by Spanish troops during the Eighty Years' War
The Eighty Years' War, or the Dutch War of Independence (1568-1648), was a war fought, as the name suggests, over the course of eighty years and for the independence of the Dutch Republic (a precursor to the modern-day Netherlands) from the western Habsburg realm led by Philip II of Spain. The leaders of the rebellion cited the strict control of the monarchy over the people as their main incentive to rebel, mainly in terms such as freedom of religion and thought and the matter of taxation. More cynically-minded observers generally put the taxes first, though.
As fitting for a war spanning almost a century, the Eighty Years War was a dramatically evolving conflict. What had started essentially as a police action within the Spanish Empire ended up spiraling into an international engagement that pitted Philip and his clan against all the other European powers at the time, most notably England and France, and entangled into the ongoing war against the Ottoman Empire. It resulted in an endless back and forth that eventually ended with Philip's grandson throwing the towel and letting part of Netherlands separate as an independent nation. In many ways, it was a truly world war, although historians only like to entertain the term after the conflict was subsumed into the Thirty Years' War, which ended more or less at the same time.
The war went into history as the Spanish version of the Vietnam War, leading to the popular idiom España mi natura, Italia mi ventura, Flandes mi sepultura ("Spain (was) my birthplace, Italy my fortune, Flanders my grave"). The conflict manifested as countless skirmishes, minor to medium battles, foreign interventions, and incredibly long and tedious sieges, many of which went nowhere. As a consequence, although the Spaniards suffered few decisive disasters, the sheer accumulation of warring expenses and the multiplication of enemies through almost a century managed to ultimately overwork the empire into giving up by exhaustion. The science of warfare would substantially evolve during his course, ending the era of the pike-and-shot and promoting the adoption of linear infantry tactics.
Losing the war not only ended hegemony of Habsburg Spain in Europe, but also their reputation forever, as the war proved the value of propaganda, skillfully used by the rebel side to convince Europe of Spain's wickedness and the sore need to resist or die against them. It basically codified the Spanish Black Legend for its further expansion by all factions interested for the next centuries.
The Other Wiki has a incredibly extensive and more specific article on the Eighty Years War.
Background
The Netherlands had ended up in Philip's hands after his father Charles V divided his personal domain and restored the separation between the Spanish Empire and the Holy Roman Empire. They should have gone back to the Holy Roman Empire, its previous domain, but the latter's endemic infighting, increased by the recent triumph of the Protestantism, had convinced Charles that the provinces would be safer with Spain, whose stronger army made it much more capable to defend them militarily from France (and control the Netherlanders' own proneness to turmoil). In general, It Seemed Like a Good Idea at the Time — the Habsburg Netherlands were the richest part of the Holy Roman Empire, with an enviable position for trade and the biggest density of urbanization in all of Europe, and aside from it being a great asset for the Spanish Empire and its global trade network, it was a priority to keep under Habsburg control.However, relations between Philip and the Low Countries soon soured. The infamously centralist king wanted to re-organize the land and extract taxes proportional to their richness, while the local nobility resisted, accustomed to Charles' more liberal attitude. Furthermore, while Charles had been born in the very Netherlands and was a cosmopolitan man, Philip was instead a remote, southern king whom the northerners struggled to accept. As it can be read in William of Orange's Apology, at the time it was popular in Europe to see Spaniards as a race "contaminated" by their contact with Jews and Moors, and Philip's fiscal voraciousness only confirmed this impression. It also happened that Philip was an uncompromising Catholic, while at the time the Netherlands had a small but influential Calvinist Protestant population he couldn't just leave be — and it turned out that even the local Catholic majority was unmotivated to hold together with him, as the common threats of France and the Ottoman Empire were removed by way of the Peace of Cateau-Cambresis and geographical distance respectively.
