Cornelia van Nijenroode

Portrait of Cornelia van Nijenroode and Pieter Cnoll, 1665, by Jacob Jansz. Coeman.

Cornelia van Nijenroode (Hirado, Japan, 1629 - Netherlands, 1692), was a Dutch merchant in the Dutch East Indies, famous for her conflict with her second spouse. She is the subject of a novel, Bitters bruid by Leonard Blussé.

Daughter of Cornelis van Nijenroode (d. 1633), manager of the Dutch trade station at Hirado, and his Japanese concubine Surishia. Married in 1652 in Batavia to Pieter Cnoll (d. 1672), manager of trade in Batavia, and in 1676 in Batavia to Joan Bitter (1638–1714), councillor of the legal court of Batavia.

Cornelia van Nijenroode was taken to Batavia with her sister Ester after the death of their father, despite the fact that their mother was still alive, to receive a "Christina education". At the death of her first spouse, she had became a successful and wealthy merchant. Through her unhappy second marriage, she lost the right to manage her own property and business to her spouse, who wished to control her economy, which caused a severe conflict. Bitter returned to the Netherlands in 1680, but returned as a councillor of the legal court in 1683, and their conflict over the control of her fortune caused such a public scandal that they were both exiled from the colony by the governor Johannes Camphuys in 1688. In the Netherlands, the court judged her to hand over her property to her husband, but as her fortune was not accounted for, the matter was still unsolved at her death.

Cornelia van Nijenroode has been referred to as a typical example of the independent Eurasian women of the Dutch colonial empire.

References

• http://www.inghist.nl/Onderzoek/Projecten/DVN/lemmata/data/Nijenroode

Persondata
Name	Nijenroode, Cornelia Van
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	1629
Place of birth
Date of death	1692
Place of death