Read The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam Online
Authors: Lotte van de Pol
It was a fight one night that led to the arrests of Willem deVroe and Catrina Cahari. An argument with a man who had been refused entry led to a street brawl and the intervention of the nightwatchmen, who attempted to take the ringleaders back to the watch-house. At that point Catrina ordered six or seven men to attack the watchmen,‘say- ing she was willing to pay them two or three ducatoons to do so’. In the fight that ensued, Catrina managed to wrench the stick out of one watchman’s hands and ‘beat him underfoot’.
66
The music houses had always been the scene of fights, yet it was not until the mid-eighteenth century that the prostitution district came to be described as dangerous. In
1764
James Boswell, who was studying in Utrecht at the time and sometimes took the public barge to Amster- dam, wrote in his journal:
I resolved to go to a
speelhuis
but had no guide. I therefore very madly sought for one myself and strolled up and down the Amsterdam streets, which are by all accounts very dangerous at night. I began to be frightened and to think of Belgic knives. At last I came to a
speelhuis
, where I entered boldly. I danced with a fine lady in laced riding-clothes, a true blackguard minuet. I had my pipe in my mouth and performed like any common sailor. I had near quar- relled with one of the musicians. But I was told to take care, which I wisely
did. I spoke plenty of Dutch but could find no girl that elicited my inclina- tions. I was disgusted with this low confusion, came home and slept sound.
67
The famous music houses, wrote Thomas Nugent several years later, were simply taverns where youngsters of the lower orders met two or three times a week to dance. However, he warns:
Those who choose to satisfy their curiosity in this respect should take care to behave civilly, and especially not to offer familiarities to any girl that is engaged with another man; otherwise the consequence might be dangerous, for the Dutch are very brutish in their quarrels.
68
Amsterdam diarist Jacob Bicker
R
aye wrote on
11
July
1768
that a former student had gone to a music house near the Nieuwmarkt and fallen into an argument with four sailors, during which one of them was fatally stabbed. A few years later the Prince of Ligne, famous
throughout Europe as a soldier, diplomat, and Enlightenment thinker, became involved in a fight in an Amsterdam music house and killed a man. He was himself badly beaten. He fled the city for fear of prosecu- tion; neither his ability to speak Dutch nor his fame, rank, and lineage would give him legal indemnity. The case caused great consternation and was the topic of fervent discussion among foreigners.
69
The elite turns its back on the music houses
By the mid-eighteenth century a visit to an Amsterdam music house had once more become part of the standard tourist programme.
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
, which had not been re-issued since
1700
, was reprinted five times and a German translation was published in
1754
. Of course the book was by now useless as a guide, but more recent descrip- tions of the world of prostitution appeared. In one of them,
De Am- steldamsche speelhuizen
(
1793
), a character called Willem explains to his old friend Jacob, who has been away from Amsterdam for some years, how things have changed. Many of the smaller music houses have gone, but several brand new or renovated establishments have replaced them. Jacob remembers how the women once lived elsewhere, going to the music houses in the evenings with their bawds or minders and taking their clients home with them. Now the girls live in-house, sometimes as many as twenty or thirty of them, and bawds are no longer admitted.
De Amsteldamsche speelhuizen
suggests a broad trend in which music houses were turning into brothels, small enterprises were becoming substantial businesses, and bawds were losing out to the proprietors of music houses.The women were now permanent residents, says Willem, since for customers it was a serious letdown after the glamour of a music house to have to go outside followed by a tattily-dressed bawd and climb the stairs to some little garret where the smell of poverty alone was enough to quench all desire. In fact the advantages were threefold: customers were no longer confronted with the harsh reali- ties of the trade, the mediation of a bawd was no longer needed, and bawds no longer spoiled the look of the place.
70
There is probably some truth in this. Contemporary prints show a freshly renovated music house called De Pijl (The Arrow), one of the establishments named in
De Amsteldamsche speelhuizen
(Plate
4
). This was one of the periods in which the authorities turned a blind eye to prostitution, so capital investment made sense, profits rose, and men rather than women were in charge. In
1790
Hein de Mof (‘Henry the Kraut’, clearly a German) was fined the enormous sum of
12
,
000
guil- ders for assault and battery at his own music house. The punishment was intended to set an example, but Hein’s ability to pay such a sum confirms the existence of enterprises of considerable magnitude.
71
In
1681
the author of
Het Amsterdamsch Hoerdom
had expressed con- cern about the temptation music houses presented to the sons of re- spectable citizens. They were a novelty, drawing customers from all levels of society. A century later most music houses were catering to the lower orders and people of standing visited them only out of curi- osity. These developments made the music houses less of a threat to young men of good character, or so contemporaries thought. Physi- cian C. J. Nieuwenhuis wrote:
In the public music houses . . . clothes and manners are so low and despicable that our young people, if so much as a spark of honour is yet to be found in them, will not be tempted by them but rather deterred, and none but a sen- sualist who has sunk to the lowest depths can find any enjoyment there.
72
The description by young American Elkanah Watson of his response to ‘the most celebrated’ of the Amsterdam music houses, which he visited in
1784
, vividly conveys these feelings of revulsion:
I could not endure the sight five minutes—my feelings were too sensibly attacked—the smoke was so thick, and the company so vulgar, that I was glad
Prostitution had now entrenched itself in the poorest districts and this, combined with the increasing segregation of higher and lower social strata in society as a whole, made the music houses foreign territory to the elite, places where they did not know how to behave and were tolerated principally as a source of income.This explains why violence and fear are given such emphasis in texts from the second half of the eighteenth century, aspects not mentioned a century earlier when these establishments first emerged.The music houses were in terminal decline and the beginning of the nineteenth century marked their final demise.
