A History of the Low Countries

Paul Arblaster

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781137611857
• Edition: 3
• eBook ISBN:
  9781350307148
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

This introductory overview of the Low Countries' history traces their development since Roman times, providing equal weighting to the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg. Paul Arblaster looks at political, cultural and social history, including the rise of the merchant classes, the Renaissance and Golden Age, and the two world wars of the 20th century. The final chapter has been expanded and revised to take into account developments since 2011. This third edition is thoroughly updated and revised throughout and benefits from our recently refreshed series design. This timely and engaging narrative provides an invaluable starting-point for students of History focusing on the Low Countries, European Studies and Dutch studies. New to this Edition:
- More detail on the EU, particularly current in light of Brexit and Euroscepticism
- More environmental and global history
- Coverage of the latest political developments
- More maps, to bridge the gap between the 15th century and the present day
- An updated bibliography

1Roman Rule, 57 BC to AD 455

The earliest historical record of the Low Countries is in Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War, a self-serving account of his conquest of the Gaulish tribes in what are now northern France and Belgium. This was the beginning of a period of Roman domination that was to last for five centuries, deeply influencing the social, political, economic, cultural and religious landscapes of the Low Countries.

THE BELGIANS ARE THE BRAVEST OF THEM ALL, 57–13 BC

In a much-quoted passage at the beginning of his Commentaries, Caesar wrote, ‘The Belgae are the bravest of them all’, with the much less often quoted continuation, ‘living furthest from the culture of the province, being least visited by merchants, . . . and constantly warring with the Germans’. He delineates the lands inhabited by these Belgic Gauls as the area bordered southwards by the Seine and the Marne, westwards by the ocean, and northwards and eastwards by the Rhine. This corresponds to all of present-day Belgium and Luxembourg, roughly the southern half of the Netherlands, part of north-eastern France, and Germany west of the Rhine.

Caesar needed intelligence about the peoples he was facing, and at various points in the Gallic War he refers to merchants, diplomatic hostages, Gaulish allies and prisoners of war as informants. Since all these voices are filtered through his own perspective, we have no way of verifying his statements. The material record shows only that the inhabitants of the area Caesar describes as Belgic belonged to the much more broadly diffused late Iron Age Celtic culture that archaeologists call ‘La Tène’.

Power in this culture was held by aristocratic families, whose members might be buried with Greek pottery and Italian bronzeware as well as Celtic work of high quality. Their subjects lived dispersed in small agricultural communities under local chieftains. The raising of crops was supplemented with extensive salt-working all along the coast, and sheep-rearing and the making of woollen cloth further inland. There are signs of pottery production, of iron-working, and, in the Ardennes, of panning for gold. Caesar identified druids and warriors as the two groups in Gaulish society distinct from the commoners. The Greek geographer Strabo was more circumstantial, distinguishing bards, soothsayers and druids as the spiritual elite. Some rulers had begun to mint coins, modelled on those of the Macedonians, but these were little more than prestige tokens, used to reward warriors. The economic life of the society was almost entirely agricultural, with little commerce. Even elite luxury imports were perhaps thought of as exchanges of gifts rather than purchases.

Celtic rulers could increase their prestige and extend their territory through war, exacting tribute from their defeated enemies but dedicating any immediate plunder to the gods. These local wars were a frequent feature of life in Gaul. Here and there in the Low Countries, especially in the Ardennes, archaeologists have uncovered the remains of late La Tène fortified settlements, hill forts with drystone defences, or timber-framed stone and earthworks (what Caesar calls ‘Gaulish walls’ in his account of the siege of Alesia), one response to the political-military dynamics of the culture. The endemic warfare and shifting alliances of the Celtic aristocracy encouraged a warrior ethic of honour, courage and personal loyalty, but no political cohesion among the various Belgic, let alone Gaulish, tribes.

