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1 Introduction
Migration is something that is deeply anchored in Amsterdam’s DNA. Since the 16th century, many thousands of newcomers have settled there every year, whether refugees of faith or persons in search of a better life. And this migration is the driving force behind the enormous diversity that still characterizes Amsterdam today.
How did Rembrandt view these newcomers? In this episode of the podcast, I ask how migrants and their descendants are reflected in Rembrandt’s work. By the way, I’ll be going through this interesting history of migration to Holland and Amsterdam while wearing ‘seven-league boots’. At the end of our high-speed journey, I’ll briefly look at the tympanum on the front façade of the current Royal Palace on Dam Square in Amsterdam – an expression of urban pride. I wonder if migrants can recognize themselves in it?
2 Strangers (‘vreemdelingen’) in Holland
I start with the man we call ‘the father of the fatherland’, William of Orange (1533–1584). He was an ambitious nobleman who became the leader of the revolt against the Spanish. On 23 May 1568, a small army led by two of his brothers achieved its first victory over the Spanish. This battle at Heiligerlee is therefore often regarded as the starting point of the Eighty Years’ War with Spain. In the 1950s, the ‘Battle of Heiligerlee’ was part of the standard history lessons for young children, including myself, in Dutch schools. The Eighty Years’ War would last from 1568 to 1648.
The resistance movement first emerged following the introduction of a tax measure and the harsh persecution of Protestants. However, it soon became a general uprising against the Spanish ruler in the Netherlands, Philip II. William of Orange was murdered in 1584. The Eighty Years’ War led to the creation of the Republic of the Seven United Netherlands, with peace being concluded in 1648. Although William himself never aspired to an independent state and by 1648 he had been dead for over 60 years, he is considered to be the founder of this new Dutch Republic. Even today he is revered as the ‘father of the fatherland’, which has been known as the Kingdom of the Netherlands since the beginning of the 19th century.
On two occasions – in 2004 (in a national TV programme) and 2012 (in the monthly magazine Historisch Nieuwsblad) – William of Orange was declared the ‘Greatest Dutchman’ ever. Unswerving appreciation for someone who started out as a rebel more than 450 years ago and was labelled ‘father of the fatherland’ more than 350 years ago. Would the TV voters have been aware that he was ‘… a man who was not born in the Netherlands, spoke French all his life, and had spent a large part of his days as a refugee [vluchteling] abroad [buitenland]’? (De Boer/Janssen (2023), p. 9).
[Adriaen Thomas Key, Portrait of William of Oranje
(Willem van Oranje), ca. 1580, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam]
But what do the terms ‘domestic’ (‘binnenland’) and ‘abroad’ (‘buitenland’) mean these days? It was only in the 19th century that the nation state emerged; a state with clear geographical boundaries. A state has sovereignty for national administration within an established and recognized territory. In 1813, a passport act was introduced in the Netherlands. As a result, every resident of the Netherlands was free to travel within the country’s borders, but as soon as they wanted to go abroad, a passport had to be shown. Since 1915, the nationality of the holder has been stated on Dutch passports, making them proof of nationality from that year onwards. Prior to the early 19th century, however, such boundaries were much less strict.
3 Migrant as a container term
In the past, the term ‘foreigner’ (‘vreemdeling’) was used. But that can’t be a person who was not born in the Netherlands. After all, our country has only existed as an independent unitary state since 1813. Before the 18th century, the borders were drawn more narrowly and differently. Anyone not coming from the same region or even from the same place (often a ‘city’) was referred to as a ‘foreigner’. In many cases, these foreigners did not enjoy the same rights as ‘natives’ (‘inboorlingen’) (a term widely used at the time that should therefore be interpreted literally) or those who were was called a ‘poorter’ (burgher) within the cities.
People were therefore foreigners (‘vreemdelingen’) in a legal sense much earlier than they are now and since so many foreigners were viewed in this way, especially in the prosperous west and north of what is now the Netherlands, foreigners were more or less a normal phenomenon in everyday life. This does not mean that foreigners were accepted as equals. So, who were considered equals? Apart from the criterion of being born in the same region or in the same city, during the Republic a person had to be a follower of the official ‘Reformed’ religion. Anyone who did not profess to this official religion was excluded from public office. This applied to Roman Catholics, Jews and Mennonites. So there are boundary lines. In addition to geography, these are the boundary lines determined by the religion that is followed and a person’s social status.
