The Twelve Years' Truce was the name given to the cessation of hostilities between the Habsburg rulers of Spain and the Southern Netherlands and the Dutch Republic as agreed in Antwerp on 9 April 1609. It was a watershed in the Eighty Years' War, marking the point from which the independence of the United Provinces received formal recognition by outside powers. For the time of its duration, the Truce allowed King Philip III and his favorite minister the Duke of Lerma to disengage from the conflict in the Low Countries and devote their energies to the internal problems of the Spanish Monarchy. The Archdukes Albert and Isabella used the years of the Truce to consolidate Habsburg rule and to implement the Counter-Reformation in the territories under their sovereignty.
Read more about Twelve Years' Truce: Context, Conferences, Content, Resumption of Hostilities, Sources
Famous quotes containing the words twelve and/or truce:
“But the twelve lie in the sand by the dry rock
Seeing nothing—the sand, the tree, rocks
Without number—and turn away the face
To the mind’s briefer and more desert place.”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)
“Our whole life is startingly moral. There is never an instant’s truce between virtue and vice.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)