5
THE SPANISH MONARCHY
Spain’s Many Dominions
The period between 1516 and 1659 is regarded as Spain’s Golden Age and era of European predominance. The international perspective on the Thirty Years War subsumes it within a broader series of struggles by other European countries against perceived Spanish hegemony. Certainly, it was largely through Spain and its overseas empire that the repercussions of the Central European struggle after 1618 were felt across the globe. Spain’s presence was a constant factor throughout, even if, as we shall see, its own problems were distinct from those of Habsburg Austria.
In one important respect, however, the difficulties were similar. Like their Austrian cousins, the Spanish Habsburgs ruled a large empire that proved difficult to manage and sustain. This empire had recently grown considerably bigger with the Union of Crowns forced on the Portuguese by Philip II in 1580. The young Dom Sebastiao had died with the flower of the Portuguese nobility in the disaster of al-Qasr el-Kabir in Morocco in 1578, extinguishing the House of Avis that had ruled since 1385. It was a shotgun marriage forced by an invading Spanish army, but one which many Portuguese came to appreciate for the access it gave to Spanish wealth and trading opportunities. Portugal itself only brought another 1.1 million new subjects to the union, but it had staked claims to Brazil, Africa and Asia. These possessions were thinly held, with perhaps no more than 30,000 Europeans and 15,000 slaves in Brazil by 1600, facing around 2.4 million indigenous inhabitants scattered across the vast, largely unexplored hinterland. A few thousand Portuguese manned forts in Angola and Mozambique, while around 10,000 more were posted across the Estado da India, or the possessions east of the Cape that were governed from Goa in western India.1
Spain itself had around 8.75 million inhabitants in Castile and the associated kingdoms of Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia and the Basque provinces. Contrary to the trend elsewhere in Europe, Castilian population growth stalled around 1580 with the onset of poor harvests, plague, emigration to the colonies and, above all, the burden of war and taxation. By 1631, there were only 4 million Castilians, about 1 million fewer than forty years earlier. Spain’s overseas colonies were likewise affected by population decline, but in this case it was a direct consequence of the conquest itself, which brought disease and overwork for the indigenous population, reducing it from over 34 million to around 1.5 million by 1620. At that point, there were around 175,000 colonists and a roughly similar number of African slaves and peoples of mixed descent scattered across Mexico, the Caribbean, the western and northern coasts of South America and around Manila in the Philippines.2 The statistics help put Spain’s colonial empire into perspective when compared to its European dominions that had 1.5 million subjects in the southern Netherlands, over a million apiece in Milan and Sicily, and 3 million more in Naples.
The importance of Spain’s dominions and colonies was magnified by the stagnant state of its own economy. Apart from the re-export of American silver, Spain’s main contributions to European trade were raw materials and some foodstuffs. Growth was inhibited by the country’s system of cartels with monopolies over particular products, a practice that extended to colonial trade with the crown’s collaboration with Seville making it the sole gateway to the Americas. Harvest failure and the onerous fiscal burden resulted in land flight as people migrated to the towns or colonies, weakening the survivors’ resistance to aristocratic and clerical encroachment on their remaining common lands. Private investors and merchants relied on silver receipts to fund consumption, since the country failed to feed its own population and had to import much of its food. The inability to produce useful goods in sufficient quantities prevented Spaniards from benefiting from the growth in colonial trade that expanded in line with the rising white population in the Americas. Dutch and other foreign merchants crowded into the market, obtaining special concessions to use Spain’s Atlantic ports around 1600. Fifty years later there were over 120,000 foreigners in Spain, notably in Seville where they formed a tenth of the city’s population.
Silver: The Lifeblood of Empire
Though the colonial economy did diversify over time, silver remained Spain’s primary interest. The New World produced 50,000 tonnes of silver between 1540 and 1700, doubling the existing stock in Europe. Exports only really got under way after the discovery of rich seams at Potosí in Bolivia (in 1545) and Zacatecas in Mexico (1548) and the introduction of German mining techniques in 1555 that used mercury to separate silver from waste. Zacatecas drew its mercury imports from Almadén in Spain, but Potosí’s production soared after the development of mercury mines at Huancavelia in Peru.3 Potosí relied on forced labour through the mita system, whereby native Indians were compelled to work four months every seven years. Labourers died at the rate of forty a day, working six-day shifts at an altitude of 6,000m. Increasingly, Indian villages bought exemption by paying tribute to hire labourers who constituted over half the workforce by 1600, but the system was still controlled by a corrupt local elite that was not above murdering a government inspector with a cup of poisoned hot chocolate. The silver was carried on the backs of thousands of llamas and mules down the mountains to Arica on the Pacific coast where mercury and food were collected for the return journey. Meanwhile, the precious cargo was shipped north to Panama and then carried across the isthmus for transhipment to Seville. Attempts by the local viceroy to improve the atrocious conditions at the mercury mine in Huancavelia contributed to fluctuating production in Potosí from 1591, and then a steady decline after 1605 from a peak of 7.7 million pesos in 1592 to 2.95 million by 1650. The shortfall was made good by Zacatecas where output increased from 1615 thanks to more plentiful labour, but Mexican production depended on Spanish mercury, leaving it vulnerable if the sea lanes were interrupted.
The lifeline rested on a convoy system established by 1564 that saw two fleets sail across the Atlantic most years. The galeones left Seville in August, headed south-west towards the African coast and then passed the Canaries to pick up the Trade Winds that took them due west to the Leeward Islands. From there, they steered south-west to Cartagena in modern Colombia, or Portobello in Panama, a journey of 6,880km taking eight weeks. The normal escort was a squadron of eight warships crewed by 2,000 sailors and marines, though the large merchantmen were also armed. Having collected the Potosí silver, along with cochineal, hides and other colonial products, the fleet wintered in Havana, before heading back to Seville. The other fleet, called the flota, set out from Cadiz in April or May with two warships. It followed the same route as far as the Leeward Islands, before turning north-west to Hispaniola, Cuba and then Vera Cruz in Mexico, to deliver the Almadén mercury and collect the Zacatecas silver. Both fleets had to return via Cuba through the Bahama Channel that posed the most dangerous section of the entire voyage due to hurricanes and reefs. The galeones sailed 29 times during the first half of the seventeenth century, but only two silver convoys were lost to enemy action (in 1628 and 1656). Spanish trade with the Americas was worth about 10 million ducats a year by 1600, roughly twice that of Portugal with the East Indies.
The Portuguese also used a convoy system, called the cafila, to protect their share of the valuable spice trade across the Indian Ocean and back round Africa. In addition, they were developing a presence at Axim and Elmina on the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) to secure the gold and slave trades, establishing further forts around the mouth of the Congo and at Benguela on the Angolan coast south of Luanda in 1617. Communications with Portugal were secured through possession of the islands of Cape Verde and São Tomé. As elsewhere, Portuguese influence depended on good relations with local rulers, particularly the king of Ndongo east of Luanda. Access to the hinterland was provided by the Imbangala, called Jagas by the Portuguese, who raided slaves to sell on the coast. The Portuguese were already importing African slaves at the rate of over seven hundred a year in the mid-fifteenth century and began shipping them to Brazil after 1535. Slaves cost around 400 pesos, equivalent to eight months’ wages for an Indian labourer, and it was not until the 1570s that they began to be transported in large numbers to replace the dwindling local population. Expansion into the Congo and Angola enabled the Portuguese to ship 4,000 slaves a year by the 1620s, by which time Africans had entirely replaced Indian labour on the Brazilian sugar plantations. Eventually, at least 3.65 million people were transported to Brazil by the time the trade was formally suspended in 1850. Slaves became essential to the Brazilian economy that only took off with the sugar boom around 1600. Already by 1628 three hundred ships were needed to transport a crop worth 4 million cruzados to Portugal each year. Average annual exports tripled thereafter to reach almost 40,000 tonnes by 1650, accounting for nine-tenths of Brazilian export earnings, a situation that did not change until the development of rival Caribbean production in the eighteenth century. The colony expanded from its main base at Salvador in Bahia, northwards along the coast to Pernambuco where two-thirds of the sugar industry was established.
Impressive though these colonial developments were, Spain and its European dominions remained the real fiscal basis of the empire. Despite a stagnating economy and inefficient administration, Spain managed to send 218 million ducats to sustain the war in Flanders between 1566 and 1654, whereas American silver receipts totalled 121 million across the same period.4 Direct and indirect taxes agreed with the Castilian Cortes or parliament produced 6.2 million ducats a year around 1600. The most important of these was the millones tax, introduced in 1590, that raised 90 million ducats between 1621 and 1639, or three times the amount arriving from America across the same period. By contrast, Catalonia, Valencia and Aragon paid virtually nothing, since their local assemblies refused to grant regular taxes to the crown. The church did pay three levies – known as the ‘three graces’ – worth about 1.6 million ducats annually. The Spanish Netherlands provided 3.6 million, Milan around 2 million and Naples twice that, but most of these sums were consumed by local defence. By contrast, silver imports provided only 2 million ducats each year to the crown at the turn of the century, since the monarch only received the surplus from the colonial treasuries, as well as a percentage of the much larger private shipments landed in Seville. American silver’s real value was as a source of credit, since lenders retained faith in the crown’s ability to pay its spiralling debts with future imports. Creditors were given consignaciones, or claims on specific revenues, or juros that were government bonds paying fixed interest. The latter developed into a form of funded debt as they became traded on the international money market through Genoese bankers who handled most of Spain’s external credit until 1670.
The basic pattern was already firmly established by the mid-sixteenth century. Only a small proportion of current expenditure could be met from ordinary revenue, with a growing share set against debt using silver imports to sustain credit. Politics supplanted economics as finance became a matter of sustaining public confidence in the monarchy’s ability to repay its burgeoning debt. Bankruptcies occurred each time this confidence was shaken, such as in 1559 when the debt totalled 25 million ducats, or at Philip II’s death in 1598 when it had climbed to 85 million, or ten times ordinary revenue. The difficulty in sustaining credit forced the crown into a series of expedients to bridge blockages in cash flow. Offices and titles were sold in Iberia and the colonies, especially certificates of ordinary nobility, while 169 new lordships were created between 1625 and 1668, doubling the size of the aristocracy. Royal rights over 3,600 Castilian towns and villages were pawned, while large parts of the customs service were privatized throughout the monarchy. In addition to providing desperately needed ready cash, these expedients created a new elite with a vested interest in the silver system, since most of the purchasers of royal rights and titles were those who had got rich from the Atlantic trade. It thus became difficult to reform the system without alienating the crown’s chief creditors. Moreover, the expedients reduced long-term revenue, for instance by increasing the number of tax-exempt nobles to 10 per cent of the Castilian population. The crown had created a monster that consumed thousands of Indian and African lives, bore heavily on the backs of its European subjects, and from which it could not escape.
Imperial Defence
All this economic activity was directed towards perpetuating Spanish imperialism. Military expenditure rose from 7 million ducats in 1574 to 9 million by the early 1590s. Between 1596 and 1600 Spain sent 3 million ducats a year just to sustain the Army of Flanders, while the Dutch War consumed a total of 40 million between Philip II’s death and the 1609 truce. Spanish forces numbered around 100,000 men worldwide in 1600, with the 60,000 in the Army of Flanders representing the largest operational army in Europe. Spain also became Europe’s leading naval power during the last two decades of the sixteenth century. It played the major part in the victory of Lepanto over the Ottomans in the Mediterranean in 1571, allowing it to scale down its galley fleet there to around twenty vessels, supported by smaller squadrons operating from Sicily, Naples and Genoa. Resources were redirected to developing the high seas Armada del Mar Océano after the failure of the attempted invasion of England in 1588 demonstrated Spain’s lack of modern warships. The new millones tax funded 56,000 tonnes of new construction, much of it at La Coruña on the northern coast, between 1588 and 1609, creating a fleet of sixty large warships by 1600.5 This was divided into three roughly equal squadrons, with that at Lisbon patrolling the Atlantic to provide additional security for the two silver convoys. A second squadron patrolled the Straits securing access to the Mediterranean, while the third was based at La Coruña for operations against France and the Protestant powers. A small Pacific squadron of six ships was formed in 1580 to protect the silver shipments between Arica and Panama, but attempts to form an additional Caribbean squadron were frustrated by the continual detachment of its ships to assist the Atlantic convoys.
