section_path: Northern European involvement (1595–17th century)
section_name: Northern European involvement (1595–17th century)
paragraph_text: Northern European involvement (1595–17th century)
  
  European nations outside Iberia did not recognize the Treaty of Tordesillas between Portugal and Castile, nor did they recognize Pope Alexander VI's donation of the Spanish finds in the New World. France, the Netherlands and England each had a long maritime tradition and had been engaging in privateering. Despite Iberian protections, the new technologies and maps soon made their way north.
  
  After the marriage of Henry VIII of England and Catherine of Aragon failed to produce a male heir and Henry failed to obtain a papal dispensation to annul his marriage, he broke with the Roman Catholic Church and established himself as head of the Church of England. This added religious conflict to political conflict. When much of The Netherlands became Protestant, it sought political and religious independence from Catholic Spain. In 1568, the Dutch rebelled against the rule of Philip II of Spain leading to the Eighty Years' War. War between England and Spain also broke out. In 1580, Philip II became King of Portugal, as heir to its Crown. Although he ruled Portugal and its empire as separate from the Spanish Empire, the union of the crowns produced a Catholic superpower, which England and the Netherlands challenged.
  
  In the eighty-year Dutch war of independence, Philip's troops conquered the important trading cities of Bruges and Ghent. Antwerp, then the most important port in the world, fell in 1585. The Protestant population was given two years to settle affairs before leaving the city. Many settled in Amsterdam. Those were mainly skilled craftsmen, rich merchants of the port cities and refugees that fled religious persecution, particularly Sephardi Jews from Portugal and Spain and, later, the Huguenots from France. The Pilgrim Fathers also spent time there before going to the New World. This mass immigration was an important driving force: a small port in 1585, Amsterdam quickly transformed into one of the most important commercial centres in the world. After the failure of the Spanish Armada in 1588, there was a huge expansion of maritime trade even though the defeat of the English Armada would confirm the naval supremacy of the Spanish navy over the emergent competitors.
  
  Dutch maritime power rose quickly as Dutch sailors, skilled in navigation and mapmaking, engaged with Portuguese voyages. In 1592, Cornelis de Houtman gathered information on the Spice Islands in Lisbon. The same year, Jan Huyghen van Linschoten published a detailed travel report in Amsterdam, providing navigation instructions for reaching the East Indies and Japan. Following this, Houtman led the Dutch’s first exploratory voyage, discovering a new route from Madagascar to the Sunda Strait and securing a treaty with the Banten Sultan. The Dutch also demonstrated their maritime strength by seizing Malacca from Portugal in 1641, following a series of battles that began in 1602.
  
  Dutch and British interest, fed on new information, led to a movement of commercial expansion, and the foundation of English (1600), and Dutch (1602) chartered companies. Dutch, French, and English sent ships which flouted the Portuguese monopoly, concentrated mostly on the coastal areas, which proved unable to defend against such a vast and dispersed venture.