For more than three decades now, the East Frisian town of Emden has drawn the attention of early modern scholars due to its place in the evolution of Reformed Protestantism. Andrew Pettegree has analyzed Emden’s role as the “Geneva of the North” for the fledgling Reformed churches during the Dutch Revolt.1 Heinz Schilling’s conception of “Calvinist Confessionalization” developed from a long-running confrontation between an orthodox Lutheran territorial count and the increasingly rigid Calvinism of the leadership of the “Calvinist urban Republic” of Emden.2 The bulk of scholarly attention has focused on the position of Emden’s Calvinists, from the massive influx of Dutch Reformed refugees in the 1550s and 1560s to the confessional battles of the 1580s and 1590s between Emden’s Calvinist pastors and nearby Lutherans. Viewing the range of religious options taken by Emden’s residents, however, offers an important perspective on the difficulties in establishing confessional homogeneity even during the “successful” confessionalization of the late sixteenth century.
Moving beyond the conflicts that culminated in a politically triumphant Calvinist confessionalization, more recent studies have investigated the relationship between religious minorities, such as varieties of Anabaptists, and Emden’s Reformed congregation, and in so doing have offered new insights into the reality of East Frisia’s diverse religious situation.3 By focusing on the doctrinal disputations between Calvinists and Anabaptists in East Frisia during the third quarter of the sixteenth century, Pettegree, for example, saw what he called “the struggle for an orthodox church.”4 He argued that by being forced to “face up to the challenge of the Anabaptist congregations” in the region, “the Emden church achieved a much clearer definition of its own beliefs and doctrine; and with it a position of towering influence among the growing Reformed congregations in the Netherlands.”5 This perspective is important in revealing the role played by religious minorities not merely as obstacles or hindrances to the confession-building process, but as shapers of the settlements. By adjusting the focus of the lens from theological disputations to the level of personal interactions, we become more aware of the ways in which people coped with or experienced religious pluralism as they interacted fairly regularly with adherents of different confessions.
The more traditional focus on Calvinist confession-building might capture the winners and losers of the legal and political conflicts over religious status, but it overlooks the interactions that were almost certainly commonplace between adherents of different confessions. Evidence from Emden shows a complex combination of religious, political, economic, and personal motivations for tolerance and intolerance. Goals and methods of coexistence changed over the course of the sixteenth century depending on the particular contexts. Thus, what worked or was attempted in one set of circumstances might not be pursued in the next confrontation in dealing with a rival religious adherent. Sources from the second half of the sixteenth century document the presence in and around Emden of Calvinists, Lutherans, Jews, Catholics, Anabaptists, and a variety of other radical religious groups. Moreover, there were at least three sizable refugee communities, largely in the Reformed Protestant religious camp: Dutch-speaking, French-speaking, and for a short time, English-speaking.
This essay will lay out an introductory topography of the city’s development during this period of religious change and occasional conflict. The city itself more than doubled its geographic size, while its population had, it is estimated, grown by over 400 percent in the second half of the sixteenth century.6 Although the fragmentary nature of surviving sources makes complete reconstruction impossible, consistory records, business contracts, poor relief books, and tax records do allow a depiction of provisional topographical trends in residence and business patterns among these various groups in Emden. Such an exploration supplements and adds nuance to the more traditional understanding of confessional territorial boundaries between dominant religious groups. If we observe only the major confessional conflicts and official religious settlements, we may fail to see the regular, daily existence of numerous religious minorities and the porous boundaries that existed among the religious groups. Moreover, complicated relationships existed between the political, social, and religious interests of Emden’s residents: for instance, economic concerns could both exacerbate tensions toward religious minorities and facilitate toleration.
I Confessionalization and Religious Boundaries in the Evolving Urban Landscape
The dominant focus on the political structures that supported confession-building, and on the confessional majorities that developed in a particular region, has impacted the ways in which the religious landscape of the early modern period is usually seen. Since the Peace of Augsburg dictated official religious settlements in particular territories, visual representations typically depict a single confession in each political territory, and thus confessional maps of this era tend to be overly simplified, with territories shaded as either Lutheran or Catholic or Calvinist only. Occasionally, maps use additional dots or stripes to indicate large religious minorities.7
This traditional cartographic depiction of German confessional identity is problematic in the case of East Frisia. The late-century confessional fight between the city of Emden and the territorial count created an illicit biconfessional territory in the Holy Roman Empire. Map 4.1 illustrates the complicated confessional boundaries in East Frisia in the seventeenth century.8 Much of the western portion of East Frisia, including Emden, is depicted with the stripes indicating the “Reformed region,” and the northeastern portion of East Frisia is distinguished by the solid white of the “Lutheran region.” While this geographic division depicts the general political realities of the religious alignments, it leaves out the realities of religious pluralism on the ground, which remained even after Emden was officially “Calvinist.”
Confessional boundaries in East Frisia around 1660
Such erasure of religious minorities in the topographical depictions frequently causes scholars to marginalize them as exceptions to the confessionalizing process whether or not they played a larger role in this process, and to ignore on what terms they survived and functioned both during and after confessionalization. Of course, they were marginalized at the time as well, but by stepping beyond questions of confessional politics to investigate the religious landscape of social networks and neighbors, scholars can better write them into the story as full historical actors.
Even at the height of Emden’s “Calvinization” in the last quarter of the sixteenth century under the pastor Menso Alting, where scholarly attention is usually focused, religious pluralism or coexistence shaped day-to-day life in the city to some extent. This religious diversity was noted by contemporaries such as the Protestant chronicler Abel Eppens, who criticized the religious conditions in Emden in the mid-1580s despite the work of Alting, whom he praised. Eppens described the city as flooded with religious malcontents, Libertines, Anabaptists, and followers of the Spiritualist David Joris, along with Jews who were allowed to live in the city. Moreover, Eppens went further to criticize corrupting economic influences: most of Emden’s leading citizens, he claimed, would rather pursue commerce than attend communion, and “commerce was more procured than the scripture was examined.”9 Implicit in this contemporary claim is a critique of a pragmatic toleration in which Emdeners were willing to do business regardless of confession.10
In order to better understand the religious topography that had emerged during the confessional era by the end of the sixteenth century, it will help to observe the significant changes that occurred in Emden across the century. The town’s religious developments took place concurrently with a dramatic expansion of Emden’s physical boundaries and walls over the course of the sixteenth century. The town’s geographic extension provides an important context for Emden’s evolving religious identities.
In the late fifteenth century, Emden was a small shipping town at the mouth of the Ems River with a population perhaps between one thousand and three thousand.11 Using economic and shipping sources, Bernhard Hagedorn has estimated that over the first eight decades of the sixteenth century, Emden’s population increased by at least six times and perhaps as much as tenfold.12 Over the course of the Middle Ages, the heart of the old town had grown up around Pelzerstrasse, which ran on the north side of the wall along the Ems, and the city church (the so-called Grosse Kirche) on the southwestern corner of town, on the river and adjacent to the count’s castle (see map 4.2). The Faldern suburbs lay to the east of town, with the Franciscan monastery in Middle Faldern and apparently little settlement in either Gross Faldern or Klein Faldern still farther to the east. By the mid-sixteenth century, sources even named Middle Faldern as the “new city.”13 Population growth altered the topography of the city, and the expansion into these eastern suburbs opened fertile circumstances for religious diversity away from the authorities in the old center of Emden.
