Oligarchy and aristocracy in early modern Europe

During the later Middle Ages and early modern times, the composition and character of the urban political elites witnessed a remarkable transformation. In a historiographical essay, Alexander Cowan suggests that between 1500 and 1700 there were three important changes: the urban rulers of western Europe consolidated their power, social distinctions between the elites and non-elites became more pronounced and upward mobility became increasingly difficult. The composition of urban city councils, he argues, ‘became more homogeneous and their powers were increasingly concentrated in the hands of the few rather than the many’.Footnote ¹ In a similar vein, Sandro Carocci has argued, more recently, that the ‘development of social boundaries culminated and less permeable hierarchies reached their highest degree of formalisation’.Footnote ² This evolution, he observes, gave rise to a Ständenordnung, namely a society that was strictly stratified according to rank and order.Footnote ³

Researchers have pointed to various explanations for this radical transformation in the European urban political elites, including state formation, religious turmoil, economic changes and processes of ennoblement. They argue that these factors – often working together – forged a more oligarchic regime. First, state formation has been singled out as a catalyst for political oligarchy in urban government. In the cases of Utrecht and Augsburg, for example, interventions in the city's political framework by the Habsburg emperor Charles V ended the guilds' influence in the city councils, so that urban politics gained a more oligarchic character.Footnote ⁴ Secondly, changes in the economic structure of a town could also alter the composition of a bench of aldermen. In Bristol, for instance, the growth of the Atlantic economy allowed overseas merchants to act as a political oligarchy that applied its political and economic power to promote a policy that protected their interests and limited newcomers’ access to the Atlantic trade.Footnote ⁵ Thirdly, the rise of new religious beliefs could also affect the composition of an urban government. For example, Robert Tittler has shown that the redistribution of confiscated goods and lands from churches and monasteries in England in the 1530s and 1540s strengthened the position of urban leaders at the expense of the church and initiated a tendency towards oligarchy.Footnote ⁶ Fourthly, the ennoblement of vast numbers of the ruling urban elite resulted in not only fewer men gaining access to the bench of aldermen, but also rulers being increasingly recruited from this top layer of society.Footnote ⁷

In this article, I focus on the case of sixteenth-century Ghent to analyse how the composition of Ghent's ruling class changed in size, form and substance in response to state formation, religious turmoil, economic changes and the growing presence of noblemen. My argument is that the combination of these four elements, which interconnected to a significant degree, initiated a trend towards oligarchy as well as aristocracy in the city. By a trend towards oligarchy, I mean that political power became increasingly concentrated in the hands of a smaller group of rulers. By a trend towards aristocracy, I refer to a growing distance between rulers and the ruled in terms of wealth and social standing.

Ghent, a political and economic centre of the county of Flanders, serves as a test case to explore the wide range of factors that shaped and reshaped urban government because this city witnessed a marked transition from a relatively open political system where the craft guilds were well represented to a system where urban governance was the privilege of a closely knit group of families that were recruited from the city's fiscal elite and predominantly belonged to the urban nobility. Scholars agree that until well into the sixteenth century, ‘there was a degree of popular political participation in Ghent, which would not be matched again until the introduction of general plural voting rights in 1893 [in Belgium]’ (my translation).Footnote ⁸ In the later Middle Ages, Ghent was ruled by an open elite: craft guilds dominated the city council and, on average, aldermen held no more than 3.3 offices during their political careers, one of the lowest figures in western Europe.Footnote ⁹ Yet, urban politics lost this participative character during the sixteenth century. In the 1500s, a total of 174 men were active as aldermen in Ghent, but by the 1590s, this number had declined to 94.Footnote ¹⁰ The resulting oligarchic nature of urban politics continued into the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.Footnote ¹¹ In the eighteenth century, it was even joked that ‘pour être grand et heureux à Gand, il faut être Triste, Bête ou Vilain’ (‘to be great and happy in Ghent, one has to be Sad, Stupid or Villainous’ (my translation)).Footnote ¹² This joke came at the expense of three families, namely Triest, Bette and Vilain, which were the city's dominant political dynasties at that time.

