Amsterdam

by Russell Shorto

  As did Erasmus, Luther appealed to ordinary Christians. They did not need the Church structure—priests and sacraments—to know the word of God. It was written in the Bible and available for all to read. The printed book had existed for less than seventy-five years, and it became a medium by which ordinary people could both express their exasperation and rechannel their spiritual longings. Two Amsterdam printers, Johannes Pelt and Doen Pieterszoon, began producing editions of Luther’s writings and of translations into Dutch of the New Testament.

  The Church moved quickly to combat the challenge to its authority. Luther was excommunicated in 1521. That same year, Church officials in the Dutch provinces issued a proclamation that “books made by a certain Brother Luther are not to be read, sold or otherwise dealt with, since these smack of heresy.” On November 18, 1525, a messenger arrived in Amsterdam with instructions that city leaders were to burn books published by the local printer Doen Pieterszoon and that singled out “certain books of St. Paul’s epistles.”

  It must have caused a stir when another messenger, representing the Holy Roman emperor himself, appeared in town and flamboyantly decreed: “My lords of the righteous areas, all printers and publishers who produce matter shall first have it inspected and approved by the sheriffs and mayors.” The atmosphere in the city was restive, almost festive, with strange energy. No one had ever heard or conceived of anything as outlandishly earthshaking as what some of their own friends and neighbors were doing: rebelling against the faith that had grounded their lives and society. The historian Jonathan Israel puts what was taking place in the Dutch provinces in grand historic context: “Alienation of a society from its own religious culture, on such a scale, was a phenomenon without precedent or parallel.” The Catholic Church had provided their moral code, and not only that but the guidelines for everything from how to have babies to how to bury corpses. And now what were otherwise ordinary Amsterdammers doing and saying?

  Strange things. Silly-sounding things. Jan Goessens, a card maker (who manufactured the combs used in making cloth), wondered aloud one day whether, if the Virgin Mary was so holy, that meant that the donkey she had ridden was a holy ass. Jacob Klaaszoon, a baker, stood in front of a holy procession that was taking place outside the Old Church and blocked it. A cobbler named Jan Ijsbrandszoon interrupted mass by standing up in midsermon and shouting, “I’m going home! I’ve heard the seducers of God’s word long enough!” Someone called Hillebrand van Zwol announced his opinion that the Eucharist—the sacrament in which the host not merely represents but actually becomes the body of Christ, which was to become a defining tension between Protestantism and Catholicism—was only “ordinary bread.” A man named Peter Vetgen publicly compared the Virgin Mary to Ytje, the town crazy woman.

  The official reaction in the city of Amsterdam to the orders from the Holy Roman Emperor to crack down on dissent speaks volumes about how the city saw itself even then. Yes, of course we will do as you say and deal with the heretics, the mayors of the city in effect told their superiors (at the time the city had a panel of four mayors, or burgemeesters). Whereupon the city’s law enforcement officer (the office of schout encompassed the duties of both sheriff and prosecutor), a man named Jan Huybertszoon, rounded up a group of eight people who had attended a Lutheran church service and sentenced them: to walk in a procession carrying lighted candles. Other people who had been especially flamboyant in their protestations against the Catholic Church had to spend a month in jail. A man who had gotten drunk and said nasty things about the communion host was made to crawl to the tavern where he had said his piece and ask the landlord for forgiveness. The phrase “slap on the wrist” might have been invented to describe the Catholic city’s official crackdown on Protestant dissent. For perspective: at this same time, in 1523, in Brussels, two Augustinian monks who had followed Luther’s teaching that forgiveness of sin is a power not of the church but of God were burned at the stake—the first of what would be a long line of Protestant martyrs. Indeed, in some cases Amsterdam dealt more aggressively with Catholics who complained too noisily about Lutheran upstarts than they did with the upstarts. A woman named Marike Meinouwe who made a fuss about Lutherans assembling in their own church services, crying “Heretics! Heretics!” in public, was sentenced to a year in prison for disturbing public order.

