Early modern war narratives and the Revolt in the Low Countries

By Manchester University Press

By the end of the sixteenth century, stories about the Revolt in the Low Countries (c. 1567–1648) had begun to spread throughout Europe. These stories had very different authors with very different intentions. Over time the plethora of sources and interpretations faded away, leaving us with opposing canonical narratives. The Dutch and Spanish national myths were forged on the basis of two visions of the conflict: as a liberation war against cruel Spanish oppressors and as a glorious episode in the history of the Spanish Empire. This volume delves into the early, seemingly anecdotal stories of the war to map the great variety and interconnection of the narratives. It asks such questions as how did the Jesuits write about the Revolt, what can we find in Italian chronicles and how did the war look from the perspective of a local nobleman or a Spanish commander?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Apr 2, 2020
• ISBN: 9781526140883

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Introduction: early modern war narratives and the Revolt in the Low Countries

Raymond Fagel

The story of war: episodic narratives

The long-lasting Revolt in the Low Countries that started around 1567 is generally considered to be one of the most influential conflicts in early modern European history. Since its outbreak, it has played a major role in the development of historiography on war and revolt. The Revolt also occupies a prominent place within historical debates on identity formation and on the importance of religion in early modern society.¹ It can be seen both as a political clash between a centralist monarchy and the defenders of regional liberties, and as a religious conflict between Catholics and Protestants within the violent religious wars that disrupted life in Europe for about a century.

Two currents in modern historiography have dominated research on the Revolt and have mostly functioned as two separate and closed-off entities. On the one hand, we find studies that focus on the reconstruction of the actual events and circumstances of the war, of which the works by Geoffrey Parker are the most outstanding examples. Parker has studied the logistics of the Spanish army present in the Low Countries, as well as the political decision-making processes that guided Habsburg policy.² We can also mention the important contributions by Belgian and Dutch historians like Hugo de Schepper, Gustaaf Janssens and Henk van Nierop.³ De Schepper has shown how the Low Countries were divided between a more integrated centre in the western regions and a less connected periphery both in the south and the east of the Low Countries. He thereby broke away from the traditional and dominant north–south division that was based on the a posteriori creation of Holland and Belgium as separate political entities. De Schepper and Janssens have also amply studied the often complicated middle position of noblemen and bureaucrats within the Habsburg government. These groups were unwilling to join the rebellion against their natural overlord, but also reluctant to blindly follow the guidelines from the royal court in Madrid. Van Nierop has in turn broken away from the still often triumphalist Dutch historiography on the Revolt, most notably with his study on the violent civil war taking place in the north of the County of Holland. For historians from this more traditional historical school, archival documents are clearly the main source of information, using the correspondence of those involved in the decision-making processes and administrative records kept by the different institutions of both Spain and the Low Countries. It is all about what really happened.

At the other end of the spectrum, we can acknowledge a more cultural tradition that focuses on the different narratives found during this period. Researchers within this trend use texts written by specific groups, like the Catholics Judith Pollmann has put to the fore, or the self-conscious citizens of urban centres that protagonize the work of Peter Arnade. There are also studies that focus on how authors in Spain or Italy related the events in the Low Countries.⁴ Within this second current we find both cultural historians and literary specialists who work mostly with published texts, such as pamphlets and broadsides, literary material like theatre plays and poetry, treatises on the perfect soldier and military theory,⁵ and autobiographical texts. It is all about what people wrote.

A very special category concerns texts belonging to the so-called Spanish Black Legend, a European narrative tradition starting in the early modern period that describes both Spain and the Spanish people in an extremely derogatory manner. The Revolt in the Low Countries plays a fundamental part in the construction of this specific discourse, as it highlights the harsh policies of King Philip II, the Duke of Alba and the Spanish inquisition, and minutely describes the cruel behaviour of the Spanish military active in the Low Countries.⁶ The Black Legend in the Low Countries was primarily constructed by Protestant enemies of the Habsburg government.

