van Leeuwenhoek's Neighborhood

These detailed maps of van Leeuwenhoek's neighborhood come from the two most famous maps of Delft from the 1600's.

The roof of van Leeuwenhoek's house is in third one in from the lower left corner of the Bleyswyck map. The house is almost in the center of the Blaeu map. The gray canal going across the middle has bridges over it. The fifth bridge from the right, the Warmoesbrugge, is the widest bridge and is part of an open square, the Cameretten over the Voldersgracht, both clearly labeled in Bleyswyck's map. Warmoes is old-fashioned Dutch for vegetables.

Van Leeuwenhoek's house, Het Gouden Hoofd, the Golden Head, was along that canal, the second one in from the lower left corner of the Cameretten. Across the canal was the Vismarkt, the ancient fish market, and the Vleeshal, the newly constructed (1650) meat market.

The area in the top left of the Blaeu map, indeed that whole corner of Delft, was destroyed in the Delft Explosion, also known as the Delft Thunderclap, when stored gunpowder exploded, killing more than a hundred. It occurred on October 12, 1654, just ten weeks after van Leeuwenhoek moved back to Delft, following his apprenticeship in Amsterdam, and married Barbara de Meij.

The Nieuwe Kerk, where van Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer were baptized, is near the top center of the Blaeu map. The largest, tallest building in Delft, it was finished before 1500. At the bottom right corner of the church, where the single row of trees across the front meets the double row of trees alongside the church, is a bridge. Just over that bridge on the Oude Langendijk is the house of Maria Thins, Vermeer's mother-in-law. Vermeer moved his growing family there about the time van Leeuwenhoek returned from Amsterdam.

The Markt is the largest white open area on the Blaeu map. On the other side of it, across from the Nieuwe Kerk, is the Stadhuis, city hall, built just before van Leeuwenhoek was born. There he earned his sinecure after 1660 as camerbewaarder, or chamberlain. On the Bleyswyck map, the corner of the Stadhuis is the small cross-hatched rectangle in the top right corner, giving an idea of how close van Leeuwenhoek lived.

Directly below the Stadhuis on the Blaeu map is the Waag (detail of facade below), the weighing house built just before van Leeuwenhoek was born and where he served as wijnroeier (wine gauger) after 1679. The right to have a weighing house and collect excise taxes locally was one of the first city rights that Delft got in the 1200's.

In the lower left of the Blaeu map is the Oude Kerk (before 1250), where van Leeuwenhoek and Vermeer are buried. It is across the Oude Delft canal from the Prinsenhof, a Middle Ages monastery; on Blaeu's map, it has the blue walls. There, William of Orange, aka William the Silent, was assassinated in 1584, the galvanizing moment in Dutch history.

Delft

The map of van Leeuwenhoek's neighborhood above is a detail taken from this map of Delft by Joan Blaeu. It was published in Amsterdam in 1649, one year after the peace of Munster and the Spanish acknowledgement of the Dutch Republic.

The map, according to the conventions of the time, is laid out for the most balanced design. North is toward the top left corner, not straight up.

The canal off the left is the Vliet that connected Delft to Leiden, twelve miles north. Van Leeuwenhoek may well have traveled that canal to go to school in Warmond and to his apprenticeship in Amsterdam.

The canal off the right, the Delftse Schie, connects Delft eight miles to Delftshaven, the harbor on the Maas River, now Rotterdam, and thus out to the North Sea.

Note that Delft had only six gates to pass over the outer moat. Only one remains, the Oostpoort in the top right corner.

South Holland

Warmond (Warmont) is at the top, about two miles north of Leiden, and Benthuizen is at the very bottom right, about nine miles northeast of Delft. Note that for maps of the time, the convention of north at the top was not yet established.

Today, Warmond is a village of about five thousand people. According to Reinier Boitet who in 1729 expanded Bleyswyck's 1667 Beschryving der stadt Delft (Description of the City of Delft), van Leeuwenhoek was sent to school there after his mother remarried in 1640. Warmond has only a couple of buildings, including the home of painter Jan Steen, that date from van Leeuwenhoek's youth, when it was much smaller than it is today.

Benthuizen has fewer residents today than Warmond. The oldest structure seems to be the Molen de Haas, a grist mill built more than a century after van Leeuwenhoek lived there. According to Boitet, he lived there with an uncle, who was an attorney and town clerk, between his time in Warmond and his apprenticeship in Amsterdam beginning at age 16 in 1648.

On the map, the straight black lines are raised dikes between the drained fields. By the 17th century, van Leeuwenhoek's lifetime, the land in South Holland had been managed for centuries by the Hoogheemraadschap van Delfland. This water control board managed the water barriers (dikes), the waterways (canals), the water levels, and the water quality. It did not manage the water supply for human use. The ancient water boards, the oldest forms of local government in the Netherlands, set the stage for the decentralized Dutch Republic's astounding success in its Golden Age.

Comparing these old maps to what you see today on Google Earth reveals almost exactly the same pattern. In other words, other than pavement poured on the tops of many dikes for auto and bike traffic, the South Holland countryside hasn't changed much in the last 400 years. It was crowded and the land was all accounted for then; it's the same now.

Dutch Empire

Spread over four continents with colonies strategically placed on the sailing routes between the world's oceans, the Dutch Empire dominated global commerce during the second half of the 17th century. But the Dutch in the Golden Age were traders, not settlers. The orange dots are trading posts.

The lighter green areas were territories controlled by the VOC: Dutch East India Company (Vereenigde Oost-Indische Compagnie / United East Indian Company).

the southern tip of Africa - Cape Colony (1652)

the southern tip of India - Malacca, Colombo, Ceylon, Nagappattinam, Cranganore, and Cochin (1641-1662)

Indonesia - the Dutch East Indies (1627) and stretching north to China and Japan

The darker green areas are the territories controlled by the GWIC: Dutch West India Company (Geoctroyeerde Westindische Compagnie or GWIC / Chartered West India Company).

New Netherlands area, which included New Amsterdam

the Netherlands Antilles, several other Caribbean islands, Suriname and Guyana

Dutch Brazil, New Holland (capital Mauritsstad, present-day Recife), taking over Portuguese possessions in Brazil (1630 - 1654)

In Africa, trading posts on the Gold Coast (now Ghana) and briefly in Angola

Delft was one of the dozen cities that had chambers of the VOC (Dutch East India Company).

World

A hundred and fifty years after Columbus and da Gama widened the Europeans' world, the map makers had a clearer vision of the coastlines than of interiors, of latitude than longitude.

The sailors of the Dutch VOC brought back an overwhelming amount of new information about the world's geography, flora, and fauna.

Leeuwenhoek received samples to examine from as far away as the Dutch East Indies from someone who had read his collected letters there.