So many people – according to contemporary standards – were born abroad, or were the child of parents, one or both of whom were born abroad. In addition to William of Orange, Anne Frank is also an example. She was born in Germany (Frankfurt am Main, 12 June 1929 – Bergen-Belsen, February 1945) and was a German and later a stateless Jewish girl. She became world famous for the diary she wrote during the Second World War, when she was in hiding in the ‘achterhuis’ on the Prinsengracht in Amsterdam. Because of her diary, Anne Frank has become an international symbol of the Holocaust, the murder of six million Jews during the Second World War. For that reason, it is also included in the Canon of the Netherlands as one of the fifty themes of Dutch history. In 2004, she was voted number 8 in the election of the ‘Greatest Dutchman’, one place above number 9, Rembrandt van Rijn.
Other examples are Ahmet Aboutaleb, mayor of Rotterdam since 2009 and born in Morocco, and – looking back with some nostalgia – my German teacher in the 1960s in Haarlem, Miss Kovács who fled from Hungary in 1956. But also my classmates in secondary school from the Moluccas or from present Indonesia and of course also my Dutch students over the last 40 years. These are second or third generation students from Afghanistan, Bosnia, Iran, Morocco, Surinam or Türkiye (the country’s name since 2023).
The Netherlands, especially Amsterdam, has in many ways been shaped by these ‘foreigners’. This process started before the 17th century. The term ‘migrare’ is Latin for to travel or wander. As a catch-all term I’m using the word ‘migrant’. This term reflects the common lay understanding of a person who moves away from their usual place of residence, whether within a country or across an international border, temporarily or permanently, and for a variety of reasons. I expect the meaning of the term migrant follows from the context in which I will be using it.
[Sebastiaan Vranckx (Antwerp, 1573-1647) – War refugees]
4 Young society with autonomous cities
The Low countries in the north were not a country under construction in the traditional sense. The cities were quite independent autonomous units that managed their own affairs and needs. Cities attracted people. It was not always purely humanitarian considerations that drove these cities to welcome migrants. In the last quarter of the 16th century, several city councils in Holland saw commercial advantages to attracting war refugees from the south. This particularly concerned those who brought knowledge, capital, networks of trade relations or access to wealthy people from whom the local urban economies could benefit. Through public letters and city publications, Leiden, for example, encouraged textile and wool workers to come to the city. Among other things, they received free city rights and could apply for subsidies for the cloth industry. Delft and Gouda (carpet weavers) and Haarlem (linen weavers) also offered these kinds of benefits. The well-organized relief for the poor in many cities would have also increased the attractiveness of migration to cities.
The cities in the Republic offered many opportunities. There was room for all religions, provided they were kept out of sight from the Calvinist state church. The Republic – and especially cities such as Amsterdam and Leiden – were known for their tolerance. There was work and also opportunities to join the largest trading companies in the world, such as the Dutch East India Company (United East India Company, VOC). Some cities tried to attract the best migrants. They were encouraged to set up new Dutch industries and wages in Holland were also high. So, large groups of migrants moved to the Low Countries for these reasons. Besides these migrants, poor farmers and agricultural workers from northern Germany and Scandinavia sought a better life in the Republic. These groups of migrants were among the poorest in the Republic. But all things considered, Amsterdam was a magnet for craftsmen, religious refugees, ambitious entrepreneurs and offered work that needed all sorts of manpower.
It is remarkable that this migration took place towards an area that was a war zone. After all, this process occurred throughout the Eighty Years’ War with Spain. There was a republic in the making with an unclear form of government. In addition, there was great religious unrest in the Republic. In 1621, the Twelve Years’ Truce ended without the need to extend it. Hostilities between the Republic and Spain resumed. The limitation (from the ‘Truce’) with regard to trade in the West lapsed and the West India Company (WIC) was established by the States-General. The Dutch commercial companies at that time were the largest commercial private companies or ‘multinationals’ around the globe, in particular the Dutch East India Company. Shipping could only exist thanks to cheap labour.
The young society in the transition from the 16th to the 17th century had opportunities to assert itself strongly in the economic, social and cultural fields. However, all that glitters was not gold. In addition to the time of war and religious unrest, there were fatal diseases (plague), a high infant mortality rate and the expected lifespan was relatively short. Nevertheless, economically and demographically Holland in particular was experiencing strong growth. A good climate for trade and innovation, various well-navigable inland roads, a booming shipbuilding and fishing industry, and the quality of dairy and beer all contributed to this.
