The other leading imperial city of the northwestern empire—Aachen—also had deep political ties to the Catholic Church. Aachen housed the remains of Charlemagne and its Palatine Chapel had been the site of imperial coronations until the Reformation era. Also like Cologne—Aachen had deep social, cultural, and economic ties to the Low Countries, especially to southern cities like Maastricht, which offered the nearest waterway (the Maas River) connecting Aachen to international markets. Following these preexisting commercial routes, Dutch Protestants first arrived in the 1540s, with more significant numbers coming in the 1550s.
1 Kirchner, Katholiken, Lutheraner und Reformierte, 51–53. After the Peace of Augsburg was signed in September 1555, the city remained uniformly Catholic in its public rites. Protestants—including migrants from the Habsburg Netherlands—worshipped covertly before the treaty was signed and continued to do so afterward. There was one significant difference between Aachen and Cologne, however: Aachen’s magistrates treated the decision to remain Catholic as theirs to make.
Soon after the Peace of Augsburg was signed, a group of Reformed Protestants from Wallonia petitioned the city council for permission to have legal worship services led by their own pastor. While they made their argument based on the principle that they did not understand German, their request also relied on the assumption that city councilors had the legal competence to grant permission for Protestant services.
2 Schmitz, Verfassung und Bekenntnis, 44. On January 26, 1556, Aachen’s city council explained that they would not permit any worship that deviated from the Catholic Church.
3 Nopp, Aacher Chronik, 178. Three years later, groups of non-Catholics again requested permission to hold separate services in accordance with the Augsburg Confession, so long as they promised “to maintain themselves obediently and peacefully” (s
ich gehorsamb und still verhalten).
4 Nopp, Aacher Chronik, 179; Enderle, “Die katholischen Reichsstädte,” 241. Their requests were accompanied by letters of support from the three Protestant imperial electors—including the Elector Palatine, of course—as well as the city of Frankfurt. A representative from the Palatinate, Wenzel Zuleger, even traveled to Aachen to support this effort. Magistrates quickly responded that they would not approve his request “at this time” (
noch zur Zeit), implying that they might well reconsider the issue in the future.
5 Schmitz, Verfassung und Bekenntnis, 46–47. Meanwhile, pressure to shut down these churches came from Ferdinand, King of the Romans, and Duke Wilhelm of the United Territories. On September 22, 1559, the city government decided that all foreigners who had not yet acquired citizenship had to prove that they were good Catholics or leave the city. Magistrates also issued restrictions on non-Catholics holding city offices.
6 Kirchner, Katholiken, Lutheraner und Reformierte, 73–74; Heppe, Geschichte des deutschen Protestantismus, 1:323. In response to the increased pressure in Aachen, the Dutch and Walloon pastors, Hermes Backereel and Jean Taffin respectively, wrote to Worms requesting permission to reside there, promising to conform to the Augsburg Confession.
7 They used the text of the 1540 variata. Heppe, Geschichte des deutschen Protestantismus , 1:323–24. While magistrates in Worms turned them down, Netherlandish Protestants in Aachen clearly hoped that the Peace of Augsburg provided enough leverage to secure legal privileges in
Reichsunmittelbare polities of the empire.
It is unclear how many Netherlanders remained in Aachen after 1559, or where the others moved.
8 Some moved to Wesel. SAW A3/52 fols. 45r–v, 46v. EKAW Gefach 6,1,84 fol. 192r. However, the number of Reformed Protestants did not significantly rise again the crackdown following the iconoclastic riots of 1566, after which new arrivals included a large number of refugees from nearby Maastricht. The Dutch population in Aachen rose to some four thousand people, roughly 15–20 percent of Aachen’s population.
9 Arndt, Das Heilige Römische Reich, 196. Like their predecessors, they worshipped covertly, even if their presence constituted an open secret. Meanwhile, Catholic powers from the region, the duke of the United Territories, the emperor, the government in the Habsburg Netherlands and the prince-bishop of Liège, all urged Aachen’s city government to crack down on foreign rebels and heretics.
10 Schilling, Niederländische Exulanten, 32–33, 73–74; Kirchner, Katholiken, Lutheraner und Reformierte, 79, 96–99. This pressure convinced magistrates to order, on April 28, 1572, all refugees from Brabant—as rebels against Philip II—to vacate Aachen (and neighboring Burtscheid, which was part of its jurisdiction) immediately. But they enforced this order. Reformed Protestants were not even deterred from holding a synod in Burtscheid on November 2, 1572.
