ANYONE WHO APPROACHED LEIDEN, WHETHER GOING ON FOOT THROUGH meadows and gardens full of fruit trees and grazing cattle, trundling along dusty paths in a coach, or gliding through the water in a barque, would be struck from miles away by its picturesque silhouette. The city glittered in the landscape like a star in the Dutch firmament.
In the bird’s-eye plans dating from the early seventeenth century, this is clearly visible. Bastions and heavy earthen ramparts, which had replaced the medieval walls, formed a jagged pattern around the map. Seven gates gave access to the city from all points of the compass, or when necessary, could seal it off hermetically. Outworks, small pentagonal islands constructed in the outer canals to give extra protection from the cannons of enemy troops, formed the points of the star.
Leiden’s skyline was dominated by three large churches: the Church of Our Lady in the west, the Church of St Pancras in the east and St Peter’s—the Pieterskerk—in the city centre. Like three gigantic ships, they sailed across the ocean of the city’s roofs, albeit without masts: the churches had no high towers. The first had a modest spire, and St Pancras had plans for one that never materialized.
The seventy-odd-metre tower of the Pieterskerk, nicknamed “King of the Sea” because it served as a beacon for sea captains navigating near the coast, had dramatically collapsed with a thunderous roar at the beginning of March 1512. Miraculously, not a single person was killed. Did St Peter himself reach down to protect the flock? His keys to the kingdom of heaven, crossed and blood-red, the blades facing upward, were displayed above the church’s double doors and served as the city’s coat of arms. “And I will give unto thee the keys of the kingdom of heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt bind on earth shall be bound in heaven: and whatsoever thou shalt loose on earth shall be loosed in heaven.” (Matthew 16:19)
When Rembrandt produced his 1631 painting, he linked different parts of Peter’s story: his imprisonment by King Herod and his remorse after he had denied Jesus three times. While the light falls on the furrowed face of Peter and on his hands, folded in penitence, it illuminates in equal measure the crossed keys on the floor. Rembrandt’s St Peter was a man of Leiden.
Jan van Goyen, View of Leiden from the North-east, 1650.
Here and there we do discern other towers projecting above the ramparts: that of the Saaihal, the main centre of cloth production, the spire of the chapel in the Faliede Bagijnhof and the tower of the town hall on Breestraat, whose twenty-three bells rang out every hour and were played at set times by the city’s campanologist.
Holland was a river delta, its cities miniature island kingdoms. Leiden was a sparkling labyrinth of canals, watercourses, the Rivers Mare and Vliet and the majestic Rhine, which branched off outside the city walls and converged again in the heart of the city. They divided the city into dozens of tiny islands with houses, churches, monasteries and gardens that were all connected by scores of bridges. In fact, when the sixteenth-century Italian-Flemish merchant Lodovico Guicciardini wrote his account of his travels around the Netherlands, Beschryvinghe van alle de Nederlanden, he counted 145 bridges in Leiden!
At the point where the two branches of the Rhine merge, on the crest of a hill, stood the stately citadel. This was where the first settlement had been built, eight centuries earlier, as a watchtower to guard over the river. From the circular citadel, the passage of ships was observed and taxes levied by the local nobleman. This was where inhabitants could retreat in the event of a siege or when the Rhine flooded its banks—a frequent occurrence. Leiden had been expanded in successive waves, like ripples spreading out from a stone tossed into the water. By the seventeenth century the citadel had long lost its military function, but it was still the central edifice of Leiden.
Crossing the city in a gentle arc from east to west, Breestraat followed the course of the Rhine. The street had been paved on top of the old dike running alongside the river. This had once been the northernmost frontier or limes of the Roman Empire. The people of Leiden believed that their city’s foundations lay on the citadel of the Batavians, the original inhabitants of the banks of the Rhine, who had valiantly resisted foreign rule.
During the siege of Leiden in 1574, when Spanish troops held the city in a vice and thousands of people died of starvation or the Plague, two local leaders, the town clerk Jan van Hout and the multitalented nobleman Jan van der Does—military leader and poet—breathed new life into the old legend of “Lugdunum Batavorum”. Orlers eagerly repeated the story in his Beschrijvinge der Stadt Leyden. It fitted seam-lessly into the story of the Revolt against the Habsburg rulers that had erupted in the Netherlands, a struggle that would last for eighty years.
