Talk:War of the Quadruple Alliance

Austria

Certainly "Austria" in this article should not link to the small, present-day state of that name, but I'm not sure what it should link to. I'd be inclined to link to Holy Roman Empire, but I believe that some states of the Empire were not part of the Alliance. - Jmabel | Talk 19:58, 14 April 2006 (UTC)

"Spain fared poorly in the war"

First I would like to add that it is not mentioned in the article, that the Spanish Fleet was attacked by British ships wihtout the pertinent declaration of war being issued by the British Crown, betraying the traditional war code. Second I would like to point out that Spain defeated repeatedly the Austrian Army in Sicily, for example on the 15th of October 1718 in the Battle of Melazzo, on the 17th of June 1719 in the battle of Francavilla etc... The mistakes committed by the general Leide was not to pursue the retreating armies in any of the victories, but in my opinion, the performance of the Spanish Expeditionary Force cannot be considered poor. Moreover, I think it's partial and therefore suggest to change the paragraph containing the information cited. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.217.143.198 (talk) 17:04, 7 June 2008 (UTC)

Firstly, the traditional code of war mattered exceedingly little in an age where ships at sea shot at other nation's ships at sea more or less constantly in peacetime; given Spain's traditional power in the New World it was the most frequent target of that, and so it should have expected something like this. Especially since they had attacked Sardinia without a declaration of war themselves to start this entire sorry conflict. Yes, it's true that the Spanish armies repeatedly defeated the Habsburgs in Sicily and Sardinia, but ultimately their achievements were more than outdone by the intervention of the British, Dutch, French, and Savoyards and the failure of their navies in the Med and their men at arms in the colonies. Feel free to edit things about the performance of the expeditionary force in Sicily, but that does not excuse the poor showings elsewhere. 75.36.161.208 (talk) 01:27, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

Casualties.

Could someone explain how the allies managed to take over five times the casualties as the Spanish?

http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/wars18c.htm#Quadruple - The entire war doesn't need to be defined by four major battles; consider how extensive the Spanish borders were even up until this point, and many border clashes are more than easily possible in these types of conflicts. Also consider that the allies fought for greater cause and had more than surperior numbers, and therefore could absorb such a hit. Look at the European Theatre of World War II, which could be defined by battles such as Stalingrad, Leningrad, Normandy, or the Battle of Britain. Regardless, the casualties of the war were defined mostly through continuous, slow-moving conflict, as it may have been here. All in all, with the way the Spaniards really may have faired in this war, I just couldn't call this a decisive victory for the allies. The Italian provinces were to Spain what Ladoga Karelia was to Finland when they fought the USSR, and this is the same result. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 67.84.113.129 (talk) 02:00, 25 December 2008 (UTC)

I'd agree the website isn't a reliable source, but it does cite a book as a reference point. Do you have any alternative figures? Lord Cornwallis (talk) 23:10, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Could partly be explained by armies and navies being far from their bases for extended periods (poor nutrition, unsanitary conditions, physical streess) suffering more from disease than those which are close to or at their bases. Disease could claim enormous tolls of sick and dead in those days. Another possibility is the Spanish figures only reflect those killed and wounded in battle but not from disease. Just a thought.

Even that doesn't explain it; cobbling together all the extremely limited precise statistics we have on this Wiki on this War would almost reach the total Spanish casualty count itself, and we have maybe three or four battles with precise Spanish casualties. So something is clearly wrong here. I'd say that the website is a somewhat reliable source in most other matters, but in this I'd say it's far from it. It's also worth noting that these battles we have info on are all *Spanish victories*, which were by any account a minority in this war. I advocate we remove them until we know better. 75.36.161.208 (talk) 01:27, 2 March 2013 (UTC)

This website is being used again for casualties figures in the infobox - the website itself isn't a reliable source so it would need to come from White's book, but this poses a few problems/issues:

• Where did the figures come from?
• The Dutch Republic has casualty figures even though they didn't commit to any fighting.
• The numbers also don't add up.

Eastfarthingan (talk) 12:34, 11 March 2023 (UTC)

Alternate name?

Is there an alternate name for this war? Searching "war of quadruple alliance" spain philip -wikipedia returns virtually nothing on Google or Google Books. I can't believe this war actually happened, then the whole War of Spanish Succession would have been fought for nothing! --Gary123 (talk) 17:08, 29 June 2013 (UTC)