In the following pages, I show how changes within urban society resulted in more offices going to fewer aldermen and how the socio-economic distinctions between rulers and subjects became more pronounced. In other words, I analyse how urban politics in Ghent became more oligarchic and more aristocratic. Four elements initiated this evolution. First, a guild-led fiscal rebellion against the Habsburg authorities spurred the Habsburg emperor Charles V to tighten his political grip on the city. He did so by limiting the power of the craft guilds – the main instigators of the urban rebellion – on the two benches of aldermen that constituted the city council. Secondly, after the short period of Calvinist rule in Ghent from 1578 to 1584, the Habsburg authorities regained control of the city and installed a small group of Catholic and pro-Habsburg families in the city council. Thirdly, the economic recession that hit the city from the 1560s onwards increased the wealth gap between the political elites and non-elites, and impoverished large segments of the politically organized craft guilds. Fourthly, the growing presence of noblemen in the city council further accentuated social differences between the urban political elites and the rest of urban society.

Fiscal rebellion, Calvinist rule and the Habsburg backlash

Across Europe, princely rulers tried to strengthen their grip on the cities over which they ruled. In medieval England, this was achieved by means of a ‘partnership in government’ between the crown and urban authorities. This partnership was characterized by a social, political, economic and financial integration of urban elites into the English framework.Footnote ¹³ Meanwhile, starting in the fourteenth century, the French kings progressively expanded their influence over the bonnes villes, for instance by intervening in the electoral procedures of the towns.Footnote ¹⁴ In the Low Countries, between the late fourteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the dukes of Burgundy and their Habsburg successors also strove to tighten their grip on the cities over which they ruled. In this region, much of the wealth and political power was located in large cities, such as Ghent, Bruges and Antwerp. To gain access to this urban wealth and ensure that the cities executed the decisions taken by the princely authorities, the latter had to make certain that the city councils were populated by men favourably disposed towards the Burgundian and Habsburg rulers. The central administration therefore tried to change urban electoral procedures in a way that would allow them to appoint pro-Burgundian or pro-Habsburg men in the city councils.

Some historians speculate that several urban elite groups had a positive view of the princely state, as the birth of the Burgundian–Habsburg union may have boosted the urban economy, but the case of Ghent provides a strong reminder that state intervention could also provoke fierce resistance: in the years 1379–85, 1449–53, 1477–92, 1537–40 and 1577–84, tensions between the city of Ghent and the central administration escalated into open revolt.Footnote ¹⁵ Ghent, as one scholar put it, was hence ‘famous, feared or admired throughout all of medieval Europe for its incurable tendency to revolt’.Footnote ¹⁶

In the sixteenth century, quarrels with the princely administration over finances had a direct impact on Ghent's political framework. In 1537, Ghent refused to contribute to an aide for the Habsburg war against the French. After three years of tension between city and state, Charles V put an end to the rebellion in 1540, and took the opportunity to reform the urban political framework. Since the 1360s, seats on Ghent's two benches of aldermen, the keure and gedele, had been strictly distributed between the city's craft guilds and the poorterij – the city's well-to-do citizenry who generated considerable income from their investments in houses, landed properties and annuities but did not engage in trade or production.Footnote ¹⁷ There were 13 seats on each bench of aldermen and 10 of these went to the city's craft guilds, which consisted of the weavers’ guild and kleine neringen, a group of 53 smaller craft guilds. The weavers’ guild and the kleine neringen each appointed 5 men to the keure and 5 men to the gedele bench. The poorterij filled 3 of the 13 seats available on each bench. As power was divided between three political groups, this system was referred to as the Three Members System.Footnote ¹⁸

Charles V ended this traditional division of power in 1540, thereby restricting the craft guilds’ influence on urban government. This is not surprising, since the fiercest opponents of Burgundian and Habsburg interventionism in urban affairs had come from the ranks of the craft guilds. In the aftermath of the 1540 reforms, however, large segments of the craft guilds were hoping to regain their once dominant position in the city council. These aspirations were fused with religious sentiments as Calvinism had gained adherents among members of the craft guilds and, to a lesser degree, among the poorterij. In the context of the Dutch Revolt, the Three Members System was reinstated between 1578 and 1584, when a coalition of Ghent craft guild and some poorterij families broke with the Habsburg monarchy and reformed Ghent into a ‘Calvinist Republic’. This Republic is best described as an ‘alliance between corporatism, particularism and Protestantism’ (my translation), since it sought to re-establish the power of the craft guilds, limit Habsburg interference in urban politics and implement Calvinist beliefs.Footnote ¹⁹ This experiment, however, proved to be short-lived. In 1584, Habsburg forces led by the Habsburg general Alexander Farnese regained control of the city, reinstated Habsburg rule and once again abolished the Three Members System (see Table 1).Footnote ²⁰

Table 1.

