Facing the Enemy. The Spanish Army Commanders during the First Decade of the
Dutch Revolt (1567-1577)
Dr. Raymond (R.P.) Fagel, Universiteit Leiden, Instituut voor Geschiedenis (History Institute)
[email protected]
PhD project A: War Heroes and War Criminals. The Spanish Commanders and their
Actions during the First Decade of the Dutch Revolt in Narrative Sources from Spain
and the Low Countries (1567-1648). PhD Universiteit Leiden, Instituut Geschiedenis, PhD
Supervisor: Prof. J.F.J. (Jeroen) Duindam
PhD project B: Spanish Heroes in the Low Countries. The Experience of War during
the First Decade of the Dutch Revolt (1567-1577). PhD Universiteit Leiden, Instituut
Geschiedenis, PhD Supervisor: Prof. J.F.J. (Jeroen) Duindam
Synthesis: Faces of War. The Spanish Army Commanders during the First Decade of
the Dutch Revolt (1567-1577)
General Research Outline
Dutch historiography and collective memory on the Dutch Revolt define the Spanish army as
an exceptionally cruel enemy, thus simultaneously legitimizing the Revolt and creating a
heroic common struggle against a violent foreign oppressor. Within this context, the Spanish
enemy army remains an anonymous, monolithic collective that has never been the subject of
Dutch historical research. In order to reach a balanced analysis of the Dutch Revolt and its
Nachleben, it is therefore necessary to finally face the enemy, by studying the Spanish
military commanders and literally providing them with a face. In Spain, the same
commanders are seen as exceptionally courageous defenders of the Spanish global empire.
Both national canonical traditions refer to the same historical events, describing the same
protagonists either as war criminals or war heroes. It is this mirrored relationship between
events, protagonists, and descriptions that stands at the centre of this research project. Who
wrote what, and why and when, about the actions of these Spanish commanders during the
Revolt? It is not our aim to reach a final judgment on whether stories are true or false, or who
was right or wrong.
Our objective is to reconstruct how war heroes and war criminals were created in narrative
sources from Spain and the Low Countries and to investigate how these images relate to the
actual experiences of these Spanish commanders through comparing the descriptions of
events in the large collection of letters written by Spanish commanders during their stay in the
Low Countries with those in the narrative sources.
Do these commanders live up to the exceptionally positive or negative images to be found in
the different national traditions? Do these traditions even tell the same stories? The results of
this case study will also provide methodological insights that can be used to deconstruct other
national myths by confronting them with source material originating from the enemy side,
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reflecting both the public image and the concrete experiences of war through the eyes of its
protagonists.
Both subprojects and the synthesis focus on the complete group of twenty-one Spanish high
commanders (see the appendix for a complete list) active during the first decade of the Dutch
Revolt (1567-1577), a period in which Spanish troops were permanently present in the
Netherlands. We will be studying renowned commanders like Julián Romero, an old
comrade-in-arms of William of Orange and Count Lamoraal of Egmont, but also responsible
for the 1572 massacre in Naarden; Francisco de Valdés, the besieger of Leiden who refrained
from attacking the city out of love for Magdalena Moons; or Sancho Dávila, victor of the
battle on the Mookerheide in 1574 but also considered responsible for the Antwerp massacre
of 1576, the so-called Spanish Fury.
Theoretical Framework
The narrative sources most suitable for comparison are the first generations of chronicles
about the conflict, as there exists an ample body of texts both from Spain and the Low
Countries. These chronicles, written during the Revolt, share with the letters by the Spanish
commanders a lack of distance from the events and people they refer to. They retain a very
fragmented character and are filled with short factual episodes on the protagonists and their
actions. Within both historiography and literary studies, such descriptions with a high
episodic (or anecdotal) nature have received little attention,as texts that remain too close to
the facts and therefore resist theoretical analysis. Within literary studies, episodic narratives
function as primitive fore-runners of modern literature, while historiographers consider these
texts as lacking sufficient distance from the events described. As Hayden White states with
some disapproval: ‘These narratives do not conclude, they just terminate’. This opinion does
not do justice to the enormous importance of the episodic genre. A great deal of information
was, and still is, transmitted by way of episodes with a high factual character. We might see
the anecdotes as the delivery room of historiography, where fact and fiction remain closely
intertwined. All three involved researchers will focus on these episodic narratives in
chronicles and/or letters. However, only the applicant will combine both source types in his
synthesis.
