Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  It was the first move in a contest that would soon erupt into open war. In an age before newspapers, pamphlets were the news medium, and those that passed from hand to hand in the Low Countries—and were read in Amsterdam taverns and on the public passenger barges that traveled between towns—began to repeat, over and over, an ancient word, with a new twist. The more highbrow pamphleteers put it in Latin: liber. Appeals by and for the upper classes sometimes cast it in French: la liberté. Most, of course, put it in plain Dutch: vrijheid. As happens so often in history at the dying of one age and the birth of another, an era of phenomenal ugliness, strife, and chaos was about to unfold. A printed appeal, a call to action that swept through the cities of the Low Countries in the midst of the chaos, written by a dashing young man who would become first national hero and then national martyr—a combination of George Washington and Abraham Lincoln—urged people to shake off the stupor of the centuries and see the new reality. “Awake,” it called. “Do not be blinded. Open your eyes.” And it breathed strange new magic into that old word freedom.

  CHAPTER

  3

  THE ALTERATION

  The rise of Amsterdam from a minor port in a distant corner of Europe to global powerhouse and birthplace of liberalism was an element of a power struggle that occupied the whole continent and ranged across much of the sixteenth century. It’s possible, however, to assign a single event as the launch point of that rise and to see it in terms of the interplay of three personalities.

  The date was October 25, 1555. The place was Brussels: specifically, the grandly colonnaded palace of the ancestral rulers of the province of Brabant. The occasion was one of the most fastidiously ornate of the century—which is perhaps strange, considering that the reason that dozens of European nobles had gathered was to bear witness as the palace’s current overlord, Charles V, perhaps the most powerful man in the world, whose titles included Holy Roman emperor and king of Spain, abdicated those thrones in order to live out his days in the warmth of the Spanish sun. Charles had modeled himself and his reign on ancient Rome (his court followers referred to him as Caesar), and he wanted to orchestrate his departure from the world stage as a kind of classical drama. He would not live long enough to appreciate how well he succeeded.

  If the history of the city of Amsterdam can be described as one of the ascendance of liberalism, which is one of the defining features of the modern world, then the emperor who limped into the throne room in Brussels on that autumn day—ashen, beaten, epileptic, crippled by gout—symbolizes, as well as any individual could, the world of the past: Europe’s past, the Western past, the tradition that underlies much of our modern culture and yet partly in opposition to which our modern selves came into being. Charles was the personification of European royalty and medieval heraldry. His grandparents were Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain, who had sent Columbus off on his historic voyage. He was heir to the Habsburg family dynasty, which began its rise in a Swiss valley ten centuries ago, reached the climax of its world-historic power with Charles himself, and finally collapsed in the trenches of World War I. He had fought and strived his whole life in the service of Catholicism: not so much the faith itself (he waged a conflict or two against popes, and once sacked Rome) as the force for controlling minds, wills, and peoples. When Martin Luther had stood before the Diet of Worms in 1521 and refused to recant what he had written against the Church, it was Charles, then only nineteen years old but assuming the full mantle of worldly authority, who heard him out, forcefully opposed him, and issued a ban against him, thus formally setting off the Protestant Reformation.

  The chessboard assembly gathered in Brussels (there were knights, bishops, and queens) was aware of the accomplishments of the man who limped into the throne room, leaning on a strong young shoulder for support. Charles had fought off Ottoman encroachments, sailed the Mediterranean in swashbuckling campaigns to rid the sea of pirates, personally sent off Magellan, Cortés, and Pizarro on their voyages, managed Spain’s South American colonization, extended his dominion to the Dutch provinces, through Germany, and across Italy, and in pretty much every way worked to hold up the pillars of the medieval world order: monarchic power, domination by the Catholic Church, feudal land management, divine right, mercantile colonization, and obedience to authority along the strict metaphysical lines of the great chain of being.

  But he was done. Before him stood his replacement: his twenty-eight-year-old son, Philip. The transfer of power would be personally as well as historically striking. The father had been, in temperament, a warrior whose aggression was shot through with touches of refinement and diplomatic smarts. He had a command of most European languages and, though not native to Spain, won over his Spanish subjects by not only entering the bullring but acquitting himself well. Throughout his life he loved both music and fighting, a combination that was excellently illustrated when he was twenty-two and a friend playfully taunted him that music was for girly men. Charles erupted in anger and insisted they duel. He beat his friend in a bloody joust in which he himself sustained a permanent injury; then he made the friend viceroy of Naples. Later, he would attempt to end a war with France by challenging the French king, Francis I, to settle things mano a mano. (Francis said no.)

  His son was neither a warrior nor a scholar—though he did like to pose for portraits in battle-ready attire. Despite the fact that the royal household commissioned whole volumes to be written expressly to teach him languages and rhetoric when he was a young prince, he was only ever comfortable in his native Spanish. (When he was king and foreign emissaries addressed him in Latin, he would brush them aside by saying their pronunciation was too poor to be understood.) He had been groomed from birth to become a king, and he came to like his comforts and deplored his father’s tendency to roam across Europe and into Africa as perennial commander of the forces of Christendom. Once when they were traveling together he had complained about the discomfort of the road, whereupon his father had roared, “Kings do not need residences!” In this, Philip probably represented an epochal as well as a generational change: from peripatetic medieval warlord to tactical modern leader.

