by Mike Dash
The seeds that led eventually to Torrentius’s downfall were sown in the little German town of Kassel in the year 1614. It was there that a small group of German adepts produced an esoteric pamphlet that was not only to inspire generations of mystics but also to lead, at least indirectly, to Jeronimus’s departure from Haarlem.
The pamphlet was an anonymous work of indeterminate origin purporting to be nothing less than the manifesto of a powerful secret society called the Order of the Rosy Cross. It was a potent call for a second reformation—a reformation, this time, of the sciences—which promised, in return, the dawning of a golden age. But what really excited those who read the work was its subtext—scraps of information about the mysterious Brethren of the Rosy Cross themselves.
The Order, said the pamphlet, had been established in the fifteenth century by a man named Christian Rosenkreuz, who had spent many years traveling in the Middle East, collecting ancient wisdom and occult knowledge. The pamphlet stated that upon his return to Germany, Rosenkreuz created a brotherhood to ensure that his discoveries were put to use. There were eight Brethren of the Rosy Cross, and they moved from place to place, spreading secret knowledge, adopting the customs and the dress of the countries where they lived, and living incognito. Each brother was a potent mystic in his own right, and each was tasked with recruiting a worthy replacement for himself as he grew old. Christian Rosenkreuz himself, the pamphlet continued, had lived to be 106. When he died, in 1484, the members of his order laid him to rest in an underground vault hidden somewhere within the borders of the Holy Roman Empire. The vault was then sealed for a period of 120 years, and its rediscovery by a member of the Order, in the first years of the seventeenth century, had heralded the dawning of a new age. The opening of the tomb was a signal for the Brothers of the Rosy Cross to step out of the shadows and make themselves at last generally known.
Two further Rosicrucian pamphlets appeared over the next two years, both of them anonymous and each making further revelations. It is not difficult to understand why they inspired the tremendous interest that they did. As well as promising the advent of a golden age, the manifestos hinted at the existence of a secret brotherhood that recruited most selectively and invited only the best and wisest to join its ranks. An invitation to join the Rosicrucians would thus be a supreme honor, and one that vainer readers dared hope might be extended to themselves. The fact that the Brethren of the Order appeared to travel incognito merely added to their dangerous allure. If no one knew just who they were or where they lived, it was at least possible that one or several dwelled nearby, and that they might be searching for converts.
Few people seem to have doubted that the pamphlets were the work of a genuine group of adepts; a number of prominent thinkers, including the French philosopher Descartes, devoted considerable efforts to searching for the Order. Several northern European states—among them the United Provinces—thus began to fear that they were faced with a genuine and dangerous new threat. Rumors that Rosicrucians had crossed the borders of the Dutch Republic reached several Calvinist ministers in 1624. In the following year, a secret agreement between French and Dutch Rosicrucians was purportedly discovered in a house in Haarlem. This threat—real or not—could not be tolerated, and in January 1624, the Court of Holland, which was the senior judicial body in the province, was ordered to investigate the Rosicrucian movement.
The task seemed impossible but, nevertheless, the Court did have some leads. Rumor and tittle-tattle suggested that the Rosicrucians of the Dutch Republic had their headquarters in Haarlem, where they assembled by night at a house in the prosperous Zijlstraat. Furthermore, the judges were informed, “one Thorentius should be considered one of the most important members of the sect.” Armed with this name, the Court of Holland commenced an investigation that was to occupy it for the next four years.
“Thorentius” was not a hard man to identify, and the controversial painter was eventually seized in Haarlem in the summer of 1627, three years after the first testimonies against him had been recorded. In the interim, the civic authorities had discovered a good deal about Torrentius, his circle, and his penchant for drunken theological discussions in the taverns of the province. The artist was charged with heresy and with membership of the Rosicrucian order and interrogated on no fewer than five occasions. Torrentius freely admitted that he had jokingly claimed to possess magical powers, but he denied every serious charge that was laid against him. His interrogation continued from August to December without producing anything that would justify a trial.
