We see a similar focus on local and regional concerns in these Dutch migrant congregations when it came to charitable giving. These congregations tended to support one another and others in their regional and transregional networks within the Empire, while—insofar as we can tell—they never received charity assistance from congregations in the Netherlands, where congregations remained short staffed and under-resourced. Cologne’s Dutch-speaking congregation, which included many wealthy merchants, often took the lead in providing financial assistance to others in the Reformed diaspora. On October 29, 1571, pastors of Cologne’s Dutch congregation urged church members to give generously (
liberalich) to support poor coreligionists in Wesel.
1 WMV 1/3, 10. While congregations proved unable to collect a substantial sum that year, due to difficulties faced by their own congregation, the following year, Cologne’s congregation sent a generous 25
daler.
2 WMV 3/5, 26, 55–57. In December 1577, Wesel’s elders wrote to the Dutch-speaking congregation of Cologne for another gift and asked whether the German-speaking congregation there might give some too.
3 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 72r. In January 1579, they again wrote to Cologne’s Dutch-speaking congregation to get help supporting impoverished Reformed refugees there.
4 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 124r–v. Cologne’s Dutch congregation responded by sending three Hungarian ducats, two Portuguese half real coins, two sovereign crowns, four royal
daler, and one imperial
daler.
5 WMV 3/5, 90. In November 1587, the Dutch Reformed in Cologne gave yet another gift of thirty-seven gold guilders to their comrades in Wesel—then suffering a more than year-long siege. As they wrote:
Because we believe in a community of the Saints, who together are members of one body under one head, Jesus Christ, that calls to a common father in heaven, who are in one church, who are baptized with one baptism, who are governed with one spirit, like members of one body with one soul.
6 WMV 3/5, 123. EKAW Gefach 72,3 57.Peter Gorter estimates that Cologne’s Dutch congregation spent two-thirds of its charity expenditures on other Dutch Reformed congregations in the diaspora, including at Wesel, Frankfurt, Aachen, and Frankenthal.
7 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 177; WMV 1/3, 40, 73, 241; WMV 3/5 53–55, 83–84, 87–88. The only time that Cologne’s Dutch congregation ever sought financial support was in 1586, when it faced the twin crises of the Cologne War and floods of refugees fleeing Alexander Farnese’s conquest of Antwerp. In March of that year, that consistory wrote to Frankenthal for help “during this sorrowful and dreadful time.”
8 WMV 3/5, 95.By contrast, Wesel’s Dutch Reformed community proved to be the largest charitable receiver in our study. Besides cash, Cologne’s Dutch congregation sent other provisions, including food, clothing, and firewood, at the request of Wesel’s Reformed elders. As they wrote to their coreligionists in Cologne in March 1579, “Because our poor are still numerous and the most prominent of our church have left, we have little means to care for our poor.”
9 Quoted in Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 92. At that time, Wesel’s consistory also requested charity from coreligionists in Frankenthal, Hamburg, London, and Stade.
10 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 27r. Frankfurt’s Dutch Reformed congregation similarly held collections for Wesel in 1572 and again during the siege of that city in 1587 and 1588.
11 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 177. Wesel’s elders and deacons drew financial support for their needy from well beyond the Dutch migrants congregations in this study. On a few occasions, they received financial support from stranger churches in England. In November 1571, Southampton’s French-speaking congregation sent £3 to help Wesel’s impoverished refugees.
12 Spicer, French-speaking Reformed Community, 129. In 1577, the Walloon congregation in Canterbury sent £5 to Wesel to alleviate the poverty there.
13 Muylaert, Shaping the Stranger Churches, 209. Far more often, though, they turned to sympathetic nobles in the region around Wesel, including Hermann von Neuenahr (count of Moers), Walburgis von Neuenahr (countess of Alpen), and Gotthard of Myllendonk (Lord of Goor).
