Courtyard of the Amsterdam Stock Exchange, 1653.
Amsterdam is the capital and largest city in the Republic of the Netherlands. It was founded in the twelfth century as a village by a dam built across the Amstel River. The village grew until it was granted city rights in the early fourteenth century. Trade with the cities of the Hanseatic League accelerated the city's growth until it was the wealthiest in the Netherlands.
The Netherlands came under the rule of the Habsburgs when Mary of Burgundy, heiress to the last Duke of Burgundy, married Maximilian of Habsburg in 1477. The Netherlands rebelled against Mary and Maximilian's grandson Philip II of Spain in the 1570s, and the resulting Eighty Years' War ended in 1648 with the independence of the northern, predominantly Dutch-speaking Protestant Dutch Republic.
Amsterdam continued to prosper during the Eighty Years' War as its merchant ships spread across the world, establishing the New Netherlands colony in North America, the Dutch Guiana colony in South America, the Cape Colony in South Africa, and the Dutch East Indies colony in the Indonesian archipelago. The world's first stock exchange was established in Amsterdam in 1602 when the Dutch East India Company began publicly trading its own shares. Seven years later the Bank of Amsterdam started operations, acting as a full service bank for Dutch merchant bankers and as a reserve bank.
Although a series of wars with England and France in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries reduced the power of the Netherlands and led to the loss of the New Netherlands colony to England, Amsterdam continued to be a major commercial and banking center. Amsterdam was the third European capital to host Governor-General Douglas Watson during his "grand tour" of the continent in April and May 1933. After the Netherlands was conquered by the Germanic Confederation in the Global War, the people of Amsterdam rose up in revolt in 1945.