‘Whores and scoundrels always talk of their honour’:
I
n early modern Europe honour was of the utmost importance and Amsterdam was no exception. Honour (
eer
), meaning a good name in the eyes of the outside world, determined a person’s worth, and the distinction between honourable (
eerlijk
) and dishonourable (
oneerlijk
) was crucial.
1
Only a person of good repute could be a full member of the urban community. A woman’s honour depended primarily on her sexual reputation, so whores were dishonourable by definition and no profession conferred greater shame than prostitution. In the Confes-
sion Books,‘leading a dishonest life’ and ‘keeping a house of ill repute’ were standard terms for prostitution and brothel-keeping.
In the cities there was also an important distinction between bur- ghers and non-burghers, in other words between citizens and non- citizens.
2
In Amsterdam a citizen was a person born to parents who were citizens, or alternatively someone who had bought citizenship or a man who had married a citizen’s daughter. Only the city’s burghers could occupy political posts, belong to guilds, or be employed by the authorities. Children in the burghers’ orphanage (
Burgerweeshuis
) were better off than those in the municipal Almshouse Orphanage (
Aalmoezeniersweeshuis
), intended for the children of ‘strangers’.
Honour and citizenship overlapped. Burghers were presumed hon- ourable, and anyone caught committing adultery, perjury, or malfea- sance could be declared ‘dishonourable and infamous’, removed from office, and deprived of citizens’ rights. Poor relief and other charitable
one hand and ‘strangers’ on the other.
In the seventeenth century and even more so in the eighteenth, the difference between rich and poor grew and the gap between the higher and lower social strata widened.The most prosperous burghers developed into a rich elite, sometimes adopting an aristocratic way of life.
3
They became less interested in the public flaunting of honour and citizenship; the gulf between them and the common folk was visible clearly enough in other ways. Citizens’ rights and codes of honour therefore impacted most strongly on lowlier burghers, who were caught in a daily struggle to determine and uphold their status, and felt a constant need to safeguard the boundary between themselves and those seen as ‘dishonourable’.
Among honourable burghers, members of the (Calvinist)
R
eformed Church were in an especially privileged position. It was not an official
state church, but membership was a precondition of employment by the municipal and provincial authorities, and for the holding of politi- cal office.‘Honourable
R
eformed citizens’ were Amsterdam’s culturally and politically dominant group, although not in numerical terms. Many other groups lived in the city, immigrants from specific regions for example, or—and there was often a direct connection—members
of other religious communities. The Jews are the most clear-cut example.
From the early seventeenth century onwards, more and more Jewish immigrants arrived and they fell into two distinct categories: the Sephardic Jews, usually called Portuguese, who had been expelled from Portugal and Spain and were relatively wealthy, and the Ashkenazi or ‘High German’ Jews, scornfully referred to as
smousen
(Yids), who
came from Germany and Poland and were generally dirt poor. Am- sterdam was one of the few places in the Dutch
R
epublic, indeed in
Europe, where Jews could settle freely, practise their religion, and live wherever they chose. They were excluded from the guilds, however, and although they could buy citizenship they could not inherit it. By the end of the eighteenth century,
10
per cent of Amsterdam’s popula- tion were Jews, mainly Ashkenazim.
Jewish men were not allowed to marry Christian women or to have sexual relations with them, including ‘those who lead dishonest lives’.
4
Close association with Jews was regarded as dishonourable. Maids, for example, who applied for jobs after working for Jewish families might well discover that Christian families no longer wished to employ them.
5
For their part Jews often regarded Christians with distaste. One example of the complex feelings that resulted can be found in a story told in court in
1740
by Hendrina Salomons, a prostitute and an Ashkenazi Jewess. She had once been fetched for a Jewish client, but he immediately asked her whether she ever went to bed with Chris- tian men. When she confirmed that she did, he declared ‘he would have nothing to do with a Yid who’d had sex with a Christian, but wanted instead a Christian wench’.
6
A Christian woman was accepta- ble to him for unclean purposes like prostitution, whereas apparently a Jewish woman who had slept with Christian men was not.
From the late seventeenth century, ‘burgher’ gradually developed into a general term for a member of the respectable middle class, rather than referring to someone in possession of citizenship and the rights that went with it.
7
But a sense of citizenship and the pride it engen- dered remained powerful, not least among people of the lower orders. In
1680
for example, when several barge-hands came to blows with a Frenchman and were consequently arrested, one of the young men shouted indignantly,‘I’m a burgher and I claim my rights as such. How can a burgher be imprisoned because of a Frenchman? I will not toler- ate it.’
8
Amsterdam citizen Lijsbeth Meyer fiercely resisted the arrest of her brother in
1700
, shouting as she tried to wrest him out of the hands of one of the bailiff ’s men that he ‘was the child of burghers and it was improper to imprison a burghers’ child who had been taken on at the Prinsenhof ’. Her brother, a hardened ex-convict who had just signed up for the battle fleet at the Prinsenhof, the seat of the admir- alty, had clearly already forfeited the privileges accorded to an honour- able citizen.
9