The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars

By Jesse Spohnholz

The Tactics of Toleration examines the preconditions and limits of toleration during an age in which Europe was sharply divided along religious lines. During the Age of Religious Wars, refugee communities in borderland towns like the Rhineland city of Wesel were remarkably religiously diverse and culturally heterogeneous places. Examining religious life from the perspective of Calvinists, Lutherans, Mennonites, and Catholics, this book examines how residents dealt with pluralism during an age of deep religious conflict and intolerance. Based on sources that range from theological treatises to financial records and from marriage registries to testimonies before secular and ecclesiastical courts, this project offers new insights into the strategies that ordinary people developed for managing religious pluralism during the Age of Religious Wars.

Historians have tended to emphasize the ways in which people of different faiths created and reinforced religious differences in the generations after the Reformation’s break-up of Christianity, usually in terms of long-term historical narratives associated with modernization, including state building, confessionalization, and the subsequent rise of religious toleration after a century of religious wars. In contrast, Jesse Spohnholz demonstrates that although this was a time when Christians were engaged in a series of brutal religious wars against one another, many were also learning more immediate and short-term strategies to live alongside one another. This book considers these “tactics for toleration” from the vantage point of religious immigrants and their hosts, who learned to coexist despite differences in language, culture, and religion. It demands that scholars reconsider toleration, not only as an intellectual construct that emerged out of the Enlightenment, but also as a dynamic set of short-term and often informal negotiations between ordinary people, regulating the limits of acceptable and unacceptable behavior.

Published by University of Delaware Press. Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Delaware Press
• Release date: Dec 28, 2010
• ISBN: 9781644531525

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University of Delaware Press

© 2011 by Jesse Spohnholz

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

ISBN 978-1-64453-151-8 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-152-5 (ebook)

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on file under LC#2010001414

Acknowledgments

MY PATH TO STUDYING RELIGIOUS PLURALISM IN THE AGE OF RELIGIOUS Wars has been both pleasant and long. Along the way I have benefited from the help of many people, only a few of whom I will be able to thank here. David Harris Sacks inspired my passion for understanding this period, which was in many ways alien to the world in which I grew up. That was, as I would later come to understand, exactly its appeal. That enthusi-asm was focused with the help of my graduate school mentors, Benjamin J. Kaplan, Sarah Hanley, Andrew Pettegree, and Bruce Gordon. Wesel’s Stadtarchiv and Evangelisches Kirchenarchiv are splendid places to work, and I owe a deep debt to Martin Roelen, Walter Stempel, Monika Hoevel-mann, and Marianna Horlich-Burbach for orienting me to that world, each in their own way. Scores of diligent and courteous librarians in the four countries in which this research was undertaken have earned my respect and praise. The project matured through discussions with friends, men-tors and colleagues. In helping me to contemplate my dissertation, from which this book had its origins, I would especially like to thank Raymond Mentzer, Ralph Keen, Linda Kerber, Mark Peterson, Jeffrey Cox, Rebecca Pulju, Shannon Fogg, Nathan Godley, Jennifer Harbour, and Mat-thew Klemm. Their insights surely aided that work’s award of the Fritz Stern Prize. My colleagues at Grinnell College offered tremendous intel-lectual and personal support as I transformed it into something larger. I particularly thank Daniel Kaiser, Victoria Brown, Pablo Silva, and Thomas Pegelow-Kaplan for their helpful comments. Valuable feedback at various stages has also been offered by Judith Becker, Tim Fehler, David Luebke, Hal Parker, Karin Maag, Nicolette Mout, Juliaan Woltjer, Susan Karant-Nunn, David Mayes, Lee Palmer Wandel, Thomas Safley, Peter Wallace, and Lawrence Duggan. As the project neared its completion, my colleagues at Washington State University have offered a warm intellectual environment for me to refine my thoughts. I would like to thank Todd Butler, Matthew Sutton and my colleagues in the Interdisci-plinary Religious Studies Group at Washington State University and the University of Idaho. All this assistance notwithstanding, all errors are my own. This project has also received invaluable financial support at various stages from a variety of institutions, including the German Historical In-stitute, Henry Meeter Center for Calvin Studies, the Graduate College and the Department of History at the University of Iowa, Grinnell Col-lege, and the Department of History at Washington State University. I also would like to thank Don Mell, John Hurt, and the staff at the Univer-sity of Delaware Press for supporting my work.

