Hello, and welcome to Western SIV, Episode two hundred and ninety four, The Dutch Revolt. We've spent the last several episodes covering the reign of Queen Mary the First of England. But of course Mary had a husband, albeit for a short time. That man was Philip the Second of Spain. Philip was truly one of the first early modern monarchs in European history. His modernized bureaucracy run out of his palace, the Escorial, was the first thing to
inch toward a modern bureaucracy in Western history. Philip was a man with huge ambitions, and those ambitions financed by Aztec and Inca gold and silver. The New World functioned as Philip's effective atm to pay for some of the conflicts I will discuss today. Yet what is also interesting is how for all of his advantages, Philip would be so vexed by the Low Countries, or as we might call it in the Netherlands. This was an age when money bought you
the best military, but that did not mean that you won. Military thinkers were still very much evolving from the Middle Ages, and Philip was about to run headlong into these issues and more. One English commentator in the sixteen hundreds referred to the Netherlands as quote the great bog of Europe, but he also went on to describe it as a place where quote gold is more plentiful than stones end quote. According to him, continuing his statements, what is it
which there may not be found in plenty? Again referring to the Netherlands, they make by their industry all the fruits of the vast earth their own, even their knaves, are worth a million of ours, for they are in a boisterous rudeness, can work and live in toil, whereas ours will rather lay themselves into poverty, and like cabbages left out in the winter, wrought away in the loathsomeness of a nauseus sloth end quote. Love. That last
phrase, by the way, might be one of my favorites. I'm going to trot that out every once in a while when students aren't, you know, working to their full potential, rotting away like cabbages left out in the winter. And all that. Now, foreigners always marveled at the wealth of the hard working traders, the Dutch, the Englishman scoffed in an egalitarian nation of self satisfied activists, where the gentry, as he writes, is scarce.
He wrote furthermore that quote every man is his own herald, and he that has but wit to invent a coat may challenge it as his own end quote. In this case, the English complaint would have jibed with those of the Spaniards, looking over a strictly hierarchical culture, and a preference for poverty over labor, honor over trade, and a downright obsession with the purity of
blood. And of course we're a stone. The Netherlands seemed to be nothing in the early sixteen hundreds, if not a tinder box for religious controversy. It seems as though every Puritan, every Protestant cult has a fouling somewhere in the Netherlands. It's this, more than anything else, the Dutchman's permissive attitude to faith that would continue to set them against their Spanish overlords all the way until sixteen forty eight. But as I mentioned, as troublesome as religion might
be, the reality was the Netherlands was vital to the Spanish economy. Over three quarters of Castilian wool, virtually the region's only export, was sold and produced in the Netherlands. Spain needed the Low countries to process its wool, and Philip also had personal reasons to treasure the Netherlands. His father was born at Ghent, his grandfather, Ebruges. Philip himself could trace his lineage all the way back to the Capatian kings of France. He took deep pride in
the fact that he was descended from such a legendary dynasty. The idea of the Netherlands as a single entity, however, was an artificial construction, an artificial construction of imperialist powers. In fifteen forty nine, Charles the Fifth had joined Flanders and Artois to the Dutch and German speaking provinces that had formerly been part of the Holy Roman Empire, and assumed for himself the title of Lord
of the Netherlands, a title he invented. Representatives of the different provinces or states met in a powerful parliament known as the States General, but there was absolutely no tradition among any of them of political unity. Disastrously, Charles isolated the intellectually and spiritually experimental Dutch from a religious tolerance forced upon him in the Empire by the German princes, thus exposing the Dutch to decades of autocratic Habsburg
intolerance. Had Charles simply approached his Dutch subjects in the same way that he approached his German ones, this story may have turned out a lot different. Instead, he negotiated a massive restructuring of the Netherlands Church with the Papacy that was kept secret from the Dutch until it was announced. He subjected this politically
unstable collection of independently minded peoples to nearly crippling levels of taxation. Philip would then continue and strengthen his father's policies and permanently stationed garrisons of dreaded professional Spanish troops known as deceros in the Netherlands as a result, in a somewhat ironic rerun of Charles's experience with the Spanish Calmuneros that covered many, many episodes ago.
