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Call for papers #37

Kamen, Henry. The Duke of Alba. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2004. x + 204 p. 10 illustrations.

Henry Kamen's The Duke of Alba profiles the most prominent Spanish military commander of the early modern era, though Kamen's ambitions extend beyond recounting the biography of this controversial figure. Celebrated by Spanish contemporaries for his courage and stoicism, reviled by the Dutch for his ruthlessness and brutality, Alba has similarly polarized the opinions of modern historians in keeping with their views of the Spanish Empire as a whole. Even though the Duke of Alba is a relatively well-studied figure, receiving biographical treatment as recently as William Maltby's Alba (1983), Kamen brings a fresh perspective and a host of fresh details to this impressive study. Rejecting the concept of empire that underlay previous assessments, Kamen revises our understanding of both the duke and his importance in the Habsburg period.
In its approach to the military history of Spain, this work is cut from the same cloth as Kamen's recent Empire: How Spain Became a World Power, 1492-1763 (2003). As in his broader study of the conglomeration of territories known as the Spanish monarchy, Kamen takes pains in The Duke of Alba to underscore the contributions of foreigners to campaigns traditionally regarded as "Spanish." At Charles V's famous victory at Mühlberg in 1547, for example, Spanish soldiers represented only a small fraction of the imperial army, which included Germans, Italians, and Netherlanders. Though this victory brought distinction to Alba, Kamen argues that "his role in it appears to have been no greater than that of the other commanders."(33) Among the German generals and Italian admirals in the royal forces, the duke stood out as the scion of the eminent Alvarez de Toledo clan.
The relative paucity of Castilians among sixteenth-century commanders could work to Alba's advantage, as when Philip II sent him to preserve the peace and repress heresy in the Netherlands in 1567. This six-year assignment cemented Alba's reputation for bloodthirstiness, and the evidence for this view is on full display here: Kamen details the 1568 execution of eighteen rebel nobles in the market square of Brussels, as well as the duke's violent reprisals against disobedient Flemish towns and mutinous Spanish soldiers alike. This biography balances these events, however, against the political and diplomatic forces beyond Alba's control. Spain was not officially at war with the Netherlands when he arrived, and Philip II's failure to carry out his own planned visit placed Alba in a difficult position, first as general and then as governor. The king did not provide the duke with sufficient funds for his objectives, and Alba's attempts to collect taxes in the Netherlands turned the Flemish people against him.
After Philip II recalled Alba in 1573 out of dissatisfaction with his policies, "For the first - and by no means the last - time in European history, a country's leading general was forced to defend himself against the politicians." (127) Kamen describes Alba more as a soldier than a politician and criticizes as overdrawn the concept of a rivalry between the federalist Eboli and hawkish Alba factions at court. Alba did want to export the Inquisition to the Netherlands, and he saw book burnings, confiscations, and war as preferable to the ruin of religion. But he frequently disagreed with presumptive allies such as Cardinal Granvelle, and his ultimate loyalties lay with his king and his family rather than with any ideological position.
The duke's devotion to his family could place a strain on his relationship with the king. The arrival of his son in 1568 represented a crucial moment during Alba's tenure in the Netherlands, since the aging and increasingly bedridden duke turned his field operations over to Fadrique. The duke's son executed his policy of selective brutality in Mechelen and Naarden, massacring civilian populations to dissuade resistance elsewhere. These unpopular actions drew the anger of Philip II, and Fadrique's multiple marriages ultimately led the disapproving king to banish Alba and his son from the court in 1578.
In Kamen's hands the career of Alba unfolds as a portrait of the age, bridging the gap between the reigns of Charles V and Philip II. Exhaustively researched, this study contains details that may come as a surprise even to students of the period, such as Alba's decision to wage a wintertime battle against the Sea Beggars by training Spanish soldiers to fight on ice skates. Through a host of documents, Kamen seeks to rescue Alba from his first demise, in the form of the Black Legend, as well as from his "second death," his celebration as a Castilian war hero by nineteenth-century Spanish historians. (170) The Duke of Alba defies these characterizations and the xenophobic tendencies behind them, revealing rather a hard-nosed soldier who struggled to identify clear military objectives amid an ill-defined assignment in the service of the king.

Ben Ehlers
University of Georgia