The Amsterdam marriage registers of 1613 show that approximately a quarter were born and raised in Amsterdam, 30 percent came from the rest of the (current) Netherlands, but no less than a quarter had moved from Germany. Of the Amsterdam brides and grooms, 13 percent were from the southern part of the Low Countries (Dekkers 2024). A few decades later, approximately 80 percent of construction workers in Amsterdam were born outside Amsterdam. And in Leiden, for instance, in the 1640s, only 44 percent of men who married were born in the Republic (Pettegree and der Weduwen (2019), p. 31).
5 Development of trade
An important driver of prosperity in the 1630s were the countries around the Baltic Sea. It was referred to as the mother trade (‘moedernegotie’) conducted by merchants from Amsterdam from the Late Middle Ages, with the main trade being in grain. Much less known and much less spectacular than shipping to the East Indies, but the region accounted for close to half of all goods imported in Amsterdam.
In the early 1630s, Rembrandt painted several merchants who were involved in trade with north-eastern regions. One of these merchants was Nicolaes Ruts (1573–1638), another ‘foreigner’. He was born in Cologne, a child of Mennonite Flemish immigrants. Later, he became a member of the Reformed Church. Ruts was a fur trader, whose business was based in the Russian colony at Arkhangelsk (formerly in Dutch: Sint-Michiel). This is a port city in the north of European Russia, located on the banks of the Northern Dvina near to where it flows into the White Sea.
[Nicolaas Ruts, 1631,
The Frick Collection, New York City]
The painting of Ruts is generally considered to be Rembrandt’s earliest commissioned portrait after having moved from Leiden to Amsterdam in 1631, working in the studio of Hendrick Uylenburgh. At the time, Rembrandt was 25 years old and Ruts was 58. In the year his portrait was produced, Ruts was taxed for 100 guilders (for owning a capital of 200,000 guilders). Ironically, it seems that Ruts was not the most successful of businessmen; he filed for insolvency in 1638.
These developments culminated in a relatively short period in which a small, new Republic would become a leading economy in Europe within a few decades.
6 Southern Netherlands
Rembrandt was actually also a ‘stranger’ or a ‘migrant’ when he moved from Leiden to Amsterdam in the early 1630s. Leiden’s religious climate was not the preferred one of his family. He may have been looking for a larger customer base than a location in Leiden would allow him to have.
Amsterdam in first half of the 17th century was a booming city. It used to be a rather small town and at the beginning of the 16th century it even had fewer inhabitants than Leiden. From the last decade of the 16th century onwards, large numbers of people from the Southern Netherlands (Brabant, Flanders and Wallonia) had left their home ground for religious or economic reasons. They settled in cities with a deteriorating cloth industry, such as Leiden and Haarlem. For example, around 1600, half the population of Haarlem consisted of (mostly Flemish) war migrants.
[Portrait of Rembrandt’s father, ca. 1631,
Oxford, The Ashmolean Museum]
A short Leiden anecdote is appropriate here. In a previous Podcast (RM24001), I told you that Rembrandt’s father was active as ‘district senior’ (‘buurtheer’, literally meaning gentleman of the neighbourhood). He was chosen for this position in 1602, four years prior to Rembrandt’s birth. His duties involved matters such as public order, safety and social control, including registering the population, the position of foreigners and attention for physical living conditions. This position, by the way, could only be terminated upon death, relocation or voluntary resignation. Harmen Gerritsz. held the position for 22 years. One of the things he arranged was the admission of two orphans of immigrants from Wallonia (Blom (2019), 77ff.). The children were placed in the Holy Spirit or Poor Orphans and Children’s Home (Heilige Geest- of Arme Wees- en Kinderhuis) in Leiden, an orphanage that housed all parentless children, regardless of their parents’ beliefs or origins. In the 17th century, this orphanage was full of Flemish immigrant children.
Another interesting thing to note is that Rembrandt’s second pupil in Leiden was Isaac de Jouderville (Leiden, ca. 1612 – Amsterdam, 1645/1648). He was a painter and a true follower of his master Rembrandt. His father was from the north of France (Metz).
