Maarten VERMEIR Moreana Vol.

53, 203-204 269-282

ChancellorJean
Chancellor JeanleleSauvage
Sauvage/ oannes
IoannesSylvagius
Sylvagius:
Erasmus’ pprinceps
Erasmus’ rinceps christianus
christianus and
and
aa prince
prince of
of Utopia
Utopia for
for Thomas
Thomas More
More

Maarten Vermeir
University College London

This biographical article is probably the first full-scale study on Chancellor

Jean le Sauvage or Ioannes Sylvagius (1455-1518). Sauvage was honored by
Erasmus in the main dedication of his Institutio Principis Christiani and
considered by Thomas More as a worthy prince for the Utopian state. This
article intends to fill a historiographical lacuna and lift once and for all the
darkening condemnatio memoriae which Sauvage posthumously fell victim to
under the Spanish-Habsburg rulers.
Keywords: Jean le Sauvage, Ioannes Sylvagius, Desiderius Erasmus,
Thomas More, Pieter Gillis, Utopia, Institutio Principis Christiani, the
Joyous Entry of Brabant, the Revolt of the Comuneros, the Dutch Revolt

Cet article biographique est probablement le premier article d’envergure sur le

Chancelier Jean le Sauvage ou Ioannes Sylvagius (1455-1518). Sauvage fut célébré
par Erasme qui lui dédicaça son Institutio Principis Christiani et fut considéré
par Thomas More comme un prince digne de la république utopienne. Cet article
espère combler une lacune historiographique et lever la sombre condemnatio
memoriae dont Sauvage fut victime de façon posthume sous le règne des
Habsbourg espagnols.
Mots clés: Jean le Sauvage, Ioannes Sylvagius, Desiderius Erasmus,
Thomas More, Pierre Gilles, Utopie, Institutio Principis Christiani, the
Joyous Entry of Brabant, la Révolte des Comuneros, la révolte
hollandaise

Este artículo biográfico es probablemente el primer estudio completo sobre el

Canciller Jean le Sauvage o Ioannes Sylvagius (1455-1518). Sauvage tuvo el
honor de ser mencionado por Erasmo en la principal dedicatoria de su
Institutio Principis Christiani, y Thomas More consideraba que sería un digno
príncipe de Utopía. Así pues, este artículo pretende llenar un hueco
270 Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 Maarten VERMEIR

historiográfico, e intentar así levantar la sombría condena que de su memoria

hicieron los gobernantes españoles de la casa Habsburgo.
Palabras clave: Jean le Sauvage, Ioannes Sylvagius, Desiderio Erasmo,
Thomas More, Pieter Gillis, Utopía, Institutio Principis Christiani, la
Gozosa Entrada de Brabante, la Revuelta de los Comuneros, la Revuelta
holandesa

* * *

Book of Hours of Jean Le Sauvage and Jacqueline de Boulogne

French Flanders, 1503 - Miniature by Jean Markant
Maarten VERMEIR Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 271

‘But I have great hopes of Jean le Sauvage, the chancellor of

Burgundy, who is himself not only a great man and a very wise
man but a very learned one, and what is more, a devoted
supporter of all men who have distinguished learning to
recommend them (letter from Erasmus to Guillaume Budé, 19
1
June 1516).’

