The great and happy and wealthy state created by the House of Burgundy had been utterly destroyed and irretrievably ruined. A new Protestant state had been formed from one fragment in the north, other portions were shortly to be incorporated in France, and the nine provinces that still remained out of the original seventeen were hardly more than a geographical abstraction. Half the great cities had been sacked and burned, the craftsmen and artisans were slaughtered or in exile, the cold and greedy Hollanders had seized (and were to retain by force or fraud) the vast commerce that once was the possession of Flanders and Brabant, agriculture had ceased, famine was universal, religion and mercy and education were memories, while the old civic spirit and the old freedom and independence were things of so long ago they were not even remembered. To do them justice, the new sovereigns meant well by the exhausted country, but first of all they had set their hearts on the crushing of the Protestant Netherlands, and nine years of war set in which ended at last with the complete victory of the Dutch republic and its acknowledged independence. Then came the anomaly of twelve years of peace with the astonishing outburst of a genuine and brilliant if evanescent culture. Peace is a good foundation for industry, trade, and commerce, but the fact is unavoidable that the black ploughing and the red fertilising of a land by war frequently bring a luxuriant crop of those cultural products that have issue in character as they follow from it. Here in Flanders the years between the Peace of Antwerp in 1609 and the restoration of Spanish rule on the death of Albert in 1624, were opulent with all manner of civic and personal wealth in those lines that are cultural rather than material. It was a time of the restoration of religion through new monastic foundations, of the establishing of houses of mercy, of the building up of great universities, of the development of printing, of the production of great scientists and scholars, of a new era of painting. The University of Louvain dates from this time, the great printing-house of the Plantins and the Moretus, the art of Rubens and Vandyck.