Cologne

Further up the Rhine River watershed, in Cologne and Frankfurt, greater economic, linguistic, and cultural differences separated the Dutch migrants from their hosts. In our research we have identified 780 discrete Dutch Reformed migrants who lived in Cologne, one of the largest and most cosmopolitan cities in the Empire.1 Not all of these individuals were full members of the Dutch-speaking church. For the following numbers, we have excluded the relatively few Dutch-speaking Reformed congregation members who came from the Empire or French-speaking Walloon regions. Their presence only reinforces the extent to which modern political and cultural categories cannot adequately capture the nature of this community. Of these, we have information about their province of origin for 546, and city of origin for 520. A full 68 percent came from Brabant, with 90 percent of those coming from either Antwerp (70 percent) or Brussels (20 percent). Eighteen percent came from Flanders (mostly from Bruges, Ghent, and Oudenaarde). Only 14 percent came from the other regions of the Habsburg Netherlands combined. That is, Cologne’s Dutch Reformed population constituted a rather homogenous population: these people largely came from urban backgrounds in the densest and most cosmopolitan parts of the Low Countries. They were thus more likely than migrants in Wesel to have preexisting social networks from back home within their new congregations. We get indications of this in cases like Hugues Sohier and Anna Saye who married in 1581 while they were living in Antwerp, but then in 1593 served as godparents for the child of Aernout van Gerwen and Martha van Uffel, who had recently arrived from Antwerp.2 Sohier and Saye were originally from Mons and Tournai, respectively. DNRM-CL-2442. DNRM-CL-2443. It seems that they had begun their friendship in Antwerp and continued it in Cologne. Because Antwerp and Brussels were vibrant European hubs of political, economic, and cultural exchange, those Dutch migrants coming to Cologne were also more likely to be cosmopolitan in outlook than migrants coming from the provinces further north and east.

Their more shared origins also meant that linguistically and culturally they were also more similar to one another than members of Wesel’s migrant community. At the same time, their Brabantine and Flemish dialects of sixteenth-century Dutch were further afield from the dialect of High German spoken in and around Cologne (called Oberländisch).3 Mihm, “Spache und Geschichte am unteren Niederrhein”; Elmentaler, “Die Schreibsprachengeschichte des Niederrheins”; Tervooren, Van der Masen tot op den Rijn, 331–34. Surely, many residents of Cologne could communicate in Middle Lower German, the lingua franca for the Hanseatic League (of which it was a member), and the city’s earlier dialect, Ripuarian “Kölsch,” included loans from Middle Dutch and other similarities along the Rhenish linguistic continuum. In any case, a blend of Germanic dialects was probably used in the streets.4 WMV, 2/5, 345–46; Mihm, “Sprachwandel in der frühen Neuzeit.” For a comparable situation in Hamburg, see Poettering, Migrating Merchants, 132. Meanwhile, among the Dutch migrants, multilingualism was common. In any case, we learn of no significant barriers to communication between the Dutch immigrants and their hosts. However, the linguistic differences were more striking than in Aachen or the duchy of Cleves and, indeed, some individuals might not have understood one another across the language barriers.

Dutch Reformed in Cologne stood out from their hosts in other ways as well. Cologne’s Dutch Reformed community was dominated by a group of wealthy social elites. Of the 136 for whom we have evidence of their occupation, 28 percent were educated professionals (doctors, ministers, schoolteachers, or government officials) or artists (engravers, painters, jewelers, and goldsmiths).5 Our choice to categorize goldsmiths with these professions, rather than with artisans like weavers and smiths, resulted from the fact that most of Cologne’s goldsmiths were masters who produced expensive artistic works, not middling journeymen. See Briels, “Zuidnederlandse goud- en zilversmeden”; Muylaert, “Accessibility of the Late Medieval Goldsmith Guild.” Meanwhile, merchants made up as much as 43 percent of the Dutch Reformed in the city. These were among the wealthiest international traders in Europe, including members of the famed Van der Meulen, Thijs, Van Geel, Boel, Perez, Van Uffel, and Del Prato6 The Del Prato family was originally from Pesaro, Italy, but had long worked in Antwerp. Baumann, Merchants Adventurers, 295. families from Antwerp. These wealthy merchants often had agents working for them in Antwerp, Bremen, Hamburg, Amsterdam, La Rochelle, Venice, Lisbon, Seville, London, and elsewhere, connecting them to vast global trade networks and giving them access to sugar from the Azores, as well as spices, diamonds, and other valuables from the Indian subcontinent.7 Before 1585, Dutch merchants in Cologne mostly engaged in Italian trade through deals with Italian merchants living there. As Italians left in the late 1580s, Netherlanders began trading with Italian cities directly. Gramulla, Handelsbeziehungen, 202–41. See also Gelderblom, “Governance of Early Modern Trade.” They were more similar in profile to Dutch communities in Venice and Hamburg than to those in Wesel or Aachen.8 Van Gelder, Trading Places, 99–130; Poettering, Migrating Merchants.

