Inburgeren in Gent deel 1

Die stad beschreven in het vorige bericht, alweer enige tijd geleden? Wel, daar ben ik nu!
Met behulp van mijn vader ben ik afgelopen vrijdag ingetrokken in een pittoresk pand met een krakende plankenvloer en communale wastafels verborgen in gangkasten. Nu, een week later, is misschien een mooi moment om wat te schrijven over mijn ervaringen tot dusver: over Belgen, over Gent*, over de universiteit en over mijn huis.

Om met dat laatste te beginnen: mijn kamer ligt in het centrum van de stad. Zo erg in het centrum heb ik nog niet eerder gewoond. Dronken gelal is ‘s avonds met enige regelmaat te horen (je went er snel aan), en overdag staan er natuurlijk ellenlange rijen voor alle geldautomaten bij mijn huis. En het is belangrijk om genoeg contant mee te nemen als je nog niet weet welke winkels allemaal Nederlandse kaarten accepteren! Ook overdag is het rumoeriger. Hoewel ik meestal in steden heb gewoond – alleen Twello en Kanne vormden korte uitzonderingen – besef ik nu dat ik nog niet eerder echt ín een stad heb gewoond. Het maakt de beschrijvingen uit het verleden, over luchtvervuiling, geluidsoverlast, en vervelende buren begrijpelijker. Gelukkig kan ik er goed mee overweg.

Van mijn ganggenoten heb ik ook geen last, ze zijn eerder te teruggetrokken dan te overheersend. Een van hen bleek zelfs verbaasd toen ik me wilde voorstellen. Misschien is de uitgestoken hand in Vlaanderen nog niet bekend. Een andere ganggenoot initieerde zelf het contact: hij wilde weten waar de douche is. Dat was helaas niet zo makkelijk – ‘Er is ook nog een gebouw aan de andere kant van de binnenplaats?’ vroeg hij zich verbaasd af. Dus heb ik het hem maar getoond. Want ja, dit gebouw heeft een binnenplaats. Desondanks is het geen klooster maar een gewoon (en oud) huis, met houten vloeren en plafonds. Ik vermoed dat het oorspronkelijk uit zeer veel verschillende panden bestond (minimaal zeker al drie), die uiteindelijk in de handen van één familie zijn beland. Een geschikte plaats dus, om stadsgeschiedenis uit te schrijven.

Dit semester volg ik drie cursussen, waaronder twee onderzoeksseminaries. Deze vakken zijn, afgaand op de inleidende colleges, goed vergelijkbaar met onze Nijmeegse onderzoekscolleges. Bij middeleeuwse geschiedenis gaan we zeer diep in op twee verschillende bronnen, die we daarbij in hun context plaatsen en van verschillende kanten bekijken. Het gaat om een kroniektekst over St Truiden – waar we ook naar op excursie zullen gaan, zeer exotisch – en een rekeningenboek van een Gentse patriciër uit de 15e eeuw. Dit lijkt mij wel een verbetering in vergelijking met de Nijmeegse vakken, waar het allemaal wat bij de oppervlakte bleef. Het sluit ook echt aan bij lopende onderzoeken! Het onderzoekscollege stadsgeschiedenis is wat dat betreft beter vergelijkbaar met de gebruiken in de Erasmustoren. We onderzoeken een thema – migratie – door de eeuwen heen. Dat sluit niet direct aan bij mijn scriptieonderwerp, maar hopelijk valt er toch nog genoeg nuttigs te leren. Het onderwerp is in ieder geval tijdloos.

Het laatste vak dat ik dit semester volg is Theorie van de geschiedenis, een verplicht vak, en dus in een grote collegezaal met – naar Nijmeegse begrippen – zeer veel studenten. Niet alleen het aantal verschilde, maar ook de sfeer. De zaal was eigenlijk te groot voor het aantal studenten, en het merendeel zat achterin, zodat de eerste vijf of meer rijen leeg bleven. Het gevolg laat zich raden: rumoer! In Nijmegen wezen veel docenten ongehoorzame leerlingen terecht of stuurden ze zelfs de zaal uit, maar daar leek hier geen beginnen aan. Hoewel het college over het algemeen goed te volgen was, was er constant gefluister. Toen de docent zijn betoog wilde afronden was het niet langer mogelijk om nog iets te horen, want iedereen ging praten en inpakken. In Nijmegen zorgde een soortgelijk incident (in dat geval ontstaan door spraakverwarring) eens voor een enorme boze middeleeuwendocente, maar hier legde de docent zich er maar bij neer…

