Zuiderzee

Zuiderzee is the name of an extinct North Sea bay in the Netherlands. It was a shallow bay with an area of 5,000 km². The Zuiderzee connected with the Waddenzee and the West Frisian Islands with the North Sea. After the Afsluitdijk dam was completed in 1933. The sea bay became a dammed lake, for which the name IJsselmeer came into use. The surface area of the new lake has shrunk considerably.

History of Lake Zuiderzee

The Dutch defeat the Spanish fleet at the Battle of the Zuiderzee in 1573.
Already in classical times there was a body of water on this site, which Roman authors called Lacus Flevo. It was much smaller than its later form and its connection to the main sea was much closer; it may have been a complex of lakes, marshes and channels rather than a single lake.

Vliestroom marked with an arrow
Over time, these lakes gradually eroded their soft peaty shores and expanded (a process known as water wolfing). Part of this body of water was later called the Vlie;. It probably drained into the sea through the present-day Vliestroom Channel between the islands of Vlieland and Terschelling.

Disasters

The Marsdiep was once a river (Fluvium Maresdeop) that may have been the watershed of the Vlie. During the early medieval period this began to change as rising sea levels and storms began to erode the coastal areas. Which were mainly peat bogs. During this period the bay was referred to as Almere, indicating that it was still more of a lake, but by the 12th century the estuary and size of the bay had expanded considerably, especially after a catastrophic flood in 1282[5] broke through the barrier dunes at Texel. This disaster heralded the creation of Amsterdam at the south-western end of the bay. As the maritime traffic of Baltic trade could now visit.

An even more massive flood on the island of St Lucia occurred on 14 December 1287, when the sea walls broke during the storm, killing an estimated 50,000 to 80,000 people in the fifth largest flood in recorded history. It was around this time that the name ‚Zuiderzee‘ came into general use.

From the 15th century onwards. The size of this inland sea remained largely stable due to improvements in the dykes, but when storms pushed water from the North Sea into the bay. The Zuiderzee became a shifting cauldron of water that often led to flooding and loss of ships. On 18 November 1421, for example, a dam broke on the Zuiderzee, flooding 72 villages and killing about 10,000 people. This was the second flood at St. Elisabeth.

Between 1810 and 1813, the Netherlands was part of the First French Empire. In 1811, a department named Zuyderzée after the Zuiderzee was formed, whose territory roughly corresponded to the present-day provinces of North Holland and Utrecht.

In 1928, the Zuiderzee was the venue for the 6 and 8 metre sailing events at the Summer Olympics in Amsterdam.