The analysis of these episodes in chronicles and letters will be undertaken with three scholarly
debates in mind, engaged in by all the project’s researchers and that may well serve as a
preliminary chapter outline for both subprojects. Firstly, the episodes on the Spanish
commanders will be analyzed using ideas taken from imagology. What images are attached to
these commanders? What images do they use to describe others? Imagologists suggest that
strong enemy images occur only within an internal debate. This means that Anti-Hispanic
images (the so-called Black Legend) can no longer be studied in isolation but must be
confronted with existing favourable views about the Spaniards and with the authors’ selfimages. Examining factual texts referring to concrete actions and protagonists will also put
into perspective the results of research that until now has focused mostly on extreme
examples of Spanish conduct. Imagology stresses the importance of studying the development
of these images over time, connecting with the present interest in memory studies.
Secondly, descriptions of violence and atrocities accompanying occupation and war, directly
related to the Spanish commanders under review, will be compared to the growing body of
literature on subsequent eras, especially seventeenth-century Great-Britain and Germany, as
well as more contemporary periods. Such comparison enables us to see whether the Dutch
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Revolt fits in with immediately subsequent wars or whether we are witnessing general
patterns independent of any historical period. For example, within the German Army in
Eastern Europe during World War II, a process of demoralization of the soldiers and a
consequent dehumanization of the victims took place. There are indications that a similar
phenomenon may have occurred during the Revolt, where antipathies between the Spanish
and the Dutch, and between Catholics and Protestants, may have triggered a process of
polarization and increased violence. However, other studies indicate that military violence in
the seventeenth-century Low Countries proved much more controlled compared to
developments in Germany. How do the Spanish commanders and their actions between 1567
and 1577 fit within these patterns?
Thirdly, there exists a lively discussion on the changing character of war and of those
involved in warfare during the Later Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, which is
reflected in recent studies on military memoirs and war epics from the Late Medieval and
Early Modern Period. Medieval military memoirs -also generally possessing an episodic
character- were focused on the remembrance of honorable and virtuous individual deeds,
while during the second half of the sixteenth century a war rhetoric emerged mainly
dominated by political and religious interests. It remains to be seen whether this change
relates to a growing importance of ‘grand narratives’ during the course of the Early Modern
Period, as acknowledged by several scholars. The stories became the reflection of a collective
consciousness and lost their focus on the remembrance of personal noble deeds. Recent
research on epic war poems claims that the change from chivalric medieval warfare to a
modern and more professional gunpowder war (Military Revolution) transformed the
descriptions of warfare and the role of military commanders within these poems. How do
Dutch and Spanish chronicles describe the Spanish commanders and their actions, and how do
these commanders portray themselves in their letters?
Towards a synthesis: episodes as a bridge between experience and narrative
Both subprojects and the synthesis will use the same analytical scheme, facilitating the
creation of a joint database. All three researchers focus on the episodes referring to the same
group of Spanish commanders, using the same scholarly debates and looking for the same
concrete elements in these episodes, producing a very high level of connectivity within the
whole program. The first subproject will offer an innovative comparison between narrative
sources from Spain and the Low Countries. This subproject will also analyze the way
narratives about the commanders in the chronicles changed over time, possibly becoming less
anecdotal as the distance from the narrated events increased. The second subproject focuses
on the never systematically analyzed letters written by the complete group of Spanish high
commanders during the first decade of the Dutch Revolt. Although the letters mostly concern
urgent military issues, we also find reflections of the commanders’ personal war experiences.
What was it like to be a Spanish soldier during the Revolt? These letters will be confronted
with those by the political elite, writing about the same commanders and their actions, but
from a top-down perspective.
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Analytical scheme
Central information
1. Central theme of the episode (siege, battle, treason,
pillage, mutiny, etc.)
2. Protagonists involved (military commanders)
Source information:
3. Source
4. Author (origin; function; religion)
5. Date of publication or writing (division in periods)
Episodes analysis:
6. Concise or elaborate? (dates, names, numbers)
7. Neutral or biased? (individual honor; group names
such as ‘Spanish’, ‘heretics’ or ‘rebels’)
8. Positive or negative? (words like brave, heroic,
terrible, cruel, etc.)