Rome’s opportunity for expansion, and Caesar’s opportunity for the glory and plunder that would boost his political career at home, came through the infighting of the Gauls. In 59 BC Caesar was appointed proconsul of Roman Provence. The next year a tribe from the region north of the Alps appealed to their Roman allies for aid against their enemies. The legions were sent north to intervene in this local war and encamped for the winter far beyond the boundaries of the Roman province. The Belgic tribes, naturally uneasy, concluded a league for mutual defence should the Romans move further northwards, and Caesar took this as reason enough to invade their territory the following year, 57 BC. His army consisted not only of Romans but also of Numidian, Cretan and Balearan auxiliaries.

Among the Belgic tribes, the Treveri (in the area around Trier) and the Remi (around Rheims) chose to make alliances with Rome, their cavalry providing a welcome supplement to the legions. The first action in the new campaign was against the Nervians and their allies, peoples living primarily in what is now Belgium and the French-Belgian border area. The Nervians brought their old folk, women and children into safety in the marshes, and engaged the Roman invaders and their allies on the River Sabis (probably the Selle, a tiny tributary of the Scheldt now in France). The struggle was fierce, and Caesar himself fought sword in hand. As the battle turned against the Belgae, their warriors stood atop the bodies of their fallen comrades until they were fighting on a great mound of corpses, still catching Roman javelins and flinging them back. By the end of the day, the Nervians were defeated and their army virtually annihilated. The survivors were spared enslavement and given guarantees of autonomy under Roman patronage.

The Aduatuci, whose force was still on its way to support the Nervians when they heard of the defeat, retreated to what Caesar calls oppidum Aduatucorum, ‘the walled town of the Aduatuci’. Scornful at first of the invaders’ elaborate siege preparations, the novel sight of a mobile siege tower filled them with apprehension, and they offered to parley. They met the Roman demand for disarmament by throwing piles of weapons over the walls, keeping back a third of their arms in concealment. That night they sallied out against the Roman encampment. After confused fighting in the darkness, the Romans stormed the gates of the fort at dawn, finding it virtually abandoned. Those Aduatuci who could be found were rounded up and sold into slavery. In the past there was some speculation that the oppidum Aduatucorum might be Namur, but in 2012 a team of archaeologists and historians announced that they had identified it as a hill fort in the woods outside the little town of Thuin near Charleroi: the topography matches Caesar’s description; digs had turned up concentrations of lead shot of the type used by Roman slingmen; and three separate coin hoards had been buried there in the mid-first century BC.

At the end of the year, Caesar somewhat prematurely informed Rome that all Gaul had been subjugated. The following year he defeated the Veneti of north-western Gaul at sea, then moved against their allies on the Belgic coast, the Morini and Menapians. These small tribes retreated into the woods and marshes, harassing the Romans but avoiding a large-scale engagement. Caesar blamed his failure to subjugate them on the bad weather, but the following year he had little better success. During the general Gallic Revolt of 53–51 BC, the Morini and Menapians allied themselves with Vercingetorix.

More distant peoples also presented Caesar with problems. In 55 BC two German tribes that had been displaced from their own lands, the Usipetes and the Tencteri, joined forces and attempted to settle in depopulated Belgic territory. Caesar led eight Roman legions to drive them back again. When, after initial clashes, their leaders came to plead with him to allow them land, he detained them and attacked the unprepared encampment. The Germans were harried to the confluence of the Maas and the Waal, and with nowhere to run they died there either by drowning or by the sword. There were no Roman fatalities, suggesting that ‘battle’ might not be the word for this particular confrontation. In 2015, the international press widely reported the claim of the Dutch archaeologist Nico Roymans to have identified the site of this event near the village of Kessel in North Brabant. Along with weapons and beads, the finds included the partial remains of over a hundred people, including women and children, some bearing the marks of weapon blows. Tens of thousands may have died when these tribes were exterminated, and the survivors were scattered, to be absorbed by other tribes. To warn off further intruders, Caesar undertook short expeditions across the Rhine and the Channel in 55 and 54 BC before resuming his campaign in Gaul.