History is written by the victors. Many of the stories that were told and retold in the seventeenth century about the Revolt and the courage, loyalty and bravery of the people of Leiden were coloured by propaganda or even distorted to serve the narrator’s purpose. Yet those stories lived on. They did much to bolster local morale.
The seeds of the Revolt were sown when the Emperor Charles V announced his abdication. The Habsburg prince had ruled over a territory extending from the Mediterranean to the North Sea and the Baltic, from Europe to the colonies in the Americas and Asia: it was “the empire on which the sun never sets”. In 1555, Charles abdicated, dividing his empire between his brother Ferdinand and his son Philip II. Ferdinand acquired the Austrian territories and was crowned Emperor. Philip II became the ruler over Spain, the Italian territories and related colonies—and the Netherlands.
Even under Charles V, relations with the Habsburg court had been problematic. “The Netherlands” did not constitute a contiguous territory, let alone a single country. The region between Wallonia in the south-west and Friesland and Groningen in the north-east was a patchwork of duchies, counties and cities, governed by miscellaneous nobles and city magistrates who invoked rights that had been acquired over many centuries.
Taxation was one problem. Imposing a centralized taxation system was hard in itself, especially in the lean years in which the inhabitants of the Habsburg Empire were expected to finance the wars. Then there were the religious conflicts, which proved increasingly hard to contain. Charles V, of course, was a Catholic ruler, and there were several pockets of opposition throughout his realm to the worldly, materialistic ways of the Roman Catholic Church. The voices of critical Christians and of Church Reformers became ever louder. In Germany, many endorsed the ideals of Luther, while Calvin attracted a fanatical following in the Southern Netherlands.
Antonio Moro, Willem I (1533–84), Prince of Orange, c.1552.
Charles V had already tried to suppress the growth of Protestantism, but his son, who firmly believed that he was crowned by God, pursued this objective with even greater zeal. After his father’s death, Philip proved a dogmatic despot, under whose rule relations with the Low Countries steadily worsened. This even applied to relations with a Catholic nobleman on whom Charles had doted and who had been destined for a leading role at the Habsburg court: William of Orange.
Frans Hogenberg, Iconoclasm, 1566.
In 1559, after his father’s death, Philip bade Brussels farewell, never to set foot in the Low Countries again. Ensconced in the Escorial, his granite palace on the high plateau north of Madrid, he left the actual business of governing the Netherlands to his half-sister, Margaret of Parma. As governor, she was charged with centralizing the administration and tax collection. This pitted her squarely against the nobles and city councillors, who resented the assault on centuries of jealously guarded privilege.
Committed to what he saw as a divine mission, Philip demanded the enforcement of a strict Catholic regime in the Low Countries. Followers of Luther or Calvin or other dissident thinkers were threatened with the Inquisition. However, Margaret of Parma found herself unable to uphold the repressive religious policy prescribed by her brother. On 5th April 1566, in Brussels, an alliance of minor nobles presented a petition to Margaret in the presence of William of Orange and the Counts of Egmond and Horne, beseeching her to pursue a more tolerant course. The governor listened gravely and was moved to tears. The lord of Berlaymont, one of Philip’s most loyal followers, said to her: “N’ayez pas peur Madame, ce ne sont que des gueux.” (“Fear not, Madam, they are only beggars.”)
A few days later, a group of Dutch nobles who had gathered to dine repeated the word that had been used to mock them and adopted it as a proud sobriquet. The Count of Brederode downed a begging bowl full of wine in a single gulp and cried: “Vive les gueux!”—“To the Beggars!”
Margaret of Parma announced her intention to moderate the religious persecution for an indefinite period, but to no avail. Calvinist preachers took courage and gave sermons to congregations gathered in the fields. These gatherings became focal points for the rising resentment. In August 1566 the Iconoclasm erupted. Gangs of plunderers and Protestant fanatics tore through the Netherlands from south to north, destroying the extravagant, papist images of God in Catholic churches which they saw as contrary to the literal precepts of the Bible.
