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Why Danzig and Poland?

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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