The harvests of 54 BC were poor, and as a result no single location could supply the needs of all the Roman troops. The legions went into winter quarters in a number of fortified camps dispersed over the Belgic region. Within a few weeks, one of these camps, housing a legion and five cohorts, was being besieged by the Eburones, a tribe whose core territory lay along the Maas in what are now the Dutch and Belgian provinces of Limburg. After an initial repulse, the Eburon leader Ambiorix asked to speak with the Roman commanders. He informed their messengers that he was personally grateful to Caesar not only for freeing him from the tribute exacted by the Aduatuci but for releasing a son and a nephew who had been held by them as hostages. His attack had been under pressure from his people and his allies, but now that he had fulfilled his military obligations, and knowing that he could not hope to beat the Romans, he wished to restore friendship by warning them that a large force of Germans would soon be crossing the Rhine. He advised them that they would be doomed if they remained in this lone outpost, and that they should both warn and reinforce the other Roman garrisons in the vicinity. When the message was brought back to them, the Roman officers argued bitterly and publicly about how to respond to Ambiorix’s offer of safe conduct, but doubt-ers were overruled. The column set off in marching order the next morning, only to be ambushed and annihilated in a valley 11 miles from the fort.

The Eburones went on to lay siege to another of the Roman camps, in the lands of the Nervians, where a single legion was lodged. They built siege engines to the specifications of Roman prisoners, and were joined by Nervians and by the remnants of the Aduatuci. The Treveri, who had initially allied themselves with Rome, now sided with the Belgic ‘rebels’, their pro-Roman Prince Cingetorix having lost a factional struggle for influence to the anti-Roman Indutiomarus.

Caesar’s response was swift and brutal. The Armoricans and then the Treveri were defeated in battle. Indutiomarus was captured and beheaded. Ten legions systematically devastated the lands of the Eburones. In 2008 a hoard of Celtic gold coins dating from the mid-first century BC was discovered in Maastricht, presumably hidden during the Roman campaign of extermination. Catuvolcus, King of the Eburones, was too decrepit to fight or flee, and hanged himself from a yew; their war leader Ambiorix escaped with four guards and was never found. There is no later record of the existence of either the Eburones or the Aduatuci as distinct peoples, nor of the Usipetes and the Tencteri. It may be that large numbers of survivors took on new allegiances, but these particular tribal identities were destroyed. Archaeologists today debate whether ‘genocide’ is an appropriate term for these circumstances, and even ancient writers were appalled. Pliny the Elder, who served on the Rhine frontier a century later, disapprovingly calculated that over a million people had perished in Caesar’s wars of conquest, and Caesar’s biographer Suetonius, writing early in the second century AD, was horrified not only at the scale of the slaughter but at Caesar’s cynical use of violence to enhance his own wealth and power.

In the nineteenth century a statue of the Eburon Prince Ambiorix was erected in the marketplace of Tongeren, in Belgian Limburg, to commemorate the heroic leader of the ‘Ancient Belgian’ fight for freedom. With the change in educational fashions, many of today’s youngsters will only have heard of the Ancient Belgians through admonishments from their elders not to eat like them, or from the pages of comic books, such as Astérix chez les Belges. For centuries past, though, Caesar’s Gallic War was a school child’s primer in Latin and history. It was still giving some people their sense of the enduring charac-teristics of the Belgians as recently as the Second World War. The lesson which a primary school textbook of 1947 drew from the story of Ambiorix was that ‘The Belgian loves liberty: it is a heritage of our forefathers.’

The great Roman historian Tacitus, writing almost 150 years after Julius Caesar’s conquests, gives the historic justification for Roman rule in Gaul: they had been invited in to defend the warring Gauls from one another and from the Germans. In return for Roman pacification and protection, the Gauls were expected only to pay taxes and to provide military manpower. But during Caesar’s lifetime Rome’s civil wars in Italy and North Africa delayed the establishment of structures for assessing and collecting tax and for recruiting auxiliaries. Caesar’s adopted son, Gaius Octavius, emerged as the victor in these wars, and on 17 January in the year 27 BC the Roman Senate conferred on him imperial powers and the title of Augustus. After spending most of the year re-establishing order in Rome and Italy, Augustus went to Gaul, where he remained for several years and instituted a series of administrative reorganizations.