  Why was Amsterdam so lenient in dealing with purveyors of outlandish new ideas? The simplest answer is that it was a trading city. This meant both that it was used to things foreign—accents, tastes, beliefs—and that its leaders did not want to let nonstandard notions disrupt the flow of business. But that isn’t a full enough explanation. Other places in Europe were also trading centers, where exotic people and exotic ideas passed through. Amsterdam was unusual in the brazenness with which its municipal leaders paid lip service to the commands of higher authority to punish dissent and continued to tolerate a wide variety of nonstandard behaviors in its streets—including behaviors that directly challenged the authority of church and monarchy.

  Understanding why Amsterdam’s municipal leaders preferred to walk such a dangerous path of tolerance requires first getting a picture of the larger power relationships at play. The Dutch provinces were part of the Holy Roman Empire, which at its height encompassed nearly all of central Europe, from eastern France to western Poland and as far south as Tuscany. As the name suggests, it traced its lineage to ancient Rome and its ultimate justification for power to the Catholic faith, though Voltaire was largely on target in his famous quip that it was neither holy, nor Roman, nor an empire: Rome itself was never part of it, and emperors variously waged war with the Vatican. That said, the many divisions within the Catholic Church—the papacy and bishoprics, the monastic orders, and organizations such as orphanages and almshouses—exerted tremendous power on everyone from peasants to princes, so that the successive emperors knew that a considerable part of their own power derived from the perceived legitimacy of their Catholic affiliation. The emperor, in other words, was a Catholic warlord, who used Catholicism as a force for control and for expanding his own power.

  The Dutch provinces were for a long time relatively complacent components of the empire. Dutch people had no national identity as such—they related not to a sense of “being Dutch” but rather to their province, seeing themselves as Hollanders or Zeelanders or Friesians. They were pious and hardworking; they contributed a large percentage of the taxes that kept the empire afloat, and in return they received protection.

  In another sense, however, the situation of the Low Countries ensured that they would develop in a crucially different way from the rest of Europe—a difference that would lead eventually to violent and world-historic upheaval. One of the defining elements of medieval Europe was the top-down structure of society, called the manorial system, which had a lord who oversaw an estate and peasants who worked the land and paid rent in the form of labor or produce. The lord provided protection and served as the court of law for his peasants, so that the manor was a complete economic and political unit. And the lord, in turn, owed fealty to both a greater lord and to the Church.

  The Dutch provinces did not become manorial, and the reason, as with nearly everything else, related to water. Since much of the land was reclaimed from the sea or bogs, neither Church nor nobility could claim to own it. It was created by communities (hence the Dutch saying “God made the earth, but the Dutch made Holland”). Residents banded together to form water boards that were responsible for the complex, nonstop task of maintaining polders (reclaimed lands), dams, dikes, and water mills to keep the water at bay. The boards—waterschappen—are still very much a part of Dutch life and have exerted an enormous influence on the culture, in particular on the peculiar combination of individualism and communalism that helps define Dutchness.

  In this system, people bought and sold their own plots of land. Many Amsterdammers owned land just outside the city, which they farmed or rented out for extra income. The striking feature of this is that it was individu
als, of all levels of society, who were invested in the land. Where land was controlled by noblemen and/or the Church in other parts of Europe, in the province of Holland, circa 1500, only 5 percent of the land was owned by nobles, while peasants owned 45 percent of it.

  It’s hard to draw definitive cause-and-effect conclusions about such things, but it seems that this situation meant that ordinary Dutchmen were less inclined to adopt the posture of obedience that serfs and peasants elsewhere were forced into. Instead of owing fealty to lords, people paid rent to one another or bought and sold property. Such language itself speaks clearly to the difference: theirs was a kind of protomodern society. Of course (to paraphrase Bob Dylan), everybody has to serve somebody, but to a remarkable extent the Dutch of the sixteenth century were their own bosses.

  This independence perhaps played a role in the thinking of Erasmus as he developed his “liberal” humanistic approach to renovating Catholicism; surely it was a factor in how rapidly the Dutch took to it, and ultimately to the Protestant Reformation. A people largely independent of the main social organization through which Catholicism dominated became, not coincidentally, the most eager to bolt from Catholicism.

