I

When in 1648 the United Provinces of the Netherlands gained independence from Habsburg Spain, the Amsterdam bookseller Gerrit van Goedesberg joined in the outburst of celebratory activities. His timely Olive wreath of peace was pitched at a market for memorabilia. The volume included an edition of the peace agreement and a fitting selection of plays and poems ‘by the most illustrious minds, and most learned men of our times’. In one of the prose panegyrics, the anonymous author sought to glorify the newborn state by presenting the Dutch Republic as a safe haven for refugees and members of displaced religious minorities:

To students of the early modern period, the self-congratulatory prose of Olive wreath of peace is at once conventional and remarkable. While discourses about freedom were commonplace in the seventeenth century, immigration and diversity were rarely regarded as positive virtues at the time. Historical textbooks routinely inform us that in this age of confessionalism and absolute rule the ideal of conformity reigned supreme. The influx of ‘strangers’ and the social, ethnic, and religious diversity that they represented were generally regarded as a threat to the political stability, social cohesion, and spiritual welfare of early modern communities.Footnote ⁸ Against the backdrop of this dominant frame of reference, the celebratory rhetoric of Olive wreath of peace seems puzzling. It prompts questions about the origins of such rhetoric, the purposes of those espousing it, and the broader appeal of migration narratives among Dutch audiences. In other words, how did notions of ‘migration’ and ‘diversity’ fuse into an early modern patriotic discourse, and what does their inclusion tell us about the Dutch Republic's understanding of itself?

Socio-economic histories of migration have provided part of the answer to this question. There is no doubt that the message of Olive wreath of peace resonated with some very real features of seventeenth-century Dutch society. In a series of pioneering studies, Jan and Leo Lucassen have shown how in particular the towns of the province of Holland expanded dramatically due to the influx of newcomers after 1585. Movements from the Republic's inland provinces contributed to this demographic upheaval, but immigration from abroad was the most conspicuous part of the flow to its urban centres (Table 1). In their up-to-date survey Winnaars en verliezers (Winners and losers) Jan and Leo Lucassen estimate that in 1600 about 40 per cent of Amsterdam's inhabitants was foreign-born; in Haarlem and Leiden foreigners made up about 55 per cent of the total population at the time in those cities.Footnote ⁹ While these figures are important and impressive, they do not yet explain the development of particular narratives about migration, of the sort we see expressed in Olive wreath of peace. After all, communities that are confronted with a large influx of strangers do not necessarily generate a positive vocabulary about newcomers and diversity. To explain how and why citizens of the Dutch Republic gradually appropriated (particular forms of) ‘migration’ as a common virtue, we need to supplement quantitative approaches with a different set of skills, which are sensitive towards shifting popular perceptions and discursive strategies. The following section seeks to evaluate the potential of such an approach by mapping recent historiography over three phases: the Dutch revolt (1560–1600), the early years of the Dutch Republic (1580–1620), and the height of its cultural golden age (1620–70). It concludes with an assessment of the transnational character of migration discourses.

Table 1 Migration and urban growth in Holland (estimates)

Source: Based on Israel, Dutch Republic, pp. 328, 621.

II

To appreciate the origins of migration narratives in the Dutch Republic, we need to examine how its communities framed their own recent past. A research project directed by Judith Pollmann has recently uncovered these memory canons of the seventeenth century. Among other things, Pollmann and her team found that collective self-images were often grounded in memories of sixteenth-century experiences, when the Dutch revolt shook the Habsburg Low Countries.Footnote ¹⁰ It has long been known that this military conflict also sparked one of the largest refugee crises of Reformation Europe. In the 1540s, 1550s, and 1560s, several thousand evangelicals had sought to escape religious persecution by the Catholic Habsburg government. These exiles generally settled in Protestant safe havens abroad, including London and Norwich in England and Emden and Wesel in the Holy Roman Empire. In his seminal The Dutch revolt (1977), Geoffrey Parker estimated that by 1570, about 60,000 Netherlanders lived in exile. He also noted that when the revolt against the Habsburg regime gained ground after 1572, many expatriates were able to return. The shifting course of the war during the 1570s and 1580s generated new forced migrations, both Catholic and Protestant. Particularly after the taking of Bruges, Ghent, Brussels, and Antwerp by Habsburg forces (1584–5), about 100,000 men and women from Flanders and Brabant moved to the rebel-controlled northern provinces.Footnote ¹¹ Flight, exile, and forced migration thus affected thousands of Netherlanders, directly or indirectly, during the decades of the military conflict.

