In 1496, the marriage of Philip the
Handsome with Joanna, a Habsburg prin-
cess of Spain and daughter of Ferdinand
and Isabella of Castile, eventually brought
the Netherlands under the rule of Emperor
Charles V, their son and the ruler of Spain
and the Holy Roman Empire. During the
next century, the region suffered occupa-
tion by Spain and a destructive civil war.
The Protestant Reformation took hold
during the sixteenth century, when the
Netherlands were in revolt against the rule
by the Catholic Habsburgs. The emperor
sent armies to put down the rebellion and
enforce Catholicism. At the end of the pe-
riod, the Habsburgs retained control of
the Flemish provinces (now Belgium),
while Holland won its independence and
built a far-flung colonial empire, from the
Americas to East Asia.
SEEALSO: Bosch, Hieronymus; Brueghel
family; Rubens, Peter Paul; van Eyck, Jan
Nicholas of Cusa .............................
(1401–1464)
Humanist, papal legate, and scholar whose
skeptical inquiries into the natural world
broke new scientific and philosophical
ground at the dawn of the Renaissance.
Born Nicholas Krebs in the Moselle River
valley, Nicholas of Cusa was schooled in a
religious fraternity known as the Brothers
of the Common Life. Although he trained
in the law as a university student, Nicholas
also attained a doctorate in the field of
canon law from the University of Padua
and finally decided on a career in the
church. He attended the Council of Basel
in 1432 and argued in favor of a general
church council that would hold authority
over the pope and the institution of the
Papacy. To support his views, he wroteDe
Concordantia Catholica. The endless bick-
ering and politics of church councils
changed his opinion, however, and he later
became a proponent of a supreme pontiff.
He entered the service of Pope Eugene IV
in 1437 and became a wide-ranging papal
diplomat, who mediated disputes within
the church and attempted to resolve the
long-standing schism between the eastern
and western branches of the faith. He also
attempted to raise an alliance against the
Ottoman Turks, who were threatening an
invasion of Europe from their base in the
Balkans, but found his efforts thwarted by
the rivalries among Christian princes of
Europe.
In 1440 he completedOf Learned Ig-
norance, a book that propounds the idea
that humans can only have limited knowl-
edge of the true state of the universe, and
that their experience of God must come
through a sense of the divine that has no
relation to ordinary, rational thought and
observation of the senses. Nicholas was
ahead of his time in the subjects of math-
ematics, medicine, and astronomy, and
held that the earth revolved about the sun
well before the observations of Nicolaus
Copernicus. His writings were known to
Copernicus as well as Isaac Newton, Gali-
leo Galilei, and Johannes Kepler, and he
was regarded as one of the true scientific
geniuses of the fifteenth century. He also
applied his knowledge in a practical way
by inventing convex lenses to correct near-
sightedness.
He was appointed a cardinal in 1448.
Two years later he became the bishop of
Brixen, in the Tyrol region of the Alps.
Here his efforts to reform the church and
its monasteries brought him into conflict
with Sigismund, the Habsburg Duke of
Austria, who had Nicholas briefly impris-
oned, an act for which the pope excom-
municated Sigismund. In 1458, Nicholas
returned to Rome, where he joined the
court of Pope Pius II.Nicholas of Cusa