When Philip returned to Spain in fifteen fifty nine, he left his illegitimate half sister Margaret of Parma, as regent in Brussels, and the Dutch were incensed, feeling downright colonized. So then in fifteen sixty five, the States General sent one of the most powerful Dutch aristocrats, the Count of Egmont, to Spain to negotiate directly with Philip. Egman returned convinced that the King had personally offered a more conciliatory policy toward Protestants and freedom of worship in general.
He even had signed an agreement that hinted at further compromise. But within months that an infamous document that is known today by historians as the Letter from the Segovia Woods. Philip wrote instructing Margaret that no leniency was to be shown to
any heretic. Far from introducing a new policy of religious tolerance, he was determined to strengthen the Inquisition in the Netherlands, and to make his point, he ordered that six radical Protestant and a Baptists whom Margaret had hoped to pardon, instead be quote brought to justice end quote. And this is definitely the Queen Mary style of justice we're talking about here. Now. Whatever Philip had said to the Count of Angmo will never know, probably, but he certainly
appeared to have broken his word. At least that's how the Count perceived it. It was a decision that made him appear three really bad things in the eyes of the Dutch. One foreign good newsing about that two week and three dishonest, and then on top of it, into this story is going to enter another character, a true wild card, if you will, Philip's own son and heir, his deformed son, Don Carlos. Don Carlos was well, we would say troubled today. Once he was given a giant turtle as
a present, which bit his finger. Don Carlos responded by biting off the turtle's head with his teeth. But he was the heir to the throne, a fact which worried Philip and had worried Charles the Fifth before him. Don Carlos was already troubled when, at a young age, he fell down a flight of stairs while chasing a gardener's daughter, whom he enjoyed striking with wooden
rods just deserts. Perhaps he struck his head multiple times. On the way down, he cracked his skull so badly that it was visible through the wound. Said wound soon became infected, and physicians around Don Carlos vigorously debated the best way to treat him. One wanted to cut a hole in his skull to relieve the pressure. Others simply wanted to purge him across Spain, Masses
were said for the air, and religious processions abounded. Carlos lapsed into a delirium, and a famous Modisco doctor was called, but his various caustic ointments only brought the patient closer to death's door. Philip could not bear the suffering and retreated to a nearby monastery to pray. He must have wondered privately whether the boy's death might not be for the best. Not the last time he
would wonder that. But then the Duke of Alba suggested they bring out the mummified body of a priest, Diego de Alcala, locally revered as a great healer of the sick, both in life and now in death. The desiccated remains were laid down beside the sick bed and the semi conscience. Don Carlos asked that his eyes be forced open so that he should see. He reached over and touched the cadaver quote, after which he drew his hands across his
diseased face end quote. Within hours, a miraculous recovery had begun, so that a week later the doctors could begin draining puss from the abscesses that had formed around Don Carlos's eyes. Five weeks later, his recuperation was complete, but the prolonged trauma had made Don Carlos's physical and mental condition worst. Philip made efforts to control his son by placing important and powerful men within his household, but Carlos was as ambitious as he was deranged. In fifteen sixty five,
he planned to go to Aragon and announce himself king. Only one of Philip's deputees managed to hold the boy back from that bizarre illusion of grandeur. But before long, Don Carlos would go for from a headache to a major political liability, and the cause for that escalation would be the Netherlands. The first the situation in the Netherlands had to escalate itself. That happened on the fifth of April fifteen sixty six. On that day, the Beggar's Revolt began.
