Whenever you find a great man in mediæval history (or any other for that matter) _cherchez la femme_; ten to one you will find behind a St. Louis a mother like Blanche of Castile, or a guardian like Margaret of Austria behind a Charles V. Men try in vain to change the course of history by their own efforts; women always have the power to do this through the new generation they are nursing and educating, while the men are exhausting their energies in the fighting and the politics and the everlasting strenuousness that bring so many great things to pass that hardly last overnight. After all, so far anyway as the Middle Ages are concerned, it was the monks and nuns at their endless prayers in chapel and cell and cloister, and the mothers in their tall towers and their walled gardens, with their children about them, that made the great and enduring things possible. Margaret of Malines was as perfect a type of this consecrated womanhood as one could find in a year’s delving in ancient history; in addition she was a particularly charming lady and a very great statesman. Moreover her twenty-three years of rule in the Netherlands cover a particularly significant and interesting period in the history of this country and the end of mediæval civilisation here when it had outlasted its career elsewhere in Europe, so we may try in a chapter to give some idea of society in the Heart of Europe, at exactly the moment when it was about to surrender to the anarchy that already was progressively dominant elsewhere. Margaret was born on January 10, 1480, in Brussels. Her father, the Archduke Maximilian of Hapsburg, was apparently a kind of imperial Admirable Crichton--handsome, fearless, a gallant knight, a poet, painter, scholar, patron of all arts and letters, and as serenely conscious of his personal merits as they deserved. Her mother was the beautiful Mary of Burgundy, daughter of the headlong and magnificent Charles the Bold and Isabel of Bourbon who, like Margaret’s own mother, and her father’s mother, Eleanor of Portugal, was one of those fine and beautiful characters with which mediæval history is so full. When the little Margaret was only two years old her radiant mother, who was adored by every one, was killed while hunting and Maximilian, who was heartbroken and quite frantic with grief, found his two children, Margaret and her brother Philip, seized by the somewhat aggressive burghers of Ghent on the ground that it was for the state, and not the father, to determine their education and their future. Louis XI of France was undoubtedly behind them, for he believed he saw his chance to devour Burgundy, and in the end he cleverly engineered the treaty of Arras whereby the small Margaret was affianced to his son Charles and taken to the French court to be properly educated, while Philip remained in Flanders to be reared as the burghers saw fit.