CHAPTER SEVEN

WAR AND IDENTITY IN THE HABSBURG NETHERLANDS, 1477–1559

Steven Gunn

Th e nature of the available evidence has inevitably drawn studies of national identity in the Burgundian-Habsburg Low Countries towards social and cultural elites: chroniclers, legislators, political leaders, uni- versity students travelling to Italy, and even individual intellectuals like Erasmus. Such studies can illuminate the development of identities amongst the wider population by inference. Th ose who read the chron- icles, heard the ordinances proclaimed, were inspired by the leaders, or were taught by the students, presumably absorbed some of the ideas on the nature of their homeland. But it remains hard to test whether they did so. Within these limitations, these studies have reached valuable and nuanced conclusions. Th ey suggest that there was no agreed name for a nation inhabiting those lands; that the language of nationhood was far more oft en used of provinces or small groups of provinces than of any larger unit; and that provincial and dynastic loyalties were more powerful than any kind of national attachments, as we might expect from the comparatively rapid changes in the territorial composition of the Burgundian-Habsburg bloc. By the 1550s, terms suggestive of a single body politic including all the Habsburg provinces—le pays (rather than les pays) de pardeça; patrie, patria, or vaderlant; Belgium or Belgica—occur more frequently, which suggests an underlying change in attitudes. Th ey argue plausibly that high noblemen and princely bureaucrats thought more readily in terms of larger allegiances than did those with less to gain from the exercise of princely power, and that those in the more recently acquired provinces felt less part of a common enterprise than those in the core Burgundian territories.1

1 Karin Tilmans, ‘De ontwikkeling van een vaderland-begrip in de laat-middeleeuwse en vroeg-moderne geschiedschrijving van de Nederlanden’, in Vaderland. Een geschiede- nis van de vijft iende eeuw tot 1940, ed. N.C.F. van Sas (Amsterdam, 1999), 7–53; Simon 152 steven gunn

A study of the eff ects of war on identity cannot overcome all the dif- fi culties faced by these studies—indeed, many of its sources too must be the products of chroniclers, legislators, poets and politicians—but it does off er signifi cant opportunities. War generated many of the ‘boundary situations’ referred to by Peter Hoppenbrouwers in his sur- vey of the theoretical literature above. It provided a major stimulus for governments to deploy rhetoric about the unity of the polity and the duties of subjects towards it: in war, as one ordinance of Charles V put it, ‘subjects are obliged to serve and stand by their own natural prince and fatherland before all other lords’.2 War engaged large sec- tions of the population in a common cause and demanded action from them, from paying taxes and celebrating victories to building fortifi ca- tions and killing those they were told were their enemies. It demanded cooperation between diff erent parts of the polity: diff erent provinces, townsmen and countrymen, noblemen and urban elites, local popula- tions and the foreign soldiers their prince sent to defend them. Again, government rhetoric stressed the need for cooperation. In 1535 Mary of Hungary proposed a union of mutual defence to the provinces gath- ered in the States General. An attack on one province, she argued, concerned ‘the person and estate of the said lord emperor and of his other lands and subjects over here’, so that ‘all good and loyal subjects of the same should help and rescue him in this, and thereby assist the said invaded and attacked land’.3 As the Burgundian-Habsburg polity

Groenveld, ‘“Natie” en “patria” bij zestiende-eeuwse Nederlanders’, in Vaderland, 55– 81; Jean Stengers, Les racines de la Belgique (Brussels, 2000); Alastair Duke, ‘From king and country to king or country? Loyalty and treason in the Revolt of the Netherlands’, in Alastair Duke, Reformation and Revolt in the Low Countries (London, 1990), 175–197; Alastair Duke, ‘Th e elusive Netherlands. Th e question of national identity in the early modern Low Countries on the eve of the Revolt’, Bijdragen en mededelingen betreff ende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 119 (2004), 10–38; Ad Tervoort, Th e Iter Italicum and the Northern Netherlands. Dutch students at Italian universities and their role in the Netherlands’ society (1426–1575) (Leiden, 2005), 186–196; J.J. Poelhekke, ‘Het naam- loze vaderland van Erasmus’, Bijdragen en mededelingen betreff ende de geschiedenis der Nederlanden 86 (1971), 90–123; Hugo de Schepper, ‘Introduction au répertoire des insti- tutions dans les Pays-Bas habsbourgeois’, in Les institutions du gouvernement central des Pays-Bas habsbourgeois (1485–1795), ed. Erik Aerts et al., 2 vols. (Brussels, 1995), I, 20–36, at 28; Robert Stein, ‘Nationale identiteiten in de late Middeleeuwen. Een verkenning’, Tijdschrift voor sociale geschiedenis 28 (2002), 228–246. I am grateful to Hans Cools, Alastair Duke, David Grummitt and the editors for helpful discussion and references. 2 Recueil des ordonnances des Pays-Bas, 2e série: 1506–1700, ed. Charles Laurent et al., 7 vols. (Brussels, 1893–1957), VI, 346. 3 Recueil des ordonnances, III, 479.