The Dutch revolt's refugee crisis was disruptive and traumatic, but it also fostered the development of new religious identities and a sense of group bonding among persecuted minorities. In the 1970s and 1980s, scholars including Heinz Schilling, Andrew Pettegree, and Alastair Duke demonstrated that in Calvinist-oriented centres of asylum such as Emden and London many evangelicals encountered Reformed strands of Protestantism for the first time. The experience of exile thus facilitated the spread of Calvinism and galvanized a spirit of religious discipline and confessional exclusivity.Footnote ¹² An apt use of biblical parallels reinforced a more heroic reading of migration. By comparing contemporary refugees to ‘Israel's children’, Reformed ministers linked the confusing experiences of displaced Netherlanders to venerable stories of the biblical tradition. The unifying and radicalizing impact of exile among sixteenth-century Calvinists has been extensively studied, but it was by no means limited to the Reformed tradition. Recent works by Johannes Müller, Jesse Spohnholz, and Mirjam van Veen have nuanced the picture of ‘International Calvinism’ and found that other denominations – Lutherans, Anabaptists, non-affiliated evangelicals, and even Catholics – developed similar narratives of exile during the Dutch revolt.Footnote ¹³ The history of forced migrations in the sixteenth-century Low Countries resulted in broadly imagined conceptions of ‘diaspora’ as an honourable spiritual experience and of displacement as a founding experience for many religious communities.

When the shifting course of the Dutch revolt allowed refugees to return and reintegrate into Dutch society, the long-term effects of the exile experience became particularly clear. Hardened by the years of displacement and energized by the evangelicalism of the refugee churches, repatriated Calvinists were among the most committed supporters of the rebel regime. Scholars of the Protestant Reformation have long noted how returning refugees from Emden, London, and elsewhere played a pivotal role in the construction of the Reformed church order in the ‘liberated’ Netherlands after 1572. Local case-studies have similarly revealed that former exiles profited from political purges and received leading positions in the governments of rebel towns and in administrative bodies. As protagonists of a new political and religious order, the former victims of Habsburg repression reinvented themselves as the self-styled standard-bearers of the new Dutch Republic.Footnote ¹⁴

The emergence of an independent Dutch polity in the later sixteenth century thus coincided with the rise of ‘exile’ as a marker of esteem among its political and religious elites. In the new four-volume history of Amsterdam, Maarten Hell rightly notes that in the largest city of Holland Protestant exiles and their descendants capitalized on their pre-eminent role during the war by presenting themselves as members of an exclusive dynasty. Throughout the seventeenth century, families that could claim an exile past, including Bicker, Pauw, and Huydekoper, stayed in political control in Amsterdam.Footnote ¹⁵ In his perceptive study Exile memories and the Dutch revolt, Johannes Müller has further shown how histories of flight and displacement were incorporated into local memory canons.Footnote ¹⁶ In Leiden, the grandchildren of Pieter van der Werff, once an exile and then burgomaster during the siege of 1574, typically emphasized the bravery of their ancestor by installing a large commemorative plaque in the local parish church as late as 1661.Footnote ¹⁷ The iconic status of religious exile among Dutch elites may also explain the popularity of the biblical exodus theme in seventeenth-century Dutch art, recently uncovered by Margriet van Eikema-Hommes. The mayors of Amsterdam, for example, commissioned a large painting of Moses with the tablets of law or Moses in exile from Ferdinand Bol in around 1662.Footnote ¹⁸ It was intended for their meeting room in the new town hall. Its theme was conventional and political (‘God's laws must be obeyed’), but the painting also echoed a collective memory of flight and exile, with which many citizens of Amsterdam were eager to identify. Studies of refugee experiences elsewhere in Reformation Europe remind us that the development of heroic exile narratives was not a specifically Dutch phenomenon.Footnote ¹⁹ Yet their political ramifications seem to have been more distinct, because former refugees in the northern Netherlands could capitalize on their family history. Their stories of venerable suffering fit an emerging discourse about an independent, Protestant Dutch state and proved highly useful to support a patriotic reading of the revolt as a fight for liberty and religious freedom.

