oa De Raad van Oorlog: generale staf, krijgsraad op het terrein of orgaan van eerbetoon?

The Council of War: general staff, council in the field or honorary body? An exploration of a forgotten junta, c. 1567-c. 1718

This article explores the history, organisation, composition, and significance of the Council of War in the Low Countries in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The Council was a flexible, informally functioning junta that advised the governor-general on military policy. There are almost no archives preserved for this Council. Researching an informal junta is methodologically challenging and required a wide variety of archival traces to be pursued. Between c. 1567 and c. 1621 the Council seems to have functioned as a general staff and advisory body in the field. From the 1620s it lost influence to competing institutions, and became a network of garrison commanders and a body of honour. More generally this article tries to understand army command and military strategy with a focus on the relationship between formal institutions and informal juntas.