****

Thomas More, Pieter Gillis and Erasmus, Utopia’s crucial trio,

held Chancellor Jean le Sauvage or Ioannes Sylvagius, as they called
st
him, in high esteem. In his letter of 31 October 1516 to Erasmus,
Thomas More envisioned Sauvage as Prince of Utopia if Sylvagius
could have lived in the Utopian state. Pieter Gillis dedicated his
Summae sive argumenta legum diversorum imperatorum to the
Chancellor and celebrated him in his dedicatory letter as the person
whose work ‘after the long and calamitous tumult of war, brought
2
peace to the world.’ The Belgian painter James Ensor even used the
names of these two men, Gillis and Sauvage, as the title of one of his
symbolic paintings (Gilles and Sauvage, 1891). Erasmus, in the fourth
and in later editions of the Institutio Principis Christiani, gave
preference to a letter addressed to Chancellor Jean le Sauvage over a
letter addressed to the young Prince Charles of Habsburg: while
Charles had initially been the only dedicatee of the Institutio, Erasmus
chose as main preface for the Institutio since July 1518 a reworked
version of his last letter to Chancellor Sauvage, written three months
before Sauvage’s death in June 1518. This last letter to Jean le Sauvage
thus became the preferred preface of Erasmus’ main political work, on

1
CWE, vol. 3, Letter 421, 308.
2
James Tracy, The Politics of Erasmus: a Pacifist Intellectual and His Political
Milieu, U of Toronto P, 1978, 57.
272 Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 Maarten VERMEIR

3
the institutio (the education and/or institution) of a Christian Prince.
A greater political-literary honor for a politician, who was already
dead at the time and thus no longer able to arrange services or
payments in exchange for literary honors, cannot be imagined. Jean le
Sauvage is even explicitly present in one of the prefatory letters of
Utopia, in the preface written by Jean Desmarez, or Ioannes
Paludanus, to Pieter Gillis. In this letter, Paludanus calls Sauvage not
only ‘Chancellor of Burgundy’ but also ‘the one and only Maecenas or
patron of every noble pursuit (who) summons us’ (provocat hic unicus
ille rerum bonarum omnium Moecenas Ioannes Sylvagius Borgondiae
4
Cancellarius).
Unfortunately, no edited book or article on the life and
activities of Sauvage has ever been produced. Only in biographical
dictionaries and broader historical studies can we find descriptions of
his life and political achievements; the most substantial of these
5
accounts are by James D. Tracy and Silvana Seidel Menchi. With this
article, I thus intend to fill a historiographical lacuna and lift once and
for all the darkening condemnatio memoriae Sauvage posthumously
fell victim to. This condemnatio had its origin with the Spanish-
Habsburg rulers who kept the Southern part of the Low Countries
under their control after the ‘Dutch Revolt’ (which affected not only
what is now the Netherlands, but also the entire Low Countries) and
the Eighty Years’ War that ripped apart the Low Countries between
1568 and 1648. The effectiveness of the condemnatio memoriae
inflicted on Sauvage by the Spanish rulers is demonstrated most

3
CWE, vol. 6, Letter 853, 54-56.
4
CW 4, 26-27.
5
Bietenholz, Peter G., Contemporaries of Erasmus: a Biographical Register of the
Renaissance and Reformation, U of Toronto P, 1985-1987, vol. 2, 325-326
(biographical note on Jean le Sauvage is written by James D. Tracy); Silvana
Seidel Menchi, ‘Iulius Exclusus‘ in Desiderius Erasmus, Opera Omnia Desiderii
Erasmi, I-8 Ordinis Primi Tomus Octavus: Iulius Exclusus, De Civilitate,
Conflictus Thaliae et Barbariei, edited by Seidel Menchi, S. Bierlaire, F. et
Hoven, R., Brill, Leiden, 2012, 44-46.
Maarten VERMEIR Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 273

