The Boundary Posts and the Dice Player

Before there was an Amsterdam or an Amstelveen, the manor lordship of Nieuwer-Amstel lay here. The Amstelland had been reclaimed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries on the orders of the bishop of Utrecht, and passed in 1296 to the count of Holland. In the thirteenth century the river divided the region in two: Ouder-Amstel east of the Amstel, Nieuwer-Amstel to the west of it. The administrative heart lay at Ouderkerk, where the lords of Amstel had their castle.

In the north of that region, from the middle of the thirteenth century, a small settlement grew up beside a dam in the Amstel. It broke away from the manor, became independent in 1275 and received town rights around 1300. So Amsterdam arose, on ground that had belonged to Nieuwer-Amstel. Every foot of land south of the IJ the future capital wrested from its neighbour in the centuries that followed, and that rarely happened without friction.

In 1399 Duke Albrecht of Bavaria, count of Holland, granted the manor as a hereditary fief. With that a piece of public authority passed into private hands: the manor became a lordship, the vassal an ambachtsheer with his own jurisdiction. The limit of that jurisdiction was marked by banpalen, stone posts that showed where the power of one authority ended and that of the other began. It was precisely over such posts that the great quarrel would arise.

Amsterdam grew rich and powerful and in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries expanded again and again at the expense of Nieuwer-Amstel. The manor lords resisted, mostly without much result. The only one who truly went on the attack was Reinoud III van Brederode (1492-1556), lord of Brederode and Vianen, knight of the Order of the Golden Fleece and chamberlain to Emperor Charles V. The immediate cause lay in the year 1489, when Amsterdam had been granted the right by Duke Maximilian to seize criminals and outlaws even more than five kilometres beyond its own borders. To mark out that area the town had boundary posts bearing its arms set up in the middle of the lord’s jurisdiction.

For Reinoud the arms of Amsterdam within his jurisdiction were unbearable. He declared large parts of the town to be his territory and demanded back what had been taken from his ancestors. A series of lawsuits followed that dragged on for years. Now he demanded tax from those who lived in the town, now he forbade his farmers to bring butter, cheese, geese and fowl to the Amsterdam market. It cost the town vast sums, and the regents sought a way out. Repeatedly they offered to buy the lordship, but Reinoud refused to sell.

The lord of Brederode, however, was, as an old source puts it, much given to drink and to play. Of that weakness the regents made use. At the dicing table they let him lose large sums. Excited by his misfortune, he looked for new stakes, and then a man acting on the burgomaster’s orders laid a great sum before him, advising him to stake his jurisdiction. Fuddled by wine and stung by his losses, Reinoud did so. He hoped for revenge, but he lost. On the spot a secretary and a witness were called, a deed was drawn up, signed and sealed. It was 15 June 1529.

When Reinoud woke the next morning, sober, he was sorry for it. He begged the court to give the lordship back, for what a nobleman had inherited, he argued, could not simply be taken from him. He even offered to pay a considerable sum for it. Nothing helped. The regents had already sent the deed to the count of Holland, who had signed and approved it. So Amsterdam gained at play what it could never have gained by purchase.

For the lordship of Amstelveen and Nieuwer-Amstel, Reinoud received three thousand Carolus guilders and a perpetual annual rent of five hundred and sixty pounds. His son, the famous Hendrik van Brederode, brought a further lawsuit in 1560, claiming his father had been deceived, but he too was rebuffed. Amsterdam later even bought off the annual rent for twelve thousand guilders. What the town had failed to achieve with lawsuits and purchase plans, it had reached at the gaming table in a single evening.

Whether it truly happened so cannot be proved; the histories speak soberly of a sale in 1529. But the legend of the dice game has clung to Amstelveen, and it has a tangible trace. The old Amsterdam boundary posts, bearing the arms Reinoud so detested, still stand here. In the centuries that followed Amsterdam nibbled on: in the annexations of 1896 and 1921 Nieuwer-Amstel lost its busiest districts, and only in 1964 did the municipality take the name of its oldest village, Amstelveen. The border stones remained, silent witnesses to a lordship gambled away on a throw of the dice.