Inhoudelijk is het vak anders dan de Nijmeegse theorie vakken. We gebruiken een artikel van Peter Burke als basis. Hierin geeft hij een beschrijving van tien punten die de westerse geschiedopvatting typeert. Vervolgens gaan we in groepjes bekende historici** (zowel Westers als niet-Westers en van alle tijden) hiermee vergelijken om te zien of ze aan deze definitie voldoen. Het lijkt dus alsof het vak een duidelijke structuur heeft! Dit in tegenstelling tot onze Nijmeegse theoriecursussen. Gelukkig was er nog wel een zeer vreugdevolle verrassing, want naast een aantal artikelen wordt ook hier het béste geschiedenistheoriehandboek ter wereld als extra stof aangeraden. Iedereen uit Nijmegen kent mijn grote liefde voor het onvolprezen meesterwerk van Chris Lorenz, waarin hij geschiedtheoretische principes in zoveel mogelijk woorden uitlegt. Mijn waardering voor deze auctoritas was zelfs zo groot dat ik, direct na het behalen van de cursus geschiedtheorie in Nijmegen, ook anderen wilde laten profiteren van het gedachtegoed van professor Lorenz, zodat ik het voor een vriendenprijsje afstond aan DeSlegte. Gelukkig hebben meerdere vrienden uit het thuisland mij al hun exemplaar ter lening aangeboden, waarvoor dank!

Het laatste vak dat ik hier ga volgen, maar dan het komende semester, is oorkondeleer. Daarover later meer (bijvoorbeeld als ik het daadwerkelijk volg). Dit is voor vanavond even genoeg tekst, zowel voor jullie als voor mij. Morgen of in het weekend zal ik nog wat meer plaatsen, bijvoorbeeld over de plaatsen die ik hier tot nu toe heb bezocht met bijbehorende foto’s!

* Hent.
** Historitsjie.

Defiance in the market square

Civic unrest has been around for a long time. This fascinating fragment, taken from Froissart’s Chroniques, illustrates this by providing a very familiar scene: defiance of the ruler in the marketplace. The so-called ‘Ghent War’ (1379-1385) was the result. Both the behaviour of the citizens and the reaction of the count of Flanders may seem familiar to those who have been reading the newspapers of late.

Jan Parneele, Rasse van Herzeele, Pieter van den Bossche, and Jan Boele, the captains of the White Hoods, suspected that matters were about to be laid to their charge. They discussed together, then summoned several of their men, all of whom were the worst and most cruel in their company, and said to them,

“Listen up. Keep yourselves armed today and tomorrow, and do not take off your hoods, whatever you are told. Be all of you at the Friday Market at seven o’clock, but do not cause any trouble unless it is begun on you first. Tell this to your men, or let them know through another.”

They replied, “Gladly,” and so it was done. In the morning at eight o’clock they all arrived in the market place as they had been commanded. They did not gather all together, but groups of ten and twelve collected, for their leaders were in their midst. The count came into the market place on horseback, accompanied by his men, knights, squires and the town magistrates. Jean de la Faucille was with him along with forty of the wealthiest and most distinguished men of the town. The count, as he rode through the middle of the market place, cast his eyes generally on the White Hoods who were in his presence, and saw no other people there, as far as he was concerned, save White Hoods, which saddened him greatly. He dismounted from his horse, as did all the others, and went up to a high window, leaning out from it on the sill over which a crimson cloth had been spread for him; and there the count began to speak wisely. All were silent as he spoke. He showed them display in great detail the love and affection he had felt towards them before they had angered him. He showed them how a lord should be loved, feared, served and honoured by his subjects, and how they had done the precise opposite. He showed them how he had protected, shielded and defended them against every man. He showed them how he had kept them in peace, profit and prosperity since he had come into his lands, and had opened up communications by sea which had been closed to them before his joyous accession. He presented them with many considered arguments which the wise recognised and understood very well, knowing everything he said to be true. Many listened to him willingly, while others did not and called for defiance.

When he had been there an hour or more and had made his intentions loud and clear, but courteously so, he finished by saying that he wished to remain their good lord in the same manner as he had been before, and pardoned them for any contempt, hatred and resentment they had shown him and any wrongdoing, and he would hear no more of it. He wished to maintain them according to the law and as their liege lord as he had always done, but entreated them not to commit any new offence, and besought them to have the White Hoods disbanded. During the whole speech there was silence, as if there had been nobody present, but as soon as he mentioned the White Hoods a murmuring began, and he realised that that was the cause. He besought them then to return calmly and peaceably to their homes.

