By the marriage of Mary, heiress of Burgundy, to Maximilian of Austria in 1477 the seventeen provinces of the Netherlands passed to the house of Hapsburg, and thus to their grandson, the Emperor Charles V. Upon the division of his possessions in 1556 they went with Spain to the so-called Spanish branch of the family, represented by Philip II. Religious and political reasons led to the great revolt against Philip II in 1568, a movement in which the whole seventeen provinces joined. The skilful policy of Philip’s general, Alexander Farnese, succeeded in detaching the southern provinces, which had remained for the most part Catholic, from the Protestant, or United, Netherlands of the north, and from 1579 on the southern provinces led a separate existence under Spanish rule, being generally known as the Spanish Netherlands. In this period they lost considerable territory on the north to the Dutch and on the south to the French. Upon the division of the Spanish dominions by the treaty of Utrecht in 1713, the Spanish Netherlands were in the following year transferred to Austria, and were known as the Austrian Netherlands until their conquest by the armies of the French Revolution in 1794. They were then incorporated with France (1795) and organized into nine departments, a state of affairs which lasted until 1814. By the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the northern and the southern Netherlands were reunited, under the rule of a king of the house of Nassau. After a separation of one hundred and thirty-five years the union proved unsatisfactory to the southern population. Marked differences of religion, economic interest, and language produced friction from the start, which was aggravated by the exclusive policy of the Dutch, who, though a minority, monopolized the higher offices and enforced the use of the Dutch language. The revolutionary movement of 1830 kindled a revolt in the southern provinces, and a separate government was organized under a constitutional monarch, Leopold of Saxe-Coburg. The separation was declared “final and irrevocable” by a convention of representatives of the five Great Powers meeting in London in 1831, and the treaty was accepted by Holland in 1839. The boundaries of the new kingdom were, as we shall see, drawn in a manner quite unsatisfactory to the Belgians. The treaty of 1839 guaranteed the independence and the neutrality of Belgium, while at the same time it placed restrictions on the new state. By Article VII it was provided that Belgium ... shall form an independent and perpetually neutral state. It shall be bound to observe the same neutrality toward all other states.