3.4.5 Conclusion: The Legal Order of the XVII Provinces at the Dawn of Black Slavery: Limited Precedent, Extended Freedom Principle
Between 1500 and 1650, the Low Countries had encounters with slavery at several points in time, and scholars developed a freedom principle in these countries.
To the people of the Low Countries, unfreedom must have seemed something from the distant past, as the great majority of the population was free in the sixteenth and seventeenth century.
That being said, there was no general emancipation in the Low Countries, and an ever-declining number of serfs could still be found there.One of the reasons for the decline of serfdom in the Low Countries can be found in the vigorousness of its cities. They were in a position of power to assert the personal freedom of their citizens, and the idea of Stadtluft macht frei was to be found in some city charters as well. Antwerp and Amsterdam, those cities that became most involved with the colonial ventures had freedom provisions in their city laws. However, the enunciation was not a blanket conferral of the freedom principle, as the slave had to be aware of the provision in the first place, and then had to petition the authorities to gain his freedom.
A national freedom principle tradition was created in the Low Countries thanks to an accidental case which made it to the Great Council of Malines. When the Portuguese ambassador tried to get help in reclaiming his slave Simon, the Council rejected this request by holding that slavery did not exist in the Low Countries. Soon afterwards, this case was moulded by scholars to construct a tradition of the freedom principle. An ever-increasing web of cross-references to both domestic and foreign writers served as a means to solidify the idea of the freedom principle in legal thinking. The exact preconditions of the freedom principle could differ and were influenced by the customary provisions of cities such as Antwerp.
In practice, the freedom principle had a mixed record in the sixteenth century. Early cases from the United Provinces and Antwerp indicated that slavery could well be allowed to exist here, as slaves who came to these areas did not receive their freedom automatically and were sometimes sold and manumitted.185