The Burgher and the Whore: Prostitution in Early Modern Amsterdam (2 page)

made the butt of such jokes, but even madness and delusion are subject to the myths of their day, and to contemporaries there was undoubt- edly a mythical dimension to Amsterdam prostitution.

The city’s reputation was based at least as much on myth as on real- ity. Tourists would almost invariably visit an Amsterdam music house (
speelhuis
), ostensibly an establishment where music was played and guests could eat, drink, and dance, but in fact a place where prostitutes picked up clients and clients prostitutes. Most also visited the Spin House (
Spinhuis
), the women’s house of correction, where they could see whores who had been given custodial sentences (Plates
2
,
8
, 9, and
10
). The music houses and the Spin House were features of Amsterdam no less famous than the harbour, the charitable institutions, and the pres- tigious new Town Hall on Dam Square. The city’s seventeenth- and eighteenth-century notoriety is perhaps comparable only to its repu- tation at the end of the twentieth century, with the red-light district a major tourist attraction and Amsterdam a setting of choice for foreign authors and film directors whose plots called for a latter-day Sodom and Gomorrah.

The music houses were the eighteenth-century equivalent of the heart of today’s prostitution district, the Wallen. Elkanah Watson, an American who visited the city in
1784
, said of them: ‘I have never heard Amsterdam mentioned but these spillhouses were esteemed a principal curiosity.’
2
A popular excuse for visiting a music house was that everyone else did. ‘All travellers visit these loathsome places,’ Frenchman Louis Desjobert wrote in
1778
, adding that ‘gentlemen of rank, bishops, and lords, even the Duchess of Chartres and the Princess of Lamballe’ had done so.
3
The anonymous author of the pornographic
Julie philosophe, ou le bon patriote
(
1791
) (Julie the Philosopher, or the Good Patriot) describes his heroine finding herself in an Amsterdam music house as part of her ‘educational journey’ as a prostitute.
4
Casa- nova found the love of his youth working as a brothel-keeper; the Prince of Ligne killed a man in a fight in which he came close to los- ing his own life; Prince Eugene of Savoy went to watch the whores with the English consul as his guide (Plate
1
)—all in the music houses of Amsterdam.
5
In
Brieven van Abraham Blankaart
(
1787
–
9
) (Letters of Abraham Blankaart), an epistolary novel by Betje Wolff and Aagje Deken, the protagonist contemplates the many times he has taken in- ternational business acquaintances to the music houses, ‘about which people in foreign countries form all too rosy and gay an impression;

and which everyone wishes to visit, whatever his character and up- bringing, and whether he comes from France or from Norway’.

To the people of Amsterdam, not least the municipal authorities, this reputation was a source of shame. As early as
1478
, when the town had only a few thousand inhabitants and prostitution was confined to two streets, a statute complained about the proliferation of prostitution in the city, warning that ‘if all this were to become known outside Am- sterdam, the city would be greatly dishonoured and made the subject of scandal’.
6
That is exactly what was to happen centuries later.

In the seventeenth century Amsterdam was the third largest city in Europe. London and Paris were two to three times as big, but they were capitals quite unmatched by other settlements in England or France, whereas highly urbanized Holland included significant towns such as Leiden, Haarlem, and
R
otterdam, all of which were a relatively short travelling distance from Amsterdam. Immigration increased the city’s population from around
54
,
000
at the start of the seventeenth

century to more than
220
,
000
by
1700
, and in the eighteenth century it continued to grow, reaching
240
,
000
before falling back after
1770
. By
1800
the figure stood at
210
,
000
. By then Amsterdam had ceded third place to Naples, but in terms of wealth it remained at the top.
7
Amsterdam’s riches and its general air of prosperity continued to amaze visitors.‘’Tis generally thought,’ wrote Thomas Nugent in his
Travellers Guide Through the Netherlands
(
1756
), ‘that next to London and Paris Amsterdam is the biggest city in Christendom. It is certainly the great- est port in the known world for trade, and inferior to none in Europe for wealth and riches.’
8

In a prosperous metropolis of this size, prostitution was only to be expected, but there were other factors that stimulated both demand and supply. Amsterdam was a magnet for immigrants, merchants, and tourists. It was a trading and transport hub and a place where many thousands of sailors signed up or were discharged; in either case they had money to spend. On the supply side there was a large surplus of women among the common people, including many poor immigrants with little prospect of marriage.

Prostitution in Amsterdam dates back at least to the fourteenth cen- tury and it has always been concentrated in the same part of town, the old city centre near the harbour, an area that has remained relatively unchanged and is still geographically central. It was the point of entry for those arriving in the city, for centuries by ship, later by train (in

1889
Amsterdam’s main station was built on an artificial island in the harbour). For new arrivals the prostitution district was easy to find, as it still is.Throughout its long history, laws governing Amsterdam pros- titution and attitudes to it have changed repeatedly, and all kinds of government policies have been tried—regulation, prohibition, tolera- tion, prosecution, state control, and, since
2000
, legalization—but in practice intervention by the authorities has generally been measured. Amsterdam has a long tradition of preferring behind-the-scenes regu- lation and toleration within certain limits to direct and heavy-handed intervention. The outside world has often gained the impression, in many cases erroneously, that ‘in Amsterdam you can get away with anything’.This too is part of the myth of Amsterdam prostitution.
9
‌
‌

Prostitution and
whoredom
10

Simply put, prostitution is sex for money. The oldest legal definition, from the late-
R
oman
Codex Justinianus
, states that a prostitute (
meretrix
) is a woman who provides sexual services for money (
pecunia accepta
) both publicly (
palam omnibus
) and indiscriminately (
sine dilectu
). Precise definitions of prostitution have always been time-bound and culture- specific, and the words used to describe it change over time.
11
In late eighteenth-century Dutch we occasionally find ‘prostitute’ used as a verb (
prostitueren
), usually meaning to corrupt, but as a noun in its modern sense (
prostituee
,
prostitutie
) it dates back only to the second half of the nineteenth century. Anyone looking for references to pros-

titution in older sources will encounter mainly the terms
hoererij
(whoring or whoredom) and
hoer
(whore). The latter occurs in all kinds of compound words and expressions, including whorehouse, street whore, whoremonger, whoremaster, to play the whore, and to allow oneself to be used as a whore.