On 20th August 1566 the Iconoclasm reached Antwerp, and six days later it came to Leiden. On 26th August, violent Calvinist mobs “purged” the city’s three large churches. Altarpieces, paintings and statues of saints were pulled down, dragged outside and burned in bonfires. The Franciscan church outside the Hogewoerd Gate and the Mariënpoel and Roomburg convents were vandalized.
In response to the Iconoclasm, Philip II despatched Alba—the “Iron Duke”—to suppress the insurgency by force. William of Orange, who had advocated religious tolerance in the Council of State, feared for his own safety and took refuge in his family’s castle at Dillenburg in Germany. In spite of the favour that he had once enjoyed with the Habsburg rulers, and although he was a Catholic, he became the leader of the Revolt.
The Counts of Egmond and Horne were immediately arrested at Alba’s behest and brought before the Council of Troubles, which the people soon nicknamed the “Council of Blood”. From Dillenburg Castle William started raising funds, recruiting soldiers and preparing an invasion. On 23rd May 1568 an army led by his brother, Louis of Nassau, lured Spanish troops into the marshland near Heiligerlee. When Alba heard that his men had been defeated, he signed the death warrants of Egmond and Horne. On 5th June the two nobles were beheaded at the main market square in Brussels. Their heads were displayed on stakes.
The Iron Duke then swept through the Netherlands at the head of an army of mercenaries, seeking to prevent the Revolt from spreading. Amsterdam was spared, since at this point it was still loyal to the Habsburg ruler. Alba achieved a number of bloody victories on land, but at sea he suffered serious defeats. A motley bunch of mercenaries, privateers and fortune-hunters evolved into a formidable guerrilla army: authorized by letters of marque signed by William, they conquered a steady succession of Spanish ships.
In the early spring of 1572, a small fleet with 1,000 men on board, under the command of Admiral Lumey, seized almost by chance the unguarded little port of Den Briel. Lumey—known as “Commander Long Nail”, because he had taken an oath, after the beheading of Egmond and Horne, not to cut his hair or nails or to trim his beard until he could avenge their deaths—committed atrocities after the capture of Den Briel. On his orders, nineteen Catholic priests from Gorinchem were tortured horrifically and then hanged.
On 1st August 1572, Lumey was given a hero’s welcome in Leiden. Since the city council had recently refused to allow a Spanish garrison under the royalist General Boussu to encamp within the city walls, Leiden had effectively joined the Revolt. This had been no easy decision. Like Leiden’s vroedschap, the forty-strong advisory council from which the city’s four burgomasters were elected each year, most of the city’s population were moderate in their religious views. They preferred to avoid taking sides and to coexist in peace. At the same time, the conflict between strict Calvinists and devout Catholics was becoming more intense.
For the city’s Catholics—which had been the entire population in the not-so-distant past—Leiden’s decision to join the Revolt spelt disaster. Some prominent Catholics, fearing violence, fled from the city. They were ordered to return home, on pain of having all their property impounded. Even so, some would stay away for years.
One of the best-known of these escapees, referred to pejoratively as glippers (sneaks), was the former burgomaster Cornelis van Veen, whose son Otto was apprenticed to Isaac Claesz van Swanenburg, the city’s most prominent painter. The Van Veen family sought refuge in Antwerp, after which their house on Pieterskerkhof was confiscated by the Beggars. Scenes of horror would play out in the house. Cornelis Musius, Prior of St Agatha’s convent in Delft, was tortured for hours on end there on Lumey’s orders in the night of 10th–11th December. After that, Commander Long Nail had the prior hanged from the gallows that had been erected in Breestraat.
Such egregious acts of violence were not confined to the Beggars. On 1st December 1572, Spanish soldiers went on a rampage through the small fortified city of Naarden, which had joined the Revolt but then surrendered, sowing mayhem with acts of plunder, murder and rape and then burning the city to the ground. Haarlem fell on 12th July 1573, after a months-long siege. Soldiers garrisoned in rebel cities were hanged, beheaded or thrown into the River Spaarne with a weight attached to their feet.
