the History of Netherlands: From Sea Beggars to Superpower

How does a waterlogged corner of Europe, with fewer than two million people and no natural defenses, fight the largest empire on earth for eighty years and come out of it running the world's shipping?THE HISTORY OF THE NETHERLANDS follows that country from Roman frontier mud to the Delta Works, and gives the piracy years the room they are usually denied: two full chapters on the men who fought the Spanish crown from a captured hull, and on those who kept going long after the war stopped paying.Inside, you'll find: - The Sea Beggars taking Brielle on 1 April 1572 with about six hundred men and a ferryman's lie that put the number at five thousand. Almost nobody died, and within four months eighteen towns were funding a rebellion that six had been willing to pay for.- The Army of Flanders, grown from 10,000 men in 1567 to 86,235 in 1574, costing 1,200,000 florins a month while barely 300,000 arrived from Castile, and mutinying forty-five separate times.- Piet Hein at Matanzas in 1628: thirty-one ships, 679 guns, a treasure fleet taken in a morning, and an audited prize of 11,509,524 guilders.- Jan Janszoon of Haarlem, who became Murat Reis, ruled Salé behind sixty-eight cannon and in one summer carried off close to four hundred Icelanders.- The VOC's 4,785 voyages to Asia, Amsterdam growing from 30,000 people to 200,000 in a century, and the flood line held at thirty centimeters that stopped 120,000 French soldiers in 1672.You need no background in Dutch history and no head for dates, only an interest in how a small, wet, stubborn country armed its merchants and drowned its own fields to stay free.