Pieter Erbervelt (d. 1721) was accused of being the leader of a Muslim plot to slaughter the Christians of the Dutch East India Company (VOC) in Batavia (present-day Jakarta) in 1721 and was brutally executed for what was, in all probability, a trumped-up accusation. Erbervelt was born before 1671 to a European father-evidently German-and a Thai mother. He followed his father in his trade as a leather tanner in Batavia, the headquarters of the VOC. In the 1720s the VOC felt particularly under threat from its