Emden in the early sixteenth century
Image created using the 1575 map of Emden by G. Braun and F. Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum
By 1529 and through the 1530s, as the new Lutheran count of East Frisia, Enno II, attempted to institute Lutheran church ordinances for the territory, there was already a diverse religious climate. His 1529 territorial church ordinances drew the ire of more Zwinglian-leaning pastors in East Frisia, who wrote urging the count to stay out of the communion question.14 Moreover, concern about a more radical presence in the territory, including among the political elite, led the new count to outlaw Anabaptism with threats of execution and property forfeiture in January 1530.15 The edict even forced the radical Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt to leave East Frisia, where he had been living under the protection of a local nobleman who had been a prominent adviser to Enno’s father during the latter’s rule.16 The edict, however, does not seem to have been implemented thoroughly enough. After a short stay in the summer of 1529, Melchior Hoffmann returned later in 1530 to Emden, where he allegedly baptized three hundred adults in the sacristy of the Grosse Kirche. This one ceremony in the city church involved “both burgher and peasant, lord and servant.”17 Such events as this contributed further to Emden’s reputation for religious heterodoxy. Therefore, despite the count’s attempted crackdown on East Frisia’s Zwinglians and Anabaptists, Martin Luther complained the following year of the count’s acquiescence to the “victorious trickery of the Sacramentarians” and condemned East Frisia as a place where the Sacramentarians’ faithlessness “predominates without restraint” and where “the count is now allowing everyone to teach what he wants.”18 The growing Protestant radicalism can be seen in the East Frisian count’s subsequent 1535 Lutheran church ordinance, which, in an interesting explanatory comment, blamed the current religious pluralism on the “the foolish and unlearned preachers [roaming the territory during the last decade], especially the rotten Anabaptists and similar wicked people.”19
By the 1540s, Enno’s widow, the Countess Anna, further sought to bring some religious order to the pluralistic territory by hiring the Polish Reformer Johannes a Lasco as superintendent of the East Frisian church, where he remained for about seven years before leaving for exile in England in 1549.20 Though it was not a formal break with the Lutheran ordinances of the ruling house, Countess Anna’s appointment of Lasco and the admission of Dutch refugees in subsequent decades introduced a Reformed confessional development both to Emden and to the dynasty. Lasco was sorely disappointed with the level of church discipline in the city when he arrived. He thus created several new institutional structures, such as a consistory for enhancing church discipline within the Emden congregation, and worked toward having the altars and images removed from East Frisia’s churches.21 Lasco also held disputations with radical Protestant leaders within the region, meeting with the followers of David Joris in 1543 and holding a public debate in Emden with Menno Simons in 1544.22 Lasco’s activities and concerns demonstrate the continued religious pluralism—from Catholics to a mix of more radical Protestants such as Jorists and Mennonites—in the town and throughout the region. His institutional reactions, especially with the consistory to regulate congregational discipline, introduced a Reformed confessional approach that proved to be central in shaping Emden’s development for the rest of the century and beyond.
Besides the foothold that the Anabaptists and other radicals had gained in Emden, Lasco was concerned that too many citizens and “most of the city council” were still entangled in “the old superstitions” of Catholicism. While the previous count held unlearned radical preachers responsible for religious diversity apart from officially sanctioned practices, Lasco placed much of the blame on the “wicked practices of the friars in the Franciscan cloister.”23 The Franciscan monastery in the adjacent Faldern suburb was the one traditional Catholic space in East Frisia explicitly exempted from the territorial prohibition of the Mass in the earlier Lutheran church ordinances of the 1530s. Although Lasco could not get the countess to approve the expulsion of the Faldern Franciscans, he did receive permission to order the friars to stop their public activities in Emden, such as baptizing children, visiting the sick, and writing testaments.24
The friars, however, protested the order to Countess Anna and her advisers with appeals to imperial law and local tradition, and the Franciscans continued to frustrate Lasco’s attempt to convince the countess to expel them. Their grounds against Lasco’s complaints began with an appeal to the imperial decrees from Speyer. Further, they argued that their rules allowed them to administer sacraments and make testaments when given permission by a pastor of the church. Here, they harkened back to the memory of Dr. Poppo Manninga, who had been provost and an adviser during the reign of Anna’s husband, Count Enno, and had issued the initial Lutheran church ordinances, which had exempted the Faldern monastery from the territorial secularization of monasteries. The friars indicated that they had sworn an oath to Provost Manninga, who had permitted them these activities. Since his death they were not aware of any pastor in the town who had the authority to judge the matter. Certainly, the Franciscans argued, this person was not Lasco, who they pointed out “is a foreign, unknown person, about whom no one knows where he is from; he also wears a beard, with which [he] can in no way be recognized as a rightful pastor.”25
From Lasco’s complaints about Emdeners—prominent citizens and commoners alike—one can clearly imagine a number of Emden residents taking advantage of devotional services and rituals within the monastery’s grounds in the suburbs away from the heart of old Emden. From traditional rituals such as baptism to creation of testaments, the surviving Catholic presence in Emden’s suburbs, despite its prohibition elsewhere in East Frisia, prevented the unified church settlement that Lasco sought. By midcentury, the friars’ presence exerted a greater influence on Emden’s residents as its population expanded to where the monastery was located in Middle Faldern. Lasco’s effort to consolidate Protestant changes in the East Frisian churches and to institutionalize them across the laity through a more intentional, rigorous, and Reformed church discipline in Emden was cut short by the Augsburg Interim in 1548. He quickly left Emden for England, where he became superintendent of the Dutch refugee churches in London during the reign of King Edward VI.
II Immigration, Discipline, and the Development of a Reformed Church
Although sources from the first half of the sixteenth century do not provide many specifics regarding Emden’s religious topography, at midcentury, Emden’s religious landscape remained a thorny collection of religious options, which the political and religious authorities had been unable to unify. After years of steady population growth and urban expansion coupled with unrelated religious pluralism, the first of the truly dramatic shifts in urban development began in the 1550s following the massive immigration of people, whose numbers were predominately in one confessional camp. After 1554 Emden experienced the beginnings of a major influx of Dutch refugees. This demographic expansion was exacerbated by a socioeconomic crisis around 1557 triggered by bad harvests, food and housing shortages, and inflation. The combination of these factors led to political upheaval, geographic expansion, social welfare reform, and a shifting confessional identity, trends that would be magnified with the outbreak of the Dutch Revolt in the mid-1560s.
The 1554 arrival of the Reformed refugees from the Netherlands, who had left their prior English refuge with the accession of Mary Tudor to the throne in 1553, was merely the beginning of the influx of refugees into Emden. Soon large numbers of Dutch-speaking exiles, a group of French-speaking Walloon refugees, and members of a small English Reformed church also came to the city. Indeed, Emden’s growing trade and tax rolls caused some in Amsterdam to fear growing economic competition from the small port to the east, to the point that the Amsterdam city council commissioned two travelers to report on activities in Emden in 1555. Among the many details in their letter back to Amsterdam, the travelers confirmed the housing situation in the booming Emden suburbs. They reported that the Faldern suburbs to the east of town, “in which mostly the foreign nations live, which have recently come here,” were now being developed with the construction of some two hundred houses and newly laid out streets. Such houses now cost “half again as much as they had cost five or six years ago,” with some particular houses specified as having even quadrupled in price in a mere two to three years.26 The economic and housing turmoil of these years corresponded as well to a period of food shortages in the late 1550s.27
This economic crisis set the stage for the expulsion of the remaining Franciscan friars from their monastery in the Faldern suburb and thus a shift in the religious balance in the town. Despite her own Protestant commitment, Countess Anna had not been convinced by Lasco’s religious arguments urging the friars’ expulsion in the 1540s. Instead, the countess now articulated that “because our town Emden daily multiplies and takes into itself both rich and poor out of other and foreign lands,” she was seizing the monastic properties “to the advancement of the glory of God and according to the opportunity of the common use and emergency needs of this city”—creating a Gasthaus that would include provision for those needs, namely, an orphanage, hospital, school, church, and cemetery.28 In effect, she kept the last remaining Catholic friars around until they had outlived their social usefulness. The Franciscans’ departure ended any evidence of remaining conflict with local Catholics. From this point forward, the visible confessional disputes were between various Protestant groups. This episode demonstrates that, just as pragmatic reasons existed for tolerance, nonreligious motivations arose to end such practices of toleration.
