During the first decades of its existence in the early seventeenth century, the Dutch Republic underwent a serious political-religious crisis. This crisis was provoked by dissensions over two main issues : predestination, and the signing of a twelve-year truce with Spain. With the beheading of Holland’s political leader Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the tragic conclusion to this conflict was to leave its mark for some time on the victory of the orthodox Calvinists and their supporters within the Dutch political class. The questions that were raised and bitterly discussed in the course of these heated controversies led to the publication of two central texts of similar content, which aimed to defend the supremacy of civil over ecclesiastical authorities. Johannes Uytenbogaert’s Treatise on the Function and Authority of the Christian Magistrate (1610) and Hugo Grotius’s The Piety of the States of Holland and West Friesland (1613) each introduced the idea of absolute sovereignty in its own way, and thereby inaugurated, at the height of a major crisis for the Republic’s survival, the modern strand of Dutch political thought.