ABSTRACT
In cost and scale the new round of fighting between the Dutch Republic and Spain was equal to the encounters of the first round in the sixteenth century, yet there were significant differences. After 1627 both sides came to the conclusion that an outright victory by way of vigorous land campaigning and territorial conquest was out of the question. The struggle on land was reduced to guerra defensive^ - a struggle to maintain defensive lines around the southern approaches to the rivers Maas and Waal. Quick victories, as Spinola lamented, were precluded by the vast nature of siege operations: ‘In order to capture a rebel town, an entire summer and army may be consumed without any certain success’ (93, p. 86). The struggle at sea proved costly for the Dutch as well as the Spanish, especially in the East and West Indies, and it was the failure of the West India Company which encouraged the Amsterdam merchants to sue for peace in the 1640s.
