Maastricht in 1579 was one of the largest cities in the Low Countries, with fifteen to seventeen thousand inhabitants. It sat on the Meuse at the strategic hinge where the rivers controlled the routes from Germany into Flanders. For Alexander Farnese, the new Spanish governor-general of the Habsburg Netherlands, taking it would split the Dutch Revolt by cutting off the rebels from German reinforcements. The Eighty Years' War was three years past the Pacification of Ghent, when Catholic south and Protestant north had briefly united against Spanish troops. That unity had since shattered. The Union of Arras in January 1579 brought the Walloon Catholic provinces back to Philip II. The Union of Utrecht, signed the same day Farnese's army crossed the Meuse at Beesel, bound the Protestant north to fight on. Maastricht stood between them, and both sides understood that whoever held it shaped what country would emerge.

The garrison numbered perhaps twelve hundred professional soldiers — French, Scottish, English — and about six thousand armed burghers. The man responsible for their defence was Sébastien Tapin, a Lorrainer praised even by his Spanish enemies as a great engineer. For months before Farnese arrived, Tapin had put thousands of men and women, nuns included, to work strengthening the walls. He built ravelins in front of the gates, deepened the moats, cut casemates into the ramparts, tunnelled counter-mines under the counterscarp, and opened sally gates so the burghers could rush out to attack siege works. During the assault on 23 March, when the Spanish nearly seized a key ravelin, Tapin had twenty Spanish prisoners thrown into the Meuse with weights tied to their feet — a brutal warning to his own men that surrender would not be an option.

When the assaults above ground failed, the fighting went beneath the earth. Spanish sappers dug mines toward the walls. Dutch counter-miners listened for them and dug to meet them. In one gallery, the defenders blocked the Spanish tunnel with planks and then poured a vat of boiling water through the gap, scalding the men below. In another, Tapin's miners used the bellows from the pipe organ of the Basilica of Saint Servatius to drive thick green-wood smoke through their counter-mine into the Spanish gallery. Sappers on both sides — many of them coal miners conscripted from Liège on the Spanish side, peasants pressed into service on the Dutch — fought hand-to-hand in tunnels barely wide enough for one man, in air thick with smoke, water and earth. Five captured Spanish sappers were brought into the city. The senior was drowned in the Meuse when he refused to switch sides. The remaining four agreed.

Because the siege began on a market day, hundreds of peasants from outlying villages found themselves trapped inside Maastricht when the gates closed. The governor, Melchior von Schwarzenberg, organised loans from the city's merchants to buy provisions, and on 28 April he ordered emergency coins of copper to be minted in red copper at half, one and two stuivers — the only legal currency in the city for the duration of the siege. On 4 May the butchers' guild was sent house to house to count every cow and pig. By 22 May, anyone holding more wheat or rye than they personally needed was ordered to sell it at the regulated market price. The burghers, who had fed the garrison for over a year already, complained and went on feeding it. Schwarzenberg's last messages went out by mail pigeon. The States General promised relief by 15 April. The relief army marched, looked at Farnese's circumvallation lines, and turned back.

Farnese fell ill in late June and could not leave his bed at Pietersheim Castle. He set the final assault for 29 June, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, and ordered feigned attacks through the night before to prevent the defenders from sleeping. At dawn, Spanish, German and Walloon troops scaled the broken ramparts at the Brussels gate and at the Tongeren gate. The defenders, after months of round-the-clock work and four days of constant bombardment, were exhausted and many were asleep when the assault came. They broke ranks and were chased through the streets. Many drowned trying to swim the Meuse. A last stand formed in the Vrijthof square but was broken. The wealthiest survivors and the remaining soldiers escaped over the bridge into the Wyck suburb and partially demolished it behind them. Tapin, wounded again, surrendered to the Spanish general Ottavio Gonzaga on condition of his life. Most historians have written that he died of his wounds at Limbourg. The likelier truth is that Gonzaga's men found him in a room and killed him in cold blood. Farnese, in his sickbed, was reportedly furious when he learned. He had wanted to spare the man.

The numbers from the sack vary, as numbers from sixteenth-century atrocities always do. Contemporary Netherlandish authors wrote that only three to four hundred burghers remained in the city afterward. Strada counted eight thousand civilian dead. The anonymous Mémoires put it at four thousand. The actual death toll in the assault itself was perhaps nine hundred to a thousand by Farnese's own report. Four thousand survivors were rounded up and forced to pay ransom while their houses were looted; the total booty was reckoned at over a million golden ducats. A nineteenth-century Dutch historian, Jozef Habets, examined the baptismal records of the city's four parishes for the decade after the siege and found that Maastricht had not been wholly depopulated as the early accounts implied — the bakers, brewers, wine merchants and butchers continued at their work. The city recovered. But the people who walked the streets in 1580 were not the people who had walked them in 1578. Habets's lists show 1,362 names. Of those, four were of Spanish background, sixty-one Walloon or French. The rest, the great Lower Dutch majority, had become a remnant population repopulating a partially emptied city.

The siege passed quickly into propaganda. Frans Hogenberg, a Protestant printmaker working in Cologne, produced two engravings: one of the siege itself, one of the sack — the second showing burghers fleeing across the bridge under Spanish swords, calculated to inflame sympathy for the Dutch Revolt. Archduke Albert later commissioned two painted series for Philip II, glorifying the Spanish victory; they hang now in El Escorial. The Anabaptist engraver Jan Luyken cut his own version a century later, the violence drawn so close the viewer cannot look away. And in eighteenth-century Peru, the Cuzco School painted Farnese's campaigns for the new Bourbon court in Madrid, the Maastricht canvas showing Farnese seated under a parasol while his soldiers stormed the breach. The same morning, depicted three different ways across two continents and three hundred years. The dead, in every version, are silent.