Books by Geert Mak

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Amsterdam: A brief life of the city

Jorwerd / An Island in Time: The Biography of a Village

In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century

The Bridge: A Journey Between Orient and Occident

In America. Travels with John Steinbeck

Geert Mak

The Angel of Amsterdam

Seven City Stories

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Uitgeverij Atlas Contact

Amsterdam/Antwerpen

© 1993 Geert Mak

© 2014 English translation Liz Waters

Original title De engel van Amsterdam

Original publisher Atlas Contact

Cover design Roald Triebels

Cover image Corbis / Monet

E-book created by Perfect Service, Schoonhoven

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ISBN 978 90 450 2739 5

NUR 301

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www.atlascontact.nl

www.geertmak.nl

For Mietsie

Start

A city in blue

The predominant colours were grey, red and green, interrupted in the centre of town by the white of cornices and the brown of canals. Rusty streaks entered from left and right, with quick yellow lines on them. The area was completely encircled by ingeniously interlaced ribbons that bore slowly advancing chains of gleaming metal. All around was green, with beyond it the blue of infinite water. Shadows of clouds raced over the housing blocks of districts called South, East or Old West. In the narrow gardens fruit trees were blossoming, exuberant pink amid the grey.

In 1992 I flew above the city for the first time. There was a strong wind and we bobbed on the gusts, wave after wave, like a leaf on a turbulent lake. Below us Amsterdam lay like a safe, orderly, thriving, evenly breathing body.

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The roof is often the first messenger – silent, subtle and unerring – to convey word of the lives beneath, and I’d seldom read so many tales of affluence, care and respectability as in the red pantiles, thick tar and coarse gravel below us. Red in North, reddish brown and white in South, grey and white in East, brownish grey in the city centre, and only in West, up against the central district, could I see, here and there, roofs with rust and rubbish, patches and blotches, like the hands of an elderly man.

The streets were remarkably quiet. On the southern outskirts I saw a newly built district, utterly still, white as a Kasbah, dusted with sand from a nearby building site. In North the land battled the water in an indeterminate region, part green, part grey, part bare earth, part everything that existed before it. In the distance were strips of dark-green trees and all the way to the horizon were shadows, moving steadily onwards, cloud after cloud. I saw a man walking a dog.

In the zoo strolled elephants and bears, big as young mice, and somewhere in the heart of the city a Star of David shone out, invisible from the earth. The old canals and quaysides were deserted, aside from a few pedestrians, like an eighteenth-century streetscape. The dead were sleeping, on this sunny and gusty day, beside avenues, flowerbeds and colonnades of trees, in thousands of greyish-white rectangles and blocks.

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For a short time we followed the banner of a broad watercourse. To left and right ran the straight silver lines of drainage ditches. The green was solid and firm here, tucked up tight like a warm farmhouse bed. The air was full of voices. In South a house was being burgled. In West a shop robbed. In South-East someone was bleeding to death in the wreckage of a car. I saw the culprits running; I saw aid for the injured lose its way between the tower blocks.

The small gardens of South were waiting, with their pergolas and fancy white garden chairs, for the few hours of sun allotted them daily. I saw a square with four little girls skipping rope. Then we sailed on along the margins, past rusted ships and forgotten harbours, past docksides with thousands of shiny new cars, past long rows of big oil storage tanks and hidden hollows in the shrubbery where they still live, the fools and the prophets, in their shacks and shabby caravans.

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Above the tall mirrored towers and concrete blocks of South-East, the sucking wind grabbed us. Far below were the birds, close to the roofs and the safety of trees. A swarm of starlings was all that slipped past in the depths. We flew back and approached the city once more, from the south-west on the back of a wind blast, a seagull racing alongside, somewhere half under us, tumbling over its wings. First came the white districts, then the greyish-brown, then the old man’s hands, then a tower topped with a crown, the house fronts on the main belt of canals fashioned like small jewels, white window frames, glistening glass. And then, once again, the water.

Stone and earth on the Burgwal

I

I flew over Amsterdam one April afternoon behind the backs of pilot Willem van Donkelaar and observer-detective Léon Toen.

