Lucretia, Claes, and their child (1702-04)

In 18th-century Amsterdam, enslaved people lived in the shadows of the city’s wealth and power, their family lives often denied and barely recorded.  In 1656, the burial register of the Sint Antonieskerkhof records for example the funerals of several inhabitants of Amsterdam of African descent and notes, for example, that on July 19, 1656, a “child of a Black slave” was buried there; however, neither the name of the mother nor the child is provided.

One of these rare surviving accounts sheds light on such lives, revealing the story of Lucretia, an enslaved woman of African descent, and her partner Claes, an enslaved man living in the same household.

On April 18, 1702, Lucretia gave birth to a son in the home of Belida Struijs, the widow of Christiaen Crijger, where both Lucretia and Claes were staying. Four years later, on October 11, 1706, a notary visited Struijs’s house to record what had happened. Witnesses noted that Lucretia had delivered a healthy child and that Claes was indeed the father. The child was formally handed over to him, and the witnesses acknowledged his paternity, wishing him well. The notary recorded:

The witnesses were present at the appellant’s house and saw a certain slave or Black woman named Lucretia had given birth to a son. It was noted that the after-work still had to be done for her, prompting the first witness to offer to do it in the presence of the second witness. The second witness then asked Lucretia who the father of the child she had just delivered was, to which she replied Claes, another Black enslaved man, residing at the appellant’s house. Subsequently, the first witness asked Claes if he was indeed the father of the child, to which he confirmed. The first witness then handed over the child to Claes, acknowledging him as the father and wishing him well, a gesture Claes accepted and expressed gratitude for. The witnesses testified, based on their knowledge, because they had personally observed it. (NL-SAA, Notariële archieven, 5075, inv. no. 4793B, Notaris Francois Meerhout jr. (1655–1740), Oct. 11, 1706)

This small moment, recorded in legal documents, is striking because it gives a name and agency to people who were otherwise erased from official records. Lucretia’s child does not appear in Amsterdam’s Protestant baptismal records of these days, highlighting how the lives of enslaved families often went unrecognized. The notary’s visit may have led to legal proceedings, as Struijs authorized a lawyer in the same period to act on her behalf in court—a small thread of a possible family drama, and perhaps research in the Amsterdam court archives will shed more light on this incident.

What emerges from this record is a glimpse of humanity: Lucretia and Claes as parents, navigating life under slavery, asserting their bonds even in a system designed to deny them. It reminds us that behind every sparse archival entry lies a rich, often painful human story.

Enslaved People Arriving in Middelburg, 1596

When the northern Low Countries broke away from Spanish rule in the late sixteenth century, the shift was felt far beyond Europe. What had once been a relatively faraway region within the vast Habsburg Empire—largely focused on Baltic trade—quickly became a rising maritime power. At sea, Dutch ships challenged Spanish dominance by attacking shipping routes that carried colonial goods from the Americas and Africa to Europe. This naval expansion would soon bind the young Republic to colonial exploitation and slavery.

The jurist Hugo Grotius famously argued that slavery no longer existed as a lawful institution in the Netherlands. Practice tells a different story. Enslaved people appeared in the Republic not only as prisoners of war but also as commodities, and private law was increasingly used to protect the property claims of those who owned them.

By the 1590s, Dutch ships were routinely involved in slave transport. In 1594, a skipper from Zutphen delivered what sources described as “a barge full of slaves” to Cape Verde. A year later, Dutch vessels off the coast of Guinea encountered several ships carrying “sugar and blacks” under the command of a Dutch captain, who transported the enslaved people to Lisbon. In 1596, an Amsterdam captain carried fifty-eight enslaved Africans from Angola to southern Portugal on behalf of a Portuguese merchant. These voyages show how deeply Dutch maritime activity was already entangled with Atlantic slavery.

