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The Spanish Road was a military road and trade route linking Habsburg Spain territories in Flanders with those in Italy. It was in use from approximately 1567 to 1648.
The Road was created to support the Spanish war effort in the Eighty Years' War against the Dutch Republic. Although sending reinforcements by sea directly from Spain was much quicker, Spanish vessels sailing up the English Channel were subject to attacks by the increasingly dominant Dutch navy. It was therefore safer to assemble troops and supplies in Northern Italy, then march them overland along the length of the Road.
Between 1567 and 1620, over 123,000 men were transported using this overland route, compared to only 17,600 by sea. The Road was eventually severed when France joined the Thirty Years' War in 1635 on the Dutch side.
However, following defeat in the Franco-Savoyard War (1600–1601), the Treaty of Lyon (1601) forced Savoy to cede its two northernmost provinces, Bugey and Bresse, to France. This meant significant parts of the Road were now controlled by a hostile party, blocking Spanish troop movements using this route. Seeking an alternative path, they backed an attempt by Savoy in December 1602 to conquer Geneva, which bordered Savoy and Franche-Comté. This would have enabled Spanish troops to bypass French territories, but the attack failed, a victory still celebrated in the annual l'Escalade festival.
The alternative was to march northeast from Milan through the Valtellina, the southernmost territory of the Three Leagues. The Valtellina allowed Spanish troops to enter the Austrian-held County of Tyrol via the Stelvio Pass, before proceeding through Alsace and Lorraine as above. As early as 1592, the Count of Fuentes, Spanish Governor of Milan, negotiated a deal to use this route. However, like the Swiss, the Three Leagues contained Catholic and Protestant districts, the latter objecting to the Spanish presence for the same reasons. In addition, factions backed by France and Venice persuaded the Leagues to grant them exclusive access to the Valtellina in 1603, thereby nullifying the 1592 agreement with Fuentes. In a bid to intimidate the Leagues, the Spanish constructed Fort Fuentes on the Milanese-Valtellinese border, but to little effect.
By 1610, all three variants of the Road had become largely impassable to Spanish troops. However, in 1609 the Twelve Years' Truce came into effect, suspending the Eighty Years' War, and temporarily removing the need for a steady stream of reinforcements to the Army of Flanders.
The Duke of Feria, Fuentes's successor as Governor of Milan, therefore instigated a Catholic insurrection in the Three Leagues, sparking a religious civil war, the Bündner Wirren (Graubünden Disturbances), within the federation. While the Leagues fought among themselves he then invaded the Valtellina in a bid to annex the territory outright and thereby reopen the Spanish Road via Tyrol. This alarmed France, which sent an expeditionary force to the Valtellina under the command of the famed mountain warfare specialist Lesdiguières. The resulting Valtellina War ended in stalemate, and under the 1626 Treaty of Monzón, Spain was forced to return the Valtellina. However, the route through the Stelvio Pass was reopened, enabling troop movements along the Spanish Road to resume.
Multiple Spanish armies travelled along the reopened Road during the late 1620s and early 1630s, some to the traditional battlefield in the Low Countries but others to Germany, where the Thirty Years' War was now raging, in order to support the beleaguered Austrian Habsburgs. They included that of Cardinal-Infante Ferdinand, which won a series of important victories in Germany including the First Battle of Nördlingen.
With the Spanish Road closed off, the Spanish were forced to start transporting their armies to the Low Countries by sea instead. In 1639 one of these convoys was attacked off the English coast by the Dutch admiral Maarten Tromp, leading to the Battle of the Downs in which Tromp annihilated the Spanish fleet that had been escorting the troop ships. This catastrophic defeat crippled Spanish naval power, making it all but impossible for Spain to get reinforcements and supplies to the Army of Flanders, and this strategic catastrophe was instrumental in finally bringing about an end to the Eighty Years' War with the Peace of Münster.
Armies only marched along the Spanish Road once or twice a year at most, and because of this no conventional military magazines were established along the route.There was however a system of étapes for provisioning troops at particular points, using commissioners sent by the Governors of the Spanish Netherlands or Milan to work out pricing details. The first type of étape was found only in Savoy, and took the form of a permanent waystation where soldiers and merchant travellers along the Road had access to food and shelter when they passed through. The second type, found in Franche-Comté, Lorraine and the Spanish Netherlands, was organised on an ad hoc basis through private contractors, who would calculate the payments and quantities of food required based on the expected size and schedule of each individual expedition.
One unintended consequence of the Spanish Road was the circulation of the plague by soldiers and merchants travelling along it, notably in Valtellina in the wake of the Valtellina War.
| Recorded expeditions between 1567 & 1593 | |||||||
| Year | Chief | Soldiers | Start | Arrival | Days | ||
| 1567 | Alba | 10,000 | 20/06 | 15/08 | 56 | ||
| 1573 | Acuña | 5,000 | 04/05 | 15/06 | 42 | ||
| 1578 | Figueroa | 5,000 | 22/02 | 27/03 | 32 | ||
| 1578 | Serbelloni | 3,000 | 02/06 | 22/07 | 50 | ||
| 1582 | Paz | 6,000 | 21/06 | 30/07 | 40 | ||
| 1582 | Carduini | 5,000 | 24/07 | 27/08 | 34 | ||
| 1584 | Passi | 5,000 | 26/04 | 18/06 | 54 | ||
| 1585 | Bobadilla | 2,000 | 18/06 | 29/08 | 42 | ||
| 1587 | Zúñiga | 3,000 | 13/09 | 01/11 | 49 | ||
| 1587 | Queralt | 2,000 | 07/10 | 07/12 | 60 | ||
| 1591 | Toledo | 3,000 | 01/08 | 26/09 | 57 | ||
| 1593 | Mèxic | 3,000 | 02/11 | 31/12 | 60 | ||
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