Institutional eras in Ghent

To reconstruct how the institutional changes of 1540, 1578 and 1584 had an impact on the composition of Ghent's benches of aldermen, I traced all individuals who served as an alderman in Ghent during the sixteenth century. All in all, I analysed 943 individuals who held a total of 2,657 offices. This works out to be an average of 2.81 offices per individual alderman.Footnote ²¹

Table 2 shows an overview of the number of individual aldermen and families that were office-holders on the keure and gedele bench per institutional era. Since the duration of each institutional era is different, with for instance 41 renewals of the city council between 1500 and 1540, and barely 7 during the Calvinist Republic (1578–83), the number of individual aldermen and families has been standardized per decade.Footnote ²² This allows for comparisons between the different institutional periods. For instance, 470 individual aldermen held office between 1500 and 1540. To standardize this, the number of individual aldermen is divided by the duration of the institutional era (in years), and then multiplied by 10 to arrive at a standardized number of individual aldermen per decade (= (470/41) x 10). In addition to the number of aldermen and families per era, I calculated the average number of offices held per individual and per family (Table 3).

Table 2.

Number of families and individual aldermen on Ghent's benches of aldermen per institutional era

Sources: Vander Meersch, Memorieboek; GCA, Series 101, no. 4/III, nos. 5, 7.

Table 3.

Average number of offices per institutional era

Sources: Vander Meersch, Memorieboek; GCA, Series 101, no. 4/III, nos. 5, 7.

A quantitative analysis of the number of aldermen per institutional era (Table 2) reveals a trend towards oligarchy in the immediate aftermath of the institutional reforms of 1540 and 1584 in Ghent. This can be observed from the standardized number of aldermen and families from which these aldermen were recruited: after the Three Members System was abolished in 1540, fewer aldermen and families were office-holders on the city's benches of aldermen. During the Ghent Calvinist Republic, when the Three Members System was reinstated, the number of politically engaged men increased spectacularly, as reflected by the standardized number of individual aldermen and families between 1578 and 1583, which respectively doubled and almost tripled in comparison to the figures for the 1540–77 era. However, this spectacular expansion of the political elite was short-lived. After 1584, when the Three Members System was again terminated, Ghent returned to the more restricted political representation that had been put in place in 1540.

The average number of offices per individual aldermen and per family (Table 3) reflect these developments. In the aftermath of the 1540 reforms, the average number of offices held by an individual alderman increased from around 2.3 to 3.0 offices per institutional era. During the Calvinist Republic, this figure decreased to 1.6 offices per alderman, only to increase again after 1584, to 3.3 offices per alderman. The average number of offices held per politically engaged family followed a similar pattern, namely an increase after the 1540 reforms, followed by a decrease during the Calvinist Republic and then a restoration of the post-1540 averages after the Habsburg authorities recaptured the city and abolished the Three Members System in 1584.

The changes to Ghent's political framework not only triggered the accumulation of offices in the hands of fewer men and families, but also led to the appointment of aldermen with a different profile. The Habsburg agenda was to limit the grip of the corporations on urban governance, so craft guilds lost a considerable share of their power in the city council. They had held around three-quarters of all political offices until the reforms of 1540, when the craft guilds lost all formal entitlement to representation in the city council. In theory, there was no barrier to prominent members of the craft guilds representing the interests of the corporate milieu in the city council after 1540, but the share of aldermen with a corporate background declined significantly after the Three Members System was abolished. Between 1540 and 1577, the number of offices held by the corporate groups in the keure and gedele dwindled to about half the previous number (see Table 4). Secondly, Ghent's aldermen were increasingly recruited from pro-Habsburg families. They were chiefly affiliated to the poorterij, although some corporate families also enjoyed an increase in power, such as the Everwijn family, which played a prominent role in the shippers’ guild. This family had been associated with members of the Burgundian–Habsburg elite as early as the fifteenth century.Footnote ²³ The guild over which they presided was also pro-Habsburg. This is not surprising, given that the shippers travelled deep into the waterways of the county of Flanders and depended on the Burgundian and Habsburg rulers to defend their interests vis-à-vis the various local authorities they had to deal with.Footnote ²⁴ After the rebellion, loyalist families like the Everwijns saw their political prominence increase substantially. Between 1500 and 1540, the Everwijn family held only four offices as alderman, but in the period between the 1540 reforms and the Calvinist Republic, members of this family served as many as 20 times in the city council.

