claim to ‘Burgundy,’ which was at any rate going out of fashion in the Habsburg Netherlands. The problematic Latin synonyms only ever served a limited public and much the same could be said of the ‘XVII Nederlanden’, while the metonymic use of ‘Flanders’ was under threat from Brabant. Yet these semantic difficulties are significant, for they attest to the fluid and elusive identity of the early modern Low Countries.

II

According to Anthony Smith, pre-industrial societies could develop ‘durable cultural communities’ or ‘ethnic cores’, before becoming full-blown nations, but to do so

they had to satisfy certain criteria, one of which was the possession of a common ‘historic territory’ or ‘homeland’.76 This was a condition the early modern Low Countries could not easily fulfil because the territorial make up of the country kept changing. Most early modern states, England apart, had uncertain borders, but the configuration of the Low Countries was exceptionally protean. No sooner had Charles the Bold died, than Louis XI recovered the duchy of Burgundy and the Somme towns, core regions of the Burgundian lands, and Gelre regained its independence. After this period of drastic contraction, the Habsburg state then expanded, but in an entirely different direction. Apart from Tournai, the territories added under Charles V all lay to the north and east. This expansion transformed the Low Countries: the Walloon region shrank in significance, while the Zuiderzee, once a dangerous maritime frontier became a ‘Habsburgse binnenzee’.77 While it is true that the north-eastern border changed remarkably little after 1548,78 no one could be sure the period of expansion had indeed come to end. There was, after all, nothing particularly ‘natural’ about the boundaries of the Habsburg Low Countries. At one time or another, Charles V and the Brussels government eyed up the bishopric of Münster and even Bremen,79 and at the very end of the sixteenth century East Friesland might have become the eighth member of the United Provinces.80

This instability was disconcerting enough, but a more fundamental threat to its identity came from the relationship of the Low Countries to France and the Holy Roman Empire. Under the Valois dukes of Burgundy, the ruler of the Low Countries had been a prince of the French blood royal: as late as 1468 the French States General reminded the duke that as an offshoot of the ‘tronc royal’, he could yet inherit the kingdom.81 Philip the Good might be saluted in the late sixteenth century as ‘imperii Belgii conditor,’82 yet he, like his father and grandfather, had seen himself as a French prince, as ‘bon et enthier Franchois.’83 There was then no contradiction between George Chastellain's position as ducal ‘indiciaire’ and his desire to write ‘pour gloire et exaltation de ce très-chrestien royaume [France].’84 Of course, the dukes wanted, like other French peers, to administer their territories more efficiently, and they therefore forged the necessary military and political instruments. As a result the Burgundian Low Countries began to function more like a state,85 but until the 1460s, the dukes

and their courtiers assumed that their destiny lay within France and Burgundian political culture was strongly ‘francocentric’, which is not to say that it was always ‘francophile’.86 And since the dynasty provided the only supra-provincial focus of loyalty within the Burgundian territories, the prolonged and intimate involvement of the latter with the French monarchy inhibited the growth of a distinctive and common identity for the Low Countries.

That identity was also complicated in a quite different way by a ghost from the past, namely the ancient boundary between Lotharingia and West Francia, which ran through the Low Countries. Five centuries after the disintegration of the Carolingian Empire that ghost had not been completely exorcised. Following the incorporation of Lotharingia into the Holy Roman Empire in the tenth century, the boundary between the Empire and ‘West Francia’ ran along the Schelde; as a result Artois and Flanders west of the river acknowledged the king of France as overlord. Charles V finally ended this dependency in 1529 and in 1548 these officially entered the Empire as members of the new Burgundian Circle. In daily life such ties made little difference, but Charles V, like his Burgundian predecessors, took exception when their subjects sought justice in the ‘Parlement’ of Paris or the ‘Reichskammergericht’, for such actions detracted from the prince's ‘preeminence et haulteur.’87