Three hundred armed men broke into the palace and demanded that Margaret of Parma, Phillip's regent, disband the inquisition in the Netherlands. She had no choice and so complied. One of her counselors loudly proclaimed that she had nothing to fear from these quote unquote Beggars, and suddenly this little rebellion had a name. Three days later, these men held their famous Beggars Banquet, during which they swore never to abandon their cause for religious toleration. But now things were
getting out of hand. On July seventh, Margaret wrote to Philip, letting him know that she had effectively lost control over the region. She believed the problem was Protestantism, particularly the Calvinists. Everywhere she wrote, there were shouts of long Live the Beggars. Evidently the name stuck. These groups quickly began whitewashing local churches in Calvinist's style. The Prince of Orange reportedly told Margaret that the crowds would soon turn on her and she would be dead. The Spanish
court was aghast. Eventually, the powerful but warlike Duke of Alba agreed to serve as governor of the Netherlands and bring the region to heal. Margaret gladly agreed to step down the following year, fifteen sixty seven, and so in the spring of fifteen sixty six, the Duke of Alba set sail for the Netherlands. In the meantime, Philip's heir, Don Carlos, had descended into
hopeless lunacy. According to one reliable diplomatic reporte he walks hunched over and seems weak on his legs, but is much given to violence to the point of cruelty end quote. On one occasion, he rode Philip's prize horse so brutally that the animal died. Another report said, quote, he has abandoned himself to such chaos that the joy among the Spaniards at having a native prince is
as great as the doubts they have about his ability to govern. Yet end quote, However, he could be generous, bind the affection and favor even of the servants in his father's household. He borrowed heavily from money lenders, to gamble, and especially to lavish gifts on women, notably Philip's attractive young Queen Elizabeth of val Waw. Philip did his best to hold out hope,
perhaps even when all else seemed lost. He encouraged Don Carlos to attend meetings of the Council of State, where he at least seems to have behaved humanly. But then Don Carlos flew off the rails when he found out that Philip had appointed the Duke of Alba as the governor of the Netherlands. For whatever deranged reason, Carlos had come to believe that the Netherlands was his, both his birthright and his personal possession. From then on, he began an almost
maniacal series of plots to seize the Netherlands for himself. He first reached out to Philip's half brother, Don John of Austria, hoping the Austrian noble would support his claim. Philip knew about all this. He hoped that Don John would talk some sense into the boy, but that seemed impossible. No. Don John reported back the Prince was determined to rebel. By now, Philip
knew he had to act. The question was whether this was a matter of his son's incompetence or treason, But the fact of the matter was Philip now had no choice. He had to do something. So shortly before midnight on the eighteenth of January fifteenth sixty eight, Philip himself put on his armor, and I do mean that literally got four of his senior ministers together and walked
into Don Carlos's apartments. We took all his important papers and weapons away, and then calmly Philip ordered that the windows be boarded up and an armed guard set at the door. Don Carlos was officially a prisoner in his own home. With nothing else he could do, Don Carlos turned all his violence and rage on himself. He tried to starve himself to death. He swallowed his
signet ring because he thought diamonds were poisonous. Finally, after attempting to eat himself to death, literally he ate four hole partridges, he fell ill with a fever. On the twenty fourth of July, Don Carlos, heir to the throne, finally mercifully died. The court, led by Philip, went into mourning. Yet ever since, there have been persistent rumors amongst historians that Don Carlos did not die of natural causes. He was murdered by his father,
who had him poisoned. True, well, I certainly cannot say, but I will say if he did, he had his reasons. As Alba approached Brussels, the population was terrified. The duke had a terrible reputation for cruelty. Now he was at the head of an army of ten thousand,
with no one able to stop him. At the same time, two Spanish Protestants published an absolutely scathing tract, the Quote Art of the Holy Spanish Inquisition, offering europe An apparently authoritative account of the atrocities of the Inquisition, which Philip now seemed prepared to visit upon the Netherlands with abandon. The local nobility was so petrified that they threw their lot in with Margaret, and she managed to restore order. Margaret, sensing the situation was under control, wrote to
Philip begging him to recall Alba, but it was too late. The moment that Alba entered Brussels, the purge was on. He arrested many leading nobles and instituted a new tribunal known ominously as the Council of Blood. A terrified peace settled across the Low countries, but thousands of Netherlanders were fleeing abroad. William of Orange retreated to his ancestral lands in Germany, and others went to France. Eleven thousand weavers from Ghent alone came to England, and Norwich by
itself allowed four thousand Flemings to settle there. The oldest Dutch Protestant church in continuous use is in the Austin Friars in the city of London. In fact, by the spring of fifteen sixty eight, William of Orange, the natural leader of the Dutch patriots in exile, was able to coordinate a series of armed incursions, but he was no match for Alba, who kept the Patriot army in the field until Orange ran out of money to pay his mercenaries.
