Pieter Cnoll, also known as Pieter Knoll (d. 1672), was a Dutch merchant who was employed by the

United East India Company The United East India Company ( ; VOC ), commonly known as the Dutch East India Company, was a chartered trading company and one of the first joint-stock companies in the world. Established on 20 March 1602 by the States General of the Neth ...

(VOC). Cnoll, who was born in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , ; ; ) is the capital of the Netherlands, capital and Municipalities of the Netherlands, largest city of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. It has a population of 933,680 in June 2024 within the city proper, 1,457,018 in the City Re ...

, joined the VOC's accounting department at some point before 1647 and was sent to the

East Indies The East Indies (or simply the Indies) is a term used in historical narratives of the Age of Discovery. The ''Indies'' broadly referred to various lands in Eastern world, the East or the Eastern Hemisphere, particularly the islands and mainl ...

to work as a clerk in Batavia at the city castle. He soon rose to the rank of junior merchant and in 1652 married Cornelia van Nijenroode, an Indo businesswoman who was the daughter of Cornelis van Nijenroode, a

VOC opperhoofden in Japan VOC chief traders in Japan were the of the Dutch East India Company (; ) in Japan during the Edo period, when Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa shogunate. The Dutch word (, ), in its historical usage, is a gubernatorial title, comparable to the ...

. In 1665, artist Jacob Jansz. Coeman painted a portrait of Cnoll's family and enslaved servants. Together, Cnoll and his wife had ten children, with only one surviving to adulthood, a son. Cnoll died in 1672, and left his entire estate in his

last will and testament A will and testament is a legal document that expresses a person's (testator) wishes as to how their property (estate (law), estate) is to be distributed after their death and as to which person (executor) is to manage the property until its fi ...

to van Nijenroode. In 1675, she remarried to a Dutchman named Johann Bitter at the age of 46, but the marriage was an unhappy one and she filed for divorce not soon after. She died in 1692 in the

Dutch Republic The United Provinces of the Netherlands, commonly referred to in historiography as the Dutch Republic, was a confederation that existed from 1579 until the Batavian Revolution in 1795. It was a predecessor state of the present-day Netherlands ...

, where she had travelled to in order to secure the divorce from the appropriate authorities. One of the fifty slaves Cnoll owned was an Indonesian man named Untung Surapati, who was possibly featured in Coeman's 1665 portrait.

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* * * {{Authority control 1672 deaths 17th-century Dutch businesspeople Businesspeople from Amsterdam Dutch slave owners 18th-century Dutch East Indies people Dutch merchants