Groningen

Groningen rises at the northern tip of the Hondsrug sand ridge, on the edge of the clay marshes of the Ommelanden, and is first recorded in 1040. No written grant of town rights survives, yet by the thirteenth century its walls and market made it the one real city of the northern Netherlands. A member of the Hanseatic network, it lived by forcing the farmers of the surrounding lands to trade through its staple right.

As Friesland dissolved into feuding peasant republics, the city grew into a city-state in the fifteenth century. By 1492 it controlled the whole province of Groningen and most of Friesland, and the great tower of the Martinikerk, the city's landmark, was raised in these years. Albrecht of Saxony and his son George, appointed by Emperor Maximilian over Friesland, could not take it, but neither could Count Edzard of East Frisia or the dukes of Guelders protect it for long. In 1536 the city let the Habsburg stadtholder Georg Schenck van Toutenburg in, and Charles V became its ruler.

Groningen turned Protestant, and Spanish and Dutch armies fought over it until Maurice of Nassau took it in the Reduction of 1594. The States General kept its staple right so that the fortress would command the north. The city founded its academy in 1614, and in 1672 Bernhard von Galen, the bishop of Münster, bombarded it without success on 28 August, a deliverance remembered as Bommen Berend. The old city-state ended with the French era of 1795 to 1813.