History of the United Netherlands from the Death of William the Silent to the Twelve Year's Truce, 1608a

In 1584, William the Silent was assassinated in a stairwell in Delft, and the Dutch cause seemed doomed. Yet by 1609, a small Protestant republic had not merely survived the might of the Spanish Empire but forced the most powerful monarch in Europe to acknowledge its existence. This is the story of those twenty-five impossible years: the desperate war, the inventive general who remade military strategy, the lawyers who argued for sovereignty with Spanish commissioners, and the fragile hope of a people who refused to submit. John Lothrop Motley, whose literary history won the Pulitzer Prize, traces the birth of the Dutch Republic through treaties and battles, through the competing visions of Prince Maurice and Olden-Barneveld, and through the grinding diplomacy that finally brought the Twelve Year's Truce. This is history written as epic: full of characters who believed they were inventing a new kind of nation, and whose struggle would reshape European politics forever. For readers who love rich narrative history, who want to understand how a commercial republic emerged from the ashes of religious war.