The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (36 page)

The scarcity of reports of prostitutes engaging in deviant sexual practices and above all the high prices charged suggest that prostitutes had an aversion to aberrant,‘unnatural’ acts.The clients who asked for them were mostly from the higher social spheres, and they included foreigners from southern Europe and ‘Portuguese’ Jews, who came from a Mediterranean culture. Sometimes these wealthier clients would carry pornographic books with them. Prostitutes were gener- ally from north-west Europe’s poorer social strata; the divide between them and these men, in both class and culture, must have been considerable.
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Earnings

The money spent on paid sex represents only part of the total amount circulating within the world of prostitution.The presence of attractive women available for a fee was a means of enticing moneyed customers to places they would otherwise not want to visit.There they would be milked of as much money as possible by having expensive food and drink thrust upon them, by demands for tips and bonuses, charges for the use of a room and a bed, fraudulent calculation of the final bill, and sometimes outright robbery or theft.

In the music houses at least, most of the profits came from the high prices charged for drinks, and the prostitutes had a duty to act as ‘host- esses’. According to
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
a good whore, one who brought in money, could above all ‘drink frightfully’.
144
Travel accounts mention that on entering a music house a guest would be presented with a bottle of inferior wine that would cost him a guilder whether he drank it or not. In whorehouses too the drinks bill would often be higher than the amount paid for a girl. In
1699
for instance, one man paid eight shillings (
2
.
4
guilders) for drinks and a thaler (
1
.
5
guilders) for sex.
145
‘Why should I keep my girls, if I had no profit on the wine?’ says a bawd in
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
.
146
This corresponds with something said of a brothel-keeper in
1667
, namely ‘that she keeps whores and so sells her beer and brandy’.
147
In
1728
a male brothel- keeper said angrily to a whore who refused a third glass of wine:‘You do not have my interests at heart.’
148

Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
describes how a girl might spill wine ‘by accident’ or empty her glass under the table, and how a customer

would be overcharged at every opportunity, as reflected in the expres- sion ‘to write with whore’s chalk’.
149
A man who contested the bill might find out to his cost that even single bawds often had enforcers they could call on at a moment’s notice.

Every year people came before the courts for involvement in fights that started as arguments over payment in brothels or music houses. An adolescent boy who ordered a glass of wine in De Bocht van Guinee one Saturday night in
1698
had five glasses plonked down in front of him.The bill was three guilders, which tallies with the information in
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
that a shilling a pint was charged for simple white wine, and two shillings for red wine or wine with sugar.
150
He refused to pay.The boss, Jochem Carstens, born in Hamburg, grabbed him and ordered the maid to take the money out of his pocket. He was now ten guilders the poorer.The boy was beside himself with rage and the man goaded him even further by saying:‘The dog is mad, give me a cask to put round his neck and a strap to tether him.’ He and the maid (Celi Wagenaars, also from Hamburg) were both punished with a year in jail.
151
In a whorehouse in
1678
, a man who had paid Grietje Hendricks (yet another woman from Hamburg) a ducatoon (
3
.
15
guil- ders) for sex before being presented with a bill for fifteen shillings (
4
.
5
guilders) for the wine, paid half and threatened the German broth- elkeeper, Helena Ulrichs, with a knife: ‘I’d rather slash your face.’ Helena called for help and took his coat from him to cover the re- maining payment.
152

A visit to a music house or a whorehouse might cost dozens of guilders, especially if the man stayed for several days.The ‘Amsterdam carousal’ in
Boereverhaal
costs the protagonist ninety-six guilders; three gentlemen in
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
get through twenty-seven guilders and eleven stivers in a few hours on wine, confectionary, and sausages.
153
Even higher amounts are recorded in the judicial archives. A
19
-year-old boy from a rich family spent around
119
guilders in

two weeks in
1697
in a brothel run by Annetie
R
udesymers.To cover his debt he gave her a gold watch and two gold rings set with dia-

monds to sell for him, a transaction on which the brothel-keeper made an additional profit of around a hundred guilders.
154
Marius Meulemeester, a sailor from the Southern Netherlands, admitted in
1658
that he had stolen money from his skipper and within two days had spent it all, some sixty guilders, on whores, brandy, and tobacco.
155

Most extreme of all was the spending spree indulged in by Amster- dam-born Willem Mast, a
21
-year-old clerk employed by the West India Company. He had tampered with the keys and so gained access to the strongbox in the office, and in eight months he purloined
2
,
000
guilders. He admitted in
1655
that he had spent the money ‘with whores and libertines’ and gave a detailed summary: at the house of brothel-keeper Christina Jans on various evenings, sixty to seventy guilders; at the house of the notorious Helena Spillebouts, eighty guil- ders in three days; at that of Catrien behind the old Town Hall,
200
to
300
guilders spent on whores; at the house of Barber Leenders in the Dijkstraat,
100
thalers in eight days, and so on. This was an extreme case, in which the bawds were reprimanded for not asking where all this money had come from.
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Those who responded to the advances of whores ran a real risk of being robbed. Here again, the fear most men had of coming into con- tact with the police and the courts made them easy victims. Thefts sometimes came to light after fights or complaints, but more often in evidence given by prisoners against former accomplices in return for a lighter sentence.
17
June
1693
saw the trial of Amsterdam-born Engeltje Jans, alias Engel Scotie, who was at that time the keeper of an

infamous tavern for thieves and whores called Het
R
attenest (The
R
ats’ Nest). No fewer than twelve women brought from the Spin House

testified against her, providing evidence that she had committed at least twenty thefts from men she had picked up over a period of six years.

