Ghent, Pacification of

Ghent, Pacification of 

an agreement concluded in the city of Ghent on Nov. 8, 1576, between two factions in the Netherlands bourgeois revolution of the 16th century. According to this pact, the northern provinces of the Netherlands, which had rebelled in 1572, and the southern provinces, into which the rebellion had spread in September 1572, agreed on these terms: a common struggle against the Spanish troops in the Netherlands, amnesty for participants in the rebellion, and preservation of Catholicism in the south and of Calvinism in the north of the country. The possessions of the Catholic Church and the authority of Philip II of Spain were formally declared to be inviolable. The creation of the revolutionary Union of Utrecht in 1579 virtually annulled the Pacification of Ghent.