Column | Would William of Orange have seen this?

Sometimes you have a new thought. I don’t mean that you learn something you didn’t know yet, René van Stipriaans Travel book of William of Orange teeming with facts I didn’t know. But I mean this: I was standing at the church in Zeerijp, a fourteenth-century large brick church, and I wondered: would William of Orange have seen this church with his own eyes?

That could be.

I now know for sure about the church in Appingedam – after all, Orange was there, as a twelve-year-old boy, and that church was already there then. Other than that, there cannot be much left of the town as he saw it.

All the churches in Groningen were already there – which places did Mary of Hungary and her enormous entourage travel through in 1545? Now I would suddenly like to know that exactly, much more precisely than that light-hearted arrow on an illustration in the book makes clear, which points from Appingedam to Leeuwarden.

For some reason it is extremely attractive to know which church buildings the eyes of Orange rested on. The twelve-year-old eyes of a boy in an uncomfortably jolting carriage. Maybe he barely looked outside. Perhaps he was allowed to go on horseback every now and then and was busier with riding and with his company than with those churches of ours. What could you even think in such a rotten, uncomfortable car or on horseback on poorly passable roads through swampy areas that were often flooded? Perhaps at most, people had been very wise to build residential mounds centuries and centuries before. The mounds with their villages and their churches must have been much more islands and traffic islands above the land then than they are now.

Why is it such an attractive idea that William of Orange saw a certain church that I can now see too? And especially when it concerns a small church, in a village – it is certain that he saw the A-kerk in the city of Groningen, or later the Martini Tower, but that does not move me. Those buildings are too widely visible.

On the other hand, the thought that he would have seen the ornamental brickwork in the niches of the church in Leermens, and that that church would have seen the entire company passing by, somehow finds me exciting.

Churches do not look and they have no memory, I know that, but in a sense they are memory, all of our memories, just as old country roads are – paths not only through the landscape but also through time.

This book, I can’t get enough of it, I actually want many more details, fold-out maps, precise routes, comparisons of how the roads ran then and how they run now. Then I could walk to Middelstum and pass the church and imagine myself following in the footsteps of that enormous procession of nobles and soldiers and supplies and tent erectors and wine pourers and pillow bearers, and feel that although I am here now, in 2023, I is attached to a history, to lives that have disappeared but that have left countless traces, not only the large and well-known ones of political agreements and military achievements, but the invisible ones of an eye resting on a church wall, a hand that lowers a latch pushes, the sound of horses’ hooves over the uneven cobblestones, the swearing of people pulling a cart out of the mud.

I am all that too.