Naval expansion pushed personnel requirements up to 27,000 by 1590 at a time when the army also needed more recruits and the Castilian population stopped growing. As the supply of volunteers dwindled, it became harder to rely on the established system of issuing commissions to officers to recruit units. The state diversified its approach, retaining direct management of the army and navy, but contracting out key aspects of recruitment, logistics and weapons procurement. Philip II co-opted local nobles and magistrates to recruit men and tried to revive the defunct militia to provide a measure of security in the hinterlands of the outlying provinces like Catalonia, Levante, Andalusia and Galicia. Meanwhile, the state monopoly over weapons production, created in 1562, was progressively dismantled after 1598, placing all works in private hands by 1632 except the Cartagena powder mill.6 Privatization did not necessarily mean weakness. For example, private shipyards could build a warship for 31 ducats a tonne in the 1630s, 4 ducats a tonne less than the state yards, saving an average of 2,000 ducats a ship. However, such measures were clearly unplanned and unwanted, forced upon the monarchy by its inability to master its burgeoning debt.
Only 5.1 million ducats of Spain’s revenue in 1598 was directly available for the crown to spend, because the other 4.1 million was mortgaged to creditors or needed to pay interest on the juros. Revenue anticipation increased, reducing the ‘free’ proportion to only 1.6 million by 1618. Meanwhile, annual expenditure climbed to 12 million, set against a total revenue that fell from 12.9 million at Philip II’s death to 10 million or less by 1621. Philip III broke the long tradition of Spanish probity by issuing debased coin a year after his accession in 1598. Though he agreed to stop issuing this copper vellón currency in 1608 in return for increased tax grants, he resorted to it again in 1617 and 1621, driving good coin from circulation. The crown lost in the long run, because Spaniards paid their taxes in vellón but the soldiers would accept only good silver. The funded juro debt rose from 92 to 112 million ducats across Philip III’s reign, driving annual interest payments up to 5.6 million, equivalent to half of ordinary revenue.
These problems led many Spaniards to believe that ‘the ship is going down’ (se va todo a fondo) and later historians have echoed this sense of decline. Writers in the 1590s drew on classical thought that suggested a natural life cycle of states from rise, through maturity to eventual decline, and many were afraid their country was entering the final stage. However, while all were convinced that only God could reverse this process, there was wide disagreement on how far human intervention could slow it. The government was certainly not short of ideas, as its subjects wrote numerous proposals, identifying possible weaknesses and suggesting remedies.7 All were concerned with the monarchy’s reputation (reputación), which was correctly identified as essential to sustaining the system of credit. They were less concerned with the underlying problems of depopulation, de-industrialization, agrarian depression and stagnant trade that later historians have concentrated upon. Whereas the historical concept of ‘Spanish decline’ assumes that a loss of political influence automatically followed economic setbacks, early seventeenth-century Spaniards were not unduly pessimistic. They recognized that periodic bankruptcy induced setbacks such as the 1609 truce with the Dutch, but they had no sense of imminent collapse. Spain remained a wealthy country where life was very good, at least for the fortunate few at the top of the social scale: the 115 grandees collectively enjoyed an annual income of 5 million ducats, equivalent to half the state’s revenue. Spain still had numerous experienced soldiers, sailors, administrators and diplomats with extensive contacts throughout Europe. It remained strong relative to its main rival, France, which continued to be racked by crises into the mid-seventeenth century. Above all, Spain had built up sufficient political and military momentum by 1621 that its imperial juggernaut carried on for two decades after it had run out of fuel.
Concern for reputación places the monarchy at the heart of any discussion of Spanish power. The Spanish concept of majesty stressed the exalted nature of kingship where the monarch was specially selected by God to rule, in charge of his own destiny and that of his subjects. The Estates, councils and other advisers that featured so prominently in older ideas of mixed monarchy, still played a role, but they were firmly subordinated to the king who took decisions alone.8 As ever, practice lagged considerably behind theory. Philip II had tried to force his advisers to work together by refusing to single anyone out for particular favour, but this merely drove personal rivalries under the surface. The situation was compounded by the king’s refusal to acknowledge constitutional checks on his power, circumventing established institutions by the creation of ad hoc committees, or juntas, for particular tasks. This could introduce new flexibility but generally just added new layers of bureaucracy, creating confusion and demarcation disputes. The Council of State (Consejo de Estado) offered the main forum to debate general matters and formulate policy. It spawned a large number of specialist juntas, many of which evolved into permanent councils, such as that for war, finance, the crusade (for Catholic renewal) and the different parts of the monarchy: the Indies, Portugal, Castile, Aragon, Italy and Flanders. The presence of the latter indicates how the empire remained a composite state, with wide powers entrusted to viceroys and governors in the Netherlands, Milan, Naples, Sicily, Sardinia and the colonies. Portugal also retained its own government in Lisbon to satisfy local pride. All governors faced advisory councils of notables and had to pay attention to provincial interests, as well as orders from Madrid, particularly since their salaries, together with those of their government and garrison, depended on local taxes.
Not surprisingly, imperial defence assumed first place in Spanish grand strategy.9 The very extent of the empire increased the potential enemies, while the spread of heresy raised the spectre of internal unrest that manifested itself most clearly in the Dutch Revolt after 1566. Defence of the trade monopoly with the Indies also expanded with the acquisition of Portugal, whose colonies now required protection. However, what gave Spain its sense of mission was a defence of Catholicism that became fused with national identity. The completion of the Reconquista in 1492 saw the defeat of the last Moorish kingdom in Iberia and earned the monarch the title of His Most Catholic Majesty from the papacy. Overseas conquests added a new missionary role as Spaniards saw themselves as civilizing the New World. Defence of the Mediterranean against the Ottomans maintained the ideal of the crusade that broadened with the fight against heresy throughout Europe.
The Catholic mission extended to the incorporation of Rome itself into Spain’s ‘informal empire’, or imperial influence extending beyond its formal possessions.10 This began with the accession of the Borga Pope Alexander VI in 1492, who divided the New World between Spain and Portugal by the Treaty of Tordesillas two years later. It evolved into a symbiotic relationship whereby each drew benefit from the other, but Spain was the dominant partner. In an age where other monarchs were renouncing Rome, Spain remained respectful. Papal feudal jurisdiction over Naples was formally acknowledged by payment of an annual tribute of 7,000 ducats and a magnificent white horse, while fees from vacant sees across the monarchy were still remitted to the pontiff’s treasury. Rome relied increasingly on grain imported from Sicily and other Spanish possessions, and Spanish charity funded poor relief, hospitals and churches. The Spanish community grew to a quarter of the city’s population by the late sixteenth century and assumed a central role in its political and ceremonial life. The Spanish ambassador arranged for the presentation of the white horse from Naples to be made part of the feast of St Peter after 1560, symbolically placing Spain at the heart of papal politics. Payments of up to 70,000 ducats a year ensured a favourable majority in the College of Cardinals. Though the Spanish presence aroused considerable popular resentment, the papacy generally appreciated the benefits. Protected by Spain, defence spending could be slashed from over half to under a fifth of the papal budget. While money flowed from Spain to Rome, even more went directly into the Spanish treasury thanks to papal sanction, and the ‘three graces’ and other ecclesiastical levies were worth 3.68 million ducats a year by 1621, accounting for a third of ordinary revenue.
The close ties to the universal church reinforced Spain’s imperial mission. Though Charles V’s imperial title passed to his brother, not his son Philip, his legacy enhanced Spain’s own sense of empire and Spanish warships and troops continued to carry flags with the imperial black double eagle into the seventeenth century. While the Austrian branch of the Habsburgs retained the Holy Roman imperial title, Spanish writers claimed their own monarchy pre-dated even ancient Rome, identifying a son of Noah as the first king of Spain.11 To its critics, however, Spanish imperialism was a spectre stalking Europe, using religion as a cloak to impose universal monarchy. Spain’s enemies had little knowledge of its many problems, believing that its American riches meant it could fight war on a scale that would soon exhaust their own resources. This was acutely felt in France where many felt encircled – by Spain to the south, Spanish-ruled Milan and the Franche-Comté to the east, Luxembourg and Flanders to the north, with the Armada closing the Atlantic to the west. For Protestant Europe, the Armada of 1588 encapsulated the twin threat of tyranny and persecution and this image of an aggressive Spain has often been repeated by later historians.
Spain and the Empire
In fact, Spain generally did not intervene in other countries unless it perceived threats to its core interests and there was usually a strong body of opinion in the Council of State urging caution and disengagement. This can be seen clearly by examining Spanish attitudes to the Empire which were to shape involvement there during the Thirty Years War.12 Philip II spent 1548–51 in Germany and knew many princes personally, as well as Rudolf and his brothers Ernst and Albert from their stay in Spain. These personal contacts provided a firm basis for Spanish diplomacy after the Habsburg partition of 1558 when each branch developed distinct interests. Philip’s concern for Catholicism did not prevent good working relationships with conservative Lutheran princes, such as the Saxon elector and Duke Heinrich Julius of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, as well as the duke of Bavaria and other leading Catholics. Philip had no interest in establishing a permanent presence within the Empire. Rather, as with the papacy, he sought to smooth the way for more effective government and rally local opinion behind an allied ruler by offering pensions and other rewards. In particular, he concentrated on building a pro-Spanish party around Bavaria and Cologne that could be mobilized to block the emperor if he embraced any policies contrary to Spanish interests. He also had some success in cultivating courtiers around Rudolf in Prague. Chancellor Lobkowitz was related to Hurtado de Mendoza, one-time Spanish ambassador to the Empire, while Cardinal Dietrichstein had been born in Spain and was related to the influential Cardona family. As we have seen (Chapter 3, pp.73–5), such connections proved instrumental in shifting Rudolf in favour of the militant Catholics in Bohemia and Hungary after 1598.
Protestants suspected a malevolent Spanish–papal conspiracy, but most of those who were labelled members of the ‘Spanish party’ were simply concerned to consolidate Austrian influence and cooperated with Madrid only so far as it suited their own interests. Spanish influence declined when the imperial court moved from Prague back to Vienna on Rudolf’s death in 1612. Zúñiga, the new ambassador, established ties to Archduke Ferdinand of Styria, but the Inner Austrian branch of the dynasty remained more closely allied to Munich than to Madrid. Ferdinand’s mother and first wife were Bavarian princesses, while nearby Italy exerted a stronger influence on the culture of the Graz court. This continued once the Styrian branch acquired the imperial title in 1619, and though Ferdinand III’s Spanish wife stimulated some interest in Iberian culture, Italy still set the tone in Vienna throughout the seventeenth century.13 The situation was matched by the declining Austrian presence in Spain. Whereas Maximilian II sent three of his sons to be raised in Madrid, only Albert remained and he was paradoxically regarded as more Spanish than Austrian. Neither Rudolf nor Matthias had children to send and both resented Spanish interference in the Empire. Austria maintained an ambassador in Madrid, but unlike the embassy in Constantinople, this was not permanent. Ferdinand of Styria’s sister, Margaret of Austria, married Philip III in 1599. She used her eight pregnancies to keep her husband attentive, but after her death in 1611, the Austrian presence in Spain was reduced to Margaret of the Cross, Matthias’s youngest sister, who lived in the Descalzes convent in Madrid and acted as a surrogate mother for Margaret’s children.
Ironically, Spanish interest in the Empire declined because Philip thought Rudolf was a reliable Catholic who would manage affairs more soundly than his father, Maximilian II. Bavaria and Styria appeared dependable allies, while a treaty with the Catholic Swiss cantons in 1587 reduced the strategic significance of the Tirol by providing Spain an alternative route over the Alps, communications between different regions in Spain’s empire always being a source of anxiety (see below, p.151). The advice prepared for Philip III on his accession in 1598 gave Germany a low priority and represents a complete contrast to later historians’ assessment of the situation there. The Protestant princes were considered too disunited to pose a threat, while the Austrians were incapable of independent action. Despite their imperial title, they had slipped to junior partners within the Casa d’Austria. Provided the king of Spain left them alone, the Germans would not cause trouble. National prejudice reinforced the reluctance to meddle in German affairs. Spanish ambassadors’ reports presented a country in moral decline. The Catholic German princes were flirting with heterodoxy and failing to pay their full share of taxes for the Turkish War, while the Germans as a whole were regarded as backward and boorish, too busy gorging themselves on fatty foods and guzzling barrels of beer to achieve the heights of Castilian civilization. They lived in a rain-soaked land of dreary forests, muddy roads and expensive, uncomfortable inns.
