A Brill Calendar: December 9

Emmius and Northern Liberty

Few phenomena fostered the genesis and rise of the Republic of the United Provinces as strongly as extensive emigration from neighbouring countries.

This emigration, (which started well before the end of the 16th century), evoked a sudden increase in cultural diversity. The newcomers were determined to live in freedom: religiously, economically and intellectually. The most spectacular segment of this influx of people with a taste for independence hailed from the highest developed urban region of Europe as a whole: Flanders, and its cosmopolitan hub, Antwerp. It is also the segment most extensively studied by cultural historians.

However, it is seldom taken sufficiently taken into account that newcomers arrived also from eastern regions, ready to contribute to paving the road for a new sovereign European State. In this regard the biography of Ubbo Emmius is representative. When he died in Groningen, on December 9 1625, the local University - founded in 1614 and the second one in the Republic, (founded some four decades after the one of Leyden in Holland Province), mourned its first Rector Magnificus.

Emmius had taken up domicile in Groningen in 1594. Born in the East-Frisian village of Greetsiel in 1547 he had served as Rector of a Latin School in the modest city of Norden, in lower Saxony. His main claim to scholarly fame is his ‘Rerum Frisiarum Historia’ (1596 – 1616). Based on earlier chronicles written by two Benedictine abbots, Emo and Menko, Emmius authored the first history of an old indigenous civilization without the frills of pious fantasy and time-honoured superstition.