It is the intention of this volume to bring together the more historical outlook on war and the cultural perspective. It tries to do so by also introducing other categories of texts that have often been neglected, such as the descriptive narrative sources that relate the events during the long period of conflict. From the earlier simple chronicles to the more elaborated historical works of the seventeenth century, all narrative sources are full of detailed stories about the long series of events that make up the essential body of the conflict. Many of these particular events have been completely forgotten, as only a small part of the actual stories have survived the canonization of past generations. By returning to what we might call the episodic narratives of the time, we can draw the events and the narratives that describe them as close to each other as possible.⁷

A second group of texts contributing to crossing this divide concerns the letters by the military participants, which can be used not solely to reconstruct the course of events, but also as informative narratives in themselves. They share with the chronicles and other descriptive texts an emphasis on detailed information. These letters were mostly used to inform the recipient about the actual situation of the military in the field and to influence decision making at a higher level. Many of the letters written by the military have never been published because historians have always given precedence to editing the letters of those at the top of the hierarchy, of sovereigns such as King Philip II, or of leading politicians such as the Duke of Alba or Prince William of Orange. Letters by the commanders can undoubtedly be labelled as war narratives and are moreover a direct reflection of their war experience. This understanding is related to the ideas of Leonard Smith in his famous The embattled self on the narratives of the First World War, as he explored the ‘means of transition between ‘what happened’ on the battlefield and ‘experience’ as rendered in published texts’.⁸

Besides bridging this divide between a more historical and a more cultural approach, this volume also tries to connect researchers and sources from different European cultural traditions. Within the context of the Revolt in the Low Countries, the most striking differences can be found between Spanish and Dutch historiography. During the course of the last centuries, the Dutch have created their myth of a national liberation war against a cruel ‘foreign’ oppressor, while in Spain the myth of an invincible Spanish army came into being. Both myths refer to the same military protagonists that were turned into either war criminals or military heroes. The same events are thus seen from radically contradictory perspectives, and the incidents that eventually entered the historical canons of the two cultures have been selected according to conflicting criteria and have been utilized differently to create meaning. For example, Dutch historiography tends to focus on rebel victories like the Battle of Heiligerlee in 1568 and the failed attempts of the Spanish army to conquer the cities of Leiden and Alkmaar in 1573 and 1574, while in Spain much more attention is given to the royal victory over the rebels at the Battle of Jemmingen, taking place only several weeks after Heiligerlee, and to the succesful siege of the city of Haarlem, preceding those of Alkmaar en Leiden.

These national grand narratives were not conceived at the historical moment they took place, as they are the result of a process taking several centuries. In order to deconstruct these national myths it is necessary to return to the simple episodic narratives decribing the actual events, and though, of course, always written down with a sense of purpose, these texts were not yet part of a national dominating view on society or on ‘history’. We can disentangle the construction of these grand narratives by scrutinizing their separate building blocks. Within both historiography and literary studies, descriptions with a high episodic (or anecdotal) nature have received little attention,⁹ as texts that remain too close to the facts and therefore resist theoretical analysis. Within literary studies, episodic narratives function as primitive forerunners of modern literature,¹⁰ while historiographers consider these texts as lacking sufficient distance from the events described.¹¹ As Hayden White stated with some disapproval: ‘These narratives do not conclude, they just terminate.’¹² 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.¹³ In the end, it is all about how war becomes a story.¹⁴

Spain and the Revolt in the Low Countries

While in the English language it is better known as the Dutch Revolt, the conflict is more correctly referred to as the Revolt in the Low Countries.¹⁵ Omittting the more specific term Dutch and instead using the more generic Low Countries (Lage Landen) as a synonym for the Netherlands (de Nederlanden) reveals more clearly that the history of the Revolt did not involve only the actual Kingdom of the Netherlands, but also territories that are now in Belgium, Germany, France and Luxembourg. In this sense, the Low Countries refer to the conglomerate of dominions of the Habsburgs situated between the Kingdom of France and the Holy Roman Empire, possessing some sort of rudimentary common identity and a beginning of central institutions. Though Dutch historians in particular often monopolize the debate on the Revolt as if it concerns only the creation of their national state, the conflict found its beginnings in what is now Belgium and the north of France.

At the same time, describing the Revolt as taking place within the Low Countries also makes it clear that not the whole of the country rebelled against their overlord, or against Spain, but that it merely concerned specific groups and individuals within society. Seeing it as a national revolt does not do justice to the current state of historical research on the subject, as we now consider it to have been a violent and chaotic civil war disrupting life in the Low Countries for decades, and by no means a conflict inevitably leading to the creation of a Dutch Republic of Calvinist burghers in the northern parts of the Low Countries.