The revolt explodes
By 1566, tensions had only fired up after the Low Countries started suffering economically from the Northern Wars, the inflation caused by American silver, and Philip's own attempts to stamp out Protestantism.note In August of the same year, Protestant mobs started attacking and destroying Catholic properties all around the country in an event called the Beeldenstorm ("Iconoclasm"), and although Spanish governor Margaret of Parma managed to control things with the help of the noblemen themselves, Philip heard the alarming reports and basically panicked, believing the Netherlands were spiraling out of control. The king replaced Margaret with the iron-handed Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba, who came with the double mission to control things by any means necessary and reorganize the largely medieval local economy in order to refloat things, waiting for Philip himself to come over, issue pardons for everybody and endear himself to the Netherlanders — essentially, a Good Cop/Bad Cop gambit.A revolt was cooking since statesman William of Orange, an understudy of Charles V best known as William the Silent, got in talks with the Ottoman Empire for help against Spain,note but the event said to have set off the Self-Fulfilling Prophecy of the revolution was Alba's execution of the two other great statesmen, Lamoral, Count of Egmont and Philip de Montmorency, Count of Hoorn, on the main square in Brussels on June 5, 1568. William fled to the functionally neutral Holy Roman Empire and became the leader of the rebellion in exile. Alba crushed the first waves of the revolt and managed to directly recapture most of the country, even against French reinforcements to the rebels, but Philip failed to visit Netherlands, as his travel was first delayed until 1571 by the Rebellion of the Alpujarras and then discarded entirely because the infamously reclusive and whimsical monarch didn't feel like going. The absence of the good cop left the Duke of Alba unsure of what to do and with a bad case of only having a hammer and seeing everything as a nail.note
In 1573, to his great relief and bitterness, Alba was eventually recalled when people back in Spain realized the problem would not be solved the same way it was provoked, and meanwhile William the Silent and King Charles IX of France got the Ottomans to pressure the Spanish Empire from the south. Still unwilling to go personally, Philip now tried luck the soft way by sending a more diplomatic governor, Luis de Requesens y Zúñiga, with conciliatory orders and a general amnesty, but negotiations went nowhere,note and Requesens was forced to resume warfare with his sorely lacking leadership skills. The Spaniards did snatch a couple decisive victories with the help of Alba's former staff, after which Requesens and William the Silent entered negotiations by the mediation of Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, but failure to reach an agreement coincided with Spain going momentarily bankrupt. Requesens then died of illness as a final strike, and the unpaid and uncommanded Habsburgian troops mutinied and committed a series of savage sackings, enraged the local population.
Europe at war
Spain's economy recovered thanks to its usual batches of American silver and gold, after which Philip tried to undo the mismanagement of Alba and Requesens by sending his charismatic half-brother John of Austria,victor of the ottomans in the Battle of Lepanto. The new governor got some tentative diplomatic success by promising to withdraw with all of his forces and approving the locally written Pacification of Ghent, but peace lasted little: William the Silent didn't trust John, while John was alerted of a conspiracy to murder him, and both of them moved militarily to counter the other (who exactly re-started the brawl depends on who you read). Again at war, the rebels received support by Elizabeth I of England and appointed their own Habsburg governor, no other than John's cousin Archduke Matthias of Austria. However, John and his lieutenant Alexander Farnese obtained a couple of devastating victories, after which infighting exploded between the rebels and an increasing number of them started changing sides.John's death passed command to Farnese, who turned out to be an even greater general, and his diplomatic and military offensive gradually brought most of the country under Spanish control. Up to this point, William and the rebel provinces had claimed to want to return to pre-war state, but now, enticed by an alliance with France, they disposed of Matthias and, by way of the 1581 Act of Abjuration, declared themselves independent so they could collect foreign support.note They pledged themselves to France, when this failed they switched to England, and finally, with William murdered by a spy, they appointed themselves a friend-of-all republic — but Farnese kept defeating them every time and solidified the Spanish threat by spectacularly capturing Antwerp, the unofficial capital of all the Netherlands. His moment only stopped with the disaster of the Spanish Armada against England and the forceful diversion of the French Wars of Religion, where Farnese was killed in action.
With the Spanish Empire now being simultanously at war against Dutch, French and British, the Dutch Republic turned the tide and re-conquered most of the territory with their own military genius, the late William's son Maurice of Nassau, while Spain depended on a new governor who turned out to have very dubious abilities on the field, Philip's distant nephew Archduke Albert of the Holy Roman Empire. At this point, with the hope it would take the wind off of the rebels' desire for independence, Philip decided to turn the Netherlands into its own state. Marrying off his daughter Isabella Clara Eugenia to Albert, he handed him lordship of the Netherlands, reasoning the rebels would be more open to return to the rule of a Central European. However, attempts to reach a conciliation failed again, as the republicans had found out they worked fine on their own and believed the new Netherlands would be puppeteered by Spain. Philip died around this time, still very far from able to see the end of the war.
The situation reached a balance by the arrival of another imperial wunderchild, Ambrogio Spinola, managing to thwart Maurice and making things look promising for the next King Philip III, who was still backing the Netherlands with the Spanish army even although Albert was the man in charge now. Both sides were utterly exhausted and needing for the negotiations to give out something, so by this point the Twelve Year Truce was declared in 1609. Albert invested the time in rebuilding the half of Netherlands under his control and all of its Catholic structure, but the spiritual winner was the Dutch Republic, because the sole fact that the Habsburgs had signed a treaty with them meant they were now being implicitly given recognition as an entity.