I thank also my amazing wife Sheri, whose intellectual and personal support I hold so dear. More broadly, I would like to thank my entire family. My research has taken me physically and intellectually far from my start at the base of Alaska’s Chugach Mountains. Yet our shared interest in ideas, tolerance, and respect for difference means that, in a certain way, I never really travelled that far at all. I hope that my own study of how hostile and frightened neighbors crafted a world of coexistence helps people in all kinds of settings to envision their own path toward greater peace.

Introduction: Religious Toleration and the Reformation of the Refugees

ON MAY 14, 1582, AN OFFICIAL IN THE RHINELAND CITY OF WESEL WALKED from house to house, pounding on doors throughout a neighborhood in the southeast corner of town. At each home, he collected taxes to support the reinforcement of the city’s defensive perimeter. The planned construction had been inspired by intense religious warfare recently in this region of northwest Germany and throughout the neighboring Netherlands, which kept residents on guard against the constant threat posed by nearby armies, both Catholic and Protestant. Yet life within the city seemed remarkably peaceful.

Among the first homes the tax collector visited was that of Lambrecht von Bellinckhoven, a strident Lutheran and town leader. Bellinckhoven, like others of his family, later emerged as a leading critic of local religious policy. After collecting two dollars (dalar), the town official went next door, where he knocked at the house of Jan Fijch, a Dutch apothecary who had arrived in Wesel only a few years before. Fijch was a Calvinist, one of countless refugees who had shown up at Wesel’s city gates in recent years, fleeing persecution and war in the Catholic-controlled Netherlands. Collecting one and a half dollars, apparently without incident or comment, the collector moved on. It could only have been a matter of minutes before he knocked on the door of Oliver van der Vinct, the son of a Flemish merchant who had likewise escaped the religious hostilities raging to the west. As almost everyone in town knew, Vinct was an Anabaptist, a follower of what was widely believed to be the most dangerous religious tradition of the Reformation era. Vinct’s fellow believers were lambasted across Europe as seditious and dangerous—rebels against all social and religious order— and they faced some of the fiercest persecution of the age. Still, the official simply did his duty and collected one and a half dollars before moving on to the next house. As he walked his route, the man always remained in sight of the Dominican priory that towered above this part of town. He soon visited the Catholic friars there too, accepting a payment of two and a half dollars. And so the day went. From house to house, the civic official visited Catholics, Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anabaptists, all without incident, collecting from each a financial contribution to protect the city’s residents against the wars raging outside the city gates.¹

If the Age of Religious Wars (ca. 1550–1650) was an era of religious fervor and intense hostility between churches and the states that sponsored them, then this mundane event of tax collection in Wesel might seem like a rare example of toleration. As city representatives walked every street through the month of May 1582, they left no record of any incident or care for religious difference. Like neighbors everywhere, residents of Wesel did have conflicts, but they generally found ways of resolving them without turning to violence. When the hard-line Lutheran Bellinckhoven and Cal-vinist refugee Fijch had a dispute the previous year, they took the matter to a civic court, where the case was resolved peacefully² Even when Wesel’s residents could not find a satisfactory legal resolution, they often avoided conflict with ambiguous language and polite silence. Such was the case when the Anabaptist Vinct refused to baptize his child in the local church eight years earlier. The resolution in this case was that Vinct promised that he would conform to local regulations, but never did. Neither did officials ever take action against him.³ The matter was simply ignored. Vinct’s presence in the town, however, was not. Officials still showed up at his door that Monday morning in May to ask for a collection.

From a certain perspective, the apparent practice of religious toleration among these neighbors looks remarkably familiar. Appealing to a neutral party, using ambiguous language, and strategically employing silence and neglect—these are hallmarks of tense social relations that many of us can recognize, and which we often practice ourselves on a fairly regular basis. When considering the perfectly ordinary nature of religious pluralism for residents of this sixteenth-century town, one might even be tempted to ignore the fact that these people did not view their coexistence as a positive experience at all. Yet the demand that Vinct baptize his newborn against his will suggests that these residents were not quite paragons of toleration. In fact, they shared the same basic convictions as those engaged in religious warfare elsewhere in Europe. While they clearly practiced a form of tolerance, these were still fundamentally intolerant people.

For many twenty-first century readers, the word toleration suggests a worldview or philosophical orientation quite alien to Wesel’s sixteenth-century neighbors. For those people raised within the Western liberal tradition, toleration depends at its heart on a shared commitment to self determination and individual freedom of conscience.⁴ Yet the example of sixteenth-century Wesel highlights the fact that even people who do not share these commitments can live relatively peacefully in pluralistic situations. While liberalism may be a path to the practice of toleration, it is not necessarily the only one. Indeed, studying examples of religious pluralism that saw neither the legal protection of religious minorities nor principled defenses of their toleration, poses interesting questions, not only about how coexistence in these types of environments could function, but also about why individuals would ever consent to it. These are the questions that this book proposes to answer.