14 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fols. 41r, 47v, 48r–v 65v–67v, 70r–71v, 93r, 163v, 165r–v. In September 1575, they received a generous gift to the poor and needy of Wesel from the church of Bedburdyck, a small noble enclave within the duchy of Jülich belonging to the Neuenahr family.
15 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 10r. By contrast, the only charitable gift Wesel’s consistory ever recorded receiving from the Netherlands did not come from a congregation but from an individual living in Dordrecht, who had probably once lived in Wesel, who left money for Wesel’s poor in his will in 1574.
16 EKAW Gefach 72,1 36v. Wesel’s consistory clearly understood that they were part of a community of giving as well as receiving. In March 1579, just as Wesel’s elders were writing desperate letters asking for assistance as refugees were streaming into the city following a string of Habsburg military victories in the Netherlands, they also send one hundred
daler to Aachen’s church for assistance as refugees from Maastricht who were also fleeing into that city.
17 EKAW, Gefach 72,2 157r. Van Booma and Van der Gouw, Communio et mater fidelium, 80–81. For examples of similar collections among stranger churches in England, see Spicer, French-speaking Reformed Community, 113.The Habsburg army’s siege of Wesel from 1586 to 1590 led to a wave of contributions to that community. As the second year of the siege began, Wesel’s elders wrote impassioned pleas for charity in the face of a massive death toll due to plague and hunger. In March 1587, they wrote to churches in Amsterdam, Dordrecht, and Leiden, as well as to the diasporic congregations in Emden, Bremen, Cologne, Frankfurt, and elsewhere.
18 EKAW Gefach 72,3 15–19, 20–21. While they did not receive responses from the Dutch Republic (for reasons yet unknown), gifts poured in from across the diaspora in the Empire. As noted before, donations arrived from Cologne late in 1587 and from Frankfurt in 1587 and 1588.
19 EKAW Gefach 72,3 57. Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 176–77. Hamburg’s Dutch Reformed community also sent an impressive three hundred
daler in 1589, two-thirds of which was earmarked for the Dutch-speaking consistory and one-third of which was designated for Wesel’s Walloons.
20 Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 92; Norwood, Reformation Refugees, 10. The Reformed church at Stade, just outside Hamburg, also provided a charitable contribution to Wesel’s Reformed community in 1589.
21 EKAW Gefach 72,3 131–32. Another gift arrived from some source whose name is undecipherable. Gefach 72,3 135–36. Elders also sought assistance from wealthy individuals who had once lived in their community, including the longtime elders Jacques van der Haghen and Steffen Wolters.
22 EKAW Gefach 72,3 120–22. After the devastating siege ended, elders wrote to the Dutch-speaking church of London for more help dealing with all the hungry people and orphaned children.
23 EKAW Gefach 72,3 159–61.Dutch Reformed congregations also collected funds for coreligionists across Europe, including in France, Switzerland, the Empire, and the Netherlands. Between 1571 and 1591, Frankfurt’s Dutch-speaking congregation held collections for coreligionists facing hardship in Antwerp and Brussels but also Sedan, Geneva, and Wetzlar. During that same period, Cologne’s Dutch-speaking congregations collected for coreligionists in Brussels, Antwerp, and Maastricht, but also Neuss, Geneva, and Roermond.
24 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 178. On parallel collections in England, see Charles Littleton, “The Strangers, their Churches and the Continent: Continuing and Changing Connextions,” in Goose and Luu, Immigrants, 185–87; Muylaert, Shaping the Stranger Churches, 191, 219. That is, while they did see themselves as part of a family of the faithful that included coreligionists in the Netherlands, that family was part of a universal community of Christians, not one limited to the “fatherland.”
This generosity was not limitless. In 1573, when the Reformed congregation in Antwerp asked the Dutch-language congregation at Cologne for financial support for impoverished members and to pay the church’s debts, the elders in Cologne did not hold a collection but instead simply forwarded their request to the German-speaking congregation in the city and the one in Duisburg. Frankfurt’s consistory did not respond to the same request.