In the early modern period, language did not arouse the passions familiar to historians of modern nationalism. Yet the possession of a common and distinctive vernacular did provide an index of nationality, and medieval student corporations and religious congregations were often divided on linguistic grounds.88 Sometimes indeed the linguistic criterion was quite strict: membership of the ‘German Nation’ at Bologna was confined to those ‘qui nativam Alemanicam habent linguam.’89 But in the case of the Low Countries this linguistic marker was conspicuously absent. The inhabitants of Artois, Namur, Hainaut, Tournai, French Flanders and ‘Rommanbrabant’, the so-called Walloon provinces, spoke the traditional ‘langue d'oïl’ vernaculars also in

colloquial use among their neighbours in Liège and the adjacent French territories.90 Since however the written language of the Habsburg-Burgundian central administration approximated to the French of the Ile-de-France, a diglossie situation existed in the francophone region. Despite the prevalence of French culture among the high nobility and in the upper reaches of the central government, neither the dukes nor their Habsburg successors made any sustained attempt to impose that language on their Dutch subjects. All the dukes after Philip the Bold learned Dutch and even Charles V was supposedly brought up to speak ‘thiois’,91 while the business of government with, and in, both the Walloon and Dutch-speaking regions was customarily conducted in the appropriate language.92

In 1538 Sebastian Franck anticipated the nineteenth-century German nationalist Ernst Moritz Arndt when he declared, ‘Teutsch landt... so weit gerechnet, so weit Teutsch zung ...geredt würt.’93 But just how far westwards did ‘Teutsch landt’ stretch? What was the relationship between ‘Deutschland’ and the Holy Roman Empire? And did the ‘Teutsch zung’ embrace the Dutch language? These were questions to which the answers were far from certain. The treatment of the Low Countries in early modern maps of ‘Germania’ varied: those faithful to the Ptolemaic tradition restricted ‘Germania’ to the lands east of the Rhine, whereas others, which interpreted ‘Deutschland’ as co-extensive with the Empire, included the southern Low Countries with the Walloon provinces.94 Within the ‘Reichstag’ it sometimes suited the ‘Burgundian’ delegates to present the Low Countries as ‘die slüssel deutscher nacion’ or ‘ein

schild und vormauer der teutschen nation.’95 In his ‘Brevis Germanie Descriptio’, published in 1512, the German humanist historian, Johannes Cochlaeus, treated Zeeland and Flanders as the western outposts of the German lands.96 For the Antwerp poet Anna Bijns ‘Duytschlandt’ stretched alliteratively from the ‘Rije’ to Reval in Estonia.97 Yet there are signs that even before the Revolt gave the United Provinces a destiny outside the Empire and ‘Deutschland’, the two Germanic languages were drawing apart.

In the early modern period contemporaries distinguished, as they had in the time of the fourteenth-century Brabant historian Jan van Boendale, between the ‘Germanspeaking lands’ and the Romance, or ‘welsch’ countries, a division which significantly passed through the Low Countries.98 Differences within these regions, between say Castilian and Portuguese, or German and Dutch, might easily be overlooked by outsiders.99 For much the same reason the English were, as we have seen, inclined to classify all Germanic speakers as ‘Douchemen’.

Though Dutch and German are now recognised as independent languages, this was less self-evident in the early sixteenth century, when both were described as ‘lingua teutonica’ and ‘neder duutsche’ might mean either Low German or Dutch.100 When the German cosmographer Johann Rauw travelled in his imagination round ‘the circumference of Germany, as far as the German language is spoken’, his journey took him past Brussels, Ghent, Maastricht and Groningen.101 Yet no one supposed that Dutch and German were mutually intelligible: High German texts had to be translated to be fully understood in the Dutch region, and this even applied to texts in the Gelders vernacular.102 That ‘averlens duysch’ differed from ‘nederlands duytsch’

was then a fact of life,103 but these differences became more obvious as High German (and in the case of Overijssel ‘Brabants’ Dutch) asserted itself in the Low German, or Low Saxon, linguistic zone.104 The spread of a print culture among the laity contributed to the greater differentiation between High German and Dutch. The Reformation in particular created an appetite for German Protestant literature in the Dutch-speaking world which could only be satisfied by translations.105 During the second half of the sixteenth century both the Dutch and High German vernaculars were slowly codified and standardised, thanks to the cumulative endeavours of countless editors of religious texts, printers, schoolmasters and lexicographers.106

