A fourth way to understand networks that developed among these diasporic congregations is to examine their correspondence. Letters allowed ministers and elders to give and receive advice and to exchange information, money, and goods to help the poor or build up Christ’s church. The surviving correspondence from these communities—the most robust collection of which comes from Wesel—reveals extensive regional, transregional, and transnational coordination across the diaspora. Consistory members wrote many letters to pastors and elders in the Netherlands, the Empire, and England, for instance, seeking to hunt down husbands who had abandoned their wives, or otherwise to inquire into the behavior and misbehavior of migrants.
1 For example, EKAW Gefach 72,2 fols. 96v–97r, 115r–v, 219r, 146v. Spohnholz, “Instability and Insecurity.” They sought advice on all manner of subjects. Leaders in the largest congregations used correspondence to organize classis meetings or, as noted above, to hire pastors. They also resolved conflicts within and between regional congregations, as Wesel’s elders did with a congregational schism surrounding the noblewomen Clara van der Dilft (i.e., the Lady of Arnhem) in Goch from 1570 to 1577.
2 Schipper, “Across the Borders of Belief,” 95–108. Wesel’s elders also intervened to resolve disputes that plagued the congregations at Hörstgen in 1576 and Xanten in 1581. EKAW Gefach 72,2 49r, fols. 231r–v. Elders also offered informal advice to one another on specific matters.
3 Emmerich’s elders wrote to Wesel in March 1578 to ask whether it was permissible for a certain widower to marry his brother-in-law’s widow. EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 84v. And, as we have seen, they exchanged letters with local noblemen and noblewomen who served as their patrons. Elders and pastors in the congregations in our study participated in transnational religious networks that included the Netherlands, as well as other areas of Europe. But they were just as engaged regionally, with the congregations of their classes, and transregionally, among the networks that developed between diasporic churches in the Empire.
Written attestations of a believer’s true faith and Christian conduct became a critical form of correspondence for elders across the diaspora. Ministers and elders would write to certify the faith and behavior of a church member who was moving, explaining to the home community the reason for that migration and describing specific circumstances relating to their case. Developing such a system of tracking individuals across the diaspora, recall, had been a chief motivating factor for Philip van Marnix and Gaspar van der Heyden to start organizing transnational cooperation in 1570, efforts that led to the synod in Emden the following year. At that meeting, delegates recommended:
in order to reduce the heavy burdens on the churches that grow larger daily from the recklessness of those who too easily move from place to place … that in each and every church it is proclaimed that those who leave from there… have an attestation or testimonial about how they conduct themselves in belief and conduct in the church that they are coming from.
4 Rutgers, Acta, 81.Attestations should include the traveler’s name, hometown, occupation, reason for traveling, and the proposed length of stay. The danger that primarily concerned delegates at Emden was not just the contamination of the church of God with unbelievers, but that unfaithful migrants would pretend to be godly in order to get charity, thereby “draining off alms for the faithful [
huysghenooten des Gheloofs].”
5 Rutgers, Acta, 81. From the perspective of migrants, such attestations acted as letters of reference of their godliness, smoothing over their incorporation into a Reformed community. From the perspective of pastors and elders, attestations constituted a system of coordination across the diaspora, ensuring the spiritual, fiscal, and communal integrity of their ecclesiastical system of church discipline. Andrew Pettegree explained that, for the Reformed congregation at Emden, using attestations in this way ensured that the strict system of ecclesiastical discipline so valued by Reformed Protestants could be maintained among migrants, “since without a valid letter of recommendation … they would not be able to join the Church in any other Reformed community.”
6 Pettegree, Emden, 49–50.Considering how mobile members of these communities were, of course, such monitoring proved helpful for elders. Consider, for example, Jan Mondekins, a Reformed Protestant from Oudenaarde, who fled to Aachen in 1558. Within two years, Mondekens had moved to Frankfurt. Two years after that, he moved to Frankenthal. He stayed in Frankenthal until at least April 1574. In January 1577, he was living in Cologne, but this is where we lose track of him.
