The surviving evidence suggests that, socially speaking, Dutch Reformed migrants traveling to Aachen had much in common with their hosts. Firstly, a large number (37 percent) of Netherlanders whose territory of origin we can identify (n=96) came from cities and towns in neighboring Limburg. Of these, 54 percent came from Maastricht, the nearest large city (only thirty kilometers away), which had a long history of economic and cultural exchange with Aachen. People in this region had less of a distinct Netherlandish identity (which was stronger in the Burgundian heartlands), and more of a regional identity across the Limburg-Liège-Aachen area.
1 Lejeune, Land zonder grens. 40 percent of the immigrants came from nearby Brabant as well, including Antwerp, which had long-established regular trade routes in textiles, food, and dry goods to Aachen.
2 Harreld, High Germans in the Low Countries, 161; Poettering, Migrating Merchants, 215. The Aachen-Antwerp trade was frequent but relatively low value compared with Antwerp’s high value trade with Cologne and Frankfurt. For this chapter, people from Mechelen are treated as coming from Brabant, though the city belonged to the Heerlijkheit Mechelen, an enclave surrounded by the duchy of Brabant. Almost no immigrants to Aachen came from elsewhere in the Low Countries. In Aachen, most of the newcomers spoke basically the same dialect of sixteenth-century Dutch (east Franconian
Limburgic, or a closely related dialect), which allowed them to be easily understood by locals.
3 Aachen and Maastricht stood on opposites sides of the Benrath Line, though they were on the same side of the Uerdinger Line and were so close to one another that linguistic and cultural variations were minor. For a linguistic map, see Hantsche, Atlas, 67; Schützeichel, “Rheinische und Westfälische ‘Staffel’/’Stapel’-Namen.” We have uncovered no mention of any significant language barriers for Dutch migrants living in Aachen. Indeed, in many ways, Aachen’s Reformed community was not so much a subcommunity of aliens but a mix of people from Aachen and its neighboring regions, including the Overmaas (part of eastern Brabant), Limburg, and the duchy of Jülich. Their migration was also in some ways the continuation of a longer tradition of people from the region moving to the city for work.
4 For one example, Asten, “Religiöse und wirtschaftliche Antriebe.”Aachen’s Dutch Reformed Protestants did not dramatically stand out in terms of their socioeconomic profiles either. The majority (57 percent of those whose occupation is known) were artisans and craftsmen. They were not, however, dominated by members of the cloth weaving industries (as Dutch Reformed migrants elsewhere in the empire) but comprised an assortment of bakers, carpenters, locksmiths, tailors, cobblers, and cloth makers. Aachen also hosted Dutch merchants, but those who moved to Aachen were not particularly wealthy or well-connected to international markets; they were tied to regional markets. The newcomers also joined Aachen’s trade associations without sparking noticeable unease among locals. The immigrants did not stand out from their hosts in terms of either wealth or poverty, and there is no evidence of significant economic tensions between these immigrants and their hosts. While some Catholics resented the arrival of foreign Protestants, most locals seem to have welcomed migrants from the Netherlands without comment. There is no record of a crisis or significant cultural conflict that emerged as the result of their arrival. Confessional differences appeared in the city, of course, but they were not markedly shaped by parallel ethnic or linguistic divisions. Instead, they were usually aggravated by outside political actors, such as the duke of Jülich-Cleves-Mark-Berg, the archbishop of Cologne, or the Habsburg government in Brussels.
5 Kirchner, Katholiken, Lutheraner und Reformierte.Neither did binary linguistic and political divides define the ecclesiastical institutions developed among Reformed Protestants in Aachen. The earliest foreign Reformed congregations that we have evidence for were ephemeral and localized. The first, starting in 1544, was made up of a group of about thirty families coming from Artois and Flanders. The second consisted of a small congregation that arrived from Antwerp in 1558 but was not permitted to remain.
6 See chapter 2. Older historiography suggested that Dutch immigrants introduced Reformed ideas to Aachen. Schilling, Niederländische Exulanten, 97–98. This conclusion has recently been challenged. Kirchner, Katholiken, Lutheraner und Reformierte. The third congregation moved—seemingly
en masse—from nearby Maastricht. It functioned separately from Aachen’s local Reformed congregation from 1567 to 1579. During the period when two Reformed congregations overlapped—one local and one from Maastricht—new members could choose which congregation they would join. By 1579, the same year that a new wave of refugees fleeing Maastricht arrived in Aachen, the local and Maastricht congregations merged.
7 Molitor, “Reformation und Gegenreformation,” 190–91. It seems that the local congregation had already been financially supporting the poorer congregation of Maastrichters for years. It may be that the merger aimed to strengthen the Reformed-Lutheran alliance against those Catholics who opposed all Protestantism in the city. Whether this decision played a role or not, two years later, an alliance of Reformed, Lutheran, and those Catholics who were willing to tolerate Protestants gained the majority on the city council, which managed a triconfessional coexistence in Aachen through the end of the century. While confessionalism shaped social relations, German-Netherlandish linguistic, cultural, ethnic, or political divides did not form a significant part of this story. Among Aachen’s Reformed Protestants, it hardly makes sense to separate “Germans” from “Netherlanders” as discrete political, social, or ethnic categories.