These interconnected histories of religious repression, exile, and revolt against Habsburg rule represented powerful social capital outside the urban centres of Holland as well. The dynasty of Orange stadholders eagerly cultivated the memory of refuge and revolt of their heroic ancestor William of Orange (1533–84). Although we still lack an up-to-date study of political culture in the Dutch Republic, scattered evidence suggests that exile credentials were highly appreciated in court and other government circles. In 1649, for example, stadholder William Frederick of Nassau (1613–64) received advice about the appointment of Haring Fongers in the magistracy of the Frisian town of Bolsward. ‘Everyone in Bolsward knows’, one of William Frederick's agents wrote, that Fongers's ‘grandfather or great-grandfather…was in exile for religion's sake’. Local sources even confirmed that Fongers's forebearer had been at the famous capture of Den Briel in 1572.Footnote ²⁰ As a descendant of a sixteenth-century Protestant refugee, Fongers needed no further proof of his qualifications.

III

As returned exiles from the revolt cemented their status in Dutch society, the area was confronted with new types of war victims. From 1585, the Habsburg reconquista of the southern Netherlands sparked the migration of thousands of men and women, most of whom had strong Protestant leanings. There has been a lively debate about the scale and impact of this migration; current consensus is that in the urban centres of Holland, notably Leiden, Haarlem, and Amsterdam, the Flemish and Brabant refugees must have made up about a third of the population by 1600.Footnote ²¹ More important than an assessment of their exact numbers is perhaps the conclusion of economic historians that the influx of skilled artisans and well-connected entrepreneurs greatly benefited Holland's urban economies. Clé Lesger, Jan Luiten van Zanden, and Oscar Gelderblom have shown how their arrival heralded the economic golden age of the United Provinces.Footnote ²² Still, as Jan Briels has pointed out, the position of southern immigrants was ambiguous: as victims of Habsburg repression, their loyalty to the revolt and the rebel state seemed beyond doubt. But their large numbers also posed a threat to the social fabric of urban communities.Footnote ²³ Building on Briels's work, we can distinguish between three recurring themes among critics of migration.

The first concerned the alleged political ambitions of the refugees. Because many of them had held positions of political power back home, local elites in Holland were keen to keep the southerners out of office. In an essay on the limits of toleration, Benjamin Kaplan quotes the Amsterdam burgomaster Cornelis Pietersz Hooft (1547–1626), who argued that ‘the management of affairs’ should be in the hands of ‘persons of a prudent, steady, and peaceable disposition, which qualities, I believe, prevail more among the natives than among those who have come here to live from other lands’.Footnote ²⁴ In most of Holland's towns, including Amsterdam, it took a generation before immigrants of Flemish and Brabant descent gained seats in local government. Religious sentiments added a second element to this atmosphere of political exclusion. In his seminal study on the development of Reformed Protestantism, A.Th. van Deursen noted that the fanaticism of Calvinists, who were well-represented among the migrant population, worried those who favoured a more broadly defined Protestant church. The dominance (real or imagined) of southerners in several Reformed congregations fuelled disputes about the direction of the public church of the Republic.Footnote ²⁵

A third argument focused on taste and the material lifestyle of recent migrants. Jan Briels's work has been particularly helpful in uncovering this moralizing discourse. A typical example concerns a sermon from 1614, in which minister Jacob Trigland (1583–1654) lamented the extravagant behaviour of some wealthy refugees ‘who have fled from persecution in Brabant and Flanders and found shelter here in Holland’.Footnote ²⁶ The booming economy of the United Provinces thus triggered a counter-narrative that linked the recent accumulation of wealth with the dangers of moral degeneration and the arrival of ‘strangers’. The playwright Gerard Bredero (1585–1618) famously reworked some of these tropes and stereotypes into his farce The Spanish Brabanter of 1617. Bredero's portrayal of immigrants partly served to shape a contrasting image of ‘sincerity’ and ‘plainness’ among native Hollanders. ‘The eye can well behold a man and know him not at all’ is the ominous motto of the play.Footnote ²⁷

Conscious of their ambivalent status, refugees from the southern provinces were keen to strengthen their position in Dutch society. These efforts became particularly visible after 1600, when the shifting fortunes of the war made a quick conquest of the southern towns – and hence a return of refugees back to their homes – increasingly unlikely. The growing military divide between north and south forced migrants to abandon thoughts that their displacement was merely temporary and to reinvent themselves as established members of the Dutch Republic. In pamphlets, poems, and plays, migrant authors skilfully presented the revolt against Habsburg Spain as a common fight undertaken by all ‘Netherlanders’, thereby legitimizing their prolonged stays in northern rebel territory.Footnote ²⁸ Two examples reveal the success of this campaign: the New Israel narrative and the Batavian myth.

