Geographically
In 1170 Holland’s physical shape was altered by flooding, a devastation that destroyed the land between North Holland and Friesland. Because of this the lake Almere now became an inner sea, as it was connected to the North Sea. Click here for a map of the land then.
After that, the Counts of Holland promoted land reclamation, pressed for the maintenance of waterways and dikes, and encouraged municipal development by granting trading privileges to the growing towns of the county.
There was no trace of Amsterdam, Rotterdam or The Hague in the first two centuries of the second millennium. Between AD 993 and 1299, the territory was known as the County of Holland. During the early 1200s, the children of Count Floris III of Holland purchased some land near Loosduinen and began building a house atop a dune adjacent to a small lake, called the ‘Court Pond’ today. The house was probably made of stone, but there were also wooden buildings nearby inhabited by servants, and stables for cattle, as well as defensive walls and probably a canal. The house and surroundings were called Haga (‘land surrounded by walls’), and later was renamed Haag.
His granchildren built part of the Royal Palace in Haga, which still stands today as the Knights Hall (Ridderzaal).
Click here for large pic.
Knight's Hall or Ridderzaal in 1655. Click on gray arrow on the right to see a photo from 2012.
Politically Holland originated in the early 12th century as a fief of the Holy Roman Empire and was ruled by a dynasty of counts that traced its origin to the 9th century. These nobles had reemerged in the 10th century after Viking devastation of the coastal area had ended, and they proceeded to expand their territory of present Noord-Holland northward, at the expense of the Frisians, and eastward and southward, which involved them in a series of wars with the bishops of Utrecht. The name Holland derives from the region around Dordrecht, which was known as Holtland (“Wooded Land”).
Dirk III, the third in the line of the early counts of Holland, conquered much of what is now Zuid-Holland from the bishops of Utrecht. He defeated their forces and an imperial army in 1018 at Vlaardingen, a fortification that he had erected to levy river tolls on traffic in the Meuse (Maas) River delta. Under Dirk’s descendants Holland reached its final frontiers by the 13th century, although it gained possession of Zeeland in 1323.
Geographically
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