May 23, 1568 · Groningen Theater

William of Orange's brothers Louis and Adolf lured a Spanish force into boggy ground near the monastery of Heiligerlee and destroyed it. Aremberg was killed; so was Adolf of Nassau, the first of William's brothers to die for the revolt. It was the first Dutch victory of the war and it was won by terrain — the tactic the Dutch would rely on for eighty years.

July 21, 1568 · Ems estuary Theater

Alba caught Louis of Nassau's army pinned against the Ems with its back to the water and destroyed it. The rebel force was cut down or drowned trying to swim the river; contemporaries put Dutch dead at 7,000 against a handful of Spanish. Louis escaped by swimming. It was less a battle than an execution.

April 1, 1572 · Maas estuary Theater

The Watergeuzen — the Sea Beggars, exiled Dutch privateers who had been raiding from English ports until Elizabeth expelled them — needed somewhere to go. They found the little port of Brielle undefended, its garrison marched away, and took it almost without a fight. It was opportunism, not strategy.

December 1572 – July 1573 · Holland Theater

Haarlem held out for seven months against Alba's son, its citizens — women among them, led by legend and probably by fact by Kenau Simonsdochter Hasselaer — fighting on the walls. When it finally surrendered on terms, the garrison was massacred anyway: some 2,000 soldiers executed, many tied back-to-back and thrown into the Spaarne to drown.

October 3, 1574 · Holland Theater

With a third of Leiden's people dead of hunger and plague and the city refusing to surrender, William of Orange did the unthinkable: he broke the dikes and let the sea into Holland, drowning the harvest to float a fleet of shallow-draft barges across the flooded fields to the walls. The wind held, the water rose, and the Sea Beggars sailed over the drowned countryside into the city. The Spanish, unable to fight boats, withdrew.

November 4, 1576 · Brabant Theater

Spain went bankrupt in 1575 and stopped paying its army. The tercios — the best infantry in Europe, unpaid for months — mutinied, stormed the richest city in northern Europe, and sacked it for three days. Perhaps 8,000 people were killed and a thousand buildings burned. No one ordered it; the men were collecting their own wages.

July 1584 – August 17, 1585 · Scheldt estuary Theater

Parma took Antwerp by taking the river. He threw a fortified bridge of boats 800 metres across the Scheldt to cut the city from the sea, held it against fire-ships that killed 800 of his men in a single blast — the 'Hellburners', the largest explosion anyone had yet engineered — and starved the city out over thirteen months. Protestants were given four years to sell up and leave.

August 8, 1588 · The Channel and the Flemish coast Theater

The Armada's purpose was the Dutch war: it was to escort Parma's veteran army across from Flanders and end the revolt. It never embarked them. Justin of Nassau's shallow-draft Dutch flyboats blockaded Parma's barges in the Flemish shoals where the deep-draft Spanish galleons could not reach them, and while the Armada waited at anchor off Calais the English sent in fireships and mauled it at Gravelines. The wind did the rest.

July 2, 1600 · Flanders coast Theater

Sent by the States-General on a campaign he thought reckless, Maurice found himself trapped on the beach at Nieuwpoort with the Spanish army between him and home and the sea at his back. He had no choice but to fight the tercios in the open — the one thing the Dutch never did. His drilled, salaried, volley-firing infantry beat them.

July 1601 – September 1604 · Flanders coast Theater

Three years and two months — the longest siege in European history. The Dutch could resupply Ostend by sea indefinitely, so the town became a machine for consuming the Spanish army: an earthwork maze that was rebuilt every night behind whatever the Spanish took by day. Contemporaries called it 'the long carnival of death'. Perhaps 100,000 died over three years for a ruin.

April 9, 1609 · Antwerp Theater

Bankrupt and unable to force a decision, Spain agreed to a twelve-year truce and dealt with the rebels as though they were a sovereign state — the recognition it had spent forty years refusing. Oldenbarnevelt negotiated it against the bitter opposition of Maurice, who wanted to fight on. The Dutch used the truce to found the East India Company's empire, the Bank of Amsterdam, and the first stock exchange.

August 1624 – June 5, 1625 · Brabant Theater

When the truce lapsed, Spinola invested Breda — the Orange family's own town — and took it after eleven months of siege lines, mines, and starvation. He then granted the garrison full honours of war and, in the scene Velázquez painted, prevented Justin of Nassau from kneeling to him. It cost Spain a fortune and most of a campaigning season.

September 8, 1628 · Matanzas Bay, Cuba Theater

Piet Hein cornered the Spanish treasure fleet in Matanzas Bay in Cuba and took it virtually without a fight — 11 million guilders in silver, gold, indigo and cochineal, the annual bullion shipment that paid Spain's armies. Benavides was executed in Spain for losing it. Hein remarked that the men cheering him now would have hanged him had he failed.

May – September 14, 1629 · Brabant Theater

's-Hertogenbosch sat in a marsh and was thought impregnable — no one had ever taken it. Frederick Henry drained the marsh. He dammed the rivers, built forty kilometres of siege works around the town and a second ring facing outward against relief, and pumped the swamp dry with windmills, then mined the walls. It fell in four months.

October 31, 1639 · The Channel, off the English coast Theater

Spain's last great armada — a fleet carrying an army to Flanders — sheltered in English neutral waters in the Downs. Tromp blockaded it, waited for the fog, and then went in and destroyed it regardless of English neutrality, with the English fleet watching, unable to intervene. Over forty Spanish ships were sunk, burned, or taken.

January 30, 1648 · Westphalia Theater

After eighty years, Philip IV recognised the United Provinces as free, sovereign, and independent, renounced all claim to them, and conceded the closure of the Scheldt that strangled Antwerp for the benefit of Amsterdam. The Dutch signed separately, ahead of their French allies, and got everything they had asked for in 1568 and much they had not.