Category:Seventeen Provinces


 * The Seventeen Provinces, is the name given to a number of counties and duchies in the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th century.
 * Most of these were fiefs of either France or the Holy Roman Empire, although by the 15th century they had been united in a personal union and were only fiefs in name. In the Pragmatic Sanction of 1549, Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor officialized this situation by declaring the region as a separate entity, a Kreits within the Holy Roman Empire, as part of the Burgundian Circle.