War without EndFormal unification did not come about until 26 June 1548, when the Diet of the Holy Roman Empire, assembled in the German city of Augsburg, decided at the emperor's behest to bring together the patchwork of Netherlandish provinces under one separate Kreits, a self-governing entity of states within the empire. The formation of the Low Countries was confirmed the following year, when all seventeen provinces endorsed Charles V's Pragmatic Sanction, which stipulated that Charles's successors were to treat the Low Countries -now separate from both France and the Holy Roman Empire -as a single entity and not divide it up among a number of successors, thus guaranteeing the unity of the seventeen provinces of the Low Countries. When Charles abdicated, that union was just seven years old.The resolutions of 1548 and 1549 and the transfer of sovereignty in 1555 represented the tail end of a process that had started more than a century and a half earlier, in 1384, when the county of Flanders fell into the hands of Philip the Bold, duke of Burgundy. Philip's wife was the daughter of his recently deceased predecessor, the duke of Flanders. In 1396 Philip acquired the duchy of Limburg. In 1406 the House of Burgundy also gained possession of the duchy of Brabant upon the extinction of the ducal line. Over the course of the fifteenth century, various other territories in the South were acquired: Namur in 1429, Hainault in 1433, Picardy in 1435 and Luxemburg in 1441, to name only the most important. To the north of the Rivers Maas and Rhine, which cut the Low Countries in two, the Burgundians managed in 1433 to annex the rapidly rising province of Holland, thanks to the crisis of succession that ensued when Countess Jacoba of Bavaria died without a legal heir. Zeeland, closely allied to Holland since the thirteenth century, fell into their lap at the same time. Other territories in the North managed to elude the Burgundian grasp for the time being.The Low Countries were a valuable asset. Since the twelfth century, Flanders and later Brabant had been developing into the most important commercial centres in north-west Europe. In Bruges, Italian merchants sold luxury goods such as spices and silk, which they acquired from their agents in the Middle East. At first, such trade was conducted overland, and merchants met at the annual fairs held in the Champagne region of France. From around 1300, however, there was also a direct maritime route between Bruges and the most important centres of trade in Italy: Venice and Genoa. These trade routes encouraged the emergence of industrial centres that developed spectacularly in such cities as Bruges and Ghent. In the Flemish countryside, spinning and weaving were engaged in with an eye to export. The Flemish textile centres also functioned as processing points for English cloth, which was imported as a semi-finished product to Flanders, where it was dressed and dyed and finally sold. It was this finishing stage in the manufacturing process that yielded the greatest profits.