From the ground the PH-RPW police helicopter looks like a vicious beetle, a metal angel, a blue voyeur in the intimacy of the city, but inside the glass bubble there was a rather philosophical mood that afternoon as the two men performed their allotted tasks together, seeing the good and reporting the bad, then being forced to watch, powerless. ‘This is Alex 82-19, Alex 82-19,’ Alex in his thick flying suit told the control tower, but it sounded like ‘Alex, caiperpetty, caiperpetty, Alex ack!’ and we dropped down again, diagonally, in a gust of wind. We were off to look at a strange drum floating loose on the IJ, at what might be an illegal discharge, at a new settlement of indigents and refugees on a wild and desolate stretch of land, then at a suspiciously parked van. After that we just roamed for a while through the clouds above the city.

‘Robbery on the Overtoom,’ said Léon. Over the years he’d developed an eagle eye for hurrying figures and strangely bulging plastic bags. ‘Bank left a moment, Willem, so I can get a better look. There, those two men there, stay with them...’

The world turned on its head and the city wheeled up along with it.

I saw the canalside streets almost empty, with only the occasional pedestrian. I could make out the Oude Kerk and the Nieuwe Kerk, the Burgwallen, the Dam, the Warmoesstraat, the Nieuwendijk, the bend in the Amstel. I saw more and more of the bird’s-eye view that in 1538 Amsterdammer Cornelis Anthoniszoon saw in his imagination, the sea of houses he drew from above, along with the Waag on the Nieuwmarkt, the Schreierstoren, the Begijnhof, bridges, streets, main roads, roof profiles, old monastery complexes and, away beyond them at an almost hidden spot on one of the Burgwallen, the house in which now, more than four hundred and fifty years later, I’m writing these lines.

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The house is near where the Damstraat becomes the Oude Hoogstraat and then the Nieuwe Hoogstraat. With its double front steps, its solid door and its heavy, broad cornice, it’s the largest listed building on this narrow canal.

Around the corner the street is alive: bicycling schoolchildren, students with bags and binders, those two ever-cheerful girls at the flower stall, Amsterdam Hell’s Angels, a clutch of American art historians, a punk girl, ladies from South who’ve come to buy Indian textiles, drunken tramps, excitable German women, sex tourists, urchins, pickpockets, construction workers and local officials – everyone and everything squeezes along the narrow thoroughfare, and where it goes to from here, no one knows.

But behind the old front door with its five locks, silence falls. There’s a hall, a marble passage, a front house and a back annex, a complex of staircases where every newcomer gets lost; there are apartments, and attics rebuilt as ‘lofts’; there’s even an old chapel – now simply another apartment – and, hidden away between the houses, a quiet old garden featuring a half-collapsed summer house with two pillars and no roof.

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It’s a typical dwelling, this house on the Burgwal, the city in a nutshell, a house that once smelled of punch and powder, of politics and trade, of love and madness, happiness and grief. The shadow of history has fallen over almost every aspect of it and much of the house will remain a mystery forever. Yet there are fragments, shards, a few lines of handwriting in an ancient deed, bits of a jigsaw that reveal something of the spirit that once prevailed in this accumulation of wood, brick and stone.

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We found the first clues when we and the house were getting to know each other in the early 1980s, when a joint renovation moved through all its nooks and crannies like a storm. Behind the vaulting in the chapel we found remnants of hay and dung, as if it had once been some kind of stable, and up against the ceiling we could just make out a couple of faded old coats of arms. The big front room was still full of antique furniture, with handles crudely screwed on here and there as if someone had used it as a stable support in life. In a small side room, under many layers of paper, the walls were still covered with black chintz fabric. In garden sheds, beneath mud and chicken droppings, was a marble floor with a regular pattern of white squares. On an outside wall of the second floor we found, mystifyingly, the remains of a stepped gable, long since bricked over. In the darkly timbered attic was a strange wooden cage that looked like a bed in which someone could be shut up at night.

In a corner of a dormer window, builders had recorded their names during a long-ago lunch break: ‘Hermanus Jan Schuurman, oud 18 jaar, gedaan den 1 junij 1871. Den 13 Oct 1891’ ‘P.J.J. Inniger, Metselaar [bricklayer], 14-12-1903’, ‘P.J.S.’ and next to another window again: ‘Hermanus Jan Schuurman, oud 18 jaar’. We found textile samples, old hatboxes and a large trunk from Königsberg. There was a box full of envelopes and invoices and underneath them some bizarre correspondence between the Grasvelds – the last family to own the house – and a certain Goldberg, with wartime dates, an exchange of letters that smelled of persecution, disaster and possible treachery. And a bill from 1942: ‘Expenses incurred for the care and burial of Franziska Michaëlis.’

