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#dutch history
clove-pinks · 2 months
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Dom Miguel de Castro, Congolese envoy, c. 1643. He served as a mediator between King Garcia II of Kongo and the Dutch Republic.
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dutch-wanderlust · 6 months
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noelcollection · 10 months
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Seventeenth-Century Pocket Book
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Today, approximately 30 currencies are in use among the fifty nations of Europe. Back in the 1600s, things were much more complex, as illustrated in this Dutch catalog of woodcuts of 1,685 coins (many scaled to actual size). European cities, duchies, dioceses, and other localized governing bodies issued their own unique sets of coinage.
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This book was printed in 1633 by Hieronymus Verdussen of the Verdussen publishing dynasty in Antwerp. At this point in history, the Netherlands dominated international trade. During the "Dutch Golden Age," the Netherlands was enriched by the establishment of the Dutch East Trading Company in 1602 and the Dutch West Trading Company in 1621. A pocket book such as the one showcased here would have seen heavy use by Dutch merchants needing a handy reference work to distinguish the hundreds of different coins in circulation. 
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And yes, this is indeed a “pocket” book! The unusual dimensions of this volume (31 x 10.5 cm) fit very well in the pockets of the early 17th century (abt. 40 x 30 cm). (Fun fact: the modern pocket as sewn into clothes was developed in 17th century Europe!)
Images from: Ordonnancie ende instructie naer de welcke voort-aen hen moeten reguleren die ghesworen wisselaers ofte collecteurs vande goude ende silver penningen. Antwerp: Hieronymous Verdussen, 1633. Catalog record: https://bit.ly/3IAMeA8
Van de Venne, Adriaen Pietersz. Prins Maurits en Frederik Hendrik op de paardenmarkt van Valkenburg. Oil on panel, 1618. Currently held by the Rijksmuseum. 
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dailyhistoryposts · 2 years
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Detail from The Witches’ Cove (c. 16th century) by Jan Mandijn or anonymous follower.
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"My compliments to all the family except for Lott[e]."
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Charlotte Philiberthe von Nassau-Beverweerd (1649-1702) (detail); created between 1675 and 1694, though the hairstyle would suggest a date in the 1670s; in the collection of the Rijksmuseum.
For Valentine's day, here's a tale of a romance that did not quite turn out as expected, but left a string of interesting documents.
Let's picture the scene: you're in love. Who do you tell? Well, obviously, you might confide the butterflies in your belly to your best friend, and it just so happens that the lady who's quite turned your head is a distant cousin of his.
This is the situation one Hans Willem Bentinck (1649-1709) found himself in during January and February 1675. His crush was Charlotte Philiberthe von Nassau-Beverweerd, a distant relation (their grandfathers were half-brothers) of his closest friend, then-Stadtholder of the United Provinces and future King of England William III (1650-1702).
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William III of Orange and Hans Willem Bentinck; dated to 1676. Collection of Stichting Kasteel Amerongen, via RKD Research.
William interceded on his best friend's behalf, and seems to have taken "Lotte", as he called her, aside when the latter, living with one of her sisters who had married an English noble, paid a visit to the Netherlands.
The Stadtholder, who was friends with Lotte as she was one of the few people who would engage him in some good, old-fashioned banter and, her love for a good joke aside, was an extremely intelligent conversationalist, made her promise to give a reply as to what he should tell his best friend; but that reply never came and so, William, writing to Lotte's brother-in-law, Thomas Butler, the 6th Earl of Ossory (1634-1680), with whom she lived, added a few P.S.-s to his usual (largely political) letters to Ossory:
In late January or early February, William wrote to Ossory:
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(P. S.) I beg of you to tell Lott[e] that, all her cruelty aside, I love her with all my heart, and to reproach her that she has neither written, nor even replied to my letter, as she had promised when we parted. I also hope that she will soon declare herself on that which she had promised me to think on when we parted, for Bentinck is very impatient to know how he stands, which seems very reasonable to me. G.*
(* In case you're wondering why William, or Willem in Dutch, signed as "G.", in his private correspondence: it's the abbreviation of the French equivalent of his name, Guillaume.)
However, it looks like Lotte was still ghosting both Bentinck and William, because he signed another letter to Ossory, datable to February 1675, off as follows:
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My compliments to all the family except for Lott[e]. G.
A third letter to Ossory lastly mentions Lotte in March 1675:
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(P. S.) I beg of you to assure Madame the Countess [of Ossory] of my very humble services, and [Lotte] as well, regardless of my not having any reason to be pleased with her. G.
