Burgundian Afterlives. Appropriating the Dynastic Past(s) in the Habsburg Netherlands

Abstract

Plagued by discord and violence, the subjects of the late sixteenth-century Netherlands looked back upon the reign of the Burgundian dukes with ‘tears in their eyes’. They recalled their former overlords as the ‘founders and benefactors of [their] beautiful trading cities [merctyen] and free privileges’. Recent oppression, resulting in rebellion against princely authority, made people long for the return of what had been more prosperous times. At least, by invoking this rather emotional vision, an anonymous pamphleteer tried to justify in 1579 the rebels’ appeal for aid to the Duke of Anjou, the French king’s youngest brother, at the height of the Dutch Revolt. Hailed as a direct descendant of the Valois dukes who had ruled most of the Low Countries in the fifteenth century, the text urged Anjou to emulate the political virtues of his Burgundian ancestors, as opposed to the divisive actions of the Spanish king. Obviously, not everyone in the rebellious provinces subscribed to a dynastic re-creation in the figure of Anjou. Many opposed the French overtures, which in 1582 resulted in the formal, yet ultimately unsuccessful, appointment of Anjou as new lord of the Netherlands, and royal supporters still advocated the ancestral rights of the Spanish king. What the pamphlet’s claim reveals, however, is a topical reinterpretation of the Burgundian dynasty. Its idealized appraisal of a once ‘native’ rule upholding the liberties of the political community reflected present disagreements about the extent of princely authority. A Burgundian golden age, built upon the combination of princely virtue and civic consent, became the touchstone of equitable government. Since Philip the Bold, son of the French king and the first Valois Duke of Burgundy, had married the Flemish heiress Margaret of Male in 1369, the rapid expansion of ducal power had transformed the Low Countries. Gradually, his successors acquired most of the semi-autonomous principalities situated on the fringe of the French kingdom and the Holy Roman Empire. By the 1470s the ducal patrimony – aside from the duchy and free county of Burgundy in the east of France − comprised most parts of what is now presentday Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxemburg, and the north of France. After the French annexation of the duchy of Burgundy during the succession crisis of 1477, the remaining lands passed into the hands of the Habsburgs through the marriage of Duchess Mary of Burgundy with the emperor’s son Maximilian of Austria. Yet, despite the subsequent integration of these regions into a much larger composite state, the ‘Burgundian’ identity proved particularly resilient. As the contributions in this special issue point out, the chronological divide between a Burgundian and Habsburg era was less clear-cut than it appears to be today, although identification with the Burgundian dynasty took on different shapes from the sixteenth century to the early twentieth century. DUTCH CROSSING 2019, VOL. 43, NO. 1, 1–6 https://doi.org/10.1080/03096564.2019.1559497