Behind one of the beams, covered in dust, was a folder with drawings of black pine forests and menacing mountain views. Signed: Franziska Michaëlis.

Those were the first things the house revealed, and for some time they were all.

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On paper practically nothing is left of the earliest years of the house, and the same goes for the city. The first mention of this part of the Low Countries dates from 12 October 1275, when Count Floris V gave ‘the people who live at Amesteledamme’ freedom from tollage for their trade goods. At that point almost a thousand people were living on two long, ribbon-shaped mounds on the banks of the mouth of the River Amstel, where it flows into the IJ. Their houses were on the Kerkstraat (now the Warmoesstraat), the Nes, the Wetering (today’s Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal; the watercourse has since been filled in), the Kalverstraat and the Nieuwendijk, which was close to another small harbour on the Amstel. The Dam was probably built across the river shortly before Floris V signed his act, to protect the hinterland from the rising waters of the IJ. Anyone today who crosses from the Ouderkerksplein to the Warmoesstraat or from Nieuwezijds Voorburgwal to the Nieuwendijk will notice that the road slopes upwards slightly. Those streets are all that remain of the paths that once led obliquely up onto the dyke behind which lurked the IJ – in those days still vast, blustery and brackish.

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In its infancy the city must have looked like a Third World village, with houses made of wood, clay and reeds, no chimneys, pigs everywhere, the smell of fish, and a perpetual battle with water. The ground was soft, the houses kept sinking, and archaeological investigations indicate a repeated heaping up of the parcels of land. Centuries later, on the Nieuwendijk, more than four metres below street level, traces of some of the city’s earliest inhabitants were found, including a fireplace (recognizable from the scorched Roman-style bricks), a few household effects and two ditches along the edges of the property. Its waste heap told the archaeologists most: thick layers of ash, a quantity of coal, scraps of iron and a few tools. There was everything to suggest that a family of blacksmiths had lived on that spot between about 1225 and 1275.

Other finds revealed that they were not the only specialist artisans to make their home on those low, narrow dykes. There was a foundry making castings in tin and brass, a shoemaker and tanner, a weaver and tailor, and a fishmonger. But otherwise this was a village of farmers and fishermen like any other. Seeds and micronutrients in the ground show that in those years the Amstel still had a wide fringe of reeds, dotted with ferns. Water plants grew in the river, wetland herbs on its banks. There were relatively few trees close to the Dam, but further upstream stood alder, in narrow bands along the river, accompanied by elder, hazel, guelder rose, red-flowering currant and honeysuckle. In some places old cereal grains recall the arable fields of many centuries past.

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The pioneers did not live an isolated existence. On the plot inhabited by that first blacksmith, traces of silk were found – from Genoa, brought here via Bruges. Nonetheless, it was not until after 1300, when the city was given the right to hold a market near the Dam, that things really began to change. The farming and fishing families, who had previously done just about everything for themselves, started to outsource certain activities. From recovered millstones we can conclude that grain was milled by hand in the time of the city’s early founders. The first windmill was built in 1307, on the Nieuwezijds Kolk, with a miller to work it. Bread was no longer baked on the floor of the hearth but by a baker in a proper oven. Among the first Amsterdammers whose names we know was one ‘Lambrecht the baker’, who by about 1310 was baking dough people had kneaded at home. Earthenware pots were no longer shaped entirely by hand but on a potter’s wheel by someone who made it his specialty. New looms were introduced, more efficient but also more complicated, opening up opportunities for anyone who chose weaving as a vocation. The introduction of hops brought a better sort of beer, which was practically all anyone in the city drank in those days.

Trade developed, and money became an important factor in the economy. If a shoemaker in the village beside the Dam were to sell a pair of shoes in about 1250, he would not necessarily receive any money. He might be paid a few chickens, or a piece of salted pork. A hundred years later, money was the most normal thing in the world. People began to save; the first piggy banks found in Amsterdam date from around 1350. Trade was increasingly brisk. Freshwater fish like carp, eel, perch and pike had always been caught locally, but excavated bone fragments show that by about 1300 people were eating a lot of North Sea dab, plaice and flounder, and cod from Norway, supplied in dried form as ‘stockfish’. Their herring came from southern Sweden.

