Union of Brussels

As a result, the Spanish soldiers did not receive any payment, and they mutinied, pillaging the countryside of Brabant and Flanders and the city of Antwerp, where 10,000 inhabitants in a city with 100,000 people were killed by the Spanish soldiers, who sought to eliminate the local Protestant population.

However, some of the fervently Roman Catholic provincial Estates did not want to invite the Calvinists of Holland and Zeeland to join.

The Estates-General, without Holland and Zeeland, founded the first Union of Brussels, which pledged to uphold the Catholic religion.

The population of Brussels celebrated him as a hero, and it was with his urging that the General Estates accepted the two counties, now arguing for equal rights for Catholics and Protestants.

The French-speaking provinces in the south founded the pro-Spanish Union of Arras in 1579, when their Protestant inhabitants were driven out.