History of the Netherlands

Philip the Good may have dreamed of wearing a single crown, but while that was not the case he was just a man wearing many different hats, and if you’ve ever seen someone wearing more than one hat at a time, you’d know how difficult and awkward that can be. Philip brought in administrative and economic changes to try and fuse the many different bureaucracies of his lands into one. This led to earl...

After the Treaty of Arras in 1435, Philip the Good’s international policies had to overcome several hurdles if he was to achieve his aim of obtaining as much territory and autonomy as he could. Despite his reconciliation with the king of France, the two cousins would continually be at each other’s throats and on the brink of breaking into warfare again. In 1441 Philip became the regent for Luxembo...

Jan van Eyck, one of the Low Countries' most famous artists, lived through an extraordinary period in history, between the 1390s and the 1440s. Although much about the early Netherlandish painter’s life is completely unknown, the details which do remain provide tantalising glimpses into an artistic and technical talent, who was both socially and politically capable enough to be able to ingratiate...

The court of Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy, became widely known as the most extravagant and luxurious in Europe during the almost 50 years of his reign between 1419 and 1467. Using pomp, ceremony and patronage of the arts, an image was created of Philip as a wise, just and fair ruler; the “grand duke of the west”. During the celebrations of Philip the Good’s marriage to Isabella of Portugal in...

At the beginning of the 15th century, towns in the Oversticht, the region which mostly makes up today’s modern province of Overijssel but at the time was controlled by the prince-bishop of Utrecht, reached their medieval zenith largely because of their involvement and affiliation with the Hanseatic League. Strategically positioned along the IJssel river, which connected the Zuiderzee to the Rhine,...

As much as we may like to imagine that those at the top of the social and political ladders - the kings, queens, counts, and dukes, politicians, merchants and bankers - are the people who drive history onwards, it is everyday people that truly live and experience most of what happens in history, whether or not their names go in the record books. In this episode we imagine the extraordinary life of...

On his death-bed in 1417, William VI, Count of Hainault, Holland and Zeeland, named his daughter Jacqueline of Bavaria as his heir. Given the financial, political and military might of these three territories, this elevated Jacqueline to an extremely powerful position within the low countries, and despite being only 15 years old, she seems to have been up to the task. Jacqueline was not afraid to...

At the end of the first decade of the 1400s, everything seemed to be going peachy for John the Fearless, the Duke of Burgundy. He had resisted a large rebellion and maintained his centralising influence over most of the low-countries as well as nurtured and made official the alliance his father had created with the other major powerbase in the low countries, the Count of Holland. By the end of the...

On September 23, 1408, a combined allied army of the duke of Burgundy, the count of Holland, and the bishop-elect of Liège marched against the people of Liege, who had erupted into an all out revolt against their ruler. At the Battle of Othée, the Liégeois were utterly crushed and in the aftermath the citizens of Liège were made to pay dearly by the victorious nobles, with the town stripped of its...

Philip the Bold and his wife Margaret ruled Flanders for twenty years from 1384-1404 and during that time would expand their family’s rule into Limburg, as well as set their successors up to rule Brabant, Holland, zeeland, Hainault and other low country territories as well. The manner in which Philip, trod this treacherous path, in particular his giving of lavish gifts and making steady and long t...

For the last 12 months we have been working on an artwork for Amsterdam Light Festival #8. The theme this year is 'Disrupt', so our piece is based on what we believe to be the most disruptive event in Amsterdam's history, the Second World War. During the occupation, around 250-300 people hid in Amsterdam Artis Zoo to escape from Nazi persecution. Among them were Jews, resistance fighters, young me...

Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy, kicked off a dynasty that would forever change the Low Countries. After his marriage to Margaret of Flanders in 1369, Philip would prove himself to be a formidable opponent to anyone playing the game of politics and power in western Europe. He generally did this by using diplomacy instead of the sword. Despite his adventurous and super trendy epithet suggesting o...