Table 4.

Number of offices held per political group on the benches of aldermen

Sources: Vander Meersch, Memorieboek; GCA, Series 101, no. 4/III, nos. 5, 7.

A similar set of dynamics is observed after the Ghent Calvinist Republic ended. As soon as the Habsburg authorities regained control of the city and (again) abolished the Three Members System, they decided to increase further the power of the pro-Habsburg families. In post-Calvinist Ghent, the Habsburg administration promoted the elite families whose Catholic beliefs were beyond doubt, and who had refused to serve under the Calvinist administration, or who had even gone into exile in Catholic strongholds such as Liège, Douai and Cologne.Footnote ²⁵ Evidence of this meticulous selection of Catholic families is found in the lists of men, compiled by the Habsburg authorities, who were categorized as ‘bien catholique’ and therefore eligible for office in the eyes of the princely administration.Footnote ²⁶ Examples of these so-called ‘good Catholics’ are Philips Triest and Jacob Taccoen, who had both headed urban militias that had resisted Calvinist opponents in the 1560s.Footnote ²⁷ The Catholic Peter de Vos, who negotiated Ghent's surrender to the Habsburg authorities in 1584, is another example.Footnote ²⁸ Families like the Bette family, which refused to support the Republic politically, also rose in political prominence once Habsburg rulers had restored Catholic order.

The 1540 reforms and the Habsburg recapture of Ghent in 1584 thus not only transformed the ruling elite into a much more compact group, but also into a more docile, pro-Habsburg, Catholic body. Tellingly, the city that was once admired for its tendency to revolt did not challenge the Habsburg rulers again after 1584.

Recession and the growth of a wealth gap

Another potential trigger for change in the composition of the urban elites is the economy. Scholars have argued that economic growth forged a more ‘open’ elite, in which newcomers rose to power.Footnote ²⁹ Conversely, oligarchies could arise when the economy was in decline.Footnote ³⁰ For Ghent, this is a fruitful perspective, as the town experienced both efflorescence and a crisis during the sixteenth century.

Scholars have traditionally studied trade in annuities (known as renten) to reconstruct fluctuations in the urban economy. In periods of economic growth, it is argued, the demand for capital to finance business – and thus for annuities – increased. Periods of economic growth were therefore characterized by a growing number of traded annuities. In contrast, during times of economic recession, entrepreneurs needed less cash to finance their businesses and consequently the demand for annuities declined.Footnote ³¹ This proxy thus allows one to reconstruct trends in Ghent's urban economy.

The first decades of the sixteenth century were an era of economic efflorescence, as the city's economy recovered quickly from the recession of the 1490s.Footnote ³² This growth phase lasted until the middle of the century.Footnote ³³ In the 1560s, the economy started stalling and there was a marked decline in Ghent's three main economic sectors: the textile industry, grain trade, and transportation. The civil war that was raging through the Low Countries and the proclamation of an independent Calvinist Republic in Ghent further aggravated the economic crisis. The nadir came in 1584, when the Habsburg governor and military commander Alexander Farnese imposed a blockade on the city. As a result, it was not until the end of the sixteenth century that the economy started showing modest signs of recovery.Footnote ³⁴

Strikingly, economic developments clearly did not have a marked influence on the size of the political elite: the economic growth until the mid-sixteenth century did not create a more ‘open’ elite, characterized by more men taking up office or an influx of homines novi. As Table 5 shows, the number of individuals and families active on Ghent's benches of aldermen remained remarkably stable during the first four decades of the sixteenth century. The decline that took place from 1540 onwards is clearly linked to the Habsburg interventions in Ghent's political structure discussed above. Moreover, the recession that started in the 1560s did not result in a shrinking of the elite: the number of aldermen (and families engaged in urban politics) did not decline significantly, and even increased in the 1570s and 1580s, when the economy reached an all-time low. Only in the 1590s, when the economy started recovering, did the number of office-holders decline. Again, this development is not so much rooted in economic change, but in the Habsburg repression of the Calvinist Republic. Rather than being determined by economic changes, the size of Ghent's urban political elite was therefore determined by the institutional and religious shocks of 1540 and 1578–84.

