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BEFORE THE RISE

Like the Great Mongol Empire, the Dutch Republic that shot to global prominence in the seventeenth century could not have had humbler beginnings. Before 1200, Holland and the other low-lying western regions of the Netherlands were practically—and in some cases, literally—under water. (The elevation of the Netherlands falls as one moves from east to west, toward the North Sea. The country's highest point is in the southeast. Even today, approximately 27 percent of the country, home to 60 percent of the population, is below sea level.) Lying in the swampy deltas of three rivers, this “sand and mud dump left over from the ice age” was barely populated, unfit for agriculture, and, because of constant flooding, often dangerous.

Starting in the thirteenth century, major areas of waterlogged Holland, including modern Amsterdam and Rotterdam, were reclaimed through the construction of ingenious dams, dikes, and drainage systems. Although the windmill was not invented in Holland—early versions existed in Persia in the ninth century—the Dutch perfected the technology, using wind power to pump water to safer areas. Even the English lampoonist Owen Felltham, who called the Dutch Republic a “universali quagmire” and “a green cheese in a pickle,” conceded that the Dutch were “in some sort Gods, for they set bounds to the Ocean and allow it to come and go as they list.”3

Nevertheless, as late as 1350, the Low Countries were an unremarkable spot on the broad European map, largely dependent on subsistence farming and collectively no larger than the state of Tennessee. Unlike in Spain or France, both of which were ruled by strong monarchies, government in the Low Countries was local and decentralized. In terms of religious tolerance, or rather the lack thereof, the Low Countries were also unexceptional. As throughout Europe, the bubonic plague in the Netherlands was blamed on many things—the unfavorable alignment of the planets, the sins of the world—but particularly on Jews:

The Black Death was so devastating that it simply had to be a conspiracy against mankind. And who could be behind that if not the Jews, who—as every Christian by then knew—were the enemies of the Church and…were seeking to destroy Christianity and rule the world in its stead? The Jews were the culprits: they had, it was reported, contaminated the wells with poison prepared from spiders, owls, lizards, basilisks, the blood of children, and the consecrated Host. The poison had been concocted in Toledo by rich Spanish Jews, and then been brought over in pouches and pieces of leather and thrown down the wells.4

Even after the plague passed, the few Jews left in the Low Countries were stigmatized and persecuted. As in England and France, Jews in the Netherlands were forced to wear identifying yellow patches (as opposed to the pointy red hats they were made to wear in Germany at around the same time). In 1439, a handsome Jewish man was accused of “turning the heads” of young girls. Known as “the Jew with the beautiful hair,” he was imprisoned in a castle by the Duke of Rozendaal and eventually expelled from Arnhem. Starting in the fifteenth century, laws were passed restricting Jewish money-lending practices, effectively closing off the only source of livelihood available to Jews. Until the late sixteenth century, the Jewish population in the Low Countries remained negligible.5

CATHOLICS AGAINST PROTESTANTS: THE

FORMATION OF THE DUTCH REPUBLIC

For most of the sixteenth century, the Low Countries were part of the Hapsburg Empire, which at the time stretched from Austria to Spain. How Spain came under Hapsburg control is worth a brief digression. Ferdinand and Isabella had five children, one of whom came to be known as Joanna the Mad. Joanna married Philip the Handsome, heir to both the Hapsburg and Burgundian territories, and gave birth to Charles V. After his grandfather Ferdinand of Aragon died in 1516, Charles became the first Hapsburg king of Spain. By 1519, as a result of his various royal bloodlines,