The Year of Disaster

In November 1686, an amateur poetess from Haarlem by the name of Elizabeth Hoofman wrote a congratulatory verse on the occasion of her younger brother’s birthday. Pondering the year of his birth fourteen years ago, Elizabeth entitled her poem – ungenerously, from her sibling's perspective – ‘Memento of the Year of Disaster 1672’ (Herdenking aan het rampjaar 1672).

This was, as far as we know, the first time an author had employed the epithet rampjaar (‘Year of Disaster’) to describe the calamitous events of 1672. Hoofman's poetry remained unpublished for almost a century, and the shorthand rampjaar did not become common currency among historians before the late nineteenth century. But the sobriquet stuck.

The year 1672 presented the Dutch Republic with a disaster of unprecedented magnitude. With overwhelmingly superior forces, France and its allies, the bishoprics of Cologne and Münster, launched an attack across the Republic's poorly-defended eastern frontier. England, supposedly an ally of the Dutch Republic, unexpectedly declared war as well. While Admiral de Ruyter succeeded in fending off an Anglo-French seaborne invasion, the Dutch land defences, which had been seriously neglected over the last quarter of a century, crumbled. In a matter of months, the enemy forces occupied three of the Dutch Republic's seven provinces. Louis xiv entered Utrecht in triumph and attended Mass in the city's main church, splendidly redecorated for the Catholic service. The Province of Holland only barely managed to stave off the French onslaught behind a line of hurriedly effectuated inundations, the so-called Waterlinie (‘Water Line’). The military collapse and the naval war precipitated an economic crisis, marked by the greatest crash on the Amsterdam exchange in early modern times. Commerce and finance collapsed; public and private building came to a standstill, while an avalanche of bankruptcies caused a devastating slump on the art market.

The rampjaar of 1672 was also a year of social revolution, with the common people and the civic militias decisively intervening in the political process.