Introduction

In 1690, Judocus de Grieck—a Catholic bookseller in Brussels—wrote an account of his life and travels. He recounted how he had visited the Northern part of the Low Countries and soon after crossing the border had found it remarkably foreign.1 He was struck by the different interpretations of the com- munal past in the North compared to his native South. In particular, memo- ries of the major rebellion against the overlord of the Netherlands, Philip II of Spain, diverged. De Grieck touched on this rebellion that had erupted more than a century before. The conflict, known in historiography as the Revolt of the Netherlands, the Dutch Revolt or the Eighty Years’ War, tore apart the Seventeen Provinces of the Low Countries and created two polities: the Dutch Republic in the North, which corresponds roughly to the modern-day Netherlands, and the Habsburg Netherlands in the South, the predecessor of modern-day Belgium. An enthusiastic supporter of Habsburg rule, De Grieck clearly knew whom to blame for the past troubles. Compiling and summaris- ing existing histories of the Revolt, he reached the conclusion that evil heretics had brought the country to disaster.2 He wrote that as a result ‘our pleasant and fertile “Nederlandt”, which had previously flourished so wonderfully, was now so abused by the vitriol of heresies and domestic troubles that it seemed about to give up the ghost.’3 Not all inhabitants of the Low Countries viewed the Revolt so negatively. On the other side of the border, in the Northern Netherlands, engraver Romeyn de Hooghe looked back in 1704 on the rebellion against Philip II of Spain from a very different perspective. In his triumphant print Allegory of the Eighty Years’ War [Allegorie rond de Tachtigjarige Oorlog], De Hooghe glorified the Revolt while blaming the conflict on the bellicosity of Spanish rulers and their sol- diers (Figure 1). On the left hand, a man closely resembling the Spanish army

1 Judocus de Grieck, Den pelgrim van dese wereldt. Verhaelende, tot een ieders onderrichtinghe ende eerlyck vermaeck, het ghedenckweerdighste dat hy in syn Levens-pilgrimagie ghesien, ghe- hoort, ende ghelesen heeft (Brussels: Ian de Grieck, 1690), pp. 31–34. 2 Ibid., pp. 1–14; De Grieck cited works of well-known Catholic historians such as Franciscus Haraeus, Cornelius Hazart, Nicolaus Burgundus, Michael ab Isselt, and Willem Estius; about the authorship of Den pelgrim, see: Albertine Van Loven, ‘Joan de Grieck. Onderzoek naar het vaderschap over zijn werken’, Verslagen en mededelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Taal- en Letterkunde 1928 (1928), pp. 556–558. 3 Ibid., p. 1: ‘Ons aen-ghenaem en vruchtbaer Nederlandt, dat eertydts soo heerlyck ghepraelt hadde: was nu door het venyn der ketteryen, en in-landtsche twisten, soodanigh mishandelt, dat het scheen synen lesten snack te sullen gheven.’