Dordrecht

Dordrecht, called the oldest town of Holland, stands on an island in the delta where the Rhine, Meuse and Scheldt meet. It won its first town rights before 1200, expanded by Count William I in 1220, and its staple rights of 1299 and 1355 forced passing boats to unload and sell their cargo in the town. Wine, timber and grain made it the largest, richest and most important town of Holland until the fifteenth century, and the Mint of Holland was established here in 1283. Its great church of Our Lady, with its massive tower, looked over the quays.

Two disasters then changed the map. In the Saint Elizabeth's floods of 1421 and 1424 the Great Waard, the farmland that lay behind the city, drowned for good, and Dordrecht was left on an island; the eastern part of that drowned land was never reclaimed and became the Biesbosch. Competing ports such as Rotterdam and Amsterdam gradually took away its trade, and its decline went on in the sixteenth century.

Dordrecht still carried political weight. In July 1572 the First Free States Assembly met here, where representatives of all the Holland towns recognized William of Orange as stadtholder and gave money for the revolt against Spain. In 1618 and 1619 the Synod of Dordrecht met in this bastion of the Reformation to settle the conflict between Remonstrants and Counter-Remonstrants, and its decisions shaped Reformed doctrine. The painter Aelbert Cuyp was born here in 1620.