As the Dutch Revolt faced setbacks by Spanish forces by early 1567, a widespread explosion of emigration of largely Protestant refugees took place along with stories of persecution by advancing Spanish Catholic troops. Dutch exiles flooded into refugee communities across western Germany and England. No fewer than four thousand people sought refuge in Emden at this time. Indeed, thousands of poor relief recipients were recorded each year in the account books of the refugee deacons in Emden, as the bookkeeper scrambled to keep up with the massive influx of people.29 An immigration of this size put massive pressure on the economic resources and housing of the small town, and many exiles ended up in the expanding Faldern suburbs. Yet the account books of the deacons administering relief to the poor immigrants reveal that a sizable number found accommodation in the houses of longer-established residents of the town. Some lived in the homes of fellow immigrants, but many lived with local families. Just as Jesse Spohnholz found in his investigation of the refugee community in Wesel, the Dutch immigrants in Emden were spread throughout the city. The refugees in Emden, however, appear to have been housed proportionally more in its suburbs than those in Wesel, where the immigrants’ housing distribution was more even between the town and suburbs.30
Institutionally, the new Dutch-speaking immigrants, numbering probably well over ten thousand by 1570, propelled the town’s move toward Reformed Protestantism. They were largely integrated into the local Reformed congregation, while the much smaller group of French-speaking Calvinist refugees were allowed their own church and consistory.31 Many of the minority Lutheran exiles among the earlier waves arriving in Emden were from Antwerp and included wealthy merchants and social elites.32 The amount of time these Dutch immigrants lived in Emden was highly fluid. Some refugees spent years or ended up settling permanently, while Emden was only a short stopover for others before moving on to another exile community. Some war refugees, of course, fled their homes for a multitude of reasons that might or might not have included explicit theological conflicts. Thus, they did not necessarily arrive in Emden with commitments to particular doctrines of Reformed Protestantism. Nevertheless, the scale of the migration fostered the growth of a Reformed exile identity within a strong community and network—in Emden and beyond—as immigrants were drawn into like-minded congregations.33
The period around 1570 certainly marked the high point in the social and economic development of Emden. In the aftermath of the 1568 Battle of Jemgum, in which the Spanish Duke of Alba had pursued Dutch rebel forces all the way onto East Frisian soil, many in Emden and across East Frisia feared the possible further advance of Alba with his army into the territory. Intense anxiety inspired days of prayers and thanksgiving. The scale of migration into the city impacted the religious tenor and the politics of Emden. The experience of exile enhanced the confessional identity of the refugees, and their presence impacted Emden’s confessional development as the town moved in an increasingly Calvinist direction throughout the 1560s and 1570s. Moreover, the Emden government used this moment for a building project to expand the fortifications around the city, and by the middle of the 1570s the full Faldern suburbs had been incorporated officially into the city itself.
III Religious Pluralism in the “Geneva of the North”
Although large-scale migrations ended before 1575 and many immigrants moved on to the coreligious Netherlands,34 it is not surprising to see a topographic awareness among Emden’s Reformed church leadership after 1575 as they worked both to strengthen their congregation and to counter the influence of what they considered pernicious religious rivals. In October 1575 the influential Calvinist pastor Menso Alting became the lead minister in Emden, where he served until his death in 1612. Under Alting’s direction, the consistory expanded the influence of the church to establishing proper moral behavior throughout the city, an objective confirmed by a number of the ecclesiastical developments early in Alting’s ministry. Just two months after his arrival, the consistory began negotiations to allow the ministers to hold Sunday services in the Gasthaus church as well as the Grosse Kirche. The topographic reality of Emden’s religious landscape suggests a practical reason behind Alting’s initiative. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the town had expanded far to the east to include the former Faldern suburbs, with many residents and much activity far removed from the town church, the Grosse Kirche, which was located in the far southwestern corner of the city. By holding regular sermons in the Gasthaus church, now located more or less in the exact topographic center of Emden, the Reformed ministers could extend the church’s influence more directly into new parts of town where they believed sectarians were enticing their members.
In February 1576 the city redrew the town church’s poor relief districts (so-called Kluften) to include new parts of town, which were geographically much larger than the old town, in order to further enhance church discipline. Emden’s previous three poor relief districts had extended into Middle Faldern. Under Alting’s leadership, the consistory now carefully divided the developed parts of Emden, including all three Faldern suburbs, into five such districts demarcated by specific streets and houses across town (see map 4.3).35 Each Kluft was assigned six deacons (for poor relief), three elders (for church discipline), and a pastor.36 The consistory thus made it institutionally clear that it was claiming pastoral responsibility over all of the town, both old town and former suburbs. The deacons’ account books of expenses indicate that concentrations of poverty were highest in Gross and Klein Faldern and lowest in the oldest settlements of the town by the Grosse Kirche to the west. 37 With the support of the Bürgermeister and city council, the consistory expressed the Reformed church’s authority over the entire town, with hopes that this poor relief would lessen social disorder in the newer parts of town, and that organized church discipline would ideally reduce the remaining religious pluralism.38
Emden consistory’s New Kluft (neighborhood) divisions for church discipline and poor relief administration
Image created using the 1575 map of Emden by G. Braun and F. Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum
Despite the growing Calvinist nature of Emden’s leadership and congregation, the town and region maintained their earlier reputation for a vibrant Anabaptist culture. Indeed, the culture was vibrant enough in 1567 that two Dutch refugee pastors proposed an intriguing idea to Emden’s consistory: namely, they would attempt to surreptitiously work their way into local Anabaptist meetings in hopes of countering their teachings.39 Such planned subterfuge among Emden’s Calvinist leadership to cross religious boundaries further indicates the reality of the area’s religious diversity. The exceptional flood of refugees that packed Emden, especially its growing suburbs, enabled these two Dutch ministers to expect that they could go unrecognized when they gained access to the illicit, but not particularly secret, Anabaptist meetings. Perhaps infiltration, they reasoned, might work to confute the Anabaptists, who were apparently attracting a growing number of Dutch refugees into their services both inside and outside Emden.
Interestingly, although we have no subsequent report of their visit, the fact that it was pastors who proposed attending Anabaptist meetings perhaps made the proposal more acceptable to the Reformed consistory. The interaction of Reformed laity with Anabaptists certainly remained a point of contention within the consistory.40 They feared seduction of congregants into false teachings as well as accusations of hypocrisy or misbehavior by Anabaptist critics, and thus they sought to limit exposure despite the religious diversity across the town. For instance, a decade after the proposal of the two Dutch pastors, the consistory discouraged Reformed members from attending Anabaptist sermons even if they firmly held Anabaptist teachings to be false and Reformed teachings to be true, for one should “not let oneself willingly be ensnared with false teachings.”41 In 1615 Coert Jansen, who lived by the Apfelmarkt in Gross Faldern, was reprimanded for being seen in an Anabaptist meeting. In his defense, Jansen explained that he did not hold to any of their teachings and had visited just once.42
The consistory also intervened when the behavior of Reformed congregants besmirched the congregation in the eyes of non-Reformed residents of town. In 1570 Garrelt, a shipper who lived outside the New Gate, was brought to the consistory’s attention because he lived an unedifying and strife-filled life with his wife. Church leaders were concerned because he beat her “to the anger of the neighbors who were Mennonites and on account of him slandered our congregation.”43 The following month, Garrelt appeared before the consistory and apologized for having beaten his wife once in anger. In response, the consistory ordered him to be once again reconciled “with the neighbors whom he has angered; in the meantime he shall behave peacefully with his wife.”44 Here, for the good of the Reformed congregation’s reputation, the consistory urged peaceful coexistence with Anabaptists, including reconciliation with those non-coreligious neighbors offended by familial misbehavior and domestic abuse in Reformed households.
