Low Countries: Notable Groups, Organizations, and Movements

The Flanders Council (All Facts)

• Provided foreign merchants significant privileges including

  • tolls being reduced

  • accounting methods being simplified

  • bills of exchange being introduced

1200s - 1500s - Beguines (All Facts)

• Religious lay order of women best known as “beggars” who served their communities by begging (some worked as textile workers)

• Communities of single women over thirty who chose to live together in peace and prayer

• They were easily identifiable by the black dresses and white veils that they worse

• They were committed to stay in the namesake place for six years after one year of initiation

• They were characterized by a theological independence demonstrated by their translations of the Bible and at their strict meetings

  • This worried the catholic establishment in France, Germany, and Belgium

• The Bishop of Mainz in Germany

  • initiated the second Church crackdown on the activities of the namesake group

  • accused them of being idle, gossiping vagabonds who refused to obey men under the pretext that God is best served in freedom

  • excommunicated the namesake beggars

  • threatened to evict the namesake beggars from their parishes

1300s - Brethren of Common Life (All Facts)

• Founded by Gerard Groote

• Group members who were not bound by permanent vows, and lived together under a rule, holding all things in common and earning their own livelihoods

1517 - College of Three Languages (All Facts)

• College which taught Hebrew, Greek, and Latin

• College located at Louvain (modern-day Belgium)

• College founded by Desiderius Erasmus

1567 - Council of Troubles (All Facts)

• Tribunal established by Fernando Álvarez de Toledo on the orders of King Philip II of Spain to punish the ringleaders of the recent political and religious troubles in the Netherlands / Low Countries

• It was a newer and more sinister form of the already-established Inquisition in the Netherlands (still separate from Spain’s)

• It was nicknamed “The Council of Blood” / “The Court of Unrest”

• Established by Fernando Alvarez de Toledo, who

  • organized the arrests of thousands just in one spring

  • oversaw the execution of 1,000 alleged heretics

  • oversaw the stripping of property of 8,000 alleged heretics

  • oversaw the seizing and burning of 500 alleged heretical books in the Calvinist city of Tournai

1574 / 1575 - University of Leyden / Leiden University (All Facts)

• Founded by William of Orange in the (Spanish) Netherlands during the reign of King Philip II and Luis de Requesens y Zúñiga