Gillis van Aken (ca. 1500-1557)

Rondtrekkend dopers bisschop uit het Maasdal en sleutelfiguur in een dopers netwerk in Amsterdam (1549-1555)

Samenvatting

This article focuses on Gillis van Aken’s role as an itinerant Anabaptist bishop in the Habsburg Netherlands and the adjacent
Lower Rhine (including the Dutch Meuse Valley) and argues that Gillis was an important link between various related Anabaptist centers in the 1540s and 1550s. Gillis van Aken was originally a Catholic priest from the Meuse Valley, who probably left this position around 1531 to join Melchior Hoffman’s early followers in Aachen, Maastricht and the surrounding area. Several years later, after the overthrow of Anabaptism in Münster (1534-1535), he joined Menno Simons’s circle as an itinerant Anabaptist bishop in the Dutch-speaking part of the Habsburg Netherlands. Between about 1548 and 1555 he commuted intensively between Antwerp and Amsterdam.

The paper proposes that between 1549 and 1555 Anabaptists were arrested in Amsterdam due to political tensions in the city under pressure from the Habsburg central government and demonstrates that the interrogations of the prisoners reveal a network of almost all Anabaptist immigrants, mainly from Flandres, held together by the Anabaptist bishop Gillis van Aken. The argument emphasizes the genuine unfamiliarity of this network with Menno Simons and Dirk Philips and thus raises questions about the influence of the latter two who were (and are) depicted in (not only Mennonite) historiography as emphatically as the leaders of Anabaptism in the Netherlands (including Flanders) and northern Germany in the 1540s and 1550s after the events in Munster.