This heightened linguistic sensitivity may have strengthened the consciousness of Dutch-speakers that they shared a common culture. But there is scant evidence of any general antipathy towards the culture of the ‘Bovenlanders’.107 Most writers still supposed the Low Countries belonged to ‘Germania’ rather than to ‘Gallia’, yet politically and confessionally the ties with the ‘deutsche Landen’ were weakening. Charles V had no intention in 1548 of severing the ties between the Empire and his

hereditary lands to the west. Indeed he hoped by the Transaction of Augsburg to have secured a promise of German support against the French, but for all that the Low Countries' involvement in the Empire, never particularly strong, diminished as the sixteenth century wore on. Occasionally, the Dutch rebels petitioned the ‘Reichstag’, but as far as the United Provinces were concerned the Empire itself had by the early seventeenth century become a foreign country. Religious differences further drove a wedge between the Reformed Protestants in the Low Countries and Lutheran Germany. The repressive policies of the Habsburgs hindered the formation of Protestant churches in the Low Countries, and when the Reformation did eventually break through in the 1560s, its leaders looked to London, Emden, the French Protestants and ultimately Geneva, not Wittenberg, and the high priests of Luther's legacy. Mutual suspicions between the Protestant confessions later bedevilled the efforts of William of Orange and others to forge a pan-Protestant alliance against Spanish rule. Nevertheless, although German itinerants and soldiers might be abused as ‘moffen’ in the Low Countries, Germans as such were not generalised objects of hatred.108

III

In the summer of 1574 Granvelle's youngest brother, Champagney, indignantly rejected proposals from the States of Holland for the ending of hostilities. He was especially outraged by a demand that the King should establish a form of government, with the advice of the States General, conducive to unity and harmony. This struck him as absurd for it would, in effect, subordinate the King to the States General. In his eyes the States were less an institution than a venue, where the King could conveniently obtain advice if he so chose, while the Low Countries were merely a collection of contiguous lordships [heerlijkheden] with miscellaneous powers, laws and customs; they had nothing in common with one another ‘dan alleenlijck gebuerschap onder eenen Landes-heere.’109 Johan Junius de Jonge, the rebel governor of Veere, to whom the States of Holland entrusted the refutation of Champagney, disagreed profoundly. Since the time of Charlemagne, he claimed, ‘dit Land en dese Provincien, in een lichame te samen gevoegt zijn geweest’ and, despite being subsequently divided between various rulers, these had remained in close correspondence with one another until Philip the Good ‘de selfde wederom onverscheidelijk in een lichaem heeft te samen gevoegt,’ binding these together with laws and privileges. Duke Philip had also convoked the States General whenever necessary and when Charles the Bold did

try to alter the constitution, turning the Low Countries into a kingdom, this body helped to frustrate his scheme. Charles V had then incorporated all the provinces, with the support of the ‘Reichstag’, into ‘eenen Rijk-Creits’, in order to forestall mischievous persons who might sow mistrust among the provinces on the pretext ‘dat sy niet gemeins met den anderen en hadden.’ These territories were not only united politically; they also shared a common name and culture, though not, of course, a single language,110 and the assemblies of the ‘schutterijen’ and ‘rederijkers’, which Junius likened to the Olympic Games among the ancient Greeks, expressed this solidarity. The unity of the country and the widespread concern aroused by the religious edicts made it more than ever essential, not least for the restoration of the King's dignity, that the States General should be part of the solution.111

The argument between Champagney and Junius as to whether the Low Countries were a confederation or a unified and indivisible body essentially continued a discussion about the constitutional nature of the Habsburg state that had been rumbling in the background for some time, but with this significant difference. In the first half of the sixteenth century, the confederalist position championed by Champagney more often found support among the provincial States, whereas Junius' emphasis on the unity of the Low Countries chimed with the outlook of the central government, which was forever lecturing the States on the need to behave as loyal subjects and ‘voisins ...estans sous l'obéissance d'ung seul prince.’112

