Necessity
The conflict between the Spanish King Philip II and the Dutch rebels in the Spanish-ruled Habsburg Netherlands, culminating in the Eighty Years' War, symbolized the prominent European power struggle of the 16th century between Catholics and Protestants. In 1550, the wars had stretched Spain's finances thin. 1566 was known as the "Year of Hunger" or "Year of Wonders". When social, political and religious unrest culminated in the Compromise of Nobles and the Beeldenstorm, apparently endangering the government of Philip's Regent in Brussels, Margaret of Parma, Spanish troops under the Duke of Alba were dispatched to restore order and punish the perceived insurrectionists. Those troops could at the time not be transported by sea and Philip was therefore forced to find a route to move troops from his garrisons in Spanish Italy overland to his Netherlands domains, crossing neutral territory. The Spanish Road was surveyed and mapped out in 1566, and Alba used it in July 1567.
Read more about this topic: Spanish Road
Famous quotes containing the word necessity:
“For us necessity is not as of old an image without us, with whom we can do warfare; it is a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
“Upon the whole, necessity is something, that exists in the mind, not in objects; nor is it possible for us ever to form the most distant idea of it, consider’d as a quality in bodies. Either we have no idea of necessity, or necessity is nothing but that determination of thought to pass from cause to effects and effects to causes, according to their experienc’d union.”
—David Hume (1711–1776)