history

Reyersz & Dirckz, International Merchants in an Expanding City

In 1485, when Amsterdam was still a young city, a man named Reyer Dircxz lived on Kalverstraat. Together with his uncle Symon, he traded on the Baltic Sea. At the time, Amsterdam was thoroughly Catholic. The Old and New Churches were not yet completed, the waterways were partially unembanked and nearly all the houses were made of wood. However, due to international developments, Amsterdam was rapidly on its way to becoming a city of significance. Merchants like Reyer Dircxz played an important role in this process.

In 1485, Symon Reyersz was an older merchant who travelled annually to Danzig for business. Every year, he made the same journey, stayed in the same lodging, bought and sold more or less the same goods and conducted business with the same merchants.

Symon’s nephew, Reyer Dircxz, turned twenty-one that same year. He had learned to read and write, knew the basics of bookkeeping and was being introduced to the tricks of the trade in Amsterdam. There, he negotiated with merchants from the Baltic Sea region, conducted business in one of the busy inns on Warmoesstraat and corresponded with his uncle while he was staying on the distant Baltic coast. Two years later, Reyer would accompany his uncle on his journey for the first time. Shortly afterwards, once he had learned the route, he travelled to Danzig independently, gradually taking over his uncle’s work.

Reyer Dircxz and his uncle lived in a time when Amsterdam was experiencing significant growth. The city had been devastated by a massive fire in 1452 and still had a rather squalid appearance. There was some artisanal industry. Brewers and soap-boilers were active, ships were being built, and goods were transshipped. But the city was not yet impressive. The small houses were made of wood, rarely had an upper floor, and only the churches and some monasteries displayed a bit more allure.

But the city’s significance became increasingly apparent. An anonymous writer, who penned a brief history of Amsterdam around 1500, observed that, while the city was “almost the youngest”, it was also “the most renowned of all the cities of Holland.” The trading activities of its inhabitants extended from the Mediterranean in the south to the coasts of Norway and the Baltic region in the north. According to the anonymous author, other cities in Holland lagged far behind in both the scale and diversity of Amsterdam’s trade.

Its favorable location on the River IJ, which flowed into the Zuiderzee, was certainly a contributing factor, along with the way the city government was intertwined with trade. The harbour had been the economic centre from the very beginning. In 1477, the city council (the Vroedschap) was expanded from twenty-four to thirty-six members, and a few years later, the ruler, King Maximilian of Austria, had ordered Amsterdam to build a city wall. The markets became increasingly busy, and it was becoming more common for the city to be overcrowded, with streets, bridges and alleys becoming congested. The city government was constantly trying to bring order to the chaos.

Trade in foreign lands

Numerous merchants worked year after year to expand Amsterdam’s position as a trading city. However, sources about the people who did this are rather scarce. The fact that, more than five hundred years later, we know something about the lives of Reyer Dircxz and his uncle Symon is thanks to their preserved merchant’s notebook, which they kept from 1485 to 1490. In this small book, they recorded the business they conducted in Danzig. Their notes helped them keep track of transactions that needed to be settled, who still had to pay and what had been paid. Once the matter was concluded, the entry could be crossed out. Their trade involved cloth and timber, oil and wine, the occasional shipment of salt, but above all, vast amounts of grain.

The notebook belonging to Reyer Dircxz and his uncle is the earliest personal testimony of Amsterdam merchants operating within an extensive network of contacts. It provides insight into how merchants like them made the annual journey to Danzig. What was unavailable in the Baltic Sea region was brought in by skippers from the Low Countries. Amsterdam had a modest export industry, with cloth, oil and soap, as well as French wine and herring. Conversely, they purchased goods here to sell in their home ports: wheat and timber, pitch and tar, hides and other commodities. In Danzig, trade from a vast area converged. Ash, pitch and tar came from the inland areas. From Greater Poland, particularly Poznań, came cloth, and through trading cities like Lemberg and Kraków, Danzig maintained connections with Hungary, the Carpathians and the Orient.

