Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, Duke of Alba

May 23, 1568 · 1,600 total casualties

Conventionally the opening battle of the Eighty Years' War, and a false dawn. Heiligerlee raised hopes of a general rising that never came; within two months Alba had annihilated the same army at Jemmingen and the rebellion of 1568 was over. The date is still Dutch national memory — the monastery ruin marks where the war began.

July 21, 1568 · 7,000 total casualties

Jemmingen demonstrated the plain truth that governed the next eighty years: in open field battle, the Spanish tercios were the finest infantry in the world and the Dutch could not beat them. Every subsequent Dutch strategy — flooding the land, fortifying the cities, fighting from behind water — was an answer to this day. Alba had crushed the revolt in a single summer, and it made him overconfident.

April 1, 1572 · 40 total casualties

The improvised seizure of an insignificant town restarted a war that Alba had won four years earlier. Brielle gave the revolt a foothold on Dutch soil, and within weeks town after town in Holland and Zeeland declared for Orange. The Dutch still say it: *Op 1 april verloor Alva zijn bril* — on the first of April, Alba lost his spectacles, a pun on Brielle. The revolt's decisive moment was a joke about eyewear.

December 1572 – July 1573 · 14,000 total casualties

A Spanish victory that cost more than it was worth, in men, in time, and above all in credibility. After Naarden and Haarlem, no Dutch town believed a Spanish promise of quarter again — which meant every subsequent siege was fought to the last, and the Spanish had to pay full price for every wall in the Netherlands. Terror had been Alba's instrument; here it began working against him.