First, the government of Caesar’s conquests of 30 years before was separated from the older province of Gallia Transalpina (Provence), under the name Gallia Comata (‘long-haired Gaul’). An altar to Augustus and Rome was erected in the new provincial capital at Lugdunum (Lyons), where the Gaulish leaders were to swear allegiance and make annual sacrifices. At a later stage, Gallia Comata was subdivided into the provinces Aquitania (from the Pyrenees to the Loire), Gallia Lugdunensis (from the Loire to the Seine) and Belgica (from the Seine to the Rhine), although the ‘Three Gauls’ were still linked in some respects, such as the annual sacrifices to the deified Augustus at Lyons.

Belgica was subdivided into districts, called civitates, according to the tribe dominant in the area. In the Low Countries these included a civitas Morinorum, a civitas Menapiorum, a civitas Nerviorum, a civitas Tungrorum and a civitas Treverorum. These districts were largely self-governing, as long as they adopted the outward forms of Roman administration and magistracy, respected the Pax Romana, submitted to Roman tax assessments and provided auxiliary troops. Each tribe had its own administrative centre, the Morini Tarvanna (Thérouanne), the Menapians Castellum Menapiorum (Cassel), the Nervians Bagacum (Bavay), the Tungrians Aduatuca Tungrorum (Tongeren) and the Treverans Augusta Treverorum (Trier). The great cities of the province, Rheims, Trier and Cologne, are now in France or Germany, but numerous towns and villages in the Benelux area date from Roman times, as do the cities of Arlon, Maastricht, Namur, Nijmegen, Tournai and Utrecht.

BEYOND THE RHINE, 13 BC TO AD 80

At the time of Caesar’s invasion, Belgic settlement extended to the ‘Old Rhine’, further north than the present course of the great rivers. When the Romans fixed the Rhine as the boundary of Gaul, and depopulated it with their wars against rebel Belgic tribes, they allowed a number of Germanic peoples – Batavians, Cananefates and Frisiavones – to settle the delta area. North of the Rhine, the lands of the Frisians stretched along the North Sea coast as far as the Ems. This was a region of marshes and lakes, the largest of them Lake Flevo (the Zuider Zee did not form until the late Middle Ages). The material culture of the Frisians was distinct from that of the Gauls. The period of Celtic culture labelled ‘La Tène’ corresponds with the ‘Proto-Frisian’ and ‘Frisian’ periods to the north, the distinction resting on a number of factors, foremost among them the different styles of earthenware produced locally.

In 13 BC Augustus launched the Roman invasion of Germania. The first stage was an amphibian operation against the Frisians, who almost immediately allied themselves with the invading Romans. Their lands were to become a military gateway: troops and supplies could be transported by water through Frisia to the mouth of the Weser, and thence upstream into the heart of Germania. To simplify the logistics, Augustus’s stepson Drusus had his men dig out a channel, the fossa drusiana, connecting the Rhine to the IJssel, and the IJssel to Lake Flevo. At first the subjugation of the Germans went well, but in AD 9 three legions and their auxiliaries, totalling 27,000 men, were lost in an ambush in the Teutoburger Wald (just to the east of the Low Countries). The Rhine again became the border. Over the course of the next 40 years there were six more Roman invasions through Frisia, none of which led to any permanent success beyond the Rhine. Belgica was to be a frontier province, with a heavy military presence, until the fall of the Roman Empire. The Frisians remained allies of Rome, perhaps fearing neighbouring tribes more than they did the Romans.

