Tilting at windmills Cervantes wrote and published "Don Quixote" during the Eighty Years' War, or Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648), a revolt by the Habsburg Netherlands to end Spanish rule. In "Don Quixote", the eponymous protagonist consistently misinterprets the motives and actions of his adversaries and allies, and struggles to even understand his own at times — a conundrum regularly resulting in apparently unjustified violent actions and consequences. One way of interpreting Don Quixote's tilting at windmills could be allegorically, thereby promoting critical, skeptical, or satirical evaluation of either a hero's motives, rationales and actions, or the ultimate aims of a nation's foreign
Windmills in Leeuwarden Windmills in Leeuwarden The city of Leeuwarden, Friesland, the Netherlands has had at least 130 windmills over the centuries. Only one, the "Froskepôlemolen" survives today within Leeuwarden. Six other mills which have stood in Leeuwarden survive elsewhere in the Netherlands. The mills had a wide range of industrial and agricultural uses. The industrial uses include the processing of bark for tanning leather, the fulling of cloth, the production of cement, the production of dyes, the extraction of oil (including the production of paints), the grinding of tobacco to produce snuff, the production of gunpowder, and the sawing of timber. Agricultural