Tulipomania - Mike Dash [22]
The siege of Leiden was the hardest fought, the costliest, and the most decisive of all the actions of the revolt. Had the town fallen, the Spaniards probably would have succeeded in mopping up the remaining Dutch resistance and restoring their rule throughout the northern provinces. The Dutch Republic would have been stillborn, trade and commerce would have remained concentrated in the south, wealth generated by overseas trade would never have flooded into Holland, and the tulip mania could not have taken place.
As it was, Leiden prevailed, but only after a desperate siege that lasted four months. At the end of that time the citizens had run out of food, and in a last bid to save the town, the stadholder ordered the dikes along the Maas to be cut so that the river waters would flood the land around the town and drive out the besiegers. The waters did rise, but not so far as to end the siege. Then in what most pious Dutchmen considered a direct intervention by the Almighty, the wind changed direction, a huge storm arose, heavy rain fell, and the river waters surged forward until the Spanish soldiers were forced to flee. The men of the Beggar fleet were able to relieve the town by sailing their ships over what had been farmland only days before.
The epic resistance of Leiden saved the Dutch Revolt, but the Spanish threat remained a very real one for decades after the first stage of the uprising was successfully concluded. The seven rebel territories formed themselves into a republic—the United Provinces of the Netherlands—with the prince of Orange still in the important role of stadholder and commander in chief. There were several further Spanish invasions of Dutch territory, the last in 1628, and so although the almost incessant conflict was broken by a long truce that ran from 1609 until 1621, the Dutch otherwise faced the expense of maintaining armies in the field and the constant threat of another attack until about 1630. From then until Spain was eventually forced to recognize the United Provinces by the Treaty of Münster, signed in 1648, the threat was all but ended, and the costs of maintaining a substantial army and navy could be cut. The money that was saved was diverted into the Dutch economy, which flourished as never before after 1630.
When Clusius arrived in Leiden decades after the drama of the siege, the university there was the only one in the United Provinces. It was still very new, having been founded only in the spring of 1575. The establishment of such a center of learning was a necessary step for the new nation to take; not only was it expressly intended as a cultural declaration of independence from Spain, but it was needed to produce ministers for the Church and young men fit to govern the United Provinces. At this time most other colleges in Europe gave priority to religious training, and in fact the majority of universities were directly controlled by the Church, which limited the breadth of the education available. But the Dutch government was determined that this should not be the case at Leiden. Teaching was offered in law, medicine, mathematics, history, and other humanist subjects as well as theology, and control of the university was vested in seven curators who were nominated not by the Church but by the provincial parliament and the burgomasters of Leiden.
All this was doubtless much to Clusius’s liking, but the young university’s humanist policy had caused unexpected problems. Between 1575 and the early 1590s, Leiden’s dangerously liberal reputation meant that the leaders of the Reformed Church looked with suspicion on the graduates of its theology school, and Dutch students who planned to pursue a career in the clergy generally chose to enroll at one of the more strictly Protestant north German universities. The ever-present danger that the United Provinces would fall to a renewed Spanish attack deterred scholars from matriculating in other subjects as well,