The Netherlands is full of contradictions. It’s a famously small country built, as we all know, on land reclaimed from the sea. Yet, in the Dutch countryside, the view seems limitless; vast, relentlessly flat space unfolds before us, under enormous cloud-dappled skies. This timeless landscape, divided by ramrod straight drainage ditches and tree-lined dykes, is instantly recognizable from celebrated paintings. It’s still picturesque, but rather than the church steeples and windmills that we’ve learned to expect, from our experience of Ruisdael or Hobbema, we find pylons and high-tech wind turbines.

Holland is not the great shipping power it was in the seventeenth century, during what the Dutch themselves referred to as the “Golden Age,” following the Protestant Netherlands’ hard-won liberation from Catholic Spanish rule. Today, instead of being a leading trader in spices and exotic luxury goods from the Far East, the Netherlands is, according to current statistics, the world’s largest exporter of agricultural produce after the United States. Yet for more than four hundred years, this sea-going, agricultural country has also been intensely urban, a place of well-appointed, often walled, cities filled with closely packed houses, impressive civic and religious buildings, immaculately paved public spaces, and tree-shaded streets along busy canals.

In the seventeenth century, Dutch cities were not only seats of power, wealth, and intellectual life, but also sources of intense pride, as visible evidence of prosperity and civic order. In a small region where allegiance was often divided and subdivided into complicated factions, the