Looking at a case of coexistence during Europe’s Age of Religious Wars offers a striking example. The intense religious conflict and warfare of the period naturally posed dramatic challenges to religious coexistence. Toleration did not just mean putting up with an alien but unthreatening Jewish population, a casual Islamic trader, or a marginal and distant heretical group, as it had in the Middle Ages. Europe’s states pitted themselves against other states in a series of religious wars that spanned Latin Christendom. Internally, cities and towns were rent apart into hostile factions. Even families were torn asunder by the religious hostilities that broke out. Not only church leaders, but also ordinary men and women, were caught between their ideal model of Christian unity and the fact that they fundamentally disagreed with other people who nonetheless also called themselves Christians.

For those men and women living through the Age of Religious Wars, therefore, tolerating people of opposing faiths posed something of a paradox. Using the meaning of the term that Europeans living through this era understood, toleration did not mean that they should try to erase those differences or forge common values. Rather than using the word tolerieren, most early modern Germans usually used the word dulden, while their Dutch-speaking neighbors to the west used the term verdragen. Early modern Germans and Netherlanders used these same words to describe the ability to withstand bodily pain, or to endure or suffer the presence of some other form of evil or danger. The meaning of these terms for early modern Europeans is akin to the modern-day English word tolerance as it applies to alcohol or other bodily poisons.⁵ It required the deep conviction that someone else’s beliefs were not only wrong, but dangerous. Toleration in this sense demanded that an individual compromise between a sincere detestation for another’s beliefs, perhaps even his or her very presence, and the person’s unwillingness to kill or be killed for those differences. The very presence of toleration in this sense, as early modern Europeans understood it, depended on intolerance, as well as some discrepancy between one’s ideal goal of ridding oneself of the threat and dealing with the fact that one could not realistically achieve that goal. In short, toleration as used here was not the opposite of intolerance, but the least disruptive of several logical consequences of intolerance, which might also include forced migration or physical violence.⁶

Yet the fact is that, despite all this, on a day-to-day level, many people all over Europe found ways to get along. Instead of tracing this only in state proclamations or philosophical treatises, we need to look elsewhere as well to understand how this worked. This demands understanding official systems of laws, political rhetoric, and policy debates, but it also requires taking a broader approach. Informal systems of coexistence, when they did emerge, did so in city streets and taverns as well as inside private houses, in church pews and in cemeteries, in courthouses and in the secret whispers of backrooms. These are the subjects of social and cultural history, and they are the focus of this study.

Relationships between Europe’s competing religious groups have not been neglected by historians, but until recently this work has been dominated by studies of religious violence, persecution, and intolerance.⁷ Most particularly, historians have given considerable attention to understanding the tendency of competing churches in early modern Europe to define themselves against their competitors. Although the doctrinal and liturgical concerns of each religious group varied considerably, recent scholarship has emphasized the extent to which, beginning in the second half of the sixteenth century, the major religious groups emerging from the chaos of the Reformation began to form separate confessions along similar patterns. We can see the beginning of this rise of confessional consciousness in the proliferation of doctrinal declarations by different faiths in the mid-to-late sixteenth century. Church leaders carefully defined orthodoxy in both doctrine and liturgy and attempted to standardize those definitions among their members.⁸ Churches also carefully regulated ministerial training and religious education. Sermons, pamphlets and songs spread awareness of confessional differences to ordinary churchgoers.⁹

For more than a generation now, scholars have been exploring the ways that this process contributed to distinctly modern forms of religious and political institutions. Most influentially, Heinz Schilling and Wolfgang Re-inhard have described a process through which confessional consolidation became interwoven with the rise of modern state systems in Europe. This model of confessionalization has been particularly influential among historians studying the Holy Roman Empire. Because the Peace of Augsburg of 1555 granted princes the power to determine the official confessional church of their territory, the establishment of religious conformity became closely linked to governments’ efforts to consolidate authority.¹⁰ More recently, though, some scholars have challenged various aspects of confessionalization as an appropriate interpretive model for understanding German history¹¹ Many have noted the failure of princes to achieve their goals to create a disciplined and confessionalized state, or have emphasized the role of ordinary people in selecting only those elements of confessionalization that fit local needs.¹² A few studies have pointed out the emergence of confessionalizing cultures even in the absence of state efforts to impose them.¹³ Other critics have stressed the diversity within confessions themselves, and the persistent ability of individuals to cross confessional lines when it suited them.¹⁴ Finally, many scholars have criticized the tendency of confessionalization scholarship to examine past events in terms of long-term modernization narratives, particularly that of state building. Like looking for modern notions of toleration in the sixteenth century, this approach has the potential to misrepresent how ordinary people, largely unaware that state systems would later characterize political norms, experienced these events.¹⁵

