A Brill Calendar: January 4

Frederik Hendrik: "Stedendwinger"

Few formalities concerning earlier attainment decided a student’s admission to Leyden University during its first decades.

Clearly, it was more important that matriculating young men were scions of influential & respected families. Some dynasties had a stake in the rebellion and the ambition to contribute to its success by becoming knowledgeable about the legal, historical and theological matters that underlay the ill-organized, unprecedented revolt against Habsburg sovereignty over the Low Countries.

When the youngest son of the erstwhile leader of rebellion was registered as a Leyden student in the ‘Praesidium Libertatis’ on January 4, 1594, this Frederik Hendrik embodied the socio-cultural role of his University and Holland. Twenty-five days later he reached the age of 10 years. The future 'Stedendwinger’ (‘Domesticator of Cities’), unrivalled master of siege-warfare, was less than six months old when his father, Willem, Count of Nassau, Prince of Orange – the German aristocrat who had done more than anybody else to endow Leyden with a University – was assassinated by a bounty-hunter attracted by Spanish blood-money.

Frederik was the son of Willem’s fourth marriage; his half-brother Maurits, issue of Willem’s second one, was 17 years his senior and already a hardened war-lord and soldier. Mauruts had become a Leyden alumnus much earlier, when both the Institute and its pupil were still in their teens. One seminal teacher there in those early days was Simon Stevin (Bruges, 1548 – Leyden, 1620) who instilled in Willem’s sons a taste for applying mathematics and arithmetic in warfare and the principles of architecture in works of defence. It is seldom in the emergence of a ‘knowledge centre’ of a new type that its curriculum was as precisely tuned to exigencies as they prevailed locally during the last quarter of the 16th century.