Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [19]
Before the siege of Münster and the attempted seizure of Amsterdam, most Dutch cities had tolerated the presence of Anabaptist sects within their walls. Afterward, the new faith was fiercely persecuted everywhere. The Anabaptists had revealed themselves as dangerous revolutionaries who actively opposed the lay authorities wherever they encountered them and insisted that they owed no allegiance to any earthly lord. In Münster, they had gone so far as to overthrow the natural order, holding all property in common and dispersing food and possessions to each according to his need. Toward the end of the siege, indeed—when the men of the town were greatly outnumbered by the women—their leaders had even introduced a system of polygamy. The Anabaptists thus naturally attracted the radical, the violent, and the dispossessed, men who were fully prepared to achieve their aims by force. They were a genuine danger to the state.
Radical Anabaptism never recovered from the fall of Münster. Many of its leaders were killed or driven into exile, and their place was taken by men who were prepared to coexist with other Protestants and even Catholics. These pacifist Anabaptists could trace their roots back to the earliest days of the movement, and they had always existed side by side with the revolutionaries. Now, led by a Frisian preacher by the name of Menno Simmons, they came to predominate. The Mennonites opposed the use of force to achieve their aims and did not seek to overthrow the state. By the middle of the sixteenth century they had become so successful that Mennonism and Anabaptism had become synonymous, and persecution of the sect became gradually less severe. True, even in Leeuwarden the Mennonites were never granted real freedom of worship, and they were not allowed to proselytise or hold civic office. But by the time Jeronimus was born, the faith was no longer a barrier to success in most professions.
Nevertheless, revolutionary Anabaptism had not been altogether extinguished by the fall of Münster. A large group of surviving radicals flocked to the banner of a man named Jan van Batenburg, who saw nothing wrong in robbing and killing those who were not members of his sect. When Van Batenburg was captured and executed in 1538, the surviving Batenburgers turned themselves into a band of robbers and infested the Dutch border with the Holy Roman Empire for another dozen years. After that, the sect fragmented into several increasingly extreme and violent groups, the last of which persisted until 1580. In that year, the surviving radicals fled east and found their way to Friesland, where they concealed themselves among the local Mennonites and disappeared from view some 15 years before Jeronimus was born.
Cornelisz, we know, once claimed that he had never been baptized. The archives of Haarlem show that his wife, Belijtgen, was a Mennonite. Taken together, these two facts suggest that he was born to Anabaptist parents and remained a member of that church into early adulthood. But it is much less likely that he himself had faith in Menno Simmons’s teachings. He married a Mennonite girl, and so he—and therefore his parents—probably did profess to be Mennonites themselves. But most Mennonites were baptized between the ages of 18 and 23, whereas Cornelisz reached the age of 30 without undergoing the ritual. This may indicate that he had become disillusioned with the church and left it altogether, but it could also be interpreted as a sign that he and his parents had picked up elements of the Batenburger’s teachings. It is just possible that the apothecary’s family may have been one of those that made its