By late autumn, the magistrates of Haarlem had grown weary of Torrentius’s obduracy, and they applied to the Court of Holland for permission to resort to more violent methods. This was readily granted, and on Christmas Eve 1627 Torrentius was interrogated by a certain Master Gerrit, who was Haarlem’s executioner and also its chief torturer. Heavy weights were tied to the painter’s legs while four men hauled him into the air by ropes that had been attached to his wrists; he was left hanging in this way while more questions were put to him. Afterward he was stretched on the rack until his limbs were pulled from their sockets. A third torture damaged his jaw and left him temporarily unable to eat, and at one point, it appears, some effort was actually made to shoot him. But the efforts of the torturers were to no avail. Through all this agony, Torrentius continued to deny he was a Rosicrucian. Supporters of the painter, who spoke to Master Gerrit in the tavern of the Gilded Half-Moon after the prisoner had been returned to his cell, were told he had impressed the executioner as an honest man. The only words Torrentius had spoken, Gerrit said, were, “Oh my Lord, my God!”
In the absence of a confession, the burgomasters of Holland were forced to go to extraordinary lengths to obtain the verdict that they wanted. In January 1628, Torrentius was brought to court still crippled from his torture and tried on 31 charges “extra-ordinaris,” a rare procedure that meant he was not allowed to mount a defense and could not appeal the verdict of the court. Instead, the judges heard a long parade of witnesses and statements damning him as an immoral heretic. In such circumstances, it was inevitable he would be found guilty, which he was after a truncated hearing. The prosecutor demanded that he be burned at the stake for his sins, but the aldermen of Haarlem balked at this request. Instead, Torrentius was sentenced to 20 years in prison. This punishment began at once.
Undoubtedly the painter’s silence, even under torture, saved him from a far worse fate and made it impossible for the magistrates to convict him of membership of the Rosicrucian order. The charge that he was a brother of the Rosy Cross, which had been the principal reason for his arrest, remained unproven. But Torrentius’s resistance to the attentions of Master Gerrit had a further consequence. The authorities in Haarlem could not be certain how widely he had spread his heresies within the city, and though the evidence that they collected was sufficient for them to identify several dozen prominent members of his circle, they continued to suspect that others had escaped their grasp.
In his empty and abandoned store on the Grote Houtstraat, Jeronimus Cornelisz had reason to be thankful that his name had not cropped up during Torrentius’s trial. But he knew there was no guarantee that some further investigation of the case would not occur and that any such action might easily compromise him. This fear, it seems, together with his bankruptcy, persuaded him that it might be best to leave the city.
The timing of Jeronimus’s departure from his home certainly suggests that this was so. In the aftermath of Torrentius’s trial, the burgomasters of Haarlem banished all the members of the painter’s circle from the city. These suspected heretics were ordered out of the city on 5 September 1628 and given a matter of weeks to settle their affairs. This period of grace coincides more or less exactly with the period that Cornelisz spent winding up his affairs and transferring what remained of his possessions to his creditor, Loth Vogel. At the end of the first week of October 1628 he appears to have fled from Haarlem. He went leaving his wife and his past life behind and to
ok the road to Amsterdam, where the wharves and flophouses seethed with human flotsam just like him, all rootless and all headed for the East.
2
Gentlemen XVII
“If this frothy nation have the trade of the Indies to themselves, their pride and insolencie will be intollerable.”
HENRY MIDDLETON
BY RIGHTS, THE TOWN OF AMSTERDAM SHOULD NEVER HAVE EXISTED. Four hundred years before Jeronimus Cornelisz first passed through its gates, it had been little more than an obscure fishing village festering in the marshes at the southern limits of the Zuyder Zee. Its situation was undoubtedly unfavorable; the climate was appalling—cold and chill in winter, clammy, damp, and foggy for the remainder of the year—and access to the open sea was only possible via a maze of narrow channels, masked by sandbanks and so shallow that ships could not approach the harbor fully laden. There was, in short, little to suggest that Amsterdam would ever be a place of much significance. Yet by the beginning of the seventeenth century the village had overcome these natural disadvantages and become the richest city in the world.
