Spain's Grand Duke of Alba is remembered by the Dutch as the Iron Duke
In Spain and Portugal he was the Grand Duke, one of the most skilled generals of his century. In the Netherlands he became the Iron Duke, a byword for tyranny, after the tribunal he created to crush rebellion condemned thousands and earned the popular name Council of Blood.
Fernando Álvarez de Toledo was born on 29 October 1507 in Piedrahíta, in the province of Ávila, into a Castilian military dynasty. His father died on campaign at Djerba when Fernando was three, and at six he rode with his grandfather on the expedition to take Navarre. Tutored by Italian preceptors and the poet Juan Boscán, he learned Latin, French, English and German. At 16 he fought at Fuenterrabía and was made its governor, and he inherited the dukedom from his grandfather in 1531.
His battlefield record was formidable. He helped take Tunis from Hayreddin Barbarossa in 1535, broke the French siege of Perpignan in 1542, and at Mühlberg in 1547 a flanking charge by his tercios decided the emperor's victory over the Protestant princes. When Pope Paul IV joined France against the Habsburgs, Alba marched on Rome with 12,000 men, partly funded by a loan of 430,000 ducats from Bona Sforza, the dowager queen of Poland, which was never repaid. He entered Rome in 1557 and the pope sued for peace.
He was also a courtier. As high steward he guided the young Prince Philip on a European tour, attended his wedding to Mary I at Winchester in 1554, and stood proxy for him at his Paris marriage to Isabel de Valois. The soldier-poet Garcilaso de la Vega travelled with him and left verse that hints at Alba's longing for his wife.
Philip II sent him to Brussels in 1567 after Calvinist crowds had wrecked churches. His Council of Troubles targeted not only Protestants but moderate Catholic nobles such as the Counts of Egmont and Horn, both condemned and executed in Brussels in June 1568. Alba repeatedly beat William of Orange's armies yet could not end the revolt, and he was recalled in 1573. His last success came in 1580 in Portugal, where he became viceroy and died in Lisbon in 1582.
Source: Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba
