Bastion of Empire: The Italian terzo vecchio of the Army of Flanders (1597–1682)

In recent years, the growing corpus of modern scholarship on the history of Spanish Italy has challenged and often overturned most of the profoundly biased narratives from nineteenth-century Italian historiography. Still, the memory of the massive Italian military involvement in the conflicts that shaped the history of the Spanish Low Countries hinges upon that of the two iconic Italian generals of the Army of Flanders: Alessandro Farnese and Ambrogio Spinola. In addressing this issue, this article offers an overview of the history of the Italian natione of the Army of Flanders based on the complex trajectory followed by its longest-lived infantry unit, its terzo vecchio.