Introduction

Taking a long-term historical perspective helpfully allows us to step away from these urgent debates to offer critical analysis that sees beyond the rhetoric. It helps us distinguish between short-term anxieties and long-term outcomes. It permits us to explore multiple perspectives that contemporaries could not see at the time. And it provides us with an emotional distance that permits us to sympathize with people whose values and culture we do not share as well as to critique those whose heritage we might cherish. As historians, we did not set about a research project in the hopes that we might offer policy suggestions for today. But we do hope that our readers might find in the history of sixteenth-century refugees some wisdom or insight that helps them better navigate their world.

As the historian Nicholas Terpstra has demonstrated, religious refugees first became a mass phenomenon in Europe during the sixteenth century, as a quest for religious purity fueled widespread projects to purge ideas and people that threatened that vision.1 Terpstra, Religious Refugees. Terpstra’s synthetic approach was made possible by the work of other scholars whose interest has centered on Reformation-era refugees, even as he has inspired still more research on related topics.2 For a few English-language examples, see Janssen, Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile; Muylaert, Shaping the Stranger Churches; Lachenicht, “Refugees”; Müller, Exile Memories; Corens, Confessional Mobility; Ó hAnnracháin, Confessionalism and Mobility. Previously, historians primarily stressed the exile experiences faced by members of the Jewish diaspora or the movement often known as International Calvinism.3 Schilling, “Christliche und jüdische Minderheitengemeinden.” But all this recent scholarship has made it clear that the early modern era saw increased refugee movements among Muslims, Catholics, Lutherans, Anabaptists, and others.4 For an overview, see Jesse Spohnholz, “Refugees,” in Holder, John Calvin in Context, 147–54. There can be no doubt of the massive demographic, cultural, economic, and intellectual impact of refugees in early modern Europe. Major host cities became centers of activism for energized religious reformers. Reformed migrants brought new skills, trade contacts, and manufacturing techniques to host communities, bolstering lagging economies. Refugee centers also became major disseminators of publications, which could then be smuggled back home. Famous religious exiles penned powerful writings that changed minds and shifted religious worldviews across the continent. Refugees from Europe also spilled into North Africa and the emerging Atlantic world, shaping the religious cultures of the Ottoman Empire and colonies in the Americas.

Besides the benefit of providing critical reflection on issues of our own day, this attention to the history of Reformation-era refugees has also offered contributions to scholarship on the early modern era. First, it helps historians see beyond processes of state building, decentering political elites and instead centering those marginalized by their efforts to consolidate authority. Because refugees moved across jurisdictions, it also provides a framework to follow historians’ subjects across archival collections, which are not neutral repositories of evidence, but themselves ideological constructions.5 See Corens, Peters, and Walsham, Social History of the Archive. Those advantages, of course, also bring enormous challenges for historians. In our case, conducting research capable of crossing the same boundaries that Reformation-era refugees crossed required considerable teamwork and cooperation among a group of scholars.

One of the largest and most dramatic cases of forced migrations of refugees during the Reformation era was sparked by religious persecution in the Low Countries, that assortment of territories under the rule of Charles V and, beginning in 1555, his son Philip II. In the 1540s, Charles stepped up his campaign against religious dissenters. Authorities reacted with measures to check the influence of all dissenting movements and with persecutions. As pressure on dissenters mounted, by the mid-1550s, Reformed Protestantism was also becoming a prominent dissenting Christian movement in the territories. Many members of these new Reformed churches fled the Habsburg Netherlands altogether. Persecution and the violence of the civil war that broke out in 1566–68 dramatically increased these outmigrations of refugees.6 Kooi, Reformation, 110–21. Tens of thousands of Protestants escaped to England and the Holy Roman Empire. When Protestant-allied rebels secured victories in the provinces of Holland and Zeeland, in the summer of 1572, they began establishing a new independent government, with the grand nobleman William of Orange as its leading figure. But war continued. Crackdowns on heretics, sedition, and the misery of the war in the Habsburg-controlled south led to continued flows of migrations. In the late 1570s, the rebels made gains in the southern provinces of Brabant and Flanders, conquering large cities. In 1581, the allied rebel-led lands abjured the authority of King Philip II and established the United Provinces of the Netherlands, a political and military alliance that formed the basis of what would become the Dutch Republic. But a string of military victories by the general Alexander Farnese starting in the early 1580s led to Habsburg consolidation in the southern Netherlands. Habsburg forces began re-Catholicizing Brabant and Flanders, including the great trade city of Antwerp after its fall in 1585. New flows of Reformed refugees escaped, some for the independent United Provinces in the north, where the Dutch Reformed Church becomes the public church, but many also fled to England and the Holy Roman Empire.

