I had a nice day yesterday! My BFF Christa invited me for a day out to celebrate my birthday. Because I was in Manila when I turned a year older last summer, she felt we had to celebrate it so she gave me three choices to choose from, this was her birthday gift for me. The choices were:

1. A day in the spa (nah, not in the mood for this)
2. Film and dinner in Rotterdam
3. Go to Den Bosch, see the city then dinner in the evening.

The last one I’ve never been to thus I chose no. 3 Den Bosch lies in the Southern part of The Netherlands and I have only seen part of this city on tv so I was pretty curious if it’s really as beautiful as they claim. Yes it was. Though we were only able to cover a small part of the city as it was huge and full of nice stores. With stores around, who would want to sightsee, right? *wink* Anyway for sure I had a good time and will come back to this city again, this time to really see it.

The following I took from wikipedia:

History

The city’s official name is a contraction of the Dutch des Hertogen bosch - “the Duke’s forest”. The duke in question was Henry I, Duke of Brabant, whose house had then had a large estate at nearby Orthen for at least four centuries. He founded a new town located on some afforested dunes in the middle of a marsh. At age 26, he granted ’s-Hertogenbosch city rights and the corresponding trade privileges in 1185. This is, however, the traditional date given by later chroniclers; the first mention in contemporaneous sources is in 1196. The original charter has been lost. His reason for doing so was to protect his own interests against encroachment from Gelre and Holland; the city was from the very beginning conceived as a fortress town. It was destroyed in 1203 by a joint expedition of Gelre and Holland but soon rebuilt. Some remnants of the original city walls may still be seen. Around 1475 a much larger wall was erected to protect the greatly expanded settled area. Artificial waterways were dug to serve as a city moat, through which the rivers Dommel and Aa were diverted.

Until 1520, the city flourished. It was the second largest population centre in the territory of the present Netherlands, after Utrecht. It was also the birthplace and home of one of the greatest painters of the northern renaissance, Hieronymus Bosch (c. 1450–1516). The city was also a center of music, with many composers, such as Jheronimus Clibano, receiving their training at the cathedrals there. Others held positions there: Matthaeus Pipelare was musical director at the Confraternity of Our Lady, and renowned Habsburg copyist and composer Pierre Alamire did much of his work at ’s-Hertogenbosch.

The wars of the Reformation would soon change the course of the city. It became an independent bishopric. During the Eighty Years’ War the city took the side of the Habsburg authorities. A Calvinist coup was thwarted. It was besieged several times by Prince Maurice of Orange, stadtholder of Holland, who wanted to put ’s-Hertogenbosch under the rule of the rebel United Provinces. Afterwards the fortifications were greatly expanded. As the surrounding marshes made a siege of the conventional type impossible, the fortress was deemed impregnable and nicknamed the Marsh Dragon. The town was nevertheless finally conquered by Frederik Hendrik of Orange in 1629 in a typically Dutch way: he diverted the rivers Dommel and Aa, created a polder by constructing a forty kilometre dyke and then pumped out the water by mills. After a siege of three months, the city had to surrender, an enormous blow to Habsburg strategy during the Thirty Years’ War. This cut the town off from the rest of the duchy. The area was treated by the Republic as an occupation zone without political liberties (see also Generality Lands). The fortifications were again expanded. In 1672, the Dutch rampjaar, the city held against the army of Louis XIV. In 1794, French revolutionary troops under command of Charles Pichegru took the city with hardly a fight: in the Batavian Republic both Catholics and Brabanders at last gained equal rights.

if you wish to read more, just follow this link.

Recent Entries

• Still no tree
• A weekend of glaucoma, cataract and lens testing
• Thank God for weekends!
• Enough with the useless talks!
• sale! perfect at times like this.
• Charlie wants to open his Christmas gifts now!
• Why not go to Las Vegas?
• Fear isn’t good
• Sale, don’t miss it!
• thief!

This entry was posted on Friday, October 10th, 2008 at 9:40 pm and is filed under uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.