Historians have long noted the rise of new patriotic images in the northern Netherlands from 1600. In his Embarrassment of riches, Simon Schama has famously described these exercises in community building as ‘patriotic scripture’. They framed the causes of the revolt as a fight for freedom against tyranny and justified the foundation of an independent and Protestant Dutch state. Particularly influential was the presentation of the Dutch Republic as a kind of New Israel. It integrated the notion of a Godly nation, freed from Hispanic and Catholic tyranny, with biblical stories of exile and providence.Footnote ²⁹ The religiously neutral Batavian myth also departed from a cyclical reading of history by framing the struggle against Habsburg Spain as a repetition of the fight of the Batavians against Roman oppression. It suggested that the Dutch nation was born out of love for ‘freedom’. One of its key representatives was legal scholar Hugo Grotius who argued that freedom of conscience was embedded in the character of the Batavian people. Reformed Protestantism was the privileged religion of the liberated Netherlands, ‘[but] we prescribe it without forcing it on anyone’, Grotius reasoned, ‘and those who take no pleasure in it with us we consider worthy more of pity than of punishment…Let each one believe what he can.’Footnote ³⁰ Freedom from religious repression, according to this line of thought, was at the heart of Dutch identity.

While these exercises in national self-invention are well known, scholars have not always been aware that a great deal of this imagery was, in fact, created by migrants. Calvinist refugees from Flanders and Brabant played a pivotal role in the exploitation of the New Israel paradigm in the early 1600s. The use of this biblical analogue was particularly suitable because it tapped into existing sensibilities about flight, persecution, and exile among self-conscious Dutch elites. The southerners thus melded an emerging religious discourse about the revolt with their own recent experience of migration.Footnote ³¹ Migrants also helped to shape the parallel vocabulary about freedom of conscience as something typically Dutch. Gary Waite has recently used the example of Willem Baudartius (1565–1640), to show how polemicists with refugee backgrounds fed a strong anti-Hispanic sentiment by contrasting the recent expulsion of Moriscos from Spain to the freedom of conscience in the Dutch Republic.Footnote ³² This reading of Dutch identity also provided a rationale for a continuing engagement with persecuted and displaced minorities from elsewhere. Telling examples of this discursive strategy can be found in recent scholarship on chambers of rhetoric: literary confraternities that flourished among southern migrants. Johan Koppenol, for one, quotes a Leiden member who made the typical argument in 1603 that Holland's hospitality to those who ‘have fled here because of freedom of religion’, was part and parcel of the country's identity: ‘Everybody can talk about the brotherly love, / Which Holland expresses to all the foreign-born.’Footnote ³³ In this way, religious exile and migration developed into more broadly defined codes of social respectability in Dutch society. The consequences of this gradual shift would become particularly evident after the 1620s, when religious refugees from elsewhere in Europe looked for a safe haven in the Dutch provinces.

IV

After the influx of the southerners, the Dutch Republic continued to attract large numbers of immigrants from abroad. Erika Kuijpers's Migrantenstad and Jelle van Lottum's Across the North Sea have mapped the size and composition of these various migrations during the seventeenth century. Probably the largest group comprised Germans and Scandinavians, whose numbers peaked during the Thirty Years War (1618–48). Smaller groups of English puritans, as well as Sephardic (‘Portuguese’) and Ashkenazi (‘High German’) Jews settled in the Dutch provinces, too. While immigration rates gradually diminished after the 1660s, there was a notable spike around 1685, when about 35,000 French Huguenots sought refuge in the Dutch Republic.Footnote ³⁴

In the ongoing debate about push and pull factors, some historians have privileged religious liberty as incentive for international migration. In their Union of Utrecht (1579), the United Provinces had formally guaranteed freedom of conscience to all. Although the interpretation of the clause depended on time and place, religious pluralism became a notable feature of seventeenth-century Dutch society. It is telling that many of its tolerated faith communities were, in fact, connected to specific refugee groups: Lutheran churches, Walloon congregations and Portuguese synagogues largely catered to immigrant communities. Other scholars have preferred to highlight economic opportunity as the driving force behind early modern migrations. Booming trading businesses and relatively high wages made the Dutch Republic a popular destination for jobseekers from abroad. As van Lottum's Across the North Sea confirms, the maritime sectors and textile industries in particular attracted thousands of immigrants annually in the seventeenth century.Footnote ³⁵ For all their merits, these categorizations sometimes fail to acknowledge that for many contemporaries religious and material motivations were inextricably intertwined.Footnote ³⁶

