page_title: Eighty Years' War (1566–1609)
section_title: Dutch Army reforms
hierarchical_section_title: Eighty Years' War (1566–1609) / The Dutch Republic resurges (1588–1609) / Dutch Army reforms
caption_attribution_description: Nederlands: Veroveringe van ´t kasteel van Breda door soldaaten, in een turfschip verborgen, Ao 1590
context_page_description: In Dutch and English historiography the Dutch struggle for independence from the Spanish Crown in the 16th and 17th century was long known as the Eighty Years' War. More recently, the initial part of this period has become known as the Dutch Revolt. This concept covers the period between the initial insurrection of Netherlandish Calvinists against the regime of the Governor of the Habsburg Netherlands, Margaret of Parma, in 1566, and the conclusion of the so-called Twelve Years' Truce in 1609 between the Spanish Crown and the Dutch Republic. The historiography of this period covers both political and diplomatic developments, and events in military history. But the period of the Truce, and the military events that followed after the Truce had ended and the war was resumed, until the conclusion of the Peace of Münster in 1648, still form one continuous whole with the Dutch Revolt, and this continuous narrative, spanning the period 1566–1648, is still known as the Eighty Years' War.
context_section_description: Henry IV of France's succession to the French throne in 1589 occasioned a new civil war in France, in which Philip soon intervened on the Catholic side. He ordered Parma to use the Army of Flanders for this intervention and this put Parma in the unenviable position of having to fight a two-front war. There was at first little to fear from the Dutch, and he had taken the added precaution of heavily fortifying a number of the cities in Brabant and the north-eastern Netherlands he had recently acquired, so he could withdraw his main army to the French border with some confidence. However, this offered the Dutch a respite from his relentless pressure that they soon put to good use. Under the two stadtholders, Maurice and William Louis, the Dutch States Army was in a short time thoroughly reformed from an ill-disciplined, ill-paid rabble of mercenary companies from all over Protestant Europe, to a well-disciplined, well-paid professional army, with many soldiers, skilled in the use of modern fire-arms, like arquebuses, and soon the more modern muskets. The use of these fire-arms required tactical innovations like the counter-march of files of musketeers to enable rapid volley fire by ranks; such complicated manoevres had to be instilled by constant drilling. As part of their army reform the stadtholders therefore made extensive use of military manuals, often inspired by classical examples of Roman infantry tactics, such as the ones edited by Justus Lipsius in De Militia Romana of 1595. Jacob de Gheyn II later published an elaborately illustrated example of such a manual under the auspices of Maurice, but there were others. These reforms were in the 17th century emulated by other European armies, like the Swedish army of Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. But the Dutch army developed them first.
  Besides these organisational and tactical reforms, the two stadtholders also developed a new approach to siege warfare. They appreciated the peculiar difficulties of the terrain for this type of warfare in most of the Netherlands, which necessitated much labour for the digging of investments. Previously, many soldiers disdained the manual work required and armies usually press-ganged hapless peasants. Maurice, however, required his soldiers to do the digging, which caused an appreciable improvement in the quality of the work. Maurice also assembled an impressive train of siege artillery, much larger than armies of the time usually had available, which enabled him to systematically pulverise enemy fortresses. He was to put this to good use, when the Republic went on the offensive in 1591.
  Already in 1590 Breda was recaptured with a ruse from which having been aided considerably by an English army under Sir Francis Vere and Maurice used his much enlarged army with newly developed transportation methods using rivercraft, to sweep the IJssel-river valley, capturing Zutphen and Deventer; then invade the Ommelanden in Groningen, capturing all Spanish forts and defeated Parma during the Siege of Knodsenburg. He ended the campaign with the conquest of Hulst in Flanders and then Nijmegen in Gelderland. In one fell swoop this transformed the eastern part of the Netherlands, which had hitherto been in Parma's hands. The next year Maurice joined his cousin William Louis in the siege of Steenwijk, pounding that strongly defended fortress with 50 artillery pieces, that fired 29,000 shot. The city surrendered after 44 days. During the same campaign year the formidable fortress of Coevorden was also reduced; it surrendered after a relentless bombardment of six weeks. Drenthe was now brought under control of the States-General.
  Despite the fact that Spanish control of the northeastern Netherland now hung by a thread, Holland insisted that first Geertruidenberg would be captured, which happened after an epic textbook siege, which even the great ladies of The Hague treated as a tourist attraction, in June 1593. Only the next year the stadtholders concentrated their attention on the northeast again, where meanwhile the particularist forces in Friesland, led by 
caption: Capture of Breda in 1590 by use of a Peat boat – by Jan Luyken
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