page_title: Hoogstraten
section_title: Early-modern period
hierarchical_section_title: Hoogstraten / History / Early-modern period
caption_attribution_description: Français&#160;: Vitraux Antoine II de Lalaing, comte d'Hoogstraten- Éleonore de Montmorency
context_page_description: Hoogstraten is a municipality located in the Belgian province of Antwerp. The municipality comprises Hoogstraten, Meer, Meerle, Meersel-Dreef, Minderhout and Wortel.
  Hoogstraten has a population of over 20,000, and lies in Flanders at the northern border of Belgium within an enclave surrounded on three sides by the Netherlands. Today, about 15% percent of the population consists of Dutch people.
  The town is named after the hoge straat or "high road" – a military highway that linked the old towns of Antwerp and 's-Hertogenbosch. In the town’s early days, little trade existed. Villages and towns produced just enough for their own support, with little or no surplus to be ‘sold’ to other areas. Thus, most travelers along this high road were soldiers and armies.
  Today Hoogstraten is internationally known for its strawberries. Veiling Hoogstraten is one of the largest of the Benelux. Every year more than 30,000 tonnes of strawberries are traded there. However its main agricultural crop is the tomato.
context_section_description: A very large brick church was built in 1524, and a matching town hall next door was built in 1530 before the church was completed in 1546.
  By 1564, a drawing shows the town still consisted of houses on both sides of the wide unpaved Vrijheid.  Cattle and dogs still ran freely along its length. The number of houses had grown to more than a hundred and they were no longer thatched but were fine upstanding wooden buildings some three stories high. The church, St. Catherine’s Church, formed the centre of the town. Behind the church on a slight hill a few kilometres distant stood the castle of the Count who owned all the land for miles around.
  Under the ownership of Count Antoon de Lalaing (1480–1540) and his wife, Countess Elisabeth van Culemborg (1475–1555), the ‘Land van Hoogstraten’ became a county, a title bestowed by Margaretha of Austria. The ‘county’ encompassed the whole the Count’s land in which several villages existed.  It is now marked by the boundaries of his property, one of three bulges of northern Belgium each of which are almost surrounded by The Netherlands.
  Between 1 September 1602 – 18 May 1604 the Mutiny of Hoogstraten took place - the longest mutiny by soldiers of the Spanish Army of Flanders during the Eighty Years' War.
  While Hoogstraten lies within modern Belgian Flanders, prior to 1794 the town was in the Duchy of Brabant since old Flanders reached no further North West than Antwerp.
  Hoogstraten remained in the hands of the Lalaing-Culemborg family until 1709 after which the town was transferred to the Salm-Salm family.  In 1740 Hoogstraten was elevated to a Duchy by Emperor Charles VI, but barely half a century later, during French rule, it lost its titles of ‘town’ and ‘duchy.’ The status of a town often depended on whether the townspeople were considered supporters or not, so one might infer that the area was seen to have anti-French feeling.
caption: Antoine II de Lalaing, comte d'Hoogstraten, windows inside St-Catherine's Church of Hoogstraten.
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