In January 1515, unpaid mercenaries rode out from the Frisian town of Franeker, burned the village of Kimswerd, and killed a farmer's wife in the ruins of her home. Her husband, Pier Gerlofs Donia, a giant of a man remembered as Grutte Pier, answered with war. For eight years his Black Heap of Arum, an army of farmers, fishermen, outlaws, and hired soldiers, defied the house of Habsburg. Its small boats turned the Zuiderzee into a graveyard for Hollandic shipping. It crossed the inland sea under cover of mist, burned Medemblik, destroyed a Habsburg fleet off Hoorn, and at Asperen committed a massacre that Erasmus set beside the cruelties of the Turks. Ricarde Leyne tells the full story of Europe's forgotten peasant admiral: the ancient Frisian Freedom and the chieftains who hollowed it out, the Duke of Guelders who funded the rebellion for his own ends, and the patient Habsburg stadtholder who finally cornered its last fighters at Sloten and beheaded their leader in the market square of Leeuwarden. Vivid, scrupulous, and humane, this is a history that weighs hero against brigand and legend against evidence, and asks what a small people keeps when it has lost everything else.