Den Bosch

Den Bosch, 's-Hertogenbosch, began in 1184 as a fortress town of the dukes of Brabant, set on a sand ridge among the marshes of the Dommel and the Aa to hold the Meuse as a northern frontier against Guelders and Holland. It became the fourth capital of the duchy after Leuven, Brussels and Antwerp, and governed the Meierij. From 1318 a second, much wider ring of ramparts was dug along the new courses of the rivers, for which the whole new area had to be raised at the townspeople's expense. By the end of the fifteenth century it was the largest city in the present Netherlands, and the stream called the Dieze began to run in tunnels under the houses as the Binnendieze.

Its painter Hieronymus Bosch and the playwright Macropedius lived and worked in the city, and its music was famous; the Gothic church of St John was finished in 1529. Fires swept the town in 1419 and 1463. The wars of religion made it an independent bishopric, and in 1579 a Calvinist attempt to seize it failed in the Fencers' Revolt on the market square. Prince Maurice of Orange besieged it unsuccessfully in 1601 and 1603, and its marsh-bound fortifications earned it the nickname of Swamp Dragon. In 1629 Frederick Henry of Orange diverted the Dommel and the Aa, built a forty-kilometre dyke and pumped the water out with mills, and the city surrendered after three months. It held out against Louis XIV in 1672 and fell to the French revolutionary general Pichegru in 1794.