Table 5.

Number of individual aldermen and political families holding office on Ghent's benches of aldermen per decade

Sources: Vander Meersch, Memorieboek; GCA, Series 101, no. 4/III, nos. 5, 7.

That the composition of the Ghent ruling class was shaped by institutional, political and religious developments does not imply that economic changes were completely irrelevant. My argument is rather that the trends in the urban economy had a more indirect effect on elite formation. An analysis of the so-called ‘forced loans’ reveals that there was a considerable wealth gap opening up not only between rulers and the ruled, but also within the political elite. This reinforced the new, more oligarchic structure of power that had been put in place in 1540 and 1584.

When the city found itself in dire financial straits, the urban rulers resorted to ‘forced loans’. The principle behind these loans was that Ghent's burghers lent a certain sum of money to the city, based on an estimate of their wealth, and were reimbursed later.Footnote ³⁵ This was an exceptional measure, since in normal circumstances the urban authorities preferred to generate revenues from indirect taxes on the consumption of goods (e.g. beer, grain, fish and meat). The Ghent City Council resorted to these interest-free loans on four occasions. In 1492, the city had to pay a fine of no less than 2.9 million Flemish groats for its role in the failed revolt against Maximilian of Austria in the 1480s. This fine was partly financed by means of a forced loan. The second of these loans was organized in 1540, when the city was raising cash to pay the fine imposed by the Habsburg authorities after the revolt of 1537–40. In 1578, the city council extracted two such loans, the first to repair the city walls and the second to guarantee the safety of Ghent's rural hinterland and to pay for soldiers’ wages. In this last forced loan, the urban administration only targeted the city's wealthiest groups.Footnote ³⁶

For the purpose of this enquiry, these forced loans are a valuable source of information as they provide a rough indication of the wealth of different segments of the urban political elite. In theory, the loans extracted were based on an estimate of the wealth of the contributors. In practice, however, some men might have contributed relatively more, others relatively less. Moreover, there must have been room for negotiation about the loans made to the urban authorities, since some of Ghent's wealthiest aldermen supplied rather modest sums or did not provide anything at all. One example is Karel de Grutere, a prominent alderman between the 1530s and 1550s. An account preserved from the mid-sixteenth century illustrates that de Grutere enjoyed lavish revenues from various lordships, landed properties and annuities.Footnote ³⁷ In 1571, his heirs inherited the vast range of his urban real estate.Footnote ³⁸ Yet, despite his wealth, he did not contribute a single penny to the forced loan of 1540.Footnote ³⁹

While the sums provided do not perfectly reflect the exact wealth of the men under consideration, the forced loans still allow one to investigate how the wealth of the political elite evolved and to compare wealth across different periods as well as between different social groups.

A comparison of the sums contributed by the political elites and the contributions of all creditors reveals that the aldermen generally contributed higher sums than the average citizen of Ghent. Given that political offices in Ghent were unsalaried, it is not surprising that the aldermen were recruited from the city's wealthier groups and hence lent higher sums than the average citizen.

More importantly, however, the fiscal sources reveal that the wealth gap between the rulers and the ruled increased during the recession. The differences in wealth between the entire group of fiscal contributors, on the one hand, and the sums lent by the poorterij and the craft guilds, on the other, developed in line with economic cycles (see Table 6). When the urban economy foundered because of warfare against Maximilian of Austria (1482–92), the members of Ghent's political elite were considerably wealthier than the average contributor. In contrast, when the urban economy recovered and flourished during the first half of the sixteenth century, the wealth gap became much smaller. Inversely, the recession that started during the 1560s made society more unequal again, as is reflected in the first forced loan of 1578. The second loan of 1578 stands out because it was only targeted at Ghent's wealthiest groups. Many urban politicians were included in this second loan: no fewer than four out of ten contributors belonged to the political establishment, while in the other three loans, urban politicians represented barely one out of ten creditors.

Table 6.

