Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  Then again, in various eras and contexts you find people who proclaim outright that, in effect, these are the good old days. And there are indications that Amsterdammers who were alive during the city’s golden age had an inkling that something very special was going on. For one thing, the city commissioned a history of itself as early as 1614—after successive waves of VOC ships had returned from the East Indies but before much of the city’s spectacular new canal belt could be built, and certainly before its great artistic and scientific flowerings—which was a pretty clear indication that the residents already felt the throb of history in their achievements. And in that history book, the author, Johannes Pontanus, actually applied the term in question to his city. After summoning the mythological ages of man that the ancient Greeks wrote of—gold, silver, bronze—he decided that the period of astonishing transformation that he was trying to describe on the fly deserved the golden epithet.

  Of course, the rich and the poor experienced the age differently. But even the poor—some of them, anyway—felt the jolt of possibility. Let’s follow, as an almost random example, a poor newcomer who arrived in the city just about at its height. Her name was Geertje Dircx. She was born in Edam, to the north. She had been married to a sailor, and he died. We know that she had worked at an inn in Hoorn and had some family in a village called Ransdorp and that her brother was also a sailor; but the fact that she headed for Amsterdam tells us that in her widowhood she could depend on no one and so had to find a future for herself.

  She might have traveled by water coach, a transit system that had become commonplace in the province of Holland by the 1630s and that foreigners marveled at. These were passenger boats that glided along the canals and rivers, towed by horses, and they signaled, even before one entered the city, a newly developing society, one that stressed order, comfort, and egalitarianism. The boats were covered, were lined with benches, could hold up to fifty people, and followed a regular schedule between towns, of which one could find printed copies. Passengers paid fares based on the length of the journey; various currencies were accepted. Everyone, rich and poor, used them, and foreigners often found this free mixing of castes to be one of their first experiences of the novel Dutch egalitarianism. Food and drink were sold onboard. People got drunk. In the evening, songs broke out, sometimes fights. If there was a dark corner, a prostitute might try to make a quick florin from a traveling salesman.

  The passenger boats wound their way close enough to the landscape as to be in it, and slowly enough for travelers to exchange words with farmers in their fields. The countryside of Holland unfolded for a traveler, as it still does, in its endlessly massing flatness. There was the green of the polder, cut by the straight lines of water channels. The horizon was a line studded by cows and an occasional tree. Then there was the sky and its cloudscapes: tunnels and chasms and cathedrals and phantasmagoria of clouds, mounting the heights and marching in vaults and columns, ennobled by sunlight or furiously crosshatched by the force of an impending storm. (The Dutch sky is seemingly unchanged; my favorite word used by Dutch meteorologists is wolkenvelden: cloudfields.)

  Then walls and church tops would rise up for interested passengers to observe: a city. And one hubbub, of insects and birds, would be replaced by another, of people and commerce. Then would come the bells. Foreign travelers to the Low Countries always remarked on the ceaseless donging of church bells in Dutch towns. A resident could tell with his eyes closed where he was in Amsterdam from the distinct timber and carillon of the Zuiderkerk, the Westerkerk, the Oudekerk, the Nieuwe Kerk, the Noorderkerk.

  Once ashore, a newcomer like Geertje Dircx would want to wander and begin exploring sites that had become legendary in just a few years. The main site was the city itself, its alleys and quays. The sleek new canal rings were already talked of as the physical manifestation of this golden age that had descended on the city. Some of the new houses, which doubled as warehouses, were five stories high: skyscrapers to someone coming from a village. At the time Geertje Dircx arrived, the first portion of this ongoing urban development project was finished, with new brick homes lining both sides of each canal; further along in the direction of the river the work of the pile drivers and bricklayers was still going on. The ring canals were then (as now) both a tourist site and a trap, for newcomers would be confused by the semicircular construction: you would start out walking south along a street and, without making any turns, end up heading north. You also had to watch out for the coaches, which had only recently come into normal use among the wealthy and which would go barreling crazily through the narrow streets and over the humpbacked bridges.

