Amsterdam (Rough Guide) - Martin Dunford [171]
New Year’s Eve Dec 31. New Year’s Eve is big in Amsterdam, with fireworks and celebrations everywhere. Most bars and clubs stay open until morning – make sure you get tickets in advance. This might just qualify as the wildest and most reckless street partying in Europe, but a word of warning: Amsterdammers seem to love the idea of throwing lit fireworks around and won’t hesitate to send one careering into the crowd.
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History
To a large extent, a history of Amsterdam is a history of the whole of the Netherlands, which includes the province of Holland. In turn, the Netherlands of today was an integral part of the Low Countries – modern Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands – until the late sixteenth century. It was then that the Dutch broke with their Spanish Habsburg masters and, ever since, Amsterdam has been at the centre of Dutch events. The city was the country’s most glorious cultural and trading centre throughout its seventeenth-century heyday, the so-called Golden Age, and, after a long downturn in the eighteenth century, picked itself up to emerge as a major metropolis in the nineteenth. In the 1960s Amsterdam was galvanized by its youth, who took to hippy culture with gusto; their legacy is a social progressiveness – most conspicuously over drugs and prostitution – that still underpins the city’s international reputation, good and bad, today.
History |
Medieval foundations
Amsterdam’s earliest history is as murky as the marshes from which it arose. Legend asserts that two Frisian fishermen were the first inhabitants and, it is indeed likely that the city began as a fishing village at the mouth of the River Amstel. Previously, this area had been a stretch of peat bog and marsh, but a modest fall in the sea level permitted settlement on the high ground along the riverside. The village was first given some significance when the local lord built a castle here around 1204, and then, some sixty years later, the Amstel was dammed – hence Amstelredam – and it received its municipal charter from a new feudal overlord, Count Floris V, in 1275. Designating the village a toll port for beer imported from Hamburg, the charter led to Amsterdam flourishing as a trading centre from around 1300, when it also became an important transit port for Baltic grain, destined for the burgeoning cities of the Low Countries (broadly Belgium and the Netherlands).
As Amsterdam grew, its trade diversified. In particular, it made a handsome profit from English wool, which was imported into the city, barged onto Leiden and Haarlem – where it was turned into cloth – and then much of it returned to Amsterdam to be exported. The cloth trade drew workers into the town to work along Warmoesstraat and the Amstel, and ships were able to sail right up to Dam Square to pick up the finished work and drop off imported wood, fish, salt and spices.
Though the city’s population rose steadily in the early sixteenth century, to around 12,000, Amsterdam was still small compared with Antwerp or London; building on the waterlogged soil was difficult and slow, requiring timber piles to be driven into the firmer sand below. And with the extensive use of timber and thatch, fires were a frequent occurrence. A particularly disastrous blaze in 1452 resulted in such destruction that the city council made building with slate, brick and stone obligatory; one of the few wooden houses that survived the fire still stands today in the Begijnhof. In the mid-sixteenth century the city underwent its first major expansion, as burgeoning trade with the Hanseatic towns of the Baltic made the city second only to Antwerp as a marketplace and warehouse for northern and western Europe. The trade in cloth, grain and wine brought craftsmen to the city, and its merchant fleet grew; by the 1550s three-quarters of all grain cargo out of the Baltic was carried in Amsterdam vessels. The foundations were being laid for the wealth of the Golden Age.
History |
The rise of Protestantism
At the