Duke of Alba
The Duke of Alba was the best general of Charles V and Philip II, governed the Netherlands for six years with a tribunal the country called the Council of Blood, and, disgraced and seventy-three, conquered Portugal in a summer. He was born in 1507 into the greatest military house in Castile, was at the siege of Fuenterrabía at sixteen, and commanded the emperor's army at Mühlberg in 1547, where the Protestant princes of Germany were broken in an afternoon. He was Philip's viceroy of Naples, beat the pope's French allies in 1557, and negotiated the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis. In 1567, after the image-breaking and the first revolt in the Netherlands, Philip sent him from Italy with ten thousand Spanish veterans along the road the world learned to call the Spanish Road, to punish and to pay for the punishment. He arrested the counts Egmont and Horne, who had thought themselves loyal, set up the Council of Troubles that condemned over a thousand people and took the estates of William of Orange, beheaded Egmont and Horne in the square at Brussels in June 1568. He put a statue of himself cast from captured guns in the citadel of Antwerp. His tenth-penny tax on every sale did what the executions had not and turned the merchants against Spain. When Holland rose in 1572 he made examples: Mechelen was sacked, the garrison of Zutphen drowned, every man in Naarden killed, and Haarlem, after a seven-month siege, had its garrison executed. Alkmaar held, and the failure and the cost got him recalled in 1573. Philip banished him from court in 1579 for letting his son marry against the king's wishes, and recalled him in 1580 because there was no one else to take Portugal. He crossed the frontier in June, beat the pretender Dom António at Alcântara outside Lisbon in August, let his men sack the suburbs, and gave Philip his third crown. He died at Lisbon in December 1582. In the Netherlands he is the reason the war lasted eighty years.
- Lived: 1507 CE – 1582 CE
- Nationality: Spanish
- Roles: general, governor