Unlike his father, Philip III had no personal experience of the Empire and it assumed even less significance in his political calculations. The new monarch has been described as ‘the laziest ruler Spain has had’, echoing Philip II’s own assessment that ‘God, who has given me so many kingdoms, had denied me a son capable of ruling them’.14 After an initial brief interest, he is widely supposed to have left government in the hands of his favourite, the count, later duke, of Lerma, and retired into a private world of self-glorification. As a result, according to one modern historian, ‘nobody ruled in Madrid; a world empire was run on an automatic pilot’.15 Such criticism is not only unjust, it creates a false division between a supposedly dynamic Spain under Philip II and one that was in decline under his son. Philip III attended the Council of State almost daily from the age of fifteen and was already signing documents for his increasingly frail father by 1597. He inherited his father’s exalted sense of majesty and retained the final decision on all important matters. The real difference lay in the more realistic attempt to put this form of absolutism into practice. The king concentrated on the symbolic representation of power through intensifying his father’s already remote, inaccessible, lofty majesty by physically removing the monarch from government. Practical business was devolved to the duke of Lerma who now dealt directly with the different ministers and juntas.
Lerma had risen by one of the classic routes to power by attaching himself to the heir apparent’s suite and making himself indispensable. His career demonstrates the vulnerability of the court favourite, a person who had clients but rarely friends. He stressed his own grandeur to distance himself from rivals and emphasize his allegedly unique qualifications to be Philip III’s right-hand man. It was a fine line to tread, since his haughty demeanour led his enemies to claim he was seeking to eclipse the monarch. His influence was already shaken between 1606 and 1608 when his main allies died, retired, or were arrested, like the count of Villalonga who became a scapegoat for the 1607 bankruptcy. Friar Aliaga, who had been Lerma’s own confessor, turned against him when he became royal confessor in 1608. Criticism mounted when Lerma concluded the Twelve Years Truce with the Dutch in 1609, temporarily suspending attempts to crush their revolt.
THE DUTCH REVOLT 1568–1609
The Dutch Ulcer
The revolt of the Netherlands became Spain’s most pressing problem during the later sixteenth century and continued to shape its policy in the first half of the seventeenth. It dictated how Madrid reacted to problems elsewhere, since these could not be tackled fully until the Dutch had been dealt with. While it did not cause the Thirty Years War, the Revolt heightened international tension and militants of all hues were quick to draw parallels between it and their own struggles in Central Europe. It is important to understand the political, strategic, religious and economic situation in the Netherlands in order to comprehend how Spain responded to Austria’s difficulties after 1618.
Attempts to impose greater control over the Low Countries from Madrid stirred opposition among the Protestant nobility, particularly the House of Orange. Orange also owned the principality of that name in southern France and was related to the counts of Nassau in the Rhineland. Resentment deepened with Spanish demands to continue with high levels of taxation despite concluding peace with France in 1559. Philip II’s insistence on a more active persecution of heresy added confessional motives to the mix, and popular rioting widened into an ill-coordinated revolt after 1566. Philip poured oil onto the flames in April 1567 by sending the duke of Alba and 10,000 troops north along what would become known as the Spanish Road. Alba occupied Antwerp and other major towns, building new citadels to overawe their inhabitants and instituting a repressive tribunal to root out heresy and treason. Though the numbers executed fell far short of the 100,000 claimed in Protestant propaganda, the situation was sufficiently appalling for 60,000 refugees to flee to north-west Germany and England by 1572.16
Spanish repression triggered a renewed rising after 1571. Alba launched a major counter-offensive in April 1572 against Flanders and the other southern provinces to cut the rebels off from the French Huguenots. The survivors retreated into Holland and Zeeland. These formed a natural redoubt, surrounded by the sea, rivers and low-lying land that could be flooded. The decentralized political structure assisted the rebels, since each province had its own States, or assembly, composed of knights from the rural areas and representatives of the Regents, or magistrates, who ran the towns.17 The revolt spread from town to town, enabling the rebels to dominate the States of Holland and elect William the Silent, prince of Orange, as stadholder, or provincial captain in charge of the militia. As the process was repeated in other northern provinces, the rebels soon controlled the key institutions, shutting out Spanish sympathizers.
The Revolt shook Spain’s reputación, forcing the government to declare another bankruptcy and prompting the ‘Spanish Fury’ when unpaid troops sacked Antwerp in 1576.18 The disorder dislocated military operations and seemingly confirmed the ‘Black Legend’ spread by Protestants describing Spain as a brutal, tyrannical power. Spain had to agree a truce in February 1577, withdrawing into Luxembourg and Flanders to regroup. In the army’s absence, the rebels enlarged their inner redoubt to include Utrecht and western Gelderland. They were now protected to the east by the river Ijssel with its crossing at Zutphen, to the south by the Rhine and Maas, and to the west by the Zeeland islands that now fell into their hands. The south-eastern approaches to the rebel-held territories were largely blocked by the neutral bishopric of Liège and the barren Kempen heath, and the capture of Antwerp secured the Scheldt estuary and the south-western approaches. Only the route from Germany to the east remained vulnerable and this was barred by the emperor who tried in vain to mediate a peaceful solution. Having secured all seven northern provinces of the Low Countries, the rebels formed the Union of Utrecht in January 1579, which agreed the Act of Abjuration in 1581, repudiating Philip II’s authority as a preliminary step towards full independence.
Though neither side realized it, these moves essentially partitioned the Netherlands, since the Spanish were unable to reconquer the northern Dutch, while the rebels could not liberate the remaining five southern provinces. The conflict continued because Spain refused to renounce the lost provinces, while the Dutch needed a clear victory to secure their precarious international position. Both sides began building institutions to sustain what was to be a further seven decades of violence. Victory over the Turks at Lepanto and the sultan’s difficulties with Persia reduced the Ottoman threat in the Mediterranean, enabling Spain to switch resources northwards at a time when silver imports were also increasing. Alessandro Farnese, duke of Parma, was appointed to govern the Spanish Netherlands and take charge of the army. Both a tactful diplomat and a skilful strategist, he was responsible for developing the Flanders school of warfare that became a central feature of the Spanish military system we encountered in the discussion of the Turkish War in the previous chapter.
The Flanders School
The Flanders school took a careful, methodical approach to warfare. Parma opened each campaign by sending his cavalry in all directions to confuse the enemy, while shifting his main body of troops from town to town, reducing Dutch strongholds, especially those along the numerous waterways that were vital to move troops and supplies. The Dutch had strengthened their urban defences with concentric rings of fortifications in the Italian manner, intended to keep the enemy at a distance and prevent him from bombarding their houses. Their expertise as dyke-builders enabled them to flood the surrounding countryside, as well as the usual system of ditches around their positions, while further outworks extended the garrison’s field of fire. Such fortresses required significant numbers of men to attack them. Besiegers had to dig trenches parallel to the enemy’s works to protect themselves from the defenders’ fire. Once they had entrenched their own artillery to provide covering fire, they would begin the laborious process of digging towards the selected point of attack, stretching out a second and possibly a third ‘parallel’ as they approached the enemy works. Each time, they would bring their guns forward, until at last these were entrenched at pointblank range to batter a hole in the main wall. An energetic garrison commander would organize sorties, especially at night, to harass the besiegers, destroy their trenches and spike their guns. Moreover, the besiegers themselves often had to dig an entire outer circle of entrenchments to protect against attack by a relief army.
Given this dangerous and lengthy process, it became customary to summon the garrison to surrender at various points. Sometimes, the defenders would agree to capitulate if not relieved within a certain time. Garrisons that surrendered at an earlier stage were more likely to be granted the honours of war, entitling them to march out with their families, possessions and symbols such as flags and one or two cannon, and make their way to the nearest friendly town. Those that surrendered later often had to do so as prisoners of war, though only the officers would actually be interned since no government could afford the cost of keeping ordinary soldiers incarcerated. Rank and file who were captured were generally pressed into their captor’s unit, accepting this as the only way to ensure their survival. Their last opportunity came once the inner wall had been breached. If they refused to surrender now, they would face an assault and their town would be given over for plunder and sometimes massacre if the enemy managed to break in.19
Spain’s determination to crack the Dutch defences led it to create Europe’s largest army, once Parma persuaded the remaining five loyal provinces to readmit Spanish troops after 1582. Already by October of that year, the Army of Flanders totalled over 61,000 men, while the monarchy maintained a further 15,000 in Italy and over 20,000 in Spain and its other possessions.20 There were only around 2,000 cavalry in Flanders, while over a quarter of the troops elsewhere were mounted. The downgrading of the principal shock arm of battle has been regarded as a retrograde step, condemning the Spanish to fight a war of attrition rather than decisive battles. Yet, Parma’s strategy was well-suited to the circumstances where the numerically inferior Dutch avoided battle after 1579. Moreover, the Spanish system remained tactically flexible, since siege warfare and outpost duty provided experience of operating in small groups.
Only a small proportion of this huge army was actually Spanish. Castilians were regarded as the elite of the troops, with Italians second, followed by the Burgundians from Franche-Comté and Luxembourg and the Catholic Irish. The Walloons from Flanders were considered unreliable when serving at home, but steady in Germany and elsewhere and they made up the bulk of the cavalry in the Army of Flanders. Germans had been preferred earlier in the sixteenth century, but were slipping in Spanish estimation and were often poorly regarded while serving in Flanders. Many of those who were to play important roles in the Thirty Years War served with the Army of Flanders. The most prominent was Jean Tserclaes Tilly whose early life exemplifies the often difficult relationship between the Netherlands and Spain. Tilly’s father was implicated in the initial revolt and fled to escape Alba’s tribunal. Tilly himself was placed in the care of the Jesuits, possibly as a hostage for his father’s good behaviour. He entered Spanish service in 1576, two years after his father’s properties had been returned, and served in Flanders and the operations around Cologne and Strasbourg, before entering imperial service in 1594.21 Other noted commanders from the southern Netherlands included Count Anholt who became Tilly’s subordinate during the Thirty Years War, and Count Bucquoy who made his name at the battle of Nieuport and siege of Ostend, before becoming the imperial commander-in-chief from 1618 to 1621. His successor, Hieronymus Girolamo de Carafa from Italy, had served in the Army of Flanders since 1587, before transferring to the Spanish forces in his homeland in 1607. Spanish influence was not restricted to Catholic Germany, since Protestant princes also joined the Army of Flanders. Georg of Brunswick, the future duke of Calenberg, decided to complete his military education after serving the Dutch by switching sides in 1604 to see out the rest of the war in the Spanish forces.
While the officer corps remained dominated by the nobility, it was becoming more professional and it was possible for men of talent to rise from the ranks. Johann Aldringen, the son of a Luxembourg town clerk, joined the Army of Flanders in 1606 and rose to become Bavarian commander-in-chief after Tilly’s death in 1631. Johann Beck, a messenger’s son, started his career as a private at the age of thirteen, eventually transferring as a general to the imperial army in 1634, before returning to command the Spanish six years later. Jan Werth, a peasant from electoral Cologne, joined the Spanish army around 1610 as an ordinary soldier, and ended his career as commander of the imperial cavalry. Parma’s renown and the prestige of his methods attracted men seeking to complete their military education. For example, Count Schlick joined the Army of Flanders as an officer in 1604, having fought previously against the Turks. Such men helped to disseminate Spanish military thinking throughout the Empire where it was interpreted in the light of previous German experience and the lessons of the Turkish wars.
The Dutch Republic
Parma’s strategy was vindicated by the success of his operations after 1579, which recovered Maastricht, Tournai, Oudenarde, Bruges, Ghent, Brussels and finally, after a long siege, Antwerp in August 1585. The conquests secured the southern provinces and encouraged the still Catholic rural population in the north to rebel against the Calvinist rebel leadership, returning another three provinces temporarily to Spanish control. Coinciding with the assassination of Stadholder William the Silent, these developments prompted the Dutch to offer sovereignty to Elizabeth of England. She was reluctant to accept anything from rebels, but was nonetheless sufficiently alarmed by the Spanish victories to become the first major power to ally with the Dutch. A small army was despatched in 1585 under the earl of Leicester, whom the Dutch accepted as their political and military leader. It was not a happy arrangement. The unpaid English troops failed to defend the Dutch, while Leicester conspired with Calvinist militants to seize greater authority. The failure of his attempted coup in 1587 decisively shifted the Dutch towards republican government under the influence of Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the moderate leader of the Holland States. Opposing narrow confessional militancy, Oldenbarnevelt favoured a broad coalition to defeat Spain and enlisted the support of the House of Orange by persuading the provinces of Holland and Zeeland to elect William’s seventeen-year-old son, Maurice of Nassau, as their new stadholder. The move cemented a powerful alliance between Holland, which generally favoured the moderates, and the House of Orange that usually served as a focal point for militants. Dutch republicanism gradually took shape, especially through the writings of the political philosopher Hugo Grotius. Republican ideals rested on the myth of Batavian freedom – Batavia being the Roman name for the Netherlands – and combined a utopian vision of biblical Judaea with that of ancient Athens to claim that liberty, stability, virtue and prosperity were best guaranteed by a consultative government of wealthy, educated men with time to dedicate themselves to the public good.22
These ideals found practical expression in a formal confederation between the rebel provinces in 1588 that retained each province’s autonomy but delegated powers to a States General in which each province had one vote. The States General met daily in The Hague after 1593 but remained a debating forum, since all important decisions required ratification by the seven provincial States. It was balanced by the stadholderate headed by Maurice, whose influence rested on social prestige rather than formal authority, and was emphasized through his connections to European royalty and his own personal court. Outside finance and military affairs, central institutions remained minimal, with most of the administration decentralized to provincial and local level. Though cumbersome, the Republic functioned because it integrated the localities within a common framework. Having rejected Philip II’s interference in their affairs, the local oligarchs needed the Republic to prevent Spain regaining control.
