The Witch trials in the Spanish Netherlands (present-day Belgium and Luxembourg minus the Prince-Bishopric of Liège, the Duchy of Bouillon and the Princely Abbey of Stavelot-Malmedy) belonged to the more intense, along with those of the Holy Roman Empire and France. In an area recently affected by a religious war, the Spanish Inquisition encouraged witch trials as a method to ensure religious conformity. In this, it was similar to the Witch trials in Latvia and Estonia. The Spanish Netherlands is still regarded as a region with a tremendously large number of organised witch hunts. At the same time, emphasis is placed on the total contrast between the Southern Netherlands on the one hand, and the Dutch Republic or the Northern Netherlands (now the Kingdom of the Netherlands) on the other, with witchcraft prosecution being comparatively rare in the North. Archival evidence and the number of people executed as witches at first sight seem to support this contrast. The current state of historical research shows that between 1450 and 1685 at least 1,150 to 1,250 individuals were executed as witches in the South – a number that is a great deal higher than the 160 to 200 persons put to death as witches in the Northern Netherlands between 1450 and 1608. However, within the Southern Netherlands, a clear distinction should be made between prosecutions in Dutch-speaking and in French- and German-speaking areas. Background The province of Groningen's first trials were in 1457, leading to the executions of twenty women and a man. In the 1550s the area between Rhine and Meuse was hit hard, while in the 1560s, and particularly in 1564, prosecutions peaked in the County of Holland. After the Dutch War of Independence, the Low Countries were divided. The Northern Netherlands became a Protestant republic, while the Southern Netherlands remained under Catholic Habsburg Spain]]. In the Northern Netherlands witch trials were rare but peaked earlier than in the Southern Netherlands. Despite significant losses of archival material, it seems that the Northern Netherlands saw most of their trials for sorcery and witchcraft between 1550 and 1575, when prosecutions in the Southern Netherlands were only just beginning. History French- and German-speaking areas - south of the language border Namur, Luxembourg, Walloon Flanders, Artois and Cambrai experienced a first serious wave of witch trials already in the first half of the 16th century. The persecutions were also much more intense: although the