But Alba also resorted to the only psychological weapon he really believed in terror. He had two Dutch leading nobles publicly executed for high treason in the main square of Brussels, with three thousand Spanish troops on duty to keep order. For the next three years, he prosecuted a relentless campaign of persecution against anyone suspected of rebellion or heresy. The figures are staggering. Nine thousand were imprisoned,
fined, or had their property confiscated. As many as seventeen hundred were executed, ten times as many victims as the Spanish Inquisition would execute during the whole of Philip's reign. Many more fled, perhaps as many as sixty thousand total in fifteen sixty seven, in fifteen sixty eight, then in fifteen sixty eight, with an arrogance that could only be described as breathtaking. Alba erected in Antwerp a bronze statue of himself trampling the rebellious Dutch under his horse's hoofs making
matters worse. This was all cast from melted down cannon he had captured from the rebellious Dutch. It was modeled on medieval images of the Spanish patron Saint James the Moor Slayer riding down Muslims, and caused such outrage that Philip had it removed and destroyed. Sure, the Duke of Alba was a brilliant soldier in a strategist when it came to battle, but he had no idea how to run the subtleties of government. At sixty years old, he was an
old man who quickly tired of trying to win the peace. Alba was not only an old man now by the standards of the age, but he was also sick, ailing with gout. Alba repeatedly begged Philip's permission to return to the warmer climates of Spain. Finally, in fifteen seventy two, the King began the process of bringing this aging general home. But before he could retire,
the Dutch erupted in rebellion. Alba was now too sick to direct the Spanish troops in the field, and that task fell to his equally psychopathic but equally inexperienced son, Fadrique. Father and son approached the campaign of rebellion with appalling cruelty, only made worse by the riotous mood of the troops who had not been paid for months. And that's going to be the key. By the way these Spanish soldiers went on the rampage at Milenken and put the entire
population of Nard into the sword. There could have been no more powerful encouragement for the Dutch, and when Fadrique advanced on Harlem, he found the citizens stealed for a fight to the death. They realized they had no choice. Even children now helped to break the siege, skimming across the ice on their skates under the cover of fog to bring supplies, and three hundred armed women played their part in the fighting. Instead of an easy victory that they had
anticipated, Fadrique's army had to dig in during the harsh winter. In early skirmishing, a contingent of Crack troops was devastated when it tried to engage a handful of armed Dutch vessels trapped in the ice. Suddenly, a group of musketeers emerged from the boats, wearing skates and slipped fast and shore across the frozen sea, firing volley after volley at their veteran Spanish assailants, who skithered
and skidded helplessly on the ice. Alba later commented that quote, it is the most novel business that has ever been heard of, end quote, and ordered seven thousand spares of skates to be made. The Spanish besiegers became so desperate that even Veddici suggested raising the siege, but his father responded as followers quote, if you strike camp without the town's surrender, I shall disown you as a son. But if you die in the siege, I shall take
your place in person. And if we both fail, your mother will come from Spain to do in battle what her son has neither the valor nor the patience to achieve. End quote. But assault after assault failed. In the end, Alba understood that this war would be won or lost at sea. In late May fifteen seventy two, the Spanish won a decisive naval battle,
and as a result by the end of July, Harlem had fallen. By this point, the Spanish troops, as I mentioned before, had not been paid for months and months on end, and they proceeded to ruthlessly sack the city. The garrison's throats were cut all time, two thousand of them. Any women within the city were raped. The town was devastated. Though he may have been cruel, the Duke of Alba abhorred the breakdown of any order.