In the historiography of Reformed Protestantism, an influential argument presented by Heiko Oberman, and later repeated by Heinz Schilling, has suggested that Calvinism offered a theological system (Eine Exulantentheologie) that bolstered the faith of beleaguered Reformed exiles.7 Oberman, “‘Europa Afflica’”; Heinz Schilling, “Peregrini und Schiffchen Gottes: Flüchtlingserfahrung und Exulantentheologie des frühneuzeitlichen Calvinismus,” in Reiss and Witt, Calvinismus, 160–68. Historians following Oberman’s argument have suggested that, bound together by the Word of God and free to work unhindered by state authority, Reformed Protestants established institutions and patterns of religious life that allowed them to live out their ideology in its most perfected form.8 H. J. Selderhuis and P. Nissen, “De zestiende eeuw,” in Selderhuis ed., Handboek Nederlandse Kerkgeschiedenis, 287. Calvinism’s doctrines of providence and predestination comforted refugees in the face of displacement.9 Grell, Brethren in Christ. Calvinists’ stress on strict church discipline also provided a well-regulated model capable of operating without state sponsorship.10 Robert Kingdom, “International Calvinism,” in Brady, Oberman, and Tracy, Handbook of European History, 2:229–45; Klueting, “Obrigkeitsfreie reformierte Flüchtlingsgemeinden.” In short, Calvinism’s intellectual, social, and institutional characteristics allowed it not only to survive but even thrive in the conditions of exile.11 Pettegree, Emden.

Many historians of the Dutch Reformation have used this argument to suggest that Dutch Reformed refugees’ experiences fleeing Habsburg persecution and war galvanized their movement into a doctrinally steadfast and well-disciplined force.12 This paragraph paraphrases from Spohnholz and Van Veen, “Disputed Origins.” Cast off from their homes, according to this view, refugees formed isolated communities of like-minded believers who developed an even deeper commitment to their cause. The trauma of persecution and exile, historians have suggested, explain why Dutch Reformed Protestants embraced volunteeristic and confessionalized Calvinism, and rejected any governmental oversight in the Dutch Republic. While seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historical reflections offered by sympathetic coreligionists sometimes bemoaned the sufferings of sixteenth-century Dutch Reformed refugees, they did not see them as possessing any distinct ideas, behaviors, or influence, compared to other Protestants.13 Cleyn, Dank-offer, 48. In the nineteenth century, though, an early version of what would become Oberman’s exile narrative became instrumentalized by advocates of Neo-Calvinism, who saw the origins of liberty and freedom in the sixteenth-century Reformed refugees, which they understood as expressed through the refugees’ commitment to the Reformed confession and their supposed independence from governmental interference.14 For example, Abraham Kuyper, “De eeredienst der Hervormde kerk in de zamenstelling van haar kerkboek,” in Ter Haar and Moll, Geschiedenis der christelijke kerk, 80. Their opponents used the same narrative to explain Calvinism as a foreign intrusion trying to impose dogmatic extremism on an otherwise moderate and peace-loving Dutch population.15 For example, Reitsma, Geschiedenis, 99–133, 159–60, 195–98, 432–33. More recent historians have similarly applied elements of this exile narrative to explain why the Dutch Reformed Church emerged as orthodox Calvinist and staunchly opposed to any governmental oversight.16 Geyl, Revolt, 110; Bremmer, Reformatie en rebellie, 173; Van Gelder, Revolutionnaire Reformatie; Pettegree, “Politics of Toleration,” 187–88; Kooi, Calvinists and Catholics, 181–96; Judith Pollmann, “Freiwillige Religion in einer ‘öffentlichen’ Kirche: Die Anziehungskraft des Calvinimus in der Niederländischen Republik,” in Reiss and Witt, Calvinismus, 178–79.

This narrative has been reinforced by more politically centered stories about the civil war raging in the Netherlands. A combination of Habsburg-sponsored warnings against the influence of foreigners combined with William of Orange’s calls for refugee communities to support his revolt have led many historians to portray the Reformed refugee communities as a key backbone of anti-Habsburg resistance. In this version, refugees took a central place in the fragile alliance developing between Orange (whose commitment to the Reformed cause was tepid at best) and zealous Reformed preachers that was central for politics in the new United Provinces. Scholars have stressed, for instance, that members of these refugee communities collected money to support Orange’s campaigns and even joined the rebel troops as soldiers. In this vision, refugees look like radicals on two fronts, seeking to topple both the political and religious status quo in the Catholic, Habsburg-ruled Low Countries, with violence if necessary. According to this version of events, the return of former exiles posed a serious threat to Habsburg order.17 Van Nierop, Het foute Amsterdam, 14. For refugees’ influence on Amsterdam, see Deen, Publiek debat en propaganda, 105–36. Exiles thus have often been treated as being filled orthodox zeal, as uncompromising, militant and ready to fight for what they believed.18 Van Stipriaan, De Zwijger, 350–53; Fagel and Pollmann, 1572, 48–53, 88; De Boer, “De verliezers van de opstand,” 20–21. Sometimes, historians even instrumentalized exile as a self-evident catalyst for radicalization.

This version of events is rooted in facts. From 1568, Orange did make numerous attempts to convince the refugee communities to support his revolt. There were examples of returning refugees who supported rebel troops. Some former refugees did become political leaders in the United Provinces and zealous promoters of Reformed orthodoxy. But these facts do not prove that there existed a specific mindset or any shared political and religious commitment among the refugees. It could well be that Orange’s appeals were only so frequent because they were proving so unsuccessful. Many refugees had strong reasons to distance themselves from the rebels. It turns out, many refugee communities were more interested in their own survival than in supporting an anti-Habsburg revolt or building a Reformed church in the “fatherland.”19 Gorter, Gereformeerde Migranten, 173–76. Many refugees also proved reluctant to support armed insurrection and refused to support the use of violence.20 Mout, “Armed Resistance and Calvinism”; Muylaert, Shaping the Stranger Churches, 154–94. Experiences abroad might have encouraged some to embrace orthodox Calvinism, but many refugees also had strong reasons to compromise on matters of belief and worship. After all, in order to survive abroad, they often learned to live alongside Lutherans and Catholics, to moderate their religious positions, and even to worship alongside people of different faiths.

