In the late 16th century, Poland became a haven for a variety of non-conformists which included Jews, Anti-Trinitarians from Italy and Bohemia, Quakers and Calvinists from Great Britain, south German Schwenkfelders, Eastern Orthodox, Armenian, and Greek Catholic Christians, some Muslim Tatars, as well as other peaceful sectarians like the Dutch and Flemish Anabaptists.
Unlike the Low Countries and most of western Europe, the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a “state without stakes,” and as such
fittingly described as “God’s playground” (note 1). In the view of 17th-century
Dutch dramatist Joost van den Vondel, it was “the ‘Promised Land,’ where the
refugee could forget all his sorrow and enjoy the richness of the land” (note 2).
Over the next two centuries an important strand of Mennonite life and
spirituality evolved into a mature tradition in this relatively hospitable
context (note 3).
Anabaptists from the Low Countries began to arrive in Danzig
and region as early as 1530. Like Bruges, for example (where some of our
Mennonite ancestors originated), Danzig was a trading centre of the Hanseatic
League, which stretched from London to Norway, with Middle Low German as the
dominant language of trade. Whereas Bruges was a major source of cloth and
other manufactured goods, the port city of Danzig with a population of 50,000
was a shipbuilding centre and main outlet for Polish grain and other
commodities.
As Danzig embraced the Lutheran Reformation, Anabaptists
from the Low Countries found both religious freedom and economic opportunity
there. Here too they could maintain strong ties to their churches of origin
with the arrival of more than a thousand Dutch ships annually (ca. 2.7 per day; note 4). Menno Simons visited his small flock scattered in Danzig and
Elbing ca. 1549 (note 5); Anabaptist leader Dirk Philips became Danzig’s first
elder, settling outside the city walls in Alt-Schottland in the mid-1550s;
Leenaert Bouwens who had baptized thousands in Flanders visited Danzig in
1563—only to be disposed by Dirk Philips two years later in dispute.
Between 1527 and 1578, approximately 750 families from the
Low Countries—mostly Mennonite refugees and settlers—had moved to Danzig and
the Vistula Delta, with some arriving directly from Flanders over Cologne (note
6).
Most of the culturally Flemish refugees from the southern
Low Countries cities like Bruges or Brussels--with Flemish names like Penner,
Buller, Wall, Fast, etc.--“were engaged in commercial activities. Since they
initially had difficulties in obtaining commercial licenses (Gewerbezulassungen)
in Danzig and Elbing, some migrated to agricultural occupations” (note 7).
Their successes opened the door for other Anabaptist refugees from the Low
Countries. In 1562 “Dutch people of the Mennonite religion” were specifically
invited by the Polish banking house Loysen to settle on the “Tiegenhoff part of
the Vistula Delta” to rebuild dikes partially destroyed by previous wars and to
drain low-lying lagoons and swamps over large blocks of land (note 8). That
story is more familiar and frequently retold. The land had to be dried, cleared
and strategically sloped to control water run-off and to protect from flooding.
Because of the enormous labour required with little capital for construction
and the danger of swamp fever, up to eighty percent of the first settlers died
prematurely. In some places it took a century—three generations—to create a
stable or fruitful agricultural region and, of necessity, a sense of community.
By 1580 there are 5 congregational groups: Danzig, Elbing, Montau, Thorn, Kleines Werder. The Gross-Werder (Large Vistula Delta) groups belonged to either Danzig or Elbing. Each understood itself to be subordinate to the mother churches in “the west” (note 9). The division between the “Frisians” and “Flemish” groups--no longer geographical or cultural designations, but ecclesiological--had not yet set in.
The region was uniquely fertile, as one Scottish traveler
noted in 1593, and wealthy in commodities, including its “great quantity of
wax, flax, linen clothes … soap-ashes, and all kind of grains, especially rye,
which has made Danzig famous, for relieving all nations therewith in time of
dearth” (note 10).
A British document on Poland from 1598 notes that this land has “wonderfull nombers of heretikes” including a “greate stoare of Anabaptistes,” and “all sortes of Antitrinitaries” (note 11). Though a strongly Catholic territory, Poland’s King Sigismund II Augustus adopted a tolerant attitude toward the Reformation, formalized with the Confederation of Warsaw in 1573:
“Whereas in our Common Wealth there is no small disagreement
in the matter of the Christian faith … we will keep the peace among ourselves,
and that we will not, for the sake of our various faith and difference of
church, either shed blood or confiscate property, deny favour, imprison or
banish.” (Note 12)
Despite occasional repressions and in contrast to almost
every other area of Europe, there were no mass religious persecutions carried
out by authorities in Poland in the 17th century (note 13). Danzig/Poland was a
tolerant context that offered Mennonites security of life and property,
together with the freedoms to practice their faith without the obligations of
military service, and to develop a tradition.
