Frederick Henry, Prince of Orange

August 1624 – June 5, 1625 · 18,000 total casualties

Spain's last great triumph in the Netherlands, and it bought nothing: the Dutch retook Breda in 1637. Its real afterlife is a painting. Velázquez's *Las Lanzas* shows the victor raising the defeated commander by the shoulder — chivalry from an empire that had massacred Haarlem's garrison fifty years earlier, and an image of magnanimity produced by a power that had already lost.

September 8, 1628 · 10 total casualties

The only time the Spanish silver fleet was ever captured, and it was a Dutch privateer war fought 7,000 km from the Netherlands. The plunder funded the Republic's army for eight months and paid for the campaign that took 's-Hertogenbosch the next year. It also stated the Dutch strategy plainly: the war was global, Spain's empire paid for Spain's armies, and the way to beat the tercios in Brabant was to rob them in the Caribbean.

May – September 14, 1629 · 9,000 total casualties

The war's engineering masterpiece and the reason Frederick Henry was called the Stedendwinger — the Forcer of Cities. It is the Dutch answer to Ostend, done better: where Spain spent three years and an army on a sand heap, the Dutch spent four months and took the strongest fortress in the Low Countries. Paid for, in part, with Piet Hein's Cuban silver.

October 31, 1639 · 7,000 total casualties

The end of Spain as a naval power and the arrival of the Dutch as the greatest one. The Spanish Road to Flanders was already closed by land and now the sea route was gone too — the Army of Flanders could no longer be reinforced at all, and the Netherlands were effectively lost. It also displayed Tromp's line-ahead tactics, which the English took careful notes on and used against him a decade later.

January 30, 1648 · 0 total casualties

A rebellion against the world's greatest empire that lasted eighty years and won outright. It produced Europe's first durable republic, a state with no monarch in an age of absolutism, religiously plural by necessity, governed by merchants — and by then already the richest country per head on earth, with an empire from Manhattan to Nagasaki. Signed alongside the treaties ending the Thirty Years' War, it is half of the Peace of Westphalia and half of the birth of the sovereign-state system.