[Isaac de Jouderville, Man in an Oriental Costume, Wikimedia Commons,
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Man_in_an_Oriental_Costume
_-_Isaac_de_Jouderville.jpg&oldid=527175855
(accessed March 24, 2024)]
Many educated, experienced and often affluent people also came to Amsterdam. In 1600, about ten percent of the population in the entire Republic came from the south. Flemish knowledge, capital, and networks from the financial sector of Antwerp mainly found their way to Amsterdam, which would become the financial centre of the Republic. Prior to 1600, Antwerp was the centre of international exchange and payment services and a junction for postal connections. The Flemish exported luxury items such as lace, silk, diamonds, textiles, carpets, gobelins (tapestry), glass, goldsmiths’ art and luxury furniture.
In the first decade of the 17th century, the financial infrastructure was still very modest compared to Antwerp. But during the transition from the 16th to the 17th century, approximately 1,000 southern Dutch merchants were working in Amsterdam. Through their activities, capital and trade relations as well as their knowledge of foreign exchange and banking, they contributed significantly to the rapid economic growth of the Republic. They also introduced knowledge of commercial arithmetic (the Italian system of double-entry bookkeeping) and the phenomenon of maritime insurance. External financiers took on a risk against a certain percentage of the value of a ship and its goods (Boots Woortman (2023), p. 92).
Dirck van Os is a good example of this group of merchants, having left for Amsterdam shortly after the fall of Antwerp in August 1585. He was one of the merchants who equipped a fleet to the Indies in 1595 and one of the founders of the Dutch East India Company in 1602, in which he invested no less than 47,000 guilders. He was also the mastermind behind the reclamation of the Beemster Polder (Boots and Woortman (2023) see also p 225, 289).
Both demographically and economically, Amsterdam has been largely shaped by refugee flows from the south, including Antwerp. I remind you of Podcast RM24005, partly dedicated to the high-society wedding of Marten Soolmans and Oopjen Copit. Oopjen was the daughter of a wealthy Amsterdam family who had acquired its wealth, among other things, through the trade in gunpowder. Marten was the son of a refugee from Antwerp. His father was sugar trader Jan Soolmans, who as a Protestant no longer felt comfortable in Antwerp. But was he a true refugee of faith? Jan Soolmans was also an entrepreneur. The Scheldt River near Antwerp was blocked for years due to military skirmishes. That would have been disastrous for his business.
[Marten Soolmans, 1634, Louvre Paris (2024)]
The developments surrounding Rembrandt purchasing a house and studio in 1639 reflect the multi-cultural society in Amsterdam. In that year, the house (the location of the present Rembrandt House Museum) was bought by Rembrandt from its first owners (including Belten and Thijs). They were all part of the large influx of Flemish people who had moved to Amsterdam and settled in the new city districts; in this case the Breestraat area in the first decade of the 17th century. Belten and Thijs were among the very rich merchants to move here.
However, due to the construction of the large canal belt in the 1630s and 1640s, the wealthiest people left the Breestraat to settle in new canal houses. In the Breestraat they were replaced by a different type of residents, including several painters who were attracted to these large houses for their work and also the presence of art dealers in the neighbourhood. Besides jewellers and highly skilled craftsman (in glass or furniture), the artistic hub in this area included the painters Adriaen van Nieulandt (from Antwerpen) and Roeland Saverij (from Kortrijk).
[Adriaen van Nieulandt, Maurits,
prince of Orange, and his goom,
1624, The Walters Art Museum]
Amsterdam grew from around 30,000 inhabitants in 1570, to around 105,000 in 1622, 120,000 in 1632, and around 219, 000 in 1680. Within a few decades, that number had tripled, making Amsterdam the third largest city in Europe after Paris and London. As a comparison: in 1672 Leiden had 72,000 inhabitants and Haarlem 50, 000; in 1688 Middelburg had 50,000 inhabitants, Rotterdam 50,000 and The Hague 30,000. So, over a century, Amsterdam had expanded from being a fishermen’s village to becoming a metropolis.
7 Jews from Portugal and Eastern-Europe
Not only had many thousands of people from Flanders and Brabant found their way to Holland and Amsterdam in particular. At the end of the 16th century, many Sephardic Jews from Portugal and Spain were fleeing the compulsion to convert to Christianity. These people, too, enriched Amsterdam with their valuable trade networks connected to Portuguese settlements on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean.
