The war progressed. Willem of Orange orchestrated a complicated rebellion, using religion or political leverage as needed and calling on sympathetic foreign rulers for aid. In particular, he groomed Queen Elizabeth—stoking her fears that Philip and Alba were plotting her assassination—in hopes that she would join in an attack. The fears were well grounded: Alba, at Philip’s request, was working with English Catholics to try to dethrone Elizabeth and install Mary Stuart (an attempt that would fail). Elizabeth was harboring the loosely disciplined but growing fleet of piratical ships that had sworn allegiance to the Prince of Orange, which became known as the Sea Beggars. Willem hoped for an invasion of the Dutch provinces from across the Channel.
But events took a different turn when Elizabeth decided against getting involved in a war with Spain and, instead of assisting in a naval invasion, forced the Sea Beggars from English ports. Whereupon they crossed the Channel and, with surprising ease, took the Dutch port city of Den Briel, in the province of Holland.
The effect was electric. Up to this point the war had been fought almost exclusively in the southern Netherlands. The south was the obvious focus of attention: the cities of the south were the economic engines of the provinces, and the Spanish court was located there. The revolutionaries had for the first time struck at Philip and won. And more than that, they had brought the war to the north, just sixty miles from Amsterdam.
Alba had recently announced yet another tax on the Dutch—the so-called Tenth Penny tax—the purpose of which, everyone knew, was to maintain the army that was oppressing them. Coming in a year of harsh weather and poor crops, news of it pushed people to the brink and brought about widespread strikes. As word traveled that the Prince of Orange had captured Den Briel, it was cause for sudden hope, for something to believe in. Cities began to revolt on their own, even without the arrival of Orange’s men.
Alba retaliated by sending his army to lay siege to one town after another. When a city capitulated, he let his soldiers pillage in order to punish the townspeople. In Zutphen, he wrote to Philip with satisfaction, his soldiers “cut the throats of everyone they found.” The Spanish army rolled across the flat landscape, past windmills and carefully managed polders. They were heading toward the province of Holland, in which, by 1572, nearly every city had switched to the Calvinist party, the side of the Prince of Orange. Only Amsterdam—with its deep ties to institutional Catholicism extending back to the time of its miracle, and with its city council propped up by money and support from Philip—was still under Catholic control.
Before they reached Amsterdam, Alba’s troops, under the command of his son Don Fadrique, came upon the small town of Naarden, fourteen miles to the southeast. It too had gone to the revolutionaries, and its gates were shut: the inhabitants refused to surrender. As the king’s soldiers arrayed before the walls and began to unfurl their siege engines, the town’s regents, shivering in a December snowfall, thought again and offered surrender if lives were spared. Don Fadrique’s men entered the town and murdered the entire population: men, women, children. Alba informed Philip that his son’s men “slit the throats of burghers and soldiers without a single man escaping, then they set fire to the town.”
And so the Iron Duke himself processed in state into the city of Amsterdam. He set up a home there, on the Warmoesstraat, the busy center of merchant activity, and he rested. History books have portrayed Alba as evil personified, but he was apparently a human being, which some of his letters from this period seem to confirm. He was in his early sixties and his health had been declining for several years. Attacks of gout would get so bad that a whole army would have to hold up until he could move again. As time went on a blackness overtook him. “I do not know how it is possible that I am alive, and so I believe that I am not,” he wrote at one point to his brother-in-law. The waves of killings, compounded by his being forced to stay and administer martial law, were wearing him down, and he wrote to a Spanish cardinal complaining about all that he had to perform for Philip: “Making me come here to cut off heads, as I have done, and then having the same punisher remain as judge for so long, is something no one has had to do.”