9. Violence and occupation (words describing
occupation and violence)
The author of the synthesis will introduce information from complementary sources, but his
principal aim is to take the research to a further level of analysis by confronting the images of
the heroes and criminals from narratives in the Spanish and Dutch chronicles with those on
the Spanish commanders in experience-based sources including correspondence. The
published case study on Julián Romero, a famous warrior in his own time but subsequently
largely forgotten, has demonstrated that this method can yield valuable new insights. While in
chronicles and literary texts he was described either as an unconditional hero or as a cruel
enemy, in his own letters and those of his superiors, we find him a multi-faceted hero, who
often complained but also received a lot of criticism.
The role of the episodes is essential as it is within these short and often factual episodes in
chronicles and letters that we find a continuously changing interplay between events,
descriptions, and protagonists. Focusing on concrete episodes grouped around individual
commanders makes it possible to combine a multi-focused view with a microscopic dissection
of detailed information. By using the central debates to regroup the material, a new vision will
be created in which the traditional Spanish and Dutch national images still play their part but
within a much more elaborated and diversified context. The Spanish commanders were no
devils but neither were they superheroes.
This project aims at bridging two historiographical divides within research on the Dutch
Revolt: firstly, between the abundant international literature on the rebel side of the Revolt
and the much more limited and predominantly Spanish interest in the Spanish/Habsburg side
of the conflict. Apart from Geoffrey Parker in the 1970’s, few researchers have considered
both sides of the conflict within the same study. The second gap exists between a fact-oriented
tradition and a modern cultural historiography that tends to study texts as subjective
narratives. This is also reflected in a preference for archival documents over printed texts. For
the Spanish side of the Dutch Revolt this tendency can be illustrated by comparing the
exemplary studies of Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez on imagological images in historiographical
and literary texts with those of Geoffrey Parker on the logistics of the Spanish army in the
Low Countries. This project will be looking at both sides of the conflict and working with a
varied methodology and typology of sources.
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Academic Environment and impact
The case study on Captain Romero constitutes the temporary culmination of the applicant’s
substantial research on relations between Spain and the Low Countries in the sixteenth
century, and qualifies him as supervisor of both subprojects and as author of the synthesis.
Since 1997, the applicant has been organizing a successful annual lecture series
commemorating the 1574 siege of Leiden and has written several articles on the subject of
this project that serve as preparatory studies. He also taught several seminars to third-year
students at Leiden University who have written essays on Spanish military presence in the
Low Countries. The History Institute of Leiden University also houses specialists on the
Dutch Revolt like prof. dr Judith Pollmann. Both research students will participate in the
Huizinga Onderzoeksschool of which the applicant is a member.
The results of this project will facilitate and stimulate other scholars to engage in research on
the enemy side of national myths by incorporating source material from the enemies’
perspective. Through episode analysis, different narratives can be confronted, and the public
images can be compared with the actual experiences of war through the eyes of the
protagonists. Project results will be relevant for historians working on other countries and
time periods, but also for researchers in, for example, media and representation studies.
Knowledge utilization
Putting the national canons into question directly touches upon the creation myth of the Dutch
state and on debates on Dutch identity. The generally acknowledged discourse of a heroic
struggle for freedom against a foreign oppressor is in need of reconsideration. The best way of
achieving this is by influencing future generations through education.
This project will therefore join ‘The Duel’, an educational project of the Prinsenhof Museum
in Delft on the Dutch Revolt, which has recently received a prestigious award for digital
innovation in museums . The Duel reaches out to pupils and teachers nationwide through a
variety of methods and multimedia: games, web applications, short video classes, and a
creative use of objects, images and autobiographical sources.
‘Facing the enemy’ will contribute knowledge and understanding of the Spanish side of the
conflict, a contrasting and supplementary view on the Dutch Revolt difficult to attain within
these museums themselves. This will be done by all the projects’ researchers as well as
through the use of student internships. The applicant’s involvement in new exhibitions has
revealed a growing interest in the Netherlands in looking at the other side of the conflict, but
the knowledge base for a balanced representation remains lacking.
Another way of opening up the results of this research to a larger public, and to researchers
abroad, with an interest in the Dutch Revolt, is by the publication of sources (also in
translation) and of descriptions of events and protagonists, on the Leiden Dutch Revolt
Website, the longstanding and most influential website on the history of the Dutch Revolt.