clearly by the near silence of historiographers about him for the past
four hundred years.
The Spanish destroyed the funeral monument with a laudatory
epitaph for Jean le Sauvage in the Cathedral of Brussels as well as the
‘Sauvage chapel,’ where his tomb was situated, to make place for a
new chapel in 1649, thus realizing the ‘assumed last wishes’ of Infanta
Isabella, the daughter of Philip II of Spain and current Habsburg ruler
of the Southern Low Countries. The castle of Jean le Sauvage in
Sterrebeek, a village close to Brussels, and one of the lordships
Sauvage had acquired (next to Escobecque near Lille), was destroyed
shortly after the conclusion of the Eighty Years’ War. That this
happened already during peace time is clear from the fact that a
neighboring sixteenth-century castle in this ‘village of castles’ can still
be visited nowadays. Nor is there any extant portrait of Jean le
Sauvage, even though he was at his time one of the most powerful
men in the Burgundian Low Countries and even called Princeps by the
Christian humanists who had also a strong network of painters that
supported them. We can only vaguely conceive Jean le Sauvage’s
image from two miniatures showing him and his wife, Jacqueline de
Boulogne, in a ‘book of hours’ that belonged to them.
If we restore in our minds his tomb, the chapel in the cathedral
of Brussels named after him, his castle in Sterrebeek in the green
countryside around Brussels (at the time the political heart of the
Burgundian Low Countries and also a political center on a broader
European scale), we get somewhat closer to imagining the material
beauty and splendor surrounding the Chancellor and his aura during
his life time and in the later sixteenth century, when his figure
provided a strong inspiration for the political events in the Low
Countries. This material splendor corresponded to the high political
positions Jean le Sauvage filled during his life time, the most powerful
of which he occupied during his last years. The epitaph on his tomb
stone survived the destruction, and in this text Jean le Sauvage is
celebrated as President of Flanders, Chancellor of Brabant, Chancellor
of Burgundy and ‘Spain’ and as Knight of the Order of the Golden
274 Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 Maarten VERMEIR

6
Fleece, ‘integritatis erga omnes’ – ‘with integrity towards all.’ Sauvage
became a Knight of this Order in 1503 and his coat of arms shows
three silver unicorn heads on a field of azure. Among the top pieces of
The Cloisters Museum in New York is a series of tapestries about the
hunt for and capture of a magical unicorn made in the Low Countries
between 1495 and 1505. These contemporary pieces demonstrate the
great prestige and importance of this symbolic animal with strong
7
Christian connotations. ‘La Dame à la licorne’, the series of six
tapestries among the top pieces of the ‘Musée de Cluny’ in Paris, was
likewise produced around the end of the fifteenth century in the
(southern) Low Countries. After all, the Duchy of Brabant was not
only the political key region of the Low Countries, but also home to
the most specialized tapestry workshops, the majority of which could
be found in Brussels, one of the four capitals of this duchy.
However, the immaterial splendor of Jean le Sauvage’s political
achievements is even more dazzling. Archival documents still permit
us to know that Sauvage was born in Lille in January or February 1455,
the son of a family of civil servants. He obtained a license in law at
the University of Leuven in 1478, made an exceptional career as a
public servant, rose continuously into power within the political
institutions of the Burgundian Low Countries and cooperated closely
with Guillaume de Croÿ, Lord of Chièvres. From 1480, he became a
financial clerk; in 1489/1490, he entered the Council of Flanders as
Councillor; in 1492, he became Councillor-Master of the Requests and
between 1497 and 1508, he was President of the Council of Flanders,
until he exchanged this Presidency for the Presidency of the Privy
Council in 1508. In this position, he presided, until 1511, the group of
intimate political advisors of the ruler of the Burgundian Netherlands.
From 1509 until 1511, Jean le Sauvage combined this high function in
the Privy Council with the position of Chancellor of Brabant, a
position he filled from 1509 until 1514, the year before he became

6
Foppens, Jean François: Bibliotheca Belgica, Bruxelles, 1739, T.2, (32).
7
Cavallo, Adolph S., The Unicorn Tapestries at the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
Metropolitan Museum of Art Publications, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1998.
Maarten VERMEIR Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 275

The Lady and the Unicorn (La Dame à la licorne) drawn in Paris around 1500.
Musée national du Moyen Âge (former Musée de Cluny), Paris.
276 Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 Maarten VERMEIR

