A Brill Calendar: October 12

The Gunpowder Disaster of Delft

Few historians of Holland’s ‘Golden Age’ have seen ‘security’ as a prime subject for investigation.

And for obvious reasons: the archaeology of physical objects and reconstruction of vanished realities and practices is already difficult enough. But reconstructing the human mind of a distant past, including presuppositions, assumptions and expectations entertained by our progenitors is bordering on the impossible.

Yet it can’t be doubted that these conditions of heart & mind, feeling & awareness have changed and transformed themselves continuously as long as the human species exists. The slow, unobtrusive metamorphoses can be regarded as prime agents of change in culture, politics, science and technology. Where safety, security and predictability are concerned, the ancestors of the current ‘Information & Communication Age’ lived on a different planet, or so it would seem.

They took risks so high that none of their 21st century descendants would willingly face them. In European towns where timber and thatch dominated the city-scape, fire was a merciless foe; an enemy not easily expelled. A town like Leyden should cease to function if open hearths, fireplaces, candles and forges would have been prohibited. And in a particularistic decentralized culture, cities needed a building where gunpowder, essential for municipal defence, could be kept available and dry.

It is seldom in the 17th century that the gunpowder disaster of Delft, near Leyden, October 12, 1654, is equalled in magnitude: both technically and symbolically. The explosion annihilated not only a fair share of the city, but also took the life – and much of the stock – of Carel Fabricius, perhaps Rembrandt’s most promising pupil. The gunpowder disaster of Leyden is at this point in time, still lurking far away in the future, some six generations later to be precise. The pattern was the same, the consequences different.