Maurice of Nassau

July 2, 1600 · 5,000 total casualties

The first time in eighty years that a Dutch army defeated a Spanish army in a pitched open battle, and the vindication of everything Maurice had rebuilt: standardised weapons, engineering, regular pay, and above all the countermarch — ranks firing and rotating so the volleys never stopped. Strategically Nieuwpoort achieved nothing and Maurice went straight home. Militarily it announced that the tercio's century was ending, and every army in Europe started copying the drill book.

July 1601 – September 1604 · 100,000 total casualties

The purest expression of how the Dutch actually won the war. They lost Ostend — and while Spinola spent three years and an army taking it, Maurice took Sluis and a string of far more valuable towns, and Spain's treasury bled out. The Dutch traded a heap of sand for the Spanish field army's whole strategic capacity. Spain declared bankruptcy again in 1607 and asked for a truce two years later.

April 9, 1609 · 0 total casualties

The de facto victory, twelve years of it, and it nearly destroyed the Republic from within. The peace faction and the war faction turned on each other in a religious quarrel between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants; in 1619 Maurice had Oldenbarnevelt — the man who had built the Dutch state — beheaded on the Binnenhof. The Republic survived Spain more easily than it survived itself.

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.