Luciana Pellegrino

November 4, 1576. Spanish troops sacked the richest city in northern Europe and killed at least 7,000 people in it over three days. They were not under orders. They were on strike. The Spanish Fury is the single worst atrocity of the Dutch Revolt and the reason it happened is almost entirely financial. Philip II of Spain had declared bankruptcy. His bankers stopped processing his transactions until a settlement could be reached, and that meant the pay for the Army of Flanders stopped. And you could not simply wire money to Flanders in 1576. Letters of exchange needed solvent bankers, so when the credit froze, the wages had to go physically, as silver, by sea or by road, slowly and expensively and at risk. In 1568 the English had seized 400,000 florins meant for those troops. So you had the best infantry in Europe, veterans of years of brutal fighting against the Dutch rebels, sitting unpaid in a foreign country. Spanish armies of this period had a recognised procedure for that situation. The men would mutiny formally, elect a leader called the Eletto, and march off as a body to extract what they were owed. They had already sacked Zierikzee and Aalst that way. The political situation made it worse. Holland and Zeeland were in rebel hands, while the other fifteen provinces were still loyal to Spain. Those loyal provinces were so fed up with the unpaid Spanish troops wandering around robbing them that they were working through the States-General to have the mercenaries removed entirely. Which the troops knew. If they were going to be sent home, they wanted paying first. And then Sancho d'Avila, the Spanish commander of the citadel of Antwerp, proposed the target. Antwerp was the wealthiest commercial city in northern Europe, the centre of the cloth trade and international finance, with a Spanish-held fortress sitting right against it. D'Avila first tried to get Count Otto van Eberstein, who commanded the German garrison in the city, to simply hand it over. Eberstein refused and warned the governor, Champagny, and they started improvising defences. On November 3 Champagny let in 6,000 Walloon troops under Charles Philippe de Croÿ, who nobody entirely trusted. About 10,000 civilians turned out to throw up earthworks facing the citadel. Meanwhile mutinous Spanish units from Aalst, Lier, Breda and Maastricht were converging on the city. They attacked at eleven in the morning on November 4. The civilian defences lasted no time at all against veteran Spanish infantry. Accounts differ on the Walloons, who either ran or joined in the looting. The Germans and the townspeople fought and were overwhelmed. Eberstein drowned in the Scheldt trying to get away. Then three days of pillage. At least 7,000 people killed. An English eyewitness, the poet George Gascoigne, who was actually in the city, estimated 17,000, and the range given in modern accounts runs from 7,000 to 18,000. Hundreds of buildings burned, including a large part of the commercial district and the new town hall. The economic damage was permanent. The Antwerp cloth market was destroyed. English merchants stopped coming, and by 1582 English trade with the city had ended entirely. The city's Jewish community was hit especially hard. Antwerp never recovered its position. The merchants, the bankers and the skilled trades that survived started leaving, and a lot of them went north. The rise of Amsterdam as the commercial capital of Europe starts here and accelerates after the Spanish retook Antwerp properly in 1585 and the Dutch closed the Scheldt to shipping. And the political consequence was immediate and total. Four days later, on November 8, the States-General signed the Pacification of Ghent. It united the rebel provinces with the loyal ones, demanded the removal of every Spanish soldier from the Netherlands, and called a halt to the persecution of heretics. Think about what that means. Fifteen provinces that had stayed loyal to the King of Spain through eight years of revolt signed a common agreement with the rebels within a week, because the King's own army had just massacred a Catholic city for its back pay. The Fury made the revolt general. It turned Dutch Catholics against Spanish rule, it wrecked Philip's reputation across Europe, and it fed the propaganda tradition that became the Black Legend. An army that had never lost a serious battle in the Netherlands handed its enemies their best recruiting argument, because a bank in Genoa stopped honouring the King's paper.