Within rebel propaganda, the enemy was generally considered to be the Spanish king and Spain was seen as an occupying force, though, of course, according to dynastic principles, Philip II was the natural sovereign of these territories as heir to Charles V. This inaccurate forging of a foreign enemy led to describing all supporters of the king as being ‘Spanish’, branding them as enemies of the nation. This volume does not follow this politicized use of Spain and Spanish, and these terms here refer only to the Iberian possessions of the Habsburgs until 1580 (not including Portugal) and their inhabitants. Though Spain was not a kingdom in any official way, as it consisted of various realms and other seigneurial territories, the use of the term king of Spain is contemporary to the Revolt and can be considered shorthand for the long list of titles of the king of Castile, Aragon, and so on. In that same sense, when referring to the Spanish army in the Low Countries, this relates only to those parts of the army consisting of military that were actually Spanish, while when referring to the whole army of Philip II, terminology like royal, loyal or Habsburg army is used. Generally speaking, the Spanish element in the Habsburg army in the Low Countries was never any larger than some 10,000 men, while the whole army could count up to 60,000 men or more, mostly German and Walloon soldiers, but also people recruited from the British Isles, Italy, Portugal and even from as far as Albania.¹⁶

There exists a large body of published war narratives related to the Revolt in the Low Countries, beginning directly with the pamphlets of the period itself.¹⁷ Early on, more general narratives were also published, both in the Low Countries and Spain, like those by Emanuel van Meteren, Bernardino de Mendoza and Antonio Trillo.¹⁸ Since the nineteenth century, many unpublished war narratives have been recovered from archives and libraries, and there continues still a quiet but ongoing stream of source editions and translations until today.¹⁹

The European context of war

These early modern war narratives were often created in an international environment. Chroniclers and historians could make use of texts from other geographical areas available in Latin, but most of the early modern intellectuals were capable of also reading vernacular languages other than their own. Dutch historians like P.C. Hooft made use of sources in Spanish and Italian. It seems that, in particular, the Italian chronicles were used both in the Low Countries and Spain as an important source of information on their own conflict.

French was also an important channel of transnational communication. The chronicle by Spanish officer Bernardino de Mendoza was published first in French, before appearing in Spanish. Both the elites in Spain and the Low Countries were capable of reading French, and a large part of the nobilty of the early modern Low Countries had French as their first language. This included the most important noblemen defending the cause of Philip II, but also Prince William of Orange, born in Germany, who used French from an early age as his primary language. Important Spanish high officers like Cristóbal de Mondragón, Francisco Verdugo and Portuguese-born Gaspar de Robles were married to women from the French-speaking nobility. They therefore had a great command of this ‘national’ language of the Low Countries, and the fact they served as colonels of Walloon infantry regiments is proof of it. And although King Philip II maybe did not speak French, he was perfectly able to read it.

War narratives unmistakenly travelled across borders and across languages, and this simple fact has not been sufficiently acknowledged in historical research, partly because such a transnational enterprise requires researchers capable of reading several European languages and being knowledgeable about multiple cultural contexts. This multilingualism is not the only aspect that underscores the international character of the Revolt.²⁰ People all over Europe were kept apace about the conflict through pamphlets, chronicles, newsletters or private letters, or even by word of mouth from somebody who had recently visited the Low Countries.²¹

Furthermore, the conflict did not stop at the frontiers as armies crossed over borders with great ease. The first phase of the Revolt coincided with the French wars of religion,²² while the second part of the conflict, up to 1648, neatly coincided with the Thirty Years’ War that devastated large parts of the Holy Roman Empire, as far as Italy. War was not limited only to these long-lasting conflicts, since all over Europe dissension reigned, such as the struggles over the Portuguese crown, after 1580 and again around 1640, the wars between Spain and England, conflicts between the Irish and the English, revolts in Granada, Aragon, Catalonia and Naples, and the wars both on land and at sea against the armies and fleets of the Ottoman sultans. Spanish soldiers active during the Revolt in the Low Countries can be found involved in most of these conflicts, even travelling as far as Spanish America. Especially from the end of the sixteenth century, the conflict also spread its wings to America, Africa and Asia.

Military developments were also interconnected. The British soldiers fighting on both sides of the conflict learned about new ways of conducting war, the Italians brought with them their knowledge of fortifications, the Germans their experience in the casting of cannons, while the Spanish taught the world how different types of infantry, pikes and fire-arms could be integrated within one regiment.²³ Maybe the Dutch showed best how to organize the financing of war,²⁴ and we should not forget the Albanian cavalry that took part in the Revolt in the Low Countries and many other conflicts. It is essential to realize that the historical context of early modern warfare had very little to do with the contained national contexts of the nineteenth century, when scholars focused on the early modern period in search for their national past.²⁵

