William the Silent (William of Orange)

May 23, 1568 · 1,600 total casualties

Conventionally the opening battle of the Eighty Years' War, and a false dawn. Heiligerlee raised hopes of a general rising that never came; within two months Alba had annihilated the same army at Jemmingen and the rebellion of 1568 was over. The date is still Dutch national memory — the monastery ruin marks where the war began.

April 1, 1572 · 40 total casualties

The improvised seizure of an insignificant town restarted a war that Alba had won four years earlier. Brielle gave the revolt a foothold on Dutch soil, and within weeks town after town in Holland and Zeeland declared for Orange. The Dutch still say it: *Op 1 april verloor Alva zijn bril* — on the first of April, Alba lost his spectacles, a pun on Brielle. The revolt's decisive moment was a joke about eyewear.

December 1572 – July 1573 · 14,000 total casualties

A Spanish victory that cost more than it was worth, in men, in time, and above all in credibility. After Naarden and Haarlem, no Dutch town believed a Spanish promise of quarter again — which meant every subsequent siege was fought to the last, and the Spanish had to pay full price for every wall in the Netherlands. Terror had been Alba's instrument; here it began working against him.

October 3, 1574 · 8,000 total casualties

The war's defining image and the birth of the Dutch Water Line — a country that could turn itself into a sea rather than surrender. Leiden's reward was a university, founded in 1575 and shortly one of Europe's finest, and the herring and white bread of the relief are still eaten there every October 3. It also set the strategic logic of the entire war: the Dutch could not beat the tercios, but they could drown the ground under them.

November 4, 1576 · 8,000 total casualties

The single most self-destructive event of the Spanish war effort, and it was committed by no one's decision. The Fury horrified the loyal Catholic provinces into signing the Pacification of Ghent days later, briefly uniting all seventeen provinces against Spain, and it broke Antwerp — capital, port, and financial centre of the Low Countries. Its bankers and craftsmen fled north to a swampy town called Amsterdam, and took the Golden Age with them.