(Grand) Chancellor of Burgundy in 1515. He was the first ‘Belgian’ or

native of the Low Countries to wear this title and at the same time the
last politician to do so. He would die as Chancellor of Burgundy, a
position he combined, from 1516 (after the death of King Ferdinand of
th
Aragon) until his death, on 7 June 1518, with the title of Chancellor of
Castile.
During the tutelage of Prince Charles after the death of his
father Philip the Fair in 1506, Philip’s sister Margaret of Austria
governed the Burgundian Low Countries. She opposed the series of
splendid offices collected by Jean le Sauvage. When Guillaume de
Croÿ and Jean le Sauvage, who became Chancellor of Burgundy in the
same year, contrived the emancipation of Prince Charles as ruler of
the Burgundian Low Countries in 1515 at the age of only 15, Margaret
of Austria was effectively excluded from the governorship of the
Burgundian Netherlands. To realize this earlier accession, the two
lords arranged a payment by the Estates of Brabant to Emperor
8
Maximilian I. After Prince Charles’ accession to the throne, Sauvage
and de Croÿ were in fact pulling the strings of power, using Charles as
a necessary but still very young puppet and thus freeing themselves
from Margaret of Austria’s entitled involvement in the politics of the
Burgundian Netherlands. She had obviously been tricked out of
power by these two actual Princes, although being a master of courtly
intrigue and spin herself – an ‘art’ she passed on to Anne Boleyn, who
lived and learned as a maid of honor of Margaret of Austria at
Margaret’s court in Mechelen from Spring 1513 until Fall 1514. Of
course, Margaret was thirsting for revenge.
It was Jean le Sauvage who arranged the appointment of
Erasmus as counsellor of the young Prince Charles in 1515: in this

8
See Bietenholz, Peter G., Contemporaries of Erasmus: a Biographical Register of
the Renaissance and Reformation, U of Toronto P, 1985-1987, vol. 2, 325-326;
with this payment, the Estates of Brabant expressed unmistakably clearly their
approval of Jean le Sauvage and Guillaume de Croÿ as real ‘Governors’ behind
the 15-year-old Prince Charles. It proves a real relation of trust between the
Estates of Brabant and Jean le Sauvage and his respect for the political culture and
constitution of Brabant.
Maarten VERMEIR Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 277

capacity Erasmus would write his Institutio Principis Christiani,

initially dedicated only to Prince Charles. Sauvage also tried to
9
arrange a regular stipend for Erasmus; the effectuation of this
payment was, however, troubled at times, maybe due to malpractices
10
by Sauvage’s secretary Pierre Barbier. At one instance Jean le Sauvage
even paid the missing stipend out of his own pocket according to
11
James Tracy. When Sauvage was making preparations for upcoming
peace negotiations that would result in the 1517 treaty of Cambrai
between the King of France, the Holy Roman Emperor and the ruler of
the Burgundian Low Countries, he invited Erasmus to write his
Querela Pacis. Erasmus arranged even a third edition of his Institutio,
the first one in France, in the same month, March 1517, when these
peace talks and following treaty in the French city of Cambrai were
being planned. What we also know for sure is that Jean le Sauvage
successfully concluded several advantageous trade and peace treaties
with and between neighboring countries of the Low Countries:
bilateral treaties with England (the so-called Intercursus Malus of 1506
and a renewed treaty in 1516) and with France (the Treaty of Noyon in
1516), a treaty between the King of France and the Holy Roman
Emperor that was signed in Brussels in 1516, and of course, as pièce de
résistance, the treaty of Cambrai in 1517.
Another major surviving source, Erasmus’ correspondence,
permits us to know that Sauvage followed with great interest the
literary endeavors and achievements of the Christian humanists. In
February 1517, Sauvage’s secretary Guy Morillon wrote to Erasmus that
they had greatly amused themselves with the dialogue on Julius,

