Of all the Dutch migrant communities in the Holy Roman Empire during the sixteenth century, Frankenthal’s was the most distinct from the local population. Of course, this was because there was no host population—the Netherlanders were given a recently emptied tract of land where a cloister had once stood. Demographically, Frankenthal’s residents also looked like a largely homogenous settler colony, relatively distinct from the Germans living in the nearby villages and towns. Thus far, we have collected demographic information from 784 Netherlanders who lived in Frankenthal, all of whom were Reformed. The vast majority of residents whose origin we have been able to identify came from Flanders (49 percent) and Brabant (39 percent). That’s not surprising, since almost half had moved to Frankenthal from Frankfurt, which had a similar profile. Many of those came from individual family networks in Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, Antwerp, Brussels, Steenwerck, and Oudenaarde. We see this in the De Carmer and Schoubroeck families from Oudenaarde, the Notemans and Van Orlei families from Brussels, as well as the Van Conninxloo family from Antwerp. While some of them had probably experienced the broad cosmopolitanism of places like Antwerp or Brussels, once they settled Frankenthal, their personal networks, news sources, and economic connections became, necessarily, more limited.
The Netherlanders who came to Frankenthal also spoke a wholly different language than the Palatine dialect of High German used in surrounding villages.
1 For this language barrier for Palatine German ministers moving to the Low Countries, see Ravensbergen, “Language Barrers,” in Soen et al., Transregional Reformations, 333–61. As the linguist Meredith Hassell found, the Brabant and Flemish dialects of sixteenth-century Dutch used by the immigrants became more similar after they began living together in Frankenthal, but the immigrants’ dialects did not start influencing or being influenced by the local dialect, as happened in Wesel.
2 Hassall, “Dialect Focusing and Language Transfer.” German- and French-speakers moving to Frankenthal were initially required to learn Dutch. Dutch continued to be used in Frankenthal into the seventeenth century, if we can judge by the language used in church records.
3 In 1578, with the arrival of Walloons from Lutheran-run Heidelberg, the elector forced the Dutch speakers to permit French-language services. Indeed, mutual incomprehensibility was the main reason that later German-speaking immigrants to Frankenthal petitioned for a separate church in 1582.
4 Cuno, Geschichte der wallonisch-reformirten Gemeinde zu Frankenthal, 11–12. That’s not to say that the native German-, Dutch-, and French-speakers could not communicate. Multilingualism was fairly common in Frankenthal. However, it seems that language groups formed subcommunities that shared an identity and recreated networks that deeply shaped social life in the town.
The occupational profile of migrants to Frankenthal was remarkably limited—and hardly even capable of sustaining a working town. A small pipeline of individuals with family and business ties seems to have made up the leading source of Frankenthal’s population.
5 On the role of personal networks in shaping early modern migration, see Lesger, “Informatiestromen.” Twenty-nine percent of the population whose occupation is known were just goldsmiths, painters, and tapestry makers, often from Brussels and Oudenaarde. Tapestry weavers from Oudenaarde were of particular importance to Frankenthal, and indeed they made it a new center for artistic production.
6 Erik Duverger, “Bildwerkerei in Oudenaarde und Frankenthal,” in Hürkey, Kunst, Kommerz und Glaubenskampf, 86–96. Oudenaarde had been the center of Netherlandish tapestry production. Vanwelden, Productie van wandtapijten. About 10 percent of the population of Dutch Reformed in the town were merchants—the lowest proportion in our study except in the small towns of Cleves. Some of these merchants later returned to Frankfurt or moved to Neu-Hanau, another community specifically established in 1597 to attract Dutch Reformed migrants but was closer to Frankfurt. Among the 40 percent in Frankenthal who were artisans and craftsmen (and this number does not include the goldsmiths, painters, and tapestry makers noted above), more than half made fancy clothes for export. In all, Frankenthal was mostly an outpost of Dutch-speaking artists, artisans, and educated urbanites who were left to build a colony largely on their own.