Average contribution per group studied (in Flemish groats)

Sources: GCA, Series 20, no. 14; Series 400, no. 48, fos. 98r–138v; Series 93/24 (Z), fos. 287v–303r; Series 532, no. 33 (5).

Lastly, and this is key, the recession also widened the wealth gap between the poorterij and the craft guilds. When the urban economy took a turn for the worse, poorterij aldermen provided higher sums of cash for the forced loan than the aldermen who belonged to the corporate milieu. In the forced loans of 1578, the sums contributed by the craft guilds to the second loan (aimed at the city's wealthiest groups) were much more modest than the sums contributed by the members of the poorterij.

In other words, the recession not only increased the wealth gap between the political elites and the rest of the urban community, but it also gave rise to growing inequalities between the poorterij and the craft guilds. An explanation for this widening gulf in wealth held by the poorterij on the one hand and the average citizen of Ghent and the craft guilds on the other must be sought in the way in which wealth was structured in each of these three groups. The ‘entire population’ of contributors, which was chiefly made up of middle-class families, faced increasing grain prices during the 1570s, wage rigidity, increased fiscal pressure from the urban authorities and a decline in trade and manufacturing (and therefore declining revenues and savings).Footnote ⁴⁰ The craft guilds, which generated most of their wealth from investments in the urban economy, also saw their revenues dwindle due to the economic contraction: despite the massive investments some corporate families made in landholding, they were essentially involved in trade and production, which declined during the recession. The poorterij, on the other hand, had invested much more heavily in landed property during the sixteenth century, buying pasture, meadows, forests, and in some cases estates.Footnote ⁴¹ Land, as some historians point out, is considered a safe investment as it serves as a buffer against economic fluctuations.Footnote ⁴² The poorterij aldermen, who as a rule had invested a significant share of their wealth in land, were consequently better protected against recessions in the urban economy than corporate families. Moreover, the steep rise in grain prices in the sixteenth century suggests that large segments of the landowning poorterij amassed substantial amounts of wealth by selling scarce and hence expensive agricultural products at a time when most of the population was experiencing a relative decline in wealth.

An important consequence of the recession was hence the impoverishment of Ghent's corporate families. Only the extremely wealthy craft guild families, like the Everwijns, weathered the economic recession with relative ease.Footnote ⁴³ It is no surprise that they belonged to the few corporate families that had invested massively in landed property in the sixteenth century. By the dawn of the seventeenth century, these well-off corporate families supplemented the ranks of the poorterij on the benches of aldermen.

Accentuating social distinctions: the ennoblement of political elites

By the end of the sixteenth century, the number of individuals and families engaged in urban politics had declined drastically and the wealth gap between the political elites and the average citizen had increased significantly. Another important change was the growing noble presence on the benches of aldermen as the century progressed, which further accentuated the gap between rulers and the ruled. This increase was partly due to the imitation of the noble lifestyle by many aspiring noblemen, who gradually became recognized as such.Footnote ⁴⁴ Simultaneously, the city council witnessed an influx of the rural nobility, which was shifting its attention to nearby cities. Across Europe, this ‘growing aristocratization of urban elites and the urbanization of their rural counterparts’ caused a rapprochement between the urban elites and rural nobility.Footnote ⁴⁵ For the county of Flanders, the share of noble families who were active in one or more city councils grew from 12 per cent of all noble lineages in 1350 to at least 44 per cent in 1500.Footnote ⁴⁶ As a result, there was a substantial presence of noblemen among the urban elites. The De Baenst family, for example, played an important role in the city councils of both Bruges and Ghent, the two leading cities of the county of Flanders.Footnote ⁴⁷ In Mechelen, an independent lordship in Brabant, between 1370 and 1378 only 2.6 per cent of the political families were of noble descent. By the mid-sixteenth century (1555–63), their share had risen to 35.1 per cent. These noble families claimed 4.4 per cent of the available offices between 1370 and 1378 and 47.8 per cent of the offices between 1555 and 1563.Footnote ⁴⁸ The data gathered show that Ghent followed a similar trajectory.

