"Four hundred years ago, Maurice of Orange, the military leader of the Netherlands, died during its greatest crisis.
With his military reform, he not only secured the existence of the young republic, he also laid the foundations for the army's role in the modern state.
When we read about the defenders' lack of artillery ammunition, about brigades, regiments, and battalions fighting each other on the front lines, about combined arms combat, and about the training of soldiers on military equipment—when we read all this, we easily succumb to the belief that war between nations and states has always played out in a similar way, as a conflict between armies and branches of service, as a military duel according to fixed tactical and strategic rules. But that was not the case. Warfare as we experience it today is essentially an invention of the early modern period. Its origins lie in the military reform of Maurice of Orange.
Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange, born in 1567 in Schloss Dillenburg was a figure of transition, like many protagonists of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. He came from the world of declining chivalry, in which tournaments were still held (in one of which a French king was fatally wounded) and castles served as noble residences, and at the same time experienced the dawn of the colonial era, the era of large merchant fleets and naval battles, as well as the beginning of the Early Enlightenment and the Thirty Years' War. The leitmotif of his life, however, due to his background and his military talent, was the war of religions in Central Europe and, connected with it, the Netherlands' struggle for survival against Spain.
In April 1568, six months after Maurice's birth, the uprising against Spanish rule began. His leader, Maurice's father, William of Orange, was able to achieve the unification of the provinces of Holland and Zeeland and several smaller territories into the Union of Utrecht eleven years later, but he was unable to prevent the division of the country into a southern part controlled by Madrid and a The independent northern part could not stop the gradual reconquest of the rebellious territories by Spanish armies. In 1584, William was assassinated in Delft by a Catholic fanatic. The following year, Antwerp, the commercial center of the Netherlands, fell to the Spanish after a long siege. A mass exodus of the predominantly Calvinist population to the north began. The end of the rebellion by the victorious general Alessandro Farnese seemed only a matter of time.
Two circumstances came to the aid of the United Provinces, as they had come to call themselves. First, the superiority of the Dutch naval forces became noticeable. While the Spanish usually won on land, they generally lost on the water. Second, Madrid's hegemonic religious policy gave the rebels two powerful allies: England and the Huguenot camp in France. In 1588, with the defeat of the Armada, Farnese's plan to cross the Channel with his army and seize London for to conquer it to the Spanish crown. In 1590, he was recalled to France to fight against Henry IV, who had just come to power. Two years later, Farnese died of a wound he had sustained during a siege.
In the meantime, the political situation among the rebels had cleared up. With the representatives of the seven rebellious provinces rejecting an English protectorate, the Netherlands had embarked on the path to a republic. In 1585, they transferred its central military authority to the second-eldest son of William of Orange, the seventeen-year-old Maurice. He had just spent two years studying in Leiden under the humanist Justus Lipsius, who had a particular passion for the study of war.
A Catholic, Lipsius taught and commented on Caesar, Livy, and Seneca, as well as the Roman military writers Aelian and Vegetius, as well as the "Art of War" of the Byzantine Emperor Leo VI. In his major work, "De Militia Romana," Lipsius attempted to make the ancient models fruitful for contemporary warfare.
His central demands can be summarized in three key words: citizen armies, echeloned battle formations, and military drill. All three were revolutionary for their time.
Until then, knight armies and more or less disciplined mercenaries had dominated warfare.
The aristocratic cavalry of the Middle Ages had been displaced in the fifteenth century by the foot troops of the Swiss and Landsknechts, and these in turn by the Spanish tercio units, in which up to three thousand men stood in line on the battlefield. But camp and entrenchment work, daily drills, and regular payment were absent. None of these troops could be said to be in the state treasury. Their discipline was correspondingly lax, and their plundering behavior correspondingly unbridled and cruel. The armies of the early modern period left a wide swath of devastation in their wake. The German word "Verheerung" (devastation) bears linguistic witness to this to this day.
When Maurice finally rose to the position of Commander-in-Chief of the Dutch army in 1587, he immediately began to implement the ideas of his teacher Lipsius.
