Willem van Focquenbroch's seventeenth-century verse about the untranslatability of Amsterdam's wealth into welfare is spiked with dark satire and raging bitterness. Yet, these are also the words of a poet who bore witness, albeit grudgingly, to the abundant affluence that the city came to exhibit in his time. Fortune had smiled on seventeenthcentury Amsterdam as never before, and prosperity had raged in this city like an obstinate tenant who refused to vacate until the century had passed. Her affluence owed much to her pre-eminent position in international trade, a fact vigorously endorsed by various forms of cultural expression in the period. She was represented in painting, poetry and print as the triumphant lady who wore her prosperity with a nonchalant air and easy modesty even as she was mobbed by hawkers from the world over eager to win her approval for the wares that they brought with them. This constituted the subject of the pediment of the city town hall in the period and Jan Vos set this image in verse in his poem Vergrooting van Amsterdam when he wrote:

Like Jan Vos, foreign visitors to Amsterdam acknowledged the role that the city's unparalleled enterprise and mercantilism played in transforming her into the foremost trading post in Europe. “For their shipping, trafficke and commerce by sea, I conceave no place in the world comes near itt,” wrote the Englishman Peter Mundy whose travels brought him to the Dutch Republic in 1640. Observing the character of Dutch trade, he surmised that her enterprise emerged from the deft execution of her role as middle man in the international purchase and sale of commodities.

That her seventeenth-century commerce took her merchants beyond her traditional engagement in the Baltic trade to the Levant, the East and West Indies was not the only indicator that the Dutch Republic's much lauded “Golden Age” had begun.