That same expansion brought enslaved Africans directly to the Netherlands. In 1596, at least one hundred enslaved people were landed in the port city of Middelburg. They had likely been captured during a privateering expedition or purchased in Guinea for resale in Brazil. The city council ordered their release, and Middelburg’s mayor, Adriaen Heindricxsen ten Haeff—also a founding director of the VOC—publicly supported this decision. He argued before the States of Zeeland that the men, women, and children brought from Guinea were baptized Christians and therefore could not be lawfully enslaved. No one, he insisted, could claim ownership over them.

The provincial authorities initially agreed, but the Africans’ freedom did not last. Pieter van der Haegen, a wealthy Rotterdam merchant and shipowner, appealed to the States-General, the highest governing body of the Republic. Although his first petition was rejected, the States-General soon reversed course. Within two weeks of the Africans’ arrival, it ruled that Van der Haegen could dispose of them “as he pleases,” and Zeeland was forced to comply. In doing so, the States-General placed the property rights of a Dutch citizen above the idea that freedom prevailed over slavery on Dutch soil.

Meanwhile, Dutch overseas ambitions were expanding even further. In the same year, a fleet led by Cornelis de Houtman sailed past the Cape of Good Hope for the first time, opening a direct route to Southeast Asia. During this voyage, two men—known as Laurens and Madagascar—were enslaved by the crew and taken to the Republic. They arrived in August 1597 near Texel, alongside Dutch and Asian sailors. On a later voyage, Laurens, identified as coming from Madagascar, was baptized.

The return in Amsterdam of the second voyage to the East Indies, under the leadership of Jacobus van Neck, on July 19, 1599. The four large ships Mauritius, Hollandia, Overijssel and Vriesland on the IJ surrounded by numerous small boats. In the distance on the right the profile of Amsterdam. Hendrik Cornelisz Vroom (1566–1640), 1599, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

The journey that brought Laurens to Holland is often seen as the beginning of a new era. Over the following decades, the Dutch Republic would become the center of a global empire, stretching from Asia to the Americas and supported by trading posts around the world. Slavery became firmly embedded in the economic system of exploitation and the laws of the overseas colonies—and increasingly, it also became a legal issue in the Republic's territories in Europe, because it was a privilege of high-ranking officials to bring enslaved people with them to Europe, where they could serve as domestic attendants, sexual property, or symbols of status.

(Detailed data and references in footnotes can be found in Bastiaan D. van der Velden – The Legal Framework of Slavery in the Dutch Republic and Its Colonies, 2026)

Huvedri Dimitri (1656)

Freedom may have been a core value for the well-to-do citizens of Amsterdam, but it wasn’t exactly codified in a law or part of the city’s unwritten laws. In 1656, eighteen-year-old Huvedri Dimitri from Poland (probably Ukraine) walked into the office of Amsterdam notary Adriaen Lock with a remarkable story. He had spent eight grueling years enslaved in Turkey and returned to Europe not as a free man, but as the servant of Joan Elias, a merchant from Aleppo. Dimitri explained that Elias had purchased him about fifteen months earlier in Izmir for 140 pieces of eight.

In Amsterdam, hope arrived in the form of the Greek merchant Augustus de Miter. He told Dimitri he was in a “free country” and had no obligation to remain with Elias—or return to Smyrna, where he would likely be sold again. De Miter urged him to escape: “Will you remain here any longer? Winter is coming; you should leave your master.”

Soon after, the drama shifted back to the notary’s office. Elias was willing to free Dimitri—but only if he was fully reimbursed for the money he had spent acquiring him. Witnesses watched as Augustus de Miter offered to cover the cost, clearing the path for Dimitri’s freedom. In a separate deed, Elias formally declared he would “set his slave free again, thereby relieving him of all servitude and slavery.”

Yet the story remains strangely convoluted. Why go through such formalities in a country where everyone was supposed to be free? Here was a Greek merchant urging Dimitri to flee, offering to pay for his return to Poland, while a notary handled every procedural detail—and the owner still demanded full payment. In a city famed for freedom, a simple court declaration might have sufficed. But in Amsterdam, liberty was far more complicated than the air Dimitri was breathing.

(detailed reference to the notarial records will be available in: The Legal Framework of Slavery in the Dutch Republic and Its Colonies)