History of the Netherlands

The Low Countries have long held mystery and intrigue for people around the world. Over thousands of years, innumerable myths and legends have sprung out of this small corner of Europe, while many more have been created by bemused foreigners looking in from outside. There is a unique quality to this busy, little, misty swampland that has long allowed imaginations to run wild and fantasy to be embr...

After being forced to sign the Treaty of Arras in late 1482, Maximilian of Habsburg found his authority in Flanders challenged by a group of powerful nobles and patrician merchants from the big cities of Ghent, Bruges and Ypres. Using their social, economic and political clout, as well as the physical possession of Maximilian’s children, an alternative government was set up in Flanders in the form...

The Low Countries have long been a metaphorical petri dish of social and technological advancements in Europe. As such, the list of Dutch and Flemish inventions, innovations and discoveries is long and broad-reaching indeed. In this episode, we intend on doing an exploration of our own into the history of some of the intellectual leaps which sprang forth from this soggy corner of Europe and spread...

After the death of Mary of Burgundy in March 1482, the Low Countries were thrust into a period of turmoil the likes of which they had not seen for around... five whole years. The reigning sovereign was dead and her heir, Philip, was not even four years old. In Flanders, the estates and particularly the city of Ghent, successfully set a course of obstruction against Maximilian, defying his attempts...

Upon marrying Mary of Burgundy in August 1477, the first thing Maximilian of Habsburg had to do was focus on stopping the French invasion of the Burgundian territories. This was, after all, the main reason why their union had been accepted by the various power bases of the Low Countries, most notably the States General. War requires money, of course, and Maximilian didn’t really have any. Due to t...

The eruption of violence across the Low Countries in March and April of 1477 led to Mary of Burgundy effectively being in the custody of the city of Ghent. Although the rebellious citizens of Ghent had taken lethal retribution for what they saw as the crimes of the previous administration, they had done nothing to solve the most pressing issue facing the Low Countries. This was, en fait, the marau...

The Dutch language and its extended influence can be found on every continent. In this special, we explore where the Dutch language came from and look at how the history of migration into the Low Countries impacted its development. On top of that, we take a look at how the Dutch language has not only shaped other languages, but also, through colonialism, has imprinted itself into the cultural and...

On 5 February, 1943, thirteen of the twenty-three defendants from the First Parool Trial were given paper and pens and told to write farewell letters to their families. Hours later, they were executed by firing squad. But the ringleader of the group, Frans Goedhart, was able to win a temporary reprieve and over the next few months undertook various attempts to escape from Vught concentration camp....

After the botched arrest of Arie Addicks in September 1941, the Addicks group was firmly in the sights of the authorities. Over the course of four months, a series of arrests would take place across the Netherlands, from the streets of Amsterdam to a freezing beach in Scheveningen, which would end with twenty-three people being charged with crimes against the state. But would these freedom fighter...

After the invasion of the Netherlands in May 1940, a group of men from a disbanded socialist youth group called the AJC, came together to fight back against the new Nazi regime. The young members of the so-called “Addicks Group” joined forces with journalist and activist Frans Goedhart and became active in creating and distributing the illegal anti-Nazi newspaper Het Parool. But their activities w...

Charles the Bold’s death at the beginning of 1477 set off a political tsunami which crashed over the Low Countries, like a rising tide from the North Sea, sweeping away the old structures and drowning those too slow to react. Unlike today, where information is transmitted around the world at nearly the speed of light, in 1477 it took awhile for the news to break and for the reality of the situatio...

As Charles the Bold spent the final years of his life campaigning, two women became integral parts of Burgundian society and politics - his daughter, Mary of Burgundy, and his wife, Margaret of York. Mary, whose mother Isabella of Bourbon died when she was young, is often portrayed as little more than a pawn in her father’s machinations. Those machinations sent him to an icy demise when Mary was j...

Why do the Dutch hang school bags on flagpoles, place giant blow-up dolls on their front lawn and have clocks without numbers in their pubs? And why do the Flemings celebrate newborns by eating ‘poop beans’? In this podcast, we are delving into some of the unique and peculiar customs, social norms and rituals of Flanders and the Netherlands and see the different ways in which these traditions have...

