The Dutch revolt of the sixteenth century sparked one of the largest refugee crises of Reformation Europe. This book explores the flight, exile and eventual return of Catholic men and women during the war. By mapping the Catholic diaspora across northern Europe, Geert H. Janssen explains how exile worked as a catalyst of religious radicalisation and transformed the world views, networks and identities of the refugees. Like their Protestant counterparts, the displaced Catholic communities became the mobilising forces behind a militant International Catholicism. The Catholic exile experience thus facilitated the permanent separation of the northern and southern Netherlands. Drawing on diaries, letters and evidence from material culture, this book offers a penetrating picture of the lives of early modern refugees and their agency in the Counter-Reformation.

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This essay surveys the wave of new literature on early modern migration and assesses its impact on the Dutch golden age. From the late sixteenth century, the Netherlands developed into an international hub of religious refugees, displaced minorities, and labour migrants. While migration to the Dutch Republic has often been studied in socio-economic terms, recent historiography has turned the focus of attention to its many cultural resonances. More specifically, it has been noted that the arrival of thousands of newcomers generated the construction of new patriotic narratives and cultural codes in Dutch society. The experience of civil war and forced migration during the Dutch revolt had already fostered the development of a national discourse that framed religious exile as a heroic experience. In the seventeenth century, the accommodation of persecuted minorities could therefore be presented as something typically ‘Dutch’. It followed that diaspora identities and signs of transnational religious solidarity developed into markers of social respectability and tools of cultural integration. The notion of a ‘republic of the refugees’ had profound international implications, too, because it shaped and justified Dutch interventions abroad.

The civil war in the sixteenth-century Low Countries, generally known as the Dutch revolt, generated dramatic streams of refugees. Whereas scholars in the past have devoted much attention to the exile experience of Protestants in particular, the circumstances surrounding the return of these refugees to the Netherlands have remained largely unexplored. This article focuses on the repatriation and reintegration of Protestant exiles in the province of Holland in the years 1572-80. It seeks to assess what strategies returning exiles developed to regain their possessions and respectability in local communities and shows how they adopted rituals of cleansing to reinforce their social rehabilitation. It can be demonstrated that the exiles consciously used the houses and properties of their Catholic enemies to mark their re-entry in Holland society. By appropriating possessions of escaped Catholic citizens, the former 'victims' of the Habsburg regime sought material compensation and styled themselves as members of a new civic elite. In this way two contrasting streams of refugees became symbolically connected because it was fugitive Catholics who provided returning Protestants with the tools to turn themselves from outlaws into the icons of the nascent Dutch Republic.