Indeed, Cologne and Antwerp had long maintained robust trade relations, mostly along the so-called Cologne Highway (Keulse baan) that ran through Brabant, Liège, and Jülich.9 Harreld, High Germans in the Low Countries, 29–32, 61, 106; Van Houtte, Die Beziehungen zwischen Köln und den Niederlanden, 6–14. Cologne shipped products for the international market through Antwerp, especially Rhenish wine, while Antwerp supplied dry goods, textiles, and foods to the region. The Cologne-Antwerp trade was far more voluminous than the Wesel-Antwerp trade and more than twice as valuable per shipment.10 Harreld, High Germans in the Low Countries, 129–30. Until war in the Netherlands collapsed this overland route to Cologne from 1577, after which Rhine River traffic increased. Harreld, High Germans in the Low Countries, 181. Cologne was also one of Antwerp’s most important trading partners because it was a key transfer point across the Rhine for luxury goods transported further inland to Frankfurt and then to Nuremberg, Augsburg, Venice, and Prague.11 Harreld, High Germans in the Low Countries, 29–32, 195. Puttevils, “Ascent of Merchants,” 119–20. Most trade between Antwerp and Venice traveled on land (via Cologne) until the 1590s, when sea routes came to dominate. Van Gelder, Trading Places, 41–66. As a result, many large merchant firms in one city had agents in the other. When conditions deteriorated for Protestant merchants in Antwerp, Cologne presented an attractive alternative. In Cologne, Reformed merchants moving from Antwerp maintained their extensive international ties, including to other centers of Catholicism in Spain and Italy.12 Gramulla, Handelsbeziehungen, 219–22; Thimme, “Der Handel Kölns”; Sadler, “Family in Revolt.” Those wealthy men often belonged to merchant firms with a global reach.

Because 7 percent of the Dutch Reformed living in Cologne were servants or maids, one might wrongly conclude that a substantial part of the community was poor. However, these men and women mostly served well-off Dutch families. They thus lived more stable lives than the destitute refugees arriving at Wesel’s city gates. The relatively high proportion of domestic workers actually serves as an indication of the overall wealth in the community, not a sign of its poverty. Meanwhile, a relatively small proportion of the population whose occupation is known were ordinary craftsmen and artisans (15 percent), even though elsewhere these groups made up the largest part of Reformed migrant populations.

In all, Cologne’s Dutch Reformed community looks surprisingly like the foreign expatriate communities common to large cities in sixteenth-century Europe. Cologne also hosted Portuguese, Italian, and Dutch Catholic communities, and the Jewish community across the Rhine in Deutz did the bulk of its business in the city.13 On foreign merchant communities in Cologne, see Gramulla, Handelsbeziehungen; Thimme, “Der Handel Kölns,” 450. Given this profile, the willingness of Reformed Protestants to move to this Catholic citadel on the Lower Rhine makes more sense. In this sense, the “pull factors” of Cologne’s markets, financial services, and travel opportunities help us understand the demographics of Cologne’s Dutch Reformed community more just than the “push factor” of religious persecution.14 See also Gelderblom, Zuid-Nederlandse kooplieden, 72–74. The relative wealth of this foreign community also helps us understand local officials’ occasional willingness to turn a blind eye to their religious dissent.

Cologne is the first host community where we find Reformed Protestants formally and institutionally dividing themselves according to ethnic or linguistic lines. Initially, in the late 1560s, the German and Dutch speakers shared a single small congregation, though by 1571 they separated permanently.15 It’s not clear what prompted the divide, except that it arose from some kind of dispute. Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 75. However, with high levels of multilingualism and high mobility, determining who belonged to which congregation posed a challenge. The institutional division did not simply reflect clear-cut ethnic divisions between local “German” and immigrant “Dutch” Protestants. Consider the arrests of nineteen individuals captured in a raid of an illegal worship service in November 1571. Though the congregation that was interrupted was the so-called Dutch-speaking church of Cologne, only six of those arrested were from the Netherlands, while the majority seemed to come from the Empire.16 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 77; Ennen, “Die reformirte Gemeinde,” 527.

