Around 768, an English missionary named Lebuinus crossed the IJssel and built a wooden church on the east bank. Four years later, in January 772, a Saxon raiding party sacked and burned it. Charlemagne used the attack as the trigger for his first punitive war against the Saxons - a campaign in which his forces destroyed the Irminsul, the great sacred tree of Saxon religion that stood somewhere near modern Paderborn. The chain of events is striking: a small wooden church in a riverside village, burned by raiders, becomes the pretext that ends a Germanic religion. Deventer is where that thread begins. By 882 the Vikings had also paid a visit, looting and burning the place; the rebuilt town wrapped itself in an earthen wall whose remains still surface in a street called the Stenen Wal.

City rights came in 956. Stone walls replaced earth. Between 1000 and 1500, Deventer's harbor on the IJssel could handle large ships, and the city grew rich enough to join the Hanseatic League and trade across the Baltic. One of its specialties was stockfish - dried haddock and cod from Norway - and Deventer's citizens have been called Deventer Stokvis ever since. In the 15th century the city operated a common mint, striking coins for the three IJssel cities of Deventer, Zwolle, and Kampen. Walk the Brink, the central market square, and you stand on stones where merchants once argued the price of salt cod from Bergen and cloth from Flanders. Markets still happen here every Friday and Saturday, as they have for centuries.

In 1340, a son was born to a Deventer patrician family. He studied at Paris and Cologne, gathered honors, then in his thirties walked away from all of it. Geert Groote founded the Brethren of the Common Life here - a community of devout men and women who lived simply, copied books by hand, taught children, and insisted that ordinary people could lead a serious spiritual life without taking monastic vows. The movement they called the Devotio Moderna spread across the Low Countries and into Germany. Among the minds it shaped were Thomas a Kempis, whose Imitation of Christ became one of the most-read books in Christian history, and a young scholar named Desiderius Erasmus, who attended Deventer's Latin School from 1475 to 1484. The press arrived early too - by 1477 Deventer was one of the first cities in the Netherlands to have one.

The Bergkwartier - the Mountain Quarter - is a misnomer in a country famously without mountains. The hill it climbs is an old river dune, just high enough to lift the Bergkerk above the rest of the town. The neighborhood's narrow lanes hold houses that have been continuously occupied since the late Middle Ages. Down on the Brink stands the Waag, the 1550 weighing house, with a large copper kettle that hung outside for centuries. Local tradition says a counterfeiter was once boiled to death in it; the holes in its side are said to be musket shot from Napoleon's troops around 1809. Across the square, the Bussink Koekhuisje still sells Deventer Koek - a dense, fragrant honey cake the city has been baking for more than five hundred years. The nickname stuck: koekstad, cake city.

Deventer's medieval center survived World War II largely by luck. The railway bridge over the IJssel was a critical link on the Amsterdam-to-Osnabrück line that fed German traffic to Berlin and Hamburg, and Allied bombers tried again and again to take it out. Steel proved hard to hit. Many bombs skipped into the river or fell on the town. The three worst raids - October 28, 1944; December 15, 1944; and February 6, 1945 - killed 35, 33, and 61 people respectively. After the last raid, a fire from the bombing reached both a German army food warehouse and a thirteenth-century retirement home in the city center. The occupying forces allowed firefighters to save only the warehouse. More than twenty elderly residents died in the flames. The poet Etty Hillesum had lived in Deventer before being deported to Auschwitz, where she was killed in 1943. Today the city still holds its old shape. Every December, the Dickens Festival fills the lanes around the Bergkerk with top hats and gaslight; in August, Europe's largest book fair takes over the streets. The Athenaeum library, founded in 1560, is still lending books.