The Twelve Years Truce and the Formation of the Classical Law of Nations

Abstract

The signing of the Twelve Years Truce at Antwerp on April 9, 1609 was a major event in the political and diplomatic history of the Low Countries and of Europe. For the Low Countries, it meant the – albeit temporary – end of a drawn-out conflict that started as a civil war and grew into a full-blown war of secession. Although the period of truce with Spain and the Southern Netherlands would be ripe with religious and civil unrest in the Northern Netherlands, it was also a crucial period in the formation of the Republic as a sovereign State and as a great power within and without Europe. At the European level, after the Franco-Spanish Peace Treaty of Vervins (1598) and the Anglo-Spanish Peace Treaty of London (1604), the Antwerp Truce was the final step in Spain’s policy of disentanglement of the major wars it had been involved in since the 1590s or before. But the Truce was also an important stepping-stone in the formation of the classical law of nations.