This point of departure from a national framework has led to different national historiographies on early modern warfare and has left an imprint in the way war is reflected in texts. German historians have dedicated much attention to autobiographical texts or ‘Selbstzeugnisse’, a line of research Gregory Hanlon would like to see followed in a more systematic way, as he states in the conclusion of his contribution to this volume.²⁶ Within the Italian context, a great deal of attention has been given to the idea of the perfect soldier, while recent studies in France have explored the specific aspect of fear in texts from the French religious wars, thereby linking with recent developments in the history of emotions.²⁷ Spanish historians have focused on military treatises and the image of the war in Golden Age Spanish theatre, and recently Miguel Martínez published a monograph on soldiers’ writings where he analyses the works by the Spanish military as a separate category of writing.²⁸

Early modern war narratives and the modern world

Though historians tend to present their research as new and innovative, this is almost never the case. Such a reputed historian as the Belgian Léon van der Essen started publishing his works on the Revolt already well before the Second World War. However, it was not until the war had ended that the Spanish army would receive his full scientific attention. Van der Essen himself was a member of the Belgian war crimes committee functioning after the war, and his strong interest in understanding violence during the Revolt was linked to his own experiences, as he was trying to grasp the essence and mechanisms of violence.²⁹ In this sense, the way historians envision and explain wars is directly related to their own life experiences. That has also been the case for Geoffrey Parker, who was greatly influenced by the Vietnam War when working on the logistics of the Spanish army during the Revolt. The same holds for the author of this introduction, of course, in a much humbler way, whose interest in the history of war narratives started with the Iraq War and the subsequent religious conflicts in the Middle East. How are the stories of international wars told on different sides and in different media, and how did the mixture of political and religious interests create an almost inextricable knot? Does the civil war taking place in Syria in the twenty-first century differ that much from the civil war in the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries?

Dominant national narratives have lost at least part of their pre-eminent role in recent years. As globalization makes it less feasible to continue to interpret the world solely from the perspective of modern western nation states, our contemporary world increasingly resembles the early modern period. The international developments since 2011 are not surprising to those who have studied the history of a period that we have come to call the era of the religious wars: wars that always possessed a religious element, but that always involved other explanatory factors as well, including social, economic, or political causes.

Indeed, there does not exist a fundamental difference between war narratives from the early modern period and those of the modern, or contemporary, world, if we define the latter as starting somewhere at the end of the eighteenth century.³⁰ At least, no intrinsic differences that would make it impossible to fruitfully compare texts from the two periods, as Mondini and Rospocher have already shown. Although they acknowledge the fact that war narratives can be critical on warfare, they mostly see the ‘discourse of war’ as an ongoing tradition to legitimize war and its protagonists. In the early modern period, such legitimization involved the image of the Christian knight or the genius of the military commander. This tradition continued well into the nineteenth century. According to Mondini and Rospocher, around the First World War authors tried to reconcile this heroic tradition with the harsh realities of warfare in the trenches.³¹ Of course, texts from the modern period differ in character and scale, but as Judith Pollmann has noted when writing on the history of memory in Europe, the change has been gradual, and old forms continued to coexist side by side with new forms of memory.³² The same holds true for war narratives.

There are, of course, social biases that Pollmann and Kuijpers refer to when speaking about early modern memory culture, and the problem of the much less articulated self during this period. These elements also influenced the character of war narratives: In their words: ‘Literacy was limited in early modern Europe and the writing of memoirs not a widespread activity. The social biases in early modern sources are thus certainly more pronounced than in contemporary evidence.’ Most war narratives are, as is the case for memoirs, written by the upper strata of society in general, and of those of the army in particular. Pollmann and Kuijpers also further expand on the matter of the less articulated self: ‘The reflective introspection that characterizes so many modern so-called ego-documents is rare in the early modern diaries of non-literary authors. […] Early modern people were not inclined to think of their selves as subjects to change beyond the expected stages of growing and aging’.³³

Yuval Harari defended in 2008 a clear difference between early modern and modern battlefield descriptions, mostly based on the military memoirs he had been using for his research.³⁴ According to Harari, military authors from the early modern period wrote in order to describe war as an honourable way of life, as an instrument for personal advancement, or as an instrument for achieving collective aims. The modern war experience was, on the other hand, based on the idea of flesh-witnessing and on the idea that war changed people, what Harari calls battlefield revelations. This change could be for the better (to become a real man; to understand life) or for worse (as a traumatic experience). War experience changed the modern man, while suggesting the early modern man came out of a battle unchanged. Harari decided to concentrate his book on this change, but he is not very occupied with the why, although he does address it briefly: in essence he considers it as a change from a ‘domination of the mind over the body’ during the early modern period to ‘a domination of body over mind’. Fundamental changes in society had changed the way war was ‘lived’. To give an example from his book: ‘Fear and cold in themselves were perhaps identical in 1450 and 1865. Yet the attention they received was quite different, and hence the lived experience of fear and cold was probably different in 1450 than it was in 1865.’³⁵ This is, of course, true, but it does not necessarily imply a rupture between early modern and modern, as it can also be considered a gradual development over time.

