Alkmaar, 1566

In 1603 a baby boy was born into the Mecklenburg family in Koedijk, a small, rural village situated a little less than four miles north of the commercial town of Alkmaar in the Province of Holland. His parents named him Johannes. Johannes would come of age during a period of growing pains for the adolescent Republiek van der Zeven Verenigde Nederlanden (the Republic of the Seven United Low Countries commonly known as the Dutch Republic). Only thirty-seven years before the birth of Johannes, some of the inhabitants of Alkmaar participated in the beeldenstorm. This storm of iconoclasm initially broke out in Flanders in 1566 during the Feast of St. Lawrence. Following an open-air sermon in which an exile Calvinist preacher called an audience of around 2,000 to cleanse the church of idolatry, twenty evangelical activists entered the chapel of the monastery of St. Lawrence in Steenvoorde and smashed its sacred images and objects to smithereens. The storm rapidly moved north, reaching Alkmaar twenty-five days later when some activists entered the Great Church of St. Lawrence and began hurling holy images and relics to the ground. Although the activists spared the choir organ and artistic treasures that pre-dated Calvin's reformation, the damage had been done. Philip II, the devout Catholic lord of the seventeen provinces that comprised the Nederlanden (Low Countries) (see figure 3), could not abide such civil and religious dissent.