Cosmopolitan Networks in Commerce and Society 1660–1914

FRANK HATJE
Limitations and Opportunities:
Co-religionists and Business Partners
Around 1576 Gysbert I van der Smissen fled from Brabant to escape
warfare and persecution. 46 He turned first to the duchy of Cleves and
in 1584 settled at Haarlem, a Mennonite stronghold in the Dutch
Republic. 47 While his son Jan stayed there and founded the Dutch
branch of the van der Smissen family, which subsequently extended
to Amsterdam and a number of other places, his son Daniel went to
Friedrichstadt in the duchy of Holstein-Gottorf. This town had been
founded in 1621 to shelter Dutch Remonstrants who had just been
defeated in their struggle with the more rigid mainstream of Calvin -
ism. Mennonites followed them and eventually had a pre-eminent
share in the town’s prosperity measured by the taxes they paid. The
Mennonite merchant families not only dominated the export of
agrarian products (grain, cheese, butter, pork, bacon) to Britain,
Holland, Spain, France, and Hamburg, but they also owned large
amounts of land. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the
Mennonite burgomaster Nicolaes Ovens, for example, owned or
rented more than 530 ha (1,310 acres). In the course of the century,
much of the town’s economic significance shifted to Altona, and the
Mennonite congregation decreased in size. 48
Daniel van der Smissen’s son Gysbert II left Friedrichstadt with
his mother and step-father, and in 1644 became a burgher of Glück -
stadt on the Lower Elbe. In the same year he married in Emden.
Gysbert II van der Smissen established a bakery and a brewery, traded
with grain, and began to trade overseas in the 1670s. Around 1680,
the van der Smissens shifted their business activities from Glückstadt
to Altona, where Hinrich I (son of Gysbert II) set up a merchant
house in 1682.
46 StAHH 424–88/50, no. 1000, ‘Geslagt Register der van der Smissen’; cf.
Münte, Das Altonaer Handelshaus, 1–8; Heinz-Jürgen Mannhardt, Die Men no -
ni tenfamilie van der Smissen und ihre Nachkommenschaft (2nd edn. Darmstadt,
1999), 6, 13, 16, 24–6, 51; Rauert and Kümper-Greve, Van der Smissen, 28–31.
47 Cf. Joke Spaans, Haarlem na der Reformatie: Stedelijke cultuur en kerkelijk leven,
1577–1620 (The Hague, 1989).
48 Robert Dollinger, Geschichte der Mennoniten in Schleswig-Holstein, Hamburg
und Lübeck (Neumünster, 1930), 16–19, 31–49, 82–99, 101.
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