Neither did the linguistic division between these two congregations encourage greater ethnic division. By 1575, the two congregations adopted an agreement regarding who would belong to which church. The boundary, they decided, should be the Maas River.17 WMV 2/2, 85. If a coreligionist came from lands west of the Maas, they would join the Dutch-speaking church, and if they came from east of the river, they would join the German-speaking church. That meant that people who had come from eastern regions of Limburg, Luxembourg, and Guelders joined the German-speaking church, including Jacob Boenen, from Maaseik (Limburg), who became an elder of that congregation in 1592 and 1593.18 Simons, Kölnische Konsistorial-Beschlüsse, 462–63. Given the instability of political boundaries during this era, selecting a relatively stable geographical boundary seems prudent, even if they had to make exceptions from time to time. Such was the case with Guiljame Gammerslach who was from Xanten (thus east of the Maas River), but who requested to join the Dutch-speaking church on the basis of the many years he had lived in Rotterdam. Thus, Gammerslach likely understood sixteenth-century Dutch (including the Kleverlands dialect spoken in his native Xanten) better than the Oberländisch German spoken in Cologne.19 WMV 1/3, 345–46. However, some Dutch speakers preferred to join Cologne’s German-language church, despite the 1575 agreement. Such was the case with Herman Schonk. In 1578, after elders confronted him about this decision, he claimed that he worshipped with the Germans because his family preferred it. Elders skeptically noted that he had attended the German language services for two years, even before he had married into his new family.20 WMV 1/3, 117–18. Perhaps Schonk’s choice to join the German-speaking church had been motivated by his desire to build personal ties within the local community. If that’s the case, his marriage into a Cologne family may have been the successful outcome, rather than cause, of his decision to join the German church. Additionally, according to a mutual agreement between the congregations in 1586, those individuals who spoke both French and Dutch should join the congregation that matched the language of their previous church. If this was their first Reformed congregation, they were free to choose which language they preferred.21 WMV, 1/3, 230. WMV 3/5, 102–104.

In practice, there may have been other reasons for people to join churches whose language did not match their native tongue, since we have identified twenty-five people in the Dutch-speaking congregation who—according to the agreement—should have joined the German-speaking church and fifteen who should have joined the French-speaking church. Maria Fassinck, from the French-speaking city of Liège, had been a member of the German-speaking congregation until she transferred to the Dutch-speaking congregation in 1592 after marrying one of its members, Christianus Quintin.22 DNRM-CL-1165. Perhaps personal choice or marriage decisions explain these differences, though Peter Gorter has demonstrated that questions about church membership were also influenced by the efforts of congregations to attract wealthier members so that consistories might benefit from their charitable gifts.23 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 165–66. Such was the case in Emden as well. See Fehler, “Coping with Poverty.” In March 1587, an elder of the Dutch-speaking congregation asked the elders of the French-speaking congregation why Barbara Machelit (the wife of Aernout Dragon), who had been born in Antwerp and did not understand French well, joined their congregation instead of Cologne’s Dutch-speaking church.24 WMV 1/3, 258–59. Their answer is not recorded, but the question suggests there was substantive social interaction across the Dutch-, French-, and German-linguistic divides, and that although congregations were organized around those divides, the divisions were not rigid.25 For ecclesiastical cooperation across these divides, see chapter 5.

We have found almost no evidence of any interaction, however, between the Dutch Reformed refugees and the parallel community of Dutch Catholic refugees in Cologne. As Geert Janssen has shown, from about 1577 the “holy city” played host to Catholic exiles fleeing Protestant-controlled areas in the Low Countries. This population included clergy and members of religious orders whom Cologne’s vast ecclesiastical infrastructure could absorb. A Jesuit college and a vibrant Catholic printing industry meant that Cologne could become what Janssen refers to as “the intellectual powerhouse” of the Dutch Catholic exile community.26 Janssen, Dutch Revolt and Catholic Exile, 65. Such exiles played key roles in providing valuable intelligence to the government in Brussels.27 Marnef, “Een Gentse proost in Keulen.” The two immigrant groups must have known of each other’s existence; the fact that Protestant and Catholic merchants often did business with one another in the city meant that they certainly had mutual acquaintances. They would also have recognized familiar accents when passing on the street. But we have seen no evidence of direct interactions. On the other hand, that also means that there is no evidence of militant, angry, or violent interactions. While confessional rhetoric did erupt in the city—especially before and during the Cologne War (1582–88)28 Schnurr, Religionskonflikt und Öffentlichkeit.—the hostilities of war in the Low Countries that forced both groups to flee to Cologne did not spill over into open conflicts between groups of Dutch-speaking migrant communities. It may well be, as Janssen has argued, that the experience of living in exile radicalized Dutch Catholics, but that radicalization seems to have been targeted at Protestants in the Netherlands rather than the Dutch Protestants who lived alongside them in Cologne.