Records of attempts to regulate cross-confessional interactions reveal Anabaptist connections among some of Emden’s wealthy citizens. For instance, the Emden notary in 1578 recorded the bequest of the prominent Emden citizen Hinrich van Coeßvelde and his wife, in which they bequeathed the massive sum of 250 gulden to the Mennonite poor in Emden.45 The couple made this bequest at an interesting moment. The Emden consistory had just completed a famous three-month-long public disputation with Anabaptists, which Calvinist pastor Menso Alting saw as a victory for the Calvinist congregation. Indeed, Alting optimistically wrote to Theodore Beza describing the ways that the disputation had strengthened his Reformed community.46 That a prominent citizen publicly bequeathed to Anabaptists one of the largest poor relief bequests from any surviving sixteenth-century testament complicates the optimistic claim made by Alting. Although the sheer scale of the Coeßvelde bequest is astounding, another testament, with much smaller amounts, offers an amazing combination of bequest recipients. In 1583 Emden citizens Johan Claesen and his wife, Schwane, each divided bequests equally in three parts among the poor in Emden’s (Reformed) Gasthaus, the poor of the Reformed diaconate, and the Mennonite poor.47 The story of Calvinist confessionalization in this period does not traditionally allow space for such boundary crossings, which seemingly approve equally of both Calvinist and Anabaptist social welfare institutions.
Such prominent individuals as the Coeßveldes typically lived in the older parts of Emden, where property was more expensive. Yet, tax sources and property contracts reveal Anabaptists living in all parts of town, including the wealthy “old town.”48 The greatest complaints about wild and undisciplined religious pluralism, however, were targeted at the fringes of town—the former suburbs of Faldern, which were undergoing such major development. Indeed, in 1569 the consistory heard a report that the Mennonites “in Faldern were holding great disorderly meetings and that they were diligently enticing our members from us.”49 That this remained the case throughout the remainder of the century is clear in the case of Peter van Winsum, a shoemaker who lived on Bruckstrasse in Gross Faldern. In 1599 a pastor reported to the consistory that he had spoken with Peter and found him wavering in his beliefs, that he was being contested and seduced by the Anabaptists. The consistory instructed that he should thus receive pastoral correction. Yet, by 1604 the Anabaptists had won a convert, and Menso Alting and the consistory banned Peter from the Reformed congregation, “whose member he has been for a while,” because he had fallen to the Anabaptists.50 Although no one single meeting place existed for Emden Mennonites in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Faldern suburbs proved a difficult area of town for Emden’s officials to oversee new buildings, residents, and property transactions.51
The unmarked Braun & Hogenberg map (which is the basis for maps 4.2, 4.3, and 4.4) with its walls and gates seems to delineate the limits and boundaries of Emden, but the reality for many people involved regular interaction and movement throughout and beyond the city, across waterways and through gates. Indeed, reading consistory accounts or drawing the new 1576 Kluft boundaries onto a map provides a reminder of the divisions that do not correspond neatly to walls and canals. So, too, the consistory cases serve as a reminder of the fluid confessional realities that the fixed city map tends to obscure. Records indicate numerous resettlements into the town and out into the suburbs or back again, as well as economic and religiously motivated movement, such as Auslauf to attend local Mennonite meetings that were available in neighboring villages as well as in the Faldern suburbs. For example, in 1576 the consistory took up the case of Engele Wiers, who had “betaken herself to the Anabaptists” outside of Emden for over a decade, but who now sought to rejoin the Reformed communion; others also caught the consistory’s attention for similar movement between confessions.52
To this point, this essay has focused exclusively on the Christian groups involved in the traditional analysis of confessional conflicts. It is important to note, however, that Jews also became a presence in Emden. After 1570 increasing references to personal interactions between Jews and Christians survive, and questions emerged in the political realm about the Jewish population. Jews had previously lived outside the city gates of Emden, in the suburbs. As the population expansion led the city to incorporate Gross Faldern, a debate emerged about whether to allow Jews to live inside the new walls of the city being constructed in the 1570s. In early 1570 the consistory informed the city council that to “allow the Jews into the city with residences is not agreed to everywhere.”53
As with other religious groups, topographic changes in the city after the period of economic growth had an impact on relations between Jews and Christians. In 1589 the Emden citizenry constructed a Judenstrasse on the northeastern edge of Gross Faldern where they sought to isolate the Jewish residents in a particular part of the city. To complicate matters, Count Edzard offered the Jewish community protection at this same time even as he was in a political dispute with Emden’s leadership. This situation led many in Emden to recognize that they could not require the Jews to live outside the city walls. Nevertheless, their concern about close personal interaction between Christians and Jews caused some citizens to argue that Jews in Emden should not be permitted to live in “the best streets” with “eminent neighborhoods.”54
As previous examples have illustrated, the consistory was often upset with congregants’ interactions with those outside the Reformed community, and this concern came also to include Jews. In May and June 1582, the consistory instructed Aelke Wittbacker, a widow, to cease renting her house to a Jew, whom the council described as a “Jew, who, like all of them, without doubt gravely blasphemes the Lord Jesus Christ.” In her defense, she argued that she had taken him in only out of economic necessity, “in order to receive a little more rent, because otherwise she had no means in order to live.” But to no avail. The consistory ordered her to get her accounts in order as soon as possible, giving her until winter to honor her contracts. The leaders ruled that she must let the Jew go “because a Christian is not free to have any fellowship with such blasphemers of Jesus Christ.”55 Of course, the fact that the consistory dealt with the incident reveals that such “fellowship,” in this case in the form of economic interaction, did indeed take place. The decision to build the Judenstrasse might have been a product of concerns with cases of personal interactions with Jews like that of Wittbacker’s. Unfortunately, Emden’s surviving sources provide no further clue as to how such situations might have been changed after the Judenstrasse was constructed.
IV Institutional Worship Locations
In the last quarter of the sixteenth century, Emden’s institutional religious topography looks something like Map 4.4. Reformed services were held at the Grosse Kirche and newly in the Gasthaus church, and the French-speaking (Walloon) Reformed congregation was given use of the Stadthalle, not far from the Gasthaus. Meanwhile, Lutherans overfilled the New Mint (Neue Münze) during their services. Beyond these formal meeting places, the previously described scattering of Anabaptist meetings in Faldern and outside the northern gates caused further consternation for Emden’s town church. And the newly constructed Judenstrasse at the northern edge of Faldern became the location for Jewish worship.
The history of East Frisia in the closing decades of the sixteenth century typically focuses primarily on the polemical, theological, and political confessional struggles between Lutheranism and Calvinism. As seen in the general map of East Frisia (map 4.1), most of the territory was Lutheran while the western portion, including Emden, was Calvinist. Confessional splits occurred not simply among congregants and theologians. The ruling house itself was split confessionally, as Countess Anna’s two sons struggled with each other over both authority and theology.56 As the Emden town church became increasingly rigid in its Calvinism over the final quarter of the century, the stage was set for a major political and religious confrontation with Lutherans. Although the Emden Calvinists ultimately won in this conflict and serve as an example of successful “Calvinist confessionalization,” a closer investigation of the religious lay of the land indicates that the story is not that straightforward.
