ABSTRACT
After the collapse of royal authority in the Low Countries during the Dutch Revolt, the Prince of Parma’s negotiations and campaigns of the early 1580s did much to re-establish the king’s power in the southern provinces of the Netherlands. The reconciliation and reconquest of the provinces and cities to the south of the great rivers entailed a restoration, but was in some ways the creation of a new entity. In this area of the Netherlands, public life was emphatically Catholic and loyalist in ways it had never been before, deliberately emphasizing the differences with the Calvinist Republic to the north. Parma was, in the words of Justus Lipsius, the foremost intellectual of the day, the ‘founder of Belgium.’1 The most important provinces of the Habsburg Netherlands were the County of Flanders (where the main towns were Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres), and the Duchy of Brabant (with the chief cities Louvain, Brussels, Antwerp, and ’s-Hertogenbosch), but there were large towns in other provinces, and numerous smaller towns throughout the land. In the sixteenth century, the three areas of densest urbanization in Europe were the Po Valley, Naples and its immediate surroundings, and the southern Netherlands.2