Yet he continued, and he used Amsterdam as his base as he orchestrated an assault on the cities of Holland. The town of Haarlem was the next battleground. Alba committed thirty thousand soldiers to taking it, and Willem sent everything he could to resist. The siege went on through a savage winter. The inhabitants inside the walls were hungry, but the Spanish soldiers were dying of cold. When Don Fadrique wrote to his father telling him it might be best for him to back down, Alba responded with what might be the ultimate father-from-hell letter: “If you strike camp without the town surrendering, I shall disown you as a son. If you die in the siege I shall go personally to take your place, though I am ill and bedridden. And if both of us fail then your mother will come from Spain to achieve in the war what her son has not the valor or patience to achieve.” When the town finally surrendered, the Spanish troops systematically murdered every one of the two thousand Dutch soldiers who remained alive.
Alba was not the only terrorizer. The Sea Beggars had invaded Holland under Willem’s banner, but controlling them was another matter. With Willem locked in fighting of his own to the south, they made their way from one town to another, igniting Calvinist passions, which combined with fury at Alba’s depredations set off a new wave of iconoclasm and anti-Catholic violence. Every kind of official Catholic structure was attacked. Nuns and priests were stripped and murdered. The pirates dressed themselves in the holy robes and marched drunken through the streets.
For ordinary citizens of Holland, these were months of double-sided terror, as both Catholic soldiers and Protestant patriots bullied and bludgeoned them into allying with their side. People didn’t know if their neighbors were informing on them. Many fled their homes, only to discover the roads were crowded with armies, thieves, and ordinary townsfolk who were wandering aimlessly, looking for a way out.
Shortly after the Sea Beggars took Den Briel, the anti-Catholic violence they had touched off reached the town of Gouda. The prior of the Emmaus monastery there summarized the behavior of otherwise ordinary and decent Dutch men and women who “care not whether God’s temples are despoiled, the holy statues broken, whether God’s servants, the priests, religious and upright Catholics, are mocked, driven forth, plundered and miserably murdered.” As such violence reached the doors of his monastery, he ran for his life.
Catholic professionals like him were heading for Amsterdam, the only refuge in what was otherwise hostile territory. Once there, he found that while the city council was still controlled by the Catholics in the king’s service, outside City Hall a virtual civil war was raging. Streets were alive with chaos, fear, flash mobs of the worst sort. He found refuge in the Sint-Agnieten Convent, one of the walled orders that had dominant positions along the city’s canals.
And so, panting and sick with fear, Brother Wouter Jacobszoon huddled at the window of his convent cell and observed the horrific transformation of his society—as medievalism convulsively gave way to modernity—from the same physical vantage point that, precisely four hundred and one years later, Kiki Amsberg would witness the flowering of hippie Amsterdam and from which I would look out on the city of the twenty-first century.
One night he saw fires in the distance, in the direction of Naarden, as the town that Alba had rendered extinct burned to the ground. Another day he reported that ten Beggars who had been convicted of setting fires in Amsterdam had been hanged. “They died,” he reported, after they had confessed the error of their ways, “as Christians.”
In early December of 1572, Alba’s son Don Fadrique arrived in Amsterdam with his army. Brother Jacobszoon found it comforting to have the official Catholic protectors on hand but also unsettling, for his own space was invaded: “The whole of Amsterdam has been brought to indescribable difficulty now by the Spanish army, because the monasteries and monastic buildings are serving as shelter not only for sol
diers but also for horses. No one can even turn around, and food has gotten expensive and scarce.”
One day, the monk made the short walk to the Holy Place, the chapel built around the unburned host that launched the miracle of Amsterdam, to witness something that pleased him. “On December 4, with my own eyes, I saw Don Frederik and his entourage attend Mass at the Holy Place,” he wrote of the Spanish soldier who was fresh from slaughtering untold numbers of Dutchmen. “He knelt there, very devout, during the entire Mass, on both knees on the stone steps of the sanctuary, and he had only one pillow under his knees.”
