As in Cologne, Frankfurt’s Dutch Reformed community functioned in many ways as a foreign expatriate community. That is, this too was a community dominated by migrants from a few wealthy, cosmopolitan cities in the southern Netherlands. We have collected demographic data from 536 Dutch Reformed who resided in Frankfurt in the second half of the sixteenth century. Of those whose territory of origin is known, 86 percent came from either Brabant (38 percent) or Flanders (48 percent). Of those from Brabant whose city of origin is also known, 78 percent came from the great trade city of Antwerp. Only 14 percent came from the rest of the Low Countries. That is, Frankfurt’s Dutch Reformed community was even more homogenous than Cologne’s. These people largely spoke the same dialect, were familiar with the same cities back in the Low Countries, and primarily came from the same social circles. Many understood themselves to be operating within an international network of trade, information, and politics that included Nuremberg, Madrid, Lisbon, and Venice, as well as places further afield, such as Brazil and India. While Frankfurt saw far fewer shipments from Antwerp than Cologne did, those shipments were more than twice as valuable. Wagons arriving from Antwerp (and transported through Cologne) brought sugar, spices, lace, embroidery, and belts to the wealthy Renaissance elites in Frankfurt and the surrounding regions—and thence to elsewhere in German-speaking lands up the Rhine and further east as well as to Bohemia and Italy.
1 See Harreld, High Germans in the Low Countries, 129–30. Thus, as at Cologne, land trade was more important than river trade. Meyn, Die Reichsstadt Frankfurt, 134–36. Further, with one of Europe’s largest and most well-connected Jewish communities, communities of English and Italian traders, and foreign merchants arriving in massive numbers for the city’s famed trade fairs, Frankfurt’s Dutch migrant community may have stood out from their hosts, but they also constituted a regular part of the city’s diverse fabric.
2 On Frankfurt’s Jewish community, see Kasper-Holtkotte, Die jüdische Gemeinde von Frankfurt/Main. On the English merchant community, Baumann, Merchant Adventurers, 170–73. On the role of foreign traders in Frankfurt, see Dietz, Frankfurter Handelsgeschichte, 2: 48–67.In socioeconomic terms Frankfurt’s Dutch Reformed population also resembled Cologne’s. Twenty-six percent were educated professionals (pastors, lawyers, printers, doctors, etc.) or involved in the arts (jewelers, goldsmiths, and painters). Twenty percent were merchants. The Dutch merchants in Frankfurt, however, were some of the wealthiest residents of the city, with extensive international ties throughout the German-speaking lands, to the Low Countries and beyond.
3 Dietz, Frankfurter Handelsgeschichte, 2:41. Toward the end of the sixteenth century, almost 50 percent of the wealthiest residents in Frankfurt were migrants from the Low Countries.
4 Brulez, “De diaspora der Antwerpse kooplui,” 292–93. Meanwhile, 26 percent of the Dutch Reformed population of known occupation were servants, most of whom worked for wealthier members of their own community. This is a far higher percentage than in Cologne, though it may be that this number reflects differences in recording the names of servants rather than different rates of wealthy elites hiring help. Frankfurt’s Dutch Reformed community had a higher proportion of craftsmen and artisans than Cologne (26 percent versus 15 percent), about 70 percent of whom worked in the “new draperies.” The prospect of introducing new weaving industries to Frankfurt had helped convince magistrates to welcome Valérand Poullain’s congregation in 1554.
5 See Poullain’s petition to the city government from March 1554, printed in Ebrard, Die französisch-reformierte Gemeinde, 156–58. And the strategy worked; Frankfurt’s clothing-related industries spiked with the arrival of the migrants.
6 Baumann, Merchant Adventurers, 67–69. This profile meant that overall, the Dutch Reformed were wealthier and more tied to lucrative trades than the local population.
7 Only 3 percent of Frankfurt’s population were merchants, while most were artisans and craftsmen. Jütte, Obrigkeitliche Armenfürsorge, 64–66. With the exception of the kerfuffle that ended with the closing of the Weißfrauenkirche in 1562, Frankfurt’s patricians often sought to attract new industries and wealthy traders, even if that meant dealing with complaints from local pastors and guild leaders. The newcomers were looking for a safe place with access to secure and profitable travel routes, stable banking, and investment opportunities. They may have been fleeing their homes because they refused to embrace Catholicism, but—for those who stayed at least—they were not so inflexible that they refused to accommodate themselves to life in a semiclandestine church.
There was also a significant linguistic gap between the Brabantine or Flemish versions of sixteenth-century Dutch spoken by Frankfurt’s Dutch Reformed community and the Hessian-style High German spoken in Frankfurt. Mutual incomprehensibility seems to have been taken for granted by Dutch and German speakers alike. Initially, linguistic differences had been a justification for allowing separate congregations for Dutch, French, and English speakers.
8 Meinert, Die Eingliederung, 4. As Poullain claimed in 1554, FRH, vol. 1. Beylage, I, 2. In later years, Dutch Reformed migrants repeatedly cited linguistic differences as the reason that they could not worship in local churches.
9 As for instance in 1592, FRH, vol. 2, Beylage LXXIX, 121–22. The “push factors” of religious persecution may have driven them from the Low Countries, but the “pull factor” of access to international markets and banking convinced them to move to Lutheran Frankfurt. In that sense, Frankfurt’s Dutch Reformed community was more like Cologne’s than Aachen’s or Wesel’s. As in Cologne, there was some ethnic blurring in Frankfurt’s Dutch-speaking Reformed congregation, though it was of a substantively different nature. Thirty-seven migrants from elsewhere in the Empire joined the Dutch-speaking congregation, since there was no German-speaking alternative, and most of these did not arrive until the 1590s, often from Reformed territories in the Empire, like the Palatinate, Moers, Nassau, and Hanau-Münzenberg. Meanwhile, we have only identified ten people who came from the Walloon provinces of the Netherlands who joined the Dutch-speaking congregation instead of Frankfurt’s larger, French-speaking Reformed congregation.