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 the redoubtable Albert of Saxony to assume authority as governor. The end came three years later when Albert was once more offered the governorship by the terrified towns of Sneek and Franeker, and his lieutenants subjugated the land by a series of manoeuvres, crafty and cruel like those of a campaign against savages, and ending with a battle of artillery against pikes, and the capture of Leeuwarden (June-July, 1498). Maximilian now bestowed the whole of Friesland, including Groningen, upon Albert with the title of hereditary governor (potestat), reserving to himself the right of redeeming West-Friesland on the payment of 100,000 florins. The greater part of his own debt to Albert, which amounted to more than treble this sum, had been taken over by Philip; but an ugly suspicion remains as to Maximilian's motives in the transaction. After Albert, who had been detained by the Gelders War, had himself arrived in Friesland, the rough insolence of one of his sons drove the country into rising once more against his yoke; and he was laying siege to Groningen, which this time had joined hands with its former adversaries, when death overtook him at Emden (September, 1500). Edzard of East-Friesland, to whom Groningen and the Omme-lande now did homage, summoned Charles of Egmond to his aid and was supported by a native rising under a peasant known as the Great Pier, who afterwards rejoiced in the title of "Admiral of the Zuiderzee." At last, in 1515, Duke George of Saxony agreed to dismiss the "Black Band" of soldiery, formerly in Egmond's service, which had carried fire and sword through the land, and to accept the redemption of the country on payment of the sum agreed upon between his father and the Roman King. Charles, who in this very year assumed the government of the Netherlands, at last solved the Frisian problem by the reduction of the country, followed by the submission of Groningen to the imperial authority.

Slight indeed had been the importance of that problem on the horizon of Maximilian's speculations. The great matrimonial plan, which he seems to have devised in part as early as 1491, was fully carried out within six years. In August, 1496, the infanta Juana was wedded at Antwerp to Duke Philip, and on Palm Sunday of the following year his sister Margaret, after intrepidly encountering many dangers on the way, gave her hand at Burgos to the infante Don John. Soon however a tragic succession of deaths-those of Don John, his posthumous child, Juana's elder sister Queen Isabel of Portugal, and her son Don Miguel, left Juana heiress-apparent of the united kingdoms of Castile and Aragon (1500). In the same year her eldest son Charles was born at Ghent; and the city, with no foreknowledge of what she was afterwards to suffer at his hands, was loud in her rejoicings. But vast as was the prospect now opened before Philip, he was, so far as the conduct of Netherlands affairs was concerned, brought little nearer to the schemes of Maximilian's foreign policy. An interview between father and son