With that he came down, and he and all his men departed the market place and retired to their lodgings. The White Hoods, however, were the first to arrive and the last to leave. When the count passed among them they smirked and looked upon him malevolently, or so it seemed to him. They did not even deign to make obeisance to him, which caused him great distress. He said afterwards to his knights, when they had returned to their lodgings at La Poterne,

“I shall never readily achieve my aims with these White Hoods. They are a wicked and misguided people. My heart tells me that circumstances are yet to change; as far as I can tell there are yet more evils to come. Were I to lose all that I possess, I could not countenance their pride and their wickedness.”

And so the count of Flanders spent four days of that week in Ghent, and on the fifth day he departed and has not returned there since.

Source

This event was followed by years of civil war and foreign invasions. The peace treaty essentially maintained the status quo. In popular history rebellions such as these are interpreted as democratic revolts. Jakob van Artevelde, the most celebrated of these ‘rebels’, even has a statue in same market square described above. He is seen as an early urban democrat, even though he excluded his enemies (who were numerous) and was deposed and killed when his bodyguard was destroyed in battle. More critical historians, like David Nicholas, view the Ghent War as a conservative backlash in which a minority managed to take control of the city and in which rivals and even entire guilds were excluded from government, even when they had been included prior to the revolt. It is to be hoped that such power-hungry individuals do not hijack the democratic movements presently rebelling in North Africa and the Middle East.

(This post made at all possible by the superb The Online Froissart Project.)

Source and invention

Working with sources is always a tricky business. No source is truly straightforward, and even when an author in advance admits a certain bias, his or her interpretation of events or look into the past may be coloured in very different shades. But I do not intend to talk about the way in which the individual perception of the creator of a source colours that source, but about the opposite: how the view of a historian colours their interpretation of the source.

Sources come in many different forms, and even administrative documents, which may seem simple, can be misleading and ambiguous. They hint at a stable and consistent collection of data. Very often, this is not the case. In the past half year I’ve been working on transcribing a collection of municipal registers kept in the provincial archives of Limburg in Maastricht. The registers date from 1777, when the council of Maastricht decided to make a survey of all inhabitants and property in the town. Fourteen registers were once in existence, four have survived to this day. These registers would not have covered all of the city – for example, one entry remarks on a citizen moving to the neighbourhood SS – Sint Servaas. Yet, as a look at the list of 14 neighbourhoods or wijken makes clear, there is no Sint Servaas wijk listed there. This is because the territory of the church of St Servaas was considered an independent political entity within the city.

These registers list a variety of information on people. It is enough to make you curious about their exact circumstances, and sometimes people appear and reappear before disappearing forever in the fog of history. Possibly for some their entry in the register is the only memory left of their name. It becomes increasingly tempting to imagine what these individuals were up to. Let me illustrate this with a single example:

Marcus Kaigi with his wife and four children only makes an appearance in the register for wijk A, Wittevrouwewijk. He makes a grand total of four appearances because he moved often. We do not know where he came from, not even in general, but he seems to have been an immigrant into the city, because the register notes his admission is valid as long as his job is ongoing. His wife and children were probably immigrants as well, or these terms would have been more lenient. Nevertheless, despite the apparently strict regulation to his stay, he lived in the city for at least two years, and when he moved out of wijk A, he was moving into a property in another neighbourhood of the city. Perhaps he stayed in the city for many years after.

The entries regarding him are in the wrong order, because they are organised topographically rather than chronologically. They are as follows:
Capucijnenstraat [house number/name/job/where from/when/when and where to did he leave]
246 / Marcus Kaigi vrouw en 4 kinderen / adm. voor lang werck Bijcoop / uyt no 270 litt A. / 10 feb 1781 / 24 feb 1781 nae no 256 l[ittera] A
256 / Marcus Kaigi vrouw 4 kinders / Adm. voor lang werck voor de comp. / uyt no 246 Litt A /1781 24 let A / 22 meij 1782 nae no 122 litt E

Hoogfrankrijk
269 / Marcus Kaigi, vrouw en vier kinders / Werck op het landswerck / Met admissie voor een jaar uyt [doorgestreept] / Per 20 meij 1779 /29 meij 1780 nae no 270 litt A
270 / Marcus Kaigi, vrouw & 4 kinders / Werck op het landswerck / Met naeder adm. voor soolang arbeit bij de comp. / 29 meij 1780 uyt no 269 litt A / 10 feb 1781 nae no 256 litt A

So, in May 1779 Kaigi moved into house number 269 in the street called Hoogfrankrijk. Because someone crossed out part of the entry relating to his place of origin, it is unclear whether he came from a house in Maastricht or from outside, but his immigrant status is clear from the special admission remarked upon (‘met admissie voor een jaar’ = with admission for one year). Almost exactly a year later, in may 1780, he moved into the house next door, number 270. His employment was the same, the phrasing ‘naeder adm. voor soolang arbeit’ makes clear his stay had been extended so long as this employment lasted. He lived in his house, with his wife and four children, until February 1781. Then, he moved to the Capucijnenstraat number 246, which may have been upmarket compared to his initial habitation. Yet he stayed for less than a month and at the end of February moved into Capucijnenstraat 256. In May 1782, more than a year later, he moved away to a different neighbourhood, the St Nicholas quarter. Because of the nature of the registers it is impossible to trace what street he moved to, or how long he stayed there. He makes no further appearances in our sources.

