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Best known as a leader of a 1689 New York rebellion that came to bear his name, Jacob Leisler was one of late seventeenth-century New York's most prominent merchants, land developers, and foremost exponent of Reformed religious fundamentalism and Orangist political ideology. He was intimately bound to the social, economic, and political development of New Netherland and New York from 1659, when he was employed as a nineteen-year-old in the Dutch West India Company's Amsterdam office, until his execution for treason in New York City in May 1691. Jacob Leisler was born into a prominent European Calvinist family that included Dr. Jacob Leisler, his grandfather and chief counselor to the Counts of Oettingen, Reverend Jacob Victorian Leisler, his father and pastor of the Frankfurt-am-Main French Reformed congregation, and the noted Huguenot theologian Simon Goulart. Leisler's brothers, Johann Adam and Frantz, were Swiss bankers who financed such Protestant states as the duchy of Wuertemburg. As a member of the Calvinist elite, Leisler was connected with such pol