In the second half of the fourteenth century, Amsterdammers began catching those species of fish themselves. Profits mounted. An ancestor of the Hoofts, for example, a family later famous for providing the city with burgomasters, was by origin a ship owner and ship’s captain from Zaandam who, in his prime, appeared in The Sound as master of his own ship, thronged by seven other craft that belonged to him, each commanded by one of his seven sons. This was regarded as so extraordinary that the Danish king invited the whole family to dinner. It seems likely that from among those fish merchants, along with descendants of the original landowners, the first urban elite emerged.

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That was how Amsterdam grew into a city over just a few decades in the fourteenth century, not by means of a Lord’s charter and a list of formal privileges but by developing those features that have characterized all urban societies down through the ages: specialization and diversity.

Amsterdam urban archaeologist Jan Baart once compiled an inventory, based on discoveries at digs and a few early archival sources, of the trades practiced in fourteenth-century Amsterdam: blacksmith, cutler, goldsmith, crossbow-maker, coppersmith, tinsmith, shoemaker, tanner, sewer of bags and purses, belt-maker, turner, cooper, basket-maker, ship’s carpenter, roofer, bricklayer, painter, sawyer, weaver, dyer, shearer, miller, oil-presser, baker, butcher, fishmonger, brewer, innkeeper, barber-surgeon, musician, prostitute, merchant, ship’s captain, burgomaster, bailiff, alderman, clerk, steward, notary, schoolmaster, priest and anchoress.

Specialists relied on their craftsmanship and exclusivity, which made them more vulnerable than those who could turn their hands to anything. A basket-maker was able to earn a decent living only as long as ten other basket-makers did not come and settle in the same town. So with specialization came the problem of how to protect specialist groups – an issue that preoccupied the city throughout the centuries that followed.

The young city was soon protected against the surrounding countryside by privileges. Only within its walls could certain activities take place. Its various trades organized themselves into guilds, powerful lobby groups with strict admission requirements that every specialist was forced to join.

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So the new settlement of Aemstelredamme quickly became a city, with all the concerns that accompany that status. On the Dam, tolls were levied on beer and a beer market developed, which brought farmers and fishermen living on the dyke into contact with traders from northern Germany and the Baltic. The Amstel became one of the most important approach routes to the inland waterways of Holland, which led on into the heart of Europe, and trade in grain and other bulk products bound for the south started up as well.

‘Amsterdam has it’ is today’s slogan, and in a sense Amsterdam already had everything in the middle ages. It was unique in its time in connecting the northern Baltic trading routes with southern routes around Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp, and later even with Venice. The bulk transport of grain, beer and timber enabled specialization to develop on an international scale. The Baltic region concentrated increasingly on the cultivation of cereal crops, while in the Low Countries the stress came to be placed on craftsmanship, trade and other urban activities. Because large amounts of grain were imported, the growth of the urban population did not automatically lead to famine and impoverishment. In fact quite the opposite: as a result of specialization, prosperity grew.

Timber also arrived in great quantities, which allowed for the building of better, more competitive ships. The first fishermen on the IJ had fashioned their own boats from hollowed-out tree trunks, raising them a little with a couple of rough planks. Their grandchildren and great-grandchildren employed shipwrights to make far better if rather more complex craft, known as cogs and hulks. Centuries later, during the building of the Golden Tulip Hotel on the Oudezijds Kolk, the remains of the first large mediaeval shipyard were discovered: workshops, peat floors soaked with tar and caulk, and, right at the back, traces of a wooden structure more than thirty metres long, probably a rope walk. Further on, near the Lastage in what eventually became the Nieuwmarkt district, there must have been a constant hum of activity. Five hundred years later, remnants are still being found: shipbuilder’s axes, coats of arms, gloves the craftsmen wore for their work, as well as discarded ship parts. Discoveries have included the oak rudder of a galleon in which Amsterdammers sailed the Baltic in about 1480.

Meanwhile, from 1300 onwards, the houses of the city were increasingly made of brick. In fact in 1400, after several major fires, the building of wooden houses was banned. Churches arose, beginning with the St Nicholas Church or Old Church (Oude Kerk). In the early 1400s a rich merchant called Willem Eggert gave up his orchard near the Dam for the building of a second church, St Catherine’s or the New Church (Nieuwe Kerk).

