The Eighty Years War
Recommendations: 1291
About the Project
For the past two years I wanted to get into historical wargaming and I finally did! I bought my first historical miniatures for the Eighty Years War. Never heard of this war? The extremely short description: a war between the Netherlands and Spain from 1568 till 1648. I want to paint two forces, one for each side. While this is more a painting and collecting project than a gaming project, I will follow the rules Pikeman’s Lament (Osprey Games) for unit size, shape and size of the bases,… The goal is to paint them as historically accurate as possible. I’ve been reading a lot about this war and other wars in this period over the past two years. My miniatures will represent soldiers from around 1600. This will be reflected in their look and armament as well as the composition of both forces.
Related Game: Pikeman's Lament
Related Company: Warlord Games
Related Genre: Historical
Related Contest: Spring Clean Hobby Challenge (Old)
This Project is Completed
Spanish command
The captain in command of my Spanish force is a miniature from Zenit Miniatures. The hospital knight came as part of a group of miniatures I bought. It doesn’t fit in this war, but since I had the miniature I painted it and added it to the Spanish force.
Inbox review – Cuirassiers from Warlord Games
The box says “metal and plastic miniatures”. The horses and bases are plastic, the cuirassiers are metal.
There are three different sculpts of the cuirassiers. A fourth sculpt for the musician.
The right arms off all the miniatures comes separately, allowing you to arm them defiantly.
- 6 swords
- 6 pistols
- 2 war hammers
- 1 pistol held by the barrel as a club.
- 1 lance / flagpole
For completeness: 4 clusters of feathers (I may be missing one)
The horses come on a sprue. They allow you to build four different horses.
The leaflet contains:
- a short description of cuirassiers
- the statistics of the unit for use in Pike and Shotte from Warlord Games
- flags from the Thirty Years War and English Civil War.
Historical accuracy
These miniatures look like a good representation of cuirassiers to me. Warlord Games sees them as seventeenth century cavalry. While this is correct, cuirassiers looking like this, appeared much sooner. The served in the Dutch army of the Eighty Years War as early as the 1570’s. This type of cavalry must have served in the Spanish army of the Low Countries as well.
Dutch cuirassiers
At last the Dutch receive cavalry! Warlord Games lets you arm them with swords, pistols or hammers. I’ve used a combination of all these since cuirassiers made use of all three these weapons.
I painted them in black armour as was customary. They were sometimes called “Schwarze Reiter” in German, meaning “Black Riders”.
Flags of War doesn’t have any Dutch cavalry flags, so I took one of their infantry flags and cut it to the right size and shape for a cavalry flag.
I've added a new type of basingmaterial te create a forest-in-autumn-look.
Spanish pikemen
Armoured pikemen
Unarmoured pikemenThe end
With this entry I’ve reached the end of this project for now. At some point in the future I’ld like to return to the Eighty Years War and reopen the project. But that won’t be soon.
Spanish command
And we’re back! It always was my intention to return to this project at some point. Time to start painting all those Spanish miniatures in my closet. And this happens to be the time of the spring-clean challenge.
These miniatures are from The Assault Group. They released a series of “Imperial Spanish” in 2019. Future entries in this project will show more miniatures from this series.
The flag is once again from Flags of War. It shows the Ragged Cross (also: Burgundy Cross) on one side and an image of the holy virgin on the other side. This type of flag came in use under Fillips III who was king of Spain in 1600. This project tries to recreate Spanish and Dutch soldiers from around that year.
