Haarlem sits on a strandwal, a long beach ridge of sand that runs north and south parallel to the coast, just high enough to stay dry while the polders sink behind it. The Counts of Holland made this their residence by the twelfth century. In 1219 the city's knights returned from the Fifth Crusade with a claim to have helped capture the Egyptian port of Damietta, and the Count rewarded them with the right to bear his sword and cross on the city arms. City rights followed in 1245. The medieval city was square because the planners thought ancient Jerusalem had been square, and they wanted Haarlem to echo it. Fire kept burning the wooden buildings down. The Black Death of 1381 killed roughly half the population. Each time the city rebuilt fast, a sign of how rich it had already become from tolls collected on travelers passing on the road between Leiden and Alkmaar.

After the siege the city's leaders made a decision that shaped the Golden Age. To rebuild, they would welcome anyone, Catholic or Protestant, who brought a skill. Flemish weavers and French Huguenots arrived in numbers. By 1622 the population had climbed from 18,000 to roughly 40,000, and at one point more than half of all Haarlemmers had been born in Flanders. The city's linen and silk became famous across Europe. Beer was the other engine. Around 1620, Haarlem had nearly a hundred breweries, drawing fresh water in barrels along the Brouwersvaart canal from the clean dune wells west of town. By 1820 every brewery was gone, killed by competition and decline, but in 1994 a foundation revived old Haarlem recipes under the Jopen label and opened a brewery in a converted church called the Jopenkerk. Then there were the tulips. From the 1630s onward, Haarlem was the center of the Dutch bulb trade, and during the Tulipmania of 1637 it was here that the most outrageous prices were paid before the crash. The bulb fields still stretch south of the city, and in spring the trains from Leiden to Haarlem run through colored stripes of red, yellow, and pink that you can see from low aircraft.

The Golden Age made Haarlem an artistic capital second only to Amsterdam. Frans Hals painted his loose, laughing portraits here. Jacob van Ruisdael painted the wide low skies and the bleaching fields outside town. Pieter Saenredam painted the cool white interiors of the Grote Kerk again and again. The architect Lieven de Key gave the city its limestone Vleeshal and the elegant brick facades of the Grote Markt. The town also fought a long, mostly losing battle to be remembered as the birthplace of printing. A statue of Laurens Janszoon Coster stands on the Grote Markt, and Haarlem schoolchildren were taught well into the twentieth century that Lau, not Gutenberg, had invented movable type. The scholarly consensus has long since settled the question against him, but the legend produced some of the finest Dutch history books of the seventeenth century, all printed in Haarlem: Hadrianus Junius on the Batavians, Karel van Mander on the painters, Petrus Scriverius on the medieval past.

The twentieth century brought Haarlem suburban quiet and then sudden cruelty. In 1944, the Germans evacuated parts of north Haarlem and built a thick black defensive wall called the Mauer-muur through the south. Gas ran for two hours a day. Electricity stopped in October. The family of Corrie ten Boom was arrested for hiding Jews and resistance fighters; the watchmaker's shop on the Barteljorisstraat is now a museum. The resistance fighter Hannie Schaft, twenty-four years old, was captured and executed by the Germans just three weeks before liberation. Most Haarlem Jews were deported and did not return. During the Hunger Winter of 1944-45, Haarlemmers survived by eating tulip bulbs stored in the sandy sheds south of the city. The bulbs had built the Golden Age and now they kept people alive. After the war the heavy industry left for Amsterdam, but the medieval core that had survived seven months of Spanish siege also survived the war, and walking the streets behind the Grote Kerk today is walking among buildings that were old before the Pilgrims sailed.