Throughout the gold boom, resentment among the rural Marranos-a majority of Mauricia's populace. Shut out of the colony's newfound riches and made to content themselves with growing grain for the miners, merchants, and slaves around them, the increasingly resentful Marrano populace was primed for an explosion. And in 1778, it came.
Moses del Castillo had started out life in an ordinary way-the fifth of six children born to a farmer near Orangestad. But Benjamin del Castillo was poor, and his farm small-certainly not large enough to have six workable farms carved out of it. And thus, as they grew up, Benjamin gravely told Moses and his other younger children that they would have to leave and seek their fortunes out west.
Moses would later tell his followers how he'd been shocked at his first sight of Orangestad. And not just its size-to a poor, pious farmboy, whose main education had been reading the Torah in his local synagogue, the looseness of city life, the multitude of strange tongues, the omnipresence of the cross that had featured so prominently in the horror stories his mom had scared him with*-it was too much. Moses bolted-first to Piratininga, before joining one of the caravans out to Guldenberg, where he'd heard there was plenty of land for the taking. And thus, the pious, naive farmboy, who a year ago had never seen a city in his life, found himself in the roughest town in Mauricia-a place of bars, prostitutes, and licentiousness, where hardly a night passed without someone dying in a drunken brawl, and where people attended worship in extravagantly gilt buildings on Saturday or Sunday, and committed every sin imaginable the other six days of the week. Penniless, and shocked by the depravity around him, Moses did the only thing he could-spent his last money on a gold pan and hoped for the best.
And indeed, after some fruitless months searching, Moses found the whitish-yellow lump he'd been seeking-not a big nugget by any means, but enough to buy an ax, some seeds, and some farm tools. Moses de Castillo found a suitable plot of land in a small Marrano farming village called Colina Rochosa, a few days ride outside Guldenberg. But that fall, as his first crop of wheat was getting ready for harvest, a flood wiped it out, along with half of Colina Rochosa's farms. And Moses, always painfully religious and somewhat unbalanced, snapped.
In the days after the flood, as he prayed to God in agony over what had happened, Moses del Castillo began to hear voices answer back. The voices claimed to be God himself and his angels, and told Moses that this was meant to be-that all his life had prepared Moses for his role as the Messiah, who would throw off Dutch rule and build a new Israel and a new Jerusalem in this land that God had given to the Jews. Excited, Moses began to tell the townspeople about his new destiny-and although most scoffed, and the Rabbi condemned him, a few believed. Moses began to preach in other farm villages, gathering followers. Gradually, he worked his way towards Guldenberg itself, where people had to deal, day in and day out, with cheating diamond merchants and corrupt Company Nabobs. The end of Gentile rule was at hand, Moses preached. The old order, with its slaves and sin and corruption, would be swept away. The churches of Guldenberg and Orangestad would be pulled down, the Gentiles driven out, and a New Jerusalem built. From there, Jewish armies would sail across the sea, to subjegate the Gentile realms and retake the Holy Land. “...and then the Old Jerusalem and the New Jerusalem will rule the Earth together, and there will be no more pain, no more war, no more sin, and the world shall bend knee to the True God.” Over the next year, Moses del Castillo built up an army among the underclass of the Terras Altas. The authorities in Guldenberg got word of his preaching and put out a warrant for his arrest, but never caught him and never comprehended the true scale of what was going on.
And then, on the night of May 8th, 1778, after a few bribes to unsuspecting guards, Moses' followers swept into Guldenberg and ran through the streets. The garrison, its morale sapped by Company mismanagement, was taken completely by surprise. Many would die in their beds as Moses' followers climbed over the barracks walls. The same fate met many diamond merchants, Jew and Gentile. Still others caught wind of what was happening and barracaded themselves in their houses, only to be burned out. Guldenberg's church and synagogue, symbols of Gentile oppression and servile, worldly Jewish aquiescence, went up flames. The next morning, Moses del Castillo read the new Law in the smoking town square. Slaves were freed, thieves were hung, prostitutes stripped and paraded naked through the streets. An unfortunate group of Dutch merchants were imprisoned and forcibly circumcized. Guldenberg, city of sin and vanity, was no more. In its place was Neve Yerushalayim, capital of the Kingdom of God.