Some two-hundred years later the first migrations to Russia
would begin.
---Arnold Neufeldt-Fast
---Notes---
Pic: 1595 Map of “Prussia,” Atlas sive cosmographica, by
Gerardus Mercator, https://www.loc.gov/resource/rbc0001.2003rosen0730/?sp=96.
Pic: 1687 Map of Danzig, https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/59/Mapa_Gda%C5%84ska_1687.jpg.
Note 1: Cf. Norman Davies, God’s Playground: A History of
Poland, vol. 1: The Origins to 1795, 2nd ed. (Oxford: University of Oxford
Press, 2005); Janusz Tazbir, A State without Stakes. Polish Religious
Toleration in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Kościuszko
Foundation, 1973); Maria Bogucka, “Religiöse Koexistenz—Ausdruck von Toleranz
oder von politischer Berechnung? Der
Fall Danzig im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert,” in Konfessionelle Pluralität als
Herausforderung: Koexistenz und Konflikt im Spätmittelalter und Früher Neuzeit,
edited by J. Bahlcke et al., 521–532 (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag,
2006).
Note 2: Cf. Willem Stuve, “Affirming the Old Fundamentals. A
Survey of the Danzig Old-Flemish Congregations in the Netherlands,” Preservings
no. 25 (December 2005), 33, https://www.plettfoundation.org/files/preservings/Preservings25.pdf;
also Peter J. Klassen, Mennonites in Early Modern Poland and Prussia
(Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 1f.
Note 3: See
Reinhold Curicken, Der Stadt Dantzig: Historische Beschreibung (Amsterdam/
Dantzigk: Janssons, 1687), https://pbc.gda.pl/dlibra/publication/61987/edition/55645/content.
Note 4: See Maria Bogucka, “Amsterdam and the Baltic in the
First Half of the Seventeenth Century,” The Economic History Review 26, no. 3
(1973), 433–447.
Note 5: Cf. also Menno’s “Exhortation to a Church in
Prussia, 1549,” in J. C. Wenger, ed., The Complete Writings of Menno Simons (Scottdale,
PA: Herald Press, 1984 ), 1030–1035. https://archive.org/search.php?query=menno+simons&sin=.
Note 6: Cf. Cornelius Krahn, Dutch Anabaptism: Origin,
Spread, Life and Thought, 1450–1600 (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1968), 219f., https://archive.org/details/dutchanabaptismo0000krah.
Note 7: Based on Horst Quiring’s work on names in the
earliest correspondence: “Die Danziger Mennoniten: Der Stand der
Herkunftsfragen,” in A Legacy of Faith: The Heritage of Menno Simons, edited by
Cornelius J. Dyck, 192–196 (Newton, KS: Faith and Life, 1962), https://archive.org/details/legacyoffaithher00unse;
idem, “Aus den ersten Jahrzehnten der Mennoniten in Westpreußen,” Mennonitische
Geschichtsblätter 2 (1937), 32–35, https://mla.bethelks.edu/gmsources/newspapers/Mennonitische%20Geschichtsblaetter/1936-1940/DSCF4464.JPG
(ff.).
Note 8: For this early period, cf. P. Klassen, Mennonites in
Early Modern Poland and Prussia; also idem, A Homeland for Strangers. An
Introduction to Mennonites in Poland and Prussia, rev’d ed. (Fresno, CA: Centre
for Mennonite Brethren Studies, 1989), https://archive.org/details/ahomeland-for-strangers-an-introduction-to-mennonites-in-poland-and-prussia-revised-ocr.
Note 9: Quiring,
“Aus den ersten Jahrzehnten der Mennoniten in Westpreußen,” 34.
Note 10: Itinerary of Fynes Moryson, vol. 4 (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1908), 69f. (lightly edited), https://archive.org/details/itinerarycontain04moryuoft/page/68. See also observations from 1615 in William Lithgow, Totall Discourse of the Rare adventures & Painefull Peregrinations (Glasgow: MacLehose, 1906), 368, https://archive.org/details/totalldiscourseo00lithuoft/.
Note 11: “Relation of the State of Polonia and the United
Provinces” (unknown author), cited in Peter P. Bajer, Scots in the
Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 16th–18th Centuries: The Formation and
Disappearance of an Ethnic Group (Boston: Brill, 2012), 70.
Note 12: Cited in Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth, 71, no. 108.
Note 13: Bajer, Scots in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,
231.
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