Zuiderzee

From the Indo-European root *plew- "flow",[4][5] the name was transmitted by the Roman geographer Pomponius Mela in describing this region.

He writes: "The northern branch of the Rhine widens as Lake Flevo, and encloses an island of the same name, and then as a normal river flows to the sea".

Other sources rather speak of Flevum, which could be related to today's Vlie (Vliestroom), i.e. the seaway between the Dutch islands of Vlieland and Terschelling.

[citation needed] In the second half of the twentieth century the Flevopolders and a new province, Flevoland, took the name of the body of water which lay there long ago.

Some part of this area of water was later called the Vlie; it probably flowed into the sea through what is now the Vliestroom channel between the islands of Vlieland and Terschelling.

During the early Middle Ages this began to change as rising sea levels and storms started to eat away at the coastal areas which consisted mainly of peatlands.

The erosion was stopped to the south and east by the high sandy shores of Gooi, Veluwe, Voorst, and Gasterland in the provinces of Utrecht, Gelderland, Overysel, and Friesland respectively.

[citation needed] The process of creating polders had developed to a point by 1667 that the damming of the Zuiderzee was proposed, although a feasible method did not appear until the 20th century.

A département was formed in 1811 and named as Zuyderzée after the Zuiderzee, whose territory roughly corresponded to the present provinces of North Holland and Utrecht.

Large areas of land, mainly for agricultural use, were subsequently reclaimed from the water through the construction of polders with dams, pumping, and other hydrological technology.

These towns traded at first with ports on the Baltic Sea, in England, and in the Hanseatic League, but later also with the rest of the world when the Netherlands established its colonial empire.

When that lucrative trade diminished, most of the towns fell back on fishing and some industry until the 20th century when tourism became the major source of income.