He was supported in this by Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, who held the central position of Provincial Advocate of Holland and Friesland in the gradually consolidating republican state. Although these were only two of the seven provinces struggling for their existence against Spanish supremacy, they accounted for two-thirds of the population and financial resources of the Netherlands, and their legal advisor, Oldenbarnevelt, was the de facto Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of the young republic. With his help, Maurice succeeded in implementing two of Lipsius's crucial demands within a few years: fiscal security for salaries and the reorganization of the army's units.
The traditional regiments, which were too cumbersome on the battlefield, were divided into two battalions of five companies of 120 men each. At the same time, the number of officers was roughly fivefolded, making significantly more command positions available for training troops and leading them in combat. An extended term of service ensured that the troops' loyalty to the Republic grew, and an army tax guaranteed their regular payment. From then on, systematic looting and atrocities against the civilian population no longer occurred in the Dutch army.
The third, no less fundamental, innovation of Maurice concerned the armament of the troops and their use in combat. After the Hundred Years' War, arquebuses (hook rifles) and large-caliber muskets had prevailed as long-range infantry weapons, replacing the expensive archers with their long training periods. Artillery, too, was no longer used solely as a siege weapon, but also on the battlefield. At Marignano (1515), Pavia (1525), and Bicocca (1532), where German, French, and Swiss troops fought in changing constellations for possession of northern Italy, the targeted use of firearms had shattered the aura of invincibility of the Swiss, with their dense groups of pike and halberd bearers.
One problem, however, remained: muskets, weighing up to 15 kilograms, and the only slightly lighter arquebuses, as muzzleloaders, were cumbersome to operate and, with their matchlocks, could therefore only fire one bullet every one to two minutes. The slow-firing musketeers and arquebusiers were helpless against a cavalry charge or a systematic mass attack by pikemen. The Spanish army therefore deployed four times the number of pikemen in its tercios, each of which had six hundred firearms, behind whom they could seek cover during enemy attacks. The disadvantage of such large formations is, of course, obvious: on the battlefield, each of them fights alone, and cooperation with other units is practically impossible. Nevertheless, the Spanish retained the upper hand in almost all major engagements for a century.
Until Maurice came along. His insight from many previously lost battles was that if the Dutch army wanted to crush the wandering fortresses of the tercios, it would have to be both more mobile and more powerful in terms of firepower. Therefore, he organized his battle formation into three lines, each consisting of several staggered battalions ten ranks deep. The checkerboard pattern ensured that units supported each other in combat, allowing rear units to advance into the gaps between the front units. And the wider formation of the battalions increased the effectiveness of musket fire against the tercios, which were up to 40 ranks deep.
To further increase firepower, Maurice gave the musket and arquebusiers in his companies a six-to-five preponderance over the pikemen. By the end of his career as a general, there were even three musketeers for every pikeman. The Dutch cavalry was equipped with breastplates, pistols, and carbines to be able to hold their own against their Spanish opponents. This, however, did not solve the problem of a lack of rate of fire. Through intensified drills on muzzleloaders, with up to 40 individual movements, the soldiers of the Republic could be trained to fire consistently, but more than one shot per minute was not possible at best—and even with the light. The more difficult flintlock rifles of the Frederickian and Napoleonic eras remained largely the same until the introduction of modern breech-loading rifles in the nineteenth century.
A way out of the tactical impasse was offered by the continuation of volley fire through appropriate movements in combat. Soldiers loading their muskets had to be led to the rear of the formation so that those with loaded weapons could step forward. On the other side of the world, in Japan, the troops of the later Tokugawa Shogun had already demonstrated the devastating effect of regular musket volleys against cavalry charges at the Battle of Nagashino in 1575 (the carnage forms the climax of Akira Kurosawa's classic film "Kagemusha"). Whether news of the battle reached the Orangeman is uncertain; what is certain is that he found the same solution as Tokugawa Ieyasu.