Noblemen among Ghent's aldermen can be identified through their use of titles like mer (Sir), ridder (knight), jonkheer (a title reserved for young noblemen of high standing), and mijn heer (my lord), which were all exclusive to noblemen in sixteenth-century Flanders.Footnote ⁴⁹ Based on these titles, Wim Blockmans has shown that in the fifteenth century only 2.2 per cent of Ghent's aldermen were of noble descent.Footnote ⁵⁰ The sixteenth century, however, saw a spectacular rise in the number of noblemen who served in the city council (see Figure 1). Until the institutional reforms of 1540, noblemen never held more than 20 per cent of the seats on the benches of aldermen. After 1540, the number of offices held by noblemen increased to c. 30 per cent. This was a consequence of the institutional reforms in the city's political framework: as mentioned above, individuals and families loyal to the Habsburg administration became more prominent on the benches of aldermen. These men mostly belonged to the noble or ennobled segments of the poorterij. By the 1550s, the share of noblemen in the city council had risen to 50 per cent, with a peak of 57.8 per cent in 1559. There followed another peak of 65.4 per cent in 1576, but then the nobility's presence on the benches of aldermen decreased as the Calvinist Republic reinstated the Three Members System: the craft guilds regained much of their former power, so the proportion of the poorterij (and hence noblemen) in the city council declined. This halt in the influx of noblemen into the city council was only temporary. After 1584, when the Calvinist Republic had been crushed by the Habsburg military, the share of noble aldermen was consistently above the 60 per cent mark and peaked at 85 per cent in 1592.

Figure 1.

Share of noblemen on Ghent's benches of aldermen

Sources: Vander Meersch, Memorieboek; GCA, Series 101, no. 4/III, nos. 5, 7.

The growing presence of the nobility on Ghent's benches of alderman was, in other words, a consequence of the growing number of poorterij families in the city council (see Table 4), as almost all of Ghent's noble aldermen came from the ranks of the poorterij. As highlighted earlier, these families gained in power due to the abolition of the Three Members System after the rebellion of 1537–40 and also after the city's reconciliation with the Habsburg authorities in 1584. A study of the city's four most prominent noble families during the sixteenth century, namely the Bette, de Grutere, Triest and Damman families, reveals the growing proportion of offices held by noblemen. Together, these four families filled 4 per cent of the seats on the benches of aldermen from 1500 until the 1540 reforms, 12 per cent between the reforms and the start of the Calvinist Republic, 6 per cent during the Ghent Calvinist Republic, and finally, 11 per cent of the seats between 1584 and 1599. In other words, the reforms reinforced these noble families' grip on urban political power.

The increasing presence of noblemen on Ghent's benches of aldermen was also partly due to the ennoblement of some wealthy and politically ambitious families. The cases of the Everwijn and Van Wijchuuse families, which started presenting themselves as ‘noble’ lineages, are examples of the noble aspirations of the urban elites.Footnote ⁵¹ Politically speaking, both families supported the Habsburg administration. The Everwijn family played a prominent role in the pro-Habsburg shippers' guild. The Van Wijchuuse family, which had played an important role in the textile guilds, had become well embedded in princely networks by the end of the sixteenth century. Anthonis van Wijchuuse for instance, an alderman serving in 1599, married Claire de Brune, the sister of a princely official.Footnote ⁵² Two of Anthonis’ daughters, Johanna and Adriana, also married princely councillors. During the sixteenth century, the Everwijn and Van Wijchuuse families increasingly adopted a noble lifestyle. While the Everwijns initially stressed their corporate identity, for instance by portraying themselves as shippers (schipman), by the end of the century they had adopted noble-like forms of address: from 1594 onwards, alderman Jan Everwijn is described as ‘dheer’ in the sources, in close imitation of ‘mijn heer’ (‘my lord’, a noble title).Footnote ⁵³ In a similar vein, in 1576, the former alderman Anthonis van Wijchuuse is described as the ‘noble and honourable Antheunis van Wyckhuys, lord of Wyckhuys and of Waelbrouck’ on his tomb.Footnote ⁵⁴ The use of ‘lord’ suggests that by that time the family had received lordly jurisdiction over its estate, the Hof van Wijckhuyze in Kruishoutem, south-west of Ghent.Footnote ⁵⁵ His son, alderman Anthonis, was described as a jonkheer in the sources, which suggests he had been accepted as a noblemen by his peers.Footnote ⁵⁶ By contrast, the Everwijns were only addressed as ‘dheer’ and so probably did not reach the ranks of the nobility by the end of the sixteenth century.