While there remains considerable debate on the usefulness of confessionalization as a framework to understanding the emergence of modern political and religious institutions, thirty years of scholarship has had the combined effect of emphasizing two key points critical to understanding early modern European history. First, this work has emphasized the tremendous value of looking at confessions alongside one another. It highlights that, in certain ways, confessions developed along similar patterns, and often as much through the interaction between those of different religious views as through the result of theological perspectives themselves. Secondly, increasing scholarship on confessional relations has brought to light just how common it was for early modern Europeans to live in mixed confessional environments. Even if religious uniformity remained an ideal for men and women across the continent, this did not reflect the realities that many people, particularly those living in urban settings, faced.

Rather than considering the rise of confessional consciousness in terms of the long-term consequences of these changes, embedded in narratives of modernization, this book focuses on short-term solutions in order to understand how individuals dealt with living in a religiously divided world. It raises questions therefore about the decisions that community leaders and ordinary people made to deal with the unnerving realities of pluralism, as well as what those decisions imply about their religious identity itself. By examining strategies of coexistence, this book focuses therefore on the kinds of decisions that individuals were faced with, and the choices that they made, rather than the consequences of those choices in terms of an end result that they could not have foreseen. In short, this study is not concerned with the origins of modernity, either in terms of religious toleration or state building, but instead with everyday practices of religious coexistence during an age in which people did not see pluralism as a virtuous condition, but a distasteful one.

This book uses the terms toleration and tolerance to describe the patterns of coexistence within early modern communities. As such, toleration had three basic components. The first was a fundamental aversion to the beliefs and practices of another group. The second was a restraint of action, regardless of the cause of that restraint. The third was that individuals on all sides of the dividing lines maintained a persistent relationship with others.¹⁶ Rather than accepting a simple dichotomy between tolerance and intolerance, this line of inquiry suggests that many communities across Europe maintained a balance between religious antagonism and coexistence, between mutual hostility and mutual toleration.¹⁷ The key to understanding toleration in this way is examining how communities found this balance, how they maintained it, and, finally, where they placed the boundaries of toleration.¹⁸ As we shall see, understanding religious coexistence during the Age of Religious Wars also offers new insights into the nature of religious identity during the confessional age.

Although scholars are beginning to accept that religious coexistence was a reality for many early modern Europeans, the present state of research only provides the barest sense of how this functioned. Benjamin J. Kaplan has offered a recent study that provides a sense of some of the broad patterns of coexistence across Europe. One remarkable feature of his study is the extent to which confessional arrangements varied tremendously¹⁹ In Brandenburg, the Calvinist prince was forced to grant legal protections to Lutherans across the territory after proving unable to impose his own church on his subjects.²⁰ Meanwhile, the Peace of Augsburg legally established institutional parity for Lutherans and Catholics in the so-called bi-confessional imperial cities of southern Germany²¹ In Augsburg, for instance, Lutherans worshiped in a preaching house adjoined to the Catholics’ priory church. Catholics and Lutherans even used the same gateway into the churchyard to enter their respective churches. The close proximity this required during times of heightened religious sensibilities understandably inspired conflicts that required careful resolution.²² In the bi-confessional city of Ravensberg, near Lake Constance, Lutherans and Catholics shared a single church building, a practice that was adopted elsewhere in the Holy Roman Empire as well.²³ Towns in the Lower Rhenish territory of Berg used these so-called simultaneum churches as well, with the specific terms of use worked out at the local level. In the town of Im-mekappel, for instance, Lutherans worshiped in the main church, while the small Catholic congregation held services in the bell tower. In seventeenth-century Denkingen, another town in Berg where Lutherans and Catholics shared the church, a hole had to be drilled into the Lutheran altar to ensure that Catholic parishioners could see the priest during services!²⁴

Within the complex political world of the Holy Roman Empire, the conditions governing confessional coexistence were diverse. Yet across the broad landscape of Europe there were an even wider array of options. For all the diversity in institutional and legal arrangements, however, historians have emphasized some common trends. In studies examining confessional relations in the German city of Hamburg, but also Chalon-sur-Marne (France), Norwich (England), and Haarlem (Dutch Republic), scholars have emphasized the critical role of local authorities in preserving peace. By emphasizing civic harmony and urban solidarity, and by shying away from harsh punishments for dissenters, civic leaders in many cities and towns played an essential role in minimizing conflicts in religiously-divided communities.²⁵

