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The Eighty Years' War (1568-1648), also called the Dutch Revolt, created the Dutch Republic out of rebellion against the Spanish Habsburgs. The Seventeen Provinces of the Netherlands, among Europe's richest and most urbanized lands, were inherited by Philip II of Spain, whose government attacked the privileges of the provinces' estates, quartered Spanish garrisons, planned new bishoprics, and sent the Inquisition against spreading Protestantism. Resistance hardened after 1566, when the nobles' petition of the Compromise was dismissed, the petitioners proudly adopting the slur 'Beggars', and Calvinist mobs in the 'Iconoclastic Fury' smashed church images across the provinces. Philip answered with the Duke of Alba's Army of Flanders and the Council of Troubles, which executed the counts Egmont and Hornes in Brussels in 1568 and drove thousands into exile.
William of Orange, the Silent, organized the revolt from exile, and in 1572 the Sea Beggars seized Brielle, triggering general insurrection in Holland and Zeeland. Alba's terror, the sack of Mechelen, Zutphen and Naarden, the siege and massacre of Haarlem and the relief of Leiden, whose dikes were cut to drown the siege, failed to break the northern provinces, united behind William in 1576's Pacification of Ghent after the Spanish Fury at Antwerp horrified the whole Netherlands. But Parma's reconquest of the Catholic south in the 1580s, taking Antwerp in 1585 after a brilliant siege, split the provinces permanently: the south remained Spanish, the future Belgium; the seven northern provinces had formed the Union of Utrecht (1579) and in 1581, by the Act of Abjuration, formally deposed Philip, Europe's first modern declaration of independence.
After William's assassination in 1584, the young republic survived through trade wealth, sea power and the military reforms of Maurice of Nassau, who with Oldenbarnevelt built a professional army that retook Breda and the eastern fortresses. England's war with Spain, ending in the Armada's defeat (1588), relieved the pressure, and the Dutch took the war to the sea and the world: the East India Company (1602) and West India Company (1621) seized Portuguese and Spanish possessions from Brazil to Indonesia. A Twelve Years' Truce (1609) acknowledged facts without recognition, but war resumed with the Thirty Years' War, whose Dutch theater saw Frederick Henry's sieges, the Battle of the Downs (1639) destroying Spanish sea power, and the Franco-Dutch alliance against Spain.
The Peace of Munster, part of Westphalia (30 January 1648), ended the war: Spain finally recognized the independence of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, keeping the Scheldt closed to strangle Antwerp for Amsterdam's benefit. The war had created Europe's most unusual state: a merchant republic without a king, tolerant by the standards of the age, the financial and naval center of the world, whose Golden Age of Rembrandt, Vermeer and Spinoza was built while the fighting continued. The southern Netherlands stayed under Spanish, then Austrian, rule until 1794.
Britannica: Eighty Years' War
World History Encyclopedia: Eighty Years' War