Charles V and his regents were, of course, not in the business of nation building; they set out to strengthen princely authority by whatever means they could.113 According to Gattinara justice was ‘la royenne de toutes vertuz pour [par] laquelles les empereurs, roys et princes règnent et dominent,’114 and by radically reforming the administration of justice, the government in Brussels accomplished the ‘l'unification juridique’ of the patrimonial lands.115 The right of appeal to ‘foreign’ courts was finally abolished, the provincial courts concentrated on providing justice to the exclusion of other political functions, and increasingly suitors looked to the ‘Grote Raad’ in Mechelen for authoritative judgements; at the same time a start was made on the

codification of custom laws. Law making, too, was perceived as the very particular concern of the prince; the central government assumed legislative roles hitherto performed at a more local level and published general edicts on heresy, censorship, coinage and the conduct of trade.116 Ecclesiastical structures, too, were slowly aligned with those of the state. In the early sixteenth century monastic congregations specific to the Low Countries were created, the jurisdiction of ‘foreign’ church courts was excluded and, with the new bishoprics in 1559, a major step was taken towards the creation of a ‘nationaal Nederlandse kerk’,117 with its own metropolitan and with diocesan boundaries that corresponded more closely with those of the Habsburg Low Countries. At the same time, the prince maintained his grip on the appointment of bishops, abbots and inquisitors. The creation in 1548 of the ‘Burgundian Circle’ marked, as Junius recognised, a further important stage in the process of statebuilding, and this was carried further a year later when all the provinces, reluctantly in the case of Friesland, ratified the Pragmatic Sanction. Henceforth one and the same prince was to inherit all seventeen provinces, which he would hold ‘en une masse.’118 Even when one allows for the enhanced powers of the provincial states of Holland and Flanders in the matter of finance,119 there can be little doubt that the ‘core’ provinces more closely resembled a ‘bondstaat’ in 1555 than had been the case when Charles succeeded as Archduke forty years earlier.120

Because Champagney, like his brother, regarded the States General, as a threat to the King's authority, he belittled their importance,121 yet earlier that century the central government, though wary of the States as a potential focus of opposition, seems to have tried to harness them in the task of state-building. Addressing the States General in 1522 Gattinara invoked, not for the first time, the familiar image of the bundle of arrows tied together to make it stronger, in effect reminding his audience that indeed

‘eendracht maakt macht.’122 The Low Countries faced a particularly anxious time in 1534-1535 with the prospect of a hostile Anglo-French alliance, continued turmoil in the Baltic and Anabaptist unrest at home. Mary of Hungary therefore pressed the provinces to establish a defensive union and a standing army, paid for by regular contributions from the provinces. Her proposal was, however, coolly received by the States General. Some saw this as a covert form of permanent taxation, a sort of taille, and knowing this had been the undoing of the States General in France, they had no wish to make the same mistake.123

But more prosaically the provinces were simply unconvinced of the benefits of a closer union. The circumstances were quite different from those in the United Provinces where Holland was so very clearly top dog in the Union; in the time of Charles V political and economic power was relatively evenly distributed between the ‘core’ provinces and, within them, among perhaps a dozen large towns.124 Nor did these provinces recognise a common enemy. While Flanders and the Walloon provinces lived in fear of incursions from France, the threat to Holland and northern Brabant came from the east, from the Geldersen. Again, though their economies were broadly compatible, even complementary, their commercial interests were disparate and dissimilar.125 For this reason the provinces were suspicious of closer cooperation, even in matters of security. In 1532 Holland proposed, with the support of Mary of Hungary, that the provinces should equip a joint fleet to force the re-opening of the Sound, yet even Zeeland, Holland's closest ally, refused to join an enterprise, which seemed only to serve the interests of Holland.126 When therefore the Regent proposed the creation of a common defence force, Holland reverted to the confederalist position held by the other provinces and objected that under such an arrangement the enemy of a single province would become the enemy of all.127 Unity between the provinces, apparently, remained an aspiration, something to be advertised during state entries by troupes of maidens sporting provincial shields in tableaux-vivants,128 but such pious hopes did not long survive the political hardball.

Mary of Hungary seems to have thought of the States General as representative of the Low Countries - at least she called the provincial delegations meeting in 1534,

‘messieurs representans les estats de pardecha’,129 - but whereas town corporations and the provincial states did represent self-conscious communities,130 the same could not be said of the States General. Under Charles V the provincial states were too jealous of their own powers to give their delegates to the States General ‘pleine puissance’ to make binding agreements with Brussels. The doubt that hangs over the representative nature of the States General is in fact symptomatic of a deeper diffidence about the cohesiveness of the Habsburg state.

Such enthusiasm as the central government had for the States General - and it was always tempered - vanished after the meeting in 1557, when the provincial delegations broached matters of state in their joint discussions. In the event the King and his closest advisors, especially Granvelle, regarded the experiment of allowing such discussions as one which should not be repeated.131 Yet at the very time when those close to the King had became thoroughly disenchanted with the States General, some of those most opposed to Habsburg anti-heresy policy began to nourish hopes that this body just might after all have a part to play in working out a more appropriate religious policy for the country as a whole.