Subproject A: War Heroes and War Criminals. The Spanish Commanders and their
Actions during the First Decade of the Dutch Revolt in Narrative Sources from Spain
and the Low Countries (1567-1648)
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In this subproject, for the first time the well-known negative images of the Black Legend will
be confronted with the images created by Spanish authors, comparing the anecdotes about the
Spanish commanders and their actions during the first decade of the Dutch Revolt in narrative
sources from Spain and the Low Countries. Simultaneously, the project will focus on the
changes these anecdotes underwent as more time elapsed between the events and the
narratives. Generally speaking, Spanish and Dutch discourses produced heroes and war
criminals respectively, but recent research has shown that these national discourses were not
monolithic. In Spain there was room for nuance, and in the Low Countries religious and
political affiliation influenced the descriptions. The creation of strong enemy images such as
the Black Legend usually is the result of an existing internal debate within a given society: in
this case, at first as a result of differences between Catholics and Protestants, and between
enemies and supporters of the king; later also between groups within the Low Countries that
propagated different memory cultures.
Our hypothesis is that a growing distance from the actual events reduces the episodic
character of the texts, creating more space for meta-narratives that embed the episodes within
a certain overarching discourse, focusing for example on the importance of religion or the
defense of the nation against foreign enemies. Amongst Protestants in the rebellious provinces
a discourse of a violent foreign occupation by Catholic Spanish soldiers will eventually gain
prominence. Conversely, Spain sees its international dominance diminishing in the course of
the seventeenth century and starts looking backwards to a Golden Age in which heroic
Spanish soldiers still dominated the battlefields. How do these developments affect the
anecdotes? Do the stories become more biased? What happens to the description of the
commanders themselves? In order to study the development of these images through time, a
division into several periods will be used: 1567-1572, 1572-1577, 1577-1609, 1609-1621,
1621-1648. This periodization makes it possible to compare the results with those of Yolanda
Rodríguez Pérez on the general Spanish image of the Dutch Revolt.
This project focuses on chronicles and general histories, as there is an ample body of texts for
the period up to 1648 available for comparison from both Spain and The Low Countries.
Overall Spain does not possess an influential body of pamphlets or other textual genres on the
Revolt equal to the Dutch holdings. However, on specific events, such as the most important
sieges and garrison cities, lesser-known descriptions will be used in addition to the more
canonical chronicles of the Revolt. An inventory of narrative sources is available on the Dutch
Revolt website, organized by Leiden University. The most important descriptions from the
Low Countries are those by Emanuel van Meteren, Pieter Bor, Everhard van Reyd, and P.C.
Hooft, but lesser-known chronicles from the Catholic side will also be used. The important
changes made to Van Meteren’s work in later versions means that different editions of these
chronicles will have to be compared.
Most of the Spanish chronicles on the Revolt have already been studied on a general level and
are accessible through editions, partly modern, partly dating from the Early Modern period.
The most important and detailed chronicles of the first decade of the Revolt are those by
Bernardino de Mendoza and Antonio Trillo, authors residing in the Low Countries during the
time of the Revolt and involved in the military apparatus. Authors writing at a later date had
rarely been eye-witnesses.
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Subproject B: Spanish Heroes in the Low Countries. The Experience of War during the
First Decade of the Dutch Revolt (1567-1577)
The letters of the Spanish commanders active in the Low Countries during the first decade of
the Dutch Revolt have been used only incidentally for historical research. These letters,
written by the commanders who were often present in the actual war theaters, consist of loose
strings of short paragraphs, each of them describing a different episode or anecdote,
explaining events and the people involved. These letters served a very different purpose than
did the chronicles as they were written on the spur of the moment with concrete and often
urgent intentions: asking for more money, extra soldiers or ammunition, outlining the
strategic situation, or asking permission to leave the front.
The military information is, however, only one element of these letters. The commanders –
many of them career soldiers who had started in the lower ranks– also offer insight into their
political opinions and personal lives. These letters are often directed to people they knew
personally, and there is no sharp division between their military office and what we consider
nowadays as belonging to their private life. For example, Julián Romero can criticize the
Duke of Alba for imposing the Tenth Penny, and he can even threaten a royal secretary that
he would leave the Low Countries if he were not awarded a governorship. Romero’s wife did
not want to follow him around campaigning in the Low Countries and would join him only if
he obtained a steady position as a governor, creating unexpected dilemmas, both for this
commander and his superiors. On all levels, professional and personal, these letters take us
back to the actual war experiences.