The picture of Calvinists radicalized in exile stands in remarkable contrast to historical characterizations of the origins and nature of religious toleration in the Dutch Republic. A long scholarly tradition, going back to the seventeenth century, but crystalizing in the nineteenth century into a powerful Romantic nationalist version, emphasized that religious toleration reflected the Dutch national character.21 Benjamin J. Kaplan, “’Dutch’ Religious Tolerance: Celebration and Revision,” in Hsia and Van Nierop, Calvinism and Religious Toleration, 8–26. These arguments relied on circular logic that explained little. By contrast, recent research has suggested that a mixture of religious, political, economic, and social factors explains religious pluralism in the Republic.22 Spohnholz, “Confessional Coexistence”; Frijhoff, Embodied Belief; Christine Kooi, Calvinists and Catholics; Maarten Prak, “The Politics of Intolerance: Citizenship and Religion in the Dutch Republic (Seventeenth to Eighteenth Centuries),” in Hsia and Van Nierop, Calvinism and Religious Toleration, 159–75. However, these newer histories of confessional coexistence have little to say about the massive migrations of Dutch Protestants fleeing to the Holy Roman Empire and England.23 More attention has been given to the migration of Southern Netherlanders northward after 1585. Briels, Zuidnederlanders in de Republiek. As Judith Pollmann has pointed out, non-Dutch historians made important contributions recognizing the international characteristics of the Dutch Revolt. Pollmann, “Internationalisering en de Nederlandse Opstand.” When refugees do appear, often histories only briefly instrumentalize the exile narrative presented above, as a way of explaining the confessionalized character of the Dutch Reformed Church.24 Kooi, Liberty and Religion, 10. Other historians of the early Dutch Republic are unconcerned with these migrations, often because they limit their research to municipal or state government archives and thus focus their attention on tracing people’s activities within—not across—political boundaries.25 For one excellent example, see Hibben, Gouda in Revolt. This book includes a discussion of Herman Herberts’s role in Gouda starting in 1582 but does not mention Herbert’s role in serving simultaneum and multiconfessional churches in the Holy Roman Empire in the 1560s and 1570s. We believe that there is much to be gained by moving across political boundaries, both to compare situations in each but also to understand how people interacted between and moved among different locations.26 Corpis, Crossing the Boundaries of Belief; Scholz, Borders; Schmale, “Grenze”; Soen et al., Transregional Reformations; De Ridder et al., Transregional Territories; Corens, Confessional Mobility.

This book explores the broad range of experiences in Dutch-speaking Reformed refugee communities in the Holy Roman Empire during the second half of the sixteenth century, and assesses their impact on the religious culture of the Dutch Republic. It focuses especially on eleven refugee communities that fall into three basic categories: (1) free imperial cities (Reichstädte) with Lutheran or Catholic majorities, (2) small towns in the confessionally mixed borderlands duchy of Cleves, and (3) one Dutch Reformed colony in the Electoral Palatinate. The first group—Cologne, Aachen, and Frankfurt—is distinguished by shared economic and constitutional features. As imperial cities, their magistrates were largely free to shape local policies (including the terms of the Netherlanders’ stay) within the confines of imperial law. They were also large trade cities with significant long-distance economic connections, including with the Low Countries. Finally, the Reformed were a confessional minority in each of these cities, and they (largely) organized separate congregations from those of their German hosts.

The second group—towns in Cleves—includes the medium-sized territorial city of Wesel as well as smaller towns within its orbit, including Emmerich, Goch, Gennep, Kalkar, Rees, and Xanten. The politics of the duchy of Cleves were marked by the confessional ambiguity—even some spiritualist leanings—of Duke Wilhelm of the United Territories of Jülich-Cleves-Mark-Berg (r.1539–1592) before 1567 as well as by the inability of the duke’s court to enforce obedience to the Roman Church, even despite his advisors’ earnest attempts after 1567.27 To avoid confusion, in this book we use the English convention of spelling the duchy “Cleves,” while using the German language “Kleve” to refer to the town of the same name. In Wesel, all Dutch immigrants were required to join the officially Lutheran (but in practice multiconfessional) city parishes. While this arrangement caused some conflict, this “comprehension church” generally functioned without significant violence through the high period of refugees.28 On the concept of comprehension, Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 127–43. While some of the smaller towns had similar confessional accommodations, for the most part the Netherlanders were members of unstable and underground Reformed congregations. They shared pastors, were often faced with insecurity, and relied to a greater or lesser degree on their ties to Wesel’s Dutch consistory and its city pastors’ willingness to perform sacraments and other rites for their members. While Netherlanders fled to other towns in Cleves as well––we discuss some who fled to Duisburg in chapter 6, for example––we focus our attention on those with more substantive surviving evidence.