As a result of Habsburg state-building, the profile of the Low Countries loomed larger in the lives of the inhabitants. But reactions to unpopular dynastic policies also stimulated supra-provincial cooperation and so indirectly strengthened the national identity of the country. The cost of the continual wars led to the belief among some nobles by 1550's that the Low Countries bore a disproportionate share of the financial burdens, even though these were ‘guerre du roy’, not ‘guerre de Flandre’. So when in 1557 it looked as if Philip might be asked to support Mary Tudor in Scotland, he was warned to wage any such war ‘non comme seigneur de pardecà, mais comme roi d'Angleterre.’132 The aggressive wars of Charles the Bold and Maximilian had in the past led to complaints that the interests of the Low Countries were being sacrificed on the altar of dynastic ambitions, but in the case of Philip those anxieties were aggravated by the conviction that his repressive religious policy was singularly illsuited to the needs of the country.

The Caroline anti-heresy legislation had always been controversial because the edicts overrode privileges which safeguarded the judicial process and forbade the total confiscation of property. In 1550 Antwerp, supported discreetly by the Regent, had persuaded Charles to remove some of the most objectionable aspects of the ‘blood’

edict lest these deter foreign merchants. These concessions, however, proved insufficient to allay anxieties. Measures grudgingly accepted to keep heresy at bay in the 1520s and 1530s seemed increasingly irksome and irrelevant in a country that lived by commerce, several of whose trading-partners had by the 1560s either adopted Protestantism or, as in the Empire and France, reached compromises of one sort or another. In 1564 Count Egmont argued in the Council of State that a policy of Procrustean orthodoxy might be all very well in the Spanish kingdoms, ‘fermez de mer et montaignes’ but it was plainly impractical in the Low Countries, ‘qui estoient petits et environnez de toutes pars de ceulx qui s'estoient aliénez et séparez de l'Église romaine.’133 The King's stubborn refusal to contemplate any sort of modus vivendi with Protestantism seemed only to confirm how little he and his Spanish Council understood that, as Mary of Hungary once told her brother, ‘lesdits pays sont totalement fondez à la marchandise.’134

Though Charles V was the architect of this repressive policy, the emperor, unlike his son, was at least a ‘natuerlijcke prince’.135 Philip, unable to speak either Dutch or French, was a Spaniard born and bred, and his household while in the Low Countries consisted overwhelmingly of Spaniards; moreover, he succeeded his father at a time when anti-Spanish sentiment was growing apace in northern Europe. This contagion apparently infected the Low Countries from Germany, where Spanish troops, commanded by Alva, had helped to bring about the defeat of the Schmalkaldic League.136 In the Low Countries, as in Germany, the alleged arrogance of Spanish soldiers alienated the townsmen, among whom they were billeted.137 When the States General got wind of plans to retain Spanish troops after Cateau-Cambrésis and to appoint Spaniards to the Council of State, they immediately demanded that these be scrapped and insisted that the country be governed and defended by natives.138 Even after the troops had been withdrawn in 1561, anti-Spanish feeling persisted; a poster attached to the town gates of Antwerp in March 1562 accused Granvelle of wanting to make Brabanters ‘esclaves aux porceaux de Spaigne.’139

Anxiety about the Spanish Inquisition had first surfaced at Antwerp in 1550; it then faded only to be re-ignited in 1559, when lurid rumours began to circulate about concerted plans to extirpate Protestantism from France and the Low Countries.140 There may have been no substance in these reports, but they came on the heels of the publication of a Spanish Protestant's denunciation of the Inquisition and coincided with well-advertised ‘autos-da-fé’ in Seville and Valladolid, news of which soon reached the Low Countries and images of which circulated in German engravings.141 Fears about the Spanish Inquisition also coincided with the establishment of an effective local inquisition in Flanders and the controversial re-organisation of the bishoprics. By 1566 the term ‘Inquisition’ was bandied about so loosely that it came to be equated in some circles with the anti-heresy legislation itself.142 In this paranoid climate Philip II's declarations that he had no intention of introducing the Holy Office into the Low Countries cut no ice.