It was in Alkmaar that the victory began. The city successfully withstood the siege, after the deliberate breaching of the dikes: on 8th October the Spanish troops were forced to flee before the rising water. Shortly after this ignominious retreat, Alba relinquished his position as governor. He had told Philip that six months and an army of 800 men would suffice to pacify the Netherlands. Now, after seven years of ruthless oppression, a fortune in soldiers’ pay and thousands of men’s lives, he had achieved nothing.
Alba’s powers were transferred to Don Luis de Requesens, a Catalan diplomat who had no inclination to fight—or to get his feet wet. Philip II sent him north as a recalcitrant pupil who was unwilling to attend school. When Requesens studied a map of the Low Countries and took in the topography of Holland’s cities, he exclaimed: “They are all islands!”
Filled with dread but dutiful, Requesens set about fulfilling his task. There was no question of the Spanish giving up after the liberation of Alkmaar. Only a few days later, troops commanded by General Francisco de Valdés marched south, towards Leiden. They built fortifications around the city and burned everything in their path. By 31st October 1573 the city was surrounded.
This was the first of two occasions on which the Spanish laid siege to Leiden, and the city withstood this initial ordeal quite well. Besides the militias and privateers—armed volunteers led by Andries Allaertsz—there was also a well-drilled army unit within the city walls: a garrison under the command of Governor George Montigny de Noyelles, appointed by William of Orange.
The tactics employed by the Spanish, who had learnt some wise lessons from the sieges of Haarlem and Alkmaar, focused on keeping fighting to a minimum. Their aim was to subdue and seize Leiden by means of isolation and starvation. This was initially unsuccessful, since the city was well stocked with food supplies. We read of the “indescribable number of horned creatures such as bullocks, heifers, and dairy cows” that initially grazed in the pastures around Leiden, which were now grazing in the public gardens. And the grain that was intended for the starving people of Haarlem was now piled up in storehouses on the banks of the Rhine.
In the spring of 1574, when stocks ran low and people started to worry, the danger appeared to have abated. On 21st March the Spanish lifted the siege to go and fight against the troops led by William of Orange, who had invaded the Netherlands from the east, partly with the aim of coming to Leiden’s assistance. The resulting encounter was a terrible day for William. At the Battle of Mookerheide on 14th April 1574 his army suffered devastating losses. Two of his brothers, Louis and Hendrik of Nassau, were killed.
Anon., Sortie Towards the Boshuys Fortifications, first half of the seventeenth century.
The troops led by Valdés had barely arrived on the battlefield when they heard that the battle had already been won. After a few weeks’ delay—the Spanish soldiers demanded payment of back wages—they did an about-turn. In the night of 25th–26th May they suddenly reappeared outside Leiderdorp. Andries Allaertsz tried a sally with his privateers, but the manoeuvre cost him his life. Jan van der Does, lord of Noordwijk, a fierce young nobleman who also wrote fine poetry under the pen name of Janus Dousa, took command of the remaining troops.
This time, Leiden was poorly prepared for a siege. The soldiers had left and the city council had failed to stock up on food supplies. Valdés was able to reoccupy his former positions. The city was completely sealed off from the outside world.
The Spanish pursued the same tactics as before, aiming to isolate and starve the population. There was little fighting. They did not fire cannons; only snipers claimed victims where they could. The townspeople seemed to have no chance of breaking out. Yet in the middle of the night of 28th–29th July, privateers led by Jan van der Does made a sudden sortie towards the Boshuys fortifications. The aim was to ambush the snipers who had claimed so many victims among the guards of the city’s militia on the walls.
Over sixty Spanish soldiers were killed with the aid of improvised truncheons and bottles filled with gunpowder. The privateers raided the vegetable gardens, pulling dozens of cabbages from the ground. These they brought back into the starving city, while also triumphantly displaying the severed heads and ears of the dead Spanish soldiers. Still, the impregnable cordon around Leiden remained in place.
The storehouses along the Rhine were fast emptying. Food was scarce and prices soared. The city council tracked down and confiscated hoarded goods, distributed rations to the poor and had emergency paper coins printed, for the first time in history, to keep trade going.