Sephardic Jews lived in relative freedom in Amsterdam. Regulations prohibited this group from joining guilds. Forced by this restriction, however, many Jews successfully established large trading houses. In the 1630s, there was a Sephardic community of around 900 persons. This group contributed to the prosperity of the Republic. After them followed a new group of immigrants: the Ashkenazi Jews, from Eastern Europe. In 1630, some 60 Ashkenazim lived in Amsterdam. These Ashkenazi Jews from Eastern Europe, however, were less successful and played a smaller role in the Amsterdam economy. They shared their faith with the Sephardic Jews, but not the language, religious rituals or customs. They were often poor as well. The numbers of these two groups grew to some 1,400 Sephardi and 1,000 Ashkenazi Jews in the 1650s (Knotter (2024, 24). Wallet notes 500 Ashkenazi Jews in 1639 and 2,500 in 1670.
Christian scientists asked for highly-regarded advice from scientist and Talmud-expert Menasseh ben Israël (who lived diagonally across from Rembrandt’s house), because of his knowledge of the Hebrew scriptures. Rembrandt made a drawing of him.
[Menasseh ben Israel, 1636,
Rijksmuseum Amsterdam]
The most important change in the character of the area, however, was that the Breestraat became the preferred place to live for the growing number of Jews who settled in this part of the city and who succeeded the departing original owners. This part of the Breestraat therefore also became known as the ‘Jodenbreestraat’ (‘Jews Broad Street’) before the end of the 17th century. ln 1639, the Portuguese Jews were permitted to build their first public synagogue, just behind the houses of the Breestraat on the Houtgracht. In 1645, Rembrandt became a neighbour to Daniel Pinto, a Portuguese merchant. Extensive renovation work initiated by Pinto led to a serious quarrel between them.
8 Northern and Western Europe
In addition to sophisticated, well-connected and often wealthy migrants, such as Jews from Portugal, the southern part of the Low Countries and French ‘elites’ (faith refugees, including in the later part of the 17th century Huguenots), other groups of people migrated to Holland. They formed the large mass of working people (labour migration), more specifically Germans, Norwegians, Danes and Swedes, and represented around three-quarters of the group of foreign migrants in 17th century Amsterdam.
These labour migrants also came to the Dutch countryside to work as harvest workers, peat cutters, haystack workers or brickmakers. They arrived every year at the port in their thousands, looking for a better life. In the fast-expanding city of Amsterdam, they merged with the anonymous mass of other working people that included maids, port workers, seafaring men, textile workers and labourers in poorly paid crafts. Their arrival, therefore, marked the formation of a large wage-dependent underclass in Amsterdam.
This flow of migrants continued In the 17th century, coming mainly from Germany. The fact that Amsterdam was reasonably safe and offered the opportunity to earn good money counted heavily – for example, for refugees from German captivity where the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) was raging. In Holland – although still in the midst of the Eighty Year’s War with Spain – there was hardly any fighting at that time. Other migrants came from the eastern parts of the Republic and Scandinavian regions. These were often impoverished and uneducated people and families coming in search of work and income, ending up in the western part of the Republic. Besides these migrants, trained workers came to the Republic who met the requirement for knowledge and skills needed by Amsterdam’s many guilds. At the same time, the city’s focus on commercial shipping and maritime trade also benefited from new technologies, such as the wind-driven sawmill. Labour – for building houses, locks, and ships – could be drastically reduced and new ship designs meant that competition in trade at sea could easily be entered into using larger ships for transport.
Another of Rembrandt’s works in this period depicts a sinister scene – the hanging of a young woman. On 28 April 1664, Elsje Christiaens, aged 18 and from Jutland in Denmark, was sentenced to death for murdering her landlady. Elsje belonged to a large group of labourers looking for work in Holland and Amsterdam in particular. Servant maids were in high demand at the time, thanks to the greater importance of the cities and the thriving middle class. She was interrogated about the killing of her landlady with a hatchet and this was recorded in a confession book. It notes that Elsje was sentenced to the scaffold to be strangled on a stake until death follows, and with the same hatchet with which she killed the woman, the executioner will hit her with a number of blows on her head. Her body is to be taken to the Volewijk and tied to a pole, with a small axe above her head, to be consumed by the sky and the birds (‘… om van de locht ent gevogelte vertreert te worden …’). Her possessions were confiscated. Elsje had only been in Amsterdam for two weeks.
The story of the horrific death of Elsje Christiaens – the first woman in more than 20 years to be sentenced to death in Amsterdam – motivated Rembrandt to etch two drawings depicting a condemned woman with a small axe above her head, tied to a pole on the Amsterdam gallows at Volewijk. It possibly is one of the last drawings that Rembrandt would make.
