Amsterdam grew up around its miracle. Its first canals were dug—to control the ever-shifting waters, channeling them into navigable courses, turning a threat to advantage. The still-tiny city, hemmed in from the forbidding sea by its dikes and dams, filled with religious professionals. The city’s original, modest church, dating from 1306, was rebuilt in 1369 as a lavish, three-aisled Gothic structure and named for St. Nicholas. Just four decades later, with the population growing and the numbers of religious tourists continuing to swell, another parish church was built on the dam in the city center. It was called, with Dutch practicality, the New Church, whereupon the St. Nicholas Church was called (and today is formally known as) the Old Church.
That was only the beginning. A certified miracle in medieval Europe brought on the equivalent of a gold rush. Religious professionals of every stripe flocked to Amsterdam. In little more than a century no fewer than nineteen monasteries and convents set up shop inside the city, with two others just outside the walls. Followers of several orders took vows of silence, but that only went so far. The narrow streets—lined with tall, gabled wooden houses—reverberated with backbiting and intrigue. The Holy Place—the shrine built over the site of the miracle—became a power center in its own right and the locus of a vigorous trade in holy trinkets (medals depicting the woman snatching the host out of the fire or bearing two angels praying over it, the earliest dating from about 1400, have been dug up around the city), arousing the envy and ire of the two parish churches. Meanwhile, the monasteries and convents were mini-fiefdoms, walled off from the rest of the city, that vied with one another for wealthy patrons. The two parish churches fought against these incursions into their monopoly on sanctity by demanding annual payment from the other religious institutions in exchange for the right to offer mass, hear confessions, or maintain their own cemeteries.
With monasteries, convents, and churches standing cheek by jowl, monks and nuns, priests and penitents became medieval Amsterdam’s core constituents. While fights broke out among the various orders and institutions, the greater tension was between the religious orders collectively and the city residents, who objected to the monasteries’ having taken large swaths of land along the canals.
What is today the oldest part of the city—Kiki Amsberg’s neighborhood, the densely packed, low-skied, high-walled center of the center of Amsterdam—preserves the memory of its rise on the waves of Catholic piety mostly in names (Monk Street, Paternoster Alley, a tiny lane called Gebed Zonder End, or Prayer Without End) that are often jarringly incongruous given that this also happens to be the location of the red light district. So the “blood” in Blood Street refers not to street crime but to the blood of Jesus. Surely few patrons of the prostitute windows of the area realize (or care) that the name of the little alley called Kreupelsteeg refers to the crippled pilgrims who came this way, their hearts filled with hope and desperation and prayer—looking for, you might say, a different kind of transcendence.
Meanwhile, another industry coincided with the rise of religious worship, contributed equally to the city’s growth, and arguably plays a greater role in its culture today than does religion. By and large, Dutch cuisine deserves its mournful reputation, but if a visitor to Amsterdam asked me to name the finest traditional culinary experience on offer I would lead him or her to one of the street stands that are still fairly common, and where the main product is typically served with onions and sweet pickles. For centuries prior to the miracle of Amsterdam, Dutch fishermen had plied coastal waters for the rich, oily, strongly flavored fish of the species harengus and genus Clupea, aka herring. The fish were caught, hauled ashore, gutted, and packed in brine to preserve them. The Dutch had no monopoly on the herring trade—it was a common activity in many northern European lands, and the Dutch for a time were regular customers of Swedish-caught herring.
But roughly around the time that the miracle of the fire-retardant host took place in Amsterdam, Dutch fishermen developed an innovation that would transform Europe and, in particular, play a role in the rise of Amsterdam. It was the tiniest of things, and it was probably discovered by accident. Fish such as herring have little pouches in their stomachs called pyloric caeca, which contain enzymes that aid digestion. If, instead of gutting the fish entirely, you leave these pouches, as well as the pancreas, in the brine mixture, the result is fish that keeps for a much longer period of time and, as a bonus, has more flavor.
This discovery gave Dutch fishermen—theoretically, at least—the ability to move away from the coastlines and into the deep, icy, impetuously heaving waters of the North Sea. More or less in the middle of that body of water lay Dogger Bank, a broad and relatively shallow region of sea that held a motherlode, for it was thick with the muscular, silvery bodies of shoaling herring.
But such a journey required a new kind of vessel. In 1416, shipbuilders in the town of Hoorn, to the north of Amsterdam, developed a long, stout, eminently seaworthy boat with bulging sides and a cavernous interior. Along with it came modifications that made it possible to do the gibbing (the technique of gutting and curing herring) aboard ship. Thus the herring buss—essentially a factory that could plow through rolling seas—came into being. Instead of immediately needing to get caught fish ashore, where they then had to be quickly processed and shipped off, the Dutch boats were able to stay at sea for five weeks or more at a stretch, fishing, gibbing, and fishing some more, and when they returned to port their hulls were packed with market-ready barrels of cured herring—lightly salted, or “soused,” in the terminology of the Elizabethan period—that would last for a year and that, to boot, were tastier than fish that had been cured in the old manner.
