Jacqueline of Hainaut Cedes the Low Countries
Jacqueline of Hainaut inherited three of the richest territories in northern Europe at seventeen and spent nineteen years losing them to her own family. Hainaut, Holland and Zeeland had been governed together since 1299, and in 1417 they passed to a woman for the first time. Her uncle John, a bishop who had never been ordained, resigned his see to claim them. The towns split into two factions that had been feuding for a century, and the inheritance became a civil war. Her marriages were the instrument and the trap. Married at four to a French prince who died, then to a cousin who allied with her uncle against her, she fled to England in men's clothing and married Humphrey of Gloucester, whose invasion of Hainaut in 1424 achieved nothing and whose interest lapsed when the papacy annulled the marriage. Philip the Good of Burgundy backed the uncle, then took the claim for himself when the uncle was poisoned. Jacqueline was captured, escaped from Ghent disguised as a man, raised her supporters again, and was beaten in the field. In 1428 she signed a treaty naming Philip her heir and governor, and agreeing not to marry without his consent. She married anyway, in secret, and abdicated in 1433 when he found out. The three territories went into the Burgundian Netherlands, which is how the Low Countries came to be governed as a single unit for the first time since the Carolingians - and, by inheritance from Burgundy to the Habsburgs, why they were ruled from Vienna and Madrid for the next two centuries.
- Year: 1417 CE
- Category: Political