The city’s defences were improved. The first city wall ran inside the Oudezijds and Nieuwezijds Voorburgwallen – merely an earthen embankment with a wooden palisade on top and a narrow moat – but soon the young city burst its seams and after 1380 the land all the way to the Oudezijds Achterburgwal and the Nieuwezijds Achterburgwal was raised and made part of the city. A century later the process was repeated, this time extending Amsterdam as far as the Kloveniersburgwal and the Singel.

A solid, thick wall was then constructed around the city, with gates – the later Waag on the Nieuwmarkt started life as one of them – and bastions such as the Schreierstoren. Outside the wall was a bulwark, fortified at the far end by what later became the Montelbaanstoren. It was all aimed at defending the city against marauding bands of robbers from Gelderland, a countrywide menace in those years.

We know all this from ancient chronicles, from archaeological finds, from the few written records that have survived, the two mediaeval wooden houses still standing to this day and those few other buildings that have withstood time. But only the bird’s-eye view painted by Cornelis Anthoniszoon, which now hangs in the Amsterdam Museum, opens up a window on the city as it was in reality, a snapshot of a clear, windy day in 1538. The pennants of the ships on the IJ stand stiff in the easterly breeze; we can see the city wall with the arches at its base, the rope walks on the Lastage, monastery orchards close to the wall, windmills, the lines that represent the Warmoesstraat, Kalverstraat and Zeedijk, and between them a sea of pointed gable ends, two or three storeys high, all in an area that stretched no further than the Munt and was no broader than the short walk from Oudemanshuispoort to the university library. Yet this was already, unmistakably, a city.

To the left, just inside the wall, in the shadow of a row of cloisters on the new stretch of land behind the defences, you can just make out the vague silhouette of the garden and house on the Burgwal, that scrap of brick, stone and earth at the heart of this brief history.

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From the oldest records we know that the stretch of newly raised ground on the Burgwal was divided into building plots around 1500, and in the years that followed the district was gradually built on until it was full. Even before that, a monastery and a convent had appeared, the Minderbroedersklooster across from what is now the Waag, and next to the Sint-Jans Molenpad, beside the spot where the house on the Burgwal now stands, the Sint-Maria Magdalena in Bethaniënklooster. The latter, ‘of the repentant sisters’ as it came to be known, was originally intended for penitents who had placed themselves under a strict regime. It was not long, however, before women of the elite flocked in and the nunnery became a residence for ladies from the city’s highest social circles.

A deed from 1472 has survived in which a garden is sold ‘on the Zeedijk next to the repentant sisters’ hay house’ – reflecting the rural atmosphere of Amsterdam at the time. Only a small sluice separated the water in the canal from the wild, brackish IJ, and as tradition would have it, around 1550 a stray seal was spotted swimming in the water near the Burgwal. The embankment served as common land for grazing cows and horses, a stream ran through the Minderbroedersklooster (the Huidenvetterssloot, later filled in) and the sisters of the Bethaniënklooster specialized in fattening oxen (a street that later became known as the Koestraat passed through their convent). When the city wall was built across the back gardens of the houses and cloisters on the Achterburgwal in 1480, pigsties were immediately put up against it. On the map drawn by Cornelis Anthoniszoon, gardens are still visible, and between the Koestraat and the Barndesteeg is a courtyard with fruit trees.

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It is hard to make out the house on the Burgwal in that first map by Cornelis Anthoniszoon. The building is small, lower than its neighbours. But on his second map, a woodcut made six years later, it is plainly in evidence, even if its precise shape is still not completely clear. Either the house had been altered considerably in the intervening years, or the mapmaker plotted the situation rather better the second time; we will never know for certain, and the archives tell us nothing.

In the cellars of the house we found huge, almost fossilised foundation beams, with notches suggesting they had previously been used to support a ceiling elsewhere. None of this tells us very much. It was probably a home like most others in those years, with an open ‘front house’, a fireplace and a closed inner hearth.

In early Amsterdam, dwellings consisted of little more than a single open space, a large barn of sorts, with an open fire at the back from which smoke escaped through a hole in the roof. The back and front walls were made of wood and constructed in such a way that they could be pulled down quickly in case of fire – a great help to those fighting the blaze. A few buildings of this type probably still existed during the early years of our house. Until 1500 mention was made in city statutes of houses with a ‘free hearth’ or ‘the fire you can go around’, in contrast to the brick fireplaces and chimneys that came into fashion from the fifteenth century onwards. The disadvantage of those was that they drew more strongly, creating a draught, so some Amsterdammers started to construct a room around the fire by erecting partitions as draught-screens, which also helped to retain the warmth. This was a room that became known as the inner hearth, a place that for centuries would symbolize the intimate nature of Amsterdam’s domestic culture. It was around the fireplace that everyone sat in winter to talk, to smoke, or simply to doze. The ceiling was often lowered, creating space for a separate room above, called the insteek, (literally: the insertion).