11 WMV 2/2, 22–24. As at Cologne, the Reformed immigrants who remained did so through a combination of secrecy and governmental inaction.
Constitutionally speaking, matters grew more complex in 1574, when there was so much Protestant support among city leaders that magistrates issued an edict allowing
Augsburger Konfessionverwandten on the city council.
12 Kirchner, Katholiken, Lutheraner und Reformierte, 80–81. In effect, this act granted freedom of conscience (but not freedom of worship) for Protestants. The council seemed to base its authority to make this decision on the Peace of Augsburg, essentially claiming that, as a
Reichsunmittelbare polity, it could determine religious policy within its jurisdiction. This was also the conclusion of seventeenth-century jurist Johann Nopp, who wrote a history of Aachen.
13 Nopp, Aacher Chronik, 185–86. The Reformed congregations—who all claimed to adhere to the Augsburg Confession—no longer had to hide. Still, they did not try to take over Catholic church buildings, but continued worshipping in private homes.
14 Kirchner, Katholiken, Lutheraner und Reformierte, 268–69. The council’s decision occasioned a question regarding how the Peace of Augsburg applied in Aachen: did cities that had been Catholic before 1555 have the right to introduce Protestantism after 1555? For Cologne, the answer had been an unambiguous ‘no.’ For Aachen, the question remained unresolved for decades. Matters escalated in 1581, after citizens elected a majority of Protestants to the city council. The new Protestant-dominated city council (which included Catholic allies) now asserted that it had the right to determine Aachen’s religious policies and permitted all adherents to the Augsburg Confession—including Reformed Protestants—to worship freely.
15 Schmitz, Verfassung und Bekenntnis, 122; Enderle, “Die katholischen Reichsstädte,” 241–42.Emperor Rudolf II was furious with Aachen city leaders’ claim to possess the authority to make this change. He immediately named an imperial commission that warned that all sectarian preachers and members of banned sects should be expelled from Aachen. His Catholic allies in the region, the prince-bishop of Liège, the duke of Jülich-Cleves-Mark-Berg, and Philip II in the Habsburg Netherlands all threatened to interfere on his behalf.
16 The duke also banned his subjects from trading with Aachen. Kurt Wesoly, “Katholisch, Lutherisch, Reformiert, Evangelisch? Zu den Anfängen der Reformation in Bergischen Land,” in Dietz and Ehrenpreis, Drei Konfessionen in einer Region, 293. A legal case regarding this question made its way through the empire’s court system.
17 Schmitz, Verfassung und Bekenntnis, 134–84. The matter remained unresolved through the sixteenth century, even as Aachen continued to function as a triconfessional city.
Throughout this period, the city government treated Reformed Protestants as
Augsburger Konfessionsverwandten, even though there existed a different congregation that professed the
Augustana invariata (viz., Lutherans). As we’ll see, in Frankfurt those who upheld the
invariata repudiated Reformed Protestants’ efforts to claim
Augsburger Konfessionverwandtschaft. By contrast, in Aachen the two groups found common ground, understanding that the political security of each was tied to their alliance. Supporters of the new government denied that there were any “Calvinists” or other sectarians in the city and insisted that Protestants only accepted ministers who followed the Augsburg Confession—without indicating which version.
18 Kirchner, Katholiken, Lutheraner und Reformierte, 117. Catholics who resented this situation formed a Catholic government in exile. As Thomas Kirchner has shown, such disaffected Catholics only ever amounted to a minority of loyalists to Rome. Kirchner, Katholiken, Lutheraner und Reformierte, 94–95, 248–49. The new city council made no effort to institute a magisterial Reformation—Catholics kept control of the city’s church buildings. But Aachen’s city government remained largely confessionally neutral within a triconfessional situation. While Reformed Protestants were free to worship in public, they continued to worship in a private home, the Haus Großerklüppel, which they also used as their schoolhouse.
19 Kirchner, Katholiken, Lutheraner und Reformierte, 277–78. It is not clear whether they kept worshipping this way because of unresolved legal questions making their way through the imperial court system because they lacked funds to construct their own building, feared military interference from an outside power, or because they simply put little value on the physical structure in which their worship took place. But, until a military occupation forced Aachen to once and for all accept the Catholic interpretation of the Peace of Augsburg in 1614, Protestant migrants remained in the city.
20 Schmitz, Verfassung und Bekenntnis, 291–352; Kirchner, Katholiken, Lutheraner und Reformierte, 174–218.