This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Most European states in the seventeenth century answered to a king. The Dutch Republic answered to seven of them, or rather to none, since its founding act was a rejection of monarchy itself. When the northern Low Countries provinces renounced Philip II of Spain in 1581, they did not replace him with a new king; sovereignty stayed with each province's own States, and a shared States General in The Hague, essentially a standing congress of provincial delegates, coordinated matters the provinces judged genuinely common, chiefly defense and foreign policy. Real executive authority, especially over the army, sat instead with a stadtholder, a post usually, though not automatically, held by a member of the House of Orange-Nassau, creating a peculiar hybrid where a quasi-monarchical military office coexisted with a fiercely provincial, merchant-dominated republic. Wealthy regents, the urban patrician merchant families who dominated town councils and provincial States, held the real civilian power, and it was their commercial interest, not royal ambition, that funded the Dutch East India Company and steered Dutch foreign policy toward protecting trade routes over territorial conquest for its own sake. The arrangement was often unwieldy, provinces could and did disagree, Holland alone supplied roughly half the Republic's revenue and correspondingly dominated its politics, but it produced a state remarkably resistant to the absolutist consolidation happening elsewhere in Europe at the same time.