The last Dutch Reformed refugee community in our study is Frankenthal, a newly formed Dutch-speaking colony established in 1562 in the Electoral Palatinate, the most powerful officially Reformed territory in the Empire. The community was founded by a group of Netherlandish migrants who had left Frankfurt out of frustration with the terms of their settlement there. The Elector Palatine, Friedrich III (r.1559–1576) granted them an empty tract of land around a recently closed cloister (after the Augustinian friars had been resettled), and set the terms for their new colony. This is the only example in our study in which the Dutch Reformed refugees did not have to adapt to a local population. However, they did have to build their own city, essentially from scratch, street by street and building by building. Frankenthal became a kind of sixteenth-century experiment in Reformed purity.

Depending on our frame of reference, other communities move in and out of our focus. Periodically, we reference Heidelberg, the capital of the Palatinate. Few Netherlanders ever moved to Heidelberg, so we did not focus on the refugee population there; yet the city proved relevant to our research for two reasons. First, many Dutch ministers studied theology at the University of Heidelberg, which became one of the leading centers for Reformed thinking in Europe. Such students were not refugees, though, since their move was more about their traveling for training than fleeing danger. Second, Heidelberg was the Palatinate’s capital, and some Netherlanders there gained access to the elector’s ear. Heidelberg thus became the most important link between the Dutch Reformed and German Reformed traditions, connecting them both theologically and politically. Chapter 1 also discusses individuals who also lived elsewhere in the diaspora or who maintained relations with people abroad, including Duisburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Lemgo, Nuremberg, and Danzig (present-day Gdańsk). We have not otherwise focused on such communities because of a dearth of sources, because the Dutch Reformed population there was small, or because they were not central to the religious networks in our study. However, we cannot pretend that the eleven communities around which this book revolves formed some kind of isolated network. Rather, they simply constituted key nodes of activity of Dutch Reformed migrants in the Empire within the larger Dutch Reformed diaspora. In addition, Dutch congregations in our study maintained significant interactions with German- and French-speaking congregations within the same host communities or in the surrounding region. That is, the Dutch Reformed diaspora was neither ethnically nor linguistically isolated but operated within multilingual regional, transregional, and transnational networks.29 See Monge and Muchnik, Early Modern Diasporas, 6–22. Thus, although the eleven communities mentioned above form the center of our analytical framework, they need to be understood as embedded within a larger and more varied set of networks as well.

It’s also important to recognize that the Netherlands from which these refugees fled was not unified linguistically or politically.30 Kooi, Reformation, 15–26; Hugo de Schepper, “The Burgundian-Habsburg Netherlands,” in Brady, Oberman, and Tracy, Handbook of European History, 1:499–527. While the Burgundian heartlands fell under Habsburg patrimony in the late fifteenth century, institutionally they remained divided into multiple duchies, counties, and lordships. Charles of Luxembourg (later Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor and king of Spain), who ruled these lands starting in 1506, also expanded his possessions north and east to include territories outside the Burgundian lands from the 1520s to 1540s. Linguistically, Dutch was the most common language, but there were extensive French-speaking areas in the Walloon provinces in the southwest, as well as Frisian and Low German dialects in the east. French was also the language of the central government, so many Dutch political elites were multilingual.

Chronologically, our book begins in the 1540s, when Charles V’s government started to take repressive measures against religious dissenters, inducing some to take refuge elsewhere, forming the first migrant congregations of Reformed Netherlanders among cities and towns along the Rhine.31 See Denis, Les églises d’étrangers. Our attention really increases after 1553, when small but politically significant migrations of Reformed refugees arrived in a few of the host communities in our study from England, following the ascension of the Catholic queen, Mary I. Larger waves of refugees came following the Habsburg crackdowns on the widespread preaching and iconoclasm in the Low Countries, known as the Wonderyear (1566–67). Other smaller migrations often depended on local developments in cities or towns of the Low Countries or even on personal experiences. The last major emigration came in the mid-1580s, following the Habsburg conquest of a series of rebel-held cities in Flanders and Brabant. Some of this last group of migrants, however, went to the rebel-controlled United Provinces in the north, which later became known as the Dutch Republic. It’s important to recognize that through this entire period of migration, movement was never one way. People moved back and forth between the Low Countries and the Empire depending on the exigencies of war, personal circumstances, and economic opportunities. They also moved between host communities in the Empire for a similarly diverse set of reasons.

We end our study at the end of the sixteenth century because around that time most religious dissenters fleeing Habsburg rule were heading to the Dutch Republic, not the Empire or England. By this time, too, most migrants in the Empire who preferred to move to the Dutch Republic had already done so. Meanwhile, those who stayed were now building permanent lives for themselves abroad.32 Though that did not necessarily involve abandoning an identity as part of the Dutch diaspora. Müller, Exile Memories. In our final chapter, we trace the influence of these migrations of Reformed refugees and then examine the memory culture of these migrations for the subsequent decades and centuries. If exile played a role in later generations, it was insofar as the memory of exile served as a particular rhetorical tool, rather than via personal experience.

