This treaty nominally added to the Empire two new counties, Flanders and Artois, and it gave the whole Netherlands the benefit of imperial protection.

But, though ratified by the States General promptly, the convention remained almost a dead letter, and left the Netherlands virtually autonomous.

As long as they were unmolested the Netherlands forgot their union entirely, and when, under the pressure of Spanish rule, they later remembered and tried to profit by it, they found that the Empire had no wish to revive it.
[Sidenote: Reformation] The general causes of the religious revolution were the same in the Low Countries as in other lands.

The ground was prepared by the mystics of the earlier ages, by the corruption of and hatred for the clergy, and buy the Renaissance.

The central situation of the country made it especially open to all currents of European thought.