25 Meinert and Dahmer, Das Protokollbuch, 23; WMV 1/3, 58; Simons, Kölnische Konsistorial-Beschlüsse, 62. Three years later, Cologne’s German-speaking congregation did make a collection to support Antwerp’s Reformed community. Simons, Kölnische Konsistorial-Beschlüsse, 108–9, 125. For cases of the English stranger churches refusing to support requests for aid from coreligionists on the continent, see Muylaert, Shaping the Stranger Churches, 198; Spicer, French-speaking Reformed Community, 129–30. In 1580, five years after Wesel’s refugees received a generous gift from the congregation at Bedburdyck, the pastor there declined to provide further support.
26 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 231v–232v. In 1593, Antwerp’s congregation wrote to Frankfurt’s Dutch-speaking congregation to ask them to support the theological training of future ministers. Frankfurt’s consistory turned them down but suggested that the congregations in Aachen and Hamburg might prove willing to help.
27 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 174. There are no indications that these rejections reflect hostility, mistrust, or a lack of support. But they do underscore the fact that the migrant congregations had priorities that they had to balance. It’s also critical to remember that sharing charity across the diaspora was not just a matter of exchanging economic resources, but also a symbolic and performative act that reinforced mutual bonds of allegiance between givers and receivers.
28 Monge and Muchnik, Early Modern Diasporas, 72–78.Dutch Reformed migrant congregations in the Empire supported one another not only financially but also by providing direct care for orphans. In December 1571, the elder in Cologne, Gillis de Schepper, brought recently orphaned children of his congregation to Wesel, to be cared for by deacons of the Dutch-language community there.
29 WMV 1/3, 17. Two weeks later, the consistory sent the children of Joris de Greve, a tapestry maker from in or around Oudenaarde, thirteen-year-old Francijnken and seven-year-old Antoonken, to Frankenthal to be cared for by another tapestry maker, Everard van Heist from Brussels.
30 WMV 1/3, 17–18. The records do not indicate that Joris de Greve was deceased, but that seems likely in this case. After Peter Eckberg died in the Spanish siege of Maastricht in 1579, his wife and children fled to Aachen. When his wife died the following year, Aachen’s Reformed congregation sent them to live with their grandmother in Wesel.
31 After the grandmother died, Wesel’s Reformed deacons found local caretakers for the children. Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 93. In February 1590, Wesel’s elders asked the church in Frankenthal to care for two sixteen-year-old orphaned girls whose parents had likely died as a result of starvation or disease during the siege of Wesel.
32 EKAW Gefach 72,3 133–34. Spohnholz, Tactics of Toleration, 93. The following year, Wesel’s Dutch Reformed elders coordinated moving another orphan to Cologne, though this time Cologne’s Dutch-speaking elders reprimanded them because the child seems to have been badly disabled, and thus care would be both expensive and make it harder for members of Cologne’s clandestine congregation to hide from Catholic authorities.
33 WMV 3/5, 130–33. Cologne’s elders made it clear that Wesel’s elders should not take advantage of offers of mutual assistance, “because it is not an appropriate custom that one church should send the burden of their poor to another, but that each [church] should take good care of their own poor.” Their response reminds us that historians should be careful about only emphasizing congregations’ generosity and mutual aid, at the risk of romanticizing the bonds of “international Calvinism.”
Despite the chastising tone of Cologne’s Dutch Reformed elders, in fact they did rely on other congregations to care for orphans within their own ranks. They sent orphans to Wesel and Frankenthal, for instance.
34 Gorter, Gereformeerde migranten, 176. When, in March 1574, they sent the orphaned son of Peter de Zee to be cared for by the Dutch-speaking congregation in Frankfurt—they provided some indication of how they understood this situation. They explained that the boy misbehaved badly and openly in the streets, which brought unwanted attention to their congregation. At Frankfurt, they reasoned, because the Reformed congregation was safer, guardians would be able to “punish such bad behavior with words and also with rods.”
35 WMV 3/5, 81.