In the course of the sixteenth century—the starting point of this study—Amsterdam already had a history of retail trade dating back several centuries. Little is known about shops in this period, but we are able to establish some rough outlines. These form the background to the situation in the sixteenth century, when the source material allows us to sketch a picture of shops and shopping in Amsterdam for the first time.

Historical background

With the construction of a dam on the Amstel river in the thirteenth century, a number of pre-urban sites on both sides of the river were connected, transforming the nature of the young settlement. The dam acted as a barrier to shipping between the catchment basin of the Amstel and the external waters of the IJ and Zuiderzee, meaning that goods had to be transferred. Carters and porters were needed for this, but trans-shipment points such as these were also typically places where artisans and merchants made a living; for when the vessels came to a temporary halt and people came together, there was business to be done. There would also have been fishermen and fish traders at the settlement on the Amstel and the IJ, of course, and there would have been farmers, too, although the settlement's low-lying position in a marshy river delta made the surroundings rather unsuitable for farming.