The ‘front house’ remained an extension of the street. It developed into the space familiar to us from paintings by Jan Steen and Johannes Vermeer: high, with a tiled floor, oblique light through a small leaded window, a front door that was usually open – apart from the lower section, to keep out wandering dogs – shutters that folded down and could be used to display wares, a table, a few chairs, a painting or two. In short, a half-private, half-public area that served as a shop, office and meeting place combined.

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We know as little about the earliest residents of the house on the Burgwal as we do about the building itself. There are merely occasional clues. We have a rough idea what urban residents of the time ate: rye and barley bread, or, if they were particularly wealthy, ‘court bread’ or ‘gentlemen’s bread’ made with wheat flour. Aside from that they lived on a diet of peas, beans, turnips, fish, poultry, hare, rabbit, cheese, butter, eggs, bacon, and gruel made with buckwheat, barley or oats. Vegetables and fruit were luxury extras. Bone fragments found during excavations show that more pork was eaten here than elsewhere in Holland, presumably because Amsterdammers had an unlimited right to let their pigs forage on the banks of the IJ.

The ordinary man seasoned his food with indigenous products such as salt, caraway, dill, chives, mustard and onions. But remains found here, even the oldest, include the seeds of raisins, currants and figs – evidence that the urban elite was familiar from the very start with products from far-off Italy and France.

As to what the inhabitants wore, we can draw certain conclusions from the earliest Amsterdam altarpieces and from paintings of civic guards. Amsterdammers, no matter how rich, usually went around in sober black, with just a small lace collar as decoration, the men wearing a kind of beret on their heads, the women a modest cap.

In 1978, close to the house on the Burgwal, a dredge pulled an item of leather clothing from the water of the Oudezijds Achterburgwal that with great care and attention to detail the experts were able to reconstruct. It turned out to be a sixteenth-century jerkin, with two panels at the front and two separately cut collars. The front fastenings made a strange impression. At the top, near the collar, were three cords, below them another two, followed by nothing at all, leaving the midriff section open, while at the bottom there was one more cord. The result was precisely the kind of jacket we see in paintings by Breughel, worn by merrily cavorting men with bulging bellies at peasant weddings or on other occasions that involved heavy drinking. This was originally the attire of the Landsknecht or mediaeval mercenary, but later, as these things often go, military dress was adopted by companies of civic guards and then by ordinary citizens who wished to appear brave and soldierly.

A few years ago, not far from the house, at the site of the shipyard on the Oudezijds Kolk, remnants of the household effects of an early sixteenth-century Amsterdam house were found. They present a detailed picture of the household of a well-to-do resident in those years: stackable tin cups, glass, pottery, the remains of a splendid Spanish majolica plate, an ornate dagger with a cow-bone handle and a wooden spinning top crowned with a silver coin. Amongst it all the archaeologists found several stones of a foreign and extremely rare fruit of which no trace had ever been found in previous excavations: the peach. Seemingly trivial, it was evidence of what must have been vast extravagance in this little town.

Of the earliest residents themselves – the bakers, fishmongers and merchants, or the proud women in those first civic portraits – nothing at all remains. Their graves were systematically cleared over the centuries, year after year.

Occasionally, during the building of an extension to a church for example, a forgotten grave dating from those earliest times is discovered: a rough coffin, a small corpse, a few jewels, committed to the earth at a time when the houses of the city were still made of wood and Miracle Processions still moved through the streets singing (or wailing, if famine or plague were abroad) with candles and banners, and children dressed as black devils, all suddenly exposed to the light amid the noise of pneumatic drills and the latest hit tunes of the modern city.

In the early 1990s the gravestones of the mediaeval St Olof’s Chapel were lifted. I saw the coffins uncovered there, with dozens of skeletons of men, women, boys and girls, some with their heads to one side, others with their knees pulled up, sometimes the hands folded, sometimes not, some two to a grave, some alone, the babies and very young children close to the pulpit, the parents further away. The graves in the top layer were only a century old; beneath them lay rows of skulls and bones belonging to people of the eighteenth, then the seventeenth century, and the remains of jewellery and fans made of animal bone that were often buried with the richest of the women, whose bodies were beautifully laid out. Now all those people were jumbled together, and next to them stood a small yellow excavator that kept taking fresh mouthfuls of the bony ground to be carried off as rubble to a new housing estate on an island in the harbour in the eastern part of the city.