What can we do with this information? It is perhaps tempting to try and reconstruct his life. What was the standard of living of him and his family? The four children seem to have survived for the duration, which might mean that they were no infants, who had a much higher mortality rate. His position as immigrant makes it likely he was not rich, because usually only the poor went in search of labour elsewhere. This seems to be borne out by his job: I’m not sure about this, but field work for the company may well have been manual labour, such as construction on the fortifications. On the other hand, he was married. This was in a time when marriage was a sign of financial independence. Is it possible to take an even closer look at this aspect of the family’s life?

One way is by comparing the other people who rented the houses he lived in. We do have information on this. At Hoogfrankrijk 269, the inhabitant prior to him moving in was clearly not very well off. After all, the entry regarding Willem Keerskens lists his employment as ‘Gaat sijn brood vragen en is blind’ – begs for food and is blind. But after he left, people with respectable professions moved in, such as a cobbler, a master smith and a roof-tiler. The initial poor inhabitant may be explained by charity, ie an allowance from a certain church paying his rent. At Hoogfrankrijk 270, other occupants include a tailor’s apprentice, a ‘wachtmeester’ of the dragoons, and another man who worked at the ‘lands werk’. None of these lived there at the same time, they rented the house consecutively. I have not yet located the exact house, but the map below reveals that the space of each of the houses in the Hoogfrankrijk street were small, although they also each had a garden.

When he moved to house 246 in 1781 he moved into a property previously inhabited by a bartender, the bartender’s widow, and a man who kept ‘beesten’, animals. This means the house must have possessed a sizeable garden, except if the animals were held on separate property elsewhere – which would still imply that the inhabitant was not poor. At 256 previous and later inhabitants include a military engineer, a soldier, a gardener and a shopkeeper. Professions that are not generally more affluent than those at 269. Furthermore, topographically speaking the houses at the Capucijnenstraat were not similar in size. Some of there were considerably larger than those at Hoogfrankrijk, but others were the same size or even smaller. Until we have identified the specific housing Kaigi and his family lived in (which may happen some time later) it’s impossible to say whether he moved into more sizeable property.

That is, I think, as far as I can go with this particular source with regard to this particular subject: the life and times of Marcus Kaigi. I cannot prove he moved up from a poor house to a slightly more upmarket home. The people we come across as living in that same house sooner or later than the Kaigi family cannot be examined by wealth, at least not using this particular source. As such, the reason for leaving cannot be explained. The idea that the family moved to acquire a better quality home is just one of many possible explanations. Proximity to family or friends may apply, for example, as would rising rent prices or even eviction. As such, our findings must be limited to objectively stating where Marcus Kaigi, his wife and his four children lived during a few years of their life. But that doesn’t make it any less interesting to think about it!

The habitat of Marcus Kaigi and his family. Hoogfrankrijk (vertical) and a part of the Capucijnenstraat (horizontal). Note how Hoogfrankrijk is very close to the (now demolished) medieval city wall, what is presently the Herbenusstraat.

obiit

The elderly woman travelling with her family was the first to speak. ‘It was probably a mentalist,’ she said, ‘they often do things like this.’
Of course, there was nothing to support this. The only thing the conductor had said was that a dead body had been found near the railway track, and so we would have to wait in Roermond for buses to take it us a little further south, rather than taking the train. It would be a minimum of two hours before railway traffic could resume, he warned. He had been the most considerate: ‘er valt een lijk te betreuren‘, he had said, ‘there is a dead body to grieve over’, which didn’t display any particular care for the deceased, but did, at least, take into account this was not an event in an empty void, but a human act with human repercussions.