Emden, official worship locations, late sixteenth century
Image created using the 1575 map of Emden by G. Braun and F. Hogenberg, Civitates Orbis Terrarum
While the Calvinist church leadership began in the mid-1570s to use the Gasthaus church as a location for sermons and catechism now in the center of the town, Count Edzard demanded that Emden’s Lutherans also be allowed to worship there. The count could not, however, overcome opposition from the Emden magistracy to the question of Lutheran services in the Gasthaus church. When the count was forced to back down, he gave the use of his own New Mint near his castle to the Emden Lutheran congregation along with his own Lutheran court preacher in 1586.57 That this minority religious group had official sanction from the count clearly chafed the increasingly dominant Calvinist-leaning Emdeners. Over the next several years, the consistory recorded several complaints made by the Reformed church leadership about the polemical Lutheran services taking place with the count’s imprimatur at the New Mint, in which the Reformed pastors and teachings were mocked and criticized.58 Though the Lutherans were now a small minority in Emden, Reformed Emdeners complained that the powerful political support of the count for the Lutherans “without doubt miserably divides both subjects and citizens against each other.”59
The diversity of religious expressions certainly heightened the sources of conflict. The services at the New Mint illustrate the fight over public worship in the conflict between count and city. At the other end of the spectrum, we have also seen a number of private, individual religious interactions between members of different confessions. Perhaps between these two categories a number of formal (if unofficial or even illegal) institutional structures had been created within various religious communities that facilitated a public expression or practice of religion beyond the officially established religion. Of course, there was a growing fight between the city and the count as to what the official religion should be. Indeed, in 1590 the regional East Frisian Diet was presented with the following “ecclesiastical grievances of the common citizenry of Emden”:
That [the counts of East Frisia] retain the true Christian religion, which they have had from the beginning of the Reformation for seventy years now, through God’s exceptional grace in unity and peace…. And that everything which is contrary to the true Christian Religion might be abolished—namely the Jewish synagogue, the [Lutheran] separation [which meets] in the Neue Münze, and various gatherings of the Anabaptists.60
In the increasingly confessionally Calvinist city of Emden, the town representatives’ greatest religious grievances were thus the apparently tolerated public worship of Jews, Lutherans, and Anabaptists in the city. Though it is not clear that the authors of this protestation indeed spoke for the full “common citizenry,” the list of grievances evinces a frustration toward religious diversity expressed here toward the count’s practices, some of which would actually later be adopted in the city council’s seventeenth-century policies toward Anabaptists and Jews.
Animosity, even if rooted in religious arguments, could be expressed in economic terms. The dichotomy between religious and economic concerns has already been witnessed in the decision to oust the Franciscans and in the case of Aelke Wittbacker’s Jewish renter. The 1590 Emden grievances also included the following claim in its “proof article” supporting its accusations against the Jews:
20 years ago there were only one or two Jews living here in Emden—outside the city gates, and not in the city—and otherwise none in the whole territory. However, from around the year 1570, the Jews were not only admitted [into Emden] abundantly with their grave usury to suck out the poor subjects, but also allowed their public exercise of religion and to hold synagogue.61
Emden’s complainants clearly sought to paint Count Edzard negatively by making accusations of toleration, both economic and religious, of alleged enemies of “the true Christian religion.” Of course, to Emden’s Calvinists, it was not merely Jews who filled this category as enemies, but Lutherans and Anabaptists too.
Count Edzard’s patronage, however, elevated Emden’s Lutherans to a position as privileged rival and greatest threat to the Reformed church leadership. The polemics and the tensions mounted during the early 1590s between the Calvinist Emden town officials, under Alting’s leadership, and the Lutheran Count Edzard. In addition to theological problems caused by Lutheran sermons, Alting spent much of his December 1592 letter to the count’s son highlighting economic conflict created by toleration of the Lutherans. Emden’s long-standing poor relief ordinances (which had been approved by the count’s representative) forbade alms collections around town without consent of the town church’s deacons. According to Alting, the Lutherans left “nothing undone that might bring the good order to demolition.” They were openly circulating around Emden’s private houses collecting alms and hanging their pouches for donations in the town’s taverns and inns. Unwilling to “content themselves with that,” Lutherans also had formed their own special schools without the magistrates’ consent.62 Though Emden’s Anabaptists and Jews apparently maintained their separate, illicit institutions, the Lutherans were able to flaunt the count’s patronage and thereby claim a public exercise of their practices.
Emden’s dominant Reformed congregation was thus encountering polemical attacks on the town church’s leadership and theology alongside economic rivalries caused by the Lutheran poor relief administrators making their presence publicly known throughout town, well beyond their worship location. As the tensions escalated, Count Edzard placed restrictions on Emden’s autonomy, and an armed, though bloodless, uprising occurred in 1595. The count lost this so-called Emden Revolution to the Emden citizenry and was forced to concede. When the count moved his residence from Emden to Aurich, the Lutherans in Emden completely lost their right to worship in the city.63 With the hardening of the confessional lines between Lutherans and Calvinists in the midst of this long-running political conflict, toleration of Lutheran public worship was no longer an option once the count lost. For the next ninety years, Lutherans living in Emden would need to leave Emden to attend Lutheran worship services north or east of town in parts of East Frisia that remained committed to the count’s confessional alignment.
The first article of the resulting treaty of 1595 between the Lutheran count and the Reformed city stipulated that:
in the old city of Emden, in Faldern, and in the suburbs, be it in the Mint or anywhere else, there should publicly be no other Religion taught, practiced or tolerated than that which is presently preached in the Grossen and the Gasthaus Churches. Nevertheless, no one should be encumbered or investigated in his conscience. The Count is permitted, when he holds court in his castle, to allow his court preacher to preach.64
Henceforth, only the Reformed religion was to be practiced in the town, and both the city and church administrations were to function independently of the count.65
Although the count’s protection of Jews had been one of the charges raised by Emdeners against him, the Emden magistracy began to collect Schutzgeld (protection money) from Mennonites and Jews living in the city by 1601.66 In the immediate aftermath of the Emden Revolution, as the count’s authority was eliminated in the city, at least three Jewish families left the city out of uncertainty for their future protection. The Jewish community was small, and sources do not allow a detailed reconstruction of its size. In 1593 the count had asserted that he was offering protection to “not more than six” Jewish families in Emden. When Emden began its own Schutzgeld policy, it included a single list for both Mennonites and Jews. Emden’s Schutzgeld policy toward Mennonites differed from the rest of the territory, as they were still officially outlawed throughout East Frisia, except during the reign of Count Rudolph Christian (1625–28), who imposed Schutzgeld throughout the territory. Surviving Schutzgeld lists in the town archives allow a partial glance at apparent housing patterns as they list the names and areas of town along with the amount paid (or “pauper,” if nothing was paid) by identified Mennonites and Jews.67 There were only seven Jewish names (or heads of household) listed in 1601, with eight in 1602, at least a couple of whom did not reside on the Judenstrasse.68 More than 150 recorded Mennonite families were spread throughout the town, but in the older parts of the town the lists of names are shorter with generally larger amounts assessed to them; in the new, eastern parts of town there are more names in the lists of Mennonites but with the individual Schutzgeld payments much lower.69 Thus, these lists match the other data that show a wealthier social status among the old town residents as well as the criticisms of church leaders that pointed to the suburbs as sources of religious diversity and propagation of heterodox teachings. It is interesting that shortly after the Calvinist city’s confessional triumph over the Lutherans in 1595 Emden Revolution, Emden’s leaders instituted a new means of toleration for some of the religious minorities. Schutzgeld did not allow a public place of worship, but Jews and Anabaptists continued to gather unofficially, and the city’s policy of official toleration for these two minorities ensured that such religious dissenters remained a regular presence in Emden at a time when the official confessional status of the town otherwise became legally more exclusive than ever.
