The Hague

The Hague began as the count's hunting ground and court: around 1230 Count Floris IV of Holland built a modest castle on the site of the Binnenhof, and in 1248 Count William II, by then King of the Romans, began a grander one beside a dune lake, the Hofvijver. His son Floris V finished the Knights' Hall. The village around it, first called Die Haghe in a charter of 1242, never won full town rights, but it stayed the residence of the counts of Holland and their successors, and a compromise place that the rival cities of Holland were happy to leave unfortified.

By the early fifteenth century the Hague had several thousand people, more than many walled towns, though without a town government of its own. The Gelderland commander Maarten van Rossum attacked it in 1528, and the settlement outside the castle paid a ransom to avoid the torch. In the early Eighty Years' War it was plundered and nearly emptied, and Spanish forces made it their headquarters during the siege of Leiden.

Once the Dutch Republic took shape, the stadtholders and the States General made the Hague the political capital, drawing diplomats and nobles. The population reached 16,000 in 1622, and canals dug under Prince Maurice formed a belt without ever becoming real fortifications. In the rampjaar 1672 a mob murdered the brothers De Witt here. Around 1800 some 40,000 people lived in this large "village," the third-biggest settlement of the Netherlands, and in 1806 the French finally gave it town rights.