Europe: A History (77 page)

Land reclamation was an ancient and improving art. Holland’s characteristic
terpen
or artificial ‘mounds’, on which houses could be safely built above flood level, dated from time immemorial. They had been mentioned by Pliny. The earliest dikes of the
zeewering
or ‘sea-defences’ dated from the eighth or ninth century. River dikes began to spread after the perfection of the sluice-gate in the eleventh century. The construction of polders or enclosed ‘stake fields’ depended on a sophisticated system of drainage which was not mastered until c.1150. The dikes had to be built, with back-breaking labour, round lines of stakes driven deep into the soft ground, then filled with rubble and stones and planted with anchor grass. Once enclosed, the field had to be repeatedly flooded with fresh water over ten or fifteen years and repeatedly drained to disperse the salt. Only then could the rich alluvial soil begin to repay the efforts. But its fertility was proverbial: as well as the meat, wool, and leather of sheep and cattle that grazed on the sea-turf pastures, it provided both the life-support system for dense colonization and an abundance of produce for export to the neighbouring towns.

In the thirteenth century the polderization of Holland was in its infancy: it could only nibble at the very edge of the marshes. Before the introduction of wind-driven water-balers, there was no efficient means of draining large enclosures. Immense damage was to be done by the terrible St Elizabeth flood of 1421, which drowned 72 villages and 10,000 people and negated the progress of two centuries. The greater part of the land below sea-level requiring permanent drainage could not be touched until the invention c.1550 of windmills with rotating turrets, which could pump non-stop, irrespective of wind direction. No schedule for reclaiming the whole of Holland existed before the Land Reclamation Act of 1918. Another catastrophic flood was needed in 1953 before the grand Delta Plan (1957–86) was brought in to regulate all the rivers and fill the channels to the sea. Eight hundred years of dogged struggle against the elements cannot have failed to
leave its mark on the people involved. Some historians have been tempted to see it as the determinant factor in the Dutch character.

The building of the dams marked a special stage in this long history. It launched a system of inland waterways whose operation could be controlled by the keepers of the sluices. Since seagoing ships could not easily pass the narrow locks, entrepôts sprang up round the dams, where shipping could exchange cargoes with those of smaller river barges. Schiedam-Rotterdam and Amsterdam both grew from the junction of the sea trade and the river trade. They would not grow to pre-eminence, however, without a whole series of extraneous developments which resulted in the demise of their principal competitors. Foremost among these, and at a much later date, was the wholly arbitrary ruin of Antwerp, effected through the forcible closure of the Scheldt 1648–1863. (See p. 567.)

Holland’s strategic location on the western frontier of the Empire ensured a high degree of political involvement. It had once formed the northern segment of the middle kingdom of ‘Lotharingia’. It spent a dozen years in the early tenth century in the sphere of West Francia, before passing definitively into the eastern, imperial sphere in 925. For the next 300 years, as part of the ‘Duchy of Lower Lorraine’, it was drawn into the endless rivalries of the feudal princes and their manœuvrings between the Empire and the rising kingdom of France.

The counts of Holland traced their pedigree to Dirk I (Dietrich, Thierri, or Theodoric), the descendant of Vikings who had established a base in the delta in the ninth century. Dirk I had been granted lands near Haarlem in 922, in a district then called Kennemerland, where he founded the Benedictine monastery of Egmont. The family’s fortunes were assured after 1018 when Count Dirk III, having set up unauthorized tolls on the lower Rhine, repulsed the Duke of Lorraine in a famous battle on the dikes. Dirk III first used the name of Holland in his title. Thereafter, secure in their castle at Haarlem, the counts engaged in ceaseless feudal strife. Holland was one of a dozen counties whose interests straddled the imperial frontier. Neither the Emperor nor the king of France could exert a permanent influence, except by proxy through the shifting combinations of their vassals. For practical purposes the feudal lords of the ill-defined Low Countries, the
Nederlanden
, which stretched from the Rhineland to Picardy, fought it out among themselves. By doing so, they were gradually creating a region with a separate identity and with a destiny that was neither German nor French.

