The Legal Rights of Religious Refugees in the Refugee-Cities of Early Modern Germany

Abstract

Nowhere in early modern Europe (15-18 centuries) did religious refugees enjoy more special legal protections than they did in the so-called ‘refugee-cities’ (Exulantenstädte) of Germany. These were new cities founded, mostly in the seventeenth century, by German princes with the express intention of attracting religious refugees to settle them. Offering two case studies, of Neuhanau and Neuwied, this article examines the legal provisions that extended personal, economic, civil, and religious rights to the refugees who settled them. The article shows that these rights reflected the needs and desires of refugees as well as the agendas of early modern princes. It also shows why, to achieve the goals of both parties, it became standard practice to combine the refugees’ special rights with separate urban status for their settlements. Although medieval Europe had its fugitive heretics and wandering Jews, both real and imagined, it was the early modern era that turned the religious refugee into a mass phenomenon. Beginning in the fifteenth century with the expulsion of large Jewish populations, continuing in the sixteenth, when the Protestant and Catholic Reformations unleashed unprecedented religious conflicts, and peaking in the seventeenth century, when hundreds of thousands of Christian dissenters fled persecution, the number and variety of Europeans migrating for religious reasons was enormous. The scale of the phenomenon was