Breda received its municipal charter in 1252 and began building brick walls and Roman-style gates. In 1327 Adelheid of Gaveren sold the city to the Duke of Brabant. In 1350 it was sold again to Johannes II of Wassenaar. In 1403 his heiress, Johanna of Polanen, married Engelbert I of Nassau, and through that marriage Breda passed into the House of Nassau, where it would remain until 1795. When William the Silent, leader of the Dutch revolt against Spain, inherited the barony, the title of Lord of Breda became permanently entangled with the highest political office in the new Dutch Republic. The Dutch monarchs are still, formally, descended from the lords of this Brabant town.

The arrival of the House of Orange-Nassau transformed Breda into a residentiestad, a residence city, drawing other nobles who built grand homes along the old quarters. The Italian architect Thomas Vincidor de Bologna designed a palace here for the first Dutch prince, said to be the first Renaissance-style palace built north of the Alps. The Grote Kerk, the Church of Our Lady, rose nearby in Brabantine Gothic style with an elegant tower of about ninety-seven meters. Inside lies the sarcophagus of Engelbert I, the Nassau who first acquired the city. In 1534 Henry III of Nassau-Breda rebuilt the medieval fortifications on a much grander scale. The same year a fire destroyed roughly nine-tenths of the city, sparing only the main church and about a hundred and fifty houses. Breda rebuilt anyway.

In July 1581, during the Eighty Years' War, Spanish troops under Claudius van Barlaymont, known as Haultpenne, captured Breda by surprise. The city surrendered on the promise that it would not be plundered. The soldiers ignored the promise and killed more than five hundred citizens in what became known as Haultpenne's Fury. In March 1590 Maurice of Nassau took Breda back through one of the most audacious operations of the era. Sixty-eight Dutch soldiers hid under the turf of a peat boat that supplied the Spanish garrison. The boat slipped into the city's harbor. The soldiers emerged at night and opened the gates. The trick was so famous that around 1610 Breda began building the Spanjaardsgat, the Spanish Gate, to commemorate it. In 1624 the Spanish came back. After a ten-month siege Justinus van Nassau handed over the keys, and Velazquez immortalized the moment a decade later. Breda changed hands twice more before the Treaty of Munster finally awarded it to the Dutch Republic in 1648.

In 1660 the exiled Stuart heir Charles II was living in Breda, drawn there by his sister Mary, the widow of William II of Orange. From Breda, with strong nudging from Parliamentarian General George Monck, Charles issued the Declaration of Breda, laying out the terms under which he would accept the English crown: religious tolerance, amnesty for most former enemies, payment of the army's arrears. Within months he was restored to the throne in London. Seven years later, in July 1667, the Treaty of Breda was signed in the same city, ending the Second Anglo-Dutch War in which Charles had been fighting the same Dutch hosts who had sheltered him. The treaty also transferred a Dutch trading post called New Amsterdam to the English, who promptly renamed it New York.

On 29 October 1944, during Operation Pheasant, the 1st Polish Armoured Division under General Stanislaw Maczek liberated Breda through a flanking maneuver. Each year during Liberation Day, Breda receives a Polish contingent and reserves part of the celebration for the soldiers who died here. Maczek himself is buried in the nearby Polish military cemetery. Forty days before Easter the city reinvents itself for Carnaval, renaming itself Kielengat for the duration. The mayor symbolically hands the keys to Prince Carnaval and his Council of 11. Four festive royal courts preside, Mop Orchestras wander between bars, and a parade of floats winds through the streets on Sunday and Monday. The fortified Brabant town that once watched Spinola accept its surrender now watches itself give itself away again, gently, every year.