Yet without the cooperation of ordinary residents, these efforts would have been futile. It is therefore useful, where sources allow, to consider the perspectives of common people, especially when they contrasted with the intentions of secular and religious authorities. Kenneth Stow’s study of the Jewish community in sixteenth-century Rome is a useful reminder that, faced with a disagreeable situation, religious minorities themselves could develop a variety of strategies to ensure their survival.²⁶ Rome’s Jews developed habits that made them less threatening to their Catholic neighbors, even as they maintained their traditional religious devotion within the walls of the ghetto.

The present study is organized around the premise that a better understanding of the complexity of coexistence can be gained by uncovering the perspective of, and strategies adopted by, members of each religious group within a city or town. This research has the potential to uncover not only the crucial role of civic leaders in preserving the peace, but also the complicity of ordinary individuals in preserving coexistence, as well as alternate avenues for avoiding conflict when mutual connivance was not an option. Dissimulation, as Perez Zagorin has argued, could be just as effective a tool for checking persecution as cooperation.²⁷ By examining the challenges of pluralism from the vantage point of competing religious groups, we can better understand the variety of strategies upon which coexistence was built. This perspective encourages scholars to reconsider toleration, not only as an intellectual construct, but also as a dynamic set of day-to-day negotiations between ordinary people, regulating the limits of acceptable, and unacceptable, behavior within their community.

This book focuses in particular on confessional coexistence in a refugee community in the German lands that hosted religious dissidents who had fled from the neighboring Netherlands. This focus on religious refugees offers three important advantages that contribute to a stronger understanding of the patterns of religious coexistence in early modern Europe. First, the rise of confessional consciousness took place early among religious refugees. If Christians across the continent were often unwilling to compromise in matters of faith, religious refugees were an extreme example of those who prioritized their religious commitments.²⁸ They had, after all, given up their homes and put themselves in considerable danger because they refused to compromise their deeply-held beliefs. Second, it was not possible for individuals of competing faiths to appeal to family or local allegiances as an alternative basis for social order, as happened in other locales. A refugee community therefore offers an example of coexistence that emerged in spite of serious differences in language, social ties, and culture. Studying confessional coexistence in the absence of these bonds pushes the emerging scholarship on this topic even further to consider how individuals understood their behavior in this environment. As we shall see, the answer helps scholars understand not only confessional existence in early modern Europe more broadly, but the very nature of early modern religious identity itself. Finally, because they arrived from outside the town, examining daily interactions between refugees and their hosts allows us to isolate the more self-conscious and sudden strategies that individuals developed to deal with the challenges of pluralism. Charting these strategies helps to identify the shifting boundaries of the practice of toleration.

The most dramatic case of migration during the confessional era was that caused by religious persecution in the Low Countries, that assortment of provinces under the rule of Charles V, who by 1519 was also the Holy Roman Emperor and the king of Spain. When evangelical dissidents appeared in the provinces in the early 1520s, Charles V quickly established measures to suppress their challenge to the Catholic Church. By 1566, at least 1,300 religious dissenters had been executed in the Netherlands.²⁹ Yet, for all its efforts, the central government in Brussels was unable to keep the new heresies in check. In the early years, Lutheranism, Anabaptism, and spiritualist movements were strong, but beginning in the 1540s, Reformed Protestantism began to proliferate. The waves of persecution that followed were among the bloodiest in Europe and many members of the new Reformed, or Calvinist, churches fled to England and Germany³⁰ The first refugee communities were established at Wesel and Frankfurt in the Holy Roman Empire, but also in London. In their new homes, Calvinist refugees were joined by Lutherans and Mennonites also from the Netherlands. Philip II, Charles V’s successor in the Netherlands as well as in Spain, intensified these policies in the 1550s and 1560s. This deepened the anti-government views of many religious dissenters and it also increased the flow of refugees to these foreign cities. Refugee communities were established at Cologne, Emden, Aachen, and Hamburg in the Empire, and in the English cities of Sandwich, Norwich, Southampton, and elsewhere. Committed Calvinists often came as entire families, carrying as many possessions as they could on the wagons or ships that carried them.

