Chapter Two Foreign Accommodations

Many previous studies of the relationships between early modern migrants and their hosts have been primarily interested in understanding the impacts of the migration either on migrants or on the hosts. Those studies focused on the migrants have often depicted diasporic communities as isolated and insular. In such cases, refugee centers look like places where migrants formed tight bonds with one another. In the case of Reformed migrants from the Low Countries, this mode of identity forming has helped historians explain how the movement survived the hardships of persecution as well as the development of a militant, confessional Calvinism.1 This work has (often wrongly) described the refugee churches as operating independent from political authority. Klueting, “Obrigkeitsfreie reformierte Flüchtlingsgemeinden.” On this point, see Jesse Spohnholz, “Exile Experiences.” Other work focusing on migrants has been more interested in the opposite: tracking their assimilation into local cultures.2 Spicer, “A Process of Gradual Assimilation”; Greengrass, “Protestant Exiles”; Schilling, Niederländische Exulanten, 65–76, 158–59. In both cases, interest has focused on how the experience of living abroad encouraged migrants to either become tightly knit groups apart from their host or to fully integrate into the local community.3 By contrast, Johannes Müller usefully emphasizes hybrid identities. Müller, Exile Memories.

Other studies have been more interested in describing the migrants’ impact on host cultures. Some, for instance, use them to explain how Reformed religious ideas spread into the Holy Roman Empire, though recent research has pointed out that there is little evidence for successful missionary activity among these migrants.4 Schilling, Niederländische Exulanten, 22; Hantsche, “Niederländische Glaubensflüchtlinge.” See now Kirchner, Katholiken, Lutheraner und Reformierte, 47–48, 377–78; Spohnholz, “Turning Dutch?” Consistories even sometimes urged church members to be cautious about trying to convert others. Meinert and Dahmer, Das Protokollbuch, 96–97. Another strand of scholarship emphasizes contributions newcomers made to local economies.5 Brulez, “De diaspora der Antwerpse kooplui”; Roosbroeck, Emigranten, 307–46; Oakley, “Canterbury Walloon Congregation”; Fussel, “Low Countries’ Influence.” For the seventeenth century, see Wilke, “Der Einfluss der Hugenotten.” Financial considerations certainly shaped why hosts might welcome certain groups of immigrants, but we cannot isolate them from other factors guiding decisions.6 Arnold, “Migration und Exil.” It would also be impossible to tally up the financial costs and benefits of welcoming refugees. There are too many factors to calculate and too few extant sources to generate accurate numbers. And, if we could, there would be no way of comparing our results to the economic impacts of an alternative reality without refugees. Further, authorities could not simply ignore the legal or religious implications of their decisions, even if financial considerations played a role in their willingness to welcome foreigners, which they surely often did. Finally, even when money featured prominently, the economic considerations do not in themselves explain how people handled the constitutional, social, and religious consequence of migrants’ and hosts’ decisions to live with their new neighbors.

All of these prior treatments, however, assume that they are describing mutually exclusive ethnic and religious cultures, and they treat the processes of change that emerge through their interaction as linear. Scholars have largely theorized relatively straightforward categorizations of difference that carry assumptions of morphological integrity of confessional or ethnic groups that, when used incautiously, might anachronistically imply the existence of clear political and religious boundaries that map onto modern national or religious identities familiar to readers. As we explained in chapter 1, from the perspective of the migrants, those categories were more malleable and permeable. To begin this exploration into how such ambiguities shaped the terms of migrants’ stays, then, we must first note four observations.