Within this circle, Holland must be counted one of the lesser lights. The mighty bishops of Utrecht and Liège, the dukes of Lorraine and Brabant, and the neighbouring county of Flanders were all much more substantial. Holland’s successful contest with Flanders over the control of the islands of Zeeland had run for centuries until the Peace of Brussels in 1253. Her subjugation of the fierce inhabitants of Frisia or Friesland, who remained pagan until Charlemagne’s time, had been concluded more by the inundations of the sea than by successful conquest. Together with the excess population of the crowded Flemish cities, distressed Frieslanders supplied one of the largest contingents of emigrants who were colonizing the lands of Germany’s eastern marches.

None the less, the counts of Holland were men of considerable political substance. William I (r. 1205–22) fought at Bouvines on the imperial side and was taken prisoner by the French. Like his forebear, who had taken Lisbon from the Saracens, he was a devoted crusader. He died in Egypt after participating in the siege of Damietta. William II (r. 1234–56) aspired to the supreme imperial dignity. Succeeding as a minor, he was raised a son of the Church by his guardian, the Bishop of Utrecht, and found himself propelled into the higher realms of Pope Innocent IV’s attempts to depose the Hohenstaufen. (See p. 353.) In 1247 he was crowned at Aachen under ecclesiastical sponsorship as King, or anti-King, of the Romans. Married to a Guelph duchess, and allied to the powerful confederation of Rhineland cities, he briefly won the upper hand in Germany’s internecine politics. In January 1256 he went home to Holland to deal with a local problem in Frisia before proceeding to his coronation as Emperor in Rome. A crack in the ice, through which armoured horse and armoured rider sank on impact, put an end to a promising career. But for the accident, the Hollander would probably have become Holy Roman Emperor.

Floris V (r. 1256–96), the current Count and the grandson of William II, was to be the penultimate incumbent of Holland’s first dynasty. He was the ruler who finally put an end to the Frisian troubles, and who won the acclaim of his lowliest subjects. Faced by an insurrection of peasants, who joined forces with the mob of Utrecht, he undertook to curb the arbitrary rule of his bailiffs and to introduce a code of written laws. He was remembered in legend as
der keerlen God
, ‘the Peasant’s God’. For many years he was to enjoy a close alliance with Edward I of England, to whose court he sent his son and heir to be educated and married. This was Count Floris, the hero of Holland’s ‘Rhyming Chronicle’, the
Rijmkronik van
Melis Stoke
:

Tgraefscap ende dat jonghe kynt
Daer wonder of ghesciede sint.

(So ended the countship of the young man [who] was the wonder of history.)
⁴⁵

Aleida van Henegouven was the aunt and guardian of the young Floris V. As Regent of Holland during the Count’s minority, she was one of several powerful women who held the reins of state in the Netherlands. Of these, the most prominent was her neighbour, the extraordinary Countess Margaret of Flanders. Known as Zwarte Griet or ‘Black Meg’, Countess Margaret (d. 1280) was caught up in all the feudal fortunes and misfortunes that one could imagine. She was the younger daughter of Count Baldwin IX, the leader of the Fourth Crusade, who took over the Latin Empire of the East. Like her sister Joanna she had been born in Constantinople, whence she had been brought home after her father’s death and, together with Joanna, made a pawn of the politics of Innocent III. As a child, she watched her sister married off to Fernando of Portugal, nephew of the King of France, whilst she herself was given as a child bride to Bouchard d’Avesnes, Lord of Hainault. After the battle of Bouvines, which sent Fernando to the dungeons of the Louvre, she saw her sister married for a second time to Thomas of
Savoy, whilst she herself, on the Pope’s insistence, was divorced and remarried to a French knight, Guy de Dampierre. By the time in 1244 that she succeeded Joanna as Countess both of Hainault and of Flanders, she was mother of five sons by two marriages, and already one of the prime survivors of her day. She could not prevent her two eldest sons fighting over her inheritance and was obliged to accept a famous mediation of St Louis, who awarded Hainault to Jean d’Avesnes and Flanders to Guillaume de Dampierre. She would outlive them all.