Holland’s phenomenal demographic and economic growth sustained the fledgling state during its protracted struggle for independence. The northern provinces’ population doubled between 1520 and 1650, already reaching 1.5 million by 1600, with numbers boosted by the influx of a further 150,000 refugees fleeing the south between 1572 and 1621.23 With 760,000 inhabitants by 1650, Holland’s population far outnumbered that of the next largest province, Friesland with 160,000, while Drenthe, the smallest, had only 22,000. Holland was also the most heavily urbanized province, with 175,000 people living in Amsterdam and another 365,000 in 22 other cities. The concentration of people, wealth and talent fuelled economic growth, securing Dutch primacy in world trade by 1590. This rested primarily on shipping, in terms of both construction and transport for European and world goods. The colonial trade caught the contemporary imagination, but the Baltic and North Sea remained the most important areas of activity. The Dutch fishing fleet totalled 2,250 boats in 1634, while 1,750 ships were employed in the Baltic and Mediterranean trade, compared to only 300 in colonial traffic. Ships in the European trade could make up to four trips a year, but a voyage to the Indies took two years. Much of the colonial trade was linked to European industry, such as the 800 boats that visited the Caribbean between 1599 and 1605 to collect Venezuelan salt to preserve the North Sea fishing catch. Nonetheless, the spice trade was extremely valuable, with the 2,710 tonnes landed annually at the turn of the century worth 137 tonnes of silver, compared to the 125,000 tonnes of grain shipped from the Baltic, worth only 88 tonnes of silver.24
The Dutch prominence in the carrying trade made their Republic the entrepôt for European and colonial goods, and encouraged demand for their own products, such as textiles, salted fish and other processed food. The flow of goods gave Dutch merchants a commanding share of the European market, since people turned to them for products they could not find at home. As the Dutch responded to shortages elsewhere, they attracted investment and credit, enabling Amsterdam to supplant the traditional financial centres in Antwerp and Genoa. The exchange bank (Wisselbank) founded in 1609 thrived unlike so many attempts elsewhere because it had access to the considerable local resources of private investors and municipalities. The Dutch were able to fund cheaper, long-term loans, reducing the rate paid by their government to 10 per cent by 1600 and half that forty years later.25 This gave Dutch finance a stability their opponents lacked. Each year, the States General approved a central budget for the next twelve months, apportioning the burden according to a fixed ratio among the provinces. There was no central treasury; rather each province was assigned specific items of expenditure to meet from its own taxes. It was here that Holland’s influence was felt, since it was responsible for 60 per cent of expenditure, whereas the others contributed the rest, with Overijssel paying a mere 4 per cent. Despite economic growth and rising revenue, the burden remained very heavy and the Dutch undoubtedly paid far more tax in fighting for their liberty than they had ever paid to their former Spanish rulers.
Dealers in Death
In addition to cash, the Dutch economy turned out valuable war material, since the Low Countries were the centre of Europe’s arms industry. The Spanish hold on the southern provinces gave them control of the Mechelen cannon foundry, the Maastricht small arms works and the armour and musket workshops in Namur. The bishopric of Liège was the most important centre in the south, producing a full range of equipment, and especially firearms, armour and edged weapons, and selling to both sides as a way of preserving its neutrality. The nearby imperial cities of Aachen and Essen also produced firearms and the entire region was vital for the rest of the Empire where production was limited. The famous Steyr arms factory in Styria was not established until 1639 and then had a capacity of only around 3,000 muskets a year. The main German centre was Suhl in Thuringia where the 4,000 inhabitants turned out at least 70,000 muskets and 13,000 pistols, mainly for the imperial army, between 1620 and 1655. The metalworkers of Solingen and Nuremberg remained an important source of edged weapons, but altogether Central European production was overshadowed by that in the northern Netherlands. Amsterdam produced small arms, cannon, gunpowder and armour, while other centres were more specialized, with Delft and Dordrecht concentrating on small arms, Gouda supplying match, Utrecht making armour and grenades and The Hague producing bronze cannon. However, it was their wider trading networks that made Dutch arms dealers so significant. They procured saltpetre from Asia and the Baltic, sulphur from Sicily and Elba, as well as parts from other suppliers that were assembled into finished weapons in the Republic.
The combination of a dense population, weapons production and good communications made both the southern and northern Netherlands attractive to potential combatants. Both the Spanish authorities in Brussels and the Dutch in The Hague often released surplus weapons to help dealers complete contracts with friendly powers. The Dutch armaments were in such demand that they never gave discounts, but their government sometimes sold part of its own stockpile to allies at reduced prices. Dutch access to credit and stores enabled them to offer package deals, for example supplying Christian of Brunswick’s army with a full set of arms, armour, belts, powder, match, shot, picks and shovels in 1622. Heavy spending by the state and the two colonial India companies sustained dealers. The East India Company (VOC), for example, regularly spent 1.5 million fl. each year, guaranteeing stable demand. Political considerations did influence exports. The last major consignment sold to the emperor was in 1624, ostensibly to fight the Turks but in reality for use against the Transylvanians. Exports to Protestant German states ceased around 1625, partly because these had largely been eliminated as distinct belligerents, but also because the Republic wished to avoid becoming entangled in the war there. Exports continued to France, England, Denmark, Sweden and Venice who were all friendly towards the Republic, and Portugal was added to the customer list once it had rebelled against Spain in 1640. The Dutch bore no grudge against Spain when it came to business, supplying weapons as soon as peace was concluded in 1648, even though these were clearly going to be used against France, the Republic’s former ally.
Exports during the first half of the seventeenth century totalled at least 200,000 small arms worth 1.2 million fl. A further 100,000 suits of armour, worth half a million, were sold abroad, along with 2.7 million kilos of match and over 2.2 million kilos of gunpowder worth over 25 million fl. The trade earned at least 50 million fl., representing 5 per cent of the total economy, equivalent to the VOC’s contribution to the Republic’s Gross National Product (GNP). To this must be added a similar amount earned from the sale of ships’ stores, copper, lead, tin, saltpetre and other war materials. Some fortunes were made, such as those of the Trip family who started as riverboat captains, or the De Geers who arrived in Amsterdam as refugees from Liège. However, it is notable that both families owed their success to diversified, if integrated, business interests. Elias Trip and Louis de Geer secured the monopoly on the Swedish copper industry by loaning money to Gustavus Adolphus, operating a consortium whose working capital was equivalent to more than a third of that of the VOC. The Trip family mansion in Amsterdam, built in 1660–2 and decorated with chimneys shaped like cannon barrels, cost a quarter of a million florins and now houses the Dutch Academy of Sciences, while Louis de Geer died worth 1.7 million fl.26
The connection between war and trade was clearest when it came to the navy. This was funded from customs duties and fees paid by merchants in return for its protection. Naval administration was decentralized, befitting the general republican structure, with five admiralties, three of which were in Holland and the others in Zeeland and Friesland. Though this created scope for personal rivalries, it did facilitate interaction with the local mercantile communities that remained a vital source of additional ships and manpower. The navy developed to provide close support for the army in the crucial inland waterways but expanded to blockade the Flemish coast, cruise the North Sea and English Channel and convoy merchant ships. The latter task was paid for by the merchants, while the fishing fleet equipped its own guard boats and the two colonial trading companies created their own squadrons to protect trade with the East and West Indies respectively. Larger, more heavily armed ships were collected from 1596, giving the navy the capacity to attack the Spanish coast and the Azores.27
Home defence was maintained by the urban militia (Schutters), which were reorganized in the 1570s and recruited from burghers and other richer residents. Though it was possible to buy exemption, service became a matter of pride, associated with republican values, masculine sociability and solidarity. Militia companies commissioned leading artists to paint their portraits, of which Rembrandt’s The Militia Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq (better known as Night Watch) became the most famous example. In the front line the militia were replaced by merging the regular troops of the different provinces into a common army under the prince of Orange as captain general.
The Dutch Military Reforms and their Influence
Though the amalgamation of the provinces’ troops took place in November 1576, it was not until a decade later that this army really took shape under the command of Maurice of Nassau.28 The young prince came to power unexpectedly after the assassination of his father, because his elder brother, Philip William, was in the hands of the Spanish and unable to take his place. He also lacked the title of captain general, since Friesland, Utrecht and Gelderland all chose other stadholders, breaking the unity of command. Nonetheless, thanks to Oldenbarnevelt’s support, Maurice had Holland’s political backing and emerged as the dominant military figure, as well as leading representative of the House of Orange in Dutch politics. His name is associated with a series of military reforms that not only underpinned the Dutch way of war, but exerted considerable influence on German and Swedish military organization. These measures addressed a problem common throughout Europe, but because they achieved success earlier than similar efforts elsewhere, they became the model to follow and the one that has attracted subsequent historical attention.29
Maurice sought to harness the cohesion of professional mercenaries while firmly subordinating them to political control. His measures were a practical attempt to apply insights from philosophy, science and medicine to solve contemporary problems. Late sixteenth-century thinkers were fascinated by the belief that patterns could be detected in the natural world that would unlock the divine secrets of the universe. This early rationality was combined with the late humanist rereading of classical texts, looking for other answers in the world of the ancient Greeks and Romans. The clearest expression of these approaches was found in the work of Justus Lipsius who taught at the university of Leiden where Maurice had studied and who presented his Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex to the prince in 1589.30 Like many of his generation, Lipsius was horrified by sectarian violence and searched classical literature for a remedy, reworking ancient Greek philosophy as Neo-Stoicism. He argued that passions blinded humans to their collective best interests, leading to irrational violence. Accordingly, emotions should be suppressed, ideally by iron self-discipline, or failing that, by external coercion. Through a reading of Roman history in its later, imperial phase, Lipsius broadened his philosophy into a plea for firm yet responsible government, where rulers had a duty to protect their subjects from harming themselves, as well as against external threats. These ideas gained such force because they were combined with a strong dose of the Christian morality so desired by Protestant and Catholic reformers of life.
From this basis, Lipsius articulated a four-fold concept of discipline. Drill had made the ancient Roman army invincible and should now be applied, not only for weapons training, but to condition soldiers to accept subordination within a disciplined unit. Such thinking affected other spheres of life. For example, dance styles were changing away from formations in straight lines that allowed partners to interact swiftly with one another, and towards circular, geometrical movements enabling individuals to make better use of the space around them. Unnecessary movement was to be avoided, with the dancer – or soldier – only moving parts of his or her body from a stable equilibrium; for example, thrusting a pike forward while keeping the head strictly aligned and facing forward. Order provided a second element, because a hierarchical command structure was required to direct individual movement and ensure all the cogs functioned smoothly in the military machine. Crucially, order was extended to the higher ranks, who could no longer treat their subordinates as they pleased. Thirdly, regular drill was part of a wider strategy of coercion, to break the autonomous mercenary culture and encourage internalized self-discipline. The final element stressed rewards and punishments. Articles of war ceased to be an expression of soldiers’ collective organization and became a means of institutionalizing the new military culture. Drafted by trained lawyers and linked to new mustering and oath ceremonies, they were intended to break collective pay bargaining by standardizing service contracts and including all personnel within a common legal framework.
