Expenses

What was it spent on?

The Expenses (uitgeeff) section filled the next several hundred pages of the Treasurer's accounts. The total expenses were composed of ten Somma Grossa, themselves composed of Somma.

i - city clothing and salaries

  • pensionary and secretaries
  • city attorneys, doctors, and surgeons
  • camerbewaarders, messengers and gentlemen servants
  • clergymen
  • organists and clock ? (clockesheeder)
  • guards, drying rack watchers, bailiff of the Lakenhall
  • inspectors and night workers
  • gatekeepers of the City gates
  • captain of the civic guards, trumpeters, manager of the target range
  • Zoetemeer
  • women and faculty of the Latin schools
  • breadweighers

Leeuwenhoek's camerbewaarder salary was accounted for here along with a variety of other people who performed services for the city.

ii - ordinances of the mayors

The largest Somma Grossa every year. Most of it was payments of property taxes (verponding) going several times per month to the national tax collector (ontvanger generaal) from den Haag. Some of the rest went to the mayors for daily operational expenses. Leeuwenhoek had several relatives and friends who regularly received amounts from this category of expense for services such as painting city property, brother-in-law Jan de Molijn, and delivering baskets, cousin Lambrecht.

On the chart below, this Somma Grossa is the bright red line driving the budget. After so much was sent to den Haag, what was left for Delft?

iii - inner and outer harbormasters

Delft's trade with the outside world was crucial to its prosperity. Keeping the waterways accessible was a neverending task, and one of the most important that the City performed for its burgers.

iiii - Delfshaven

See note above.

v - amount to passed to the next treasurer

This Somma Gross introduced had a corresponding Somma Grossa on the expenses side. It rose steadily through the years.

vi - renten int restantbouck

for the various annuities due from the City  

vii - losrenten met aflossinge van de vaste renten

Not in every Reekening volume.

viii - life annuities on the Weescamer

For the annuities by the City drawn on the Weescamer. This Somma Grossa was divided into monthly Somma.

ix - life annuities

Delft paid hundreds of people small sums of money on the annuities they had bought years earlier. This debt service was a small percentage of Delft's expenses. This Somma Grossa was divided into monthly Somma.

x - for writing the treasurer's account book

Every volume of the Reekeningbouck series concludes with a one- or two-page section paying the clerks and messengers who compiled it from the ongoing accounts of revenues (Maanbouck) and expenses (Uitgeeffbouck).