The first and most plausible cause for a body being found near the railway is, of course, suicide. Whether the elderly woman was right in assuming that everyone who kills himself is a mentalist is another matter (and, indeed, it put into perspective the comments said on TV yesterday, when the new mayor of Maastricht hoped that the suicide of Anthonie Kamerling would make the killing of oneself something that could be more easily discussed – no one in the train ever uttered the word suicide, but everyone was thinking it), but the fact remains that people had little respect for the dead. The term itself, ‘lijk’, a human-specific term for cadaver, may in part be responsible for this. As opposed to ‘dead body’, ‘lijk’ no longer has any link with the living. Once dead, one becomes a lijk, an inanimate object. At best, a problem. In the tightly packed bus heading towards Sittard a woman was on the phone to presumably the university, informing them she’d be late for her lecture. ‘But,’ she said somewhat chirpily, ‘I can start my speech by talking about how things like this damage the economy. Just think of all those employees who are late. This must be expensive!’
I frowned. Half the people in the bus had a cup of coffee in their hands. Twenty-three buses had been ordered by Dutch Rail to make up for the railway ‘inconvenience’. The problem had arisen only at the end of the traffic jam, when many people would already be at work. I had a delay of only an hour.

In Maastricht I made my way to the archive and transcribed the information for the last 94 houses in the 18th century housing register. Every name in it represented a dead person, and in some cases they had died in time for a scribe to make a note. ‘Obiit‘, it would say. Deceased. Here, too, the dead received little compassion, I thought.

Then I reached house 302, located in the Capucijnenstraat, which a certain Jan Switskebel rented from Bottij (who himself lived near the Leurepoort, the register informed me). Switskebel, a salesman of old clothes, had died at an unspecified date, but, uniquely, a note was added behind the obiit:

Er valt een lijk te betreuren.

Knightly pursuits

On Thursday evening I realised it would be better to read a good book than twiddle my thumbs, so I picked the Wordsworth edition of Dante’s Inferno from the shelf, of which I had only finished the first canto. Alas, I could not get through two pages without getting bored. Reading a translation from 1844 is clearly not beneficial for creating a text that feels vibrant and alive. The prose is overly verbose and the sentence structures were awkward. The translator seemed convinced Dante would have written like Shakespeare, had he been English. But Dante was no Shakespeare (and I mean that in a positive way) and he wasn’t writing a play. I guess I’ll either have to find a better translation or read it in the original language eventually.

So I put down Dante’s Inferno and took another important piece of medieval literature off the shelf: Chrétien de Troyes’s Li conte du graal, which tells the stories of the Arthurian knights Percival and Gawain. They’re not exactly what you expect of Arthurian knights. Percival is no more than a peasant when he decides to become a knight. He has never ventured out of the forest he grew up in and he is not only unfamiliar with civilisation, he responds to it in strange ways (mostly played for laughs, but some of which will have dire consequences). He very slowly improves his understanding of those around him, but he remains mostly egocentric until he makes a brief return in the second half of the novel, seeking and receiving absolution.

Sir Gawain, on the other hand, is already the ideal knight when Chrétien begins to talk about his adventures. Yet even he does not meet expectations. Gawain is first presented as a knight who shies away from violence and advocates the parley rather than the duel for ending a dispute. But he is accused of killing a knight – we never do find out if he is guilty – and wherever he goes, people hate and despise him for disappointing or slighting them in some way. Not only the response to his actions implies he is no proper knight, halfway through his horse is stolen and he has to continue on what is possibly the worst horse in the world, while being followed and taunted by a woman who takes pleasure in his discomfort. It certainly seems like a subversion of the knightly stories popular in the high middle ages. Of course, that’s not to say these stories are anti-chivalric: far from it. Although they hint at a grittier reality where duels can lead to fueding and endless and pointless bloodshed and where peace is preferred over war, this mirrors the knightly ideals. Everything that goes wrong is because someone decides not to follow the code, and much of the comic relief – especially the opening with clumsy Percival – is humorous only because the behaviour is distinctly non-noble. Even if the characters are rendered in grey-scale rather than black and white, knights are protecting the innocent, the church and, of course, ladies. And a justified knight mounted on the worst horse in the world can still win a joust from a lesser man.

In case of emergency

Recently, I’ve been thinking about what to do in case the end of the world turns up unexpectedly. Where would one hide when civilisation breaks down and society dissolves? The popular choice would be to go to the countryside, grow your own vegetables, get a goat and live happily ever after.
Obviously, the countryside will be rather full in case of an apocalypse.

So, I have devised a fool-proof method of surviving such cataclysmic times: hide where no one will repose, as a safeguard of civilisation, in the archives! The larger the archive, the better. It would be best to get to the national archives, but those might be busier, so sheltering in university, provincial, regional or, in the worst case, municipal archives might improve your survival risk.