This is a special episode we were invited to make by Tony's Chocolonely, an Amsterdam-based chocolate company which is on a mission to eradicate modern slavery and make 100% slave-free the norm in chocolate.  Earlier this year, the Chief Chocolate Officer of Tony's Chocolonely, Henk Jan Beltman, was arrested for spray painting a Black Lives Matter slogan next to a statue of one of the most notorio...

The final two years of Charles the Bold’s life would see him achieve one of his life’s ambitions, uniting his northern and southern domains as one continuous territory, before suffering a hat-trick of defeats at the hands of the Swiss, which would leave him unrecognisably dead, naked and half-eaten in a frozen pool of water. Having come to peace terms with the Emperor when abandoning the siege of...

After being rebuffed in his royal ambitions at Trier in 1473, Charles the Bold became embroiled in a series of power struggles with neighbouring imperial lands during the final years of his life. In Upper Alsace, which the Duke of Austria, Sigismund, had mortgaged to him, Charles installed a man named Peter von Hagenbach as his bailiff, whose tyrannical tendencies united a coalition of Swiss and A...

Charles the Bold inherited from his predecessors a lust for territorial expansion. When an old conflict in Guelders reared its head in 1468, Charles put himself in position to intervene there in much the way he had in Liège. Not just satisfied with this, he also sent a strongly worded letter to the power-brokers of Friesland, suggesting that they should think about accepting him, the Count of Holl...

At the beginning of 1468, after having crushed a second uprising in Liège in the space of two years, Charles the Bold set about the all-important task of figuring out to whom he was going to marry. At the same time, he was once again being dragged into affairs in France as petulant nobles there began once more to grumble militarily about his nemesis, French king, Louis XI. Although Charles and Lou...

When it comes to food, Flanders and the Netherlands are not two peas in a pod. What is the influence of religion on our cuisine? Why do Belgians love eating out at restaurants? Which recipes can be found in the oldest Dutch cookbook? Why did the Dutch ever eat tulip bulbs and now have a dish called a hairdresser's salon? In this episode, we find out what Flemish and Dutch people have been eating s...

To tide you over in our absence during the summer break, we decided to reboot an episode of our previous podcast entitled 'Rembrandt and the Revolting Batavians'. We'll be back with regular programming as soon as possible. Marked explicit due to a few naughty words. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Upon becoming the Duke of Burgundy, along with all the titles that came with it, Charles the Bold inherited the complex series of social revolts that were either simmering or boiling over in places like Liege and Flanders. After burying his father, which he did with all the symbolic and royal pomp and ceremony that he could muster, Charles headed for Ghent. There, he expected to make a Joyous Entr...

Charles, the Count of Charolais, began to take a more dominant role in the Burgundian court after the forced reconciliation with his father, Philip the Good, in January 1464. By midway through the next year Charles had ejected the pro-French members of the Duke’s inner sanctum and was finally able to convince his father that it was time to check Louis XI’s expansion into the Burgundian realm. He w...

Why did the Dutch drink almost four times as much beer in the fifteenth century as they do today? Why would the Beer Drinking War be a better name for The Eighty Years' War? And why is the longest-standing beer in Belgium not as old as the brewers want us to believe? Pour a glass of your favourite brew and join on a historic journey of beer and brewing in the Low Countries. Proost! Do you want to...

In the final decade of his reign, Philip the Good was obsessed with the idea of a crusade against the Ottoman Turks. The complexities of the diverse state that he had built, however, would never allow him to fulfill this dream, as he would continually be distracted by local issues. Although Philip had been released from his personal vassalage to the French King, France still remained a threat to s...

When Philip the good went to the Imperial Diet in Regensburg in 1454 it gave his son and heir, Charles, the count of Charolais, a chance to get some practice at ruling in his stead, giving subjects in the Burgundian Low Countries a glimpse into what the future of the dynasty might hold. When Philip returned he was obsessed with the idea of crusade, meaning both Charles and Isabella of Portugal rem...