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)