As the linchpin of Imperial Spain's strategy in Europe, and as the fighting force that at its height set the ‘gold standard’ for early modern European armies, the Army of Flanders was the point of arrival of the largest and longest migratory flow of military labour force of its time. Hundreds of thousands of soldiers from the Spanish, Italian and Balkan peninsulas, the British Isles, the lands of the Habsburgs’ Burgundian inheritance and the Holy Roman Empire served in its ranks, joining the local Walloon and Flemish troops.
However, this massive migratory phenomenon has received little attention, as military migrants have long been branded with the negatively charged (and poorly defined) label of ‘mercenary’, which severed them from the national historiographical narratives (Spanish, Belgian, Italian, British, Irish, French, etc.) that still today speak for the naciones that once constituted the Army of Flanders itself.
The aim of our project is to use the massive documentary and cultural footprint left by the Army of Flanders both in the Low Countries and across Europe to ‘identify’ the Army itself at all its levels. This will be done through the creation of a state-of-the-art online database and digital platform, using the prosopographical information extracted from the vast body of administrative documents now preserved in the archives of Brussels, Simancas and Madrid, as well as the published narratives of the period.
The results of this project will enhance our understanding of the dynamics of migration and integration in the early modern period, as well as the development of contemporary European national and military identities and will provide new impetus and momentum to both national and transnational scholarship in fields ranging from the social sciences to human geography, cultural history, medicine and linguistics.