  All of that held particularly for Amsterdam. Put this historic lack of fealty together with a theology of independent thinking in a vigorous trading city—a city where people make money on differentness, so to speak—and the result is a culture of tolerance.

  The Dutch notion of tolerance—which would have such a broad influence on history, coloring the thinking of men like John Locke and Thomas Jefferson—would come into its fullest form a century later, but even here we can pinpoint a feature of it that is not generally understood. Amsterdam’s sixteenth-century policy of looking the other way has a lot in common with the modern Dutch notion of gedogen, or toleration of illegal activity. A recent application of gedogen suggesting a deep history and multilayered understanding of “tolerance” pertains to marijuana “coffee shops,” whose owners must apply for permits and pay taxes just like any other business owners even though the product they sell is technically illegal.

  So tolerance in Amsterdam in the 1520s, as later, did not have the broad meaning the word would take on in the late twentieth century. It wasn’t synonymous with “celebrating diversity.” It was more like “putting up with,” a concept born of necessity and practicality. Americans in particular tend to associate such concepts with idealism—to assume a philosophical grandeur at the root of their principles: “We hold these truths to be self-evident …” It’s true that as this notion of tolerance developed, it would be subjected to moral scrutiny and be championed in church pulpits as an element of Christian belief. But the root of it in Amsterdam was something other.

  In what would become a familiar pattern, Amsterdam’s tolerance attracted people of what would later be termed alternative lifestyles. Just as, in the 1960s and 1970s, the city became a haven for hippies, freaks, squatters, feminists, gay rights activists, and countercultural environmental radicals, in the years immediately following Luther’s manifesto—a time of free-form reimagining of Christianity throughout Europe, with sects coming into being that condemned holy images, that were opposed to war under any circumstances (and fought to the death to defend the idea), that defied any organized church, and that preached that the human heart had supremacy over holy scripture—Amsterdam served as a magnet. Many of these sects died out from sheer exoticism or were crushed out of existence by the Inquisition. But for a time they flourished, and Amsterdam emerged as a center of countercultural experimentation, sixteenth-century style.

  The city’s unofficial policy of tolerance did not extend infinitely. The court of the Holy Roman Empire, regionally based in Brussels, became increasingly impatient with it, for it allowed the city to become a hotbed of dissent from crown and church. In addition, as breakaway sects multiplied, order within the city started to collapse. And that was the one thing the municipal leaders, who were also businessmen in a city that thrived on trade with foreigners—by allowing but properly managing foreign or unusual expressions—could not tolerate.

  The change in official attitude began on an afternoon in March 1534, when the residents of Amsterdam were stunned to see five men marching down the street stark naked and proclaiming (following a logic all their own) God’s blessing on the right side of the city and his damnation on the left. Sheriff Huybertszoon dealt with the problem in his typical fashion: knocking on a few doors, knocking a few heads together, and then trusting that this latest bit of nonsense would go away.

  It did not go away—instead, Sheriff Huybertszoon did. The Catholic overlords of the city—in The Hague, where the provincial court of Holland sat, and in Brussels, the regional center of the empire’s power—had a wider perspective than the city fathers did. They saw that what had begun with Erasmus and Luther was proliferating in bewildering fashion across the Continent. The laissez-faire approach of Huybertszoon and the other city officials was not sufficient. Huybertszoon was forced to resign. There was a good deal of trouble trying to find a suitable replacement—someone who could be relied on to pursue heretics aggressively—but when they found him, Cornelis Wouter Dobbenszoon quickly indicated a dramatic change in strategy by making it his first order of business to prosecute his lax predecessor for failure to perform his duties. (Huybertszoon, however, had seen what was coming and fled the country.)

