An afternoon in Naarden-Vesting: Spanish treachery, French occupation, and a Roman goddess.

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Dating back to the 9th century under the name Naruthi, Naarden was granted city-rights in 1300, but the South Sea (an inlet of the North Sea, which would later be dammed in to form the IJsselmeer, in which the world's largest man-made island would be created, on which I now live) was a tumultuous and continuous threat, so the city was rebuilt in a safer location some fifty years later. As I mentioned earlier, Naarden-Vesting as we know it now is a fortress town with double battlements in a star shape. Originally a Spanish innovation, the star fort allows the occupants to fire weapons not only at advancing enemies, but also at villains trying to scale their walls. 

Should it be unclear, vesting is a Dutch word for fort, derived via a no doubt circuitous route from the Roman goddess Vesta. She represented the hearth, the homestead, belonging, which is why we still see her name in words like invest and vestibule, and in the Dutch verb vestigen, meaning to settle, to occupy, to inhabit. 

The town put its defenses to good use against the Spanish invasion and subsequent occupancy of the Netherlands during the 80 Years War, when Don Fadrique, son of the Iron Duke, laid siege on the town. Despite adequate defenses against the Spanish troops present, the annexation of the Netherlands as a Spanish territory was well under way and, fearing for future reprisals for continued resistance, the people of Naarden disarmed themselves and opened the city gates. The Spaniards rounded up some seven hundred men, women and children, and executed them in front of the municipal house.

After the occupation ended the defenses weren't adequately rebuilt when in 1672, exactly one hundred years after the Spaniards marched in, the troops of King Louis XIV sashayed briskly into the town. The battlements were substantially upgraded, but our own King William of Orange III nonetheless won the city back for Holland a year later, and once more under a Dutch flag, work continued to modernize the defenses. 

In the 19th century the French rolled in again, this time under Napoleon's flag, but the French general in charge of the garrison stationed in Naarden apparently liked it there so much that he refused to surrender the town even after Napoleon's forces in the Netherlands had capitulated. It took a few months, but once again the town was reclaimed.

The history since then doesn't really show much of a return-on-investment for the fortunes that were spent building the town's defenses, and by 1926 it ceased to serve as a fort entirely. Still, the battlements are still there, all covered with grass and surrounded by a moat and quite easily accessible to the able-bodied, adventurously-inclined and sturdily-shod. 

Here's a passel of photos — pardon the curious 'ghost silhouettes' on some of them; I'd accidentally turned on my iPhone's HDR function and apparently didn't hold the phone still enough during the exposures...