  For centuries historians portrayed Philip II (as he was about to become known) more or less as a concentrated block of evil, but recent scholarship has moderated that view, giving us a more rounded portrait: of a loving father and husband as well as an able tactician with a vision for his empire. A review of this recent scholarship is convincing in that what had come before was so clearly written or influenced by Protestant enemies of Philip. Then again, the central portion of any understanding of him has to be the extent and zeal with which he wielded one of history’s most vicious weapons, the Spanish Inquisition, and the systematic torture and violence he unleashed on many thousands of human beings. Perhaps we can best say that he was no more malevolent than other absolute rulers who had sway over half the known world. But the one thing he possessed that his father did not—a fierce passion for the Catholic faith—would give his long reign a calamitous fire.

  There was one other major player in this power transfer, whose role was as yet unknown to the participants (including himself) but who was not only present in the throne room that day but offered the shoulder on whom the fading emperor put his weight as he walked in. His presence was one of those incongruities that fate inflicts on human affairs, particularly meticulously planned affairs: in his refinement and grand good looks, and in the affection that he showed the abdicating emperor as he helped him into his seat and that was clearly reciprocated, he seemed more naturally a model son and successor than Philip, who walked in behind them.

  His name was Willem. He had been born twenty-two years earlier in a storybook castle overlooking the clustered dwellings of the German village of Dillenburg. His father was the count of Nassau, a minor nobleman, not a man of great wealth, and Willem grew up, one of seventeen children, in a boisterous household of simple comforts and old-fashioned learning. He would eventually have inherited the estate and lived out
his life tending to it as his father had, but for one thing. His uncle, his father’s elder brother, who had greater wealth, land, and titles, had married a woman whose family had considerably more wealth, land, and titles. This couple had a son who, when he came of age, went off to war and was killed. Whereupon it was revealed that all of the wealth and inheritance that had come to the son from both his parents had been willed to his cousin, Willem of Nassau. With that twist of fate, eleven-year-old Willem became one of the richest noblemen in Europe.

  It so happened that Willem’s uncle and Charles, the prematurely aged emperor who was now about to give up his throne, had been childhood friends. When the emperor learned of events, he insisted on taking the now fantastically wealthy and titled youth into his protection and had him brought to his court at Brussels. Willem’s life changed in an instant: from romping with dogs, visiting tenant farmers with his father, and sitting in the evening with his siblings before the massive hearth, it was now banquets, masked balls, jousting tournaments, and sitting for portraits. He pushed his native German into the background and learned to speak French and Dutch, the languages of the court at Brussels, and Spanish, the language of the kingdom. When his family next saw him, he was nearly a man and in his bearing as aristocratic as the title by which he would henceforth be known: the Prince of Orange.

  Willem’s background says a good deal about the complexities of identity in the sixteenth century. In his teens, he seems to have accomplished the difficult trick of becoming fully a member of the ruling aristocracy yet never letting go of his rural, central European roots. Then there was the most historically decisive layer, for he came in time to identify himself with the Low Countries. From Brussels, he eventually moved north to the city of Breda. He got to know Dutch society, the most striking and unusual feature of which, for him, was how it was clustered into towns and cities. In these cities, he learned, power was not something that flowed from the castle down to the peasants. It was in the hands of herring merchants and cloth traders, men who owned soap works and timber yards and shipyards, the regents who sat on town boards, who were nominated to their governmental position by those same wealthy men of business, the members of the water boards of each community, and the dijkgraaf, literally “dike count,” who had overall responsibility for the never-ending task of managing the damming and rechanneling of water, and which is still an important position in the Netherlands.

  Charles took to the boy and kept him close to his royal person. They were much alike: not bookish but smart, and full of adventure. The boy enjoyed people and society and became a popular figure at court, yet he was delighted to leave it behind and go on hunts, and he took up military training with zest. He became an excellent soldier and leader; at the age of twenty he was named lieutenant general of the emperor’s army in the Low Countries.

  The most interesting feature in the interpersonal dynamic between the emperor and the boy lay just below the surface. Charles’s motive in bringing Willem to him when he was young was not merely to please an old friend; rather it had everything to do with geopolitics. Willem’s German parents had converted to Lutheranism, the dreaded heresy that the emperor was doing his best to quash. Charles pulled to his court the suddenly wealthy youth—whose newly inherited lands covered large swaths of France, Germany, Luxembourg, and the Low Countries—not out of kindness to the family but as a strategic move on the chessboard of Europe. His plan was to raise the boy himself and so personally take him, and his holdings, out of play for the Protestants and make them part of his empire.