As with the waves of southern migration after 1585, the integration of newcomers in the early seventeenth century sparked mixed responses. In some towns, the influx of foreigners caused frictions in neighbourhoods, where ‘strangers’ were frequently accused of putting pressure on housing markets and charitable facilities.Footnote ³⁷ The historiographer Johannes Pontanus, for one, claimed in his Rerum et urbis amstelodamensium historia (1611) that the majority of those who now depended on some form of charity in Amsterdam were inhabitants ‘of foreign nations, [who] have been forced out their country by war and other urgency’.Footnote ³⁸ Briels has read texts expressing such sentiments as evidence of a culture of increasing discrimination and social exclusion in Dutch society.Footnote ³⁹ But this interpretation does not really explain why many newcomers quickly gained prominence in local economic networks, were allowed to establish their own immigrant churches, and integrated with relative ease into urban institutions.Footnote ⁴⁰ What is more, a closer analysis of sources suggests that the deployment of ethnic stereotypes was generally used as a rhetorical tool to suit particular political or religious purposes. As Johannes Müller has rightly argued, discourses of exclusion may have been commonplace in the seventeenth century, but they were also ‘highly permeable and fragmentary’.Footnote ⁴¹ It is telling, for example, that Johannes Pontanus himself had emigrated from Denmark to the Dutch Republic. His critical stance towards recent newcomers may have been a part of a strategy to distance himself from fellow Scandinavians of poorer backgrounds.

Further evidence for Müller's reading can be found in the simultaneous production of strikingly positive narratives about migration. Although no systematic work has been done on this, scattered evidence allows us to identify three tropes that became particularly widespread between 1620 and 1670. The first was built on the existing glorification of religious exile during the revolt and the presentation of the United Provinces as a bastion of freedom – ideas that firmly grounded the development of a more general discourse about the Republic as a safe haven for displaced religious dissenters. The works of the poet and minister Samuel Ampzing (1590–1632) are a case in point. Comparing the Dutch state with other European countries in his Theatre of Europe (1631), Ampzing concluded that the United Provinces was unique because it served as ‘the refuge and home of those who suffer miserably abroad’.Footnote ⁴² As a Reformed minister, Ampzing clearly tapped into idealized Protestant conceptions of religious exile, but he used this intellectual resource to develop a more broadly conceived vocabulary about religious migrants that suggested that they possessed an honourable status in Dutch society. Because the new state had emerged out of forced migration and resistance against tyranny, he argued, it had to keep up its special position among seventeenth-century regimes.

A second argument followed from this reading of the Dutch state. In short, it reasoned that religious diversity did not prevent the development of unified communities. The editor of Olive wreath of peace (1649) even asserted that the protection of refugees had, in fact, been the raison d’être of the Dutch Republic. Religious diversity was therefore one of its admirable characteristics. A shared love for religious freedom would eventually transform different diasporic groups into a single Dutch body social:

Glorifications of ethnically and religiously diverse communities could also be based on more traditional arguments of charity. Jeremias de Decker (1609–66) composed an ode to Amsterdam's almshouse in which material support to religious refugees, displaced dissenters, and immigrants more generally was presented as part and parcel of the city's identity: ‘This house of God is open to German, Dane and Walloon: whatever their faith, whatever their tongue or speech, all will be nourished here, all will be instructed edifyingly.’Footnote ⁴⁴ In his recent study of Dutch conceptions of freedom and patria, Donald Haks finds a similar rhetoric in popular poems from the later seventeenth century. He quotes a member of the Walloon church who linked hospitality to immigrants to the welfare of the Dutch state: ‘always must this state be blessed, where the poor strangers are treated favourably’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Clearly, not all immigrants to the Dutch Republic could be regarded as religious exiles and not all dissenting groups could claim the same level of religious freedom. In the collection of essays Calvinism and religious toleration in the Dutch golden age, Maarten Prak has warned against deceptive ‘hollandocentric’ perspectives in this regard. In a similar fashion, Peter van Rooden has distinguished between varying local policies that Jews encountered.Footnote ⁴⁶ Erika Kuijpers's Migrantenstad rightly points to the miserable circumstances of many poorly trained Scandinavian immigrants in Amsterdam.Footnote ⁴⁷ Still, it seems that even the latter could benefit from the moralizing perspectives, expressed by de Dekker. For its rhetoric was reinforced by a third, more ‘rational’ narrative, which emphasized the economic advantages of refugees and other immigrants and linked the prosperity of the Republic to their arrival. Arthur Weststeijn's fine study Commercial republicanism in the Dutch golden age shows that this argument had already been made in the works of Simon Stevin (1548–1620) but received a wider hearing through the publications of the brothers Johan (1622–60) and Pieter de la Court (1618–1685). Themselves descendants of migrants from Ypres, the Leiden-based de la Courts asserted that migrants were agents of economic growth.Footnote ⁴⁸ Because recent Dutch history showed that newcomers tend to ‘invent and create new fisheries, manufactures, trade, and navigations’, Pieter de la Court therefore proposed that ‘one should grant all foreigners who want to come to live in the Cities as much freedom as the other old inhabitants’. Such a policy of open citizenship, as Weststeijn explains, was based not just on Christian hospitality towards refugees and on classical examples of inclusive citizenship but also on rational economic thinking.Footnote ⁴⁹