[Elsje Christiaens Hanging on a Gibbet, 1664]
9 Amsterdam
The city offered refuge to wealthy merchants from Antwerp and wealthy Jews from the Iberian Peninsula. Intellectual life could flourish in this relatively free climate. For instance, it allowed the controversial philosophical ideas of René Descartes who lived in the Republic from 1628–1649.
Amsterdam was an economically vibrant city. Throughout the ‘Golden Age’ of Amsterdam, ships sailed to all corners of the world. City merchants financed expeditions and acquired the overseas possessions that would sow the seeds for the later Dutch colonies in what are now Indonesia, Suriname and the former Dutch Antilles. Governed by a body of regents in a large, but closed, oligarchy, Amsterdam provided its residents with good services. The city’s governors spent vast amounts on waterways and other essential infrastructure, as well as on municipal almshouses for the elderly and widows, and on hospitals and churches. Generally, the regents encouraged immigrants to build churches and provided sites or buildings for churches and other religious buildings.
At the end of the 16th century, Amsterdam had become a city of immigrants and by the mid-17th century these people formed the majority of the population. The integration of immigrants was generally a smooth process. It was not hard to find work as a craftsman, though these workers were forced to join guilds and serve in the city’s civil patrol (sometimes called ‘schutterij’). In the 16th century, some 400 city patrol groups were active. Contrary to the guilds, city patrol groups did not have religious obligations, though some groups did have religious tasks. The groups’ members came from the upper middle class as they had to take care of their own military equipment. Their function was to protect the city and they also had some influence on the city council. The city council of Amsterdam was composed of people from all kinds of backgrounds: Dutch, German, Flemish, French, and Scottish.
From 1658 onwards, various armed skirmishes occurred in northern Europe, but also with the English far beyond Europe with the Dutch conquering Curaçao, New Amsterdam and factories on the West African coast. In spite of the cost of these battles, prosperity in the Dutch Republic reached a peak in 1662. Amsterdam became the most important trading city in the world with a population of more than 160,000.
Back to Rembrandt’s neighbourhood. A small African community was also living there. Dozens of people of African descent, at the time called ‘Moors’ (‘moren’), lived in the multicultural 17th century city district surrounding the Breestraat. They were mainly servants, sailors and soldiers in the service of the West India Company (WIC) (the WIC was a ‘multinational’ company, which in the first half of the 17th century traded mainly in West Africa, the Caribbean and North and South America; in the second half of the 17th century, the WIC was also involved in the slave trade). Some of them had travelled along with Sephardic jews from Portugal. The moors usually lived in the basement of houses. Many of these free black Amsterdammers had a maritime background in (Dutch-)Brazil. Rembrandt most likely found models from among this community, as black persons appear surprisingly often in his work. They are part of historical scenes, are seen in separate studies, and even in a remarkable informal portrayal of two black figures (now in the Mauritshuis Museum, The Hague) (Ponte (2019); Zell (2024).
[Twee Afrikaanse mannen (Two African men),
1661, Mauritshuis Museum, The Hague]
Rembrandt’s openness towards unfamiliar people and cultures is noticeable. Where Rembrandt championed an ‘according to life’ (‘naer het leven’) ethos of lifelikeness in his art, he will also have applied this to Jews and Africans in his neighbourhood. As to Africans, they appear in around 20 of Rembrandt’s works, painted or etched. They were not slaves (or ‘slaafgemaakten’) as the city of Amsterdam had decreed that all people who lived within the freedom of Amsterdam were free, and not slaves (‘Binnen der Stadt van Amstelredamme ende hare vrijheydt, zijn alle menschen vrij, ende gene Slaven’), Ponte (267)
The Republic was known for being a tolerant and open society. Migration had many advantages. Indeed, it transformed Europe into a trading power and an intellectual centre. The dynamics of trade and business had shifted, from the south to the Republic. The Netherlands would not be what it is today without all the migrants who sought refuge here over the centuries. And without the people who contributed to prosperity overseas.
10 The other side of the picture
There is another side to this picture, i.e. the depiction of the story. The current Royal Palace on Dam Square was Amsterdam’s city hall from 1655 until the early 19th century. When it was built, the building was described as ‘the eighth wonder of the world’. The present Dutch national heritage, the dominant image in the Netherlands and what I learned at school in the 1950s and 1960s mainly relates to the glory of what would later be called the Golden Age. In this way, Amsterdam was presented as a world power and an idealized national identity was created.