Once abroad, the welfare of the Dutch emigrants depended greatly on local conditions.³¹ Some hosts were motivated by a commitment to aid coreligionists while others were more interested in the boon to the economy that Dutch artisans and merchants might provide. In every location, emigrants from the Netherlands confronted new cultures and religious traditions. They had to accommodate themselves to the demands of secular authorities and come to terms with the requirements of local churches. Life in these new diverse and sometimes hostile environments meant that host communities and refugees had to build working relationships if they were to live together. When this did not happen, Dutch refugees found themselves in search of a new home.³²

This study centers on the refugee center of Wesel, a medium-sized German city in the northwest area of the Holy Roman Empire, during the second half of the sixteenth century. By midcentury the town government had abandoned its allegiance to the Roman Church and formally adopted Lutheranism, though a Catholic community remained, awaiting the opportunity to reestablish the traditional order. Divided between Lutherans and Catholics, the town thus faced the same challenges as cities and towns across the Empire. While residents were still reeling from this transition, though, the tumult in the neighboring Netherlands completely transformed their world, bringing waves of Calvinists, but also Mennonites and Lutherans, to Wesel. The city’s proximity to the Netherlands, its location along the Rhine River trade routes, and its government’s welcome policy toward immigrants made it among the largest of dozens of Dutch refugee communities popping up in Germany and England. In this case, the weak position of the territorial prince, the duke of Cleves, meant that he had little hope of putting a stop to either defections from the Catholic Church among his subjects or the arrival of these non-conformist immigrants.³³ Thus by mid-century, substantial numbers of the four chief religious camps emerging out of Europe’s Reformations coalesced all of a sudden in this town along the Rhine River. Its remarkably confessionally diverse population, along with the rich evidentiary base available in governmental and ecclesiastical archives, makes Wesel an ideal location for a study of coexistence in a refugee community.

Wesel also serves as one of the few examples of confessional coexistence in the Empire that included not just Catholics and Lutherans, but Calvinists and Anabaptists. The omission of Calvinists from the Peace of Augsburg in 1555 seriously limited the appeal of the movement throughout most of Germany. In those few places where Calvinism did emerge as a tolerated confession, this was generally the result of a prince who had converted to Calvinism and served as patron to that church. In cases like the county of Lippe or the electorate of Brandenburg, though, the prince’s adoption of the Reformed faith met with little enthusiasm, and could spark vigorous resistance.³⁴ Calvinism within the Empire only had a substantial presence in those communities that hosted large numbers of religious refugees, as at Wesel.³⁵ Yet the fact that Calvinists were not legally recognized by imperial law, and had no influential patron to protect them, meant that the arrangements for their continued survival in the city could succeed only because those arrangements were unofficial. This had an important side effect for Anabaptists, the fourth of the major religious groups to emerge out of the Reformation. In this case, the informal nature of Wesel’s confessional coexistence provided a greater opportunity for peaceful Anabaptists to find a place for themselves than they often found elsewhere. As a result, Wesel was a more confessionally diverse city than most places in the Empire. Yet for all the promise that the city’s archives offer for understanding the dynamics of confessional coexistence in the early modern era, scholars have treated Wesel only with an eye toward narratives of the spread of Protestantism, confessionalization, or cultural assimilation.³⁶ The result has been an emphasis on long-term processes, but little attention to the problems of pluralism that residents of this town faced on a daily basis.

Life in a refugee community encouraged these urban inhabitants to become even more aware of their confessional identity than they ever had been.³⁷ In Wesel, local Lutherans and Catholics faced the arrival of thousands of Calvinists and Mennonites from the Netherlands. Wesel’s confessional groups disagreed on fundamental points of Christianity, while cultural, occupational, and linguistic differences only compounded their religious differences. Despite these challenges, Wesel’s residents did learn to live in relative peace with one another. Like all toleration in pre-modern Europe, Wesel’s solution was provisional and begrudging. Members of each confessional group recognized that some compromise was necessary until their faction achieved ultimate victory. Until that point, residents of Wesel, like people of competing faiths across Europe, had to learn to live alongside one another, with or without a system of law that supported that process.

This book is primarily aimed at understanding how people in Wesel learned to coexist during this era of mounting challenges to toleration. It explains not only the obstacles to coexistence, but the wide variety of strategies that people developed to make living in this environment possible. In this way, this study differs from previous scholarly work on refugees during the Reformation era, which has been largely written from two perspectives. The first tradition has examined the long-term social and economic integration of refugees within their host populations.³⁸ This perspective de-emphasizes the complexity of the short-term solutions to problems of pluralism, in favor of tracing long-term patterns of assimilation. Another strain of scholarship examines the role of religious refugees in the consolidation of the Reformation and the Dutch Revolt.³⁹ In the safety of their foreign exile, religious refugees from the Netherlands supported political resistance and developed a system of independent church government. In this case, exile transformed migrants into strongly independent and well-trained champions of a rigidly confessional model of piety. By the time they returned home, many Reformed Protestants had become uncompromising followers of John Calvin, with unrealistic expectations for the triumph of their church in the newly independent provinces.⁴⁰ This strand of scholarship correctly sees exile as contributing to a process of confessional consolidation, and is essentially forward-looking, more concerned with explaining later developments in the Dutch Republic than understanding the particular interactions of refugees with their hosts. While these traditions of scholarship are not in themselves flawed, there has yet to be a study that realizes the potential of examining the wildly diverse refugee communities of early modern Europe as a valuable case study of confessional coexistence during the Age of Religious Wars.

