Chapter 4 - Violence

Summary

As ships entered into Amsterdam's harbor in the early seventeenth century, each sailor, merchant, and visitor to the city could easily view the criminals dangling from the gallows on the opposite shore. Like a giant billboard, the location known as Volewijk, where the main office of the Shell Company now stands, warned newcomers to the city as well as its residents that Amsterdam's magistrate penalized violators who did not abide by municipal laws. The cadavers hanging from the gallows transmitted a pedagogical message. Criminals guilty of offenses were publicly executed on Amsterdam's main square, the Dam Square. Unlike other European countries with a monarch, Amsterdam's magistrates were present, emphasizing that civic law reigned. Criminals were publicly executed after the sentence was spoken, ‘these are things that cannot be tolerated in a city of law and have to be punished as an example to others’. After the execution, the corpses were paraded to the harbor and taken in a boat to the gibbets of Volewijk and hung for all to see.

Violence was a common facet of early modern society. In 1606 the amount of bloodshed and violence in the towns and villages of the Dutch Republic was said to have reached excessive levels. In that year the Dutch Reformed Church classis of Enkhuizen asked Amsterdam's classis to persuade the States of Holland to take drastic measures. Willem van Zuylen van Nyevelt, the bailiff of Gooiland, Muiden and Weesp (and the lord of Bergambacht), took matters into his own hands and requested the stadtholder, Prince Maurits, to address the matter nationally. According to Van Zuylen van Nyevelt, the country was plagued with too much knifefighting, bearing of swords, breaking of windows, and malice in general. Consequently, a decree was passed that gave authorities the right to fine and prosecute those guilty of harming other people with knives, swords, and rapiers and causing innocent bloodshed. Furthermore, the decree stipulated stiff financial fines for those who smashed windows and caused other acts of property damage or disturbed the peace. The early modern era has often been portrayed as a violent period marking the tumultuous transition from feudalism to capitalism. By exercising more self-constraint, the people experienced a substantial decline in the crimes committed throughout the era, which signifies a qualitative shift in the norms of the early modern society.