But what do archives hold that may ensure your survival, you might ask. Books, of course, endless amounts of books! Without electricity or central heating you may need to keep a fire going. Take out Gibbon, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and let it burn. There must be thousands of other libraries that host his work, so even if you valued his writing you could assuage your conscience. When you’ve worked that through, you can move on to other rubbish. Take dissertations, particularly if you’re at a uni library. Most quality dissertations will have received a trade version, so future generations rediscovering our present will not miss much when you start burning these – or when you use them as toilet paper. There will be hundreds or perhaps thousands of them, so you can keep going for a while. If rampaging hordes have not yet found your hideout by now, you can move on to the parliamentary accounts. The government releases these regularly, they’re located in every important library and most archives, and they’re not really very interesting. Plus, they have thousands of pages. Burn them! They will keep you warm – a promise the politicians might not keep themselves (apart from Tom Watson).

When civilisation succumbs to barbarism and public toilets are no longer maintained, one might feel somewhat desperate at times. But the archive might help out here as well! Whenever a night of soul-searching approaches, you head down to the vault to take out the properly old documents (N.B. do not hide out in an archive with a shite medieval collection). These documents will make your day. Plus, when you are bored, you can try and translate medieval Latin and then practise your skills by writing a chronicle in that language! Good times!

And food, you might enquire? Well, you have so many books at your disposal, there must be at least one that tells you where to find it.

Sign of life

Apologies for the delay; as is a common occurrence, when more interesting things happen in life, one tends to find less time to write about it. It’s hard to believe, but my previous post actually predates the present academic year, which is already halfway over.

In terms of ‘interesting things happening’, I must admit that these have been fairly limited in number. I did recently make a very brief semi-touristic visit to Elburg, but as I didn’t bring a camera and it started raining within thirty minutes there’s nothing I have to illustrate the trip, as opposed to the previous few blog entries. In any case, the city is tiny (250×350 metres, apparently), but quite wonderful. It was initially located a little further to the west, but as the inland sea it was then bordering was slowly gobbling up the land, the duke of Guelders ordered the entire city to be torn down in the second half of the fourteenth century and relocated it a little to the east. You can view pictures of the fourteenth century city castle and the fifteenth century St Agnes monastery here (the castle is depicted on the first two images, the monastery is shown near the bottom on the left – it actually looks more defensible than the castle). I like both of the buildings a lot: in a sober red brick style buildings like this could probably be found all along (parts of) the North Sea and Baltic coasts. That site is, incidentally, an excellent guide to Dutch castles, with generally good pictures and historical information. Unfortunately (for half my reader base) it appears to be exclusively available in Dutch and French.

Meanwhile, I’m looking to move city as well, although I’ve decided not to bother taking all my fellow citizens along (I mean, the waiting lists in Nijmegen are a sore as it is, I wouldn’t be doing my own cause any good by bringing along 160 000 Arnhemers (not that they’d want to go, of course)). However, at the present rate it may still take a few months before I actually get a room. Fingers crossed, however: as I’ll be studying in Nijmegen for at least two and a half more years, it should be worth my while.

Naarden

Apart from studying, I have also undertaken some more traditionally entertaining activities during the course of the holidays. For one, I went to Brugge, to visit the (already finished) Charles the Bold exposition in the Groeningemuseum, which was excellent and featured many courtly objects, both art and practical, from all over Europe. I didn’t take any pictures, but you can go here for my earlier photographs of the city. Brugge has of course not changed at all since then.

I also went to Naarden, a medieval city that was properly fortified in the late 17th century. It fell to the French during their 1672 invasion, because the defences were by then seriously outdated. The Dutch recaptured it in the following year and modernised the defences. Being in the province of Holland, it wasn’t exactly a frontier fortress, but its importance lay in shielding off Muiden and Amsterdam – and as Muiden was a pivotal strategic position when it came to flooding the countryside as a defensive measure, Naarden still fulfilled an appreciated position.

Naarden never became a proper city – its walls contained the population while the moats (and strict laws regarding the expansion of fortress cities) seriously hampered construction outside. Because of this, the fortress is almost perfectly preserved, as one of few Dutch cities. This also means that the best shots of the city can not be made from the ground. This wikipedia image shows what I mean. But below you can find the photographs I took myself.

There are more than a few similarities to make between Naarden and Brugge. Both are entirely surrounded by water, both have a very high percentage of monumental buildings within the moats and both still appear to be quite authentic cities from the past. There are arguments to make here about neo-architecture being used to make part of the buildings appear to be old, rather than actually being so, but on the whole this does not lessen the experience in either case (although I believe that most of the buildings in Brugge are not medieval but 16th/17th century, so the marketing is somewhat off there).

