The Dutch fortress called the Swamp Dragon fell only after its marsh was pumped dry
Den Bosch, home town of Hieronymus Bosch, sat inside a marsh so wet that ordinary siege works were useless. In 1629 Frederick Henry of Orange beat it anyway: he rerouted two rivers, threw up a 40-kilometre dyke and let windmills drain the ground beneath the walls.
The official name, 's-Hertogenbosch, shrinks an old Dutch phrase meaning the duke's forest. Henry I, Duke of Brabant, planted the town on wooded dunes in a bog and, by the traditional account, gave it city rights in 1185, although no surviving document mentions it before 1196. He meant it as a stronghold against Gelre and Holland, which flattened it in 1203; it was rebuilt quickly.
By 1520 it had grown into the second most populous place in what is now the Netherlands, behind only Utrecht, and it was a musical centre where Pierre Alamire, the Habsburg copyist and composer, did much of his work. During the Eighty Years' War the city stayed loyal to the Catholic Habsburgs and held off Prince Maurice in 1601 and 1603. Expanded fortifications during the Truce earned it the name moerasdraak. After a three-month siege it surrendered to Maurice's brother, a heavy setback for Habsburg strategy, and the Republic then governed the area as occupied land with no political liberties.
Later centuries were uneven. French revolutionary troops under Charles Pichegru took the weakly held town in 1794. It became capital of North Brabant in 1815, yet building outside the ramparts stayed banned until 1878, producing crowding and the worst infant mortality in the kingdom. The Nazi camp known in Dutch as Kamp Vught carried the city's German name, Herzogenbusch; about 30,000 people passed through it between 1943 and 1944, some 12,000 of them Jews. British troops of the 53rd (Welsh) Division freed the city in October 1944.
Postwar planners wanted to fill in canals and rebuild old districts, but the national government declared the centre a protected townscape first. In 1956 councillors even proposed demolishing the Moriaan, the country's oldest brick building, for traffic; permission was refused and restoration began in 1963. Today carnival turns the city into the village of Oeteldonk, complete with a frog emblem, and bakers sell the Bossche Bol, a chocolate-covered cream puff bigger than a tennis ball.
Source: 's-Hertogenbosch
