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Authors: Mark Lamster
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difficult that the phrase “send a soldier to Flanders” (
poner una pica en Flandes)
became a sardonic euphemism for asking the impossible. Some three hundred engineers were sent to expandthe military corridor known as the Spanish Road, and their preparations continued through the winter and into early spring. In June 1567, the army finally departed under the command of Philip’s most militaristic counselor, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alva.
What followed was an object lesson in the dangers of an arrogant, insular, and incompetent occupation. The “Iron Duke” arrived with his troops in late August, and wasted no time in alienating the local population. His soldiers, hardened veterans in shiny battle gear, were a daunting vision as they marched in file through the Low Countries, trailing behind them an unruly horde of profiteers. Despite the objections of Margaret of Parma, the Spanish governor, the duke garrisoned his men in the loyal towns surrounding Brussels, where they were needed least and where their rough behavior was an affront that turned friends into foes. He then proceeded to decommission Margaret’s army, a public rebuke that prompted her resignation and left him with responsibility for both military and administrative governance. Undeterred, he dismantled her entire bureaucracy. “Putting in new men one by one is like throwing a bottle of good wine into a vat of vinegar,” he said. To see to his directives, he relied almost exclusively on his own staff of Italian and Spanish officers and functionaries. He even ordered that William’s son, a university student in Louvain, be abducted and packed off to Spain. When the boy’s professors complained about this outrage against their very conception of order and fairness, the duke’s councillor replied, “We care nothing for your privileges.”
In Antwerp, a hotbed of Calvinist insurgency, the duke saw to the design and construction of a fortified military compound. Just south of the city, and separated from it by a large open field that would leave would-be attackers fatally exposed, an enormous moated citadel—a “green zone”
avant la lettre
—was erected by the duke’s Italian military architects, who then rerouted the cityramparts to enclose it. Pentagonal in form, but with wedged bastions and ravelins projecting from its corners and flanks, the fortress offered a menacing profile to the city it was ostensibly intended to protect, an unholy inversion of the typical fort-defends-town program. Inside was a veritable city within a city: barracks, armory, stores, tavern, chapel, all the necessities a battalion might require to withstand a prolonged siege, including—presumably for inspiration—a bronze statue of the unrepentant duke himself. Its inscription was dedicated to the man “who extirpated sedition, reduced rebellion, restored religion, secured justice, and established peace.”
With his army in place, the duke set about the subjugation of the local population, and did so using tactics honed during the Inquisition. “Everyone must be made in constant fear of the roof breaking over his head,” the duke wrote in a letter back to Philip. He seemed entirely immune to the commonsensical idea that his harsh rule might come back to haunt him, though Machiavelli, in
The Prince
, had warned specifically of the danger of such measures. “He who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it,” the Italian wrote in 1513, “for in rebellion it has always the watch-word of liberty and its ancient privileges as a rallying point, which neither time nor benefits will ever cause it to forget.”
The primary instrument of Alva’s terror was a secret court, the Council of Troubles. Flemings called it the Council of Blood. The tribunal prosecuted some twelve thousand citizens for heresy and treason, often on trumped-up charges and with evidence obtained via torture. Alva
poner una pica en Flandes)
became a sardonic euphemism for asking the impossible. Some three hundred engineers were sent to expandthe military corridor known as the Spanish Road, and their preparations continued through the winter and into early spring. In June 1567, the army finally departed under the command of Philip’s most militaristic counselor, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, the Duke of Alva.
What followed was an object lesson in the dangers of an arrogant, insular, and incompetent occupation. The “Iron Duke” arrived with his troops in late August, and wasted no time in alienating the local population. His soldiers, hardened veterans in shiny battle gear, were a daunting vision as they marched in file through the Low Countries, trailing behind them an unruly horde of profiteers. Despite the objections of Margaret of Parma, the Spanish governor, the duke garrisoned his men in the loyal towns surrounding Brussels, where they were needed least and where their rough behavior was an affront that turned friends into foes. He then proceeded to decommission Margaret’s army, a public rebuke that prompted her resignation and left him with responsibility for both military and administrative governance. Undeterred, he dismantled her entire bureaucracy. “Putting in new men one by one is like throwing a bottle of good wine into a vat of vinegar,” he said. To see to his directives, he relied almost exclusively on his own staff of Italian and Spanish officers and functionaries. He even ordered that William’s son, a university student in Louvain, be abducted and packed off to Spain. When the boy’s professors complained about this outrage against their very conception of order and fairness, the duke’s councillor replied, “We care nothing for your privileges.”
In Antwerp, a hotbed of Calvinist insurgency, the duke saw to the design and construction of a fortified military compound. Just south of the city, and separated from it by a large open field that would leave would-be attackers fatally exposed, an enormous moated citadel—a “green zone”
avant la lettre
—was erected by the duke’s Italian military architects, who then rerouted the cityramparts to enclose it. Pentagonal in form, but with wedged bastions and ravelins projecting from its corners and flanks, the fortress offered a menacing profile to the city it was ostensibly intended to protect, an unholy inversion of the typical fort-defends-town program. Inside was a veritable city within a city: barracks, armory, stores, tavern, chapel, all the necessities a battalion might require to withstand a prolonged siege, including—presumably for inspiration—a bronze statue of the unrepentant duke himself. Its inscription was dedicated to the man “who extirpated sedition, reduced rebellion, restored religion, secured justice, and established peace.”
With his army in place, the duke set about the subjugation of the local population, and did so using tactics honed during the Inquisition. “Everyone must be made in constant fear of the roof breaking over his head,” the duke wrote in a letter back to Philip. He seemed entirely immune to the commonsensical idea that his harsh rule might come back to haunt him, though Machiavelli, in
The Prince
, had warned specifically of the danger of such measures. “He who becomes master of a city accustomed to freedom and does not destroy it, may expect to be destroyed by it,” the Italian wrote in 1513, “for in rebellion it has always the watch-word of liberty and its ancient privileges as a rallying point, which neither time nor benefits will ever cause it to forget.”
The primary instrument of Alva’s terror was a secret court, the Council of Troubles. Flemings called it the Council of Blood. The tribunal prosecuted some twelve thousand citizens for heresy and treason, often on trumped-up charges and with evidence obtained via torture. Alva
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