In general, Reformed refugees escaping the Habsburg Netherlands fled in three directions. Some crossed the English Channel to England.33 Muylaert, Shaping the Stranger Churches; Esser, Niederländische Exulanten; Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities; Spicer, French-speaking Reformed Community. Others fled to the northeast, to the imperial county of East Friesland, especially to its largest city, Emden.34 Pettegree, Emden; Fehler, Poor Relief and Protestantism; Schilling, “Reformation und Bürgerfreiheit.” The rest fled south and east, utilizing both land and river routes long used for trade and migration. These are the people we chose to follow, largely because we recognized early in our research that their experiences were more diverse than the historiographical paradigm suggested. While leaders in these congregations maintained correspondence and relationships with people in England and East Friesland, their ties to one another were both more sustained and more substantial.35 Some also moved between these regions, and thus some people who had been in London and Emden are included in our study. The smaller congregations in Cleves maintained regular interactions with Dutch Reformed migrants in Wesel. Trade contacts also connected Dutch traders in Wesel, Cologne, and Frankfurt. Regional ecclesiastical bodies called classes linked the congregations in Aachen and Cologne to one another, just as other classes linked congregations in Frankfurt and Frankenthal, Wesel and Kalkar. Additionally, pastors and other church leaders moved frequently between these congregations, as between Goch and Gennep and between Frankfurt and Frankenthal. Thus, although each congregation in our study faced distinct opportunities and challenges, based on these personal bonds of positive associations, we treat them as a loose network of congregations that can be studied separately from those of East Friesland and England.

This book’s parameters are further defined by answers to three questions. Who counts as Reformed? Who counts as Dutch? And who counts as a refugee? What determines whether someone was Reformed is a thorny question. Casually associating “Reformed refugees” of the sixteenth century with “Calvinism”—as used to be common—is problematic. In the sixteenth century, the term “Calvinism” was a derogatory epithet used by enemies of the Reformed to suggest that they followed beliefs and practices put forward by an ordinary man rather than Christ.36 Plath, “Zur Entstehungsgeschichte des Wortes ‘Calvinist.’” It was only in the nineteenth century that Dutch Reformed Protestants began to treat Calvin as the central figure in their religious tradition.37 Schutte, Het Calvinistisch Nederland; Paul, “Johannes Calvijn.” Other reformers proved as influential—or more so—for the movement overall, including Jan Łaski, Heinrich Bullinger, and Philip Melanchthon.38 Muller, “Demoting Calvin”; Becker, Gemeindeordnung und Kirchenzucht; Springer, Restoring Christ’s Church; Neuser, “Die Aufnahme der Flüchtlinge,” 28–49; Mühling, Heinrich Bullingers europäische Kirchenpolitik. For arguments that Zwinglian ideas are reflected in Dutch refugee churches, see Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities, 70–71. Calvin played a role in advising Reformed refugees but as part of a larger pool of resources from which the leaders of those churches drew. Thus, we risk misunderstanding both the refugees and the International Reformed movement if we privilege Calvin’s role over the diversity of other thinkers who made significant contributions.

But our unwillingness to define the Dutch Reformed tradition by its “Calvinism” alone does not solve the problem of whom to include (or who to exclude). For the most part, we chose to include only people who had some positive affiliation to the Dutch Reformed churches in our study. However, we have tried to operate under a broad definition of “affiliation.” Of course, we include all the church officers and full members we were able to identify. These people receive the bulk of our attention in this book. But since these communities did not keep complete membership lists, determinations can sometimes be tricky. To be included in our study, individuals need to have made some positive effort—submitting to Reformed discipline, attending Reformed services, or defending Reformed beliefs. But those included some people who also sometimes worshipped with or took rites in Lutheran, Anabaptist, or Catholic congregations. That is, for the most part, we include all people who were involved in personal networks of relationships that included some markers of a positive association with the Dutch Reformed ecclesiastical networks in the host cities and towns in our study. But not everyone who did so was as steadfast and inflexible in their faith as the older exile narrative imagined.

Defining the linguistic and ethnic boundaries of our project poses similar challenges. The term Netherlands described the entirety of the multilingual Low Countries. But we focus on Dutch-speaking congregations rather than French-speaking ones. Reformed Walloons facing the same dangers as Dutch Reformed fled abroad too. For the most part, they joined French-speaking Reformed communities, which developed in Aachen, Cologne, Frankfurt, Wesel, and Frankenthal. However, making too absolute of a distinction between Walloons and Dutch is problematic. Many Netherlanders spoke Dutch and French. Some also already knew German, some learned it while in the Empire, and since the linguistic border was fluid, understanding German proved little problem for others. Thus, some migrants from the Low Countries were capable of moving between French-, Dutch-, and German-speaking churches. Thus, while we focus on Dutch-speaking congregations, these communities also included individuals from Hainaut, Walloon Flanders, Artois, Cambrai, and Namur, as well as the semiautonomous prince-bishopric of Liège. In terms of our research methods, thus, sharply distinguishing Walloon from Dutch can prove tricky.

Despite this, we have limited ourselves to focusing on the Dutch-speaking refugee communities—rather than all Reformed Protestants from the Low Countries. We made this decision for practical reasons and historiographical ones. Practically speaking, distinguishing Walloon migrants from migrants from France would prove far more challenging, since they were mostly part of the same congregations. Including the Walloons would also have doubled the already vast research requirements for this book. Historiographically, it would also raise entirely separate questions about the history of the French Reformation and Wars of Religion.39 Diefendorf, “Reformation and Wars.” But the historiographical problem that we began with—the influence of exiles on the religious culture of the early Dutch Republic—centered on Dutch-speaking migrants, so that’s where we focused. Thus, while we recognize that separating Netherlandish Dutch and French speakers does not fully reflect their shared experiences as subjects of the Habsburg Netherlands, it does correspond to the ways that Reformed refugees from the Netherlands organized their lives and their churches abroad.

