Niclaes managed to convert a surprisingly large group of successful and wealthy merchants and seems to have appealed to an intellectual cliental as well. The apocalyptic element of their belief meant that adherents could live the life of honest, law abiding citizens even as members of religious communities because all religions and authorities would be irrelevant come the end of times. He believed he had been sent by God and signed all his published writings H. Hendrik Niclaes saw his mission in instructing mankind in the principal dogma of love and charity. The sect was apocalyptic and believed in a rapidly approaching end of the world. Their ideal was a quite life of study, spiritualist piety, contemplation, withdrawn from the turmoil of the world around them. Familists were basically quietists like the Quakers, who reject force and the carrying of weapons. Niclaes wrote vast numbers of pamphlets and books outlining his religious views and I will only give a very brief outline of the main points here. He is thought to have died around 1580 in Cologne where he was living at the time. He travelled much throughout the Netherlands, England and other countries combining his commercial and missionary activities.

Around 1539 he felt himself called to found his Famillia Caritatis and in 1540 he moved to Emden, where he lived for the next twenty years and prospered as a businessman. About 1530 he moved to Amsterdam where his was once again imprisoned, this time on a charge of complicity in the Münster Rebellion of 1534–35. Niclaes was charged with heresy and imprisoned at the age of twenty-seven. This secret sect was similar in many aspects to the Anabaptists and was founded and led by the prosperous merchant from Münster, Hendrik Niclaes (c. Both Christophe Plantin and Abraham Ortelius were members of a relatively small religious cult or sect the Famillia Caritatis (English: Family of Love), Dutch Huis der Leifde (English: House of Love), whose members were also known as Familists. Although much of Plantin’s work was of religious nature, as indeed most European publishers of the period, he also published many important academic works.īefore we look in more detail at Plantin’s life and work, we need to look at an aspect of his relationship with Ortelius, something which played an important role in both his private and business life. Plantin’s was the leading publishing house in Europe in the second half of the sixteenth century, which over a period of 34 years issued 2,450 titles. Plantin also published Ortelius’ Synonymia geographica (1578), his critical treatment of ancient geography, later republished in expanded form as Thesaurus geographicus (1587) and expanded once again in 1596, in which Ortelius first present his theory of continental drift. Abraham Ortelius by Peter Paul Rubens, Museum Plantin-Moretus via Wikimedia CommonsĪ man who printed, not the first 1570 editions, but the important expanded 1579 Latin edition, with its bibliography ( Catalogus Auctorum), index ( Index Tabularum), the maps with text on the back, followed by a register of place names in ancient times ( Nomenclator), and who also played a major role in marketing the book, was Ortelius’ friend and colleague the Antwerp publisher, printer and bookseller Christophe Plantin (c.

Abraham ortelius biografia