V Conclusion
Living next to each other in the city and its environs created possibilities for conflict while, at the same time, requiring strategies for religious coexistence. Political, economic, and religious conditions were often in flux. Immigration, in addition to bringing economic benefits to the shipping city, also enhanced diversity and fluidity as well as an increased degree of potential anonymity; the expanding topographic boundaries of the city magnified the difficulty of effective oversight. Living near and interacting personally and economically with foreign immigrants or dissenting religious groups likely expanded an individual’s acquaintance with, and sometimes affinity toward, ideas and practices that might not fit within the dominant Reformed confessional model. This reality seen in Emden’s complicated confessional topography required religious and political authorities to interact frequently with those potentially outside the confessional norms.
The case of Emden demonstrates that there is no single formula to disentangle the political and economic concerns, let alone the personal and family relationships, that intersected with religious tolerance and intolerance. Even when sources are not as direct as Abel Eppens’s critique of the money-loving Emden residents, economic associations are often not far beneath the surface, such as Countess Anna’s justifications for ceasing to tolerate the Franciscans, the widow Wittbacker’s resorting to a Jewish rental agreement for her own sustenance, Emden citizens’ complaints about Jewish usury, and the magistracy’s Schutzgeld policy (after having protested the count’s protection). Under some circumstances, economic interactions facilitated coexistence, but many of these Emden cases highlight how economics could also be a point of contention. Official policies and practices, no doubt, generally reflected Emden’s deepening Calvinist identity. Yet, the city’s different reactions toward allowing three despised religious groups to worship in the city at the turn of the seventeenth century—Lutherans (patron expelled; public activities strongly prohibited) and Mennonites and Jews (tolerated with a Schutzgeld payment)—suggest that policy was driven not just by simply religious or economic or political concerns, but by a complicated combination of all three. Despite the predominant historiographic emphasis on Calvinist confession-building in Emden, especially during the last quarter of the century after Alting’s arrival, the religious topography of Emden’s population serves as a useful reminder of the practical limits of the church leadership’s attempt to impose a particular orthodox Reformed settlement. Many of the laity, even if members of or sympathizers with the Calvinist congregation, could often be far more tolerant of the religious heterodoxy that continued even as the confessional boundaries became officially more rigid.
Recent scholarship has begun to emphasize more explicitly these multiconfessional realities in the aftermath of the Reformations.70 Rather than seeing religious pluralism and asking about the “success” or “failure” of confessionalization, a shift of attention is needed. One method would be to investigate the social interactions of adherents of different beliefs at the level of everyday decision making in a particular town. Recognizing the reality of religious coexistence, rather than categorizing it as confessional failure, enables fuller investigation into the ways in which people coped with the realities of this religious diversity and the strategies that they developed to manage the often porous boundaries that emerged as a result of the religious changes.71 A careful investigation of the individual reactions and strategies of those living in multiconfessional societies would deepen understanding of individual people’s particular relationships to their respective confessions. It would also uncover their relations with their non-coreligious neighbors. Further work building on the topographical reconstruction of housing, occupational, and worship patterns will expand the analysis of the day-to-day interactions and strategies among Emden’s neighbors supposedly “divided by faith.”
Bibliography
Primary Sources
Brenneysen, E. R., ed. Ost-Friesische Historie und Landes-Verfassung: Aus denen im Fürstlichen Archivo Vorhandenen und Sonst Colligirten Glaubwürdigen Documenten … zusammen Getragen …; in Zween Tomis. Aurich: Samuel Böttger, 1720.
Emmius, Ubbo. Rerum Frisicarum Historia. Leiden: Elzevier, 1616.
Ihering, Joachim Christian. Ausführliche Kirchen-Historie von Ostfriesland. Manuscript, ca. 1710. Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Aurich, Rep. 135, #147.
Luther, Martin. D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Briefwechsel VI. Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1935.
Meiners, Eduard. Oostvrieschlandts Kerkelyke Geschiedenisse of een historisch en oordeelkundig verhaal van het gene nopens het Kerkelyke in Oostvrieschlandt, en byzonder te Emden, is voorgevallen, zedert den tydt der Hervorminge, of de Jaren 1519, en 1520, tot op den huidigen dag. Groningen, 1738.
Edited and Secondary Sources
de Buhr, Hermann. “Die Entwicklung Emdens in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts.” PhD diss., University of Hamburg, 1967.
Deppermann, Klaus. Melchior Hoffman: Social Unrest and Apocalyptic Visions in the Age of the Reformation. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark Publishers, 1987.
Eppens, Abel. De kroniek van Abel Eppens tho equart, uitgegeven en met kritische aanteekenigen vorzien. Edited by J. A. Feith and H. Brugmans. Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1911.
Fehler, Timothy. “Anabaptism and Calvinism around Emden: Disputation and Discipline.” In Politics, Gender, and Belief: The Long-Term Impact of the Reformation, edited by Amy Nelson Burnett, Kathleen Comerford, and Karin Maag, 179–205. Geneva: Droz, 2014.
Fehler, Timothy. “The French Congregation’s Struggle for Acceptance in Emden, Germany.” In Memory and Identity: Minority Survival among the Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, edited by Bertrand van Ruymbeke and Randy Sparks, 73–89. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.
Fehler, Timothy. Poor Relief and Protestantism: The Evolution of Social Welfare in Sixteenth-Century Emden. Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999.
Fehler, Timothy. Review of Indifferenz und Dissens in der Grafschaft Ostfriesland im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, by Nicole Grochowina. H-German (H-Net Reviews, June 2005): http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10650.
Fehler, Timothy. “Social Welfare in Early Modern Emden: The Evolution of Poor Relief in the Age of the Reformation and Confessionalization.” PhD diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1995.
Hagedorn, Bernhard. Ostfrieslands Handel und Schiffahrt vom Ausgang des 16. Jahrhunderts bis zum Westfälischen Frieden (1580–1648). 2 vols. Berlin: Karl Curtius, 1910–1912.
Häpke, Rudolf, ed. Niederländische Akten und Urkunden zur Geschichte der Hanse und zur deutschen Seegeschichte. Vol. 1. Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1913.
Hesse, H. Klugkist. Menso Alting: Eine Gestalt aus der Kampfzeit der calvinischen Kirche. Berlin: Furche-Verlag, 1928.
Jürgens, Henning P. Johannes a Lasco in Ostfriesland: Der Werdegang eines europäischen Reformators. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002.
Kaplan, Benjamin J. Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Tolerance in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007.
Kochs, Ernst. “Die Anfänge der ostfriesischen Reformation (Part III).” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst und vaterländische Altertümer zu Emden 20 (1920): 1–125.
Lokers, Jan. Die Juden in Emden 1530–1806: Eine sozial- und wirtschaftsgeschichtliche Studie zur Geschichte der Juden in Norddeutschland vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zur Emanzipationsgesetzgebung. Aurich: Verlag Ostfriesische Gesellschaft, 1990.
Pettegree, Andrew. Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992.
