rs, and in
time of war as much as three. This treaty nominally added to the Empire
two new counties, Flanders and Artois, and it gave the whole Netherlands
the benefit of imperial protection. But, though ratified by the States
General promptly, the convention remained almost a dead letter, and left
the Netherlands virtually autonomous. As long as they were unmolested
the Netherlands forgot their union entirely, and when, under the pressure
of Spanish rule, they later remembered and tried to profit by it, they
found that the Empire had no wish to revive it.

[Sidenote: Reformation]

The general causes of the religious revolution were the same in the Low
Countries as in other lands. The ground was prepared by the mystics of
the earlier ages, by the corruption of and hatred for the clergy, and buy
the Renaissance. The central situation of the country made it especially
open to all currents of European thought. Printing was early introduced
from Germany and expanded so rapidly in these years [Sidenote: 1525-55]
that no less than fifty new publishing houses were erected. As Antwerp
was the most cosmopolitan of cities, so Erasmus was the most nearly the
citizen of the world in that era. The great humanist, who did so much to
prepare for the Reformation, spent in his native land just those early
years of its first appearance when he most favored Luther.

{240} A group to take up with the Wittenberg professor's doctrines were
the Augustinians, many of whom had been in close relations with the Saxon
friaries. One of them, James Probst, had been prior of Wittenberg where
he learned to know Luther well [Sidenote: 1515] and when he became prior
of the convent at Antwerp he started a rousing propaganda in favor of the
reform. [Sidenote: 1518] Another Augustinian, Henry of Zuetphen, made
his friary at Dordrecht the center of a Lutheran movement. Hoen at the
Hague, Hinne Rode at Utrecht, Gerard Lister at Zwolle, Melchior Miritzsch
at Ghent, were soon in correspondence with Luther and became missionaries
of his faith. His books, which circulated among the learned in Latin,
were some of them translated into Dutch as early as 1520.

The German commercial colony at Antwerp was another channel for the
infiltration of the Lutheran gospel. [Sidenote: 1520-1] The many
travelers, among them Albert Duerer, brought with them tidings of the
revolt and sowed its seeds in the soil of Flanders and Holland.
Singularly enough, the