Spain at that time dominated Portugal, parts of North Africa, Southern Italy, Holland, Belgium and the Americas. How did the small, mercantile United Dutch Provinces successfully repel the might of the Spanish Empire?
Strategic Issues
The Duke of Alba was assigned by King Philip II to bring the United Provinces under control. However, the Dutch had invested their mercantile wealth in turning their towns into fortresses using the most up-to-date bastioned walls and earthen redoubts. The Dutch were able, in many cases, to sit in their fortresses with their supplies whilst the Spanish armies were out in the open with supplies unreliable due to the distances and Spain’s additional wars which divided resources as well as France, their enemy, standing between Spain and Holland. On more than one occasion, the Spanish army in Holland mutinied over lack of pay.
The Dutch, meanwhile, fiercely defended access to the sea, from which their ships could keep the Spanish navy at bay and bring in supplies more easily. Their privateers, along with those of England, strangled the Spanish shipping as well.
The Dutch countryside was not an easy one to live in for an invading army: the landscape is low (hence their name of the day, the Low Countries) and marshy, and soldiers right up until the Twentieth Century have remembered it as an inhospitable and unhealthy place to fight. It made constructing siege trenches arduous and difficult to form large army formations due to canals and swamps being in the way.
Tactical Issues
Alba’s tactics also left something to be desired: he tried to terrorize the Dutch by a policy of ‘beastliness.’ To that end, he allowed his men to massacre Naarden when it had already surrendered. However, this had the opposite effect, making the Dutch defenders all the more intractable. Sieges made early modern European warfare a slow and incremental business, especially in the highly urbanized Low Countries. The Spanish army of sixty thousand re-conquered several of the Dutch towns, but every one that was taken required a garrison to hold it, dwindling the army until Alba had twenty-four towns still to retake and only twelve thousand men; insufficient to besiege one town, never mind twenty-four.
The Spanish had played a leading role for many decades in the evolution of military tactics; however, they had emphasized Classical-style pike phalanxes reinforced with firearms companies. The Dutch seized the initiative in the last decade of the sixteenth century, developing tactics that further prioritized lines of musketeers, allowing them to damage their numerically superior enemy without closing with them. They also had the ability to move around their own countryside to retake one town while the Spanish besieged another, thus keeping the Empire’s campaign in limbo.
Conclusion
History is full of ‘underdog’ states that confound the efforts of larger powers to control them. The progression of the Dutch Revolt illustrates some of the reasons this dynamic takes place. The campaigns of Alba eventually led to the Twelve Year Truce, and the Dutch ultimately had their independence confirmed in the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648.
Sources
Parker, Geoffrey. Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare. Cambridge University Press, 1995.
Parker, Geoffrey. Spain and the Netherlands. William Collins, Sons and Associates, 1979.
Parker, Geoffrey. The Army of Flanders and the Spanish Road: the Logistics of Spanish Victory and Defeat in the Low Countries War. Cambridge University Press, 1972.
Elliott, J.H. Imperial Spain 1469-1716. Pelican Books, 1963.