The partly overlapping discourses about the positive effects of immigration – religious, social, and economic – resulted in the widespread notion that belonging to a diasporic community was not necessarily problematic. On the contrary, a refugee background (real or imagined) could give migrants some prestige and provided them with a means of presenting themselves as members of a respectable category in Dutch society. The range and meaning of the terms ‘refugee’, ‘exile’, and ‘diaspora’ may often have been blurred in seventeenth-century Dutch texts, but as Müller's Exile memories explains, it was exactly this flexibility that allowed new groups of migrants to appropriate part of this vocabulary.Footnote ⁵⁰ Müller finds evidence for this in examples of immigrant families who adopted the language of exile even though their motivations for migration had been mixed. The tendency to use particular semantic categories to frame stories of migration is also evident from Nick Terpstra's magisterial Religious refugees in the early modern world. Reviewing the various incentives behind early modern migrations, Terpstra asserts that ‘economic and political factors drove many expulsions, but religion was the factor most commonly used to justify them’.Footnote ⁵¹

The commemorative culture of the Dutch Republic, which glorified the history of the revolt as a narrative of repression, forced migration and liberation, enabled newcomers of various backgrounds to identify with the origins of the Dutch state and participate in its civic culture. Still, due to the strongly decentralized political structure of the United Provinces, images of migration varied locally and played distinct roles in urban communities. Although we lack a comprehensive study of such local responses, a few tentative conclusions can be drawn. Recent work on printed town chronicles by Eddy Verbaan and Raingard Esser, for example, reveals that a gradual appreciation of migration and even diversity can be observed in these sources, too. Esser's The politics of memory finds that until the early seventeenth century, authors of urban chorographies rarely mention the recent influx of strangers. Nor do they single out religious pluralism as a characteristic of their town.Footnote ⁵² These features did not sit well with traditional notions of civic unity, of the urban community as a body social and metaphorical corpus christianum. But over the course of the seventeenth century, this picture gradually shifted as town chroniclers sought to incorporate recent migration history into their narratives. Esser notes that groups of migrants and religious diversity are explicitly mentioned in the popular descriptions of Amsterdam by Olfert Dapper (1663) and Caspar Commelin (1693). What is more, both features are portrayed as ‘typical’ of Amsterdam and as a source of local pride.Footnote ⁵³ Contemporary travel guides reveal a similar shift in rhetoric. Philipp von Zesen's Description of the town of Amsterdam, a kind of Lonely Planet guide from 1664, styles the city as a cosmopolitan and multi-cultural community. It is telling that among its prime attractions is a walking tour featuring Amsterdam's various émigré churches.Footnote ⁵⁴

It is perhaps surprising that migration was rarely thematized in the rich visual culture of the Dutch golden age. All the same, Boudewijn Bakker has noted that images of diversity became increasingly common over the course of the century. This shifting imagery is particularly visible in the genre of the cityscape. The explicit inclusion of ‘strangers’ on pictures of Amsterdam's central square, for example, branded the city as a marketplace of the world, but brought out some very real features of Holland's population too: its religious and ethnic diversity as a result of recent migrations.Footnote ⁵⁵ Crucially, artists presented these features as typifying the new Amsterdam of their times.