The Frisians were very much the junior partner in the alliance. They were not ruled or taxed by Rome, but they did have to pay tribute, and a garrison was installed to collect it. The tribute was set at a certain number of cow-hides for military uses, the size and quality of which was left undetermined. In the year AD 28 Olennius, the leading centurion commanding the garrison, decreed that the standard for tribute was to be the hide of the aurochs, the now extinct wild ox, larger and tougher than the local cattle. Declaring the Frisians to be in default, the soldiers seized cattle, land, women and children. The Frisians rose in arms and crucified the tribute collectors. Olennius took refuge in the fort of Flevum (Velsen), which the Frisians besieged in vain. The army of the Rhine was sent in but was unable to deploy effectively in waterlogged country. After rescuing their cavalry from encirclement, the legions pulled back to firmer ground. In the chaos 900 men had failed to withdraw and were later killed in the Grove of Baduhenna, while another 400, who had holed up in a retired soldier’s villa, committed suicide en masse to avoid being captured and sacrificed to the Frisian war goddess.

The Frisian Revolt ended Roman influence north of the Rhine for 20 years, but after AD 47 the Frisians again recognized the paramountcy of Rome, for the security it offered against tribes from the east. The legate of the frontier army, Corbulo, finalized a new treaty of alliance with the Frisians, fixing and recognizing their borders and reorganizing their government on the model of a provincial civitas. Corbulo also consolidated the Rhine defences, building a fort at Utrecht and having his men dig a canal between the lower reaches of the Maas and the Rhine to facilitate the supply of the frontier forts. Utrecht, with a large fort and outlying watchtowers, was to become a particularly important crossroads in the Roman communication system. It controlled both the Rhine river traffic and the main north–south crossing of the river. Several Roman cargo vessels, preserved in the waterlogged soil, have been excavated along the former course of the Rhine, which reached the sea at Katwijk, where the Romans had built a lighthouse in AD 40.

Roman extortions were the source of the most famous of the revolts on the lower Rhine, led by the Batavian Julius Civilis. The Batavians inhabited a large ‘island’ of the Rhine, usually identified as the Betuwe between the Waal and the Lek, now the two main streams of the delta. In his Germania Tacitus describes the Batavians as ‘foremost in manliness’ among all the Germanic tribes of the Rhine. Presumably the Romans had fixed their borders by treaty and encouraged them to adopt Roman-style magistracy, as they had with the Frisians. As an independent client people, the Batavians were not subject to taxation, but were expected to tolerate a garrison and provide troops, and the Romans avidly cultivated the Batavians as a source of recruits. They had done so since 12 BC, shortly after Augustus’s invasion of Germania, and unlike directly subject peoples, Batavian cohorts served under their own officers. The emperors were soon using Batavians as ceremonial guards.

Rome’s first imperial dynasty came to an end in AD 68 when Nero, faced with a successful rebellion led by Servius Sulpicius Galba, committed suicide. The senate recognized Galba as Nero’s successor, but in the course of AD 69, ‘the Year of Four Emperors’, the frontier legions proclaimed their commanders as emperor: those on the Rhine, Aulus Vitellius; those on the Danube, Marcus Silvius Otho; and those in the Levant, Vespasian. Galba himself and his designated heir were murdered. The press-gangs that Vitel...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Foreword
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Editor Title
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Roman Rule, 57 BC to AD 455
• 2 From Pagans to Crusaders, 456–1100
• 3 The Rise of Princely Rule, 1056–1231
• 4 Princes and Parliaments, 1231–1384
• 5 The Low Countries United, 1384–1559
• 6 The Low Countries Divided, 1559–1648
• 7 From Delftware to Porcelain, 1600–1780
• 8 The Rise of the Liberal Order, 1780–1878
• 9 Fin de Siècle, 1878–1914
• 10 World Wars and Decolonization, 1914–60
• 11 The Present Time, 1960–2018
• Chronology of Major Events
• Select List of Dynasties and Rulers
• Select List of Political Parties and Governments since 1918
• Suggestions for Further Reading
• Index
• Index