It wasn't Maurice himself who provided the decisive impetus, but his brother-in-law and cousin, William Louis of Nassau, who, as governor of Friesland, played a key role in the defense of the Maritime Republic's open eastern flank. In a letter to Maurice dated December 8, 1594, he described a procedure that would go down in military history as the "countermarch," in which the riflemen, after firing their ball, ran back through the ranks to reload, while the next rank advanced to fire their volley. Now the battalions only had to be positioned at the appropriate depth to allow for continuous volley fire. The sketch that William Louis attached to his letter called for five rank. In the reality of the war, there were ten.
By that point, Maurice, who consistently exploited the Spanish weakness after Farnese's death, had recaptured numerous cities and fortresses in the south and east of the Netherlands, including Groningen and the Orange ancestral seat of Breda, and he continued his victorious march over the next five years. But the real test of the new battle tactics came at the Battle of Nieuwpoort. In June 1600, the States General, the assembly of the seven provinces, had decided to attack Spanish-held Dunkirk, whose privateer fleets were severely disrupting Dutch maritime trade. Maurice landed with an army of 11,000 men near Ostend and began the siege of Nieuwpoort, which blocked the route to Dunkirk. Meanwhile, the new Spanish regent in Brussels, the Habsburg Albrecht of Austria, had unnoticed inserted an equally strong army between Maurice and his base of operations in Ostend.
On July 2, the armies clashed in the dunes. While Maurice's infantry was able to repel the Spanish in the center, the English auxiliaries on his left flank were driven from their positions by two elite Spanish tercios. However, the tercios' order had disintegrated during their advance. A counterattack by the Dutch cavalry reserve drove them to flight. Finally, the Spanish retreated. They had lost 3,000 men, the Dutch about 2,000. It was their first major battle victory in decades. Nevertheless, Maurice was forced to retreat because Archduke Albert was recruiting new troops, and the Dutch army's supply situation was becoming increasingly precarious.
Subsequently, the "Dutch Ordinance," the battle order of the Orange Army, became established throughout Central and Northern Europe. Two of Maurice's particularly adept students were the Swedish King Gustav II Adolf, who destroyed Tilly's tercios-organized army with methodical volley fire at Breitenfeld in 1631, and Oliver Cromwell, who, with his "New Model Army," repeatedly defeated the Royalist aristocratic armies in the English Civil War. Even more consequential than his military tactical innovations, which were soon replaced by even more sophisticated battlefield maneuvers, were the financial and organizational aspects of Maurice's reform program. The Thirty Years' War, with its marauding bands of mercenaries and depopulated landscapes, dramatically demonstrated the destructive power of unregulated warfare. As a result, standing armies emerged almost everywhere, with fixed pay, loyal officer corps, and their own traditions. The oldest military units in Europe, such as those in England and Scotland, trace their regimental histories back to the seventeenth century.
Maurice of Orange did not live to see the success of his military reform. After his victory at Nieuwpoort, the land war took hold in Flanders, while Dutch naval power expanded. In 1604, he was unable to prevent the fall of Ostend to the Spanish, and in 1609, the States General, for whom the security of trade routes was now more important than the acquisition of further border fortresses, concluded a twelve-year peace treaty against his will. The peace with Madrid lasted for several years. This sealed the rift between Maurice and Oldenbarnevelt. As the religious dispute between moderate and radical Calvinists escalated in the following years, both men took positions on opposite sides of the conflict: Oldenbarnevelt with the liberal Arminians, Maurice with the defenders of dogma.
When the provincial advocate finally attempted to organize his followers, including the philosopher Hugo Grotius, into a citizen militia, an uproar ensued. Maurice had Oldenbarnevelt arrested and executed in 1619. Two years later, the war against Spain flared up again. Meanwhile, the empire had caught its breath and, under the new general Spinola, went on the offensive. When Maurice of Orange died on April 23, 1625, at the age of fifty-seven, Spanish troops laid siege to the fortress of Breda. Six weeks later, the city fell; Velázquez captured its surrender in a famous painting. But the existence of the Netherlands was no longer in question. It was confirmed by the European powers in the Peace of Westphalia of 1648. This historic triumph was the work of two men: the diplomat Johan von Oldenbarnevelt and the military reformer Maurice of Orange.” [1]
1. Eine neue Form des Krieges. Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung; Frankfurt. 19 Apr 2025: Z1. Von Andreas Kilb
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