Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [18]
The pharmacy on the Grote Houtstraat was closed; Jeronimus the apothecary was dead. But, no doubt quite unknown to Vogel, that was far from the end of the matter. Cornelisz the heretic was still very much alive.
Jeronimus seems to have been brought up as an Anabaptist—a member of one of the smaller Protestant churches then established in the Netherlands. His home province, Friesland, had long been the religion’s main stronghold in the Dutch Republic, and in 1600, when Cornelisz was still a child, as many as one in five of the population of Leeuwarden professed the faith.
The members of the Anabaptist church could easily be spotted on the streets of the Frisian capital, for even by the standards of the day they insisted upon sober dress, clothing themselves in black from head to foot and favoring baggy breeches and long jackets that had fallen out of fashion years before. Most Anabaptists were quiet, thrifty, conscientious, and hardworking, yet even in Leeuwarden their neighbors often viewed them with distaste and barely tolerated their religious views. Elsewhere in the republic they were sometimes actually persecuted.
Cornelisz’s early faith thus assumes a certain significance, for the distrust that other Dutchmen felt when confronted by Anabaptism had strong roots in the history of the preceding century. The Anabaptists had not, in fact, always been model citizens. When Jeronimus’s grandparents were young, their religion had been the scourge of northern Europe; militant members of the church had formed armies, captured cities, and been responsible for tens of thousands of deaths. This movement had eventually been crushed, but memories of its excesses persisted. In its pure form, Anabaptism was a fanatic’s creed, and even in the last days of the century it still attracted agitators and iconoclasts.
The faith had first emerged during the 1520s, a period of unparalleled religious ferment that also saw the rise of the new Protestant religions of Martin Luther and John Calvin. Unlike Calvin—whose views came to dominate in Holland and who believed in predestination, the notion that the fate of every soul is fixed before birth—Anabaptists acknowledged the existence of free will and held that infant baptism was a worthless sham, for only a mature adult, they believed, could accept entry into the church of Christ. This doctrine was heresy to Catholics and Calvinists alike, but the early Anabaptists were dangerous for another reason. They were, without exception, fervent millenarians—convinced that the Second Coming would occur within a few months or years and determined to assist a vengeful Christ to reclaim his earthly kingdom, thus triggering the bloody occurrences prophesied in the Book of Revelation. To Anabaptists, those verses were no allegory. They were sure that Revelation described a literal series of events, which would begin with the construction of a new Jerusalem on earth, and end in an apocalypse that would consume all those who had not accepted the new faith.
The first Anabaptists firmly believed it fell to them to build this new Jerusalem, and their faith thus led them inexorably into conflict with the civil authorities of western Europe. Several bloody attempts were made to seize control of this city or that, and in 1534 thousands of members of the church streamed into the Westphalian town of Münster, expelled all nonbelievers, and held the place for 16 months. The reprisals were appalling; when the Anabaptist “kingdom” eventually fell, every defender capable of bearing arms was slaughtered, together with hundreds of women and children. A similar fate befell the members of another party, 40 strong, who stormed the town hall