7 DNRM-AC-148. DNRM-FR-828. DNRM-FL-62. DNRM-CO-146. With such mobile lives, elders struggled to keep track of whether new members had properly married or baptized their children, submitted to consistorial discipline, or whether they had a reputation for trustworthiness and piety. When Gillis Vogelsank and his wife Sibille moved from Frankfurt to Wesel in the autumn of 1581, they got a recommendation from their former pastor, Gilich Ubrecht. After reading the letter attesting that they were properly married and upstanding members of their former congregation, Wesel’s elders accepted the couple as full members without further questions.
8 EKAW Gefach 72,2 246v. Conversely, elders also refused to write attestations when they could not provide a positive assessment of a person’s belief and conduct. In May 1576, for instance, Wesel’s elders refused Peter Zeebeke’s request for an attestation because he had lived there for such a short time that they could not honestly speak for his faith.
9 EKAW Gefach 72,2 21r. They also denied Jan van Erkelens an attestation in December 1587 because no suitable witness could testify to his godly belief and behavior.
10 EKAW Gefach 72,3 52. To further improve the effectiveness of their monitoring, Wesel’s elders also decided, in September 1576, to collect all the attestations that newcomers brought to them in a book, which could then be consulted when writing attestations if that person moved again.
11 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 36v.In practice, however, letters of attestation seemed to have worked differently. When newcomers did not have an attestation, consistories might write back to their former home or try to find someone locally who could speak on their behalf.
12 For people arriving without attestations, see below, for example, in Frankenthal, Edgard J. Hürkey, “Kunst, Kommerz, Glaubenskampf—Frankenthal um 1600,” in Hürkey, Kunst, Kommerz, Glaubenskampf, 12. In other cases, it was consistory members who did not live up to the ideal. In the summer of 1574, Frankenthal’s elders admonished the Dutch elders in Cologne for not preparing a letter of attestation for one of their church members, Adriaen de Brienen, from Brussels, who moved to Frankenthal.
13 WMV 1/3, 69. In November 1573, Wesel’s elders wrote to the Reformed congregation in Duisburg, explaining that they could not accept an attestation that elders there had written for Jan van Maele because it was not written according to the standards required by the synod of Emden.
14 Wesel’s elders expected that Duisburg’s elders should have interviewed one of Van Maele’s housemates. EKAW Gefach 72,1 fols. 50r–51r. Four years later, Wesel’s elders warned the consistory in Dordrecht that they should no longer accept anyone moving from Wesel to that city without an attestation from them.
15 EKAW Gefach 72,1 fol. 34v. In 1580, elders in Cologne’s Dutch Reformed congregation investigated how Wilhelm Krayen, formerly a member of their church, managed to marry in the Reformed congregation of Aachen without getting an attestation from them.
16 WMV 1/3, 140. It is also important to admit that, even with all good intentions, congregations might have proved unable to exchange letters due to the risk of Catholic political authorities capturing them and thereby endangering the congregations themselves.
The best records we have of attestations for our project come from the records of the Dutch Reformed consistory in Wesel, which included transcriptions of elders’ correspondence, including 130 attestations written between November 1573 and November 1590.
17 There are no surviving records from the consistory before this point, and none for the years 1583, 1584, or 1585. We cannot be confident that this list is comprehensive, of course. After all, there are cases in which the consistory’s scribe failed to record the arrival or departure of someone in the community.
18 That is why it is inappropriate to estimate membership size by lists of attestations for departing members and mentions of new members, as in Dünnwald, Konfessionsstreit und Verfassungskonflikt, 115–20. On this problem in consistory records, see Pollmann, “Off the Record.” Still, this is the most comprehensive collection of attestation letters of any of the migrant congregations in our study, providing a useful window into the monitoring of belief and behavior across the diaspora.