When working with texts, we have to be aware of existing textual and rhetorical conventions that greatly influenced the character and purpose of the texts that have come down to us from the early modern period. For example, the letters from late-sixteenth-century Leiden merchant Daniël van der Meulen and his family clearly show the difference in letter-writing culture between men and women. Women almost continuously lament sickness and death, while men seem to mention family matters much more from a distance, as if they hardly have any personal feelings at all. If we did not have the letters by the women of the family at our disposal, we could think early modern Netherlanders did not have feelings for their immediate kin.³⁶

Spanish military commander Julián Romero was not a specialist in hiding his feelings. Still, you have to look very closely at his letters in order to discover the reflection of his personal experiences, for example when he writes about the loss of his son in the war, a son of whom he had great expectations. At that moment, the harsh and experienced commander did change as a person.³⁷ His personal ‘revelation’ did not inspire him to write an emotional poem or a personal novel, but we can clearly appreciate a personal transformation from the few emotional words he permitted himself in his professional letter.

Rhetorical writing conventions persist, even if we seem to be less aware of them. When in a sports programme the goal scorer is asked about his performance during the match, he will immediately start by stating his goals were the result of good teamwork, in the form of a ‘captatio benevolentiae’. As soon as the cameras are gone, it is highly probable that he will boast and brag about his goals with all his friends. In the case of Julián Romero again, we know he loved to brag about his exploits in personal conversations, as he did in Brussels when he told the story of the heroic victory over the rebels at Jemmingen, or when he went for a walk on the quay of Palermo with a French nobleman. This commander undoubtedly possessed an articulated self.

Early modern military were without a doubt aware of the fact that war changed people. A telling example is the wonderful – and often quoted – statement by Spanish commander Francisco de Valdés on how the moment a man picked up a pike, he stopped being a Christian. You did not even need a battlefield experience. Just pick up a pike and you became a different person. An analysis of the letters of this commander also demonstrates that the war in the Low Countries actually changed his vision of the conflict. In the beginning he was completely neutral as a professional soldier engaged in doing his job in a faraway country, but gradually we perceive his growing awareness of the civil war going on around him, including a positive outlook on most of the good Catholic inhabitants of the country, sharply contrasted by his growing hatred for the small group of stubborn and incorrigible rebels. However, in the end, his disappointment about the development of the war made him state that it would be better to flood most of the country in order to finally stop the Revolt.³⁸ He shifted from a distant position to an involved one, finally ending up with a feeling of rejection and disappointment.

War narratives in practice

This volume offers a varied sampling of methodologies for the study of war narratives, though the analysis of episodic narratives is clearly one of the dominating methods. Differences in analysis also occur as a result of the thirteen authors representing seven different nationalities, and using narrative sources in the following seven languages: Dutch, French, Spanish, Italian, Latin, German and English. The contributions vary between the very detailed analysis of episodic narratives of one particular event, one individual, or one specific source, and the much broader scope of Gregory Hanlon’s contribution, as he searches for universal elements in war narratives through time.

In the opening chapter, Mia Rodriguez-Salgado connects the political world of the Habsburg Empire to the circulation of episodic narratives. She does so by focusing on the way texts on the Revolt in the Low Countries were used throughout the diplomatic network of the king. The narratives were used to inform on, and confirm, news from the Low Countries in various ways, but at the same time there could have been political strategies behind this circulation. Ambassadors, secretaries, and other informers within Philip II’s information network, all could adopt their own information policy, deciding what, how and with whom information was shared. Her contribution also shows how the king’s representative in Venice, Diego Guzmán de Silva, formed an essential nodal point in the communication between Philip’s court and the Low Countries.