We also need to define what we mean by refugee. There are two important considerations: the definition that we used to select our subjects, and the language that our subjects used to describe themselves. For the first, we define refugees as people who fled from their place (or places) of residence out of fear of ongoing or anticipated hardships that posed a serious threat to life, safety, or livelihood.40 Spohnholz, Ruptured Lives, 2–4. The word thus emphasizes the “push factors” that caused people to flee, rather than “pull factors” that draw them to a specific location. Yet sometimes examining pull factors also proves critical to understanding the nature of a specific community. They help us see, for instance, why the Dutch Reformed communities in Frankfurt and Cologne resemble Dutch expatriate communities in Venice and Hamburg. Yet because the push factors were persecution and war, all the migrants in our study can generally be regarded as refugees in the sense that these push factors explain why they moved. Still, economic incentives, political calculations, family relationships, and other considerations played roles in these migrations too. Thus, while it’s appropriate to use the word “refugees” for these migrants as whole, when we get to specifics, sometimes the more neutral “migrant” or the more legally defined “exile” seem more appropriate.

However, we don’t use these different terms to subdivide the refugees. Yes, some refugees may have been exiles: that is, people who were explicitly barred from their hometown or from the Habsburg lands for crimes against the government, including heresy and sedition. But in practice, it can be difficult to distinguish between the two. A head of household may have been exiled but traveled with his whole family. Do we call them exiles too, or do we split family members into separate categories of migrants? Exiles also lived together, intermarried, and built social relationships with other kinds of refugees and migrants. We do not parse these differences too carefully. After all, emphasizing the difference between exiles and refugees privileges the legal perspectives of the Habsburg authorities which comes at the expense of undervaluing the perspectives of the migrants themselves. In other cases, the legal status of a refugee was unclear or unknown, or was known at the time but cannot be determined today. Thus, while there are good reasons at times to distinguish between exiles, refugees, and other forced migrants, in general, we avoid rigid distinctions.

We also do not divide the refugees we study according to the reasons for their migration. Did they flee religious persecution, political threats, or economic adversity? Often multiple reasons factored into decisions to flee. Trying to deduce an individuals’ decision-making process often proves fruitless, even impossible.41 See Schunka, “Konfession und Migrationsregime”; Van der Linden, Experiencing Exile; Lougee, Facing the Revocation. In many cases people probably tried to balance different and even contradictory interests: their religious beliefs, their political views, their economic prospects, and their social interests. Some emphasized the religious reasons for their escape and the extreme suffering they endured to elicit sympathy from their hosts, even if that meant omitting less convenient parts of their stories.42 Such was the case for Utenhove, Simplex et fidelis narratio. That is, the rhetorical strategies that people used in times of hardship do not always provide particularly useful windows into understanding why they left. Accordingly, although we are primarily interested in Reformed migrants who fled as religious refugees, we do not pretend that such clear lines can be drawn. When considering whether to use terms like “migrant,” “refugee,” “exile,” or otherwise, we try to use the most appropriate word for the circumstances we are describing, but we recognize the inexact nature of these categories.

At the same time, we are careful to consider the nuances of meaning in individuals’ self-descriptions. In an early modern context, calling oneself an “exile” (in Latin exul or in Dutch balling) necessarily invoked a comparison with the tribulations of the ancient Israelites as described in the Old Testament. It also emphasized that the suffering was involuntary. Some people also described themselves as living in Babylon, which carried similar connotations. Others described themselves as pilgrims (Latin peregrinus, Dutch pelgrim), drawing on a medieval tradition of leaving one’s home as an expression of one’s devotion to God.43 Van Veen, “‘Reformierte Flüchtlinge”; Janssen, “Legacy of Exile.” In the course of our research we found that some people invoked these connotations self-consciously. Others used a broad repertoire of language to describe righteous Christian suffering. Sometimes it was living in a foreign land, away from one’s home, that constituted the suffering, while at other times living abroad marked a release from the suffering of living in fear back home. Other times that suffering merely constituted the more general struggles that humans face on earth before being released to heaven. Especially in chapters 1 and 6, we pay attention to these nuances to understand these migrants’ experiences of, whether because they provide insights into the migrants’ worldviews or their rhetorical strategies.

A persistent challenge during this project was confronting the influence of anachronistic national and religious classifications, not only on the prevailing scholarship but also on our own understandings. Despite so much useful revisionism in recent years, modern political boundaries and confessional categories still deeply influence how scholars describe early modern migrants, their relationships to their hosts, and the long-term significance of migrations. Such categories have sometimes encouraged historians to essentialize the experience of migration or to overlook diversities within migrant populations.44 Monge and Muchnik, Early Modern Diasporas, 11–12. But early modern political and cultural boundaries were flexible and permeable. For instance, it is impossible to make neat political, social, or cultural distinctions between the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire. Politically, following the imperial constitutional reforms of the late fifteenth and early sixteenth century, the Netherlands remained an official part of the Burgundian Circle, an institutional subset of the Empire. In practice, the Burgundian Circle largely operated independently from the rest of the Empire and, from 1555, had a separate sovereign. Yet, some Netherlandish entities still sent delegates to meetings of imperial diets or appealed to imperial legal institutions. Additionally, from a linguistic and cultural perspective, the border was more fluid and the differences gradual, so some migrations were less dramatic than others.