One imagines that William may have taken his best friend aside and told him to forget about Lotte. Sadly, we have no information on how Lotte reacted to these messages.
If there is anything to be taken from this tale of historical heartbreak, it is that this sort of thing happens. If this Valentine's Day you find yourself unhappy because you're celebrating it alone and rather would not to, remember that you're not alone. Maybe also talk to your best friend, even if they're not a powerful noble in charge of a country.
Oh, and don't be a Lotte and ghost someone with an (romantic) interest in you. Just tell them in polite, but no uncertain terms that you're not into them.
From a historian's perspective, I find it fascinating how the Lotte-letters to Ossory highlight a part of William III's personality that is largely overlooked; posthumously often regarded as a guarded, almost robotically emotionless man, the young William in his early 20s who tries to play cupid for his best friend and adopts a very domestic tone in his missives going so far as to utilise nicknames paints a rather different picture.
Lotte was evidently forgiven, because she became a member of William and Mary's court, and briefly served under Anne as well. She never married, and her motives for doing so have been lost to history.
As for Hans Willem Bentinck, he met a woman called Anne Villiers (1651-1688) two and a half years later: she was, her mother having been the governess of William's bride Princess Mary, the future Mary II, a sort of sisterly figure to the Princess, and the two met through the marriage of their friends/employers. Contrary to William and Mary, for whom love only developed gradually in the aftermath of a fairly traumatic arranged marriage (especially on the then-15-year-old Mary's part), for Anne and Hans Willem Bentinck, their romance was much more organic: they fell in love at their workplace, so to say. To crown their personal happy end, William III stepped in to provide Anne, who was of a respectable family, yet had no fortune to speak of, with a dowry.
For the letters from William to Ossory, see: Japikse, Nicolaas [ed.]: Correspondentie van Willem III en van Hans Willem Bentinck (1927-1935), Vol. II, ii, letters 4, 15 and 16.
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247reader · 5 months
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Day 21: Anne of Cleves!
Anna von Kleve was born in 1515, daughter of Johann “the Peaceful,”Duke of Cleves, a territory on what is now the border between Germany and the Netherlands, and Maria, Duchess of nearby Julich-Berg in her own right. Her father earned his nickname striving for religious harmony during the tumult of the Reformation, but his feuds with his nominal overlord, the Holy Roman Emperor, pushed the family towards Protestantism - and a political alignment with England.
In 1539, Anne’s portrait was painted by Hans Holbein, court artist of Henry VIII, as preparation for a possible marriage. Henry, a widower three times over, was reputedly thrilled by the painting, and the alliance went forward. Anne, a very sheltered young woman who spoke no English and had received little of the education offered to her brother, sailed to England - and for the first months of her distant, unconsummated marriage, had no idea anything was out of the ordinary, much less that Henry was complaining to anyone who would listen that she was “nothing so fair as she has been reported.”
By the time Henry sent her away from court, however, Anne, a deceptively intelligent woman who was learning English quickly, was well aware of the fate of his previous unwanted wives. The annulment seems to have been something of a relief, considering the alternative, and Henry offered her generous terms, including multiple castles and the status of the king’s sister. Remarkably, she and Henry became friends, and she grew close to both her former stepdaughters Mary and Elizabeth.
Anne settled in to an independent life in England, becoming known for hosting a fine table. She died in 1557, the longest surviving of Henry’s wives, and is buried in Westminster Abbey.
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what about pottery in early moder ?
There, it became more of a bigger deal in the Netherlands, where tin-glazed pottery was imported by an Italian potter who moved to Antwerp around 1500, and then spread to the rest of the Netherlands by the end of the century thanks to the sack of Antwerp scattering potters across Holland.
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However, tin-glazed pottery particularly took off in Delft in the mid-17th century, where rigorous quality-control and mass production methods allowed for affordable luxury goods that emulated the highly desirable Chinese porcelain that had been imported by the Verenigde Oostindische Compagnie but was temporarily unavailable due to the collapse of the Ming Dynasty.
Especially when Delft potters began shifting from merely emulating Chinese styles to adopting a more Dutch idiom (hence all the tiles, windmills, and tulips), delftware really took off as a desirable status symbol for the bourgeoisie of northern Europe.
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Due to a pronunciation error Lodewijk Napoleon introduced himself as a "konijn" (rabbit) instead of a "koning" (king) when he became king of the Netherlands
In other words, the Netherlands was governed by a rabbitboy for four years
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piratesaresexy · 1 year
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I don't post much on here anymore, but I just wanted to drop by with this website: On board a slave ship | (slavenhandelmcc.nl) it details the journey of a Dutch slave trading ship through an interactive map with translated + original texts of the first mate's logbook, surgeon's diary and the ship's trade journal. Truly is a wonderful website for anyone looking for historical sources about sailing and the slave trade.