During the Revolt the conviction grew that a ‘een naturelicke vijantschap’ existed between Spaniards and Netherlanders and hatred of Spaniards eventually became a defining characteristic of the rebel Dutch. But even before the outbreak of hostilities, anti-Spanish feeling focused the disparate opponents of the King's religious policy. Fear of the French haunted Margaret of Parma and in Artois and Flanders they certainly posed a real military threat; here too the inhabitants reserved a visceral hatred for them - after the French had been defeated at Grevelingen local women allegedly ran about the battlefield stabbing the wounded enemy with pitchforks143 - but the French posed no direct threat to Holland. Spain, by contrast, cast a sinister shadow across the whole country and one which because it was intangible, could be more easily manipulated.

IV

In the early modern period the concept of the patria was elastic. For the Cologne patrician Hermann von Weinsberg, the ‘heimat’ resembled a Russian doll; at the centre was his household, and from there the ‘heimat’ extended outwards to include Cologne,

the prince-bishopric, ‘Deutzlant’, Christendom, and finally heaven itself.144 The anonymous lexicographer of the Dictionarium Tetraglotton was more down-to-earth. He defined ‘Vaderlant’ as ‘[d]e stede, het dorp, ghehucht of ander plaetse daermen gheboren is,’145 but for him too the ‘patria’ was pluriform. How one defined the patria depended on one's own horizons. It was relatively easy for the great nobles - the members of the Golden Fleece - to conceive of the Low Countries as their ‘patrie’: they shared the outlook of the prince and as captains of the ordinance companies it fell to them to defend the country, while their lands were often scattered across several provinces. The artisans, on the other hand, still felt a keen sense of loyalty to their native city, whose privileges protected their employment and property. Despite these glaring differences, the notion of the patria underwent a slow and subtle expansion. By the end of the fifteenth century Holland had come to be seen as a single political entity represented by its provincial states,146 while the humanists’ discovery of ‘Batavia’ directed attention beyond the boundaries of Holland to Utrecht and even Gelre.147 Habsburg state-building had also contributed to the enlargement of the notion of patria, most notably with the creation of the new Burgundian Circle and the Pragmatic Sanction.

The publication in 1557 of the very first maps of the Habsburg Low Countries both reflected and promoted those broader horizons. These displayed the political integration achieved under Charles V in a pictorial form so that the Low Countries could at last be visualised as a single entity, standing apart from the rest of Low Germany. As well as being decorative and informative, these may also have encouraged a sense of ‘national’ pride: Hieronymus Cock, who produced one of the earliest maps claims to have been impelled by patriotic motives.148 Though relatively expensive - the cheapest map cost a couple of stuivers, the ceiling price for pamphlets and ephemera in 1566 - there was evidently a market for such maps to judge from the accounts of Christopher Plantin for 1557-1559.149 Within ten years ‘nederlantsche caerten’ adorned the houses of Brederode, a Ghent brewer, a burgomaster of Hoorn and a graduate priest from Niedorp in North Holland.150 In 1568 Guicciardini's chorography was

translated into French. Readers could now make an armchair journey through ‘dese edele ende heerlijcke Nederlanden,’151 whose inhabitants were praised for their inventiveness and linguistic skills and whose mixed constitution the Florentine so much admired. Though Guicciardini still regarded the province as the fundamental unit, his strict adherence to the country's borders reinforced the impression that ‘Belgica’ now formed a coherent and cohesive state.152

The perception of the Low Countries as the common fatherland also began at this time to take root among those who were politically and religiously disaffected, in particular among the Calvinist émigrés. While these often bickered among themselves as to the legitimacy of resisting the civil powers, their circumstances, living as they did in a culturally alien, and sometimes confessionally hostile, environment, encouraged them to draw together. Van Roosbroeck detected a growing inclination among Germans to describe the Calvinist exiles in their midst as ‘de niderlendern.’153 The Low Countries as a whole were also the focus of their religious life: they longed to see their country delivered from the tyranny of the ‘Roomschen Pharonis’. Their experience in exile naturally encouraged their leaders to draw parallels between God's dealings with the children of Israel in the past and His treatment of the Low Countries in the here and now. In the preface to his church order, written in 1554, Marten Micron, deplored what he called the ‘Aegyptische slavernie des Nederlandts.’ He lamented that among the countries still living under the domination of Rome was ‘onse Vaderlandt, dat gansche Nederlandt’ but he saw the stranger church as an instrument ‘om het lucht des Evangeliums over onse gansche Nederlanden ... metter tijdt te moghen bringhen.’154 His colleague Jan Utenhove shared his broad patriotism. In 1561 he invited those better able than himself to translate the psalms of their obligation to serve God's people in this way ‘in onsen Nederlandschen Vaderlande.’155