Guilder paper coins bore the city’s emblem of two crossed keys and the circumscription “GOD BEHOEDE LEYDEN”—“God Save Leiden”. The reverse displayed the Dutch lion holding a lance with a liberty cap in its claws, around which was inscribed the legend “HAEC LIBERTATIS ERGO”—“For the Sake of Freedom”. The local Protestant minister Den Taling protested at the text, claiming that it should have read: “HAEC RELIGIONIS ERGO”—“For the Sake of Religion”. According to the writer Coornhert in his Justificatie des Magistraets tot Leyden in Hollant, a document known as the Leiden Justification, the minister railed at the city councillors from the pulpit of the Pieterskerk, calling them “Epicurean swine”.
Jan van der Does
Jan van Hout
In the mid seventeenth century, the secretary to the Remonstrant scholar Petrus Scriverius wrote to the historian Gerard Brandt that the town clerk had reacted with fury at the minister’s offensive remarks. Van Hout was a hot-headed, imperious character, who sought to impose his will on the population as if they were mindless animals. Indeed, the townspeople called Van Hout—whose name means “wood”—“the rod that flogs the dog”.
In response to Den Taling’s insults, Jan van Hout, seated beside Burgomaster Van der Werff in the congregation, leapt up and drew his pistol, aiming it at the minister’s head. “Shall I remove it from his shoulders?” he demanded. The burgomaster barely managed to restrain Van Hout, arguing that the act would provoke public unrest.
In August 1574 famine began to take its toll and Plague erupted in the city. Penniless citizens protested outside the town hall, demanding to be given money or food. As later movingly described by Jan Fruytiers, counsellor to the Prince of Orange, in his Brief Chronicle of the Harsh Siege and the Miraculous Salvation of the City of Leiden (1574), “poor women crouched over dunghills, their cloaks pulled over their heads, searching for animal bones to take home. If they found a cabbage stump, they would devour it on the spot. Youths chewed on bones that had already been gnawed by dogs.”
In the second, revised edition of his chronicle, in 1577, Fruytiers added the messianic scene that is still seen today as exemplifying the bravery of Leiden city council. When the starving protesters came to Burgomaster Pieter Adriaansz van der Werff, begging him to surrender the city to end the famine, he offered them his sword, saying, “If my death can help you, take my body, cut it into pieces, and distribute as many of them as you can. That will give me comfort.”
In reality, Van der Werff had deliberated with the council in all earnestness about Valdés’s proposal: clemency in exchange for surrender. Jan van der Does, furious that surrender was even being contemplated, wrote indignantly to William of Orange that Van der Werff had discussed the perilous state of the city in detail with the entire vroedschap, captains, sergeants-at-arms and several prominent citizens, giving ample consideration to the enemy’s fine promises.
To bolster morale, the council deemed it paramount to maintain contact with those who were trying to liberate the city—the Prince of Orange and Admiral Louis de Boisot, commander of the Sea Beggars. How else would the people of Leiden know whether salvation was at hand? However, it was almost impossible to get messages in or out of the city, through the unrelenting stranglehold of the besieging Spanish troops.
The sixteen-year-old privateer Leeuwken had tried to skirt around the Spanish encampment near the hamlet of Ter Wadding, but he was discovered and taken captive. The Spaniards cut off his nose, ears and lips, and hung him up from one leg. When the agile boy almost succeeded in freeing himself, a Spanish soldier shot him in the head.
Salvation finally came two months after the dikes near Delft and Rotterdam had been breached, by order of William of Orange. The aim was to repeat the successful relief of Alkmaar, forcing the enemy to retreat by flooding the land. At first the water level in the polders of the Rhineland crept up slowly. But when a west gale swept through the country, suddenly sending the water coursing towards the encampments, the Spanish troops fled in panic.
In the early morning of 3rd October 1574, those keeping watch on the city walls could not detect any movement outside. Thirteen-year-old Cornelis Joppensz, the son of a widow who lived in one of the small alleys behind Koepoort, bravely ventured out to reconnoitre the Lammenschans fortifications. He found the camp completely deserted. Another Leiden boy, Gijsbert Cornelisz Schaeck, came upon a metal pan in a dugout that the soldiers had left behind in their haste, containing hutspot—a mixture of boiled carrots and onion—with stewed beef. This tale has been revamped and mythologized in written accounts over the centuries. To add drama, Cornelis Joppensz was soon being described as a penniless orphan who had fetched the pan of stew from the Lammenschans. The people of Leiden still commemorate the event to this day by eating hutspot with brisket on 3rd October each year. The pan itself is proudly displayed in De Lakenhal Museum.