Within a few decades the Dutch had cornered the market. They shipped tons of herring to Poland, to France, up the Rhine into Germany, even as far afield as Russia. Dutch artists made etchings of herrings wearing crowns and writers spoke of “our noble herring.”
Transforming the herring industry could happen only if there was an unusual degree of cooperation among different people. Here Amsterdam’s tradition of water management—which already had a couple of centuries of history behind it—served the city well. Building up dikes and dredging canals were massive communal activities in which everyone concerned had to see a common as well as an individual interest in order to take part. Fishing the coastline required little more than a father and son and a few hands, but moving into deep waters meant a commitment of capital and a complex support infrastructure. The ships were larger, and they had teams of specialized workers: sailors, gutters (a skilled team of gutters could process 2,000 herring an hour), packers, officers. Since a herring fleet had such a recognizably valuable cargo, it needed a naval escort for defense. Ship chandlers had to supply linen, hemp, tar, tallow, netting, barrels, salt, and other products.
To make all of this work, herring merchants pushed for local government to get involved. The government sent warships to protect the fleet, and over time it developed regulations covering every aspect of the netting, processing, and sale of herring. This was done with one purpose in mind: to keep the quality high. As more money came into the province of Holland, the provincial government required that herring casks be of regulation size and manufacture and that they be stamped not just as Dutch but as Holland Herring—a very early and stunningly successful instance of branding.
At the high point of the industry, fishermen of the province of Holland caught about 200 million herring per year. New wealth came to Amsterdam. And dominance in one field led to success in others. In order to build herring busses, Amsterdam bought timber from Germany and processed it into planks. The city’s sawyers (and later saw mills, after a farmer from nearby Uitgeest patented a crankshaft, which turned the circular motion of a windmill into the back-and-forth motion of a sawing blade) produced so efficiently that England’s burgeoning shipbuilding industry bought processed wood from Amsterdam and the surrounding area. Meanwhile, the city’s own shipyards expanded, producing barges for working the regio
n’s rivers as well as seagoing vessels. And the city’s merchants in turn became savvy international traders; they paid top dollar for information about faraway events that they could earn money on and adjusted their cargo accordingly. When harvests in southern Europe failed, the city’s vessels returned from their herring runs to the Baltic port of Danzig laden with rye and wheat, so that Dutch vessels provided Polish grain for tables in Spain and Italy. The ships likewise carried wine from France to the Baltic and brought beer from Germany for Dutch consumption.
All the while, merchants kept alert for new business opportunities. When they discovered that rapeseed, hempseed, and potash—the main ingredients of soap—could all be got cheaply in the Baltic ports their ships frequented, they carted the raw material home and created an industry. At one point there were twenty-one soap works along Amsterdam’s canals. Once again branding became part of marketing: Amsterdam’s unique “green soap” became famous throughout Renaissance Europe and for all we know could have been the preferred brand of Leonardo da Vinci or Queen Elizabeth.
Thus, while the cities of Antwerp, Ghent, and Bruges in the so-called southern Netherlands (today Belgium) were among Europe’s glittering jewels, cornering the refined trades in spices and rare fabrics, their great artists—from Jan van Eyck to Hieronymus Bosch—as fully a part of the Renaissance as Italian masters, Amsterdam came of age by pursuing an altogether rougher market. The IJ—the city’s great inland harbor (it’s not a typo: the Dutch syllable is pronounced something like aey)—was later famously characterized as a “forest of masts,” as busses, buyscarveels, boyers, fluyts, vlieboots, and other vessels offering variations on the theme of durable bulk seagoing transport rode at anchor before the city walls, taking on sailors and supplies before making their way out into the heaving North Sea.
Wealth came, and something else: sailors and traders from faraway places. They presaged what Amsterdam would become: a place of mixed languages and backgrounds. But where the city that was to come would have a high gloss of luxury to it—with its markets of fine goods, its children coddled by loving parents, paintings decorating the walls of ordinary homes that would in later centuries be considered some of humanity’s masterpieces—this Amsterdam, the late-medieval city, was still one of rough wooden houses swirling with the acrid smoke of open-pit fireplaces.
Circa 1500, then, at the high point of the Renaissance—as Michelangelo was beginning work on his David statue and Copernicus was getting serious about astronomy—Amsterdam was both a lively shipping center and one of the most intensely Catholic cities in Europe: a grittily holy place of fish guts and church incense, of bilge, tar, dung, and sour beer; a town of narrow alleys and slanting rainfall, of cursing seamen and scheming abbots. And the two main enterprises alternately clashed with and enriched each other, creating a late-medieval frisson of sweat and strife and energy.
