In no instance had his hand been heavier than in his treatment of the peninsula now known as North Holland, stretching out between the North Sea and the Zuiderzee, where dwelt the Kennemer, a primitive race of great and tried vigour, who clung to their liberties as they held fast to the fragments of land left to them by the waters. In Kenne-merland proper Alkmaar was the only town; with thriving Haarlem on their borders these peasants were constantly engaged in petty warfare, and it was from here that Philip proceeded on his expedition of. vengeance which reduced them to the condition of overtaxed dependents. A few of the mercantile settlements along the western coast of the Zuiderzee came in the Burgundian period to rank among the busiest towns of Holland-Hoorn as the chief market in the Netherlands for dairy produce and cattle, Enkhuizen as a centre of the herring-fishery. Friesland proper, on the north-eastern shore, over which Philip asserted his claims as Count of Holland and Zeeland, was not actually absorbed by him. Here the party-name of the Schieringers mainly applied to the lower population settled round the waters of the ancient Westergao, and that of the Veikoopers to the men of substance in and around Groningen, which town held a position so distinctive that it afterwards became eponymous of a whole province (officially called stadt en landen). Philip the Good might possibly have been acknowledged as Lord of Friesland, like John of Bavaria before him, had he been prepared to bind himself to respect the liberties of the population. But this he consistently refused, and the remote region was once more left to itself. Even the subsequent recognition by Groningen of the overlordship of the Bishop of Utrecht was purely nominal; as was the episcopal protection claimed by her against the attempt of Charles the Bold to assert the ducal authority over all West-Friesland (1469.) From the renewed internal party-conflicts in Friesland Groningen discreetly held aloof, intent upon the advancement of her commercial prosperity, by whose side that of ancient “golden” Stavoren was passing away, while that of Leeuwarden had hardly yet begun.
Philip’s last important territorial acquisition was that of the duchy of Luxemburg, a sparsely peopled land of mountains and forests whose capital derived importance from the incomparable natural strength of its position. It had been twice temporarily united with Brabant-first under Wenceslas, upon whom it had been bestowed by his brother, the great Emperor Charles IV, and who was married to the heiress Joan; and then under Elizabeth, niece of the second Wenceslas, King of the Romans, who had left it very much to itself and the protection of its natural outworks, the wild Ardennes. To her (commonly called Elizabeth of Gorlitz) he had, after her marriage to Duke Anthony of Brabant, Philip’s younger brother, made over his rights in Luxemburg; and since both Anthony and her second husband, John of Bavaria, formerly Bishop-elect of Liege, left her a childless widow, her duchy was plainly marked out for incorporation in the Burgundian dominions. In 1445 Philip purchased it from Elizabeth, who, after he had averted an extraneous attack and established his authority in every part of the duchy, made a formal donation to him of the whole.
Of the four great dioceses into which the Netherlands were up to the time of Charles V divided, Liege and Utrecht retained the character of self-governed ecclesiastical principalities beyond the duration of Philip’s reign. Liege (Luik) was one of the most important sees in the Empire, and the spiritual authority of its Bishop extended over parts of Brabant and Hainault, as well as over Namur, Limburg, and Upper Gelderland. In the principality the Diets were composed of representatives of clergy, nobility, and towns, but these last were in enjoyment of liberties resembling those possessed by the Flemish communes. In the city of Liege itself the struggle which had long been carried on between the old patrician families, relatively few in number but favoured by the Bishops, and the mass of the Walloon population, had been decided in favour of the latter, even before “a city of priests had been changed into one of colliers and armourers.” The faction feuds between the Awans and the Waroux had ended with the utter extrusion of the patrician element from the city; and Liege became a democracy of the most advanced type, with a governing body based directly upon the suffrage of all the thirty-two trades. It was as a community swayed by leaders who gloried in their rupture with the past (haydroits), that Liege, with the support of the other “good towns” of the principality revolted against the Bishop-elect, John of Bavaria. The terrible chastisement inflicted by this “pitiless” prince, in which his kinsman the “fearless” John of Burgundy had hastened to have his share (1408), was followed by a reconstitution of the government, from which the trades were absolutely excluded (1414); but some concessions were made to them a few years later.
Half a century later the Liegeois, instigated by Louis XI of France, waged another struggle against another bishop, Louis of Bourbon, a nephew of Duke Philip of Burgundy. His son, the future Duke Charles, forced the principality to acknowledge the Burgundian Dukes as its hereditary protectors (mambourgs) (1465); but another insurrection speedily broke out, nor was the defiant spirit of the artisans who were masters of the city broken even by the bloody sack of Dinant, hitherto the seat of a flourishing industry in the working of copper and brass. In 1467, after defeating the Liegeois in the field, Charles, now Duke in his father’s place, annihilated their privileges and reestablished the Bishop, but at the same time reduced the principality to the condition of a Burgundian fief. In the following year, when Louis XI had placed himself in the power of Charles at Peronne, and a fresh rising had taken place at Liege, the recalcitrant city was overtaken by a fearful doom, at the wreaking of which the French King assisted perforce. Leodensium clades et excidium became the most flagrant of Charles the Bold’s titles to fame; and the pillaged churches, in which, formerly, according to Commines, as many masses had been daily said as at Rome, were virtually all that, after a seven weeks’ sack, was left standing of Liege. But the principality, which had never been formally annexed by Charles, after his death recovered its political independence; and, with characteristic vitality, the great Walloon city rose rapidly from its ruins.
At Peronne Charles also made use of his strange opportunity to strengthen his hold over the series of towns along the line of the Somme, extending from St Quentin to St Valery at the mouth of the river. These Picard towns, “the key of France,” had been left in pledge by France to Burgundy already in the Treaty of Arras (1435), which first impressed upon western Europe a sense of the magnitude of the Burgundian power; redeemed by Louis, in 1463, at a time when Philip and his heir were on ill terms with one another, they had been recovered in 1465 for the Netherlands and the protection of their southern frontier.
The temporal power of the Bishops of Utrecht covered, at least in name, the later provinces of Overyssel and Drenthe (called the Upper See), Groningen, and Utrecht (called the Lower). Although much restricted by the “five Chapters,” whose deputies took the first place in the Diets, the episcopal system of government, as well as the institutions of the city of Utrecht, showed considerable lasting power; largely because, while the representatives of the trades controlled the civic Council, members of the noble families residing at Utrecht had been frequently placed on the roll of the trades themselves. Conflicts, however, repeatedly broke out on the occasion of the filling up of the see, and in Jacqueline’s times the factions of the Llchtenbergers and the Lockhorsts respectively supported the Hoeks and the Kabeljaauws. In 1425 the question of the episcopal succession gave rise to a protracted contest, in which Philip took part; and when, after this had come to an end on the expulsion of one of the claimants and the death of the other, the succession was again disputed, he menaced Utrecht with a large armada, and thus managed to secure the see for his illegitimate son David, who kept possession of it till the death of Charles the Bold. From 1456 onwards to that date Utrecht was entirely under Burgundian influence; but though, as will be seen, Maximilian in 1483 assumed the administration of the principality, and though from 1517-24 another of Philip the Good’s bastards was put in possession of the bishopric, it was not till 1529 that the temporal government of the Upper and Lower See was definitively assumed by Charles V as the sovereign of Brabant and Holland.
It was still later that Gelderland in its turn acknowledged the authority now established over all the rest of the Netherlands. The dynastic broils of the House of Gelders had been tragic enough while they merely affected its own dominions and the neighbouring duchy of Juliers-brother supplanting brother, and sister striving against sister. The contending factions in the duchy of Gelders, whose fury survived the occasion of their origin, went by the names of the Heckerens