Historians frequently talk about the serendipity of the research process. Surprise encounters with the right resources at the right time often give them a fateful sense of their subject pursuing them relentlessly.
I consider myself a historian and have experienced probably hundreds of these incredible connections over the past thirty years of studying Dutch Reformation history. But I have another name for them—God’s provisions!
In the first two books in this series, I’ve given credit to the people who have so generously rendered services and encouragement. This time, I want to acknowledge God’s part.
God sent our family to live in the Netherlands for three years in the 1960s. Back home in California, God led me to a library to learn about Dutch history. Through two lengthy sets of books by nineteenth-century scholar John Lathrop Motely and some charming volumes by Hendrick van Loon, God introduced me to Willem van Oranje. I knew instantly that someday I had to write about this unusual prince. In the 1970s God gave me incredible opportunities to learn to write and publish and build relationships with editors and writing teachers all over the country. I entered the 1980s with a newly emptied nest (my youngest child went away to college that year) and a surgery that slowed me down for several months.
While convalescing, the thin notebook with notes on Willem and the Reformation beckoned to me from my dream shelf above my desk. Through a series of serendipitous events, I discovered that now was the time to follow through with His vision given to me in the late 1960s.
God had located me within easy driving distance of the University of California at Berkeley Library, home to the largest collection of Dutch language and history books in the country. In those days, for a ten-dollar-a-year card, I had almost unlimited access to all the books, magazines, and maps I could possibly need for my research! I also found generous and helpful access to Dr. Lewis Spitz, a leading Reformation scholar at Stanford University, twenty miles down the road from my house.
In 1985, God allowed my husband to take a three-month vacation and accompany me all over the Netherlands, Belgium, and key corners of Germany and France. We tracked down every artifact we could find left over from the sixteenth century, bought out-of-print books, copied items from books made available to us in archives and museums, collected stacks of brochures and maps, took pictures, recorded sound effects on a microcassette recorder, soaked up atmospheres, filled a journal.
In previous books in this series, I’ve mentioned many of the treasured “finds” that opened the doors for me into Pieter-Lucas’ and Aletta’s world. Here I want to tell you about several that belong to this book more than to either of the others.
First is the city of Leyden. Amidst the bustle of a modern university city, we found many of the old windmills, churches, public buildings, and bridges still intact—artifacts of this story. In one museum we saw a stewpot made famous because it was found in the fortress of Lammen, abandoned by Spaniards on the night when a portion of the wall collapsed. We photographed one of the towers left standing from that wall and spent a delightful hour inside the citadel for which this book is named.
When I began this book, I assumed that access to the old fortress was always public. Then I read in a booklet about the citadel that it was privately owned until 1651, when the city of Leyden purchased it. Could it be as accessible to Pieter-Lucas and Christoffel as I envisioned in my story? I searched all the books in my shelves—some new, some old, some English, some Dutch. They gave me no conclusive answer.
I had to read what one of Pieter-Lucas’ contemporaries had to say about it. So I pulled out my facsimile copy of Guicciardini’s Description of the Low Countreys, first issued in 1566. A thick book with gold gilding on the pages, it is one of my prize possessions. God led me to it in a miraculous fashion just three days before the end of our research trip.
Often throughout the writing of the entire Seekers series, I referred to its fascinating double-page maps, which provided birds-eye views of eighty of the old cities of the Netherlands. The map of Leyden was my guide all through the writing of The Citadel and the Lamb and became the inspiration for the map in this book. But the text was formidable. Scripted in ornate medieval squarish letters of sixteenth-century Dutch, I found it all but impossible to read. Only as a last resort did I ever consult Guicciardini’s obscure words.
In desperation I prayed for keenness of mind and meticulously deciphered and translated. Guicciardini told me that from the beginning the old citadel was always open to all as “a place of refuge in time of need.” Just the detail I needed!
Finally God sent me a character named Joris. For months I’d been casting about in my mind for an artist in Leyden. One day, in my imagination, the man approached my desk and said, “I am the painter you’re looking for. And I’m Jewish. Now, what are you going to do with me?”
Once more God was launching me, this time into the adventure of researching Jewish history, beginning with the unsavory details of the origins of the Inquisition directed against the falsely labeled “Christ killers.” The Institute for Historical Study helped me to make sense of the mysterious discovery that no Jewish artists are known by name in the Renaissance time period. Chaim Potok’s two marvelous novels about Asher Lev, a Hasidic Jewish painter, opened many doors of insight. An unexpected invitation to accompany two cousins on a Holy Land tour seemed a final confirmation. I now know I’ve just begun a lifelong study of the Jewish people and roots of my faith.
I am deeply grateful for God’s serendipitous provisions; for the continuing support and prayers of family, friends, critique group, and Sunday school class; for my agent, Les Stobbe, who answers my questions and picks up the pieces when I begin to crumble; for Sharon Asmus, the ideal cheerful and insightful editor; for every member of the expanded team at Bethany House; for you, my readers, who approach this book with hearts and minds hungering to see more of His ways traced out in lives lived long ago.