This remarkable success was based on trade. As early as the fifteenth century, the Dutch had built one of the largest shipping industries in Europe, carrying bulk goods such as timber, tar, and salt from the Baltic to the North Sea and the Atlantic coast. The Hollanders were noted for their efficiency, low freight charges, and the sheer volume of their shipping, which even then dwarfed that of their rivals. The men of Amsterdam were at the forefront of this business.
From around the year 1500, the old Dutch shipowners—who had made their profits solely as carriers—began to be supplanted by merchants who took advantage of the favorable geographical position of the Northern Netherlands to buy and sell goods on their own account. The seven provinces that would eventually form the Dutch Republic were ideally placed to profit from the growth of international trade, which at that time was centered in the ports of Italy and Spain. They were midway between Scandinavia and Iberia and at the confluence of seaways and river systems that linked the Atlantic coast with central Europe. Goods landed in Dutch ports could be sent quickly and cheaply to Germany and England, the Southern Netherlands and France.
The towns of Zeeland and the Zuyder Zee thus grew in wealth and population. For many years, however, the greatest fortunes continued to be made by merchants in the Southern Netherlands. The towns of Antwerp, Bruges, and Ghent were far bigger than Amsterdam and its great Zeeland rival Middelburg, and they had long been established as commercial centers for the trade in wool and cotton. Being large and wealthy places, they also attracted merchants specializing in luxury goods such as spice and sugar. Commodities of this sort were generally known as the “rich trades” because they were so much more profitable than the bulk trades of the Dutch.
The merchants of the Southern Netherlands retained their dominant position until late in the sixteenth century. It was only in the late 1570s that the people of the northern provinces at last began to overtake those of the south. One reason for this was the Dutch Revolt, which broke out in 1572 and ran on intermittently until 1648. Before the war began, Amsterdam had been a town of 30,000 people—a good size for the time, but no more than a third the size of Antwerp and smaller, too, than Brussels, Ghent, and Bruges. By 1600, though, double that number lived within the city walls, and by 1628 the number of inhabitants had exploded to 110,000. Amsterdam was now larger than any of its southern rivals and, indeed, one of the four largest cities in Europe.
In an age when plague and pestilence visited the largest towns with grim regularity, and could carry off up to a fifth of the population within a year, such rapid growth could only be the result of mass immigration. Amsterdam became home to tens of thousands of new citizens during these years. A few, like Jeronimus Cornelisz himself, were from elsewhere in the Dutch Republic, but the majority were Protestant refugees from the Southern Netherlands, driven north by Spanish persecution and the war. Many of the refugees were merchants from the great cities of Flanders and Wallonia, who possessed both capital and experience. They helped to establish Amsterdam as a trading power in its own right. A new bank, a stock exchange, and all the other paraphernalia of a mercantile economy followed, and by 1620 the town had unquestionably become the greatest entrepôt in northern Europe. During the first third of the seventeenth century, this flood of cash and expertise made it easier to exploit fresh opportunities and open up new markets. The most important of these was the spice trade.
Why spice? Amsterdam, in truth, was built upon the taste of rotting meat. In 1600, when the science of food preservation was still in its infancy, most of the cuts sold by butchers or hung in larders throughout Europe were sour and decaying. The only things that masked the tang of decomposing flesh were spices such as pepper, which thus became the most-sought-after luxury goods of the day.
The great difficulty, so far as the merchants of Europe were concerned, was that spices came from far away. They were grown and harvested in a swath of southeast Asia stretching from India nearly to New Guinea, and though they had been known in Europe since Roman times, they had never been available in any quantity and could only be afforded by the rich. To get as far north as the Dutch Republic, they had to travel enormous distances. The annual harvest was first carried in small boats and on the backs of animals to the great trading ports of China, Indonesia, and the Coromandel Coast, where merchants from Asia, Persia, and Arabia paid good prices for it. From there the spice road headed west and north, eventually terminating in the Italian quarter of Constantinople. Venetian and Genoan skippers then carried the precious spices west, until at last they reached the markets of Italy, then France and Spain, and—finally—the cities of the United Provinces, where they were used to flavor roasts and stews, turned into medicines, and valued as preservatives. The whole voyage from Asian tree to European table took the best part of two years, and until the middle of the fifteenth century the merchants of the West had no real control over either the supply of spices or their price, which in the course of the long journey could increase a hundredfold.