In the early modern period, concern lay not with prostitution as we now understand it but with ‘whoring’, a word used for all sexual acts outside the marriage bed—or indeed in it, if the sex was immoderate in character or if conception was deliberately prevented. Whoring meant fornication or adultery, irrespective of whether money changed hands, and there was a distinction between engaging in illicit sex and accepting payment for doing so.This is illustrated by a
1667
statement from Annetje Jans, who confessed in court to being ‘a whore and

earning some money by it’.
12
Clearly ‘whore’ was not synonymous with ‘prostitute’. When Hendrickje Stoffels admitted before the con- sistory of the Amsterdam
R
eformed Church that ‘she was guilty of

whoring with
R
embrandt the painter’ she was confessing to sharing

his bed without being married to him; there is no suggestion here of

prostitution.
13

Whores were women who led ‘dishonourable’,‘disreputable’,‘god- less’,‘disorderly’, or ‘iniquitous’ lives, whether or not any form of pay- ment was involved. A
hoerenwaardin
, literally a hostess to whores, was a brothel-keeper or bawd in charge of a ‘disreputable house’, a ‘disor- derly house’, or a ‘house of ill repute’. The terms
ravot
and
rabat
were also used, meaning commotion and hullabaloo; a bawdy-house might be referred to as a
ravot-huis
, indicating that it was the scene of brawls, noise, drunkenness, and debauchery, which disturbed local residents and gave the neighbourhood a bad name.

The male counterpart to the whore was the
pol
. He might simply live with a woman out of wedlock or be the lover of another man’s wife, but he might well be a brothel-keeper, or perhaps a pander.There are several comparable words like
lichtmis
—rake or libertine;
plug
— scoundrel, rogue, or blackguard; and
kochel
, which could simply mean a disreputable man but often referred to a whoremaster. Such charac- ters abound near whores, but all these terms refer to moral qualities rather than financial arrangements. In the roughest kinds of whore- houses and music houses, people were said to speak ‘the argot of black- guards and thieves’ (
plugge- of gauwdiefstaal
) and to indulge in ‘rogue’s dances’ (
pluggedansen
).
14

The ‘moral’ terminology used in judicial records which referred to illicit sexual acts, public scandal, disorderliness, and contempt for God’s laws is typical of the seventeenth century. After about
1675
there was an increasingly clear-cut distinction between immoral women and prostitutes.
15
In the eighteenth century, definitions became more pre- cise and unambiguous, and at the same time more neutral. After
1750
, although ‘whore’, ‘disreputable life’, and so forth were still used in court, terms like
licht meisje
and
licht vrouwspersoon
took root (the rough equivalents of the English ‘girl of easy virtue’ and ‘loose woman’), alongside
meisje van plezier
, meaning ‘lady of pleasure’.

These changes in vocabulary emerge in the ways prostitutes them- selves describe their activities. In
1658
Anna Jans confessed in court to ‘playing the whore and spending time in various taverns; she also

admits to having earned money on several occasions by carnal intercourse’.
16
In
1727
Anna
R
ingels answered the question ‘whether she would not have to admit that she had conceived a child out of wedlock and is therefore an infamous whore’ by saying ‘yes’, endorsing a by then rather old-fashioned conception of a whore.
17
In
1782
Magdalena Beelthouwer gave her livelihood as ‘loose woman’ and

when asked in court exactly what she meant by this answered:‘Some- one who must live by any old man-Jack and therefore stands in the alley of an evening, to have the opportunity to play the whore.’
18
These three statements demonstrate a semantic shift in emphasis away from illicit sexual acts as improper moral behaviour towards prostitution as a livelihood.

Of course prostitution is more than a matter of words and defini- tions.‘Public whoring’ was a reality throughout this period, as a busi- ness within the city, a possible livelihood for women, and a problem for the authorities.The Amsterdam judiciary would continue to use broad terms like ‘whoredom’ and ‘dishonourable life’ in interrogations well into the eighteenth century, but in passing sentence a clear distinction was made between prostitution, adultery, and fornication. Dutch legal

reference works were based on
R
oman law and one, called
Het
R
ooms- Hollands-
R
egt
(
R
oman-Dutch Law), states that of all whores only the ‘public whores, who share their bodies with everyone indiscriminately

to make foul profit, and those who, by keeping such women, aim to lead the children of honest people astray, are to be punished accord- ingly and chased out of the country or the city’.
19

The question therefore arises as to which words a modern historian, whether writing in Dutch or in English, ought to use. In both lan- guages,‘prostitution’ and ‘prostitute’ are anachronisms, while ‘whoring’ and ‘whore’ have insulting connotations, and ‘public whoredom’ is rather long-winded. In my view, the words prostitution and prostitute may be used analytically; after all my theme is prostitution in the mod- ern sense, although in an historical context. These are therefore the words for which I have opted in the main. Quite frequently ‘whore’ will be used, both for the sake of variety and because it occurs so often in the sources.

The word ‘madam’ in the sense of a brothel-keeper or procuress was introduced into English only in the nineteenth century and evokes a quite different image from the earlier and more earthy ‘bawd’; it there- fore does not appear in the English edition of this book.Words that are