Few scholars have attempted to explain patterns of interaction within these communities. One notable exception is Heinz Schilling, whose 1972 book Niederländische Exulanten im 16. Jahrhundert compared the socioeconomic status of exiles to local economic and political situations within their host communities.⁴¹ In many cases, the fate of the refugees depended on the balance of power between guilds, defensive of incursions on their economic dominance, and magistrates. Individuals expressed these economic and political tensions, Schilling argued, using a language of doctrinal conflict. Where refugees strengthened economic growth, as they did at Wesel, Schilling suggested that they eventually influenced many of their neighbors to convert to Calvinism. When they competed with local economic forces, as at Frankfurt, religious conflict was the rule. Schilling thus tended to reduce religion to an expression of socioeconomic interest. Robert van Roosbroeck’s survey of Dutch refugee communities in Germany also treats the difficulties that exiles faced in their new environments.⁴² He too emphasized their economic contributions, but also discussed the operation of Calvinist morals and social welfare and the development of a common national identity shared by refugees, which would later shape Dutch nationalism. Like Schilling’s work, Roosbroeck’s survey of refugee communities confines itself to the interaction between church leaders and local magistrates, rather than examining the broader population. Both studies drew heavily from nineteenth-century church histories. As we shall see, archival study of Wesel with an eye toward understanding a broader array of behavior demonstrates that life in a refugee community was far more complicated than these studies suggest.

Unlike previous studies of the reformation of the refugees this book therefore focuses on short-term strategies that ordinary people developed in order to live in a religiously-mixed community. To understand the tactics that made this coexistence possible, it is first necessary to explore the kinds of religious and social conflicts that emerged in a multiconfessional community like Wesel. Charting when and how hostilities erupted helps to define the boundaries of toleration. Determining these boundaries also demands an understanding of what kind of persistent relationships developed between strangers and their new neighbors.

The town of Wesel was the first major settlement along the Rhine River after leaving the eastern frontier of the Netherlands. By the late Middle Ages it was characteristic in its size as well as in economic and political life of the German home towns that Mack Walker has characterized.⁴³ Before the arrival of the refugees, Wesel had nearly 7,000 inhabitants, though the population swelled to almost twice this number during the high point of immigration. Thus even before this influx Wesel was more than twice the size of Emmerich, the next largest settlement in the duchy of Cleves.⁴⁴ Although Wesel was not the capital of the territory, it was its most important settlement. It contributed far more to ducal coffers than any other city. Like other home towns, Wesel was largely economically independent, sustaining itself from the wealth drawn from trade along the great Rhine River, which cut through some of the most economically vigorous regions of Europe and slowly meandered past Wesel’s own city gates. Wesel’s traders carried goods up from the Low Countries and down from the Upper Rhine. The town also served as a transfer point for trade into the eastern interior along the shallow Lippe River. The town’s economic independence was strengthened through its membership in the powerful Hanseatic League of northern European trade cities.⁴⁵ This was a town of traders, artisans, and craftspeople, whose livelihood was based on the cargo ships passing though its docks.

Although it fell under the jurisdiction of its territorial prince, in practice Wesel’s government was largely autonomous, and its citizens felt a pride in preserving that autonomy. The duchy of Cleves straddled the Rhine River between Duisburg in the south and the eastern frontier of the Netherlands. While Wesel was an economic powerhouse in the territory, it was not a central focus of the duke’s attention. In 1368 the count of Mark had inherited the county of Cleves and was granted the title duke by the Holy Roman Emperor in 1417. Almost a century later, in 1511, the house of Cleves inherited the Lower Rhenish territories of Julich, Berg, and Ravenstein through a marriage of prince Johann of Cleves-Mark to the daughter of the duke of Berg. When Duke Johann III took the throne in 1521, the territories were united under a single ruler, although the administrations remained separate.⁴⁶ The new so-called United Territories followed the Rhine almost as far south as Koblenz and as far north as Bielefeld. The duke’s lands were, however, geographically discontinuous. Besides the neighboring Low Countries, the territories were separated by the Archbishopric of Cologne, the Counties of Moers and Recklinghausen, several imperial cities, and a myriad of smaller principalities. Through the sixteenth century the duke remained simply unable to enforce his directives uniformly throughout the United Territories.