Of course, not everyone was thrilled with this development. The Rabbis of Guldenberg, and all of the Terras Altas, universally opposed the false Messiah. Several of the more outspoken ones soon hung, and the rest went into hiding. Much of the traditionally pious people of the Terras Altas were gravely offended, and refused to have anything to do with Moses del Castillo and his New Israel. Over the next few days, hundreds of people fled Guldenberg, clogging the Company Road and hacking their way through the jungle to Piratininga. As word spread, several other uprisings of the overtaxed erupted throughout Mauricia, and in the Terras Altas, the slaves in the company-owned mines rose against their masters, threw off their chains, and ran into the jungle. Among the Marranos, some-mostly young and hotheaded-went to “Neve Yershalayim” to join the new “Messiah”, while others, perhaps more levelheaded, hunkered down or fled to the rainforest themselves to wait things out. Moses, meanwhile, began to plan his next move. Gathering a ragtag army, armed with a deficit of weapons and an excess of fanaticism, Moses started down the Company Road towards Piratininga.
But it was a rainy spring, all of Moses' appeals to the Heavens nonwithstanding. The Company Road, always tricky in the best of times, was a now a river of mud, and Moses army bogged down. Harried by bandits and even the occaisional Indian, the army moved only slowly, and Piratininga had plenty of warning as to what was coming. Sufficiently shocked by the fall of Guldenberg, the Company crushed the sympathy revolts in short order, then prepared to meet the main threat. And thus, when the starving, mud-covered “Army of Neve Israel” emerged from the jungle and gazed upon the walls of Piratininga, it was met with a force of eight thousand German mercenaries, taken from garrisons all over Maurcia and supplemented by several times that number of irregular militia, many of them Jewish. The result was never in doubt-within an hour, the broken remains of Moses del Castillo's revolt were fleeing back into the jungle, and del Castillo himself lay dead in a pool of blood and mud.
Several weeks later, after a long, muddy journey down the Company Road, the Company's army stumbled into Guldenberg, only to find that word of their arrival had preceeded them. The remains of Moses del Castillo's army, upon learning of their leader's death, had grabbed all the gold and gems they could carry before knocking down the city's walls, setting it on fire, and fleeing into the forest. The Company commander raised Holland's orange-white-blue above the smoldering ruin and declared the war over.
But of course, things were far from over. The gold and diamond mines, central to the West Indes Company's ability to make any money out of Mauricia, were largely destroyed. Even when the mine survived, virtually all of the slaves that ran them had taken the opportunity to escape, and the company simply didn't have enough troops to hunt them all down. And plus, the fall, even for a few months, of what had been one of the major gems in the faltering Dutch empire did not make the Company look good. Willem V, Stadholder-general of the Dutch Republic, was angry. Determined to find out what had happened, he convened an inquiry into the circumstances of the rebellion and the Company's management of Mauricia in general, and soon shocking stories of corruption and graft came out. Cheated diamond merchants, overtaxed villages, underpaid workers, stolen public funds-it seemed the tale of the Company Nabobs' misdeeds would never end. And at the end of it all, when a delegation from Orangestad arrived and petitioned the Stadholder to end Company rule, he was not in much mood to refuse. All of the West Indes' Company's owners escaped jail or any other punishment-in exchange for turning Maurcia over to Willem V, who declared that from then on, the Stadhouderskolonie Mauritsland would be the personal property of the holders of that office-and since the office of Stadholder-general was now hereditary, that meant Willem V and his descendents. It was the dawn of a new era.
*While this will change, pretty much all of Mauricia's urban centers are majority Dutch Christian, albeit with large Jewish communities. The countryside is overwhelmingly dominated by two groups of people-Marranos, and slaves on Company owned plantations or mines. And the overwhelming majority of the population lives in the countryside.