The first thing to notice about these letters of attestation is that there were three different kinds of documents. The first were those written to the consistory of a specific community to which a migrant intended to move, just like those recommended by delegates at the synod of Emden—our research found a total of fifty-seven such letters. Fifteen (25 percent) of these were sent to other Dutch congregations in the Empire. The remaining forty-two letters of this type were for Netherlanders moving to the provinces of Holland and Zeeland (mostly in the early 1570s) and to the provinces of Brabant and Flanders (mostly in the late 1570s and early 1580s). These kinds of letters offer elders the greatest measure of oversight of migrants’ behavior and belief. After all, once the migrant left Wesel, he or she could not change destinations without raising suspicions. Often these letters also provided valuable information about the reason for travel, such as the letter that Wesel’s elders wrote on behalf of Jan Kools, from Leuven, to travel to Antwerp in October 1578, hoping to earn a better living as a silk weaver.
19 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 111. Van Booma and Van der Gouw, Communio et mater fidelium, 402–3.A second kind of letter consisted of open-ended letters from Wesel’s elders to wherever a migrant might end up—our study included forty-nine such letters. These letters served a somewhat different purpose. A church member might bring one with them to a variety of locations, and thus the document might prove useful so long as the paper and ink maintained their integrity. These letters were often more general in nature, usually attesting to a person’s church membership and good conduct but less likely to indicate the reasons for travel. Thus the attestation for Jan van Nuce from May 3, 1580, only states that he was “a member of our church, pure in the faith, upright in his comportment and in his work,” without indicating where he might be heading or why.
20 EKAW Gefach 72,2 183r. Van Booma and Van der Gouw, Communio et mater fidelium, 494. Similarly open-ended is the letter from May 1589 for the carpenter Willem Pauwels and his wife, “who have lived here for a long time and have carried themselves as members of the church” but are “of the opinion to leave here.”
21 EKAW Gefach 72,3 114. These letters helped ensure the integrity of the Christian community across congregations with very mobile populations, but they granted more flexibility to migrants as to where and how they might use such recommendations.
The third type of letter of attestation was written for short-term trips. The three surviving letters of this sort were not written to help the traveler integrate into a new home but served as a kind of safe-conduct passport (though only for those few authorities who recognized Wesel’s Reformed consistory as legitimate).
22 On passports (letters of passage) and safe-conduct, see Scholz, Borders. One example is the recommendation written for Henrich van Bijpen, a merchant heading to Emden to buy cheese and butter in the summer of 1574. The consistory testified to his piety and honesty—and that he had never acted against “the honorable prince of Orange.” Such letters would not have proven useful for Van Bijpen within the duchy of Cleves, but may have helped down the Rhine in Dordrecht, where he probably planned to get sea transport to Emden.
There are strong indications, however, that the vast majority of Reformed migrants neither received nor sought an attestation when moving and that this was normal and uncontroversial (the complaints mentioned above notwithstanding). First, consider what we know about 187 individuals who joined Wesel’s Reformed congregation as full members after moving to the city from elsewhere during the same period as the attestations we analyze (November 1573 and November 1590). Of those, only forty (22 percent) came with an attestation. For the rest, elders usually only noted that they “made a confession of faith” (or used similar language) before being accepted into the community. The statement of faith that elders used to determine orthodoxy was the Belgic Confession of Faith, written in 1561 by Guy de Bres.
23 EKAW Gefach 60,7,18; Gefach 72,1 fol. 10r. However, members were not expected to have memorized all thirty-seven articles of this document to gain church membership. On July 30, 1576, for instance, elders indicated that one of them read aloud the confession of faith to Hans van Mechte and his wife Sybille van Bergingen—recently arrived from Mechelen—which they approved.
24 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 32r. In September 1577, after Faes Fryssen arrived from Linter (a small town in Brabant), elders explained that one of them held up their church ordinance before him and then presented the content of “our discipline” to him. He was asked whether he could conform to these, to which he answered “yes” before being received with a handshake by the brothers.
25 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 4. The next month, when Jan Kools requested to join, because he had formerly been an Anabaptist in Leuven, elders first made sure that he was instructed on their church’s teaching on baptism, the incarnation of Christ, the swearing of oaths, and obedience to secular authorities “so that he knew enough.” After that, the elders read aloud “the articles of faith,” which he confirmed with a “yes.”
26 EKAW Gefach 72,2 fol. 64v. Such examples suggest that joining Wesel’s Reformed community did not require an attestation and that becoming a full member of the church was not an especially onerous or intrusive process (even if being subject to consistorial oversight could be). Such a perspective indicates that we might need to rethink the role of attestations as tools of coordination across the diaspora.