These proto-absolutist ideas chimed with the social disciplining agenda of church and state, but were intended by Lipsius to render war less violent and destructive. His ideas made Maurice’s reforms intellectually respectable and they were widely disseminated, because the Netherlands was already a centre for printing and publishing. Jacob de Gheyn’s famous illustrated manual of arms published in 1607 appeared in Danish later that year and in German in the next. Numerous other practical handbooks followed, such as the three by Johann Jacob von Wallhausen in 1615–16 that were frequently reprinted or rehashed throughout the seventeenth century.31 Still more influential were the numerous volunteers who flocked to learn the military art under Maurice, now that the English alliance and the foundation of the Republic removed the stigma of rebellion and made Dutch service more attractive. As in the case of the Army of Flanders, these personal connections were to exert a powerful influence on the conduct of the Thirty Years War. A few rose through the ranks, like Peter Eppelmann, a Calvinist peasant from Hademar in Nassau, who had enjoyed a university education thanks to good family connections and changed his name to the more elevated ‘Melander’, the Greek version of ‘Apple man’. Melander served as Maurice’s secretary before becoming an ensign in his army, later transferring to Venetian and then Hessen-Kassel service, finally ending his career as an imperial commander and ennobled under German translation as ‘von Holzapfel’. Many German Protestant nobles joined Dutch service, including Johann von Geyso, another ennobled commoner who replaced Melander as Hessen-Kassel commander in 1640, and Baron Knyphausen who was made a Dutch captain in 1603 and later a Swedish general. Others took their experience elsewhere, like the Welshman Charles Morgan who later commanded a British expeditionary force to northern Germany, or the Scot Alexander Leslie, who served under Maurice as captain between 1602 and 1608, before transferring to Sweden and then rising as the earl of Leven to command first the Covenanters and then the Royalists in the British Civil Wars. Meanwhile, Gaspard de Coligny, marquis de Châtillon, commanded two Huguenot regiments in Dutch service, helping to transmit Maurice’s reforms to France.
Political ties provided a third route for Dutch influence, particularly through Count Johann VII of Nassau-Siegen, a nephew of William of Orange who served under Maurice and implemented the reforms in his own territories. It was Johann’s drill book that de Gheyn illustrated, while Wallhausen was director of the military academy the count ran in his capital at Siegen between 1616 and 1623. Johann combined the Dutch ideas with past German practice, so making the new methods more applicable to the situation within the Empire. The duke of Alba’s march north along their borders in 1567 greatly alarmed the Rhenish princes, particularly the Nassau counts as relations of the rebel leadership. Fearing that the regular Spanish reinforcements following Alba might be redirected into their own lands, the Nassau counts forged an alliance with their neighbours in the Wetterau region. All ruled small, sparsely populated territories unable to maintain large numbers of regular soldiers. Johann recognized that militiamen could not replace professionals for offensive operations, but believed they would be motivated to defend their homeland. Subjects were already obliged to turn out in emergencies, but they appeared with an odd assortment of rusty swords, farm implements and cudgels. What they needed, thought Johann, was a good dose of Dutch discipline to stiffen their resolve and enable them to make the best use of modern weapons.
Local officials were charged with registering the male population, dividing it into groups according to age, marital status and fitness, and then selecting unmarried young men for regular instruction by professional drill sergeants. Men were grouped into companies of a standard size with large communities providing complete units and smaller parishes combining to field one. The select portion (Auswahl) would drill each Sunday on the village green, periodically assembling in camps to practise manoeuvring in larger formations. Summoned by the church bells in emergencies, they would collect their weapons from the bailiff’s house and muster under their drill sergeants and those members of the local gentry with military experience. All elements of this ‘territorial defence system’ (Landesdefensionswesen) were in place in Nassau by 1595 and were disseminated through Johann’s written advice among Protestant princes who adopted the new militias around 1600.32
The reforms were an important part of the changing relationship between rulers and subjects. The German princes and other territorial rulers could already summon their subjects to perform Landfolge, or assistance against invasion and natural disaster, as well as Gerichtsfolge against lawbreakers. The development of the imperial public peace (see Chapter 2, pp.21–2) strengthened these powers by 1570, since rulers could now call on their subjects to uphold imperial law and defend the Empire, although the territorial Estates disputed whether these powers extended to conscripting subjects to fight offensive wars and generally refused to vote taxes for these.33 Princes saw the new militias as a way of extending their authority over their subjects and believed that regular drill would spearhead social change in line with the disciplinary and moral drives present in confessionalization. Like these measures, implementation of the territorial defence system relied on the same network of parish priests, village headmen and princely bailiffs. However, princes encountered resistance from their territorial nobility who refused to allow their own tenants to be incorporated. The result was a compromise, since the reforms depended on the Estates’ agreement to pay the drill sergeants, buy the new weapons and provide beer and other inducements to encourage men to turn up for training. Militia enrolment was restricted to electoral towns in Brandenburg, while in Saxony 9,664 men were selected from the elector’s 93,000 able-bodied tenants, and the 47,000 fit men under the imperial knights’ jurisdiction were obliged to field only 1,500 pioneers. Nobles were unable to dodge the system entirely, since their fiefs were associated with the obligation to perform military service. These long-standing personal ties were incorporated within the territorial defence system by forming cavalry from the feudal levy. The Saxon knights were obliged to raise two regiments totalling 1,593 men, while those elsewhere generally provided a tenth of the total militia. Overall, around one in ten able-bodied males were incorporated into the militias, or about 2.5 per cent of the total population.34
The militias were not intended to replace regular troops in the field as some later historians have believed. Instead, they were to provide immediate local defence against incursions and marauders, as well as garrisoning strategic fortresses. The latter formed the most expensive element of the system as princes built new works in the Dutch manner, or modernized existing installations. The Palatinate, because of its dispersed territory and vulnerability, embarked on the most ambitious programme, constructing Mannheim between 1606 and 1622 around an older village, complete with a seven-bastion citadel (the Friedrichsburg), as well as walls around the rest of the city with another six full and two half bastions. Another fortress was built at Frankenthal in 1608 and strengthened in 1620–1, while the existing Heidelberg castle was expanded. In all cases, princes maintained small cadres of professionals as bodyguards and garrisons. The combination of militia, fortresses and small professional bodyguards formed the basis of military organization across the German territories by 1600.
It is easy to understand why the Estates doubted their rulers’ assurances that the measures were purely defensive, since the professionals could be used to stiffen mobilized militia for operations in the field. Subjects regarded drilling as another chore on top of mounting labour service demands, and the heavy drinking that often accompanied the training sessions disproved the theorists’ predictions that drill would foster Christian morality. The Brandenburg towns persuaded their elector to abandon the militia in 1610 and return to the previous practice of hiring men when he summoned them to assist him. Such setbacks slowed the introduction of the reforms; plans in the Palatinate from 1577 were not fully implemented until 1600, while the Estates delayed the organization of the Saxon militia until 1613.
Assessment of these measures and of the Dutch reforms generally has suffered from anachronistic back-projection of later concerns. Conservative Germans took the militias to be a milestone in the development of universal military service as a patriotic duty that was frustrated by the Empire’s political fragmentation, forcing the princes to fall back on mercenary recruitment after 1618. Others interpreted militias as potential people’s armies, noting how peasants used the system to organize their revolts. Neither perspective is entirely apt. Both the Dutch Schutters and the German militias incorporated distinctly early modern visions: the former as privileged burghers of a decentralized republic, the latter as obedient subjects of a territorial prince. Dutch influence was, in any case, only one inspiration behind the German measures. Fabian von Dohna, who led the Prussian reforms in 1602, had served under Maurice and helped organize the Palatine militia. Yet, the Prussian system was called Wibranzen, after the Polish word Wybrancy for ‘selected’, while reforms elsewhere were stimulated by the Turkish menace after 1593. Moreover, Catholic territories were also reorganizing their traditional militias along similar lines, notably in Bavaria where measures implemented in 1593–1600 formed 22,000 men into 39 rural and 5 urban regiments.
Many of the Dutch ideas and those associated with the German militia reforms were highly theoretical, preoccupied with devising geometrical formations of little utility. Even those more concerned with practical advice often opposed technological change, such as Wallhausen who bemoaned the decline of the lance as the cavalryman’s main weapon. Dutch methods were often not dissimilar to those of their opponents, for example in their reduction of cavalry to a small proportion of the army. Their preference for thinner lines was not solely driven to maximize firepower; it was also an expedient since they were generally outnumbered. Above all, Dutch success did not depend on new weaponry or military theory, but on financial stability and a specific business mentality. Spain, despite its vast wealth, still relied on fidelity and loyalty to social superiors to keep men in the ranks even when the money ran out. Such thinking was anathema to the Dutch for whom a contract was a binding agreement: it could not be otherwise in a commercializing economy where continued growth depended on sustaining faith in credit. Soldiers were employees and, as such, were entitled to regular payment.
Since the spread of mercenary recruitment around 1500, it had been customary to pay soldiers monthly, giving them one or more additional month’s pay as a recruitment bounty and as a bonus upon discharge. Soldiers’ pay rose between 50 and 100 per cent in the fifty years before 1530 when rulers began fixing upper limits for each rank. By threatening mutinies, soldiers had forced the authorities to pay them in growing quantities of silver coin thereafter, though the official monthly rate remained around 4 gold florins for an infantryman. As Spain and the Dutch formed regular armies, their costs rose still further since they had to pay these all year round, and not just during the campaign season, as was still customary at the beginning of the sixteenth century. The so-called ‘Dutch month’ was introduced in 1576 as an economy measure, dividing the year into eight blocks of 42 days, plus one of 29, thereby reducing the number of pay instalments the government owed each year. Others tried this, with the Austrians, for example, reducing the year to nine months by 1607, the pay for two of which would be given in cloth to make uniforms. The Austrian measures merely prompted further mutinies, since the imperial soldiers already had huge pay arrears. By contrast, the Dutch made it work, because they at least honoured their promise to pay the reduced rates. Regular pay underpinned cohesion in an army where over half the men came from outside the Republic and sustained loyalty despite periodic defeats, especially as the government’s credit remained unshaken. The Bohemians and Protestant Germans were unable to replicate this financial stability and so their attempts to copy Dutch tactics and organization after 1618 rested on very shaky foundations.
Defence of the Republic 1590–1609
While the Dutch forces enjoyed a sounder financial footing, they remained outnumbered, with Maurice mustering around 20,500 troops in 1588, about a third of the number in the Spanish forces. However, he benefited from Philip II’s diversion of resources, first to the Enterprise of England in 1588, and then to fruitless intervention in the FrenchWars of Religion after 1590. Parma accepted these orders from Madrid with reluctance, and Archduke Albert, who followed him as governor in 1593, was obliged to continue the campaigns in Artois in support of the French Catholic League. This enabled Maurice to go on to the offensive with a series of strikes to strengthen the Republic’s southern frontier by seizing strategic towns. The capture of Breda in March 1590 enlarged the Dutch salient into Brabant in the south-west, securing a launch pad for possible thrusts deeper into the Spanish Netherlands. The captured territory was not incorporated into the Republic on an equal basis with the other provinces, but governed in common as the Generality. It would become the most hotly contested area from the 1620s onwards. A three-pronged offensive enlarged the salient in the following year by taking Hulst, only 16km from Antwerp, as well as recapturing Zutphen and Deventer, thus securing the line of the Ijssel, while the seizure of Nijmegen on the Waal rounded off the frontier to the south-east. With the entire southern front secure, Maurice turned north in 1592 to crush the Catholic rebellion in the northern provinces that had broken out seven years before. The capture of Groningen in 1594 completed this campaign and restored all seven provinces to republican control.
Having regrouped in 1595–6, Maurice struck east into the remaining Spanish territory across the Ijssel in August 1597 in a move that was to have fateful consequences for the Empire, since it shifted the war towards the imperial frontier. The Dutch swiftly captured another seven fortified towns, extending their territory up to the edge of the Westphalian Kreis, as well as capturing the vital crossing over the Lower Rhine at Rheinberg, a town belonging to electoral Cologne.35 The northern Catholic population in the Republic was now completely cut off from the Spanish, unless Madrid was prepared to breach imperial neutrality and outflank the Dutch by going further east through Westphalia. The Spanish belatedly responded by sending 24,000 troops into Münster, Recklinghausen and the four Lower Rhenish duchies of Jülich, Cleves, Mark and Berg in September 1598 to secure these before the Dutch got there. The decentralized structure of the public peace allowed local rulers to activate imperial defence, even though Emperor Rudolf failed to respond. The five western Kreise eventually mobilized 16,000 troops, but these did not assemble until July 1599, three months after the Spanish had departed, leaving only a few garrisons just inside the German border. An attempt to retake one of these towns failed miserably, and the Kreise army disintegrated in September when its pay ran out.36 Known as the ‘Spanish Winter’, this episode reinforced the Germans’ desire to stay out of the Spanish-Dutch quarrel, and Cologne, Münster and other territories in the vicinity opened talks with both sides to persuade them to limit their incursions.
