A Brill Calendar: January 20

Amsterdam's New Town Hall

Few Peace Conferences have been awaited as eagerly in European history as the Peace of Westphalia, officially concluded early in 1648.

After negotiations, which had lasted years and had been conducted in two Westphalian cities, Osnabrück and Münster, the drafts of the treaties were furnished with final details and arrangements during the month of January. Recognition by European powers of the sovereignty of a new ‘player’, The Republic of the United Seven Provinces, was a key-item in the whole settlement, a settlement which also ended a devastating Thirty-Years War in the heart of Europe - until the Second World War the most gruesome one the Old World ever witnessed.

After the first resistance against Habsburg Spain – now some 80 years in the past – the Republic of the Seven Provinces could safely bask in self-confidence and wealth.

It is seldom that economical, political and cultural pride and self-assurance has expressed itself so solidly in one single building. On January 20, 1648, after long and careful planning in that mercantile nucleus of the new-comer in European politics, Amsterdam, the first long wooden post was driven into the marshy soil near the local dam of the Amstel river and the municipal harbour, the Y. This reliable construction technique was used to found on that site a new Town-Hall, designed to be second to none and an Eighth Architectural Wonder of the World.

Naturally such an astonishing, would-be miracle needs more than one post; and the last one was brought home October 10, 1649, bringing the total number of these necessary conditions for a grand architectural presence to 13659; a number easily remembered: the number of the days of a normal year flanked by 1 and 9. Then the building proper could rise; while the world wondered.