He ordered the ringleaders of this riotous event to be shot by their own men, and just like that, Alba and his son found themselves despised not only by the Dutch, but by their Spanish subjects as well. Moreover, these massacres, as I mentioned, and this most recent one and Harley backfired. Every Dutch town now realized it had to fight to the death, It had to hold out at all costs. All fake and the Duke of Alba
did was make their job more difficult by showing cruelty after cruelty. Fadrique besieged Al Kamar in August and September, but even against an army of ten thousand, this teeny tiny town held out. Every man, woman and child had helped to achieve the victory. On the eighteenth of December fifteen seventy three, Alba finally rose from his sick bed and left Brussels, never to return. On his way home, he summarized the reality of the Dutch problem for his
king as follows quote. The greater part of the states have always aspired to liberty of conscience and the principle that whatever is dought in the privacy of one's own home should not be subject to inquiry. If your majesty grants them freedom of worship, they will pay whatever taxes you demand. Neither side wants another ruler, but you should understand that they want you to be their ward under
their tutelage. End quote. Now, even though he was giving this advice to Alba, any such tolerance of religion was heresy in and of itself, and the idea of diluting an absolute monarchy was anathema. As he said himself later on, had he been given the resources to stamp out heresy in the Netherlands, he almost certainly would have done so, even if he had to destroy the dikes in order to visit a flood of seawater upon the heretics their
farms. And their cities. He repeatedly complained to Philip about the impossibility of winning the war because he didn't have enough money to pay his troops, but the King retorted simply, quote, I shall never have enough money to satisfy your greed end quote. Philip finally understood he couldn't afford to borrow enough money to defeat the Dutch, and in fact Alba's war of vengeance and cruelty had bankrupted him. It is worth noting for a moment how shocking this was.
The gold and more importantly, the silver that flowed into Europe i e. Spain from the New World was a massive boon to essentially every European economy, but it gave Spain a tremendous, albeit temporary, financial advantage. It also led to the first period of sustained price inflation in European history. As inca, gold and silver poured into Europe, the prices for just about everything rose.
This was also the age when international banking really took off. Trade boomed as a result of the influx of cash, and now Europeans they needed ways to finance international transactions at a level that had never before been imagined. The famous Fuger family of Augsburg were the banking heavy weights of the early sixteenth century, borrowing across Europe at relatively low rates of interest in order to lend in
the lucrative market at the Flemish city of Antwerp. Their ability to accumulate real money, gold, silver and coin in the strategic centers of Charles the Fifth's military operations enabled them to dominate the market in Habsburg sovereign debt. Their bills of exchange, or as they called them, banknotes, were considered so secure that people began to treat them as though they were actually gold or silver.
In fact, for the first time, paper became currency, but the Fuguers and the other German bankers were charting in their account books essentially a voyage of monetary discovery, just like the explorers of the New World. Their ships might
hit rocks. They overexposed themselves to Charles borrowing and were badly hurt by his occasional forced reorganization of his debt and the risk adverse Germans reduced their involvement as a result, the old nobility of Genoa stepped in to fill the gap, encouraged by the bond that the naval Commander Andrea Doria and his family had forged
with the Habsburgs. The Spanish crown borrowed in two basic ways. The foundation stone of sovereign debt was juros, a range of government bonds securized in one way or another with a guaranteed rate of interest over the life of the loan. The interest was increasingly linked to some specific source of income, perhaps a lean against what were called acabbola, which was a sales tax raised in cast deal on salt, wine and other commodities, or against the rents payable on
certain Crown estates. The recovery of the payment was often the responsibility of the bankers themselves. Then there were the other type, that were referred to as assentios. These were a vertable kaleidoscope of floating debt, usually agreed upon in an ad hoc basis in order to fund a particular project or campaign, on which the crown paid an extremely high rate of interest for a relatively short period,
after which creditors usually agreed to consolidate the assentios into juros. Until the fifteen sixties, the bankers who lent money to the crown largely did so out of their own pockets. But in a world a wash with money, the Genoese were determined to borrow as much as possible from the tradesmen, merchants, noblemen, farmers, and even peasants from across Europe who wanted to lend it to them. They then found all sorts of ways and putting that money to
work. But the Spanish crown was always the major client that drove the European debt market. In fact, Philip's government was so hungry to fund its huge expenditure that it regularly outbid more useful creditors such as farmers and industrialists, driving up interest rates and contributing to the rampant inflation, which devalued the principle of crown debt and was also very damaging to the economy. And the last part there is the key. Certainly, Charles the fifth and Philip the Second were
smart men, but they didn't understand the market forces at play. The more they borrowed, the more they increased their own borrowing costs, and the more New world silver they imported, the less that silver was worth. It would be like if you went to an atm, but every time you went it gave you less and less of your money now. Wars are expensive. They always have been, they always will be, just asked the British, who
won two World Wars, but lost their empire harshly as a result. Philip had a lot of money, sure, but he couldn't afford to fight the Dutch, the French, and, as we will see, the Ottomans simultaneously. Of all these wars, the Dutch revolt was the most ruinous for Philip, probably because it had been completely avoidable. Moreover, as I mentioned,
the Spanish needed the Netherlands to process its wool. War disrupted trade, and that made matters so bad for Philip that by the late fifteen seventies he was essentially only able to make the interest payments on all his debts. On September the first, fifteen seventy five, Philip effectively declared bankruptcy, the first sovereign
and history to formally default on their debts. The Genoese retaliated by withdrawing his banking facilities in the Netherlands, and Philip's new military commander there complained that he couldn't find a single penny to pay for his men. He wrote to the King, short of a miracle the whole military machine will fall in ruins.