In order to be able to analyze the interplay between professional and personal elements in
these letters written by the group of commanders under research, we need to know the basic
features of their military careers and their personal backgrounds. Even for a well-known
commander such as Francisco de Valdés, essential information on his official and private life
remains elusive. Who were these commanders and how does the Dutch episode fit into their
careers? Did their social position as noblemen or as lower-born professional military
influence their outlook on war and violence?
At a second central level, the analysis of the commanders’ letters will be compared to the
information about these commanders in the letters of the political elite, including governors
such as the Duke of Alba and Luis de Requesens as well as King Philip II and subsequent
secretaries and political advisors. Numerous published source collections are available. Our
hypothesis is that the more politically inspired letters, written from a top-down perspective
and from within the safety of palace walls, will have a different outlook on the war then
letters written by the commanders. We expect the commanders to focus on personal matters
and practical problems. Did politicians and commanders look differently at themes like
heroism, atrocities, sacrifice, and war misery? For example, Julián Romero told his governor
general how his own soldiers criticized him directly, calling him the worst man on earth, and
this because he would not allow them to plunder the countryside. The commander’s vivid
description lets us almost hear the soldiers shouting.
A recent study by the applicant on the letters of the Duke of Alba has uncovered a clear
change of tone after the outbreak of new violent actions in 1572. The hypothesis, which will
also be tested in the project on narrative sources, is that the letters by the military will reflect
the same shift: after a relatively calm initial period (1567-1572), with rather neutral
comments, letters will become much more negative as the war intensified starting in 1572,
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possibly showing a demoralization of the soldiers themselves and a dehumanization of the
population.
Most letters by the commanders can be found in the archives of the two most important
governors in the Low Countries during this decade: The Duke of Alba and Luis de Requesens.
For example, in the Alba Archives alone, we have more than sixty letters from the Low
Countries by Francisco de Valdés, 88 by Cristóbal de Mondragón, and more than a hundred
by Sancho Dávila. Additional commanders’ letters can be found in the Archivo General de
Simancas, where we can also find the accounts of the army of Flanders. Other more limited
collections can be found in Madrid, Brussels and The Hague. The published correspondence
of Philip II, Cardinal Granvelle, Alba, Requesens and some of the Spanish military such as
Sancho Dávila provide a useful starting point before addressing the archives. We even find a
small collection of letters by someone like Julián Romero in the digitized correspondence of
William of Orange.
Synthesis: Faces of War. The Spanish Army Commanders during the First Decade of
the Dutch Revolt (1567-1577).
The synthesis offers an analysis of the interplay between experiences and narratives, focusing
on the same protagonists and events analyzed separately by the subprojects. The episodes
serve as the point of encounter, where time and again, historical events and narrative elements
have to be combined into a single text. The three central debates on enemy images, the
character of warfare and the use of violence and atrocities, will be used to conduct a multifocused analysis that enables us to put the national canonical histories of both Spain and the
Low Countries into perspective. How were war heroes and war criminals created, and how do
the images relate to the historical context?
The pilot study on Julián Romero shows the possibilities of such a multi-focused approach,
revealing clear differences between Spanish and Dutch sources, between narratives close to
the events and others from a later date, between chronicles and letters, and between the letters
of military commanders and those of political leaders. We find Romero described as a stupid
commander who cannot think for himself in a coded letter by Governor Requesens, while
playwright Lope de Vega considered him the best soldier of his time. It is the main purpose of
the synthesis to understand this complex interaction between sources through case studies
focusing on the main protagonists. At this stage of the project, the following case studies are
suggested, though, of course, changes might occur during the course of the research project,
depending on unexpected outcomes:
Besides the sources analyzed in the two subprojects, the applicant will use a selection of
English and French sources, both chronicles and diplomatic correspondence, as well as the
recently digitized Fuggerzeitungen. Were the commanders heroes or criminals in the eyes of
people looking from an outsider position? The applicant will also include information from
literary texts from Spain and the Low Countries (epic poetry, theatre plays, historical novels,
songs), that have a less episodic character and often have greater distance from the events.
Here the project links up with a growing interest in the relation between war and literature in
the Early Modern Period.
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