Dynasty and Piety. Archduke Albert (1598–1621) and Habsburg Political Culture in an Age of Religious Wars by Luc Duerloo (review)

In Dynasty and Piety, Luc Duerloo offers a comprehensive survey of the Habsburgs’ international relations with their allies and rivals during the early-seventeenth century centered on the court of Brussels, with Archduke Albert as the main protagonist of the book. His narrative begins with the archduke’s education and career prior to his appointment as governor general of the Netherlands and further analyzes the relationship between Brussels and Madrid, the conflict with the Dutch Republic, the Treaty of London, the Twelve Years’ Truce, the succession of Rudolf II, the two crises of Jülich, the succession of Philip III in the Netherlands, and the first years of the Thirty Years’ War. With Albert as the focus during the examination of these topics, he succeeds in making complicated political situations understandable, although he sometimes gives Albert too much credit for political and military developments in Habsburg Europe.

From the beginning it is clear that Duerloo attaches more importance to the events in central and northern Europe. When describing the relationship between Brussels and the German states, including the imperial court, he draws on a series of hitherto unknown primary sources kept in Belgian and Austrian archives. The “Spanish” part of the story, including relations with France, England, and the Republic, is on the one hand based on sometimes interesting diplomatic accounts written by French, English, Dutch, and Italian ambassadors (although not all of them well informed, as Imran Uddin’s analysis of William Trumbull’s embassy in Brussels has shown), and on the other hand, curiously enough, on very superficial summaries from the Correspondance de la Cour d’Espagne, which hardly can fully replace the original documents.

Partly as a result of this, Duerloo’s book has two faces. The part on the first half of the archducal reign, when the relation with Madrid is of great importance (roughly corresponding to the first 200 pages), is a rather classic account with few new insights that confirms the existing interpretation that Madrid greatly influenced archducal politics (although Duerloo thinks otherwise). The part on the relations with the Holy Roman Empire and the crises in Jülich, Bohemia, and the Palatinate (the next 300 pages) is highly innovative and offers, maybe for the first time, a coherent and comprehensible account of European politics at the eve of the Thirty Years’ War. It also demonstrates the impact of (Austrian) Habsburg family affairs on international events at the time. Most of this reviewer’s remarks are related to topics discussed in the first part.

Writing a book of this scale is a time-consuming process. It took the author more than a decade. The main problem with this kind of Herculean task is to keep up with recent research and to integrate new insights that are published after parts of the text have been written. Duerloo’s bibliography shows important gaps: Tim Piceu’s study on freebooters and war contributions in the County of Flanders, which stresses the important role of informal war up to 1607; the essays included in Bernardo García’s exhibition catalog on the Twelve Years’ Truce, which place the Act of Cession as well as the Twelve Years’ Truce in the tradition of Habsburg pacification strategies in the Netherlands; the book edited by Cordula Van Wyhe on Isabella and female sovereignty in the Brussels court; and the essays published by René Vermeir and colleagues on agents connecting Spain and the Low Countries in the early-modern age. Other studies are listed in the bibliography, but do not seem to have been consulted. This is the case with most of Alicia Esteban’s work on the Act of Cession and its reversal in 1621.

As a consequence, several of the author’s statements seem to be based on partial evidence. For example, Duerloo argues that Albert sought...