The Eighty Years' War

8,000 dead

The Spanish Fury was not ordered by anyone. Spain defaulted in 1575, the tercios went unpaid, and Europe's finest infantry sacked Europe's richest city to collect their own wages. It killed some 8,000 people, drove the loyal Catholic provinces into revolt, and destroyed Antwerp — whose merchants fled north and built Amsterdam's Golden Age.

18,600 dead

Alba's terror was meant to make surrender attractive. After Naarden's townsmen were killed in a church and Haarlem's garrison was executed despite agreed terms, no Dutch town ever trusted a Spanish promise again — which meant every town had to be stormed, and the Army of Flanders could not afford that. The cruelty was strategically self-defeating, and it cost Spain the war it had already won in 1568.

100,000 dead

Ostend alone accounts for roughly a sixth of all the war's fighting deaths: three years and two months, the longest siege in European history, which contemporaries called 'the long carnival of death'. Spain won it and lost the war doing it — while Spinola spent three years and an army on a heap of sand, Maurice took the towns that mattered.

400,000 dead

Eighty years of war killed perhaps 600,000 people in total, and the figures here are necessarily rough — this was a war of sieges, disease, and attrition across three generations, and army losses to typhus, dysentery, and desertion dwarfed battlefield deaths on both sides. The Army of Flanders bled out slowly rather than dramatically.

20,000,000 dead

The arithmetic that decides this war: a republic of about 1.5 million people fought the largest empire on earth for eighty years and won outright. It could do it because it was richer per head, borrowed at a fraction of Spain's interest rate, and paid its soldiers — while Spain, ruling twenty million Europeans and two continents, declared bankruptcy seven times.