  The naked paraders turned out to be the advance guard of another new sect, the Anabaptists, who went much further in their zeal for reform than the Lutherans. The main tenet of their beliefs was that infant baptism was wrong since the infant was not aware of the meaning of the ceremony, so that adults had to be rebaptized (ana- being Greek for “again”). The Anabaptist enthusiasm for stripping away layers of dogma and paraphernalia from Christianity also extended to literal, bodily stripping; perhaps related was a penchant for polygamy. Another naked display took place a few months later: in February 1535—that is, the dead of winter—an Anabaptist group, including women who had left their husbands home in bed, met at night to listen to the words of their prophet. After several hours, his sermon reached a sufficient pitch that it required him to strip off his clothes and hurl them into the fire, since all that was man-made was to be committed to the flames. The others followed him. Then they all went out into the cold night and ran through the streets shouting, “Woe, the wrath of God!”

  The impact on the city was spectacular. Sheriff Dobbenszoon arrested the religious radicals and hauled them into jail, but they still refused to get dressed, declaring, “We are the naked truth.” They were given food but would not eat from plates and bowls, which were an adornment. One man, a particularly hard-core adherent, demanded that someone chew his food for him because, he said, he was a child.

  The Anabaptists disturbed the city in a way the Lutherans had not. Plus, the pressure was on from the court in Brussels. And Dobbenszoon had to prove himself. After a short trial, the city issued vibrant death sentences that followed the emperor’s rules for dealing with heretics: the male troublemakers were publicly beheaded; the women were tied into sacks and drowned in the frigid water of the IJ.

  The warning didn’t take. Other cells of Anabaptists emerged in the city. The year before, a group had taken over the German city of Münster, declared rebaptism, polygamy, and common ownership of property mandatory, and otherwise set to making Münster the center of a new, pure Christian kingdom on earth. While the German Anabaptists still held sway (they would soon be captured, tortured, and put to death, and their bodies displayed in cages from the tower of the church—cages that hang there today, though without the bodies), Amsterdam’s Anabaptists decided to make their city Münster’s twin: a second Zion. Forty of them chose a late afternoon in May—a holiday, when, as they knew, the crossbow militia held its annual feast, which meant everyone would be drunk. They had no problem storming Dam Square and taking over City Hall.

  But Amsterdam—its political leaders, its merchants, its shippers and tradesmen
—had no interest in becoming a new Zion. An angry crowd gathered in the square. A drunken man staggered to the door of the town hall and declared that for purposes of negotiation the rebels could consider him the representative of the city. There was a scuffle, and one of the Anabaptists stuck a knife in him. A vicious fight broke out, in which one of the mayors and twenty of his followers were killed. When the Anabaptists were finally subdued, they died in the most horrible way the authorities could dream up. Their chests were cut open, their still-beating hearts taken out and thrown in their faces. Then they were beheaded and quartered.

  However horrific the punishments meted out, Protestant ire and acting out against the Catholic Church and allied civil authorities only grew, in Amsterdam and elsewhere. Yet another rebel churchman—the French theologian Jean Cauvin (John Calvin to the English-speaking world)—would soon make a lasting impression on the Dutch. His clean-and-sober variety of reform, coupled with a clear structure for creating and operating a new church, appealed especially to poor and working-class Dutch and paved the way for an organized separation from the Catholic Church.

  But the crisis that built up in the ensuing decades—a crisis that would give people in the various Dutch provinces a national identity and would transform Amsterdam into arguably the most powerful city in the world—was not just about religion. It was equally political and economic. The Catholic Church and feudalism had evolved together into a solid mass. The merchant-and-trader cities of the Dutch provinces, centered on a fundamentally different type of economy, did not fit with it. The forces involved in this crisis were at play across Europe, but they took on a particular resonance in the Low Countries, where ties to feudal authority were weak and where an entire generation had come of age under the influence of Erasmus’s application of individual reason to faith issues. In the minds of Catholic leaders and officials of the Holy Roman Empire, a kind of mania seemed to be taking hold of the Dutch people. After the Anabaptist takeover of City Hall, and despite the satisfyingly harsh prosecution of the heretics, the imperial powers in Brussels decided not to trust the citizens of Amsterdam with their own governance. They removed the local regents from power and replaced them with a new crop of “sincere Catholics,” most of them out-of-towners.