It was quite the prophecy. The light Cavalry, for example, rode six years pay, and in fifteen seventy six the soldiers mutined after committing a series of terrible atrocities, including the especially brutal sack of Friendly Antwerp, remembered in
history as the Spanish Fury. The army of the Netherlands mutinied and abandoned the coastal countries of Holland and Zealand. The States General worked quickly to unite all seventeen provinces of the Netherlands in an act known as the Pacification of Ghent, which established a humiliating general peace that required the removal of all Spanish troops and
officials from both the Spanish and Dutch Low countries. The Dutch had bankrupted Mighty Philip by forcing him to keep such a large army in the field for so long, had taken charge of themselves everything all but had fought for, and every penny that he had spent had gone to waste. Philip had paid a high price for all of this. The negotiations now began for the restructuring of all of his debts again, there could be no doubt that the bankers would
have agreed to some solution in due course. Philip may have threatened to go elsewhere for his credit. While his activities underpinned such a huge proportion of the
European economy that without his borrowing the whole system would have eventually collapsed. But the process would have proved considerably more painful had it not been for the intervention in fifteen seventy seven of Providence. That year, silver receipts from the Americas broke every record because one of the great technological developments in history of silver production, the so called patio method, was now in use in both Peru and
Mexico. With the promise of new American riches, Philip and his bankers finally reached an agreement known to history as the Medio General, which imposed a brutal tax of almost forty percent on nearly fifteen million ducats of short term debt. Cooked into all this was a provision of a new loan of five million ducats, and so the cycle of sovereign solvency and default started again. As ever, the American that is to say, Mexican and Peruvian silver financed Habsburg aspirations
throughout Europe. The problem for Philip was that even by the fifteen fifties, as I mentioned, the surface deposits of silver and gold in the New World had all but dried up. He needed new methods to extract the wealth that lay deeper beneath the surface. He got it the patio method, but not until fifteen fifty seven, and took time for the new techniques that involved essentially combining silver or with mercury to separate it out, and then later heating the
mixture to burn off the mercury. But when he did, when it went into production, the results were astounding. Between fifteen seventy five and fifteen eighty the production of silver from Peru was four times would it have been previously. But it was too late to save Spain and its battle with the Dutch. Ultimately, the Dutch Revolt lasted longer than any other uprising in modern European history.
In the end, it lasted nearly eighty years. It came to define daily life for generations of both those who lived in the Netherlands and those who fought there. The Dutch were fighting on their home soil, their navy. Throughout the conflict was consistently more agile, and in the end it won more engagement. But really the reason Spain lost the Dutch Revolt had little to do with the Dutch themselves. Philip would lose in the Netherlands because he had so
badly over committed himself. The Dutch could afford to focus only on the Spanish. The Spanish could not. Moreover, the Spanish were standing on the beach trying to hold back the tide. They were desperately trying to achieve what were unachievable goals, and if I'm being honest, some of the blame for all these failures lies squarely at Philip's feet. He didn't learn from his father's experience dealing with religious toleration and dissent in Germany. But worse still, he never
once personally visited the region. For a man who considered the Netherlands to be his birthright, that was inexcusable. Now, as we're going to see, the Dutch Revolt was not the only reason for the collapse of the Spanish Empire and the end of Spain's Golden Age, but it certainly did not help. Next week we head back to England as Elizabeth the first takes the throne. If you're interested in more Western Sieve in the interim, you can check out
the links in the show notes. Try a seven day free trial of Western SIEV two point zero and get back in it with the Romans. We're deep into it now with them in the Punic Wars, and I'm having a lot more fun covering that in a lot more detail.