User:Nederlandse Leeuw/Sexual violence in the Eighty Years' War

Sexual violence in the Eighty Years' War

The chaotic and dramatic early decades of the Eighty Years' War, which were filled with civil revolts and large-scale urban massacres, largely ended for the provinces north of the Great Rivers after they proclaimed the Republic in 1588, expelled the Spanish forces and established peace, safety and prosperity for their population. In literature, the last few decades have often been considered a rather 'regulated' and 'professional' armed conflict in the borderlands of the Dutch Republic and the Spanish Southern Netherlands, which is less interesting to recount, because the ideological struggle had essentially been decided. However, the countryside in especially Brabant, Flanders and the lands constituting the modern two provinces of Belgian and Dutch Limburg continued to be devastated by decades of uninterrupted warfare, with armies forcing farmers to hand over their food, or destroying their crops to deny food to the enemy. Both parties levied taxes on farmers in the still-contested environs of 's-Hertogenbosch after the Dutch conquered it in 1629. Towns such as Helmond, Eindhoven and Oisterwijk were repeatedly subjected to pillaging, arson, and sexual violence committed by both rebel and royal forces.

Depictions in Dutch Republic publications
Inhabitants of the early 17th-century Dutch Republic deployed depictions of sexual violence committed by Spanish Habsburg troops as a political tool in order to justify the anti-government revolt, and ensure the Republic's continued existence. It could also be used to unite various political and religious factions against a common enemy, and thus protect the young state against instability due to internal conflict. According to Amanda C. Pipkin (2009), '[t]hey propagated stories that vilified the Spanish in two ways: focusing on the literal raping women of the Low Countries as Phillip II's troops attempted to reassert his control there and the metaphoric violence of a people ruled by a tyrant who violated the traditional rights of the Dutch nation imagined as a vulnerable woman.' In addition to uniting the Republic's population against a common enemy, the rhetoric around war-time rape also 'generated the idea that treating women with proper care and respect was part of a Dutch (male) national character.' In turn, this idea was employed 'to articulate the place of Dutch men as heads of the household with a patriotic and patriarchal duty to protect (and control) Dutch women.'

Some of the most influential authors of the first half of the 17th century, particularly during the Twelve Years' Truce (1609–1621), were Pieter Bor, Willem Baudartius, and Johannes Gysius.