Hoorn. Hoorn is a city and municipality in the northwest of the Netherlands, in the province of North Holland. It is the largest town and the traditional capital of the region of West Friesland. Hoorn is located on the Markermeer, 20 kilometers east of Alkmaar and 35 kilometers north of Amsterdam. The municipality has just over 73,000 inhabitants and a land area of 20.38 km 2, making it the third most densely populated municipality in North Holland after Haarlem and Amsterdam. Apart from the city of Hoorn, the municipality includes the villages of Blokker and Zwaag, as well as parts of the hamlets De Bangert, De Hulk and Munnickaij. Hoorn is well known in the Netherlands for its rich history. The town acquired city rights in 1357 and flourished during the Dutch Golden Age. In this period, Hoorn developed into a prosperous port city, being home to one of the six chambers of the Dutch East India Company. Towards the end of the eighteenth century, however, it started to become increasingly more difficult for Hoorn to keep competing with nearby Amsterdam. Ultimately, it lost its function as port city and became a regional center of trade, mainly serving the smaller villages of West Friesland. Nowadays, Hoorn is a city with modern residential areas and a historic city center that, due to its proximity to Amsterdam, is sometimes considered to be part of the Randstad metropolitan area. Cape Horn and the Hoorn Islands were both named after this city. The origin of the name Hoorn-in archaic spelling Hoern, Horne or Hoirn-is surrounded in myths. According to old Frisian legends, the name comes from Hornus, a bastard son of King Redbad and brother of Aldgillis II, who presumably founded the city in 719 and named it after himself. A different theory claims that the name was derived from a sign depicting a post horn, which hung from one of the taverns established by brewers from Hamburg in the early fourteenth century. According to Hadrianus Junius, the name could also be a reference to the city's horn-shaped port. Others believed that the name was derived from damphoorn, a weed with a hollow stem that grew in the area at the time of the city's establishment. The chronicler Theodorus Velius rejects this theory as well as the assertion that the name comes from Dampterhorn, which was thought to be the only remaining neighborhood of the flooded village of Dampten. One of the earliest mentions of Hoorn is found in a letter which states that in 1303, a merchant from Bruges was imprisoned in West Friesland near a place called Hornicwed. This phrase-although it is uncertain whether it actually refers to Hoorn-is a compound of the Middle Dutch words hornic, meaning corner, and wed, meaning shallow water. It is likely that the name Hoorn was indeed derived from Middle Dutch hornic, or simply horn, and that the city was named for its location in a sharp bight of Lake Flevo. In the beginning of the eighth century, the threat of Viking raids led to unrest in the Frisian Kingdom, causing many people to leave their hometowns and settle elsewhere. Following this example, Hornus-a bastard son of Redbad-allegedly moved westward along with his companions and, in 719, built a settlement west of the river Vlie, which he named after himself. This legendary settlement did not exist for long, as it burnt down only a few years later. In the Late Middle Ages, the site of present-day Hoorn was a swampy area that was not at all suitable for agriculture, as opposed to the more fertile inland. Here, overproduction of dairy products led to the establishment of a marketplace within the domain of Zwaag, where excesses could be traded for other goods. This marketplace was located near a sluice in the river Gouw, which was the most convenient passage into the Zuiderzee for the surrounding villages.