Restart of the war
The peace lasted until 1619 when the Thirty Years' War broke out, similarly pitting the Austrian Habsburgs against more or less everybody in Europe, and this returned the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Empire to opposition as they intervened in favor of each side. The truce also finished in 1621, point at which both Archduke Albert and Spinola wanted to negotiate again with Maurice and end the damn war, but the conflict had seriously disadvantaged the Spanish Empire in many fields around the world (for instance, weakening their Portuguese subjects in The Dutch-Portuguese War) and many voices called for retribution. To further fire up things, Albert died shortly after, returning the Netherlands to Philip IV, whose prime minister Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, declared war again on the belief that any outcome readable as a loss would encourage Spain's enemies to get cocky on them.Despite Maurice's death in 1625 and a promising campaign the following year, people at the Spanish court were now aware that they needed both Force and Finesse to have a hope of submitting the Dutch Republic, so they went for a policy of economic warfare. They besieged their chokepoints and engaged in naval commerce raiding to cut off their wings, resorting to their Dunkirker privateers to hit where the great Dutch navy couldn't catch them. The plan was a big advance, but the Republic managed to resist under the leadership of Maurice's brother Frederick Henry, and meanwhile the Spanish Empire added a new foe to the list in France of Cardinal Richelieu, which they were clashing with in the War of Mantuan Succession. The Spanish unexpectedly strengthened their position under the new general Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, so Dutch answered by jumping into an alliance with France.
Spain was initially winning the dual clash against France and the Dutch thanks to Ferdinand's strategic talent, but this and the Dunkirkers' success caused the Count-Duke of Olivares to become fatally overconfident — he stopped supporting Ferdinand and ordered a risky naval attack, the Battle of the Dunes, which turned out a fiasco and disrupted all of their maritime offensive. Spain then entered the Super-Power Meltdown known as the 1640 Crisis, during which Ferdinand suddenly died of illness in the worst possible moment, and this brought down the whole thing went down for the House of Habsburg, with multiple revolts exploding across their empire due to the 80 years of drain, chief among them the Catalonians and the Portuguese. The Dutch Republic also found itself weary of the experience and in midst of an inter-provincial conflict, so both sides accepted to negotiate for real. In the 1648 Peace of Munster, the Eighty Year War finally ended.
Aftermath
The Peace of Munster divided permanently the Low Countries into two, the southern part belonging to Spain and the northern part belonging to the Dutch Republic, which would later become respectively the modern countries of Belgium and the Netherlands. Spain recovered most of Catalonia, but they had lost Portugal forever, which re-established itself as its own empire again. Fortunes among all were unequal, however.The Eighty Years War basically brought an end to Iberian supremacy in the Christian world. The Spaniards were now free from a 80-year nightmare that in hindsight could have been both avoided and won at several points, but the ultimate inability to recover the full Netherlands after so many years was seen as a a massive Shoot the Shaggy Dog. The loss of money, resources, men, relations and their whole Portuguese branch translated into an equally gigantic global loss of influence, marking the point in which the Spanish Golden Age finally ended. The Spanish Habsburg branch would die off soon by the hand of Charles II of Spain, whose complicated succession ended up placing a French dynasty in its throne and further solidifying the France of Louis XIV as the next great power in Europe. For their part, Portugal managed to re-conquer gradually their American and African territories taken by the Dutch, but most of their control of the Indian Ocean had been lost and their own prime had passed.
In turn, although the lands of the Netherlands had been left quite devastated, sinking the life of everybody who wasn't part of the bourgouis middle and high class, the Dutch Republic only came out of the war stronger. The conflict had allowed them to cram the best manpower and brainpower in the Netherlands, as most of them were Protestants and were naturally forced to flee to the rebel provinces due to the Catholic persecution, and at the same time they had capitalized highly in the reform work made by their own enemies back when it seemed to be the solution to keep the country in the Spanish Empire. They had also carved a colonial empire, displacing the Portuguese thanks to the reason of the war, and spread trade networks around the globe. As a result, they became one of the lead powers in Europe, giving birth to the Dutch Golden Age — until 1672, when a series of wars against Louis XIV and Charles II of England ended their own heyday.
Depictions in fiction
- The titular character in Alatriste is a Spanish veteran of the 80 Years War. The war is brought front and center in the third book of the series, The Sun over Breda.
- Alatriste (2006) takes place with the war mostly in the background, starting with the title character fighting in the Dutch Revolt and ending at the 1643 Battle of Rocroi.
- The setting of Age of Empires III includes this period and has the Spanish and Dutch as playable factions, although it is mostly centered around the conquest and colonization of the Americas.
- The Dutch comic Gilles de Geus is set during the war, with Gilles even participating in some of the historical battles.
- Belgian author Charles de Coster adapted a German(ic) folk trickster, Till Eulenspiegel, and turned him into a folk hero who grew up in this warnote and fought for Dutch and Belgian independence. In the book Tijl Uilenspiegel (his Dutch name) joins the Geuzen, the same resistance group Gilles joins.