The story of the delta before the Dutch nation is somewhat different from the later history of the Netherlands. That later history, however, cannot be understood without knowledge of what went before. The Dutch Republic did not emerge in a single instant; it was made possible by earlier developments, and the culture and society of early modern times was heavily indebted to those of the Middle Ages. We have to start our story even further back, with the advent of the Romans. They came to the region where the rivers Rhine, Maas and Scheldt reached the sea during the first century BCE. They felt far away from home. One of them, the historian Tacitus, remarked in the first century CE that the inhabitants of the delta, as this region can best be called, seemed to be half-man and half-fish. The land ran out here to make place for the sea, and with the land all that a Roman might call “civilization” came to an end. More than a thousand years later, when Hartbert, the bishop of Utrecht, came to the coastal abbey of Egmond in 1134 to dedicate its new church to saint Adalbert, he felt he had arrived “at the extreme margin of the earth.”

In the long first millennium of our era the delta of the Rhine and its hinterland was a border region between the most important political spheres of influence of the day and their neighbors. Because it seems to be an almost universal human inclination to identify spheres of influence with the dominant civilizations of the people who live in them, the region may with some justification be thought to have been situated in the periphery of civilization. This did not mean, however, that the inhabitants of the delta experienced disadvantages due to their marginal situation. Quite the contrary. They participated in the Mediterranean civilization of Rome, and Batavian legionaries were thoroughly Romanized. Later, they shared in the civilization of the Franks, who, after the departure of the Romans, increased their sphere of influence in these parts. At the same time, they shared in the proceeds of Frisian trade. In the eighth and ninth centuries, when they definitively became part of Christian civilization, some continued to do things in their own ways.