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The first person named in the archives as the owner of the house was Clement Volckertszoon Coornhert. In a taxation listing from 1578 he is recorded as having three houses in his possession on this short stretch of the Burgwal. He had probably lived there since 1561. In an acknowledgement of debt dated 9 January 1561, he admits to owing money on a house in the Warmoesstraat and a house ‘on the Oudezijds Achterburgwal, where he is currently living’.

Alterations were carried out at some point in those years, with the result that two houses became one. The archives say nothing on the subject, but the house speaks for itself. During the most recent bout of renovation, the ceiling in one of the large front rooms was removed and found to be hiding two sixteenth-century ceilings, with massive joists supporting the cross beams, that made it obvious two houses must have been combined. From the pattern of the broad, mediaeval floorboards beneath those ceilings you can still tell precisely where one house ended and the other began.

At that time Clement was in the prime of his life, a little over forty, and for years he had been among the richest of Amsterdam merchants. As one of the largest houses in town, this was a suitable dwelling for a man of his status. To this day its long walls run parallel to the canal, instead of perpendicular to it as in almost all other Amsterdam houses. That basic structure suggests that the original house was erected by someone who had ample materials and a great deal of money.

Clement’s father, Volckert Janszoon Coornhert, was a highly respected cloth merchant who lived on the wealthy side of the Warmoesstraat, the side with the waters of the Amstel mouth at its back. His mother was from a rich Amsterdam family; her great-grandfather is recorded as being an alderman in 1430. His brother Dirck Volckertszoon Coornhert, several years younger, would later become a world-famous humanist and law reformer, but Clement was closer to his other brother, Frans, a notary and translator. The life of the Coornherts is illustrative of the spirit of independence that began to stir in the mid-sixteenth century, both in the house and in the still small city, with its fewer than ten thousand residents. In fact Clement’s father, the cloth merchant, struck out on a path of his own in 1540, when he did something that must have seemed revolutionary in industrious, pre-Calvinist Amsterdam: at the height of a successful life he decided to stop working, declaring ‘that he was rich enough’, as his son Dirck later wrote. His wife, whose thinking on such matters was rather more old-fashioned, believed he ought to consider his children’s future, but Volckert was of the opinion that they were perfectly capable of taking care of themselves, and anyhow he would prefer them to be ‘honest and diligent earners’ rather than ‘idle and shameful consumers’. From then on, mother Coornhert ran the textile business, along with her daughter Katryn and her son Clement.

Shortly after Volckert’s death, which was not long in coming, his son Dirck caused consternation in the family with a fresh bout of independent thinking. At nineteen he had travelled in Portugal and Spain, and on his return he was absolutely determined to marry Cornelia, a beautiful and kind but poor child of the common people. His mother refused permission, and with that Dirck lost his substantial inheritance. ‘Verkiesen doet verliesen’ he wrote: ‘choosing means losing’. He took a lowly job with Count Reynout van Brederode, whose household, and more besides, was managed by Cornelia’s sister.

Dirck was truly artistic by nature, and it seems the city already had space for men of that sort. He translated large parts of The Decameròn and could play ‘with great mastery’ the ‘German flute, as well as the lute and the harpsichord’. But what he did by marrying so far beneath him was extraordinary in the Amsterdam of his day. It seems rather like what his father had done, in that he was guided in the most important decision of his life not by religion, tradition or money but simply by his own personal feelings.

It was a genuine love match in sixteenth-century Amsterdam, and it lasted all their lives. Even the dry archival records that have come down to us are aglow with it: when Dirck is imprisoned in The Hague by the Spanish Duke of Alba’s ‘Council of Troubles’ in 1567, Cornelia more or less deliberately allows herself to be infected with plague because she does not want to survive his execution; almost twenty years later, when Cornelia falls dangerously ill, Dirck breaks off the most important polemic of his career, a four-week debate with Leiden professor Adrianus Saravia, to go and nurse her; and when Cornelia’s death finally puts an end to their life together, Dirck writes to his friend Hendrick Spiegel, in stiff but loving terms:

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