Vistula delta Mennonites

Vistula delta Mennonites settled in the delta of the Vistula between the mid-16th century and 1945.

The Mennonite movement was founded by Menno Simons, a Dutch priest who left the Roman Catholic Church in 1536 and became a leader within the Anabaptist movement. The Dutch regions of Friesland and Flanders as well as the German regions of Eastern Frisia and Holstein became a center of the Mennonites. Religious persecution in the Netherlands under Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba however forced many Mennonites to leave in the 16th century.

The first Anabaptist, a native of Prussia, is reported in 1526 in Marienburg (Malbork). In the 1530s Dutch Mennonites moved to the area of Danzig (Gdansk) in the Polish province of Royal Prussia, a town connected with the Netherlands by traditional grain trade. Menno Simons apparently visited the community in 1549 and in 1569 Dirk Philips founded the first Mennonite Church in Danzig. Soon about 1,000 Mennonites lived in the city.

In 1552, the Danzig city council allowed Mennonites to practise their faith but refused to grant Mennonites the formal status of a Citizen, a situation unchanged until the city became a part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1793. As a result, most of them settled in the suburbs of Schidlitz (Siedlce), Petershagen and Alt-Schottland (Stare Szkoty). The relation between the city council and the Mennonites was often ambivalent. Though their faith was tolerated in general, protests of local craftsmen caused the ban of Mennonite traders and craftsmen to participate in the annual trade fairs. In 1582, local guilds’ complaints against the employment of Mennonite linen weavers by the Catholic St. Bridget's church were judged by the city council, which decided to limit the number of Mennonite weavers to one per abbey. In 1583, the council unsuccessfully requested the Polish King to dislodge the Mennonites in the suburb of Alt-Schottland while in 1586 the King asked the council not to tolerate this “human plague” inside the city.

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Wikipedia