History

Amsterdam's Origins

Amsterdam was founded at the place where two fishermen and a seasick dog jumped ashore from a small boat to escape a storm in the Zuiderzee (Southern Sea). The dog threw up, thereby marking the spot. Sound like a shaggy-dog story? Well, the city's original coat of arms backs up the tale. In some ways, it's an appropriate metaphor for a city with a lifestyle that has about as many boosters and detractors as did Sodom and Gomorrah. Some first-time visitors want to throw up everything and live this way forever; others just want to throw up.

At any rate, fishermen, with or without a seasick dog, did play the decisive role in founding Amsterdam. Around 1200, they realized that the area at the mouth of the Amstel River allowed their wooden cog boats easy access to rich fishing on the Zuiderzee beyond. They built their huts on raised mounds of earth called terpen.

The low-lying marshy terrain left these early settlers at the mercy of tides and storms, and many must have perished or lost their homes as a result of flooding. In an effort to control periodic flooding, the populace dammed the Amstel (they'd likely been damning it from the beginning) at the point where today's square called the Dam stands. This is the source of the city's original name, Aemstelledamme.

Archaeological finds show that by 1204, local big wheels were moving in on what the ordinary folks had created. Count Gijsbrecht II of Aemstel made the first power play, building a castle at the settlement and lording over the locals. In the 1990s, archaeologists uncovered the castle's foundations under Nieuwezijds Kolk, a side street off Nieuwendijk -- and brought to light the earliest known clog shoe, made from alder wood and dating from the early 13th century.

There are few records of Aemstelledamme (or Amestelledame, or Amstellodame, as it was also known in an age without spelling bees) before 1275, when Count Floris V of Holland granted village locals the right to trade anywhere in the Holland and Zeeland counties without having to pay tolls along the way. This is the settlement's first official documentary record, and the year that's now celebrated as Amsterdam's foundation date.

Trading Center

Amsterdam began its rise to commercial prosperity in 1323, when Count Floris VI established the city as a toll point for beer imports. Later, Amsterdam was granted toll rights on exported ale. Beer thus became a major component of the city's prosperity, and remains important to this day, as anyone who visits a traditional bruine kroeg (brown cafe) will see.

Always skillful merchants, Amsterdammers began to establish strong craftsman guilds and to put ships to sea to catch North Sea herring. They expanded into trading salted Baltic herring; amber; Norwegian salted or dried cod and cod-liver oil; German beer and salt; bales of linen and woolen cloth from the Low Countries and England; coal from England; Russian furs and candle wax; Polish grain and flour; Swedish timber, pitch, and iron. They opened up lucrative trade by both doing business with and competing against the trading towns of the powerful Baltic-based Hanseatic League.

The city's merchants, growing rich on the contents of the warehouses they built along the canals, trampled over the Hanseatic League in the competition for wealth, and by the 1600s had come out head and shoulders in front.

Wars of Religion

During the Middle Ages, the Netherlands was a bastion of Catholicism, with powerful bishops in the cities of Utrecht and Maastricht, and a holy shrine in Aemstelledamme that attracted pilgrims. No one is sure when Amsterdam became an independent parish, but it's thought to have been around 1334, when the Oude Kerk (Old Church) is first mentioned in the city's records -- though a small timber chapel on the spot dated from around 1300.

As the town grew in prosperity, churches, monasteries, convents, and cloisters called begijnhofen sprang up. Eventually, there were 18 begijnhofen, which functioned as social welfare agencies, providing care to the sick, orphaned, and poor, and hospitality to travelers and pilgrims. You can visit the main Begijnhof.

Protestantism emerged at the same time as the Low Countries came under the rule of Charles V, the intensely Catholic Habsburg emperor and king of Spain. Holland, and Amsterdam in particular, became a fulcrum for the shifting political scene the Reformation brought about everywhere in Europe. John Calvin's rigorous doctrines and his firm belief in separating church and state began to take root in Amsterdam.

In 1555, Philip II, son of Charles V and great-grandson of Emperor Maximilian I, became Spain's king and the ruler of the Low Countries. An ardent Catholic, he was determined to defeat the Reformation. The Dutch resented Philip's intrusion into their affairs and began a resistance movement. Within 10 years, William of Orange, Count of Holland (known as William the Silent), formed a League of Protestant Nobles. Philip's response, in 1567, was to send the ruthless Duke of Alba, Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, to the Low Countries with an army of 9,000 men (accompanied by 2,000 courtesans) to enforce the death-to-heretics policy.