Their depositions cover several pages and a pattern emerges.The man was usually lured by more than one woman, somewhere such as ‘behind the Town Hall’ or ‘behind the Begijnhof ’, and taken to a house in the ‘Gauwdiefssteeg’ (Snatchers’ Lane), one of the maze of alleyways known as the Devil’s Corner close to the Botermarckt (the butter mar-

ket, today’s
R
embrandtsplein). If he was not already drunk he was plied with alcohol. Sometimes sex would follow and the Confession Books

mention various ‘dishonourable acts’—on one occasion a man was flogged—but often money was picked from his pocket early on, while he was drinking. Anyone who noticed and protested was shown the door or thrown downstairs. The women usually dealt with such inci- dents themselves; there is just one account involving a man with a knife. A victim who came back the next day to demand the return of his money was answered with a torrent of abuse and he smashed all the

windows in revenge, but none of those involved went to the police.The average profit from each of this series of thefts was forty-five guilders, not including items like coats, watches, or silver toothpicks.
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Customers who were unable to pay were usually forced to leave garments behind in the bawdy-house in lieu of payment, or as collat- eral. Male brothel-keeper Dirk Sweers stripped the clothes off an ado- lescent boy served drinks on a Sunday evening in
1684
for which he did not have enough money to pay. The lad was chased out onto the street wearing only a shirt—in February.The boy’s mother, who came with another woman to complain, was told by Sweers ‘that he would have taken his shirt too if the weather had been a little better’.
158
Like the prostitutes, clients were sometimes held hostage for debt. Trijntje Cornelis, who ran De Porseleinen Kelder (The Porcelain Cellar), and her sister Sijtje, also a bawd, forcibly detained a married man from Zaandam in their house for four days in
1697
‘on the pretext that he had not paid his drinks bill of forty-six guilders’.The man had tried to arrange payment while in the whorehouse and had found a certain Jan van der Mars willing to stand surety for eleven guilders. His wife had meanwhile heard about the affair and she went to the bailiff.The of- ficers freed him, but that same evening the two sisters went to Jan van der Mars’ house with five thugs (
pollen
) and demanded the money with menaces,‘yelling and cursing’.
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Finally there was money to be earned by striking a deal with the police. One evening in January
1710
, Lijsbeth Sijmens, along with two other prostitutes, picked up a man behind the Begijnhof. They took him to the basement they shared with Keulse Marie (Marie from Cologne), who asked the moment they came in,‘Is Grietje the wash- erwoman home?’ After some urging, Lijsbeth explained that ‘this ex- pression means among them that there is money to be earned’. The man fell asleep drunk in a chair and his pockets were expertly ran- sacked. Lijsbeth found in them the pornographic
L’Académie des dames
(The Academy of Damsels), with pictures of flagellation, and this gave her the idea of turning the man over to the authorities:‘Now I’ll go to the bailiff with the book and a guard and say that I have flogged you.’ Lijsbeth Sijmens was making a double miscalculation, however. First she had refused to give her ‘sweetheart’ a share of the spoils, so he broke open her chest while she in turn was sleeping it off. Secondly she was not rewarded but punished; another example of the unpredict- ability of dealing with the police (see Chapter
5
).
160

To what extent these efforts—characterized in
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
as ‘miraculous tricks, to earn a living by idling’—made anyone rich is questionable.
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The cynical comment in that same book about whores, bawds, and whoremasters is surely not undeserved:‘These peo- ple do prove at least, by their entire policy, that although they may be too lazy to earn a living by honest means, they are not too lazy to think up all kinds of ways to support themselves in a dishonest fashion.’
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In conclusion

In all the large cities of pre-industrial Europe, prostitution was an impor- tant social phenomenon and economic activity.This certainly applies to early modern Amsterdam, where prostitution was big business. It had a large turnover, although we have no way of determining even approxi- mately the sums involved.As to the number of people who made a living from it, the city had an estimated
1
,
000
prostitutes and hundreds of bawds and brothel-keepers. In the larger brothels and music houses especially, there were those who lived indirectly from prostitution, or who supple- mented their incomes by it: maids and cleaners, musicians, procuresses, and bouncers. This amounts to a considerable number of people who had no place in honourable society but who used the lure of sex to si- phon off some of the money circulating in the legal economy.

In his
Fable of the Bees
, Bernard Mandeville advanced the thesis that a sum of money stolen by robbers that fell into the hand of whores did more economic good than the same sum hoarded up unspent by its virtuous initial owners.
163
Prostitution made money go around, and all sorts of people profited from it, including landlords, purveyors of drink, seamstresses, traders in fabrics, trinkets and used clothing, women who sold cooked meals to whores or did their laundry, people who stood watching out for the constables, deliverymen, and those who treated venereal diseases. Whoredom caused so much clap and pox,
De gaven van de milde St. Marten
(
1654
) opined, that ‘barber-surgeons, pockmas- ters, and quacks earned entire houses and gardens from it’.
164
Writers, printers, and booksellers made good money out of Amsterdam’s repu- tation as a city of prostitution.The fame of the music houses brought tourists, and the expectation of seeing beautiful whores in the Spin House became a lucrative source of income for that particular house of correction.The proceeds from compounding with married or Jewish

clients and the fines imposed for keeping a bawdy-house were a sig- nificant contribution towards the costs of maintaining law and order.

Finally, prostitution ensured a steady stream of labour for the VOC, the WIC, and the navy, which were always in need of sailors and sol- diers. As a major European power, the
R
epublic relied on its battle fleet, and its commerce depended on seafarers. As Diderot wrote, as long as the poor can find no work they will risk their lives at sea.
165
If the reproach of contemporaries was even half true, prostitution was a major reason why young men fell into poverty, and once they had