First, much of the scholarship of the Dutch refugees fleeing into the Empire has assumed that this forced migration constituted a crisis for the hosts. However, managing migration was relatively common in sixteenth-century European cities.7 This had been true for centuries. Rubin, Cities of Strangers. For educated urbanites, non-migratory travel was also common. See Schunka, Migrationserfahrungen. Because of high urban death rates, cities needed to import 20–40 percent of their population annually just to maintain their size.8 Lucassen and Lucassen, “Mobility Transition Revisited”; Hochstadt, “Migration in Preindustrial Germany.” To grow, cities needed even more migrants. Half the population of sixteenth-century Frankfurt, for instance, consisted of immigrants. While most of these came from the surrounding region, many came from further afield.9 Hochstadt, “Migration in Preindustrial Germany,” 203, 215. Large cities often hosted substantial communities of foreign merchants and artisans as well as substantial diplomatic personnel from faraway lands.10 Subacci, “Italians in Antwerp”; Miller, “Early Modern Urban Immigration”; Gramulla, Handelsbeziehungen Kölner Kaufleute. People migrated for all kinds of reasons: for work, to find a spouse, for study, or to escape dangers like war, natural disasters, poverty, and religious persecution. Sometimes migrants’ motivations overlapped. For many of the travelers in our study, their relocation to the Empire was probably not even their first migration: so many were urban merchants, traders, weavers, and other skilled craftsmen whose lives were already remarkably mobile.11 Yves Junot, “Heresy, War, Vagrancy and Labour Needs: Dealing with Temporary Migrants in the Textile Towns of Flanders, Artois, and Hainaut in the Wake of the Dutch Revolt (1566–1609),” in De Munck and Winter, Gated Communities?, 61–80. On the demographics of these migrants, see chapter 3. Other migrants were lawyers, ex-priests, and other educated people who had also lived mobile lives well before they fled to the communities where we first encountered them.

Host communities also had well-established mechanisms for integrating foreigners, particularly for judging when they became eligible for poor care and guild membership, for instance, as well to perform civic duties.12 Schunka, “Migrations in the German Lands,” 9. It is true that anti-immigrant rhetoric, protectionism, and xenophobia were common and that immigrants were more vulnerable than people with roots in the community.13 This was particularly true for immigrant women without substantial family networks. Kamp, “Female Crime and Household Control.” It is also true that civic authorities in the Empire often sought to regulate immigration because they associated itinerancy with disorder.14 Coy, Strangers and Misfits. Still, although cities and towns did not have what we might call a coherent immigration policy, they did have regular ways of handling newcomers. New arrivals were expected to attend church in local parishes and could not benefit from local privileges without citizenship or some other indication that they were reputable, stable, and otherwise able to contribute to the community. If migrants begged, stole, or otherwise lived unsettled lives, they could be expelled. While civic leaders often presented their community as an isolated corpus Christianum, in practice, immigrants from near and far were a feature of everyday life. Additionally, there existed no legal category of “refugee.”15 See Geert Janssen’s project on the invention of the refugee at http://www.inventionoftherefugee.com. Essentially, local officials in the Empire treated Dutch migrants much as they did other migrants.16 The exceptions being the Exulantenstädten, which were formed explicitly to attract Netherlandish migrants. See Kaplan, “Legal Rights of Religious Refugees.”

Second, the arrival of Reformed migrants into Protestant cities was facilitated by the fact that confessional differences among Protestants remained uncertain and contested. By the time the first significant numbers of Dutch Reformed refugees had arrived, in the early 1550s, a legal and ecclesiastical distinction had emerged between adherents of the Roman Catholic Church and those who followed the Augsburg Confession, a statement of faith first presented to Emperor Charles V by evangelical leaders in 1530. But defining who constituted a follower of the Augsburg Confession became confusing, since its author, Philip Melanchthon, continued to revise the text after its original drafting, as he worked to find a phrasing—especially on the question of the Eucharist—that might unify evangelicals. By 1552, four versions of the text existed. Melanchthon also wrote other statements that he considered merely “repetition[s]” of the Augsburg Confession.17 Irene Dingel, “Augsburger Religionsfrieden und ‘Augsburgerverwandtschaft’–konfessionelle Lesarten,” in Schilling and Smolinsky, Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden, 157–76. Some Reformed Protestants rejected any version of the document. However, many—including migrants in our study—were willing to sign Melanchthon’s 1540 variation (variata) of the Augsburg Confession, which offered more accommodating language on the question of Christ’s presence in the bread and wine of the Lord’s Supper, but not the 1530 original (the so-called invariata), which was more explicit about Christ’s Real Presence, and was preferred by those whom historians usually call Lutherans.18 See also Willem Nijenhuis, “Calvin and the Augsburg Confession,” in Nijenhuis, Ecclesia Reformata, 1: 97–114. At the time, the variata was still accepted as legitimate by the majority of Protestant states without much controversy. Even after a political consensus of eighty-six Lutheran governments of the empire emerged around the publication of the so-called Book of Concord of 1580, which treated the invariata as authoritative, many Lutherans in the Empire and all Reformed remained aloof from this effort to define orthodoxy so precisely.19 Whaley, Germany and the Holy Roman Empire, 1:500–501. The categories of religious differences among Protestants, that is, remained contested and confused through most of the century, even if partisans often stressed polarizing dichotomies.