Its own economic independence and the weakness of territorial governance, therefore, left Wesel largely self-governing. On a daily basis, the town was ruled by a twelve-man council that was elected annually from among the male citizenry. Men could become citizens by one of two ways. The first was to be the natural son of a citizen. The second was to petition the council. After a petitioner proved himself to be obedient, morally upright, and religiously orthodox, he could pay a fee to become a citizen, which would grant him civic rights and freedom from most taxation, as well as allowing his family to benefit from local charity institutions.⁴⁷ Once a year, citizens were called by a ringing of the bells to St. Willibrord’s church, where they divided themselves up according to the four quarters of the Old Town (Steinport, Veheport, Lewport, and Cloisterport) for voting.⁴⁸ There, residents of each quarter elected three so-called Gemeinsfreunde (Friends of the Commune) from each quarter. These twelve men elected an equal number of municipal judges, or Schöffen, who selected the two Bürger-meisters from among themselves. The Schöffen and Gemeinsfreunde then selected six council members each (for a total of twelve) from among the citizenry, often from among their own ranks or those of their families.⁴⁹

In practice the government was dominated by wealthy merchants, especially those involved in the Rhenish wine trade. These include the families Bert, Bellinckhoven, Heshusen, Brecht, Hasselt, and Swager, many of whom emerged as supporters of orthodox Lutheranism.⁵⁰ The council administered most matters of trade and business, religion and morality, though it was periodically subject to ducal intervention. Magistrates also represented Wesel’s interests with the duke, the Hanseatic League, the territorial estates (called the Landtag), and in other international affairs. They were also arbiters in judicial disputes that the Schöffen could not resolve. Throughout the year Gemeinsfreunde acted as representatives of the burghers and annually issued policy demands to magistrates based on citizens’ interests. The city was not governed, therefore, by a distant and powerful patriciate. The fact that the representatives of the burgher’s interests, the Gemeinsfreunde, elected urban magistrates highlights the communal orientation of the town government, at least in the sense that male citizens had an active role in selecting local leaders and influencing civic policy⁵¹

We should be careful not to idealize local autonomy or imagine that this was a democratic form of government. From the outside, although the duke’s authority was limited in practice, his influence was always felt in the town, especially when he aligned himself with more powerful allies. Seen from inside, if half the town’s residents were women, there were no formal mechanisms for them to engage in town governance.⁵² Further, although male artisans and craftsmen without citizenship usually were members of a guild, these institutions did not have a formal role in politics. The communal nature of governance, therefore, should not obscure the fact that town policy, and the local ideals of communalism that served to justify it, represented the viewpoints and interests primarily of male burghers, and particularly those influential families who were repeatedly elected to positions of authority by those burghers. Civic government is perhaps best characterized by the paternalist but intimate rule that Mack Walker characterized in German home towns overall as a regime of uncles. Rightly or not, civic leaders presented themselves as representing the interests of the town commune above and against outside interests, including imperial and ducal authorities. In this role they welcomed input from residents both through formal institutions, such as the annual recommendations presented by the Gemeinsfreunde, and as well in less formal ways. The Bürgermeisters of Wesel, for instance, held office hours twice a day, inviting residents to discuss matters of local interest.⁵³

Like other towns across Germany, and indeed across much of Europe, Wesel’s magistrates and citizens regularly articulated an ideology of what might be called sacral communalism, which suggested that the spiritual unity of the entire community was a fundamental religious value as well as a civic ideal. In this vision, the parish churches offered residents a space to express their religious sentiments. Through the communal rituals within those churches’ walls, residents actually bonded their spiritual lives together as a single corporate and sacred body—the Gemeinde. Just as in Germany’s southern imperial cities, urban leaders in the northern territorial city of Wesel described their community as a corpus christianum, in which residents were united by a bond of shared fates not only in politics and economics, but also in social ethics and spiritual expression. It was for this reason that peace and unity was the mantra of urban elites during this period.⁵⁴

Of course, this rhetorical device was used by ducal and imperial policy makers as well.⁵⁵ In this light, peace and unity were terms of contested meaning. Authorities used them to encourage a kind of consensus among the governed that was marked by deference to their own benign rule, as well as to compete with rival authorities over who embodied these universally-accepted values. The repetition of these