The trade in Amsterdam and Danzig complemented each other almost naturally. Unlike Amsterdam, Danzig was a Hanseatic city, a member of the alliance of cities that jointly sought to monopolise their interests. However, Danzig was not particularly committed to maintaining the Hanseatic monopoly. Free trade was the priority. In this regard, Danzig had much in common with Amsterdam. Here, too, there were reasons to oppose the Hanseatic League whenever it conflicted with local interests. And that was increasingly the case towards the end of the fifteenth century, when a rift developed between Lübeck – the headquarters of the Hanseatic League – and Danzig.

The importance of grain

In the time of Reyer Dircxz, around a hundred ships per year sailed from Amsterdam to Danzig. Of all the previously mentioned commodities, wheat and grain were by far the most important. When Reyer and Symon arrived in Danzig in the spring, it was still too early for the new harvests. But from the outset, they must have closely monitored reports about the land’s expected yields. A city with grain-rich fields outside its walls had a significant advantage in multiple ways. Provided there were no failed harvests or disasters, its own food supply was guaranteed. Additionally, any surplus could be sold, for example, to Holland. The country, with its dunes, peatland and lakes, offered far too little space for arable farming. This problem was not exclusive to Holland. The demand for wheat and rye was enormous across Europe.

For a long time, southern Flanders and northern France had been vital for the supply of grain, especially as agricultural land in Holland deteriorated and more had to be imported. But wars with France significantly hindered imports. In 1477, the French king ordered the destruction of grain fields around border towns such as Douai and Valenciennes in order to starve the provinces of Holland, Zeeland and Flanders. It was therefore only logical that Holland sought other, more stable channels for importing grain. Exports of grain from eastern England were generally too small, and Zeeland, Utrecht and the regions around the Rhine and Meuse were at best of regional importance. The Baltic Sea region, however, increasingly emerged as the granary of Europe. During the time when Reyer and his uncle Symon were active in trade, grain commerce with Danzig increased fivefold. Meanwhile, Riga and Reval (Tallinn), followed by Elbing and Königsberg, were also important export harbours.

That so much grain was available in the Baltic Sea region was also due to political circumstances. Central European grain exports had been hampered in 1453 by the Fall of Constantinople. Trade via the Black Sea was decimated, and for the areas affected by this, trade with the north became an attractive alternative. It was primarily the River Vistula that served as the main connection. It originated in the Carpathians, on the border with present-day Slovakia, and meandered more than a thousand kilometres northwards before ending in the sea at Danzig. From the east, rivers from Belarus and Ukraine joined the Vistula. The rise of Amsterdam in the fifteenth century, therefore, cannot be considered separately from these major international political developments.

The imperial crown for Amsterdam

For Reyer Dircxz, Danzig was a world-class port city, clearly a size larger than Amsterdam. While Amsterdam had fewer than ten thousand inhabitants, Danzig had more than three times as many. Ships from Amsterdam formed an important trading fleet, yet the city’s prestige lagged behind that of free imperial cities such as Hamburg, Bremen, Lübeck and Danzig. These free cities were directly under the authority of the emperor, and the imperial crown was proof of that.

The Amsterdam city council sought to change this. When Maximilian – though not yet emperor at the time – granted Amsterdam the privilege of bearing the imperial crown on its coat of arms in exchange for a loan in 1489, it was the first time that a city in Holland had been granted such an honour. Amsterdam was granted this special privilege because the city was not “graced with a proper coat of arms” and because its citizens, more than those of other cities in Holland, conducted trade on a European scale.

The latter was particularly important for Reyer and Symon. The crown conferred status and commanded respect. With all the privileges Amsterdam already possessed, the city in Holland had long since surpassed the authority of the count. The crown in the coat of arms made it seem as if Amsterdam was now on an equal footing with its most important competitors. The crown soon featured on official documents and – important for skippers and merchants – on all sea passes and safe-conduct letters. The city council seems to have devised this clever strategy to elevate Amsterdam’s status to the highest level in one stroke, regardless of whether the crown was truly imperial or not. Historians would only concern themselves with the legitimacy of that claim much later.

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