Just as migrants from the southern Netherlands had helped to shape patriotic self-images of the Dutch Republic, new generations of migrants and their descendants influenced the construction of more inclusive local and national discourses. A prosopographic analysis of the creators of the texts and images discussed above reveals that many of them originated from migrant families. Jeremias de Decker, Pieter de la Court, Olfert Dapper, and Caspar Commelin all belonged the second (or, in the case of Commelin, third) generation of migrant families who played a guiding role in the reconceptualization of Amsterdam as a cosmopolitan city and the Republic as a safe haven for refugees. Eric Jan Sluijter and Boudewijn Bakker have previously observed that numerous innovations in the cultural industry of the Dutch golden age, from cartography to painting, originated from this particular group.Footnote ⁵⁶ Because many of the works of this ‘second generation’ have been internalized as part of the national canon of ‘Dutch’ art, scholars have often failed to recognize them as immigrant productions.

V

The notion of a ‘republic of the refugees’ was reinforced by reports made by foreign observers – a topic that has been studied by Hans Bots, Willem Frijhoff, and notably Kees van Strien in his Touring the Low Countries. The latter volume concludes that visitors who travelled to the Netherlands in the seventeenth century routinely commented on the large number of ‘strangers’ they encountered in Dutch towns and the variety of faiths represented by such people.Footnote ⁵⁷ Calvinists from the Habsburg Netherlands, German Lutherans, French Huguenots, Portuguese Jews, and English puritans: all served to illustrate the Dutch Republic's pronounced engagement with religious dissenters and displaced minorities. Pierre Bayle's (1647–1706) much quoted description of the Dutch Republic as ‘the great ark of the refugees’ of his times was no more than a commonplace observation.Footnote ⁵⁸

The cultivation of this image by Dutch authors and foreign observers had important consequences for the United Provinces’ commitments in international politics. So far, political historians have struggled to integrate migration in their analysis of Dutch politics, both domestic and foreign. But recent work of Ole Grell, Donald Haks, and David van der Linden suggests that the concept of a ‘republic of the refugees’ served as a flexible moral resource in these contexts, too. More specifically, it framed religious conflicts elsewhere in Europe and justified Dutch interventions abroad. From the start, the appreciation of exile had been the byproduct of a demonizing campaign against Habsburg Spain. Grell's Brethren in Christ further shows how during the Thirty Years War, stories of Catholic repression in the Holy Roman Empire fed a strong identification of the Dutch faithful with more recent victims of ‘Habsburg tyranny’. The Reformed church fuelled these sensibilities by reminding its members that the church of the Republic had its origins in the resistance to Catholic persecution and in heroic exile communities formed during the sixteenth century. The notes of the Reformed Acta synodes of the 1620s and 1630s are peppered with references to Protestant refugees in Germany, the notion of a shared history of exile, and the responsibility of Reformed communities in the Netherlands to support their brethren.Footnote ⁵⁹ During their meeting in Dordrecht in 1637, the synod characteristically reasoned that the current suffering of German Protestants affected their Dutch co-religionists, too, because they were ‘parts of the same body’.Footnote ⁶⁰

The engagement with international refugees of Calvinist colouring was as much an act of charity as an exercise in self-fashioning. With government approval, the Reformed church regularly organized large collections and mobilized their members for relief operations for German refugees. Grell finds that church members with refugee backgrounds co-ordinated many of these initiatives.Footnote ⁶¹ Growing tensions between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland triggered a similar expression of transnational solidarity – a topic recently uncovered by Erica Boersma. She notes that in 1643–4, the Reformed churches collected no less than 300,000 guilders for repressed Irish Protestants in a widely publicized campaign.Footnote ⁶² The eagerness with which the church of the Republic presented itself as a rescuer of repressed brethren abroad even worried the States General at times. During the Thirty Years War, Dutch authorities regularly feared that church collections and media campaigns would encourage ‘all ministers’ from German lands to come and settle in the United Provinces.Footnote ⁶³

The cult of exile was particularly pronounced in Reformed circles, but it was by no means limited to supporters of ‘International Calvinism’. A similar sort of transnational solidarity characterized other religious groups in the Dutch Republic, for example the Lutheran community. Erika Kuijpers's key study reveals that the Amsterdam congregation – by far the largest in the country – played a pivotal role in the accommodation and integration of German Lutheran refugees during the Thirty Years War.Footnote ⁶⁴ The scholarship of Miriam Bodian and David Ruderman suggests that even for Sephardic Jews the self-image of the Dutch Republic may have resonated with long-established Jewish teachings regarding diaspora and international brotherhood.Footnote ⁶⁵

