Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 1.djvu/455

 and perseverance displayed by Philip the Good in the course of the long and momentous struggle carried on by Jacqueline of Bavaria for the maintenance of her rights as William VTs heiress.

Philip began the systematic extension of his dominions by the business-like purchase of the county of Namur (Namen) (1422), of which he came into actual possession eight years later by the death of the last female representative of the House of Dampierre. This district was of some consequence by reason of its mining industry, whose products the Meuse carried north, after uniting the waters of the Sambre to its own at the capital. Brabant fell into his hands in 1430 on the death of the young Duke Philip, the brother of Jacqueline's unhappy husband. To the duchy of Brabant that of Limburg had been annexed (1288), with its chief town of Maestricht, the "higher ford" of the Romans and the residence of many Caroling Kings, over which the Bishop of Liege claimed joint rights of sovereignty with the Dukes of Brabant. Unlike the Flemish Counts these Dukes had consistently remained on friendly terms with their towns, where the patriciate (geslachten) vigorously maintained itself throughout the fourteenth century. Ample and solid liberties were conceded to his towns and nobility by Duke John II in the compact known as the Letter of Cortenberg (1312), enlarged by later charters, and above all, when the accession of Wen-ceslas of Luxemburg offered an irresistible opportunity by the famous Joyeuse Entree (blyde inkomste) (1356), which remained the chief pillar of the liberties of the two united duchies down to the tempestuous times of Philip II of Spain. At the beginning of this century Louvain (Leuven) had still regarded herself as the foremost city of Brabant, mindful of the day when she had numbered a hundred thousand inhabitants, and the cloth-industry and the linen-trade had alike flourished within her walls. Soon, however, though she became the seat of the first Netherlands University (1426), a large emigration set in to Brussels, whither the Court likewise transferred its seat. Here the active lower town, and the residences of the nobility lining the descent from the Castle to St Gudule, together contained all the chief elements in the Brabancon population, while the French tastes and manners introduced together with the use of the French tongue by the new dynasty familiarised its favourite residence with an exotic license of life. But, owing to the decay of the cloth industry early in the century, the democratic ascendency of the trades was short-lived in the capital of Brabant; and, like the great Flemish cities themselves, Brussels, though other industries flourished here, was commercially distanced by Antwerp.

Over Hainault, Holland, Zeeland, and (more or less nominally) Friesland, Philip's sovereignty was definitively established in 1433, five years after the resistance of Jacqueline had finally collapsed, at the very time when the fury of the Kabeljaauws had risen to fever-pitch