Flanders, which was torn by the rivalry of Bruges and Ghent, was none the less the richest prize in Netherlands politics. Its fate could not be a matter of indifference to Holland. In the past the counts of Flanders had balanced between the Empire and France and had accepted fiefs from both sides, creating groups of territories known as
Kroon-Vlaanderen
and
Rijks-Vlaanderen
. Since Bouvines, however, French influence had been rising steeply, and would lead to a full-scale French occupation. In 1265 the struggle between Pope and Emperor was fast approaching its nadir. The Papacy had blocked the cause of the Hohenstaufen after Frederick II’s death; and the interregnum in the Empire, which Count William’s accident left unresolved, was sinking into ever deeper complications. 1257 had brought a double election: one meeting of the imperial Electors produced a decision in favour of Richard, Earl of Cornwall, the younger brother of Henry III of England, a second meeting decided for Alfonso, King of Castile. In contrast to Alfonso, who stayed at home in Toledo, Earl Richard did proceed to his coronation as King of the Romans. But neither of the rival candidates could exercise any authority over Germany as a whole.

Richard of Cornwall (1209–72) was one of the wealthiest and best-connected men of his age.
⁴⁶
His possession of the Cornish stannaries was worth a second earldom, whilst his management of the Mint and of England’s reformed coinage brought him a fabulous cash income. Through his financial adviser, Abraham of Berkhamsted, he was able to make loans to kings and cardinals; and he had no difficulty in finding the 28,000 marks which greased the machinery of his German election. Lord of Corfe, and of Wallingford and Berkhamsted, he had dabbled with the baronial opposition in England, and was known as one of the very few barons who actually spoke English. As titular Count of Poitou, he held strong interests in Gascony, where he had served as royal governor. He had led a Crusade to Acre, but had used the expedition as an occasion for making the personal acquaintance of his two brothers-in-law, first of St Louis in Paris and then of Frederick II in Sicily. He had good relations with the Low Countries, whence Floris V had hastened to London to pay him homage in person. He was due to take as his third wife, after Isabella Marshal and Sanchia of Provence, Beatrice Countess of Falkenburg in Brabant.

For most of 1265, however, Earl Richard’s fortunes were at a low ebb. Three visits to Germany had given him no benefit. What is more, having been caught up in his brother’s baronial war and captured by de Montfort’s men, he was now a prisoner in Kenilworth Castle. His inglorious adventures after the Battle of Lewes, where he hid in a windmill, gave birth to one of England’s earliest political satires:

The King of Alemaigne wende do fill wel
He saisede the mulne for a castel,
With hare sharpe swerds he grounde the stel
He wende that the sayles were mangonel to helpe Wyndesor.
Richard, thah thou be ever trichard
trichen shalt thou never more.
⁴⁷

At that juncture, the royal party was well and truly hated in England. Simon de Montfort, the
protector genus Angliae
, was seen as a popular champion against oppression:

Il est apelé de Montfort,
Il est el mond et si est fort
Si ad grant chevalerie.
Ce voir, et je m’acort,
Il eime droit, et hete Ie tort.
Si avera la mestene.
⁴⁸

(He is called de Montfort / He is our protector
(mund)
and is so strong (
fort) I
And has such great chivalry. / Look here, I quite agree, / He loves right and hates wrong. / Thus he will have the mastery.)

When Simon was killed at Evesham on 4 August 1265, his companions in the emplacement on Green Hill died with him to a man; he was mourned as a saint and a martyr.

That year also saw a papal election. Clement IV was a Frenchman who, as Guy Foulques, had once had a wife and children and had served as legal consultant to St Louis. Rome and parts of northern Italy were still so sympathetic to the Hohenstaufen that Clement, who had been away on legation to England, was obliged to travel home disguised as a monk and to take up residence in Perugia. From there he arranged for Charles of Anjou to be invested with the kingdom of Sicily and Naples, and for finance to be found for the brutal campaigns that were to put an end first to the Emperor’s bastard son, Manfred, and then to Manfred’s nephew, the young Conradin. From Perugia, he sent a bull to the Abbey of Egmont in Holland confirming its ancient rights and immunities.
⁴⁹

Like the Civil War in England, the imperial interregnum in Germany reduced the country to chaos:

Every floodgate of anarchy was opened; prelates and barons extended their domains by war; robber-knights infested the roads and the rivers; the misery of the weak, the tyranny and violence of the strong were such as had not been seen for centuries … The Roman Empire ought now to have been suffered to expire.
⁵⁰

Less traditional historians do not see the Empire’s distress quite so drastically. The absence of an Emperor gave the signal for the rise of several regional and city states, which were destined to play a prominent role in European history. The Netherlands, among others, prospered in the shadow of the Empire’s weakness.