David of Burgundy had been Prince-Bishop of Utrecht since 1456 — installed by his Burgundian relatives, supported by the Cods, opposed at every turn by the Hooks. When Charles the Bold died unexpectedly in 1477, the old anti-Burgundian sentiment came surging back. David fled the city and sought help from the new master of the Burgundian lands, an ambitious young Austrian named Maximilian. By April 1483 David was reinstalled in his palace. He held it for seventeen days. On the night of 8 May, a Hook raiding party slipped through the city in the dark, burst into the episcopal palace, and seized him in his own rooms. They marched him east to Amersfoort and locked him up. When the news reached Maximilian, the Archduke gathered an army under his stadtholder Joost de Lalaing and rode for Utrecht.

Maximilian arrived before Utrecht's walls on 23 June and dug in. His siege engineers knew their business: stone walls, no matter how thick, became rubble under sustained bombardment. Within days the city's defenders could feel the fortifications shifting under their feet, and the Hooks asked for a truce. A delegation went out — Viscount Jan of Montfoort, Engelbert of Cleves, and Gerrit Zoudenbalch — to talk terms with the Archduke. The terms were not light. Jan went back into the city to consult his allies; Engelbert and Zoudenbalch stayed in the Habsburg camp as hostages. It might have ended there. Then a party of Maximilian's men, acting without orders, broke the truce. Jan's Hook militants resumed the fight, the hostages were reclassified as prisoners of war, and the hand-to-hand struggle for Utrecht resumed — uglier by the day, both sides bleeding.

Sieges are settled less by walls than by the will of the people behind them. As the casualties mounted through July and into August, the firebrands of the Hook party began to lose their grip on Utrecht's mood. The chief Hook personalities were scattered, captured, or wearied; the peace party inside the city gained ground. Maximilian, too, had reason to want it over. His stadtholder Joost de Lalaing had been killed in the fighting, and many of his men with him. The terms he now offered for capitulation were, in the contemporary phrase, hard but not harsh — punitive enough to mark the city's defeat, mild enough that an exhausted Utrecht could accept them. On 31 August 1483, after sixty-nine days of siege, the gates opened. The Archduke rode through walls his cannons had broken.

Maximilian did not pause to celebrate. He turned east at once for Amersfoort, broke open the prison where David of Burgundy was being held, and restored his ally to the episcopal throne. What followed surprised everyone. Maximilian was an ambitious man who would one day become Holy Roman Emperor, and David of Burgundy was a bishop with two decades of grievance behind him. They could have made a meal of Utrecht's defeat. Instead, both men chose moderation. Their post-war policies — financial, political, ecclesiastical — were calibrated for reconciliation rather than revenge. The Hook and Cod wars did not vanish overnight; the names of those two long-dead factions would echo through Dutch politics for another century. But 1483 was the moment when the Habsburgs took firm hold of Utrecht, when the bishopric tilted decisively into a wider European orbit, and when the city — battered, hungry, finally quiet — settled in for a generation of peace it had not known in living memory.