The Dutch nobles fought back, though they had no army and no money. William of Orange and his brother, John of Nassau, managed to wage war on Spain despite all this, their only ally a ragtag "navy" of Protestant privateers called the Geuzen (Sea Beggars). When Spain levied a new tax on the Dutch, the action was so unpopular that it rallied the majority of Dutch -- Protestant and Catholic alike -- to the anti-Spanish cause.

Amsterdam's Calvinist merchants expelled the Catholic city council in a 1578 revolution called the Alteratie (Changeover). As the Protestant Reformation took hold, the city's many Catholics were forbidden to hold public office or to worship openly, a situation that continued for more than a century.

The Golden Age

Over the first 75 years of the 17th century, the legendary Dutch entrepreneurial gift would come into its own. These years have since become known as the Golden Age. It seemed every business venture the Dutch initiated during this time turned a profit, and each of their many expeditions to the world's unknown places resulted in a new jewel in the Dutch trading empire. Colonies and brisk trade were established to provide the luxury-hungry merchants at home with new delights, such as fresh ginger from Java; jewels, spices, and silks from the Orient; foxtails from America; fine porcelain from China; and flower bulbs from Ottoman Turkey that produced big, bright, waxy flowers and grew quite readily in Holland's sandy soil -- tulips. Holland was rich and Amsterdam was booming.

In 1589, Amsterdam's greatest commercial rival, Antwerp, fell to the Spanish, prompting its many industrious Protestant and Jewish merchants and craftspeople to flock to Amsterdam. Of the Jewish influx, the jurist Hugo Grotius wrote in 1614: "Plainly God desires them to live somewhere. Why not here rather than elsewhere?" These migrants brought with them their merchant skills and industries -- including diamond dealerships -- establishing what is still a famous part of Amsterdam commerce.

Amsterdam grew into one of the world's great cities; its population reached 50,000 by the end of the 16th century. In 1602, Dutch traders set up the Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie (V.O.C.), the United East India Company. It was the world's first limited-liability joint-stock corporation, which was granted a monopoly on trade in the East.

It was a runaway success -- in 1611, the V.O.C. paid its shareholders a dividend of 162% -- and established the Dutch presence in the Spice Islands (Indonesia), centered on their colony at Batavia (Jakarta), which was run by a company-appointed governor-general. The big V.O.C. merchant vessels could hold twice as much cargo as their English rivals. A full-size replica of one of these sailing ships, the Amsterdam, is tied to a wharf at the city's Science Center NEMO.

Great wealth flowed back to Amsterdam, and the merchants used it to build the canals and the impressive 17th-century architecture along Herengracht's Golden Bend. The merchant owners of canalside mansions liked to put up a good facade, but canal frontage was expensive, so the houses behind those elegant gables were built long and narrow. Their upper floors were storerooms bulging with their owners' wares, hoisted up with loft-mounted ropes and pulleys.

In 1613, work began on the three concentric waterways of the Grachtengordel (Canal Belt) -- Herengracht, Keizersgracht, and Prinsengracht. City planners designed a system for smaller transverse canals to connect the large canals, making travel by water more convenient throughout Amsterdam. They decided the wealthy would live facing the major canals, while the connecting canals were set aside for middle and lower classes. Thus began the popular comparison with Venice -- though Amsterdam has more canals than the Italian city.

Golden Age Amsterdam can be compared to Renaissance Florence and Periclean Athens for the great flowering that transformed its society. Of Amsterdam's Golden Age, historian Simon Schama wrote, "There is perhaps no other example of a complete and highly original civilization springing up in so short a time in so small a territory." Artists like Rembrandt worked overtime, cranking out paintings for newly affluent merchants obsessed with portraying themselves and filling their homes with beautiful images.

Flower Power -- With the profits from global trade flooding in, Amsterdam's merchants needed a visible sign of their vast disposable income to flaunt in the faces of friends and rivals. These strait-laced, parsimonious Calvinists went astonishingly overboard for tulips. Bulb prices skyrocketed from virtually zero in 1620. By 1630, single bulbs were going for 1,000 florins ($200,000 in today's U.S. dollars) and the price finally topped out at 30,000 florins ($6 million in today's U.S. dollars) for three bulbs in 1637. To give that context, that was also the going rate for the most prestigious houses along Amsterdam's canals, with the garden and coach house thrown in. When the Tulip Mania bubble burst soon afterward, more than a few fortunes vaporized with it.

Decline & Fall

A long period of decline set in during the 18th century. At the Museum Willet-Holthuysen and the Museum Van Loon, you get an idea of the decadent, French-influenced style in which wealthy Amsterdam families lived during the Golden Age's fading afterglow, rich with Italian majolica and Nuremberg porcelain.