Methodologically, we have combined social, cultural, and intellectual history. To do so, we have drawn on records produced by refugee churches, such as consistory records, classis and synodal minutes, as well as attestations and letters between pastors and elders. Where possible, we also examined the correspondence of laypeople in these communities. Additionally, we used records from several of the host governments, such as parish church records (including baptismal, marriage, and funeral registries), city council minutes, and legal records. Together, these sources enabled us to understand religious life and social interactions from the perspective of both refugees and locals, including the legal frameworks for their welcome, modes of boundary-drawing around communities of faith, and ritual behaviors at both a prescriptive and descriptive level. Finally, we examined published and unpublished writings of both refugees and former refugees. Our goal has been to understand how refugees’ experiences affected the ways that the authors articulated their worldviews but also how authors rhetorically emphasized or elided components of their exile, both during and after, to serve strategic purposes.

We found it helpful to compare refugees’ experiences in different kinds of environments rather than treating this migration into the Empire as a monolith. In this effort, we followed the example of Heinz Schilling, who compared Dutch refugee communities, looking for correlations between the extent to which Dutch migrants challenged local economic structures and local religious norms.45 Schilling, Niederländische Exulanten. His 1972 study suggested that newcomers’ challenges to local economic structures often underpinned conflicts over confessional norms and help us understand why Netherlanders successfully integrated into some places but found hostile receptions elsewhere. Schilling’s work was pioneering, but it was mostly based on secondary sources and tended toward larger structuralist and functionalist generalities. While Schilling’s study usefully examined how economic structures shaped exiles’ experiences, it often reduced humans to sociological categories, downplaying contingency and personal experience. To a large degree, these limitations are understandable: one person could not possibly undertake the kind of research that such a broad comparison would require. When we began this project, we were aware of the challenges such a study would entail and that its successful completion would require a team of five researchers working together over many years.46 Other members of our team included two doctoral researchers, Peter Gorter and Inge Schipper, and one postdoctoral researcher, Silke Muylaert. We draw on their research for this book. Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten. Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief.” Muylaert is currently writing her book.

The prosopographical database we produced allowed members of our team to collect evidence in a relatively consistent manner in order to compare these migrants across the communities under consideration, even if no team member had read all the sources for the entire project. The five researchers who cooperated on this project produced a database with evidence about more than nineteen thousand individuals who lived in these communities, mostly Netherlanders who associated with one of these congregations.47 Because our parameters for data collection in each community were not fixed, but flexible, there are some people in this number who were not refugees or exiles or even migrants. In chapter 3, we used this database to look for demographic patterns across these communities. More often, we used the database to provide a repository—arranged in a format that was consistent regardless of our individual research methods and habits—for tracing individuals when they appeared in different types of primary or secondary sources as well as for when they moved from one community to another. The process of following migrants in demographically unstable communities has not been easy. German-speaking scribes sometimes Germanized Dutch names and Dutch-speaking scribes sometimes Dutchified German names. Additionally, sixteenth-century naming and spelling conventions were inconsistent. Finally, some kinds of migrants left far more traces in our sources than others. Thus, although 70 percent of the individuals in our database are men, we cannot use this number to make an accurate estimate about the gender balance in these communities because women’s presence frequently went unreported in the sixteenth century. Further, records have not survived consistently in all the communities we studied. The Dutch Reformed consistory of Wesel left meticulous records starting in 1573, for instance, while similar sources for Aachen only begin in 1592. Although our results differ according to community, we have been able to learn about intermarriage patterns, correspondence networks, demographic patterns, residency patterns, and formal legal and political interactions but also more informal social interactions as well as trace movements between communities.

The book consists of six chapters. Chapter 1 explores the religious, political, and economic developments and personal experiences that forced Netherlanders to flee their homelands for the Empire. It demonstrates the extent to which modern religious and political categories—anachronistically projected back into the sixteenth century—have shaped understandings of this migration. It also shows how fruitless it is to distinguish between economic migrants, political exiles, and religious refugees. And it demonstrates that for some migrants the distinction between the Low Countries and the Holy Roman Empire—or as the distinction is often made today, between Dutch and German—was not straightforward. And finally, it looks for factors that explain the multifaceted and ambiguous reasons that people fled and the factors that influenced where they decided to go.

Chapters 2 and 3 examine the kinds of relationships migrants developed with their hosts. Chapter 2 focuses on the institutional political and ecclesiastical compromises that migrants had to make, depending on the religious and political situations in which they found themselves. Changing structures of the imperial constitution and the dynamic ways that local magistrates interpreted that constitution dramatically impacted migrants’ experiences. Most importantly, chapter 2 makes it clear that, from the autumn of 1555 onward, the way in which authorities applied the Peace of Augsburg—formally and informally—played the most critical role in determining the legal and institutional frameworks for Dutch Reformed living in the Empire. Here we see how the malleability of confessional categories and the variability in the enforcement of the imperial constitution resulted in a variety of arrangements.

