Ever want to go to Amsterdam ? peradventure sit at a cafe or tour the Red Light District ? You monster . It carry two horrific flood , which re - sculpt the coast of Europe , to make Amsterdam into a city deserving visiting .
Life was n’t much fun in the Middle Ages . On the plus side , few the great unwashed had to hold out it for long . The Middle Ages were scar by upheaval — geologic upheaval . The storms that shook the magnetic north of Europe were so muscular that they did n’t just drown people , they reshaped the intact coastline . Peninsulas became island . Islands were broken down into nothing . And the ocean came inland .
Two storms , space seventy - five geezerhood apart , constantly changed the fate of the Netherlands . The first storm led to the St. Lucia ’s Day photoflood in 1287 . The North Sea had been steadily rising . On St. Lucia ’s Day a storm caused a especially rocky and in high spirits tide . A dike broke . By some estimates , eighty thousand masses become flat . What had been an inland lake , formed by depleted altitude and human munition , became part of the North Sea . From then on , the orbit was call the Zuiderzee , the “ southern sea . ” It was not an easily trip mend of water , as it was still shallow and protected by patches of coastline . That would change .
Grote Mandrenke is a depressed German word . It mean “ Great Drowning of Men . ” In January of 1362 , a storm drive by intensely high wind hit Ireland . What coastal houses the undulation did n’t get were blown down . As the violent storm moved down the glide of Europe , it coincided with an extremely gamey lunar time period . The medieval town of Dunwich in England , now lies under the ocean because of the Grote Mandrenke . Sixty parishes in Slesvig , Denmark disappeared . And in Holland , twenty - five thousand more hoi polloi died and the coastline eroded to the point where the Zuiderzee became , essentially , a seventy - five mile bay with a identification number of extremely queasy little sportfishing settlement around its edges .
One of those small villages was Amsterdam . It had been concede rights as a city in 1300 , and its spot at the extreme southerly edge of what became an incredibly authoritative waterway gave it an reward as a trading metropolis . At first the Netherlands switch with England and with other countries in the north of Europe . Then it sent feelers out into the quietus of the world . The Zuidersee was a cataclysm zone that became an economic and military hoarded wealth , with Amsterdam as its shining jacket crown precious stone .
The Zuiderzee was , once again , cut off from the North Sea in 1932 . There ’s a museum to preserve both its memory and the memory of the culture that sprang up around it . Most of the reality wo n’t see theZuiderzee Museum , but they will see the internationally - renowned metropolis that it produced .
Top Image : Lies Thru a Lens
[ beginning : Grote Mandrenke and the Opening of the Zuiderzee in the Netherlands , The Grote Mandrenke , Dunwich Underwater Images Show Britain ’s Atlantis . ]
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