The Sea Beggars navigated up the Vliet through a hole in the southern city wall in their scows, flat-bottomed vessels that were less likely to ground in the flooded polders. Into Leiden they sailed, flying the orange, white and blue flag of the Prince of Orange and bringing bread and herrings for the starving population. The arrival of the liberators and the desperately needed food provoked wild scenes of relief.
“The emaciated people,” wrote the great Dutch writer P.C. Hooft in his Nederlandsche Historien (1642),
women and men, young and old, thronged to the banks of the river, leaning out as far as they could across the water, with outstretched shoulders, arms and hands, groping and grasping to snatch the bread, herrings, cheese and other foodstuffs that the Sea Beggars handed out or tossed from their boats. Some walked or leapt until they were up to their necks in the water, or swam to the boats. These people, dripping-wet as they were, and others who had secured something, returned with it, spreading the word that the city was saved. In every district and neighbourhood, the same cry was to be heard: “Leiden, Leiden has been freed. May God be praised to all eternity!”
The Catholic Otto van Veen, who had escaped from Leiden with his family and had moved to Liège to train as a painter, made a painting of the Sea Beggars’ entry into the city, which he based on the horror stories he had heard from his brother and friends who had remained behind.
In 1576 it was safe for Van Veen and his family to return to Leiden. They took the painting with them and hung it on the wall of their house at Pieterskerkhof. There, Otto’s younger brother Pieter made a copy of it to which he added a number of dramatic elements. Among the crowds of people kneeling in prayer, begging for food or gobbling herring and bread, the severed head of a horse lies in the street—perhaps because Fruytiers had related in his account that the citizens had even resorted to eating their horses. Pieter van Veen’s talents were very meagre compared to those of Otto, who was highly gifted and would later accept Rubens as his pupil. Nonetheless, Pieter’s painting reflects depth of feeling in his compassion for his fellow townspeople.
Otto van Veen, The Starving Population after the Relief of Leiden, 1574–1629.
Romeyn de Hooghe, Siege and Relief of Leiden, 1574.
Stories about the siege of Leiden often draw biblical parallels with events such as the siege of Jerusalem by the Babylonian ruler Sennacherib. Like the people of Israel in the Jerusalem of the Old Testament, Leiden too seemed to have been saved by divine intervention. As for the distribution of bread and herrings, did it not put one in mind of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes on the shores of the Sea of Galilee?
Historians have questioned the emphasis on bravery and drama that has come to characterize the Dutch Revolt and the siege of Leiden in the nation’s collective memory. How reliable was the eyewitness who recorded a nobleman shouting “Vive les gueux!”? Was Burgomaster Van der Werff’s bold gesture of self-sacrifice added to Fruytiers’s account by his own family? Was the episode of Jan van Hout waving a loaded pistol in the Pieterskerk not a tall story spun by Scriverius? Did Cornelis Joppensz really find the pot of stew? All legitimate questions.
Distortion and mythologizing always play a role in memories and depictions of real events. In the accounts of the Dutch Revolt and the siege of Leiden, these extend at times to blatant propaganda. Even so, many of the remarkable incidents, however much they smack of an adventure story, did in fact take place. The terrible hardships suffered by the inhabitants of Leiden are not in dispute. The siege cost some 6,000 of them their lives—a little over one-third of the population. Many died of starvation, while far more succumbed to the Plague.
Every inhabitant of Leiden had a heart-rending personal story to tell of the siege. The city council did its best to preserve the memory of the brave resistance of the people of Leiden and the liberation on 3rd October 1574. In the Pieterskerk, an annual service was held on 3rd October to commemorate the thousands of people who had died during the siege. Books were written, plays were performed, paintings were made.
After the city’s liberation, the painter Isaac Claesz van Swanenburg, who was then serving as one of Leiden’s burgomasters, commissioned the Delft weaver Joost Jansz Lanckaert to make a tapestry measuring three by four metres depicting a bird’s-eye view of the acts of war that had led to the relief of Leiden. After its completion in 1587, the tapestry was hung in the town hall, where the citizens flocked to see it. Every 3rd October the great tapestry drew crowds of visitors.
