The Vliet at the Walls of Leiden

The Dutch let the sea in to save a city

From 26 May 1574 a Spanish army under Francisco de Valdez besieged Leiden, cutting it off with a ring of forts. The town refused to surrender.

Relief could not come by land, so William of Orange sent it by water. On 3 August his men began breaching the dikes to flood the polders between the sea and the town. A fleet of flat-bottomed boats under Admiral Louis de Boisot, crewed by Sea Beggars, waited for the water to rise high enough to carry them. Carrier pigeons took messages between the prince and the besieged town.

For weeks the water stayed too shallow. Then a storm from the south-west drove the sea over the drowned land, and the boats pushed forward from dike to dike.

A wall fell, and the Spanish left

The last obstacle was the Spanish fort at Lammen, on the Vliet just outside the town. In the night of 2 October part of Leiden's wall, undermined by the floodwater, collapsed. The Spanish did not attack. They abandoned Lammen instead.

At daybreak on Sunday 3 October the boats sailed up the Vliet into Leiden with bread, cheese and herring. Each person received half a loaf, some cheese and a herring.

The town they reached was still medieval: straight brick walls with half-round towers above a broad moat, and over the roofs the huge nave of the Pieterskerk, towerless since its tower collapsed in 1512.

A siege counted in thousands of dead

The relief came late. Thousands had died of hunger and plague during the siege, by some estimates up to a third of the people of Leiden.

The best-known story of those months belongs to the burgomaster, Pieter Adriaansz. van der Werff. Faced with a starving crowd demanding surrender, he is said to have offered them his own body to eat. Whether or not he said it, Leiden has kept the story for four and a half centuries.

Herring, white bread and hutspot, every 3 October

William of Orange rewarded the town with the first university in the northern Netherlands, founded in February 1575. Leiden University is still one of the country's leading universities.

The town rewards itself every year. On 3 October the municipality hands out herring and white bread, and families eat hutspot, a mash of carrots, onions and potatoes. Legend says an orphan boy found a pot of it in the abandoned camp at Lammen, although historians credit the find to another man, Gijsbert Cornelisz. Schaeck. The hutspot of 1574 had no potatoes, which were not yet eaten in Holland.

The Leidens Ontzet festival is now one of the largest in the Netherlands, and the Revolt it kept alive became, eighty years after it began, the independent Dutch Republic.

Sources

• Wikipedia (nl): Beleg van Leiden (1573-1574)
• 3october.nl