It was only in 1498, when men from Portugal first rounded Africa and found their way to the Indian coast, that Europeans gained direct access to the markets of the East. For another century, the Portuguese and, to a lesser extent, the Spaniards explored the archipelagos that stretched from Sumatra to the Philippines and produced the spice so greatly coveted at home. They kept their hard-won knowledge of the sea routes secret, reserving for themselves the lucrative new trade with the Indies. Profits from these ventures flowed into the coffers of the kings of Portugal and Spain.
By Jeronimus’s day, however, fierce competition from the Netherlands and England had robbed Iberia of its monopoly. The Dutch and English East India Companies now controlled most of the markets of the East and shipped their wares home to London and the seaports of the United Provinces. Thousands of sacks of spices, to which were added tons of precious metals, porcelain, and cotton, were unloaded in the warehouses of these companies each year, and the wealth generated by their sale defied belief. The ships that thronged the busy roadsteads north of Amsterdam went halfway round the world to sail home full of spice; the closely guarded warehouses grouped along the wharves bulged with it; and the auction houses and the grocers’ shops along the grander streets sold it, all at profits so enormous that men traveled to the town from all over Europe in the hope of sharing in them. The city had become a place where a man’s readiness to chance a long voyage east was more important than his past, and where one or two successful speculations were all it took to restore a fortune. These were the qualities that attracted Jeronimus Cornelisz.
Dutch interest in the Indies dated to the 1590s, when merchant immigrants from the south began to have an impact on the city’s trade. During this decade herring, salt, and timber became less significant to Amsterdam than the more valuable commodities of the rich trades. Fleets were fitted out and dispatched north and west in search of all manner of luxury goods. Dutch merchants
sailed to Muscovy to buy up furs, whale oil, and caviar, and to the Americas for sugar and silver. But it was clear, even at this early date, that the riches of the East would far surpass them all.
The Indies trade was at this time still in the hands of Portugal and Spain, whose domination of the Spiceries had been ratified a hundred years earlier by the so-called Treaty of Tordesillas. This agreement, sponsored by Pope Alexander VI, was signed in 1494, and under its terms Portugal and Spain agreed to split the world between them. The treaty assigned to Spain all undiscovered territories to the west of a line of longitude that ran from pole to pole a few hundred miles to the west of the Cape Verde Islands, and to Portugal all new lands to the east. In this way the Spaniards gained a formal title to the Americas and the Portuguese the right to exploit the Indies. Between them the two Iberian powers established a duopoly on trade with the West that did not always sit well with their own citizens; the great missionary St. Francis Xavier wrote of the Portuguese officials he encountered in the East: “Their knowledge is restricted to conjugation of the verb rapio, to steal, in which they show an amazing capacity for inventing new tenses and participles.” Naturally enough, the Dutch and English—who coveted the Spice Islands for themselves—were even more unhappy with the arrangement.
Nevertheless, challenging Iberian domination of the East was no simple matter. Spain and Portugal had contrived to keep their knowledge of the Indies secret, and as late as 1590 neither the Dutch nor any other Western power had any real idea of the best way to reach the Spiceries, the precise location of the richest islands, or the disposition of the forces ranged against them. The information that the rivals of Spain and Portugal needed most—detailed sailing instructions for Far Eastern waters—was, moreover, the very thing most closely guarded by their enemies. In the days before the development of accurate maps and instruments, all seafaring nations went to great lengths to preserve the accumulated knowledge of their sailors, compiling decades of experiences to produce directions outlining all that was known about a given place or route. These instructions, which were known as rutters, were among the most jealously guarded possessions of the state. Iberian pilots and masters were under the strictest instructions to destroy their copies if threatened with shipwreck or capture, and they obeyed their orders so scrupulously that no sailing directions were ever found on board Spanish or Portuguese ships taken by privateers. More subtle efforts also failed; the Dutch sent spies to Lisbon to buy or steal copies of the rutters but with no success. Without an understanding of the information the rutters contained, it was generally acknowledged that any expedition to the East would be a costly failure.