Pettegree, Andrew. “The Struggle for an Orthodox Church: Calvinists and Anabaptists in East Friesland, 1554–1578.” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 70 (1988): 45–59.
Reeken, Erich von. Zur Geschichte der Emder Taufgesinnten (Mennoniten) 1529–1750. Aurich: Ostfriesische Landschaft, 1986.
Schilling, Heinz. Civic Calvinism in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries. Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1992.
Schilling, Heinz, and Klaus-Dieter Schreiber, eds. Die Kirchenratsprotokolle der reformierten Gemeinde Emden, 1557–1620. 2 vols. Cologne: Böhlau, 1989–1992.
Sehling, Emil, ed. Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts. Vol. 7: Niedersachsen, II. Hälfte: Die außerwelfischen Lande, 1. Halbband. Tübingen: Mohr, 1963.
Smid, Menno. Ostfriesische Kirchengeschichte. Pewsum: Deichacht Krummhörn, 1974.
Spohnholz, Jesse. “Confessional Coexistence in the Early Modern Low Countries.” In A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, edited by Thomas Max Safley, 47–73. Leiden: Brill, 2011.
Spohnholz, Jesse. The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011.
Vos, Karel. “De dooplijst van Leenaert Bouwens.” Bijdrage en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 36 (1915): 39–70.
Zijlstra, Samme. “Anabaptists, Spiritualists and the Reformed Church in East Frisia.” Mennonite Quarterly Review 75, no. 1 (2001): 57–74.
Andrew Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt: Exile and the Development of Reformed Protestantism (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
Heinz Schilling, Civic Calvinism in Northwestern Germany and the Netherlands: Sixteenth to Nineteenth Centuries (Kirksville, MO: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, 1992), 11–68. Schilling’s analysis of Reformed church discipline grew especially from careful scrutiny of the consistory records of Emden. The consistory was the Reformed church council composed of the pastors and elders that oversaw church discipline and other congregational matters.
Timothy Fehler, “Anabaptism and Calvinism around Emden: Disputation and Discipline,” in Politics, Gender, and Belief: The Long-Term Impact of the Reformation, ed. Amy Nelson Burnett, Kathleen Comerford, and Karin Maag (Geneva: Droz, 2014), 179–205; Samme Zijlstra, “Anabaptists, Spiritualists and the Reformed Church in East Frisia,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 75, no. 1 (2001): 57–74; and Timothy Fehler, Review of Indifferenz und Dissens in der Grafschaft Ostfriesland im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert, by Nicole Grochowina, H-German (H-Net Reviews, June 2005): http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=10650 (accessed March 24, 2018).
Andrew Pettegree, “The Struggle for an Orthodox Church: Calvinists and Anabaptists in East Friesland, 1554–1578,” Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library 70 (1988): 45–59.
Ibid., 59.
Schilling, Civic Calvinism, 21; Hermann de Buhr, “Die Entwicklung Emdens in der zweiten Hälfte des 16. Jahrhunderts” (Ph.D. diss., University of Hamburg, 1967), 53.
See, for example, AP history textbook maps “Religious Divisions about 1600” and “The Holy Roman Empire about 1618” in Donald Kagan et al., The Western Heritage, since 1300, 11th ed. (Boston: Pearson Education, 2014), 158, 160. Although the maps visually demonstrate dominant confessional settlements, the map captions do point out “the existence of large religious minorities, both Catholic and Protestant” and caution that the maps are “somewhat simplified.”
Menno Smid, Ostfriesische Kirchengeschichte (Pewsum: Deichacht Krummhörn, 1974), 309.
Abel Eppens, De kroniek van Abel Eppens tho equart, uitgegeven en met kritische aanteekenigen vorzien, ed. J. A. Feith and H. Brugmans (Amsterdam: Johannes Müller, 1911), pt. 2, 29–30, 153.
Later examples in this chapter will also illustrate cross-confessional economic interactions.
Timothy Fehler, Poor Relief and Protestantism: The Evolution of Social Welfare in Sixteenth-Century Emden (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 29; de Buhr, “Entwicklung Emdens,” 53. This estimate is based on Emden’s topographical development around 1500 and a survey of surviving property contracts in light of de Buhr’s estimate of five thousand inhabitants in 1550.
Bernhard Hagedorn, Ostfrieslands Handel und Schiffahrt vom Ausgang des 16. Jahrhunderts bis zum Westfälischen Frieden (1580–1648) (Berlin: Karl Curtius, 1912), 2:3.
Fehler, Poor Relief and Protestantism, 155.
Smid, Ostfriesische Kirchengeschichte, 115, 119.
Fehler, Poor Relief and Protestantism, 74–75; Klaus Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman: Social Unrest and Apocalyptic Visions in the Age of the Reformation (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark Publishers, 1987), 153–59, 312–20; Ernst Kochs, “Die Anfänge der ostfriesischen Reformation, III,” Jahrbuch der Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst und vaterländische Altertümer zu Emden 20 (1920): 74n5.
Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman, 155. Karlstadt left East Frisia for Zurich. The East Frisian Junker Ulrich van Dornum, whom Zwingli had early referred to as his “alter ego,” had been protecting Karlstadt at his residence in Oldersum.
Ibid., 316.
Martin Luther, D. Martin Luthers Werke: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Briefwechsel VI (Weimar: H. Böhlau, 1935), 16.
Emil Sehling, ed., Die evangelischen Kirchenordnungen des XVI. Jahrhunderts. Vol. 7: Niedersachsen, II. Hälfte: Die außerwelfischen Lande, 1. Halbband (Tübingen: Mohr, 1963), 386.
Henning P. Jürgens, Johannes a Lasco in Ostfriesland: Der Werdegang eines europäischen Reformators (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2002), 159. Lasco’s theological development ultimately placed him in the Reformed confessional camp, connected to that of Melanchthon, Bucer, and Bullinger.
Ibid., 167, 346–48; Smid, Ostfriesische Kirchengeschichte, 158–60.
Smid, Ostfriesische Kirchengeschichte, 161–65; Jürgens, Johannes a Lasco, 245–71.
Ubbo Emmius, Rerum Frisicarum Historia (Leiden, 1616), LIX, 916–17. This passage was cited in and translated by Joachim Christian Ihering, Ausführliche Kirchen-Historie von Ostfriesland (ca. 1710), 2:220v. Ihering’s manuscript is in the Niedersächsisches Landesarchiv Aurich [hereafter NLA AU], Rep. 135, #147, 219v–221.
Emmius, Rerum Frisicarum Historia, LIX, 917; Ihering, Ausführliche Kirchen-Historie, 2:221v–225.
Ibid.
Their letter to the Amsterdam city council was published in Rudolf Häpke, ed., Niederländische Akten und Urkunden zur Geschichte der Hanse und zur deutschen Seegeschichte (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1913), 1:576–78.
On the social welfare changes triggered especially during and after the economic crises around 1557, see Fehler, Poor Relief and Protestantism, chap. 4.
Ibid., 137–42. The letter from the countess is in NLA AU, Rep. 135, no. 12, 3–4.
Fehler, Poor Relief and Protestantism, 185–89, 277.
Jesse Spohnholz, The Tactics of Toleration: A Refugee Community in the Age of Religious Wars (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2011), 191–93.
On the refugees’ impact on Emden’s Reformed Protestant development, see Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt. On the Walloon French congregation, see Timothy Fehler, “The French Congregation’s Struggle for Acceptance in Emden, Germany,” in Memory and Identity: Minority Survival among the Huguenots in France and the Atlantic Diaspora, ed. Bertrand van Ruymbeke and Randy Sparks (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003), 73–89.