Third, imperial laws governing Protestantism were neither static nor consistently followed. The temporary peace treaty ending the Second Schmalkaldic War in 1552 (the Peace of Passau) referred to the “verwanten der Augspurgischen Confession” (people who were akin or related—Verwandt—to the Augsburg Confession), but provided no clarity regarding that term or its application.20 Drecoll, Der Passauer Vertrag, 113. A more enduring treaty, the Peace of Augsburg, signed in September 1555, permitted those political entities in the Empire whose autonomy was limited only by their allegiance to the emperor—those with so-called Reichsunmittelbarkeit (imperial immediacy)—to determine whether their territory would remain allied with the “old religion” or those “adhering to the Augsburg Confession,” whom the text also called Augsburger Konfessionsverwandten.21 The text describes “Angehörigen der Augsburgische Konfession,” and “die der Augsburgischen Konfessions verwandte Religion,” https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=4386. However, there was no clear or uniform answer about how to interpret the Peace of Augsburg. As we will see, disagreement soon emerged about which Reichsunmittelbare cities (i.e., imperial cities) had the right to pick their own church. Further, an unpublished provision of the Peace granted nobles and cities in ecclesiastical territories (who according to the main text would have to be Catholic) to continue adhering to the Augsburg Confession if they had already been doing so for multiple years. Disputes about the authenticity of that clause arose because it had not been published or officially endorsed by the organs of imperial governance.22 Luebke, Hometown Religion, 39–42. Many Protestants even argued—sometimes with surprising success—that the Peace of Augsburg granted them freedom of conscience in Catholic territories.

Perhaps most significantly, the Peace of Augsburg did not define who counted as Verwandten. Some evangelical states—notably representatives of the duke of Württemberg—had argued for adopting a definition of Augsburger Konfessionverwandten that explicitly excluded people identified as “sacramentarians,” a category that lumped together Reformed Protestants and Anabaptists. Another proposal was to limit Verwandtschaft to those territories whose leaders had originally delivered the Augsburg Confession to Charles V in 1530. Both ideas were rejected due to fears that such specificity would only divide the evangelical bloc, leaving them vulnerable to Catholic stratagems.23 Pohlig, “Wahrheit als Lüge,” 148–49. In the end, the politicians and diplomats settled on ambiguity: the text provided little guidance as to whom specifically that term referred.

This result left room to maneuver. At the local level, authorities often had leeway in how strictly to interpret or enforce the law. It was common—at least at first—for Protestant governments not to require that pastors or citizens sign the Augsburg Confession itself but to have a distinct statement of belief drawn up for their specific polity.24 From the perspective of a prince or magistrates, requiring conformity to a confessional statement that they drafted for their policy was about promoting confessional unity under their supervision. On this point, see Atherton, “Power and Persuasion.” For them, the logic of Verwandtschaft rested on the extent to which those newly crafted statements of faith conformed to, or could legitimately stand in for, the Augsburg Confession. Until recently, conventional wisdom has had it that Reformed Protestantism was excluded from the Peace of Augsburg. Matthias Pohlig and Irene Dingel have helpfully suggested that we reconsider this perspective.25 Pohlig, “Wahrheit als Lüge”; Irene Dingel, “Augsburger Religionsfrieden und ‘Augsburgerverwandtschaft’,” in Schilling and Smolinsky, Der Augsburger Religionsfrieden, 157–76. The ambiguity of both imperial law and definitions of what it meant to adhere to the Augsburg Confession left Reformed Protestants with several viable paths for securing their stay.26 See also Blum, Multikonfessionalität im Alltag.

When Dutch Protestant migrants arrived in evangelical cities of the empire, they were often able to use this ambiguity of imperial law and the shifting nature of local ecclesiastical arrangements to their advantage. Still, over time imperial politics put increasing pressure on communities to concretize what it meant to conform to the Augsburg Confession. This process often put an unwelcome spotlight on Reformed Protestants’ worship practices and doctrinal statements. As we’ll see, the more interpretive layers between a community’s local governance and imperial law, the more inventive local interpretations of the Peace could be to facilitate their stay. In practice, the freedom of Reichsunmittelbarkeit actually constrained how much latitude localities had in applying the Peace of Augsburg. As such, the rest of this chapter considers the Dutch Reformed migrants’ situation in their various host communities: from places where their arrival was the least ambiguous from a constitutional standpoint (Catholic imperial cities) to places where the application of imperial law was the most flexible (small towns in the border territory of Cleves).