9
Cf. CWE, vol. 3, Letter 436, 333-334.
10
Marcel Nauwelaerts states in the commentary of the French translation of Letter
443 that Erasmus suspected Pierre Barbier of holding back money from his
stipend. Desiderius Erasmus, La Correspondance d’Erasme, traduite et annotée
par M.A. Nauwelaerts d’après le texte latin de l’Opus epistolarum de P.S. Allen,
H.M. Allen et H.W. Garrod, UP Bruxelles, Volume II, 387; CWE, vol. 3, Letter
443, 340-341.
11
Bietenholz, Peter G., Contemporaries of Erasmus: a Biographical Register of the
Renaissance and Reformation, U of Toronto P, 1985-1987, vol. 2, 326.
278 Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 Maarten VERMEIR

12
enormously appreciated by the Chancellor. With a certain pride,
Erasmus wrote to More in March 1517, that Chancellor Sauvage had
13
‘this dialogue of Iulius and Petrus in his hands and took delight in it’.
This latter remark is one of Silvana Seidel Menchi’s key arguments for
attributing the Julius Exclusus to Erasmus, as she does conclusively in
the introduction of her edition of Julius Exclusius e Coelis as part of
the Opera Omnia Desiderii Erasmi from January 2013. In this excellent
introduction, she even states that Sauvage
became an important link in the diffusion of IE because the
codex that Erasmus sent to Brussels was one of the potential
matrices that gave origin to a wider manuscript circulation and
14
later to the first printed edition of the dialogue.

Menchi writes that Jean le Sauvage was a more powerful and more
15
accessible patron than Erasmus had ever known before. I would like
to state that Sauvage was one of the most powerful political figures in
Europe to share in theory and in practice the same Christian humanist
ideals that Erasmus and Thomas More tried to spread and realize. In
that perspective Jean le Sauvage was for Erasmus and Thomas More
what Cesare Borgia was for Machiavelli: a living image of their ideal
Prince.
It is well-known that Sauvage encouraged Erasmus to write his
Institutio Principis Christiani and Querela Pacis. Less well-known is
Sylvagius’ role in the creation and production of Utopia. When
Thomas More came to the city of Bruges for his ‘Utopian embassy’ in
the Low Countries, he was only able to travel on to Antwerp, where he
would conceive the basis for Utopia together with Pieter Gillis, due to
an interruption of the trade negotiations in Bruges between the

12
EE, II, Ep. 532, Guy Morillon to Erasmus, Brussels, 18 February 1517, ll. 21-26.
13
EE II, Ep. 543, Erasmus to Thomas More, Antwerp, 1 March 1517, ll. 9-10.
14
Silvana Seidel Menchi, ‘Iulius Exclusus‘ in Desiderius Erasmus, Opera Omnia
Desiderii Erasmi, I-8 Ordinis Primi Tomus Octavus: Iulius Exclusus, De
Civilitate, Conflictus Thaliae Et Barbariei edited by Seidel Menchi, S. Bierlaire,
F. et Hoven, R., Brill, Leiden, 2012, 45.
15
Silvana Seidel Menchi, ibid., 45.
Maarten VERMEIR Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 279

