History
Geography
Culture
The prehistory of the area that is now the Netherlands was largely shaped by the sea and the rivers that constantly shifted the low-lying geography. The oldest human (Neanderthal) traces were found in higher soils, near Maastricht, from what is believed to be about 250,000 years ago. At the end of the Ice Age, the nomadic late Upper Palaeolithic Hamburg culture (c. 13.000–10.000 BC) hunted reindeer in the area, using spears, but the later Ahrensburg culture (c. 11.200–9500 BC) used bow and arrow. From Mesolithic Maglemosian-like tribes (c. 8000 BC) the oldest canoe in the world was found in Drenthe.
Celts, Germanic tribes and Romans (800 BC–410 AD)
From 800 BC onwards, the Iron Age Celtic Hallstatt culture became influential, replacing the Hilversum culture. Iron ore brought a measure of prosperity and was available throughout the country, including bog iron. Smiths travelled from settlement to settlement with bronze and iron, fabricating tools on demand. The King's grave of Oss (700 BC) was found in a burial mound, the largest of its kind in western Europe and containing an iron sword with an inlay of gold and coral.
The deteriorating climate in Scandinavia around 850 BC further deteriorated around 650 BC and might have triggered migration of Germanic tribes from the North. By the time this migration was complete, around 250 BC, a few general cultural and linguistic groups had emerged.The North Sea Germanic Ingaevones inhabited the northern part of the Low Countries. They would later develop into the Frisii and the early Saxons. A second grouping, the Weser-Rhine Germanic (or Istvaeones), extended along the middle Rhine and Weser and inhabited the Low Countries south of the great rivers. This group consisted of tribes that would eventually develop into the Salian Franks. Also the Celtic La Tène culture (c. 450 BC up to the Roman conquest) had expanded over a wide range, including the southern area of the Low Countries. Some scholars have speculated that even a third ethnic identity and language, neither Germanic nor Celtic, survived in the Netherlands until the Roman period, the Iron Age Nordwestblock culture, that eventually was absorbed by the Celts to the south and the Germanic peoples from the east.
On January 23, 1579, the agreement at Utrecht was concluded, forming a “closer union” within the larger union of the Low Countries led by the States General sitting in Brussels. Included in the Union of Utrecht were the provinces and cities committed to carrying on resistance to Spanish rule: Holland, Zeeland, Utrecht, Gelderland (Guelders), and Zutphen (a part of Overijssel) as the first signatories, followed in the next year by the whole of Overijssel, most of Friesland, and Groningen, all in the north, and in the south by the cities of Antwerp and Breda in Brabant and Ghent, Brugge (Bruges), and Ypres (Ieper) in Flanders. Designed to establish a league for conduct of the war of independence and ultimately to strengthen the central government in Brussels, the Union of Utrecht became in fact the foundation of a separate state and a distinct country in the northern Netherlands. The new state was named the United Provinces of the Netherlands, or, more briefly, the Dutch Republic, and its government was known in the international community as the States General.
The people of the northern Netherlands began to be distinguished from the inhabitants of the south (to whom the name Flemings continued to cling) by the appellation Hollanders (French: Hollandais; Italian: Olandese; German: Holländer; and so forth), after their principal province. The English, however, came to apply exclusively to the Hollanders the term Dutch, which previously they had applied to all German speakers (from German Deutsch, Dutch Duits). The name Netherlanders, which remained in use in the Low Countries for the inhabitants of the United Provinces specifically and for all those, north or south, who spoke Dutch (Netherlandic), passed out of currency in most foreign countries or came to be restricted to the northerners. The transformation had a price: the erosion of the bond of historical identity between northerners and southerners—or Dutch and Belgians, as they would be called beginning in the 19th century.
The treaty that formed the basis of the new northern union established a military league to resist the Spaniards on a “perpetual” basis, and it provided for closer political arrangements between the provinces than those of “allies” in the ordinary sense. The provinces united “for all time as if they were a single province”; each remained sovereign in its internal affairs, but all acted as a body in foreign policy. Decisions on war and peace and on federal taxation could be made only unanimously. The union did not throw off the formal sovereignty of the king of Spain, but it confirmed the effective powers of the provincial stadtholders (formally the “lieutenants,” or governors, of the king) as their political leaders (there was no “stadtholder of the United Provinces,” as foreigners often assumed, although several of the provincial stadtholderates were often united in the same person). The union moved away from the religious settlement embodied in the Pacification of Ghent of two years before and toward a predominance of the Calvinists and their monopoly of public practice of religion in the key provinces of Holland and Zeeland.
The immediate political significance of the union was that it complemented the Union of Arras, concluded earlier in January, which began the reconciliation of the southerners with King Philip II of Spain. The two “unions,” parallel but opposite, thus undermined the policy of William I (Prince William of Orange) of collaboration between Roman Catholics and Calvinists throughout the Low Countries in resistance to the Spanish domination, which required mutual toleration between the religions. But it took some time before the “general union,” with its base in the States General at Brussels, fell apart irrevocably.