The Spanish Way. Four and a half centuries of logistical prowess

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The problem was as old as the outbreak of the revolt itself. In his Commentaries on what happened in the Wars of the Netherlands from to , the soldier and diplomat Bernardino de Mendoza raises the paths that were discussed in for a possible trip by King Philip II to Flanders that never occurred. would come to fruition: “one for the ocean sea of ​​Westeros; and the other for Italy and Germany; and the third from Italy through Savoy, and Burgundy and Lorraine.” The second land route formed, a year later, what historiography calls the “Spanish Way” and which, from to the beginning of the s, allowed the Spanish Monarchy to wage its war against the Dutch rebels.

The maintenance of the Spanish Way posed incessant diplomatic and logistical challenges for the Austrians. The original route had its starting point in Genoa, an allied republic from which preeminent men in the service of the Habsburgs came, such as Admiral Andrea Doria and one of the most prominent commanders of the Army of Flanders, Ambrosio Spínola . It then linked with Milanese and from there it ran through the B2B Email List duchy of Savoy and the Swiss cantons to a possession of the Spanish Crown, Franche-Comté, and then crossed the duchy of Lorraine to Luxembourg, already in the Netherlands. Numerous enemies threatened the route: the Kingdom of France, whose foreign policy had the express objective of cutting off the Spanish Way; the Protestant Swiss cantons, especially Geneva; and the Rhine Palatinate – a Protestant state of the Holy Empire whose conquest by Spanish troops between and responded to the Hispanic desire to secure the route. At the beginning of the th century , France blocked the original route , leading to an alternative route that ran through Valtellina and Tyrol to Alsace, and from there to Luxembourg. This route remained in force until the Swedish invasion of the area in , during the Thirty Years' War .



On a logistical scale, the challenge translated into the need to guarantee the supply of several thousand men for periods ranging from days to two months, over hundreds of kilometers, many of which passed through rugged mountainous regions. -the Alps-. “The mountain ranges on the sides that make up this valley – wrote Bernardino de Mendoza about the Isère valley, in Savoy – are of great height, and so high that it almost tires the eyes to look at them.” Not in vain, the instructions sent from the Court to the Duke of Albuquerque – governor of Milan – in , on the eve of the inaugural trip of the Duke of Alba's army to the Netherlands, warned him: “It will also be advisable for these people to take with them spenders, to make esplanades and other things that are offered along the way, especially for the mountains.