  The Amsterdammers themselves were as well a source of confusion for newcomers. When Willem of Orange rode into the city in triumph Amsterdam had had 30,000 inhabitants; now there were close to 140,000, plus swarms of undocumented aliens, which a scholar recently estimated would have numbered in the hundreds of thousands, flooding into the city to work on the expansion or looking for places on VOC ships. And the inhabitants were a bewildering mix. At least a third were foreign born. Most immigrants were from Germany and Scandinavia, but Geertje would have also seen and heard Africans, Turks, Inuits, Laplanders, and others. The city was a cacophony of languages.

  It was also, however, very well organized, and that too would have taken some getting used to. Amsterdam comprised a maze of bureaucracies and societies that had to be negotiated. There were taxes to be paid on everything from beer to rent. Nearly every profession had a guild, and each guild had rules to follow. It must have seemed that the city had invented every possible job for a human to do, and some that humans had no business doing. There were people who only made balances for scales, people who only made glue, and people who only bored pearls to be strung. The textile industry employed not just weavers but wool washers, nap shearers, bleachers, dyers, and fullers. Wire drawers worked gold, silver, and copper into wire, for use in jewelry, which more and more ordinary people were wearing, and scientific equipment. Vuilnisvaarders hauled dung. Piskijkers (literally: piss lookers) could cure whatever was ailing you (or said they could) by studying your urine.

  A small-town girl would have been rendered dizzy by the activity and, in this city that had set itself to be the entrepôt to the world, the display. Among the canals you could find live elephants and armadillos, pickled snakes and frogs, microscopes and telescopes, old Chinese porcelain and new delftware. And of course spices and herbs not only for cooking but for aiding digestion, loosening stools, dilating cervixes, and warding off disease: stores went far beyond garden-variety pepper and cinnamon to include exotica like scammony, zedoary, galangal, spikenard, euphorbia, tragacanth, coloquintida, and what was billed as dragon’s blood.

  There was food everywhere to goad poor and yearning immigrants. There was a poultry market and a butter market, vegetable markets and butchers’ stalls. Street hawkers sold cinnamon cakes and roasted nuts. At noon our traveler might see and smell, through house windows, families sitting down to bowls of pea soup or the national dish of hutspot—a stew of vegetables, chopped meat, ginger, and lemon juice—along with knobs of hard dark rye bread and beer for young and old. Peering through the stained glass windows of finer houses our woman from the provinces would have noted that the wealthy were now eating on porcelain, drinking from porcelain mugs, employing finely wrought silver cutlery. Nowadays, after a meal, people were fanatics for tobacco; men, young and old alike, would pull out their long-stemmed pipes and start puffing.

  Geertje would likely have found temporary residence in the Jordaan, the area of the new part of the city that sat astride the canal belt, which mostly housed the poor and working classes. Life was rougher and shaggier here, the houses were smaller and more cheaply constructed, and there was more unpleasantness, since zoning laws prohibited smelly industries like tanneries from setting up in the main part of the city (two windmills nearby were known as the Big Stink Mill and the Little Stink Mill).

  We don’t know when she first arri
ved in Amsterdam, but in 1642 Geertje Dircx began her own upwardly mobile trajectory when she made her way to the Breestraat, or Broad Street. It ran through what had until recently been one of the fashionable neighborhoods of the old city, until its wealthier residents began to decamp for the new canal zone and their places were taken by members of Amsterdam’s large Jewish population, as well as by artists and artisans. Geertje needed work, and she had gotten a tip. There was a couple who lived here, in a grand, double-sized house. They had recently had a baby; the wife was doing poorly. They needed help. Geertje stood on the stoop, perhaps still heavily swaddled in her North Holland dress, with the bonnet drawn tight around the sides of her face. A bonnet might have obscured some of her features, but it could not have masked the fact that she had eyes that danced, eyes that, whatever she had been through, showed a keen will to survive, someone still vibrant to life’s possibilities.