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completelybitch · 7 months
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It is actually so important to study history beyond just your high school curriculum if you live in a (former) colonial power.
Because I guarantee you that the stuff you learned in school is whitewashed to some degree and will never give a full picture of the atrocities.
I'm from the Netherlands, and we did spend some time talking about our colonial history, but there is so much that wasn't mentioned.
For instance we were never told in school that our royal family massively personally profited of colonialism through their position as major shareholders in the Dutch corporations involved in the transatlantic slave trade and the exploitation of Indonesia.
This matters a lot because the royal family being indepently wealthy and therefore costing less taxmoney to maintain is frequently used as an argument against abolishing the Monarchy. When in reality their wealth needs to be seized and redistributed to the people of Indonesia, Suriname, the Antilles, Brazil and the African nations who had their people abducted.
It is important to keep learning these things.
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geschiedenisish · 4 months
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Dutch 1500s witchcraft
I saw a lot of satanic posts on my feed today, so I thought I'd just drop this Dutch prayer here I found in a 1500s book;
“I adjure you, Ashtaroth, by the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, and by the Virgin Mary and by holy obedience, etc., that as long as this candle burns, through the fire, N., the daughter of N. becomes inflamed and burns with love and desire for me, so that she neither wakes nor sleeps nor eats nor drinks nor does anything until she has submitted herself to my will.” (In the places of N you need to fill in the relevant names.)
“Ik bezweer u, Astaroth, by de Vader en de Zoon en de H. Geest, en by de Maagd Maria en by de heilige gehoorzaamheid enz. dat, zolang deze kaars brandt door het vuur, N., de dochter van N. ontstoken wordt en brandt van liefde en begeerte voor my, zodat ze niet waakt of slaapt, eet of drinkt, of wat anders doet totdat ze zich aan myn wil heeft onderworpen.”
Source; "Middeleeuwse witte en zwarte magie in het Nederlands taalgebied" (Medieval white and black magic in the Dutch language area) written in 1997 by historian Willy L. Braekman.
The book is full of examples of how Dutch witchcraft was truely practised in the Mediaeval and Early Modern Netherlands. (The book is in Dutch, but is fully in txt form so you can easily put Google Translate on it.) So not the stuff that innocent women were accused of, but how people truely used magic to improve their lives.
Most of it is little things against small pains, finding lost things or stuff like that. But one of the biggest claims was the above prayer that can get you a girl. (Or a boy of course. Just replace 'daughter' with 'son'.)
Hope y'all can enjoy it and put some use out of it! :)
Also out of the book as a whole! I highly recommend the book to anyone interested in witchcraft and how our ancestors truely practised it in the past. <3 (It was more nuanced and interesting than the outrageous accusations thrown at innocent women.)
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akka-van-kebnekaise · 9 months
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It's not just that he apologised for the country's role in slavery, he also adressed his own family's role. He's done this before, when it came to the royal family's lack of care when it came to the fate of the Dutch Jewish population during WW2.
It's a good start, but I hope it doesn't end here.
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dutch-wanderlust · 8 months
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thetudorslovers · 1 year
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Girl with a pearl earring - An oil painting by Dutch Golden Age painter Johannes Vermeer, dated c. 1665. The painting is a tronie, the Dutch 17th-century description of a ‘head’ that was not meant to be a portrait. It depicts a European girl wearing an exotic dress, an oriental turban, and what was thought to be a very large pearl as an earring. In 2014, Dutch astrophysicist Vincent Icke raised doubts about the material of the earring and argued that it looks more like polished tin than pearl on the grounds of the specular reflection, the pear shape and the large size of the earring.
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dailyhistoryposts · 1 year
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On This Day In History
April 17th, 1986: The Three Hundred and Thirty Five Years' War, a war between the Netherlands and the Isles of Scilly, ends. It was a bloodless war, and the original declaration of war is considered historically dubious, but the peace treaty was certainly real.
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newhistorybooks · 1 year
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"Through careful and sensitive studies of medico‐social discourses, media representations, and literary depictions of queer femininity, Different from the Others recovers the submerged history of queer feminine women in both Germany and the Netherlands. Cyd Sturgess provides a theoretical analysis that makes key empirical contributions to the history of Dutch gays and lesbians while reframing our collective understanding of queer femininity more broadly."
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