“Don Frederik” may have had a starry-eyed fan in Wouter Jacobszoon, but his father had lost support. As Willem of Orange pressed his advantage in the north—scoring a naval victory in the Zuiderzee, forcing the Spanish to abandon their siege of the town of Alkmaar—advisers at Philip’s court turned against Alba. They saw that his scorched-earth approach had had the opposite of the intended effect. Alba’s own soldiers were close to mutiny. And the man was nearly out of his mind with pain and illness. Philip relieved him of his command; he died in Lisbon in 1582.
The Catholics still clung to power in Amsterdam, but Wouter Jacobszoon was increasingly miserable. At the mundane level, he had lived all his life in a monastery, among men, and found the nuns in the convent disagreeable. After a year, in order to tend to a sick prior, he moved to a convent across the canal but found the situation no better. He couldn’t make the nuns listen to him. And their singing annoyed him to distraction.
But there were larger worries. His world was in the final stages of collapse. “Everywhere they go, the Beggars are setting everything on fire,” he wrote. Things had turned topsy-turvy: “The most incompetent, the frauders, the exiles, the robbers, the murderers and heretics—these are the government of cities and countries.” He didn’t understand why God was letting this happen. At one point he decided the reason must be that Amsterdam had taken to the ways of sin, both to the Calvinists and to commerce. Another time, cowering in mortal panic, he blamed himself for the shrieks he heard outside: “O Lord, I have sinned against Thy Divine Majesty and therefore, I fear, brought all of these torments.”
On May 26, 1578, Amsterdam’s Catholic leadership finally caved in. The Beggars took control of the city government. Technically, it was the day that the city became Calvinist, but it might be more pertinent to say it was the day it became liberal. Ahead was staggering growth, a stock market, a harbor bristling with masts, streets filling with immigrants from all points of the compass. As the Dutch writer Geert Mak has it, “the 26th of May in the year 1578 is the exact moment when the real Amsterdam was born.” It is with striking but perhaps typical Dutch understatement that Amsterdammers to this day refer to the event, into which so much calamitous history had gone, as the Alteration.
Calvinist worship was permitted. The annual procession associated with the holy host and the miracle of Amsterdam, which had launched the city on its rise, was banned. The dismantling of the Catholic orders began. The Sint-Agnieten Convent closed its doors. (A couple of decades later, its timbers would be used to build the frame of Kiki Amsberg’s house.) As Catholic priests, monks, and nuns were being brutalized, Brother Jacobszoon, after some initial worries about where to locate street clothes, managed to escape from the city. He made his way south and eventually returned to his hometown of Gouda.
Before he left, he recorded a couple of parting images of the new city that Amsterdam was becoming. One was of the Damrak, the body of water that extended from the harbor into the city center, lined with ships: commerce was returning. Another was of drunken, delirious Calvinists, the city’s incoming elite, behaving with inexplicable strangeness: a group of them had come upon a maypole, left over from May Day celebrations, and were pouring beer onto it—“as if the beer were water and the maypole needed watering,” the monk wrote, in one of those odd and excellent little observations that ground the larger episodes of history.
If Amsterdam crossed the threshold into modernity on that day in May 1578, it celebrated the rite of passage, two years later, with a thoroughly medieval ceremony. The “princely entry” had of old been a staple by which monarchs knitted control and loyalty via pageantry. The last ruler to enter Amsterdam in state had been Charles V. In March of 1580, Willem of Orange resuscitated the tradition, standing on the foredeck of a galley draped with his noble colors (orange has been the Dutch national color, used for everything from the annual Queen’s Day and King’s Day celebration to the national soccer team’s jerseys, ever since), at the head of a flotilla that entered the harbor and sailed majestically into the city center.
The entire population lined the streets and cheered. True, people had been warned by the Calvinist authorities that they would be fined if they did not, but no doubt there was a strong layer of enthusiasm. At strategic points the heroic prince could see tableaux vivants staged in his honor—live sculptural happenings in which costumed actors portrayed great events. The city’s civic guard, its mayors, and its real nobility—the merchants and shipping magnates—greeted Willem in front of City Hall, on Dam Square, the spot where the dam had been built that gave Amsterdam its name. In the evening there was a performance of flaming arrows and, as a climax, a mock battle between two wooden citadels representing the fortresses of the Prince of Orange and the Duke of Alba, which culminated with Alba’s burning to the ground.