representatives of Henry VIII and Prince Charles in May 1515. When

the Netherlandish negotiators felt the need to ‘seek’ instructions from
st
their government in Brussels, the negotiations were suspended by 21
July, and the continuation depended on the remarkably slow-coming
green light from the political ‘counselors’ directing the policy of the
young Prince Charles at the ducal court of Brussels (negotiations
would only restart after More had already been called back to England
by Henry VIII in October 1515). We now know who the key
‘counselors’ at Prince Charles’ court were. The impression suggests
itself that this interruption was no coincidence at all, but politically
arranged by Chancellor Jean le Sauvage at the helm of the central
government in Brussels, who thus provided More with the
opportunity and free time to visit Pieter Gillis in Antwerp and there
conceive the basis for Utopia. Two apparently trivial facts add
strength to this impression: just before More went to Bruges, he had
received Erasmus as a guest in London, and just before Erasmus went
16
to London, he had met Chancellor Sauvage in Ghent. This would
also explain why Jean le Sauvage is called the ‘one and only Maecenas
of every noble pursuit’ in the prefaces of Utopia and why he is called
by More in the letter to Erasmus a ‘Prince of Utopia’, like Jerome de
Busleyden and Cuthbert Tunstall, who played a clear and well-known
role in Thomas More’s ‘Utopian embassy.’ More asked Erasmus in the
same letter how Jean le Sauvage had received Utopia. This would also
shed new light on the reasons why Thomas More wanted to get Utopia
first published in the city of Leuven, one of the capitals of Brabant,
under the political auspices and protection of the Chancellor.
For these reasons, I have Sylvagius in mind whenever I read the
prefatory quatrain in the ‘Utopian vernacular’ on Utopia’s ruler
17
Utopus who converted ‘a non-island into an island’ and More’s
description in Book I of a ruler whose name and country More has

16
On May 7th 1515, Erasmus wrote from London to Gillis that Chancellor Jean le
Sauvage had held him busy for three days in Ghent while he was on his way to
London. CWE, vol. 3, Letter 332, 84-85.
17
CW 4, 18-19.
280 Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 Maarten VERMEIR

forgotten and through whose generosity Hythlodaeus and ‘his five

companions were supplied with ample provision and travel resources
and moreover with a trusty guide on their journey to take them to
18
other rulers with careful recommendations in their favor.’ In a letter
th
of 6 February 1517 to Erasmus, Antonius Clava mentions in one and
the same context that he is waiting for the arrival of More’s ‘most
joyful’ book of Utopia and that Erasmus, uncertain about what he will
reap for what he has sown (by publishing Utopia), should have good
hope because he has a Chancellor who is the most human of all
19
humans. It was also during this crucial period of the conception of
Utopia that Erasmus asked Pieter Gillis, in a letter of September 1515
from Basel, to hand over a second attached letter to ‘the Chancellor’ in
20 th
his name. And in a letter of 6 October 1516, one month before the
first publication of Utopia in Leuven, Erasmus writes to Pieter Gillis
very joyfully that, whilst he was enjoying leisure and amusing himself
with reading and writing in Antwerp, Chancellor Jean le Sauvage had
21
tried in Brussels to make him Bishop of Sicily. At the very moment
when Thomas More was writing to Pieter Gillis in his prefatory letter
for Utopia that a devout theologian intended to go to the island of
Utopia and requested the Pope to assign him the bishopric of
22
Utopia, Erasmus seemed indeed on the brink of becoming Bishop of
an island. Finally it appeared to be the right of the Pope, not of the
new King of Castile and Aragon, to appoint the Bishop of the Sicilians,
who are described by Erasmus as ‘once clever Greeks and still witty
23
and gay.’ It was to the Pope, then, that Chancellor le Sauvage
addressed his request to let Erasmus have this see, a request which
greatly amused Erasmus: ‘When I heard that, I could not suppress a

18
CW 4, 50-51.
19
EE, Ep. 524.
20
CWE, vol. 3, Letter 356, 177.
21
CWE, vol. 4, Letter 476, 95-96.
22 CW 4, 42-43.
23
CWE, vol. 4, Letter 476, 96.
Maarten VERMEIR Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 281