The Spanish move into Germany was a consequence of the Peace of Vervins, agreed with France in May 1598, which ended Spain’s two-front war and enabled Albert to redeploy the entire Army of Flanders against Maurice. He switched the focus back to the west and renewed the assault against the Republic’s heavily defended frontier around the Scheldt estuary. Operations soon stalled in front of the Dutch defences and then collapsed as the army mutinied over its mounting arrears. Maurice struck south from the Brabant salient down the Flanders coast, intending to eliminate the naval base the Spanish had developed at Dunkirk. Albert’s attempt to intercept him led to the battle of Nieuport on 2 July 1600, the first major engagement since the mid 1570s. The action demonstrated the constraints of the Flanders school of positional warfare. Though the Army of Flanders then totalled 4,000 cavalry and 60,000 infantry, Albert had difficulty in finding 1,500 horse and 8,000 foot for the battle because the rest were required to garrison the fortified towns, or were still defying orders because of the mutiny.37 Equally, the action underlined the limits of a more aggressive strategy of seeking battle. Despite defeating the Spanish army, Maurice was unable to take Dunkirk and ended the campaign back in his starting positions.
Albert decided to block any further attempts on Dunkirk by attacking the Anglo-Dutch garrison in Ostend in July 1601. Ostend became the seventeenth-century equivalent of the First World War battle of Verdun. Both sides poured men and materials into the contest as possession of the port assumed symbolic significance out of all proportion to its strategic importance. The Dutch were forced to enlarge their army from 35,000 in 1599 to 51,000 by 1607, not least because Maurice’s earlier successes had given the Republic a longer frontier to defend.
Nonetheless, Spanish preoccupation with Ostend gave Maurice another chance to extend his positions eastwards, this time concentrating on protecting the north-eastern frontier to secure the newly reconquered areas around Groningen. This was one of the many porous border regions in Europe where territorial jurisdictions had yet to establish firm frontiers. The entire North Sea coast shared a similar topography, social organization and political culture, despite the eastern part lying within the Empire, while the west now belonged to the Republic. People on both sides of the frontier cherished their peasant communal autonomy, expressed as ‘Frisian Freedom’. Those at the eastern extremity lost this when the Danish king forcibly incorporated their villages in what is now Holstein in modern Germany into his dominions in the mid-sixteenth century. Those in the west tried to preserve it as a province of the new Dutch Republic. In between lay the county of East Frisia that had been incorporated into the Empire only in 1464 and was governed by the Cirksena family, itself descended from village headmen who still lived relatively modestly. East Frisia was troubled by an internal dispute, like so many other German territories in the later sixteenth century, notably Jülich-Cleves, Hessen, Baden, Cologne and Strasbourg (see Chapter 7). While none ever led to major war, all involved issues that concerned foreign powers to whom one or more of the factions appealed for assistance. Their stories have been told by local historians, and by those examining the wider panorama of European relations who tend to see them as potential flashpoints for great-power conflicts. These two perspectives need to be integrated, since the real significance of these disputes lies in their proclivity to suck external powers incrementally deeper into imperial affairs. Foreign intervention was always intended to be temporary and directed at preventing hostile parties from interfering. Little thought was given to an ‘exit strategy’, and once involved it often became difficult to withdraw without creating a vacuum that might be filled by opposing forces.
East Frisia illustrates these general points, as well as serving as background for important events in north-west Germany during the 1620s (for which see Chapter 10). Like many secular north German rulers, the Cirksena family embraced Lutheranism during the early sixteenth century. This remained the faith of their subjects living in the poorest third of the county, a region of heath and moorland under the count’s direct jurisdiction. The other two-thirds was marshland that was more prosperous, because the fertile soil supported more market-orientated agriculture. The marsh peasants secured representation in the territorial Estates and forced the count to ban further rent increases. They, and the few local nobles, converted to Calvinism and forged an alliance with the burghers of Emden, the only large town. Strategically situated at the mouth of the Ems, Emden was the westernmost North Sea port and serviced the trade of much of Westphalia. The town experienced a boom following the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt as merchants sought a safer place to do business, while refugees headed there for a new life. Gradually, Calvinism became associated with the opposition of Emden and their richer peasant allies against attempts by the Lutheran Cirksena to assert greater authority.
The Dutch grew concerned with the accession of Count Enno III in 1599, because he seemed more determined to impose his will than his predecessors, and had relations in Spanish service. Maurice’s failure to take Dunkirk raised the spectre of a new Spanish naval strategy to disrupt the trade upon which republican independence rested. Dunkirk privateers were already intercepting Dutch ships in the English Channel and it was feared they would be able to attack the Baltic trade as well if they were allowed to use Emden. The Republic persuaded the Emden burghers to admit a Dutch garrison in 1602, and then to extend this by allowing troops into Leerort, a fort further up the Ems by the little town of Leer that blocked the only route into East Frisia from the south-west across the marsh and heath. Emden now became a radical political and religious centre, one of the few places in Germany where the Calvinists adopted the decentralized presbyterian organization used by their co-religionists elsewhere. The town hired Johannes Althusius as its advocate in 1604, expressly because of his book Politica which had attracted wide notoriety for its suggestion that magistrates were entitled to resist tyrannical princes.38
War of Attrition
The Spanish remained stuck in their trenches before Ostend. The war had cost them 1,500 dead every year since 1582, in addition to further losses among their Walloon, Italian and German troops. Another 40,000 fell in the four years of the siege that was finally brought to a successful conclusion by Ambroglio di Spinola in September 1604. Spinola’s appointment as commander the year before was symptomatic of Spain’s financial and military problems. He hailed from Genoa, the hub of Spain’s credit and logistical system. His younger brother played a major role in establishing the Armada of Flanders after the capture of Dunkirk in 1583, but Ambroglio stayed at home to marry and run the family bank. Like many bankers, he owed his success to diversifying his business, securing a cardinal’s hat for one of his sons by financing military recruitment, as well as becoming heavily involved in Spain’s Mediterranean trade. The bank amassed a working capital of 2 million ducats, enabling Spinola to raise and equip 13,000 soldiers for Spain by 1602. His interests had become entwined with those of the monarchy; the king needed him for the war effort, while Spinola needed victory to sustain his bank’s credit. His capture of Ostend validated the decision to make him a general and he officially replaced Archduke Albert as commander of the Army of Flanders in 1605. What could have been a disaster became an effective partnership. Both were reasonable men, while Spinola’s tact and skill soon won him the respect of his more seasoned subordinates.
He now renewed the policy of outflanking the Dutch to the east, striking with 15,000 men at the Ijssel sector to retake many of the towns lost there in 1597, including Rheinberg by 1606. However, Spinola failed to penetrate the Republic’s inner defences, while the Dutch responded to a Spanish embargo on their trade since November 1598 by declaring unrestricted commerce raiding. The move was equivalent to the German submarine campaign of the First World War and just as controversial. Small vessels were licensed as privateers to intercept enemy trade, disguising themselves as harmless fishing boats, or friends in distress to deceive merchantmen. There was a thin line between this and piracy, which was bad enough that Barbary Corsairs from Algiers regularly raided the Channel, and even enslaved Cornish villagers. The Dutch assuaged their pious burgher consciences by issuing regulations to distinguish patriotic privateers from godless pirates, but turned a blind eye to their frequent infringement of these. Privateering was not only a lucrative weapon of war but was also deeply embedded in Dutch culture. A land of seafarers, the Dutch celebrated the free-booting ‘Sea Beggars’ who had sustained their cause between Alba’s repression and the capture of the Holland-Zeeland redoubt in 1572. As with the German U-boat campaign, the naval war dragged into a conflict of attrition in which the Dutch in turn suffered heavily from the depredations of the Dunkirkers.39 Dutch defence spending had doubled over ten years to reach 10 million florins by 1604. There were clear signs that despite its efficiency, the Republic’s fiscal-military system was cracking up. The central debt climbed to 10 million fl., while the inland provinces were falling into arrears and by 1607 the army was 11,000 men short of its official establishment of 62,000.
With both sides locked into a protracted struggle on land and at sea, logistics became a vital factor. The growth of the Dutch sailing navy, together with the privateering campaign, made it difficult to supply the Army of Flanders by sea. Though the Spanish had recaptured Antwerp in 1585, the Dutch hold on the Zeeland islands effectively blocked the Scheldt, while the numerous sandbanks that protected Dunkirk and made it an excellent privateering base rendered it unsuitable for large vessels. These problems had been graphically exposed during the Armada campaign of 1588 when the Spanish fleet had been unable to find a safe port to escape the English attacks and collect Parma’s troops.40 The difficulties of supply by sea heightened the strategic significance of the route taken by duke of Alba in 1567 that had become known as the ‘Spanish Road’.
THE SPANISH ROAD
Though called a ‘road’, this vital artery in fact still involved a journey by sea from Spain’s Mediterranean coast to Genoa that, like Rome, was part of Spain’s informal empire. Troops, money and supplies were convoyed by the Genoese galley squadron that formed an unofficial part of Spain’s Mediterranean fleet. From Genoa, the men marched north to Milan, centre of Spanish power in northern Italy, where they were refreshed and often joined by recruits from Spain’s Italian possessions. The main route ran from the fortress of Alessandria in the south-west Milanese lands across to Asti in Piedmont, a territory belonging to the duke of Savoy who was an ally until 1610. The road forked here, with one branch running north-west via Pinerolo which gave access to the Alpine pass of Mont Cenis and thence to Savoy proper and the upper Rhône, from where the soldiers could march north into the Franche-Comté. A subsidiary track ran along the Val de Susa west of Turin and over the Mont Genèvre. Alternatively, the men could head directly from Milan north up the Ivrea valley and cross by the Great or Little St Bernard passes through Aosta, down the Arve valley in Upper Savoy to Geneva, and then north-east along the Jura into the Franche-Comté. The three routes converged there and then headed north across the duchy of Lorraine into Luxembourg and the front. Sea transport from La Coruña covered about 200km a day, compared to the 23km a day average soldiers took to march the 1,000km from Milan to Flanders, but the overland route was safer and Spain sent over 123,000 men this way between 1567 and 1620, compared with 17,600 by sea.41
The French Wars of Religion
Concern for the Road drew Spain deeper into French and Savoyard internal affairs during the 1580s, rather in the manner that the Dutch and other powers were sucked into German quarrels. In Spain’s case, however, involvement did escalate into major war, because France posed a much greater potential threat than any German territory.
France had entered a dynamic period of expansion following its victory over England in the Hundred Years War. The Valois kings consolidated royal control over the central provinces, while subduing previously autonomous border regions: Normandy in 1450, Provence in 1481, Brittany (1491), Bourbonnais and Auvergne (1523) and Saluzzo (1548). Attempts to seize Burgundy after the death of its last duke in 1477 sparked a long-running war with the Habsburgs that widened with Charles VIII’s invasion of Italy in 1494. Though this conflict ended with eventual French defeat by 1559, the country’s population had doubled across the previous century and continued to grow, reaching 19 million by 1600. The ability of the French crown to exploit this potential was hamstrung by its weakness following Henri II’s accidental death in a tournament in 1559. Government passed to his widow, Catherine de Medici, who acted as regent for a succession of the late king’s young sons: Francis II (1559–60), Charles IX (1560–74) and Henri III (1574–89). Aristocrats and others who had lost out during the previous century of growing royal power now sought to reassert their influence, under the leadership of the princes of the blood. These grandees were related by intermarriage with the royal family but excluded from rule by the principle of hereditary succession and the crown’s desire for more exclusive authority. Religion complicated matters since many princes and their provincial clients became Huguenots around 1560, embracing the French version of Calvinism, while their rivals remained Catholic. A series of bitter feuds, known as the French Wars of Religion, developed after 1562 and eroded royal authority by exposing the Valois’ inability to guarantee the peace.42
International peace was no longer threatened by French aggression but by the danger that the kingdom’s implosion would suck neighbouring countries into its civil war. This was a particular problem for the Empire where princes claimed the right to recruit soldiers to assist friendly Christian powers as one of their German Freedoms. While recruitment was regulated by imperial legislation forbidding it against the emperor or the public peace, territorial fragmentation made it hard to prevent princes collecting troops for their relations or friends across the frontier.43 The Huguenot leaders had already appealed to the German Protestant princes in April 1562 for assistance, receiving 4,000 cavalry in the first of seven German military expeditions totalling over 70,000 men. Other soldiers were provided by the Protestant princes for the Dutch rebels, but the Catholics were equally active, supplying Spain with 57,200 men between 1567 and 1575 alone, while a further 25,000 Germans served Sweden and Denmark during their war of 1563–70. These figures illustrate the Empire’s importance, because it provided more troops than any of the other unofficial participants in the French and Dutch wars. Around 20,000 Britons served in the Huguenot and Dutch forces between 1562 and 1591, while 50,000 Swiss fought for the French crown and 20,000 for the Huguenot rebels over roughly the same period. The Palatinate was the prime mover behind German recruitment for the Huguenots, since its elector converted to Calvinism in 1560 and part of its territory lay close to the terminus of the Spanish Road. Germany’s rising population ensured that the princes had the men, but they relied on the Huguenots and their international sponsors to pay for them. The money invariably arrived late and never covered the full cost. Consequently, German intervention was intermittent and short-lived, with most expeditions lasting only a few months and ending in a shambles.