Hagedorn, Ostfrieslands Handel und Schiffahrt, 2:128–30; Smid, Ostfriesische Kirchengeschichte, 215–18; Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt, 220–23.
Pettegree, Emden and the Dutch Revolt, 243–51.
Hagedorn, Ostfrieslands Handel und Schiffahrt, 1:251. Hagedorn’s study of Emden’s trade placed the shipping capacity of the fleet of ships registered in Emden in 1570 as greater than that of the entire kingdom of England.
Heinz Schilling and Klaus-Dieter Schreiber, eds., Die Kirchenratsprotokolle der reformierten Gemeinde Emden, 1557–1620 (hereafter cited as KRP) (Cologne: Böhlau, 1989–92), 2:660–62 (17 February 1576).
Emden had only four pastors, so the church’s “visitor” (an elder) was assigned to the pastoral role over the third Kluft.
Timothy Fehler, “Social Welfare in Early Modern Emden: The Evolution of Poor Relief in the Age of the Reformation and Confessionalization” (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin–Madison, 1995), 395.
Sehling, Kirchenordnungen, vol. 7/II/1, 455–63; Johannes a Lasco Bibliothek (Emden), Archiv #3001, 1–32. The deacons provided relief to non-church members, but they were expected to maintain Reformed church discipline such as that described in Emden’s 1576 Poor Relief Ordinance.
KRP, 1:291–92 (1 December 1567).
For several specific Emden consistory cases relating to tolerance and interaction with Anabaptists, see Fehler, “Anabaptism and Calvinism around Emden,” 194–201.
KRP, 2:666 (29 April 1577).
The pastoral admonition was sufficient to get Jensen’s pledge that he indeed would remain by the teachings of the Reformed Church; KRP, 2:1078 (18 September, 2 October 1615).
KRP, 1:379 (28 March 1570).
KRP, 1:381–82 (24 April 1570).
Emden Kontraktenprotokolle, (NLA AU, Rep. 234), 14:673.
H. Klugkist Hesse, Menso Alting: Eine Gestalt aus der Kampfzeit der calvinischen Kirche (Berlin: Furche-Verlag, 1928), 230–44.
Emden Kontraktenprotokolle, 15: 498–498v.
Fehler, “Anabaptism and Calvinism around Emden,” 200–201. Moreover, there were business interactions between Mennonites and Emden’s Reformed. The convoluted case following Jacob Tymmermann’s ban from the congregation over a bad business deal with Mennonites indicates similar economic interactions between the Reformed and Mennonites, and it also shows some degree of conflict between the approaches taken by the church council and the city council.
KRP, 1:337 (24 January 1569). Lenaert Bouwens, one of the Anabaptist elders who lived in Faldern between 1551 and 1565, kept a list of all of those he baptized. Of the 604 people he baptized in East Frisia, 80 lived in Emden. Karel Vos, “De dooplijst van Leenaert Bouwens,” Bijdrage en Mededeelingen van het Historisch Genootschap 36 (1915): 65.
KRP, 2:924 (12 February 1599), 2:946 (13 May 1604).
Interestingly, Emden’s present-day Mennonite congregation still has its meetinghouse in Gross Faldern, located at Brückstraße 74, diagonally across the street from the seventeenth-century Calvinist church (Neue Kirche).
KRP, 2:643 (22 October 1576); KRP, 1:112, 114, 119, 124, 130–31, 159. The Dutch refugee couple Jacob and Proene went back and forth between the town church and local Anabaptist congregations several times between 1560 and 1563.
KRP, 1:375 (27 February 1570).
Jan Lokers, Die Juden in Emden 1530–1806: Eine sozial- und wirtschaftsgeschichtliche Studie zur Geschichte der Juden in Norddeutschland vom ausgehenden Mittelalter bis zur Emanzipationsgesetzgebung (Aurich: Verlag Ostfriesische Gesellschaft, 1990), 23, 31.
KRP, 2:778–80 (7 May, 18 June, 25 June 1582). For additional consistorial interventions between 1576 and 1594 with the congregation over issues ranging from business dealings to mere conversations, see KRP, 2:640, 658, 691–92, 878, 897–98 (24 September 1576, 4 February 1577, 9 April, 2 June 1578, 20 March 1592, 11 January, 8 February 1594).
Count Johan provided some protection for the Reformed in and around Emden until his death in 1591; his older brother Count Edzard, however, ruled the territory from Emden and had shifted to a Lutheran orthodoxy. For an English summary of Emden’s “Calvinist Confessionalization and Civic Revolution,” see Schilling, Civic Calvinism, 28–39.
Smid, Ostfriesische Kirchengeschichte, 222, 230.
KRP, 2:835–37 (30 December 1587; 2 January, 22 January 1588).
For the letter sent to Count Edzard on 24 April 1589 by the “subservient, obedient, and common citizenry of Emden,” see Eduard Meiners, Oostvrieschlandts Kerkelyke Geschiedenisse of een historisch en oordeelkundig verhaal van het gene nopens het Kerkelyke in Oostvrieschlandt, en byzonder te Emden, is voorgevallen, zedert den tydt der Hervorminge, of de Jaren 1519, en 1520, tot op den huidigen dag (Groningen, 1738), 2:274, 275. Count Edzard also transferred lands and endowments to provide financial stability to the Lutheran congregation. Many of these endowments had been under the oversight of the Grosse Kirche, and hence recently under the Reformed church leadership, since the count’s father had confiscated these lands and properties from the Catholic church in the early decades of the Reformation. For complaints about the count’s property transfers during the late 1580s and early 1590s, see ibid., 2:271–73, 276–78.
Stadtarchiv Emden, I. Registratur 910, 19. Another complaint, the so-called Emden Apology, was presented to the Landtag in 1593; it also opens with the same grievances and is printed by E. R. Brenneysen, ed., Ost-Friesische Historie und Landes-Verfassung (Aurich: Samuel Böttger, 1720), 1:413.
Stadtarchiv Emden, I. Registratur 910, 3.
Brenneysen, Ost-Friesische Historie, 1:411. The consistory records indicate that the city council investigated whether the Lutherans were hanging their alms-pouches in violation of the Poor Relief Ordinance; KRP, 2:891 (14 May 1593).
Schilling, Civic Calvinism, 36, 38.
Delfzyler Vertrag (15 July 1595) reprinted in Sehling, Kirchenordnungen, vol. 7/II/1, 414–15.
Fehler, Poor Relief and Protestantism, 236. Indeed, when the Emden government finally authorized Lutheran worship again, in 1685, it was under limited, tightly controlled circumstances: only four Lutheran services could be held per year, attended by a Reformed pastor with alms collected by Reformed deacons.
Stadtarchiv Emden, I. Registratur 415.
For the partially transcribed Schutzgeld lists, see Erich von Reeken, Zur Geschichte der Emder Taufgesinnten (Mennoniten) 1529–1750 (Aurich: Ostfriesische Landschaft, 1986), 20–24 (1601 list), 25–31 (1602 list).
Two of the eight Jews listed in the 1602 list were identified as “pauper” and paid no Schutzgeld.
The 1601 list contains 158 Mennonite names. Despite the fact that 24 from that list had left by 1602 (19 had moved away, and 5 had died), the 1602 list counted 171 (of which 4 were identified as “pauper” and 7 more paid no Schutzgeld).
See, for example, Benjamin J. Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007).
Jesse Spohnholz, “Confessional Coexistence in the Early Modern Low Countries,” in A Companion to Multiconfessionalism in the Early Modern World, ed. Thomas Max Safley (Leiden: Brill, 2011), 47–73.