  If the golden age meant that there were ways for a peasant girl from the country to advance herself, for a smart, ambitious boy from a moderate background the future was positively fat with promise. Claes Pieterszoon was born two years before Cornelis de Houtman set off on the disastrous voyage to the East Indies that would, despite its immediate failure, launch the VOC, which in turn would fuel the city’s rise. Claes’s father was a linen merchant. The family house stood virtually within the shadow of the New Church, and the boy spent his childhood playing in the streets behind Dam Square, in the very center of old Amsterdam. He would have marched with friends down to the harbor to see fleets of VOC ships returning from impossibly faraway lands and wandered eastward toward the river to inspect the progress of the new canals and houses. In time, his older brother went to Leiden University to study for the ministry. Claes followed but chose medicine.

  In 1617, he was back in Amsterdam, ready to start a career as a doctor medicinae, what we would call a general practitioner. He knew right where he wanted to be: on one of the new canals, convenient to the upwardly mobile gentry who were moving in there. He bought a house on the Herengracht and shortly afterward married a young woman named Eva van der Vroech. One account says Pieterszoon’s mother wasn’t pleased with the match, which seems strange because his family was part of the conservative wing of the Dutch Reformed Church, and so was the young woman’s family. Eva had an uncle who had snapped his sword while hacking at a Catholic statue during the iconoclastic frenzies, an incident that her family recalled with pride.

  Claes Pieterszoon, who at this time had a bit of baby fat to his features and wore his beard and moustache long, was possessed of a sober and wide-ranging intellect, which soon attracted the attention of others. As a physician, he was conscientious and became known for his warm bedside manner. Science was beginning to develop basic principles to be applied to the natural world, but the new fascination with observation was still in its early stages. Most medical men preferred to rely on the teachings of the ancients. Claes Pieterszoon went both ways. On the one hand he was the main force behind a significant modernization: the city’s codification of its sixty-odd apothecaries, which involved listing which of the hundreds of compounds were to be prescribed for what ailments and even provided for government inspectors. But as a physician he was old school. The Englishman William Harvey published his revolutionary theory of the circulation of the blood in 1628; Claes Pieterszoon didn’t buy into it. The prevailing thinking, which went back to the Roman physician Galen, was that the body produced two kinds of blood, one made by the heart and the other by the liver, and that the lungs pumped the blood. The two-bloods theory was the basis for the method of bleeding patients in order to cure disease, and indeed for much of medicine. Harvey thus had good reason to expect the medical establishment to frown on his theory (“I tremble lest I have mankind at large for my enemies … respect for antiquity influences all men”), and many physicians did. Pieterszoon was a deeply conservative man, and he preferred to scour the texts of ancient writers for answers, just as he relied on the Bible as his moral guide. He even made a joke about his refusal to go with the new theory, saying that he would rather be wrong with Galen than “circulate” with Harvey.

  As a representative of Amsterdam’s golden age, Pieterszoon was in this way typical: it was a time of constant clashes between ancient and modern, and nearly everyone had in his or her makeup a mix of the two. This dividedness is one of the biggest obstacles to our comprehending the early modern personality. The inability of Claes Pieterszoon to see the truth of Harvey’s theory seems especially bewildering in view of the fact that his greatest passion as a medical man was for anatomical dissection. He was among the first to study the functioning of several parts of the human body, and he described them in minute detail. Like a good Dutchman, for whom an understanding of the channeling of water was second nature, he described an intestinal valve as functioning “like our locks, the gates of which go up and down, and are so sound that they can open for ebb tide but are able to withstand the force of the flood.”

