The Disaster Years

On the evening of the first of August 1674 a tornado crossed Utrecht and needed a quarter of an hour to leave the city unrecognisable. Roofs came off, facades went down into the street, trees came out of the ground with their roots, and the spires of the Pieterskerk and the Jacobi tower snapped like matchsticks. Here, on the spot where you are now looking across an empty space, the nave of the cathedral collapsed, the nave you heard about at the tower that was never vaulted.

Weeks later the rubble was still lying there, because repairs cost money and there was none left. Two years earlier the French had emptied the city, and when they finally withdrew they demanded another four hundred and fifty thousand guilders while Utrecht had two hundred and fifty thousand. For the difference they took fourteen inhabitants with them as hostages.

The strangest part came afterwards. While the city was celebrating the occupier's departure, the army of the Republic marched in with the accusation that the people of Utrecht had surrendered too easily, and for months the city was not allowed a voice in the Republic it had helped to found.

The ruin stayed where it was until well into the nineteenth century. We now walk along the Domstraat to the Janskerkhof, where you will hear who really held power in this city.