Such flexible appreciations of religious migration could easily be adapted to suit the new challenges of the times. In the second half of the seventeenth century, Louis XIV's France replaced Habsburg Spain as the Dutch archenemy. Donald Haks's Vaderland & vrede (Fatherland and peace) brings together a wealth of new evidence from this long-neglected part of the Dutch golden age. With a keen eye for the power of historical precedents, Haks shows how polemicists modified existing commonplaces to frame the regime of Louis XIV as tyrannical and hence as the new threat to the Dutch Republic.Footnote ⁶⁶ The growing number of Huguenot refugees in the 1680s was particularly useful in this regard. Their move from France was skilfully presented by Dutch authors as ‘le second refuge’, as Edwin van Meerkerk has remarked.Footnote ⁶⁷ Thus, current French policies were a mere repetition of a sixteenth-century Catholic habit of persecution and heroic Protestant exile. Typical examples of this sort of rhetorical spin can be found in the works of printmaker Romeyn de Hooghe (1645–1708), which have received ample study in recent years. A case in point is de Hooghe's spectacular, large-scale engraving Tyrannies against the Protestants in France that was published in the aftermath of the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (1685). It depicts a vivid catalogue of atrocities committed against Huguenots in France. Looting and widespread rape and murder by dragonnades coincide with the forced migration of agonized men and women. The central scene of the print features the safe arrival of the Huguenot refugees in the Dutch Republic. Welcomed by stadholder William III of Orange, the wretched French exiles receive bags of money, clothing, and food from Dutch officials.Footnote ⁶⁸

De Hooghe's print was just one example of a string of publications that pictured the French treatment of Protestants in the darkest possible colours and glorified the accommodation of Huguenot victims in the United Provinces. A keen propagandist, de Hooghe knew that his portrayal of the Huguenot refuge as a successive story of persecution, victimhood, and exile would resonate with the sensibilities of Dutch audiences. Tyrannies against the Protestants in France effectively fused stories of current French migrations into recognizable Dutch categories. In a fine recent overview of the Huguenot experience in the Netherlands, David van der Linden quotes the French ambassador in The Hague, Count D'Avaux. He warned Louis XIV that prints like those of de Hooghe were a viral phenomenon in Dutch society, as ‘these sorts of images are used to animate the common people’.Footnote ⁶⁹ Narratives of religious persecution and migration thus became a source of Dutch anti-French policies and of xenophobic sentiments more generally. They offered a powerful frame of reference for support of Dutch military interventions against Bourbon France in the late seventeenth century.

VI

Recent scholarship of early modern migration invites us to rethink why processes of social integration failed or succeeded. The well-studied example of the Dutch Republic demonstrates in particular that when this urbanized corner of Europe became a migration society in the seventeenth century, new patriotic narratives and cultural codes were created, too. The experience of revolt and forced migration in the sixteenth century fostered the development of a national discourse that framed religious exile as a heroic experience. In the early seventeenth century, the accommodation of persecuted minorities could therefore be presented as something typically ‘Dutch’. It followed that diaspora identities and signs of transnational religious solidarity developed into markers of social respectability and tools of cultural integration. The notion of a ‘republic of the refugees’ had profound international implications, too, because it fuelled a transnational engagement with displaced dissenters and justified Dutch interventions abroad.

Studies of the United Provinces allow us to draw two more general conclusions about early modern migrations. First, it demonstrates that the study of social integration and ‘membership regimes’ requires more than analyses of formal civic rights, access to labour markets, and local institutions. Unwritten cultural codes represented an equally powerful tool of social integration. The accommodation capacity of early modern societies depended partly on the existence of shared norms or values that could unite natives and newcomers. As a number of case-studies have shown, the cultural climate of the Dutch Republic offered a range of possibilities in this regard. We still lack a European-wide study of processes of integration, but scattered evidence from hubs like Venice, Geneva, and London suggests that the underlying mechanism discussed in this review, were not specifically Dutch.Footnote ⁷⁰ Second, the agency of migrants in the creation of new patriotic images in the United Provinces remind us that national identities in this period often originated in local communities. Rather than being invented and imposed by ruling elites, the remarkable identification of the Dutch state with international refugees was the outcome of local sensibilities and migrant activism. To think of the United Provinces as ‘the great ark of refugees’ also compels us to reconsider how ‘Dutch’ its golden age really was.