Book Review: Los Ultimos Tercios. El Ejercito de Carlos II by Davide Maffi

Abstract

The supposedly decrepit condition of Spain under the last Habsburg, Carlos II (1665-1700) is among the most entrenched of historical commonplaces: apparently unable to defend itself, Spain only survived because others intervened to save it from Louis XIV until its defensive capability was transformed by the new Bourbon dynasty in the eighteenth century. Evidence for this view is found, inter alia in the performance of Spain’s armies. In the sixteenth century Spanish hegemony had rested on its distinctive tercios, but all had come to grief at Rocroi in 1643 in the reign of Carlos II’s father, Philip IV. Worse was to follow under Carlos, with defeats in Flanders, in Italy, and in Spain itself, where in 1697 Louis XIV’s forces captured Barcelona. In recent decades, however, revisionist historians – including Luis Ribot, Antonio Rodriguez Hernandez and Davide Maffi – have exploited the extensive source materials in the Guerra Antigua series at Simancas to question the received opinion on Spain’s military performance in the last third of the seventeenth century. In the book under review Maffi uses this work to provide a synthesis which challenges virtually every aspect of a ‘black legend’ about Spain’s armies in this period. Chapter 1 provides a narrative of the performance of Spain’s armies from the War of Devolution (1667–1668) to the Nine Years War (1688– 1697). This broadly chronological and often detailed survey underpins the more analytical chapters which follow and allows Maffi to advance some preliminary revisionist claims regarding the participation in those conflicts of the Spanish armies – and of the Dutch, English, French and Imperial armies. While Spanish intervention was crucial on occasion, the broader implication is clear: the importance of the Spanish contribution to the overall success of the allies on many fronts in confronting and restraining Louis XIV before 1700. Chapter 2 begins with an invaluable discussion of the character of European warfare in the period – one which all interested in that broad topic will find useful – in part in order to refute those who see Spanish avoidance of battle as indicative of some fundamental lack of martial spirit. Not so, says Maffi, it was driven by a prudent wish to conserve resources which informed the mindset as well of Austrian, Dutch, English and French commanders. Sieges and ‘little war’ were what war was about. Book Reviews