laugh; all the same, it is pleasant to know how the prince feels towards
24
me, or rather the chancellor, who in practice is the prince.’
When Prince Charles inherited the reign over the Spanish
kingdoms with the death of his grandfather King Ferdinand of Aragon
in 1516, he travelled to these kingdoms to fulfill his duties as entering
Prince. Jean le Sauvage and other politicians from the court of Brussels
followed Charles to Spain. On this journey, Jerome de Busleyden
would die in Bordeaux, before even reaching the Spanish peninsula.
25
As James D. Tracy has argued, Netherlandish ‘counsellors’
accompanying Charles in Spain ‘helped provoke’ through their
interventions the Revolt of the Comuneros which claimed the right for
the Spanish representative assemblies to elect their own Prince
autonomously, without the interference of foreigners. Whenever this
‘interference’ is discussed, the role of Netherlandish counsellors, and
especially the role of Jean le Sauvage, who had been Chancellor of
26
Castile since 1516, is described as tactically unwise. I would like to
disagree with this view and to present an alternative perspective on
these facts. I believe that the Chancellor willingly tried to sabotage
the enthronement of the ruler of the Burgundian Low Countries as
Prince of Castile and Aragon. After all, it was Sauvage who had
invited Erasmus to write his Institutio Principis Christiani, in which he
expresses the wish that ‘princes would eschew such dynastic unions
27
and marry within their borders.’ It was the very same Sauvage who
had made great efforts to obtain a stable peace in Europe by an
ingenious web of treaties – an arrangement that surely would be put
under great pressure and at risk through Prince Charles’ accumulation
of crowns on the European chessboard (a fear history would prove to
be correct). It was also Sauvage who had been called the one and only
Maecenas of noble pursuits in Thomas More’s Utopia, a text
presenting for the first time, under the guise of fiction, the political

24
CWE, vol. 4, Letter 475, 94.
25
Bietenholz, Peter G., Contemporaries of Erasmus: a Biographical Register of the
Renaissance and Reformation, U of Toronto P, 1985-1987, vol. 2, 326.
26
W. Blockmans, ‘De onderdanen van de keizer’ in H. Soly, Karel V 1500-1558, de
keizer en zijn tijd, Mercatorfonds, Antwerpen, 1999, 260.
27
James Tracy, The Politics of Erasmus: a Pacifist Intellectual and His Political
Milieu, U of Toronto P, 1978, 58.
282 Moreana Vol. 53, 203-204 Maarten VERMEIR

system claimed by the Comuneros (which was in fact inspired by the

original political system of Brabant) as a general, widely applicable
political theory. When Sauvage died in Zaragoza in June 1518, he was
pursuing his political ideals most tactically, in my view. His body was
brought to Brussels, where he received the burial of a Prince in
St. Gudula Cathedral. A month after Jean le Sauvage’s death, Erasmus
printed his last letter to Sauvage in Spain, in which he expresses his
deep concerns about the health of the chancellor ‘amidst enormous
waves of worries and dangers,’ as the first dedication of his Institutio
Principis Christiani. To this preface Erasmus added the following line
addressing Sauvage:
You guide the affairs of a prince on whose genius, more than on
aught else, the sum of human affairs seems to depend and
guide them in such a way that between you there might seem
to be a kind of noble competition: does he show more integrity
as he holds supreme dominion all by himself over so many
kingdoms, or you as you fulfil the highest office in the state,
28
servant and master alike without parallel.

When Charles’ son, Philip II, would swear his oath to respect
the Joyous Entry of Brabant in Leuven in 1549, including the article of
resistance that Emperor Charles V had unsuccessfully tried to erase
from the Brabantine constitution and through which the Estates-
General of the United Provinces would legitimize the abjuration of
Philip II in 1581, he would pledge his oath into the hands of the
current Chancellor of Brabant who first read out the complete text of
the Joyous Entry: Engelbert van den Daele, the son-in-law of Jean le
Sauvage. Regardless of his suspicious death in Spain (already in 1518
29
there were rumors about poisoning), regardless of a cruel
condemnatio memoriae, Jean le Sauvage’s heritage lives on.

Maarten Vermeir
vermeir.arts@gmail.com
28
CWE, vol. 6, Letter 853, 54-56.
29
L’Académie Royale des Sciences, des Lettres et des Beaux-Arts de Belgique,
Biographie Nationale, Etablissements Emile Bruylant, Bruxelles, 1911-1913,
Tome 21, 441-445.