  By the early 1620s he was one of Amsterdam’s most distinguished citizens. Politics in the city were divided into two Protestant-aligned factions: the ultraorthodox, who believed that the city’s sudden rise, along with that of the young Dutch Republic, was due to the will of God and that every act, public and private, should not only expressly follow God’s commandments but be based on the conviction that mankind was fundamentally depraved and only divine grace could bring salvation, and the liberals, who pushed for a bit of lightening of this unyieldingly dark view of things and who advocated tolerance in a wide range of matters. Pieterszoon was temperamentally orthodox, and that faction on the city council sought him out to join their number. Doctors were now newly respected—people believed that they were not all necessarily quacks (a word, incidentally, of Dutch origin) but that some of them could actually alleviate suffering on occasion—and it made sense to bring an up-and-coming medical man into the city’s affairs. It was the beginning of a lifelong career in city politics—four times he would serve on the four-person panel of mayors—which Pieterszoon would pursue alongside his medical practice.

  Accompanying his sobriety, piety and civic-mindedness, Pieterszoon had a good deal of vanity. He collected fine things and worked with very modern energy to cultivate his public image. Indeed, he rebranded himself. To his dismay, his name was a common one in the Dutch provinces. There were Claes Pieterszoons digging ditches and baking bread. He, however, was anything but common, and he was in the market for an appropriate association by which to recast himself. Since their introduction into the country in the late 1500s, tulips had steadily become a Dutch passion. People loved their color and stateliness. Tulips adorned the homes of Pieterszoon’s wealthy clients. They were dignified, upscale, exotic, increasingly expensive, and emblematic of the times. The physician appreciated all the associations the flower possessed. In 1621 he took the bold step of changing his name. The flower had originated in central Asia and reached Europe by way of Turkey. Dulband, the Persian word for turban, which the flower looked like, became, in Dutch, tulp. When Pieterszoon and his wife, Eva, moved from their Herengracht home to another on the next fashionable canal, the Keizersgracht, and then shortly after to yet another home on the third new canal, the Prinsengracht, he hung a sign above the door to announce his practice. It was a painting of a tulip. From that moment, Claes Pieterszoon became Dr. Nicolaes Tulp. He had expanded his first name to its formal size, quietly jettisoned the tie to his father’s name, and added the floral crown. And thus was born a new dynasty. When a daughter was born the following year, he named her Catharina Tulp, and his son, two years after that, was christened Diederick Tulp. As a member of the city government, he was expected to choose a coat of arms and an insignia, with which he would stamp documents. He chose the tulip. He ordered one of the first full-sized coaches to ferry him around town on his rounds and had it emblazoned with a tulip, so that people clogging the roads knew to stand aside for Dr. Tulip to get to his patients.

  Again, the paradoxical, not
to say schizophrenic, nature of the age shows itself in riddle form. Granted that the convention of given name plus family name was not firmly fixed, it seems strange to us that a man so conservative that he would not change his medical perspective in the face of the evidence of his own eyes would take the seemingly radical step of changing his identity as if it were a suit of clothes. And for such a sober, serious, prudish man, a man of weight and bearing—to choose a flower?

  He seems to have eventually had reason to regret the step. A few years later, in the mid-1630s, the unprecedentedly vigorous city, and the Dutch provinces as a whole, would become swept up in the first of the many speculative frenzies that would afflict the capitalist world in the subsequent centuries. Recent economic bubbles have been centered on the dot-com industry and on real estate. In Dr. Tulp’s Amsterdam, the focal point was, uncomfortably for him, the tulip. When prices for the rarest varieties reached their height, single bulbs were going for thousands of florins, the equivalent of the price of Dr. Tulp’s grand canal house. In retrospect, the lunacy of tulipo-mania makes perfect sense, or at least fits a pattern of human nature. As John Kenneth Galbraith puts it in his Short History of Financial Euphoria, “Speculation … comes when popular imagination settles on something seemingly new in the field of commerce or finance. The tulip, beautiful and varied in its colors, was one of the first things so to serve. To this day it remains one of the more unusual of such instruments. Nothing more improbable ever contributed so wonderfully to the mass delusion here examined.” Recent scholarship has questioned how widespread tulip speculation was, and thus how devastating the crash was, but there is no doubt that after the bubble burst the tulip suffered a serious image problem, going from a symbol of refinement to a symbol of folly. Dr. Tulp had the shingle over his door removed. But he could hardly change his name, which was by then known far and wide.