Let’s look upwards at the backside of the palace to the tympanum. A tympanum is the triangular section on the façade between the cornice and the sloping roof cornices of a building. The tympanum high on the front of the Royal Palace is 20 meters long.
Under the statue of Atlas, it depicts the City Virgin of Amsterdam surrounded by people offering her goods from all over the world. The river gods Amstel and IJ sit at her feet. She, Amsterdam, is presented as the centre of world trade: in fact, as the centre of the world. To her left stands a crowned female figure representing Europe. She is holding a cornucopia full of fruit, as a reference to wealth and prosperity. A horse and a cow accompany her. Behind Europe is Africa, a half-dressed black woman, accompanied by a lion and an elephant. These animals typically represent this continent. She is followed by people carrying goods, such as ivory tusks, in the far left corner. To the right of the City Virgin of Amsterdam, the figure Asia, wearing a turban and leading a camel by its halter, bringing incense and spices. Finally, on the far right, America can be recognized by the figures with feathered headdresses. Silver and gold are mined here and transported to the centre. Remember, it would take more than a century before the British James Cook discovered Australia, the fifth continent.
The iconography or imagery is obvious. The tympanum emphasizes Amsterdam’s unprecedented economic power. The city was home to the most powerful commercial and military Dutch ships that transported all kinds of ‘treasures’ from all over the world: animals and products from different parts of the world. Slaves play an active role in this image: they carry the heavy goods and hand them over to Amsterdam.
I agree with many historians who do not consider this image to be incorrect, but incomplete. The Amsterdam City Virgin naturally receives the abundant revenues from all over the world, without having to do anything for it. She does this out of greed for the benefit of a limited group of Amsterdam residents: wealthy city dwellers, regents and the merchant elite. The pride and prosperity that Amsterdam wants to symbolize through the City Virgin is today hardly a credible symbol of innocence and purity. The Amsterdam tympanum uses the ideal image of the Golden Age ‘… to disguise the often harsh reality: the fierce power struggle that was waged both inside and outside the Republic and the violent trade expansionism, including the slave trade, that preserved prosperity in the clean Dutch cities, have been replaced here by a personification of innocence and purity.’ (Helmers et al. (2021), p. 34). Indeed, in the Dutch Golden Age, all that glitters is not gold.
References
On the International Organisation for Migration, see https://www.iom.int/mission
Maria Baarspul et al., Rijksmuseum in detail, Amsterdam: Rijksmuseum, 5th revised ed, 2013.
David de Boer en Geert Janssen (red.): De vluchtelingenrepubliek. Een migratiegeschiedenis van Nederland. Amsterdam: Prometheus, 2023.
Boots en Woortman (2023)
Boots, Alice & Rob Woortman, Een geniale koopman. Dirk van Os en de invloed van Zuid-Nederlanders op de Amsterdamse geldmarkt, Zutphen: Walburg Pers, 2023.
Jan Briels, De Zuid-Nederlandse immigratie en de dageraad van de Gouden Eeuw, in: Neerlandia/Nederlands van Nu 2005, jrg. 109, p. 21 e.v.
Geertje Dekkers, Lachen om die domme Duitsers, Historisch Nieuwsblad 2024 nr 2, p. 15 e.v.
E.J.H.P. Goossens, Heel en Al: Het iconografische programma van het Stadhuis van Amsterdam (1647-1665), diss. Utrecht 2022.
Helmers e.a. (red.)
Helmers, H. J., G. H. Janssen, & J. F. J. Noorman (red.), De Zeventiende Eeuw, Leiden University Press 2021.
Danielle van den Heuvel, Een markteconomie, in: Helmers, H. J., G. H. Janssen, & J. F. J. Noorman (red.), De Zeventiende Eeuw, Leiden University Press 2021, p. 210 e.v.
Mirjam Janssen, Hoe ging de Republiek om met migranten?, Historisch Nieuwsblad, november 2018.
Mirjam Knotter, Sephardi Jewish Life and Material Culture in Rembrandt’s Time, in: Mirjam Knotter, Gary Schwartz (eds), Rembrandt Seen Through Jewish Eyes, Amsterdam University Press 2024, 23ff
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