Day of Empire_ How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance--And Why They Fall - Amy Chua [80]
Charles, who was born in Ghent, was sympathetic to the Dutch. Under his rule, the Low Countries received unrestricted trading rights and came to control a majority of the world's trading volume. The advent of the Reformation, however, proved as divisive in the Netherlands as it was throughout Europe. Calvinism swept with intoxicating force across the Low Countries, pitting Protestants against Catholics in both the northern and southern provinces. This rift was exacerbated in 1556, when Charles abdicated his claims to the Netherlands and Spain in favor of his son Philip II.
Unlike his father, Philip was born and raised in Spain, spoke no Dutch, and openly disdained the Low Countries. He was also a far more zealous Catholic. Making it his holy mission to stop the expansion of the Reformation, Philip launched “one of the most dramatic, bloody, and confused episodes of early modern European history.”6
Philip demanded absolute loyalty to the Roman Catholic Church and appointed Catholic, non-Dutch-speaking governors all over the Netherlands. In the 1560s, led by William the Silent of Orange, many of the northern provinces began agitating against the Spanish yoke. Philip responded by sending 10,000 troops, led by the Spanish Duke of Alva, to deal with the troublemakers. As one author describes him, the Duke of Alva was “unswerving, even fanatical, in his detestation of Protestant heresy…Capable of great cruelty but always out of calculation, his outlook was a strange mixture of humanist cosmopolitanism and xenophobic bigotry…His deeply suspicious attitude towards the Netherlands nobility and population was tinged with scarcely veiled contempt.”
Evidently in one of his less humanist moods, Alva, upon arriving in the Netherlands, promptly convened a tribunal—nicknamed “The Council of Blood”—and proceeded to execute one thousand Dutch, including many prominent citizens, while imprisoning and confiscating the property of many more. He also levied heavy new taxes. Starting in 1572, popular revolts erupted throughout the north Netherlands. Alva retaliated brutally, devastating Haarlem and massacring the townspeople of Mechelen, Naarden, and Zut-phen. Aggravated by the arrival of the Dutch “Sea Beggars”— fiercely anti-Catholic, piratelike forces recently expelled from England's ports—violence stretched on for four years. What happened next was unexpected.7
In 1576, mutinous, starving Spanish troops—unpaid by the financially strained Philip II—left the rebellious north for the prosperous south, where they plundered Antwerp and slaughtered as many as seven thousand citizens. This incident became known as the Spanish Fury. Although the massacre occurred in the south, it had a far more lasting influence in the north, where it was captured in apocalyptic detail by contemporary poets and artists, becoming part of the Netherlands’ national birth story. In one famous account by the Amsterdam poet Pieter Hooft, a bride is raped and murdered on her wedding day by a sadistic Spanish captain: “He stripped her, chains, clothing, underthings, everything from top to bottom taken from that pure body.” Having abused her, the captain “hunted her, mother-naked, dripping with the blood of her innumerable wounds, through the city.”
The Spanish Fury prompted the signing of the Pacification of Ghent, in which the northern and southern provinces of the Netherlands united to drive out the Spanish troops. But the Pacification was short-lived. In 1579, led by influential Catholic nobles, the southern provinces declared anew their loyalty to Philip II, Spain, and the Catholic Church. In response, the northern provinces proclaimed their autonomy and their right to religious freedom. Two years later, they enacted the Oath of Abjuration, a declaration of independence with an opening sentiment that found a striking echo in American history two hundred years later:
As ‘tis apparent to all that a prince is constituted by God