  And indeed, Willem dutifully grew up Catholic, regal, and “Spanish.” Charles—the brilliant old schemer whose handcrafted plots had included colonizing Mexico and Peru (along with decimating the natives and their godless cultures) and squeezing money out of German Protestants to finance his defense of Vienna against the Ottoman sultan Suleyman the Magnificent—must have been pleased with this small success as he sat back in his velvet chair and surveyed the distinguished audience who had come to bear witness to his taking leave of the world of power politics. There were troubles on nearly every front of the empire, but in this at least—the plan to take a boy from the wilds of Germany, turn him into the excellent specimen of manhood who now stood at his right, and so bring him and his lands into the empire—things had gone as planned.

  In fact, life had substantially improved on his original idea, for he had taken to the boy as to a son, saw greatness in him, and had groomed him to be proxy ruler of the Dutch provinces. Charles’s plan for the Low Countries included making them, as it were, more medieval: building up the historically weak Dutch nobility, creating a line of Dutch noblemen who would get power and prestige from the court, and who would in turn do the king’s bidding. With the transfer of power complete, Charles left it to his son, Philip, and the young Prince of Orange to make this happen.

  As Philip began his reign, he quickly discovered that his adventurous, war-loving father had left vast problems behind. Foremost among these was money. Income from taxes totaled 1 million ducats, and the government’s debt stood at 7 million ducats. Interest payments were crippling. Philip had to raise money. The Dutch cities—money-producing engines without parallel in Europe—were the only option.

  The Dutch, though, were brewing a resentment against their Spanish rulers, who had pressed them for extra taxes time and again. The leaders of the States General—the governing body that represented all the provinces—knew that Philip needed them, and so they made a proposal. They would agree to tax their citizens again and raise 3.6 million ducats for the king over nine years—more than enough to bail him out of his financial crisis—but on the condition that they dispense it when and as they saw fit. The king was outraged, but he accepted the terms. Unwittingly, he was taking the first step toward losing the Dutch provinces.

  Philip does not seem to have had a master plan for his rule, but his father had written a sort of “how to run an empire” guidebook for him, which the son did his best to follow. It had general advice (“maintain friends and informants in all areas”) and region-specific wisdom (“Remember that the French are always discouraged if they do not succeed immediately in anything which they undertake”).

  When it came to the Low Countries, Charles wrote, “As we have seen and discovered, the people there cannot tolerate being governed by foreigners.” Philip seems to have disregarded this caution. Whenever he deviated from his father’s plan, it was in pursuit of his own ideals. Philip had what might be termed reactionary tendencies. He loved to watch knights joust and periodically ordered tournaments—replete with chivalrous decorum, thudding hooves, and roisterous bonhomie—that would last for weeks, never mind that these were, by the 1550s, largely a thing of the past. Philip’s Catholicism was of a piece with this. It grew more passionate as he aged, but from the first it differed from his father’s. Where Charles had ordered the execution of more than two thousand Protestants for heresy, it was for political reasons; Charles was also known to express sympathy with points of Protestant doctrine.

  Philip was deeply devout, both in the sense of piety—he went on regular retreats to monasteries—and also in ways that get at the definition of fanaticism. After his marriage to Elizabeth of Valois, for example, he took her, in March 1561, as a kind of date, to an auto-da-fé—the ritual sentencing, parading, and execution of heretics (in this case twenty-four of them) by the Inquisition. He was an obsessive collector of holy relics, whose powers he swore by. At the end of his life he had more than seven thousand sacred bones and other relics in his possession, including 144 heads of saints, thousands of arms, legs, and other pieces, in addition to hairs supposedly of Jesus and Mary and bits of the True Cross.

  In Philip we see the true merging of secular and religious powers, resulting in what is tempting to look at in modern terms as psychosis (one of his standard justifications was to say an act he wanted to be performed was in “God’s service and mine, which is the same”). Yet psychosis also involves an inability to function, a
nd Philip did indeed function, through a nearly forty-year reign. He was a man of his time, preoccupied with the trappings of the past yet dealing with forces of the future, waves of change that were altering the framework on which his world was built. Protestantism was a threat from below—masses of people were defecting from the faith—but also from above. Princes and bishops across Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, and Denmark had renounced the Catholic faith and thus presented a dangerous challenge to Philip. In England, Henry VIII had reformatted Christian worship in wholesale fashion; the result would be the creation of the Anglican Church.

  The Dutch provinces were part of this upheaval, but as far as Philip was concerned the difference was that these provinces were his territory, which he had sworn to maintain. They were a financial engine that powered his government. And they were slipping away from the faith.

  His conclusion was clear (“God’s service and mine, which is the same”): he would exert every force to stop Protestantism in the Low Countries. As he later opined to his fellow Catholic warlord Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian II, “To think that a passion so great as this about choice in religion can be resolved by soft means [is] a complete illusion.” He made two decisions. The first was to maintain a standing army of three thousand Spanish soldiers in the Dutch provinces. These had been brought in as a defensive tactic in a war that he was in the process of fighting against France; he now proposed to station them permanently. Second, with the support of the pope, he would reorganize the Catholic Church in the provinces. This would keep the flow of church revenues out of the hands of abbots in the country, many of whom were showing signs of rebellion. It would also let Philip appoint his own man as the cardinal who would lead the Dutch church. And, most ominously, it would bring the Inquisition into Dutch life as an instrument with not only ecclesiastic but also secular authority.