Lorraine and Savoy
Recruitment also exposed the princes to retaliation from the French Catholics who formed the League (Ligue), or ‘Holy Union’ as they preferred, in 1584 when it became obvious that the only plausible heir to Henri III, the last Valois, was Henri de Bourbon, king of Navarre and Huguenot leader. The League was a vehicle for the powerful Guise family, who were related to the Valois and controlled north-eastern France around Champagne, as well as the largely French-speaking duchy of Lorraine which was formally part of the Empire. The Guise considered themselves to be the guardians of French Catholicism and were keen to prevent anyone occupying the French throne who might want to curb their political autonomy. Their territories made them a major factor in Habsburg strategic thinking, since their cooperation was essential to secure the last stretch of the Spanish Road, as well as blocking any hostile French moves towards Alsace and the Rhine. Philip II’s decision to subsidize the League from December 1584 transformed what had been a series of seven fierce but brief civil wars into a protracted international struggle lasting until 1598. The situation within France simplified as the different factions polarized into two opposing camps, each with powerful foreign backers. England complemented its involvement in the Dutch Revolt by allying with Henri de Navarre in 1585 and funding the largest German expedition to date that lasted five months from August 1587. The League retaliated by invading the Protestant territories west of the Rhine, burning 62 villages in Mömpelgard alone.
Lorraine’s involvement was matched by that of Savoy, another territory maintaining a precarious autonomy on the Empire’s western periphery.44 Savoy narrowly escaped being another victim of French expansion during the early sixteenth century, thanks to Habsburg intervention that forced France to return its territory in 1559 after 23 years of occupation. Duke Emanuele Filiberto saw France’s subsequent troubles as a chance to escape the tutelage of foreign kings. He moved his capital from Chambéry in Savoy across the Alps to the relative safety of Turin in Piedmont in 1560, and began fostering a more distinct identity. Italian was declared the official language, the prized Holy Shroud was moved to Turin in 1578, and writers were paid to elaborate the myth that the new capital had been founded by a wandering Egyptian prince and so pre-dated Rome and Troy. These moves were given a nationalist gloss by nineteenth-century writers, especially once the House of Savoy became kings of the newly united Italy in 1860. The family had no such grandiose plans in the sixteenth century, concentrating instead on securing recognition as the equals of other European royalty and capturing enough new territory to sustain its independence. It became a matter of pride to recover Geneva, which had been lost during the French invasion of 1536 and subsequently became an independent Calvinist republic, while its hinterland in the Vaud joined the Swiss Confederation. The duke also planned to move south over the Ligurian Apennines to seize Genoa and gain access to the sea. There were also hopes of pushing westwards into Provence and the Dauphiné, as well as east into Milan. Such ambitions could not be achieved alone, and Savoyard policy relied on capitalizing on its strategic position as ‘gatekeeper of the Alps’. In addition to controlling the Tenda Pass between Nice and Piedmont south of Turin, all three routes of the southern section of the Spanish Road ran across its territory.
The accession of Carlo Emanuele I in 1580 saw the start of a more aggressive policy. The new duke has been dismissed as an opportunist, darting in and out of Europe’s wars over the next forty years. However, his frequent shifts of international alignment were forced upon him since he could not afford to pin his fragile independence too closely to any one power, and his goals of dynastic aggrandizement remained constant underneath. The failure to retake Geneva in 1582 convinced him of the need for a powerful ally and he married Philip II’s daughter, Catalina Michaela, in 1585, agreeing to back his father-in-law’s intervention in France. In 1588 he recaptured Saluzzo in the upper Po valley just east of the Alps that had been lost to France forty years earlier. He retook the Vaud the following year, but another attempt on Geneva ended in failure, prompting him to redirect his efforts against Provence and the Dauphiné, thinking they would be easier pickings.
Supported by the Savoyard invasion of the south, the Catholic League was able to take Paris in May 1588 in defiance of Henri III’s orders. The king’s assassination by a Catholic militant on 2 August 1589 removed the last constraints on the League, which began a vicious persecution of the Huguenots. The League’s apparent success was its undoing, since it lacked its own candidate for the vacant throne. Most moderate Catholics regarded Henri de Navarre as their legitimate sovereign, but the prospect of him being recognized as king was a major challenge to Spain’s reputation. Not only was he a heretic, but he was locked in his own dispute with Spain, which had annexed half of Navarre in 1512. Having used the League and Savoy to fight the war by proxy, Philip II now intervened directly by ordering Parma’s invasion of Artois in 1590 – the act which had such a serious impact on the conduct of the Dutch War. The Palatinate and Saxony organized the seventh and last German expedition in 1591–2 to assist Henri, but the king gained his crown largely through his conversion to Catholicism in July 1593, reportedly saying ‘Paris was worth a mass’. Though his conversion alienated the more militant Huguenots it allowed the far more numerous moderate Catholics to join him, and his formal coronation as Henri IV in February 1594 was followed by his entry into Paris a month later. Philip II’s health was failing and in the face of mounting setbacks he was unable to prevent Pope Clement VIII from welcoming Henri back into the Catholic church in August 1595. The new king copied Spain’s methods with regards to the papacy, relaxing opposition to papal jurisdiction over the French church and swiftly building up a faction of around twenty cardinals. Though Spain remained the dominant factor in Rome, it was no longer the only player in town, especially as France’s rising influence allowed the pope to increase his own freedom by playing one power against the other.
With Henri IV accepted as king, the League looked increasingly like a Spanish puppet and its leaders defected one after another, leaving Spain to fight alone. Henri formally declared war on Spain in January 1595, invading the Franche-Comté and cutting the Spanish Road. Spain had to re-route this section further east into the Empire via Saarbrücken. Two years later, Field Marshal Lesdiguières drove the Savoyards from the Dauphiné and captured the Maurienne and Tarantaise valleys, cutting the southern end of the Road. Spain launched a counter-attack from the Netherlands, capturing Amiens after bitter fighting, but it was clear its intervention in France had proved counterproductive. Both sides accepted papal mediation, leading to the Peace of Vervins in May 1598, whereby Spain recognized Henri IV, returned Amiens and Calais, and compelled Lorraine to surrender occupied Metz, Toul and Verdun. The French evacuated Savoy and put the question of Saluzzo to papal arbitration.45
Savoy offered to surrender its French-speaking possessions between the Rhône and Saône if it could keep Saluzzo – a possession that completed its hold on the western Alps. The proposal alarmed Spain, because it would expose the Road as it left the Alpine valleys and skirted Calvinist Geneva. Carlo Emanuele was secretly encouraged to hold out for better terms by the offer of Spanish military assistance. Henri lost patience and sent 20,000 men back into Savoy before any Spanish help could arrive, and Carlo Emanuele cut his deal with France with the Treaty of Lyons on 17 January 1601, ceding his French-speaking subjects in return for Saluzzo. The Road narrowed to the Chezery valley between Mont Cenis and the two-span bridge at Grésin over the Rhône, west of Geneva, and its vulnerability was demonstrated when France temporarily closed it in July 1602. Spain tried to reopen the Geneva route deeper in the mountains by sponsoring Carlo Emanuele’s assault that December: the famous ‘escalade’ that failed to retake the city and led to rapidly deteriorating relations between Spain and Savoy. Keen to maintain good relations with a resurgent France, Savoy placed growing restrictions on Spain’s use of the Grésin route, finally expelling the soldiers guarding it in 1609. The political reorientation was completed in a formal alliance with France the following year. Spain needed another way over the mountains.
The Swiss Passes
Concern for the western route had already prompted Spain to sign a treaty with five of the seven Catholic Swiss cantons in May 1587 to use the St Gotthard pass. This was the only practical way across central Switzerland and ran through the Catholic cantons east of lakes Luzern and Zug, and then down the Reuss valley to the Rhine. From here, soldiers could march through the friendly Austrian possessions of the Breisgau and Upper Alsace and rejoin the original Road north via Lorraine to Luxembourg. The only alternative way through central Switzerland via the Simplon Pass to the upper Rhône was long and could be blocked by the powerful Protestant canton of Bern. The governor of Milan managed to renew the 1587 treaty in 1604, but the Catholic Swiss were growing nervous over the revival of French influence, and one of the original signatories refused to sign. Though the Catholic cantons had formed a holy alliance in 1586, they had no desire to fight their Protestant neighbours. Swiss politics were a tangle of local relationships, like those in the Empire, where conflicting interests inhibited
polarization into sectarian violence. The renewed treaty obliged Spain to march its troops in detachments of two hundred men at two-day intervals, with their weapons loaded separately in wagons. Spain used the St Gotthard route six times between 1604 and 1619, but the Catholics of Uri and Schwyz closed it temporarily in 1613, preventing the governor of Milan from drawing on German recruits during the war with Savoy. These were not conditions that a great power could tolerate for long.46
It was possible to send men by sea through the Adriatic to Trieste and then across Inner Austria and the Tirol to the Rhine. However, this was not only very long but liable to disruption by Venice, a power that frequently opposed Spanish policy in Italy. Venice also controlled the Brenner Pass, which offered the best access to the Tirol from Italy. Only three routes remained between these eastern routes and the central Swiss passes. One road ran north from Milan over the Splügen Pass, east of the St Gotthard, and down the Upper Rhine past Chur and Lake Constance to the Breisgau. East of the Splügen lay the Engadin valley that exited through the upper reaches of the Inn into the Tirol. Finally, there was the 120km corridor of the Valtellina that ran north-east from Lake Como to enter the Tirol either through the Stelvio Pass, open between June and September, or the slightly lower Umbrail, generally passable throughout the year. Though further east, the Valtellina offered a faster route, taking roughly four days to cross, compared to ten days over the St Gotthard.
All three routes were in the hands of the Rhetian free states, more commonly known as the Grisons, or Grey Leagues. Rhetia was a federation of three alliances loosely associated with the Swiss Confederation, but also nominally allied to the Austrian Habsburgs. Like the Swiss, Rhetia had emerged from a network of alliances among the Alpine communities that rejected Habsburg rule during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The actual Grey League controlled the far upper reaches of the Rhine, including the city of Chur, whose bishop refused to join. The Holy House League held the Engadin valley of the upper Inn, while the smaller Ten Parish League bordered on the Tirol in the north-west. All three were composed of self-governing communes that sent representatives to a council to coordinate external relations. The Grey League held a majority, but agreement of at least two of the three alliances was necessary for binding decisions. Rhetia’s strategic significance derived from conquests it made from Milan in 1500–32. The mountaineers had not only taken the Valtellina but also the county of Chiavenna at its southern end: this controlled access both southwards into Milan and northwards along the Splügen and Engadin routes.
Like Switzerland, Rhetian government was not democratic in the modern sense. A significant part of the population was disenfranchised, and while the inhabitants of Chiavenna and the Valtellina had been left with self-government, they were treated as conquered territories and denied any representation in the Rhetian council. Social tensions grew more pronounced as population growth placed increasing pressure on the relatively meagre local resources by the 1570s. Communal government fell into the hands of the ‘Big Johns’ (Grosse Hansen), networks of families who secured a controlling stake in the village councils and increasingly assumed noble titles and lifestyles. As in Switzerland, the decentralized political structure ensured that local control translated into greater opportunities for wealth and influence at a higher level. Foreign powers were prepared to pay handsomely for favourable decisions in the Rhetian council to open the passes or permit military recruitment among the overpopulated villages. External influence encouraged factions aligned to different powers, heightening existing tensions. Conflicts in the council passed back to village level as the Big Johns used their influence in the local law courts to pursue personal vendettas. This struck at the heart of the communal ideal upon which Rhetian (and Swiss) society was based, since the primary purpose of all early modern association was to preserve the public peace and the courts were intended to uphold this. The spread of Lutheranism complicated this from the 1520s, as many families converted, while others remained Catholic. Protestants regarded their faith as an expression of independence from Habsburg jurisdiction and that of the bishop of Chur. Their disenfranchised southern subjects (the Sudditi) in the Valtellina clung to Catholicism as an expression of their own identity. Linguistic differences reinforced these divisions, since the northerners spoke German, while the southerners spoke Italian.
Matters worsened as the Rhetian church fell under Calvinist influence and began insisting on greater supervision at parish level to enforce the reformation of life just as the Capuchins and other missionaries sent by Cardinal Borromeo and the bishop of Chur arrived to promote Catholic renewal. The Rhetian leadership felt increasingly beleaguered, not least because their three alliances were outnumbered by their subject populations in Chiavenna and the Valtellina. These grew increasingly restless, revolting in 1572 and 1607. Matters were further complicated by the fact that the majority of the inhabitants of the actual Grey League also remained Catholic, while the 4,000 Protestants living in the Valtellina felt very insecure. It is scarcely surprising that the Calvinist political leadership equated Catholicism with subversion and used its influence in the local courts to instigate a campaign of persecution from 1617.