By the second half of the century, revolution was in the air. The "Patriots," pro-French, anti-royalist democrats, seized control of the city on April 27, 1787. Prussian troops rescued the House of Orange, tramping into the city to put down the rebellion. In 1799, the United East India Company was liquidated, a key indicator of the nation's steep commercial decline.

Revolutionary France invaded Holland in 1794, capturing Amsterdam and establishing the Batavian Republic the following year, headed by the Patriots. Napoleon brought the republic to an end in 1806 by setting up his brother, Louis Napoleon, as king of Holland, and installing him in the town hall on the Dam in Amsterdam, which was converted into a palace. In 1810, Napoleon deposed his brother and brought Holland formally into the empire.

The French reign was short-lived, but the taste of royalty proved sweet. When the Dutch in 1814 recalled the House of Orange from exile in England, it was to fill the role of king in a constitutional monarchy.

For 2 centuries after Amsterdam's Golden Age, the city's population remained at a quarter of a million. Between 1850 and 1900, however, it jumped to half a million. As did most major cities during the Industrial Revolution, Amsterdam began to face overpopulation issues. Housing was in short supply, and the canals were increasingly befouled with sewage.

Holland was neutral during World War I, but the city suffered from acute food shortages. During the 1930s, widespread unemployment brought on by the Great Depression convinced the government to use the army to control the populace.

Amsterdam was just beginning to recover from the Depression when, on May 10, 1940, the Germans invaded. The overmatched Dutch army resisted for a time, but with Rotterdam blitzed into ruins, the end came quickly.

Hitler managed to gain a following in Amsterdam. However, Amsterdammers mostly opposed the way Nazis treated Jews, Gypsies, and homosexuals. In February 1941, city workers organized a strike to protest the deportation of 400 members of the city's Jewish community. Today, in the old Jewish Quarter, stands The Dockworker, a statue in tribute to the February Strike. Unfortunately, the strike did little good; by 1942, the Nazis had forced all Dutch Jews to move to three isolated ghettos in Amsterdam. Between July 1942 and September 1943, most of Amsterdam's Jews were sent to death camps. Of Amsterdam's 80,000 Jews, only 16,000 survived.

Among the murdered was a girl who has come to symbolize the Holocaust's many victims: Anne Frank (1929-45). Anne is famous the world over for her diary, a moving record of a teenager's struggle to cope with coming of age amid the horrific realities of war and the Nazi occupation. When the Germans began deporting Jews, Anne and her family hid in an Amsterdam canal house, now the Anne Frankhuis. Cut off from other outlets for her energies, she began to keep a journal telling of her thoughts, feelings, and experiences. Sadly on August 4, 1944, Anne and her family were discovered by the German Security Police following an anonymous tip-off.

On May 5, 1945, the grim ordeal came to an end when German forces in the Netherlands capitulated. Canadian troops reached Amsterdam first, on May 7.

Hippie Haven

In the 1960s, the city was a hotbed of political and cultural radicalism. Hippies trailing clouds of marijuana smoke took over the Dam and camped out in Vondelpark and in front of Centraal Station. Radical political activity, which began with "happenings" staged by the small group known as the Provos -- from provocatie (provocation) -- continued and intensified in the 1980s. In 1966, the Provos were behind the protests that disrupted the wedding of Princess Beatrix to German Claus von Amsberg in the Westerkerk; they threw smoke bombs and fighting broke out between protesters and police.

Some radicals joined neighborhood groups to protest specific local government plans. The scheme that provoked the greatest ire was a plan to build a Metro (subway/underground) through the Nieuwmarkt area. In 1975, demonstrations aimed to defend the housing that had been condemned for the subway. The most dramatic confrontation between the police and the human barricades happened on Blue Monday, March 24. Thirty people were wounded and 47 arrested in a battle of teargas and water cannons against paint cans and powder bombs. Despite the protests, the Metro opened in 1980.

Protests similar to those against the Metro were launched against proposals to build a new Stadhuis (Town Hall) and Opera (Muziektheater) side by side on Waterlooplein, a complex that became known as the Stopera. Despite an energetic and at times violent campaign to "Stop the Stopera," both buildings were completed in 1986, and the Muziektheater is now a star in the city's cultural firmament.

Though the turbulent events of the 1970s and 1980s seem distant today, the independent spirit and social conscience that fueled them remain -- Make Sex Not Guns, reads a typical retro piece of graffiti -- and Amsterdam is still one of Europe's most socially advanced cities.

New priorities have emerged, however, with the general aim of boosting Amsterdam's position as a global business center and the location of choice for foreign multinationals' European headquarters. The city aims to consolidate its role as one of Europe's most important transportation and distribution hubs. These goals are aided by an ongoing effort to change the city's hippie-paradise image to one more in tune with the needs of commerce.