the cured herring to
distant ports became a lucrative business. It had two important
consequences, the formation of a Dutch Mercantile Marine, and the growth
of Amsterdam, which from small beginnings had in the middle of the
sixteenth century become a town with 40,000 inhabitants and a port
second only in importance in the Netherlands to Antwerp. From its
harbour at the confluence of the estuary of the Y with the Zuyder Zee
ships owned and manned by Hollanders sailed along the coasts of France
and Spain to bring home the salt for curing purposes and with it wines
and other southern products, while year by year a still larger and
increasing number entered the Baltic. In those eastern waters they
competed with the German Hanseatic cities, with whom they had many
acrimonious disputes, and with such success that the Hollanders
gradually monopolised the traffic in grain, hemp and other "Eastland"
commodities and became practically the freight-carriers of the Baltic.
And be it remembered that they were able to achieve this because many of
the North-Netherland towns were themselves members of the Hanse League,
and possessed therefore the same rights and privileges commercially as
their rivals, Hamburg, Luebeck or Danzig. The great industrial cities of
Flanders and Brabant, on the other hand, not being members of the League
nor having any mercantile marine of their own, were content to transact
business with the foreign agents of the Hanse towns, who had their
counting-houses at Antwerp. It will thus be seen that in the middle of
the sixteenth century the trade of the northern provinces, though as yet
not to be compared in volume to that of the Flemings and Walloons, had
before it an opening field for enterprise and energy rich in
possibilities and promise for the future.

Such was the state of affairs political, religious and economical when
in the year 1555 the Emperor Charles V, prematurely aged by the heavy
burden of forty years of world-wide sovereignty, worn out by constant
campaigns and weary of the cares of state, announced his intention of
abdicating and retiring into a monastery. On October 25, 1555, the act
of abdication was solemnly and with impressive ceremonial carried out
in the presence of the representatives of the seventeen provinces of the
Netherlands specially summoned to meet their sovereign for the last time
in the Great Hall of the Palace at Brussels. Charles took an affecting
farewell of his Netherland