Fuentes, the governor of Milan, induced the Rhetians to permit small detachments of Spanish soldiers to transit the Valtellina after 1592, but the council then promised exclusive access to the French in December 1601 and signed a similar agreement with Venice two years later. The governor retaliated, building Fort Fuentes at the top of Lake Como to block the entrance into Chiavenna in 1603 and imposing a grain embargo. The Rhetians remained unmoved, so that by 1610, Spain was without a satisfactory route across the Alps. Fortunately, this was now less pressing since the conclusion of the Twelve Years Truce with the Dutch.
SPANISH PEACE-MAKING
Spain’s association in French and Protestant historiography with aggressive policies has overshadowed its attempts to find peaceful solutions to many of its problems around 1600. Spain was not alone in doing this, and indeed its relative success in bringing some of its wars to an end was due in part to the desire of other European powers to make peace. Peace-making was not altruistic, but linked instead to competing visions of European security whereby one dominant power could safeguard its own interests by arbitrating disputes between its rivals. James I of England and Henri IV of France both saw their own power and posthumous reputations as depending on their ability to resolve European conflicts. The papacy also hoped to break free from Spanish and French influence by assuming this arbiter role.47 Such attempts also responded to the deeper underlying shift in European relations away from medieval Christendom and towards an international order based on sovereign states. At this stage, economic and political connections were binding states more clearly within a common system, but the exact nature of their interaction had yet to be resolved. Order was associated with hierarchy, not equality, implying the presence of a pre-eminent power to guarantee peace for all, equivalent to the king within a kingdom, or the magistrate within a city.
The Spanish vision of Pax Hispanica was central to its monarchy’s imperial mission. Like the peace-making efforts of other European monarchs, Spain intended to resolve conflict from a position of strength, but was often forced to do so through its own weakness. Given these mixed motives and the fragility of the resulting settlements it is easy to dismiss peace-making as mere tactical withdrawals in longer-running struggles. This is certainly how Spain’s efforts have been interpreted for the period between Philip II’s death and the outbreak of the Thirty Years War by those who subsume the entire period within a protracted anti-Habsburg struggle. Yet, peace-making was neither naïve nor cynical, and an examination of negotiations to end hostilities reveals how contemporaries saw themselves engaged in a series of distinct, if related, conflicts.
Pax Hispanica had its origins in the 1559 peace with France that ended the struggles of the first half of the sixteenth century and guaranteed the ‘tranquillity of Italy’ for fifty years. Renewed bankruptcy in November 1596 and the failure of the 1597 Armada convinced Philip of the impossibility of defeating France, England and the Dutch simultaneously and led to the negotiations that concluded in the Peace of Vervins in 1598 (see p.156 above). In one sense, Vervins was a tactic in the further struggle against the Dutch, since it broke the Triple Alliance of Greenwich of May 1596 by which Spain’s three enemies swore not to make any separate treaties of peace with her. However, it was also a product of a broader desire to end European conflict, since it was brokered by both the pope and Elizabeth of England. Moreover, Spain clearly wanted it to last. The duke of Lerma resisted calls to exploit France’s troubles following Henri IV’s assassination in 1610 and stuck to the policy of fostering closer relations. Henri’s widow agreed in April 1611 to Lerma’s plan for a double dynastic marriage that took place four years later.48
Belgian Autonomy
Lerma also continued Spain’s serious efforts to end the Dutch Revolt that began when the dying Philip II devolved greater autonomy to the Spanish Netherlands in May 1598 by entrusting them to his daughter Isabella. This arrangement stemmed partly from the king’s concern to provide for his favourite daughter now that it was obvious Emperor Rudolf would never marry her. The alternative match with Archduke Albert was celebrated in 1599 but it had been planned by Philip, who stipulated that Belgian autonomy would continue if the couple had a son. Meanwhile, the couple would rule jointly as ‘the Archdukes’ from Brussels. The hope was that an autonomous Netherlands would prove more acceptable to the Dutch who might be induced to abandon their struggle with Spain and accept union with Brussels instead.49 This was undoubtedly too little too late, coming a full decade after the foundation of the Dutch Republic, while the entire project was compromised by the continued presence of the Army of Flanders in the south, still reporting directly to Madrid. Yet, the plan should not be dismissed too hastily. Albert and Isabella were determined to assert their autonomy and matters might have turned out differently had they had a son. Isabella was one of the most attractive personalities to emerge from the gloomy Spanish court. Her portraits show her taller than her husband, and she was certainly a feisty character, scoring a bull’s eye with her first shot at the Brussels shooting club tournament in 1615. The event led to her being fêted as an Amazon queen in text, image and ritual in what was clearly an orchestrated attempt to raise the couple’s regal status.
Practical measures underlined these efforts and were intended both to secure local loyalty and to foster sympathy within the rebel provinces. Though they asserted their authority over Brussels and other towns, the couple generally respected local privileges. Their revival of Catholic life included the usual sponsorship of the Jesuits, but was more generally directed at renewing the older Erasmian tradition to make Catholicism more attractive to potential northern converts. Albert already had experience of government from his time as viceroy of Portugal (1583–93). He managed to cooperate with General Spinola without compromising Belgian autonomy, sending his own envoys to England, France and Rome, and he opened direct talks with the Dutch in 1600. He played a major part in persuading the Madrid government to secure peace with England by recognizing James VI of Scotland as successor to Elizabeth of England who had died in 1603. Belgian mediation helped secure the Treaty of London in 1604 which ended the nineteen-year-long war with England and initiated a gradual Anglo-Spanish rapprochement that lasted, despite serious moments of tension, into the mid-seventeenth century.
The Twelve Years Truce
The Archdukes recognized that their autonomy ultimately rested on achieving peace with the Dutch. Military operations increasingly focused on forcing the Dutch to accept reasonable terms, and Albert negotiated an armistice in March 1607 to give more time to conclude the talks. The Dutch refusal to grant toleration to northern Catholics caused considerable disquiet in Madrid, since any truce would sacrifice spiritual concerns to pragmatic pressures, such as renewed bankruptcy in November 1607. Some also feared it would give time for the Dutch to regroup and so make it even harder to defeat them in the future. The Scheldt had to be kept closed to trade and many feared the Dutch would now penetrate the vulnerable Indies trade, despite promising to postpone the foundation of their proposed new West India Company (WIC). They refused to disband the existing East India Company that was already stealing markets from the Portuguese and the final terms effectively restricted the truce to Europe. Philip III and Lerma overruled objections to the truce, arguing that continuing the war risked inflicting even greater damage, and agreed the Twelve Years Truce with the Dutch on 9 April 1609.
Spain had thus successfully extricated itself from all three western wars by its agreements with France, England and the Dutch between 1598 and 1609. As a military strategy, diplomacy clearly worked; it shattered the hostile Triple Alliance, and allowed tensions to grow within the Dutch Republic that left it weaker in some respects by the time the Truce expired in 1621. However, just because Philip III presented peace-making as an expedient doesn’t mean that we should ‘take him at his word’.50 Given the controversy surrounding the settlements, especially that with the heretical Dutch, the king could scarcely present them otherwise in public without harming his prestige.
Lerma swiftly became the target of all those who regarded peace-making as a sell-out of Spain’s core interests. Even the duke of Uceda, Lerma’s own son, joined the growing ranks of his critics. To deflect attention, Lerma ordered the expulsion of the Moriscos on the day the Truce was signed. The Moriscos were converts from Islam living in Spain since the defeat of the Moors in 1492 and they formed around 4 per cent of the country’s population. Coinciding with demographic and economic stagnation, the policy was certainly misguided, reducing Valencia to subsistence farming and swelling the numbers of corsairs who intercepted supplies for Spain’s North African garrisons in Ceuta and Tangiers. Spain was obliged to devote growing resources to defend its own south coast. The ensuing fruitless campaign against the Barbary pirates at least enabled Spain to make common cause with England and France, who also suffered their depredations, as well as offering a chance to polish its traditional image of Christian crusader.
Savoy and Mantua
It was also part of Lerma’s wider reorientation of Spanish policy towards the Mediterranean, which he saw as the country’s proper arena in Europe. He sought to punish Savoy for its defection to France and so restore Spanish prestige and reopen the Spanish Road to the Netherlands. The marquis of Hinojosa, a relative and political ally, was made governor of Milan after Fuentes’ death and directed to step up pressure on Savoy. Events intervened to precipitate an unwanted war that was to be the first of a series of struggles over the duchy of Mantua. The disputed Mantuan succession requires our attention, because it forms the Italian dimension to the Thirty Years War and also illustrates the importance of dynasticism as a cause of war.
When Duke Francesco IV died in 1612 after a reign of less than a year, his brother Ferdinando seized power and sent his bereaved sister-in-law, Margherita, packing on the grounds she had failed to produce a son. She was the eldest daughter of Carlo Emanuele of Savoy who saw an opportunity to consolidate his eastern borders by claiming the marquisate of Monferrato as compensation. Unlike Mantua itself which was a male fief, Monferrato could be inherited by women, enabling Carlo Emanuele to demand it on his daughter’s behalf. The matter should have been adjudicated by the emperor, since Mantua, like Savoy, was part of imperial Italy and so fell under his jurisdiction. However, the Brothers’ Quarrel left little time for the emperor to look to Italian affairs, prompting Savoy to invade Monferrato in April 1613, starting the first major war in Italy since 1559. Hinojoso had been instructed to avoid war, but felt obliged to respond since the disputed territory lay sandwiched between Milan and Savoy. Madrid presented its actions as a defence of Ferdinando’s inheritance and, after much prodding, Hinojoso counter-attacked in 1614, ejecting the Savoyards from Monferrato and invading Piedmont. Lerma had no desire for a major conflict and was pessimistic about Hinojoso’s chances of fully defeating Savoy. Hinojoso accepted French mediation, agreeing to a provisional peace at Asti in June 1615 that obliged him to withdraw from Piedmont and left Monferrato’s fate open.
The war increased the pressure on Lerma at the Spanish court, particularly as the duke of Uceda copied his father’s strategy and cultivated the friendship of the crown prince and those hoping for a changing of the guard in Madrid. Personal rivalries intermingled with principled disagreements on what was best for Spain. As criticism of Lerma mounted, Philip III rejected the peace deal of Asti and Lerma was forced to dismiss Hinojoso as a scapegoat to save his own position.
Carlo Emanuele’s position grew stronger thanks to foreign assistance. While not seeking war, France was quite happy to exploit Spain’s predicament to enhance its own international standing, despatching up to 10,000 auxiliaries to reinforce the Savoyard army.51Venice also regarded Savoy as a foil to the Habsburgs, and paid one-third of its military expenses in 1616 and 1617, and Carlo Emanuele was able to recruit 4,000 German mercenaries under Ernst von Mansfeld who arrived in time for the 1617 campaign. Savoy reopened the war in 1616 by reconquering Monferrato, but the majority of the French had failed to arrive, while Venice had become embroiled in its own war with Archduke Ferdinand (see Chapter 8), and refused to open a second front against Milan. Moreover, Carlo Emanuele’s rhetoric of Italian liberty failed to impress the other rulers in the area, who continued to regard Spain as the best guarantor for regional peace. The marquis of Villafranca arrived as the new governor of Milan and reorganized Spanish forces. The Catholic Swiss temporarily suspended objections to Spain’s use of the St Gotthard route over the Alps, enabling reinforcements to arrive from the Army of Flanders, as well as German recruits. Villafranca took Vercelli after a six-month siege, breaching Piedmontese frontier defences. With the war turning in its favour, Spain renewed efforts to secure a satisfactory peace through Franco-papal mediation. A double peace was concluded in the autumn of 1617, with the Treaty of Pavia ending the Mantuan dispute and that of Paris settling Venice’s war with Inner Austria. Spain returned Vercelli in exchange for a Savoyard withdrawal from Monferrato, which was now left for Duke Ferdinando of Mantua.
Neither of these settlements was particularly satisfactory and Savoy was to challenge that over Monferrato again in 1627. However, relations between European rulers were always subject to a degree of friction. What is more important is that there was nothing to suggest a major war was inevitable. The Dutch truce still had a third of its time to run, and the Brussels government, as well as a significant section of that in Spain, felt that it should be renewed, at least if the Dutch agreed to modified terms. Above all, there was nothing in western or southern Europe which seemed to point to conflict erupting in Central Europe within a year.