Something that could have been similar is the isolation offered by the moated settlements, but it is still quite distinct. Naarden is a unique little city because the walls and gates are still in place, so that there are only three roads allowing cars into the city. This might create some congestion in the holiday season, but it mostly gives the centre a very secluded and peaceful atmosphere. You can saunter through the streets and not get run over by cars every 50 metres. In Brugge this is only partially mirrored. Although parts of the city offer the same serene atmosphere, on the whole the place is simply too busy with tourists. Although there are many beautiful and quiet areas if you move away from the main squares, the Belfort and city hall are just too beautiful and the tourists there too much of a presence to ignore. There’s also many more cars inside, while the greater size of it all makes it less compact and clear, giving a reduced ‘ooh what a lovely small city’ feel to it.

Moat and wall

The Vitus church in Naarden, also the Comenius museum

The covered road leading into the fortress

One of the ravelins in the fortress moat

Courtine and bastion

An artillery piece on the main bastion and a ravelin in the moat

Wijk bij Duurstede by bike

Kasteel Sterkenburg

Today I cycled over 40 kilometres with my dad, from my parents’ new house to Wijk bij Duurstede and back. On the way we passed by multiple castles. I photographed those that still had authentic medieval touches.

First up was the castle Sterkenburg (‘strong fort’), rather arbitrarily named. It was intensively renovated in the 18th and 19th century, but the tower still betrays its medieval origin. The first castle on this spot was created in the late 12th century. It is still inhabited today and not open to the public. I photographed it from across a stream.

Kasteel Lunenburg

After that, only a few hundred metres down the road, we passed by the Lunenburg, probably constructed in the late 14th century and still authentic looking. The castle was badly damaged on one side during WWII – I think that must have been on the other side, as you can spot a lot of different masonry work here (including filling up some windows). The castle wasn’t ‘updated’ because the family decided to build a brand new mansion right beside it in the 19th century. Like the previous castle, it is still private property and can only be seen from the road. This time not only running water, but many trees as well hindered observation. It was impossible to photograph it from any other position.

The Leuterpoort (click to reveal)

Wijk bij Duurstede was one of the favourite residences of the prince-bishops of Utrecht in the 15th century. It’s currently small in size, but it was granted city rights in the middle ages and fully walled. In the 17th century the fortifications weren’t really necessary any more – there was no bishop left and the city was far from the border. The citizens decided this was as good a reason as any to make alterations to the city gate, which is now one of the strangest (and most useless) gates I have ever seen.

Kasteel Duurstede

Obviously the prince-bishop would not waste his time inside the city. Cities stank. So in stead he lived in an extensive and expensive castle just outside the walls. It was probably built in the 13th century, for a different lord, but as you can see it was modernised later on, in the 15th century.

Kasteel Duurstede

The parts of it that remain, especially the round tower, show some apparent renaissance influence. The castle saw active service, especially during the reign of the bishop David of Burgundy (r. 1456-1496; bastard son of duke of Burgundy Philip the Good). In the 1480′s a civil war broke out and the bishop was expelled from the city. He sought refuge in the castle he had modernised, but was eventually captured anyway (the place was not sieged). Maximilian of Habsburg had to come and rescue him.

The round tower was built by David of Burgundy, and because of his family called the Burgundian tower. The square tower is the original 13th century donjon.

Tower facing the gate

Burgundian Tower

Left: this artillery opening covered the approach to the gate. The castle still boasts multiple of such strategically placed openings, revealing good military architecture skills.

Right: Detail of the magnificent Burgundian tower.

Grote kerk in Wijk bij Duurstede

Stock Pigeon at Duurstede

Not just the castle was renovated and expanded during David of Burgundy’s reign, the city itself saw improvement, too. For example, the main church (pictured on the left) was improved by David as well, in 1486. He probably required a more stately church outside of the city of Utrecht, where he wasn’t very popular.

Incidentally, the city is named after the castle which is named after a former, no longer existing, city called Dorestad. The lord who founded the castle of Duurstede in about 1270 (Zweder van Abcoude) named his castle after a long-gone but not forgotten city, which had been a major Western European trading hub before it was destroyed by the Vikings raids. The new city, originally called Wijk, started calling itself Wijk bij Duurstede (Wijk near Duurstede) later on.