Chapter 3 examines how refugees interacted with host communities more broadly. Scholarship on the relationships between refugees and hosts has often fallen under the purview of scholars interested in German or English history who have largely focused on the contributions of migrants to local economies (and to a lesser extent cultures), the extent to which the migrants converted locals to “Calvinism,” or the pace at which the migrants assimilated.48 For example, Goose, “‘Dutch’ in Colchester”; Pettegree, “Progress towards Integration”; Sarmenhaus, Die Festsetzung; Rotscheidt, “Übergang der Gemeinde Wesel”; Hantsche, “Niederländische Glaubensflüchtlinge.” Most of that work, though, has accepted the distinction between “Dutch” and “German” as straightforward national, ethnic, or linguistic categories. In this chapter, we examine the specific linguistic and socioeconomic profiles for each migrant community relative to its host community to better understand the social relations between migrants and hosts. As we learned, the further migrants traveled from their homes, the less like their hosts they were—not just linguistically but socially as well. Thus, the strategies for coexistence in some areas relied on a blurring of social distinctions, while elsewhere those strategies depended on clearly demarcated social boundaries.

Chapters 4 and 5 examine the religious lives of these refugee communities. Chapter 4 looks at how Dutch migrants worshipped while living in the Empire. Certainly, the distinctiveness of each as described in the previous chapters played a key role in shaping the opportunities for religious practice. But belief systems and the variable significance of ritual practices also mattered. As we explain, migrants proved more willing to compromise with local restrictions on their faith when it came to rites of passage—baptisms, weddings, and funerals—than they were from the central rite of community of their faith—the celebration of the Lord’s Supper. In Catholic cities, the fact that the migrants shared a commitment to infant baptism—and Catholics’ fear that migrants might be harboring Anabaptists—proved critically important in shaping the compromises that developed. Meanwhile, in Protestant cities that followed the Augsburg Confession (in scholarship, commonly referred to as Lutheran cities), Dutch Reformed baptized their infants, married spouses, and buried their loved ones in local churches. By contrast, in order to preserve the purity of the Lord’s Supper, migrants sometimes put their communities in grave danger by celebrating it separately.

Chapter 5 examines the religious life of these refugee communities in the context of the international ecclesiastical structures and the networks for communal assistance that refugees developed abroad. While scholarship has stressed that the structures and networks of “international Calvinism” helped refugees to survive (and even thrive) in diaspora, our research yielded a different conclusion. We found that the institutions and networks binding this diaspora of Reformed Protestants were quite dynamic, diverse, and provisional. Communication networks were patchy. Transnational ecclesiastical institutions bound migrants together but were not primarily oriented toward the Netherlands or the Dutch Reformed Church. This chapter examines the construction of ecclesiastical institutions, the supplying of pastors for congregations, charity efforts to aid communities across the diaspora, and letters of attestation to monitor mobile church members. Our research suggests that Reformed migrants adapted to serve their own local, regional, and transregional needs, including closely collaborating with French- and German-speaking coreligionists living nearby, while they were less oriented to supporting the Dutch Reformed Church, the Dutch Revolt, or the Netherlands per se.

The final chapter examines how migrants remembered their experiences and asks to what extent those experiences contributed to the religious landscape of the Dutch Republic. Surprisingly, we found that few refugees played any direct role in shaping Dutch religious life. Many of the refugees remained abroad, with little fanfare. While the number of Netherlanders who did move to the Dutch Republic was never large, some became outspoken champions of Reformed confessionalism. However, there is little indication that they developed their zeal in exile, nor is there any indication that they were ever imprinted with an exile identity. Meanwhile, other refugees who moved back to the Netherlands explicitly rejected confessional forms of religion altogether. As we have shown in this book, life as an exile was not exceptionally traumatic for those who experienced it—at least no more so than any of the other dramatic political and religious upheavals of the late sixteenth century in this region of Europe. The memories of these migrants centered on the general suffering of the faithful for the true church. Many Dutch Reformed Protestants remembered the fight against the authority of Rome and against Habsburg rule in terms of the utmost suffering, which they interpreted as a kind of “bearing of the cross.” For many, though, living abroad brought an escape from that suffering. Over time, this memory culture began changing as the children of exiles started to record their families’ histories. In their writings, exile gradually emerged as an important theme to explain the suffering experienced by Reformed Protestants living abroad during previous generations. In the nineteenth century, this story of the transformative power of exile to crystallize Dutch Calvinism really took shape, inspired by the Romantic nationalism of the era.49 Spohnholz and Van Veen, “Disputed Origins.” By the mid- to late twentieth century, when these kind of confessional and nationalist studies of the Reformation were being replaced with a more secular and less confessionally invested brand of history, this exile narrative had become so entrenched that even some of the most talented and creative historians of the day repeated it without a second thought.

In each of these earlier iterations, historical reflections on the history of refugees provided meaning for people struggling with questions of their own day. In many cases, however, that meaning carried with it the implicit moral and ethical connotations that the word “refugee” connotes, dividing the world into heroes and villains. We do hope that readers will find meaning in these stories, though we do not offer any clear morality tales. Instead, readers will find the nuances, complexities, and contradictions that are found in real life and that our discourses about migration today often cannot quite capture.