Dordrecht

Dordrecht received its charter in 1220, the earliest in the county of Holland, and grew rich on the staple right that obliged goods moving down the Rhine, Meuse and Waal to be unloaded and offered for sale there. The Saint Elizabeth's flood of 1421 broke the surrounding polders and turned the town into an island, which it has remained, and the drowned land to the south became the marsh now managed as a nature reserve.

In July 1572, with the revolt against Spain barely begun, delegates of twelve towns met in a Dordrecht monastery in the first assembly of the States of Holland not convened by the royal governor, and agreed both to recognise William of Orange as stadtholder and to allow the exercise of Catholic and Reformed worship alike. Dutch tradition treats that meeting as the beginning of the republic. The city was a printing centre and a place where a synod could sit without the crowding of Amsterdam or the university politics of Leiden, and a national synod had already met there in 1578, which is part of why the international assembly of 1618 was sent to it as well. The 1572 assembly is also where the Dutch revolt acquired its religious character in a form that lasted.

The delegates guaranteed freedom of worship to Catholics and Reformed alike, a promise the Reformed party did not keep for long, and the gap between what was undertaken in Dordrecht in 1572 and what was enforced afterwards is a standing subject of Dutch historical argument. The city kept its printing houses through it all, and the 1618 synod met in a place already used to publishing what it decided.

The synod that opened at Dordrecht in November 1618 was called to settle a dispute inside the Dutch Reformed church between the followers of Jacobus Arminius and those of Franciscus Gomarus. In 1610 the Arminian party had presented a Remonstrance in five articles, holding that election is conditional on foreseen faith, that Christ died for all, that grace is necessary but resistible, and questioning whether a believer can finally fall away.

The synod answered article by article, and its Canons are built as replies rather than as a system: unconditional election, a redemption definite in its effect, the total inability of fallen humanity, grace that accomplishes what it intends, and the preservation of the saints. The English mnemonic TULIP is a much later invention and does not follow the order the synod used. Delegations came from England, Scotland, the Palatinate, Hesse, Switzerland, Bremen, Emden and Geneva, which is why it is treated as an international Reformed assembly rather than a Dutch one.

The Remonstrant ministers were deposed and many exiled, and the statesman Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, who had protected them, was executed in May 1619 while the synod was still sitting. The same synod commissioned the Statenvertaling, the state Bible translation completed in 1637, which did for written Dutch something close to what the King James Version did for English.