It’s not the end of the world

I’ve recently been updating my links section, and, apart from egotistically adding a bunch of my own articles, observant viewers may have noticed another link on the right, directing you to Fred Clark’s excellent weblog. This is an expansive weblog I only heard about quite recently myself and I’ve only really taken a look at the Left Behind section of the site. This may not sound terribly familiar to those on this side of the pond, and I’d only heard of this series of books in passing before. The books describe the end of the world as, according to the warped interpretation of the author, the Bible allegedly predicts it. This interpretation has little to do with what the book actually says and cherry-picks the bits the authors like (the more explosions and suffering, the better, basically), all the while trying to demonstrate how right they are and how wrong everybody else is. Obviously this doesn’t really work as it’s fiction, but the authors appear to hang on to Augustine’s interpretation of words – there is a direct connection between a word and the thing it represents. These books were apparently wildly popular among a particular group of Christians in the US, mostly those hoping the end is near.

And this is where Clark comes in. On his weblog he painstakingly analyses the first book of the series and carefully demonstrates that the novels are not only theologically unsound (not at all, as the authors claim, literally interpreting the Bible) but also terrible, terrible fiction. The authors take sadistic pleasure in punishing all the sorts of people they look down upon in real life, all the while acting as if they’re morally superior, even though their own characters, supposedly good Christians, do nothing to help (or even notice) their fellow man in need. Apart from providing an interesting look into the worldview of some of today’s eschatologists, the articles by Clark are very well written and humorous, making the subject matter entertaining rather than depressing. The first post of his analysis starts here (start at the bottom and work your way up, then click the ‘previous’ link).

In the past few months I’ve read into eschatology a little, myself, but where Left Behind gives a modern view, my reading was exclusively medieval. Now, medieval religion is typically looked down upon, by non-religious people, who view the period as barbaric and often think science was being kept down by religion, as well as by Christians themselves, who, in the case of the protestants, regularly view the medieval church as one of excesses, superstitions and dishonest faith (and evil popery) while the catholics often go along with this view if only to explain why the Reformation occurred (after all, if the true church was flawless, good Christians wouldn’t want to leave – Eamon Duffy disagrees with this and quite convincingly shows that the catholic church of the middle ages was quite good at regulating itself, but judging from his actions it seems the present pope follows the traditional interpretation).

The interesting thing is that the medieval church, when it comes to eschatology, was much more inclusive and humane than the Left Behind group. Well-off, middle aged Americans can easily write about the world going to hell (quite literally) without realising the severity of the events they are writing about. This was quite different from the 14th century Antwerpian clerk Jan van Boendale, for example, who was convinced, by 1350, that the world was going to end relatively soon. A few decades earlier, he had refused to give any estimate as to the coming of the end times, and predicted that it would be 700 years at the least. But by 1350, the Hundred Years War had started and a terrible disease had come out of nowhere and destroyed a third of Europe’s population. His writing is inspired by fear, and he can’t seem to properly understand what’s going on. He does qualify it as a divine punishment, and he tells of terrible rumours he’s heard: a ship, crossing from France to England, meeting Death on his way to punish the English for their sins (he had just finished doing the same to England), travellers in Bohemia stumbling upon a village with no survivors, a sole priest in Poland noticing an angry Christ striding through the woods, causing the clergyman to hurry to his church to hold mass, etc. These stories are not theologically sound, either. Christ punishing the unbelievers is essentially the same as what is happening in the Left Behind novels. But there are clear distinctions:

1. The punishment wasn’t imaginary, it was actually happening. People didn’t invent it, they were just trying to fit this terrible event into their world view. Divine punishment was the explanation they deemed most logical. In the Left Behind books, the authors are not looking for explanations but are rather seeking to predict the future.
2. The punishment is regrettable. As opposed to the events in the Left Behind books, it is the devastation that receives first priority. Mary, riding in the company of Christ, explains to the Polish priest that they want the suffering to stop and convinces the man to hold mass, in order to try and appease Christ.
3. It is Christ who is doing the punishing, not the Antichrist. This may seem irrelevant, but in the Left Behind books the Antichrist is virtually omnipotent, while Jesus and God are hardly mentioned at all as having any part in this; they only play a part in providing the believers with ‘get out of jail free’-cards. This seems a direct contradiction of one of the most basic tenets of Christianity, monotheism. The Antichrist is mentioned by Boendale, but the exact part he is going to play is never made fully clear.
4. The Black Death seems to have raised an early global awareness. Jan van Boendale, the Brabançon, writes about the effects of the ‘epidemic’ in Poland, Hungary, Bohemia, England, France, etc. It wasn’t just something that happened to people he knew – he was more than aware that this was a worldwide phenomenon and that the whole of society was being affected. This aspect is strangely absent from the Left Behind novels, even though it should be one of the first things anyone would notice in a world devastated on such a scale.

All of the above make the medieval expectations of the end of the world understandable and human, while those of the Left Behind books are almost cultist in their exclusivity. The authors also do not seem to accept their own personal fallibility, while Boendale hammers on self-improvement all the time.