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The sixteenth century was an age of prophets. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin interpreted the Word of God, challenging the claim of the Roman church to its own uniquely valid interpretation. These prophets found their armed champions in Knox, Coligny and William of Orange. The Catholic church countered them with her own arms, with Loyola, with Philip II and the Inquisition. But for more than a generation, before the religious conflicts erupted into open war, the political and religious life of Europe was dominated by a very different fighter for God: The Habsburg Emperor Charles V, the last medieval emperor to whom the religious and political unity of Christendom was both the ideal purpose of his life and a practicable object of policy. ‘Caesar is not a doctor of the gospels’, wrote Erasmus in his dedication to Charles of his paraphrase of St Matthew, ‘he is their champion.’ ‘God's standard bearer’, the emperor called himself when, in June 1535, he weighed anchor at Barcelona to wrest Tunis from the Turks. Charles had good reasons for his belief. ‘God has set you on the path towards a world monarchy,’ said the Grand Chancellor Gattinara, in 1519. Marriage alliances and inheritance had given Charles his unique opportunity. In the fifteenth century the houses of Austria and Burgundy had become united in northern Europe, those of Aragon and Castile in the south; but the marriage of Philip of Burgundy and Joanna of Castile, in 1496, produced a similar union between the northern and southern houses only through a series of unexpected deaths. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction In the early modern era, the system of public finance of the northern Netherlands constituted a most singular type among its neighbouring countries. This tiny nation, without large resources of its own, was extremely successful in raising sizable quantities of funds for public purposes, in particular for warfare. Various larger monarchies experienced enormous difficulties in making both ends meet. Powerful princes went bankrupt, but not this conglomeration of sovereign provinces. Distinguished ambassadors of foreign authorities reported home on how the Dutch managed their astonishingly high levels of public debt. Within this state, the commercial and financial strength of the province of Holland constituted the major backbone. In the course of the sixteenth century, Holland had developed a system of provincial public finance which enabled the ascent of a secured public debt against relatively low rates of interest. This so-called ‘financial revolution’ (Tracy 1985a, p. 3; Dickson 1967) acted as a most welcome safety-valve for unforeseen and exorbitant military expenses. The reverse side of the coin was an enormous incidence of taxation. Loans, after all, had to be serviced by duties that had to be paid by the populace. In 1595, a young English traveller by the name of Fynes Moryson noted the paradox of this burden: The Tributes, Taxes, and Customes, of all kinds imposed by mutuall consent – so great is the love of liberty or freedome – are very burthensome, and they willingly beare them, though for much lesse exactions imposed by the King of Spaine… they had the boldnesse to make warre against a Prince of such great power. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of the financial and monetary history of The Netherlands shows a vacuum between about 1965 and 1985. Silence ruled for almost 20 years after J.G. van Dillen, the most important historian of the financial history of the Dutch Republic, laid his pen aside and A.M. de Jong completed his history of the Nederlandsche Bank (the Dutch central bank). M.G. Buist's history of the banking house of Hope & Co. proved for long the only exception among Dutch scholarship. The field was left to British and American historians who conducted pioneering research into government finance in Holland in the sixteenth century (J.D. Tracy) and the Amsterdam capital market in the eighteenth century (A.C. Carter and J.C. Riley). However, new outlooks of Dutch origin arose in the slipstream of an international boom in monetary and financial history. W. Fritschy (1988), M. 't Hart (1989a), E.H.M. Dormans (1991), J. Barendregt (1993) and R. van der Voort (1994) obtained their doctorate on studies of government finance in the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. The first volume of Joh. de Vries' history of the Nederlandsche Bank in the period 1914–48 appeared in 1989. In the meantime the discussion about monetary policy in the 1930s was revived by contributions of Den Bakker and Bochove 1988, Van Zanden 1988c and J.W. Drukker 1990. Finally, this period witnessed the start of research into the Bank of Amsterdam (P. Dehing in progress) and into Amsterdam banking during the nineteenth century (J. Jonker 1996b). The work in progress shows that these studies have provided important new insights into Dutch financial history. In short, in the range of a couple of years time a moribund specialism revived. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]