A useful perspective can be gained by asking what kinds of people received letters of attestation in the first place. Here again, the extensive surviving letters from Wesel prove helpful. Of the 130 letters that elders sent and the 40 records they made of receiving attestations, four categories of people are prominent. It’s hard to say what we might make of the largest group who received attestations: working-aged single men (32 percent). In many cases, such attestations mentioned the man’s occupation and testified to his having financial reasons for moving. Single men might well want to avoid suspicions that they were thieves or miscreants. However, it was fairly common for male apprentices and journeymen of good repute to travel for work in sixteenth-century Europe.
27 Hochstadt, “Migration in Preindustrial Germany,” 203–4. Often that travel was regional, not long distance. Prak et al., “Access to the Trade,” 11–13. These men made up a high proportion of migrant communities in general. There is simply no reliable indication about whether single working men were overrepresented or underrepresented among those asking for attestations. Thus, it’s probably impossible to make any useful conclusions about this group.
The other prominent groups offer more useful clues. First, a relatively high proportion (18 percent) of letters were written on behalf of men who had served a church or other public office. These men could use the document to provide testimony of their past service, perhaps to facilitate integration into those same social circles in their new homes. Second, there was a relatively high percentage of attestations (22 percent) for women traveling alone, including widows, wives separated from their husbands, and women who had never been married. In such cases, attestations may have protected the women from suspicion that they were thieves, beggars, or prostitutes. After all, given the dependency of women on social networks for financial and social stability, marginalized women were pushed into migrant lives that combined begging, work as a servant, domestic theft, and prostitution.
28 Kamp, “Female Crime”; Rublack, Crimes of Women, 92–162. Thus women traveling for honest, even pious, reasons, had good reason to travel with an attestation of their stable connections to family. Another 10 percent of attestations were for impoverished individuals or people with scandals in their past. These include people who had flirted with unorthodox beliefs, had some kind of family or sexual scandal behind them, or whose impoverished appearance or desperation might inspire suspicion. When such people came with an attestation, elders would put in some extra effort, as they did with Jan Kools in 1577.
Thus, it seems that attestations were not standard practice across the diaspora; instead, they were used by specific subgroups of people with a special reason for seeking an attestation. In Wesel, elders wrote an average of only 9.5 attestations per year, a small fraction of the people moving in and out of Wesel’s Reformed community in the 1570s and 1580s. Attestations were usually unnecessary and not common. Those who did bring attestations included social elites looking to document their status and piety as a means of integrating into similar circles in their new homes. For others, having an attestation probably helped them avoid scrutiny and facilitated their acceptance because something about their situation risked provoking suspicion.
Compared to Petrus Dathenus and Gaspar van der Heyden’s vision for a transnational system of exchanging attestations in 1570, the practice looks like an utter failure. In most cases, requiring attestations for every migrant indicating their hometown, occupation, reason for traveling, and the proposed length of stay proved either impractical or impossible. Few Reformed migrants seem to have traveled with them. As a result, consistories developed other means of judging newcomers’ suitability to join Christ’s church. It’s not clear whether this discrepancy between ideal and reality was primarily a result of the fact that people were so mobile, political circumstances so precarious, church members so unreliable, consistories so overwhelmed with work, or a combination of these factors.
Looked at in another light, though, the system of attestations served the necessary purposes exactly. Consistories maintained pragmatic procedures for integrating new members arriving without attestations. Meanwhile, those people who wanted special assurances that their honor and piety would be recognized could secure it by requesting an attestation before they left. If they knew where they were heading, they could request the more detailed kind of attestation recommended by the synod of Emden. Given the uncertainties of the period—beset by sieges, large-scale military campaigns, religious persecutions, economic uncertainties, and outbreaks of plague—consistories also proved willing to write more open-ended letters of recommendation. In that sense, the system of attestations adapted to serve the needs of the individuals of the Dutch Reformed diaspora. That said, transnational networks of coordination were not nearly as vigorous as delegates at Emden had once hoped or as historians have sometimes portrayed them.