In the latter half of the 14th century, a series of technological developments as well as ripe social and economic conditions saw the foundations being laid for the future Dutch takeover of the northern European herring industry. Up until then, the herring trade had been dominated by the Danes, Swedes and the Hanseatic towns of northern Germany and the Baltic Sea, with Dutch and other European con...

Friesland was an autonomous anomaly in Europe, free from the feudal obligations that had so deeply entrenched themselves in society everywhere else. For years the Frisians just rocked along, doing their own thing, which generally involved something to do with cows. We have largely avoided talking about them for a few episodes, but now is the time in our journey through the History of the Netherlan...

By the mid-1300s the fractured mini-states of the lowlands were being pulled apart by competing political and economic interests, warfare, dynastic struggles and the Black Death. The resulting instability meant that relations between the rulers and the ruled were constantly tested as the various layers of society tried to protect their interests in such perilous times. Whereas in Flanders this had...

The Flemish victory over the French at the Battle of the Golden Spurs led to a vast change in social structures, but that battle did not finish or solve the issues between Flanders, France and England. By the 1320s Flanders had still been in near constant warfare for decades and was, frankly, in a state of chaos. The Count of Flanders had lost much control, guilds had gained power in towns so as t...

At this stage in our journey through the History of the Netherlands we have emerged into the 1300s: a century which for a long time, has been seen as the most awful century to have been alive in western Europe. Warfare and plague led to an almost complete breakdown of order in the social fabric. Estimates vary and depend on the region, but in less than a decade up to half of the European populatio...

Today we are going to break the pattern of the last few episodes and make the outrageous move of not talking about Belgium. I know, crazy right. We’ve gone on a lot about the social changes which were taking place throughout the southern lowlands over the last few episodes, so now we move back north and focus our attention on how the area which, after various disastrous floods cut it off from Frie...

In the late 1200s many of the trends and forces that we've been exploring, such as feudalism, urbanisation and industrialisation erupted in a spectacular clash between Flanders and France. Flanders was totally annexed by their larger and more powerful neighbour, but a rebellion stirred that would result in a brutal massacre and an unlikely battlefield victory in a pile of mud, flesh and golden spu...

Today we are taking you on an epic adventure, being passed from hand to hand and from group to group, throughout medieval Flanders, as wool. You read that correctly. Wool. Yes, it might seem strange at first, imagining being an inanimate object. But wool was the most important commodity in Flanders during the 13th century, and the process through which it was transformed from a raw material to a f...

We break away from the main chronology of the series a little bit, to zoom out and re-focus on one particular topic: how exactly, in the space of roughly 500 years, this empty swamp land was transformed into one of the most densely populated places on the planet. But in order to do that, we’re going to have to focus on one of the most underrated, and unappreciated of mother nature’s gifts. And tha...

Freed from the need to be working the land due to the improvements in agriculture discussed in episode 6, people in the low countries began congregating in urban centres. They developed new skills and began manufacturing goods. Artisans like smiths, woodworkers, weavers, embroiderers and textile workers suddenly possessed talents with great economic value. Now, for the first time, members of the c...

The last few episodes have focused heavily on the “Game of Thrones” layer of history; that’s to say, nobles killing each other. As exciting as it's been, only a tiny minority of people who lived around the end of the first millennium of the Common Era would have been directly concerned with those kinds of conflicts. For most people in the lowlands, it didn’t matter who their count or duke or emper...

The disintegration of Charlemagne’s empire at the end of the 9th century left the lowlands part of a larger entity, Lotharingia, wedged between two much more powerful kingdoms, East and West Francia. If you were an ambitious noble, controlling one of the many small, swampy territories and you wished to move yourself up into a more prominent position, what would you do? Well, what lots of them chos...

In the latter half of the 8th century, events and circumstances around Europe become vastly influenced by a man who ruled a huge empire from (right next to) the lowlands. This man is the reason why the name Charles - which if you think about it really hard is actually a pretty weird name - is anywhere near as populous as it is today. But this Charles was, apparently, greater than the rest, and so...