Leonor Álvarez Francés uses the example of Spanish commander Francisco de Valdés, leading the siege of Leiden in 1573–74, as a way to compare war narratives in Spanish and Dutch chronicles. In her contribution she shows how the main characters of the story were fabricated in order to support the underlying perceptions of the chroniclers. The comparison leads to a surprising conclusion. The differences are not so much between Spanish and Dutch narratives, but depend on the overall vision the chroniclers want to offer. Valdés and his men are shown in a negative way by Dutch historians who want to emphasize the positive qualities of the Leiden defenders, while those that do not stress local unity do not show such a negative vision on the Spanish enemy either. The same holds true for Spanish authors. Those who wish to convey a very positive picture of the Spanish let their hero Valdés fight against a negatively described enemy, while a Spanish text more neutral on the enemy can even offer a negative image of the Spanish commander. As in imagology, the image of the other is the reflection of one’s own self: auto-image and hetero-image are closely interconnected.³⁹

In ‘The year of the Furies’ Beatriz Santiago Belmonte looks at one of the most chaotic years of the Revolt. In March 1576, the death of Governor-General Luis de Requesens created a power vacuum that would worsen during the following months, leading up to the infamous Sack of Antwerp on 4 November the same year. Santiago Belmonte suggests opening up the discussion on the Sack of Antwerp by looking at hitherto understudied sources: the letters of the Spanish commanders playing a prominent role in the events. They saw things differently, but they also saw different things. The power vacuum created a growing disunity between the Spanish commanders and the members of the Council of State that had officially received full authority. Political and military affairs became divided for the first time since the outbreak of the Revolt. The case of the almost forgotten previous Sack of Maastricht on 20 October 1576 moreover enables the author to put the events in Antwerp into a broader historical perspective.

Cees Reijner’s chapter deals with the early modern Italian historiography on the Revolt, mainly focusing on the reasons Italian authors were interested in the events taking place in the Low Countries. In his contribution to this volume the author centres his attention on the Sack of Antwerp in 1576, one of the central episodes of violence during the first phase of the Revolt in the Low Countries. Though most Italian historians supported Spanish policy, several Italians wrote more critically about these events. While it was a way of criticizing Spanish dominance within the Italian peninsula, the Sack of Antwerp could also be used to create a clear-cut opposition between the behaviour of Spanish and Italian military in the Low Countries. The cruelty of the Spanish soldiers could be contrasted with an image of superior and virtuous Italians fighting in the same war and on the same side. As such, these texts could be used to support an Italian patriotic language that could be found, for example, at the Medici court in Florence.

Miguel Martínez is the author of a recent monograph on the writings of Spanish military during the early modern period, conceptualized as a ‘soldiers’ republic of letters’.⁴⁰ His contribution focuses on a long epic poem written by Cristóbal Rodríguez Alva, who had been active in the military both in Italy and in the Low Countries. He uses this unknown manuscript text, consisting of more than 18,000 verses, to analyse the language of the mutineers, as the author of the poem was an eyewitness and a participant in mutinies in the Low Countries. Rodríguez Alva offers insight into the life of the common soldier and is therefore a rare exception, as most texts from the early modern period reflect the viewpoint of the social elite. It is a different war narrative that shows the realitites of war instead of embellishing it, and where common soldiers rather than high commanders are the heroes.

Raymond Fagel has collected narrative fragments on Spanish defectors to the rebel side during the Revolt in the Low Countries. His contribution not only shows the importance of this rather unknown phenomenon, but also addresses the different ways of describing these side-changers. Especially interesting is the fact that though Spanish chronicler and military man Alonso Vázquez criticizes all defectors, he does find positive words for some of them in his individual biographical descriptions. One of them, a mulatto soldier, decided to change sides after being the victim of racist comments from within his own army unit. The fact that rebel propaganda produced a strong and lasting image of all Spaniards as cruel liars did not prevent the presence of Spaniards within the rebel army.

In his contribution, Werner Thomas returns once more to the siege of Ostend and provides a very precise analysis of the siege in successive published sources.⁴¹ ‘How a defeat became a victory’ demonstrates how the facts of the siege could be manipulated in printed media in order to change the outcome of the events. Texts were able to convert a defeat into a victory, and in this case it was the translation of a text that changed the meaning of the original narrative. Translations are often taken for granted by historians, but Werner Thomas proves it is worth analysing how the meaning of texts could be changed in the process, and how the translation was presented to the new public.⁴² This new example can now be placed next to the well-studied Dutch translations of Bartolomé de Las Casas’s Brevíssima relación, where the addition of engravings and descriptions highlighting cruel actions turned the book of the critical Spanish monk into an open attack on all Spaniards.⁴³

Jasper van der Steen analyses the development of episodic war narratives produced in the