The name Thuredriht appears in records around 1120 and means, roughly, thoroughfare. Linguists once thought the suffix came from Latin trajectum, a ford, but in 1996 that etymology was rejected in favor of an older Germanic root meaning to pull or to drag. Dordrecht sat where ships had to be towed by rope between the Dubbel and the Merwede, and the place took its name from the work that was done there. Count William I of Holland granted city rights in 1220, making Dordrecht the oldest city in present-day South Holland. Geertruidenberg got rights first in the historical county, but Geertruidenberg now sits in North Brabant. By the late 1200s the city was a major market for wine, wood, and grain. The staple right granted in 1299 made it the choke point of regional trade. Everything coming up the rivers had to stop here first.

On the night of 18 and 19 November 1421, the Saint Elizabeth's Flood broke through dikes south of the city. Tradition held that more than ten thousand people died across the region. Recent research suggests the casualty figure in Dordrecht itself was probably fewer than two hundred, though the surrounding Grote Hollandse Waard polder lost villages, farmland, and lives at a scale that took decades to fully manifest. The lasting consequence for Dordrecht was geographical. The flood left the city perched on what is now called the Island of Dordt, bordered by the Oude Maas, the Beneden Merwede, the Nieuwe Merwede, the Hollands Diep, and the Dordtsche Kil. The city that had built its wealth on a river crossing now sat on an island created by a flood that had killed its neighbors.

In July 1572, four years into the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule, representatives of every Holland city except Amsterdam gathered in Dordrecht. The Watergeuzen sent William II de la Marck. The meeting, the Eerste Vrije Statenvergadering or Union of Dordrecht, was illegal. Only King Philip II or his stadtholder, the Duke of Alba, was permitted to call the States of Holland together. The delegates did it anyway. Over a few days in the Augustinian monastery still standing as het Hof, they denounced Philip II, recognized William of Orange as their rightful leader, promised him financial support, and declared freedom of religion across Holland. The meeting did not declare independence. That would not come formally until the Act of Abjuration in 1581. But it was the first time the rebellion had a coordinated leadership, a funding base, and a public face. The room where they met, the Statenzaal, still contains a stained glass window with the coats of arms of the twelve cities that were present.

From 13 November 1618 to 9 May 1619 the same city hosted a meeting of a very different kind. The Synod of Dordrecht convened to settle a theological dispute that had bled into politics and was threatening to tear the young Republic apart. The Remonstrants, followers of the theologian Jacobus Arminius, had published Five Articles in 1610 challenging core Calvinist doctrines on predestination and grace. The Contra-Remonstrants, led by Franciscus Gomarus, were ready to expel them. Delegates came from Reformed churches in Germany, Switzerland, and England. The synod heard the Remonstrants out, rejected their arguments, and produced the Canons of Dort: five sections affirming unconditional predestination, limited atonement, total depravity, irresistible grace, and the impossibility of falling from grace. The Canons, with the Belgic Confession and the Heidelberg Catechism, remain the doctrinal basis of the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands. Two hundred Remonstrant ministers were deposed. Eighty were banished. On 13 May 1619, a Remonstrant political leader was beheaded. The persecution did not stop until Prince Maurice died in 1625.

Dordrecht's economic dominance ended in the eighteenth century. The Voorne Canal in 1829 and the Nieuwe Waterweg in 1883 redirected ocean shipping toward Rotterdam, and the trade that had once been forced to stop at Dordrecht's quays no longer was. By 1910 Rotterdam was sending two hundred times as much cargo up the Rhine as Dordrecht did. What stayed was the culture. The medieval center holds more than 950 monuments, seven historic churches, and six museums. The Grote Kerk, built between 1285 and 1470, holds a 65-meter tower with a 67-bell carillon. The heaviest bell in the Netherlands, at 9,830 kilos, hangs in that tower. The Dordrechts Museum holds paintings by Aelbert Cuyp, the seventeenth-century master who painted Dordrecht's flat light better than anyone before or since. The city's nickname, according to its own folk tradition, is the Sheepheads, from a legend about two men who tried to smuggle a sheep through the city gate dressed as a man and were caught when it bleated. The local football club's logo includes a ram. The supporters chant about being the Dordtse schapenkoppen. There is even a cookie called the Schapenkop. The city has built a thousand-year tradition out of refusing to take itself too seriously, and out of remembering, with quiet stubbornness, that it was here first.