Religious Encounters in the Borderlands of Early Modern Europe: the Case of Vaals

Chapter 11 Religious Encounters in the Borderlands of Early Modern Europe: The Case of Vaals 1 Introduction In the Dutch province of Limburg, at the far southeastern corner of the Neth- erlands, lies a village named Vaals. Without a train station and almost an hour’s bus ride from Maastricht, it is as remote from the centers of Dutch population and power as can be, within the confines of the country. Few foreigners have heard of it. Yet Vaals is famous among the Dutch, most of whom, it is no exaggeration to say, have visited it, typically on a school trip or family holiday. What brings them to Vaals is the so-called Drielandenpunt, or “three countries point,” that rises on the edge of the village. At an elevation of 322.5 meters, the Drielandenpunt has the distinction of being the highest point in the Nether- lands. It is also the point where the borders of the Netherlands, Belgium, and Germany meet – hence its name. From 1839 to 1919, it was even, uniquely, a four countries point, since there existed then a tiny sliver of an artificial country named Moresnet whose border met there as well. Promoted as a tourist destination since the 1920s, the Drielandenpunt attracts more than a million visitors per year.1 Feeding and lodging them is the business of the many hotels and restaurants at the bottom of the hill in the commercial center of Vaals, which nestles in a curve of the Dutch-German border. Vaals owes much of its identity to its location at the intersection of three states. Since 1976, it has formed a centerpoint of the Maas-Rhine Eurore- gion, an association established in 1976 to promote co-operation between the adjacent parts of Germany, Belgium, and the Netherlands in areas such as education and economic development. The further European integration has proceeded, the more the entire village has become a site of tourism and com- memoration. In 1994, a former customs guardhouse was converted into a tiny, 1 An artificial historic monument was created in 1927 at the behest of the Dutch tourism board (vvv), some 35–40 meters north of the real geographical drielandenpunt. The Drielanden- punt is an artificial site also in that the highest point of elevation is actually about 50 meters to the west of it. See Roger Janssen, Vaals en het drielandenpunt (Zaltbommel, 2007). The territory of Neutral Moresnet, with a valuable zinc mine, had been contested between Germany and the Kingdom of the Netherlands (Belgium did not exist 1815–30). With only 344 hectares, its original population of 256 increased exponentially. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��9 | doi:�0.��63/9789004353954_0�3 <UN> 280 Chapter 11 one-room Border Museum called the Klèng Wach (which in the local dialect means “small guardhouse”). In it, memories of national divisions are cast as the historical recollection of a thankfully bygone era. A statue of “Rencontre” on the main thoroughfare of the village is one of several recent monuments erected to symbolise the union or friendly meeting of nations in today’s Europe.2 In the early modern era, Vaals was likewise a place of intersection and en- counter (figure 11.1). What is now the Dutch-German border divided Vaals from the territory of Aachen, an Imperial Free City in the Holy Roman Empire; something resembling the Dutch-Belgian border divided it from the Duchy of Limburg, which formed part of the southern Netherlands, ruled by the Spanish, later Austrian, Habsburgs. In fact, together with the adjacent villages of Vijlen and Holset, Vaals formed a little enclave of territory belonging to the Dutch Republic, since to the west, the German County of Wittem divided it from the rest of Dutch Limburg. Such anomalies – patches of land belonging to a state but separated from the rest of its territories – scarcely exist any more. The most important difference from today, though, is that in the early modern era, the borders dividing Vaals from its neighbours were religious as well as political ones. For while the Dutch Republic was officially Calvinist, Aachen, Limburg, and Wittem were all staunchly Catholic. Surrounded by Catholic states, Vaals was an outpost, not only of the Republic but of “the true Reformed religion.” That made it a site of intensive engagement – and as we shall see, struggle – between Protestants and Catholics. Vaals poses a challenge to the textbook image of early modern Europe that prevails today. This image represents Europe in the wake of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations as a place where a majority of people had little or no contact with people of different faiths. Whether or not it was ratified by for- mal treaty, it is said, the principle of cuius regio eius religio meant that most 2 Others include (a) a monument to peace on Belgian territory near the Drielandenpunt, erected during the Cold War (b) a 1997 monument celebrating the creation of the Euro (mentioned by Hoven) (c) near the Drielandenpunt itself there is a boulder with a bronze plaque to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of the EU-region Maas-Rhine. Vaals thus exempli- fies the use of some borderlands “as symbols of peace and cooperation”; see Julian Minghi, “Changing Geographies of Scale and Hierarchy in European Borderlands,” in Boundaries and place: European borderlands in geographical perspective, ed. David H. Kaplan and Jouni Hakli (Oxford, 2002), 35, 43–5; Minghi, “From conflict to harmony in border landscapes,” in The Geography of Border Landscapes, ed. Dennis Rumley and Julian V. Minghi (London, 1991), 15–30. On the meaning of the border in modern memory, see Jac van den Boogard et al., Grenz-Controle / Grens-Kontrolle: Aachen, Eupen, Maastricht – Oral Histories (Remscheid, 2008). The Maas-Rhine Euroregio was one of the earliest established; see Joanna M.K. Kep- ka and Alexander B. Murphy, “Euroregions in Comparative Perspective,” in Boundaries and place, ed. Kaplan and Hakli, 56–9. <UN>.

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