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Prologue: Prince Philip's Tour of the Low Countries, 1549 Prologue: Prince Philip's Tour of the Low Countries, 1549
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War War
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Finance Finance
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Politics Politics
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Part front matter for Part I The Habsburg Netherlands, 1549–1567
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Published:January 2008
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Prologue: Prince Philip's Tour of the Low Countries, 1549
In sixteenth‐century Europe politics was the dance of authority with privilege. Emperor Charles V was ruler in so many lands that he seldom exercised authority in his own person. In the Holy Roman Empire, Archduke Ferdinand of Austria represented his elder brother, as king of the Romans or heir apparent to the imperial throne. When absent from Spain, Charles entrusted the realms of Castile and Aragón to his wife Isabella (d. 1538), or his son, the future King Philip II (1527–98). The crown of Aragón included the kingdoms of Naples and Sicily, where viceroys acted in Charles's name. In the Low Countries Charles ruled the provinces inherited from his Burgundian ancestors1 under separate titles, as duke of Brabant, count of Flanders, count of Holland and Zeeland, etc. Two strong‐minded Habsburg women functioned as regents of the Netherlands: Charles's aunt, Margaret of Austria, from 1517 to 1530, and his sister, Mary of Hungary, from 1531 to 1555. Both Charles and those who governed in his name had a clear conception of his hauteur—what theorists would soon be calling sovereignty.2 Mary of Hungary, faced by Holland's adamant refusal to accept a 1 per cent export fee to which the other provinces had agreed, imposed the tax in Holland by virtue of ‘the emperor's absolute authority’; she knew that this principle, because seldom invoked, brooked no opposition.3 Yet it was equally true in each of Charles's lands that subjects enjoyed privileges resting on grants by his predecessors; these could not lightly be set aside. The privileged convened in parliamentary assemblies: nobles and (often) clergy, exempt from most forms of taxation; and deputies from the cities with voting rights, jealous of their power to decide where the burden of taxation fell.
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