It may have felt like an armistice celebration, but the fighting was far from over. Eventually history would come to know it as the Eighty Years’ War. The Netherlands’ struggle for independence would carry on through much of its golden age. Willem himself would die four years hence, at his headquarters in Delft, from an assassin’s bullet (the supposed bullet holes are still lodged in the wall: a muted tourist attraction), after King Philip, with whom he had once cavorted as a boy, offered a financial reward for any good Catholic who could eliminate the man he called the “sole head, author, and abettor of the Revolt.”
But if the period of the Alteration, culminating with the entry of Willem of Orange into Amsterdam, did not translate into victory for a new nation, it was a time of transformation. In this period, the northern Dutch provinces would sign the Union of Utrecht, a de facto constitution that, following on the decades of slaughter in the name of religion, would guarantee freedom of conscience. It would be a first draft of the concept of religious freedom and, beyond that, of the legal notion of equality. There is a connecting thread that runs from Willem of Orange’s first articulation of “religious peace” (tolerance of religious differences) in the 1560s to the language of the Union of Utrecht (“each person shall remain free, especially in his religion”) to the religious freedom clause in the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
Of course, the horror that Brother Jacobszoon experienced shows the limitations of tolerance in its sixteenth-century form. Liberalism would become Amsterdam’s new banner, but maintaining tolerance in practice would forever be a challenge.
Nonetheless, the policy was put in force almost at once as newcomers started to flood in. The great cities of the southern Netherlands—Ghent, Bruges, Brussels, and especially Antwerp—lost money and influence during the war. The Spanish sacked Antwerp in 1576 and laid siege to it in 1580. By the time the siege was over, the city that had once been the center of European finance was a shell. Its wealth, and more importantly its professions—the bankers and merchants and artisans—left by the tens of thousands, in one of history’s great brain drains, and headed to the new power center in the north.
The results of this shift are visible, for the very way of seeing was in the process of changing. The art of the Flemish masters of the southern Netherlands, with its stiff human figures locked into metaphorical landscapes in which man submits to a greater will, would give way to the northern Dutch work of artists like Rembrandt and Vermeer. This new breed would be storytellers in the modern sense, alive to character, to the glories and writhings of the individual.
Part Two
CHAPTER
4
THE COMPANY
He was thirty years old, at the peak of life and health, feet planted on the sound wooden deck of his flagship, the Mauritius, in command of 249 men spread over three ships and a pinnace. It was the twelfth of May 1595. They were nearly two months out of Amsterdam, had passed south of the Canary Islands, and were riding in fair weather off the coast of West Africa. Just today they had encountered five ships from the Caribbean bound for Europe, had a friendly exchange, and given over a sack of letters to be delivered to loved ones. Cornelis de Houtman, the young commander, a brewer’s son from Gouda, was sailing purposefully, muscles braced against the pull and heave of the South Atlantic, on a mission that, for all its staggering scope, he had every reason to hope would bring not only riches to the city of Amsterdam but a historic transformation. Ship’s logs don’t record such things, but this was perhaps the last moment of happiness that he would ever know.
Shortly after, they crossed the equator, and it was like crossing from normal waking life into a nightmare. De Houtman and his crew seemed not to have prepared themselves for the tropical nature of the tropics. Men began to swoon from the heat. Prying open their casks of food, they were horrified at what they found. “Our flesh and fishe stunke, our Bisket molded, our Beere sowred, our water stunke, and our Butter became as thinne as Oyle,” wrote one of the crewmen, according to an English account of the voyage that was published three years later. “Whereby divers of our men fell sicke, and many of them dyed.”
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