During the winter of 1565/1566 a small group of Calvinist gentry - the leaders of the Compromise of the Nobility - launched a carefully orchestrated campaign,

recruiting support from almost every province.156 Early in April 1566 some two hundred gentry presented their petition to the Regent in Brussels, in which they asked Philip II to frame a new religious policy, ‘par l'advis et consentement de tous les estats-généraux assemblés,’157 including the abolition of the inquisition. It was a remarkable demonstration of political solidarity across the country: urban revolts had been common enough in the early sixteenth century, but these had been confined to a single town. With the Compromise there emerged a supra-provincial protest movement. The great nobles had long seen themselves as serving both the King and the patrie, but this rhetoric was gaining currency outside these circles by the ‘Wondeijaar’. The Reformed minister Guy de Brès echoed it in his despairing remonstrance, addressed in January 1567 to the Knights of the Golden Fleece, in which he explained that the Calvinists wished to be regarded as ‘fideles et loyaus serviteurs de sa M[ajesté] et amateurs de la patrie.’158 Of course, the unity of the Beggars was fragile and short-lived, but the very attempt to organise a pan-Netherlands movement suggests that the disaffected political community of the Low Countries was beginning to find its voice.

 

When therefore William of Orange and the rebel publicists larded their propaganda after 1568 with calls for the deliverance of the ‘lieve Vaderlant’ from foreign tyrants, they were addressing a constituency that had, for one reason or another, already begun to think, albeit with difficulty, of the Low Countries as their ‘communis patria’, one that could stand alongside their provincial ‘patriae’. To that extent the Low Countries had acquired a national identity; it may not have been very robust, but the concept of the Netherlands was rather less elusive than it had been fifty years earlier when Charles had succeeded.

Nomenclature for the Early Modern Low Countries

Typology Usage Latin Dutch German
1 Dynastic Official --- landen van her/derwaertsover ---
2 Dynastic Official --- (neder) erfnederlanden unser erblanden Erbnederlandenn
3 Dynastic Generic --- Borgoengen landen unser niderburgundischer landen
4 Classical Literary Usage Gallia Belgica Belgica Belgium Belgium inferior --- ---
5 Classical Literary Usage Germania/Alemania inferior nederduytslandt/landen Nider Teutschlandt
6 Political Literary Usage --- seventien landen XVII Niederlandschen Provintzen
7 Pars pro toto Generic Flandria [Brabantia] Vlaenderen Flandern
8 Geographical Generic patriae inferiores partes inferiores Alemanie Nederlant Nederlanden Niderlendischeland Niderland/Nederlandt Nyderlanden Unterlandt

Typology Usage French English Inhabitant Adjective
1 Dynastic Official pays de par deҫà/delà --- --- ---
2 Dynastic Official pays patrimoniaux lands of the emperor/king Philip subject of the emperor/king Philip ---
3 Dynastic Generic Basse Bourgogne (Lower) Burgundy Bourguignon Burgundian bourguignon bourgoense Burgundian
4 Classical Literary Usage La Gaule Belgique Belgia Belge Belgi(ae) Belge Belgica belgicque
5 Classical Literary Usage Basse-Allemagne Germanie Inferieure Inferior/Low(er)/Nether Germany Nederduitscher Nider dütsch Doch/Doucheman Germanus inferior Teuto/T(h)eutonicus duuts/diets nederduytsch bas allemand Dutch/Low German
6 Political Literary Usage XVII provinces belges/païs belgique xvii landes --- ---
7 Pars pro toto Generic Flandre Flanders Vlaming Flamand/Flameng Fleming vlaemsch Flemish
8 Geographical Generic Les/le Pays Bas Ces pays embas Netherlands Low Countries/Country Nederlander Niderlander Netherlander Lowlander Nederlantsch Netherlandish


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