William of Orange's Revolt Against Philip II

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Eighty Years' War was the revolt of the Seventeen Provinces of the Habsburg Netherlands against the rule of King Philip II of Spain. It opened with the 1566 iconoclastic riots against Catholic church imagery and the 1568 executions of the Counts of Egmont and Horn, and ran through the 1581 Act of Abjuration, by which the northern provinces formally renounced Philip's sovereignty. William of Orange led the early resistance, and the rebellious provinces organized from 1579 as the Union of Utrecht, continuing the fight under his sons after his own death partway through the long conflict.

Spain's forces in the Low Countries were commanded across the war by a succession of governors, including the Duke of Alba and Alexander Farnese, both sent from Spain specifically to hold the provinces. The war produced a de facto independent Dutch Republic in the north while the southern provinces remained under Habsburg and Catholic rule, a division that hardened into the later border between the Netherlands and Belgium. It closed in 1648 with the Peace of Munster, part of the wider Peace of Westphalia, in which Spain formally recognized Dutch independence after eighty years of intermittent war.