The Capture of Damiate

Two crocodiles in the foreground tell you this river is the Nile. The city is Damietta in Egypt, which crusaders captured in 1219, and Haarlem had its own story about that siege. In the legend, a ship from Haarlem, fitted with a saw on its bow, cut through the chain that barred the harbour and opened the way for the attack. Historians treat the tale as fiction, and an eyewitness account of the crusade gives Haarlem no such part. In the 1620s the town still told it with pride. Haarlem's Calivermen, the civic guard company of arquebusiers, commissioned this canvas from Cornelis Claesz van Wieringen, a local painter of ships and sea battles, some 400 years after the event. Two small bells in the tower of the town's great church of Saint Bavo, named the damiaatjes after the siege, are still rung every evening between nine and half past nine.