“Leiden’s relief was Holland’s salvation,” wrote the historian Robert Fruin in his book The Siege and Relief of Leyden in 1574, first published in Dutch in 1874 to mark 300 years since the events described. It is an entirely defensible position. Since Amsterdam had remained loyal to the King of Spain and Haarlem had been seized, the fall of Leiden might well have led to a chain reaction, claiming Delft and Rotterdam as Spanish conquests and possibly bringing the Revolt against the Habsburg ruler to an end. If that had happened, the history of the Netherlands would have been completely different.
In 1588 the Republic of the Seven United Provinces was proclaimed. It was too late for William of Orange. He had been assassinated in Delft by a Catholic bounty hunter four years before, and legend has it that his final words were to beseech God to take pity on his poor people. The struggle for the independence and liberty of the Dutch Republic had been long and hard-fought. Still, what emerged was not yet one country, let alone a unified nation. Every burgher from the province of Holland still tended to see his own city as the centre of the world.
After Leiden’s liberation, it developed rapidly and soon shook off its medieval character. So many had fallen victim to the famine and the Plague during the siege that the city was left with fewer than 10,000 inhabitants. However, the Relief unleashed a population explosion. Within the space of fifty years, Leiden’s population would increase almost fivefold. At the beginning of the seventeenth century around 25,000 people lived in Leiden, and the 1622 census recorded a population of 45,000.
The growth came from outside. Leiden had become the symbol of liberty to Protestants who were suffering persecution in Europe, whose cities were being besieged and laid waste by Habsburg armies. The city was inundated with thousands upon thousands of immigrants, political-religious and economic refugees from all parts of Europe. Most were penniless, a few immensely wealthy. Crowds of paupers and beggars congregated around the city gates.
The arrival of the Calvinist immigrants gave rise to tensions, religious extremism and cultural confusion. But the immigrants also brought tremendous prosperity. The development of the “new draperies”, the weaving, dyeing and sale of fine woollen fabrics in which the Flemish, Walloon and French refugees specialized, breathed new life into the cloth trade. Indeed, they ushered in what became for Leiden—and for the whole of Holland—the “Golden Age”, a period of intense activity and creativity. An age of production and trade, speculation and consumption.
Something else crucial had happened that would change the atmosphere and life in the city for good. After the Relief it was decided, following a proposal by William of Orange, to establish the first Protestant university in the Netherlands, for the “firm support for and preservation of liberty”, as he wrote in a letter to the States of Holland. The decision was not so much a reward, as suggested by Leiden’s most famous historian, Johan Huizinga, as a fitting way to crown the courage, loyalty and persistence that had been shown by the people of Leiden.
The founding of the academy on 8th February 1575, and the boundless energy and determination of Jan van Hout and Jan van der Does, attracted scholars, students, printers, printmakers and booksellers from the whole of Europe. They made science possible and paved the way for a great flourishing of the arts. No longer were the most important commissions granted by monasteries, convents and churches: instead, they came from the city council and the urban élite. A market arose for portraits of professors, scholars and wealthy students, as well as for still lifes, landscapes, militia pieces and history paintings.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century, Leiden was Holland’s second city, after Amsterdam, but it was also a small, enclosed cosmos: threatened by foreign powers, but relatively free, certainly after the Republic concluded a truce with the Habsburg overlords in 1609 that held for twelve years. After the epidemics—and afflicted by a lack of medical expertise and care provision—the people of Leiden knew all too well how it felt to stare death in the face. But that did not deter them from devising ambitious plans for the future or blunt their capacity for love.
In just two hours you could walk all around the city, following a leafy path along the canals, with an unimpeded view of the paradisaical gardens. To go straight across the city took even less time. Within half an hour you could traverse Breestraat from west to east, from Wittepoort to Hogewoerdspoort. In the neighbourhoods, everyone knew everyone. Life was orderly while also containing the seeds of adventure.
Intimate and worldly-wise: that was the city into which Rembrandt was born.