Qualla: Polanen Castle

Polanen Castle: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit AnonymousUnknown author, Public domain. In the night of 22-23 September 1392, the mistress of the Count of Holland - a young noblewoman named Aleid van Poelgeest - was hacked to death in a street in The Hague. Among the chief suspects was Philip II, Lord of Polanen. He fled the county. Two years later, in 1394, county accounts record a mason being paid for ten weeks of breaking bricks out of Polanen Castle. Another contractor was paid for twenty-eight days of filling in the moats and carting the medieval brickwork up the road to The Hague for reuse. The castle that vanished into the count's new building projects had been an ancestral seat - the seat of the family from whom, four generations later, the Counts of Nassau would inherit their Dutch fortune.

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Image: AnonymousUnknown author | Public domain

Polanen Castle: A Tower in the Dunes

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gerard Dukker, CC BY-SA 4.0. The fief was granted on 6 November 1295. Floris V, Count of Holland - the count who would be murdered by his own nobles a year later - handed the land at Polanen, just outside the village of Monster on the South Holland coast, to a younger man of the Van Duvenvoorde family named ...

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Image: Gerard Dukker | CC BY-SA 4.0

Polanen Castle: The Polanen Line

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit No machine-readable author provided. Jensbn~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 2.5. Philips's son John was the family's making. He acquired fiefs across the dunes near Monster, took the surname Van Polanen by 1305, and rose to become a counselor of Count William III. The career outgrew the house. In 1320 John was granted Nieuwendoorn Castle, a proper full-sized ...

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Image: No machine-readable author provided. Jensbn~commonswiki assumed (based on copyright claims). | CC BY-SA 2.5

Polanen Castle: The Siege of 1351

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit CC BY-SA 3.0. When William V seized Dordrecht in April 1351 and turned on the castles of his Hook enemies, Polanen was on the list. The young count had already taken Rosenburg near Voorschoten and Binckhorst near The Hague. On 1 June 1351 the battering ram that had been used at Rosenburg was c...

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Image: CC BY-SA 3.0

Polanen Castle: The Mistress and the Mason

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Michiel1972, CC BY-SA 4.0. What finally killed Polanen Castle was not a war but a murder. Aleid van Poelgeest was the mistress of Count Albert of Bavaria, who ruled Holland as regent and then count from 1358 onward. She was killed in The Hague in September 1392, a political assassination by enemies of her ...

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Image: Michiel1972 | CC BY-SA 4.0