Four centuries ago, in 1624 and 1625, all of Europe followed the siege of the city of Breda with utmost interest. In June 1625, after ten months of strangling encirclement, the Italian general Spinola and his tens of thousands of troops, fighting for the king of Spain, forced the surrender of the city.<\/p>\n
This last great Spanish victory against the \u2018heretic rebels\u2019 in the Eighty Years\u2019 War in the Low Countries (1568-1648) was immortalized in a play by Calder\u00f3n de la Barca, \u2018El sitio de Breda\u2019 (\u2018The siege of Breda\u2019), and, of course, by the famous Vel\u00e1zquez painting, \u2018La Rendici\u00f3n de Breda\u2019 (\u2018Breda surrenders\u2019), better known in Spain as \u2018Las Lanzas\u2019 (\u2018The Lances\u2019)<\/p>\n
In his talk, dramatized in a surprising and humoristic fashion, Harry \u2013 born and raised in Breda \u2013 talks about the historical context of the siege, its propagandistic use in later years and, more in general, about the image of the Spanish in the Low Countries, the lands now occupied by The Netherlands, Belgium and Luxemburg.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Four centuries ago, in 1624 and 1625, all of Europe followed the siege of the city of Breda with utmost interest. In June 1625, after ten months of strangling encirclement, the Italian general Spinola and his tens of thousands of troops, fighting for the king of Spain, forced the surrender of the city. This last […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1374,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[203],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/harryrijnen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/harryrijnen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/harryrijnen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harryrijnen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harryrijnen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1377"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/harryrijnen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1377\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1378,"href":"https:\/\/harryrijnen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1377\/revisions\/1378"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harryrijnen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1374"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/harryrijnen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harryrijnen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harryrijnen.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}