International Protestantism in the 16th Century: Frustrations, Failures, and Perseverance

In the mid-sixteenth century, harsh persecution and warfare drove many thousands of Netherlandish Protestants into exile in the Holy Roman Empire. Considerable scholarship has described the organizing efforts of this new brand of International Calvinism that helped this religious movement not only survive but thrive in exile. But how would it be that a religious movement could be strengthened by a lack of political support and long distances between its members? These earlier arguments depended on an implicit celebration of refugees as Reformation-era heroes to be celebrated for their steadfastness in the face of persecution. In fact, persecution seriously weakened the International Protestant movement in the sixteenth century. This paper considers three ways that this was true. It examines the difficulty for pastors and elders in monitoring itinerant church members, the inability of separated church leaders to develop consensus on questions of belief and practice, and the ineffectiveness of diasporic ecclesiastical institutions. It is based on the results of a six-year, five-person research project, based at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, that examines the experiences of Netherlandish Protestant refugees in eleven cities along the Rhine River Corridor (including the Lower Main) during the second half of the sixteenth century.