He was a smart boy, alone in the world. He had been born forty miles south of Amsterdam, and if one were to create a fictional character who would come to alter the course of Christianity and Western history by contributing to a grand schism in the Catholic Church, one might devise circumstances of birth and upbringing that mirrored his. His father was a priest, his mother the daughter of a local physician. He had to endure the secrecy and shame of his illegitimacy and then, after the plague swept in, the simultaneous deaths of both his parents. Whereupon he was given to the local monastery to be raised. While we can’t be sure of the precise nature of the abuse and suffering he endured there, his graphic descriptions later of what went on in monasteries—monks “whipping boys to death every day” and creating an atmosphere in comparison to which there was “more innocence in a brothel”—certainly explain his lifelong hatred of Catholic monasteries and foreshadowed the imminent avalanche that would become known as the Reformation in terms that echo even to our time.
He is known to history as Erasmus of Rotterdam, though he spent only his first four years in that Dutch city. Remarkably enough, the monastery in which he grew up was the very same one where, half a century later, the diarist Wouter Jacobszoon would serve as prior. But unlike Brother Jacobszoon, Erasmus got out of its cloisters as soon as he could, studied in France, Italy, and England, and became the great Latin stylist of the Renaissance Church. His fame, however, came from substance, not style. While he remained an obedient Catholic all his life, Erasmus mounted a sustained assault on the structures of the Catholic Church, insisting that the essence of Christianity was not to be found in observance of the sacraments, or in the power of the Vatican, or even in the person of the pope but in the individual: in the study and awareness of holy scripture.
His brand of Christian humanism—a learned, honest, individual approach to faith—became a sensation in his homeland. The Dutch were, and are, a practical, no-nonsense people—traits that Dutch writers have linked to their involvement with water and the need for a society in which strong individuals cooperate with one another to get things done on their own, as opposed to the medieval model that prevailed elsewhere in Europe, in which a nobleman ruled an estate and serfs. Examples of the down-to-earth sensibility are everywhere in Dutch history. In the seventeenth century, a French naval commander, on visiting a Dutch sea captain, was shocked to find him sweeping out his own quarters. I used to run into the mayor of Amsterdam in the local supermarket—and he wasn’t engaged in a populist stunt (Dutch mayors are not elected but appointed); he was doing the family shopping. This sensibility accounts in part for the depth with which the Dutch people took to Erasmus and his writings as his work gained fame around Europe: he was one of them, and they responded. Erasmus despised the “superstition of ceremonies” to which the Church chained its people. He condemned the trade in indulgences, which saw Catholic clergy selling dying people a kind of insurance policy that guaranteed that on their death their sins would be forgiven. He questioned the very structures of Church life—the religious art, the vestments of the priests, the grandeur of the cathedral—as so many excuses to suck money out of ordinary believing people and bind them to the will of the Church.
What struck Dutch Christians most deeply was Erasmus’s focus on the application of individual human reason. The Dutch were among the earliest adopters of a new technology—the printed book—and it proved to be an ideal instrument for advancing this new focus on the individual. Dutch editions of Erasmus’s works—his translation of the New Testament and also his Handbook for the Christian Soldier, in which he excoriated the trappings of piety and called on Christians to use their brains as well as their spirits—were best sellers at bookshops in Amsterdam, Leiden, Antwerp, and other cities and became the basis for a whole new curriculum in Dutch schools.
Erasmus himself had a term for this new approach to learning. He called it “liberal studies.” He never intended it to be anything but a means for correcting faults within the Church. But other people felt differently. In 1517, when the German monk Martin Luther nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in the city of Wittenberg, he set off a tidal wave that rolled four hundred miles due west and crashed head-on into the medieval town walls of Amsterdam. It was the era in which popes issued business licenses to brothels (from which they then received revenues), openly fathered illegitimate children, and were so flagrant in manipulating their power that Sixtus IV appointed an eight-year-old as bishop of Lisbon. As a major center of Catholic worship, Amsterdam was as steeped in the excesses and corruption that Erasmus railed against as anyplace. It was common in the city for “celibate” priests to have mistresses. And whether at the Carthusian monastery to the east or in the headquarters of the Canons Regular just outside the city walls to the south, for a young novitiate to enter orders he had to “donate” sufficiently. You rose in power by buying higher offices, so that the families that had grown rich on trade and shipping were able to place their sons as heads of the orders. As Church leaders gained more power, they collected official titles, each of which came with its own salary. It was not physically possibl
e for one man to perform all the fuctions of each office, but that was the idea: a leader collected these offices in order to subcontract the work to others, at lower salaries.
Like other Europeans, Amsterdammers had become fed up with such activity. If Erasmus, the great Dutch theologian who had inspired them, was not willing to take the full step and sever ties with Rome, his German colleague was. Great numbers of Dutch Christians were ready to follow Luther in breaking away from the Church. It all happened in the course of a few years. Erasmus watched in horror as people deserted the Church and declared themselves followers not only of Luther but of Erasmus as well. Dutiful as he remained to his faith, he found it unbearable to hear a Catholic official in the Dutch city of Dordrecht vividly pair the two theologians, saying, “Luther is pestilential, but Erasmus more so, for Luther sucked all his poison from Erasmus’ teats.”
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