The Twelve Years’ Truce of 9 April 1609 — the armistice signed at Antwerp between the Spanish crown and the United Provinces, ending the land war in Europe for twelve years but leaving the colonial conflict in the East Indies unresolved, with the formula that trade was to be free in the regions where it had been carried on at the time of the truce, but Spain’s restriction limiting this to “the kingdoms, lands and lordships that he holds and possesses in Europe, and other places and seas where the subjects of kings and princes his friends and allies have the said traffic by mutual consent” — is the diplomatic event that defined the strategic situation in which the VOC consolidated its position at Atjeh and Banda and inaugurated its monopoly-by-force policy. The truce is treated by Johan van der Woude in his Van der Woude (1948) as the diplomatic pivot of the early VOC period.
Background: the long debate
The truce was the product of a long debate within the United Provinces. Johan van Oldenbarneveldt, the Raadpensionaris, favoured peace or armistice: the Republic was war-weary, the cost of the war was unsustainable, and the French and English diplomacy of 1607-1608 pressed for a settlement. The war party — led by Prince Maurits and the urban merchant interests that profited from the East India trade — opposed any peace that conceded Spain’s claim to exclude the Dutch from the East Indies. Huigh de Groot (Grotius), writing on behalf of the Heeren Zeventien, formulated the Dutch position in his Mare Liberum and De Jure Praedae: the seas were free to all, the Portuguese had no right to exclude the Dutch, and the war against the Portuguese in the East Indies was just. Van der Woude notes that Grotius’s argument drew heavily on the Spanish theologian Francisco de Vitoria, the Salamanca professor who had argued that the Pope’s temporal power was limited to spiritual matters and that the Spaniards had no right to take possession of the Indies on their first arrival.
The negotiations of 1608 broke down over the colonial issue. The States-General offered the status quo outside Europe; Spain refused. Countless pamphlets denounced the proposed peace as a sell-out of the East India interest. The compromise finally accepted in 1609 was the formula quoted above: free trade in regions where it had been carried on, restricted to the king’s European dominions and to those places where his allies’ subjects had traffic by mutual consent. The French and English ambassadors explicitly declared that the East Indies were included in the formula. The peace party in the United Provinces accepted the declaration; the war party suspected, correctly, that Spain would sabotage the colonial provision.
The colonial sabotage
Spain, in Van der Woude’s words, “verzuimde daarvan officiële mededeeling te doen” to the Portuguese authorities in the East. The result was “vrede in Europa en oorlog in Indië, waar de Spanjaarden en Portugeezen nu krachtiger dan voordien konden worden gesteund”. The truce thus paradoxically strengthened the Portuguese position in the East Indies: the Portuguese at Malaka could now be reinforced from Europe without Dutch interference in the Atlantic, while the Dutch fleets in the Indies continued to operate against the Portuguese under the cover of the truce’s ambiguity. The Dutch, for their part, used the truce to consolidate their position before the truce expired and the war resumed. The Heeren Zeventien’s secret instruction of 11 April 1608, sent after the Verhoeff fleet by fast jacht, and the further instruction of 4 May 1609,[^1] committed the Company to the monopoly-by-force policy that would define its conduct for the next twelve years.
The effect on Atjeh and Banda
At Atjeh the truce’s effect was indirect. The sultan of Atjeh’s successor — who had acceded in 1604 — was already playing the Dutch, English, French and Portuguese against each other; the truce did not change his policy. But the truce freed the Dutch to operate more aggressively in the East Indies without fear of Spanish reinforcement of the Portuguese. The Dutch squadrons at Djohor and in the Strait of Malaka could now be maintained with less risk; the Banda expeditions of 1609 and after could be undertaken with confidence that the Portuguese would not be reinforced. The truce thus marks the strategic moment at which the Dutch shifted from defensive commercial operations to the offensive acquisition of monopolies.
At Banda the truce’s effect was direct. Pieter Willemsz. Verhoeff’s fleet arrived at Banda in April 1609 with the secret instruction to obtain the spice monopoly by treaty or by force; the resulting murder of Verhoeff and forty-six of his men on 22 May 1609 produced the first Dutch fort on Banda and the so-called eeuwig verbond of 10 August 1609 by which Banda-Neira was ceded to the VOC in perpetuity. The truce, in other words, was the diplomatic condition of possibility of the Banda conquest — the strategic pause in Europe that allowed the Dutch to act decisively in the East.
The Dutch debate
The truce remained politically controversial in the United Provinces throughout its twelve years. **Oldenbarneveldt’s opponents — above all Prince Maurits and the orthodox Calvinist clergy — used the colonial issue to attack him. The execution of Oldenbarneveldt in 1619 and the resumption of the war with Spain in 1621 marked the triumph of the war party. Coen’s Discours of 1 January 1614, written in the middle of the truce, repeatedly invoked the colonial danger: the truce was a strategic pause, not a peace; the Spanish would return; the VOC must use the pause to entrench itself or be driven out.
Significance
The Twelve Years’ Truce is, in Van der Woude’s narrative, the principal instance of the diplomatic framework within which the early VOC consolidated its position at Atjeh, Banda and Malaka. The truce’s ambiguity — peace in Europe, war in the Indies — was the condition of possibility of the Dutch monopoly-by-force policy of 1609-1621, and the legal-political background to the Coen programme. The truce also marks the moment at which the Dutch-Portuguese conflict in the East Indies ceased to be an extension of the European war and became a colonial war in its own right — a war that would continue, with brief pauses, until the Dutch conquest of Malaka in 1641 and the expulsion of the Portuguese from most of their Indonesian positions. The truce’s effect at Atjeh was less direct than at Banda, but it was the strategic background against which the sultan of Atjeh’s successor’s attack on Djohor in 1613 and the Dutch response under Coen in 1614 unfolded.
See Also
- Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie
- Heeren Zeventien
- Johan van Oldenbarneveldt
- Prince Maurits
- Huigh de Groot
- Francisco de Vitoria
- Mare Liberum
- Pieter Willemsz. Verhoeff
- Verhoeff’s Malaka expedition (1608)
- Murder of Verhoeff at Banda (May 1609)
- Jan Pieterszoon Coen
- Discours of 1 January 1614
- Sultan of Atjeh (1589-1604)
- Acheh
- Banda-eilanden
- Malaka
- 1609
Source
Coen, Koopman van Heeren Zeventien. Geschiedenis van den Hollandshen Handel in Indië (1598-1614), by Johan van der Woude (Amsterdam: C.V. Uitgeverij v/h C. De Boer Jr., 1948), Hoofdstuk II (pp. 56-58).