Peter Stuyvesant (; in Dutch also Pieter and Petrus Stuyvesant, ; 1610 – August 1672) was a Dutch colonial officer who served as the last Dutch director-general of the colony of New Netherland from 1647 until it was ceded provisionally to the English in 1664, after which it was split into New York and New Jersey with lesser territory becoming parts of other colonies, and later, states. He was a major figure in the early history of New York City and his name has been given to various landmarks and points of interest throughout the city (e.g. Stuyvesant High School, Stuyvesant Town, Bedford–Stuyvesant neighborhood, etc.). Stuyvesant's accomplishments as director-general included a great expansion for the settlement of New Amsterdam beyond the southern tip of Manhattan. Among the projects built by Stuyvesant's administration were the protective wall on Wall Street, the canal that became Broad Street, and Broadway. Stuyvesant, himself a member of the Dutch Reformed Church, opposed religious pluralism and came into conflict with Lutherans, Jews, Roman Catholics, and Quakers as they attempted to build places of worship in the city and practice their faiths. Stuyvesant was in particular antisemitic, loathing both the Jewish race and religion. Early life Peter Stuyvesant was born around 1610 in Peperga or Scherpenzeel, Friesland, in the Netherlands, to Balthasar Stuyvesant, a Reformed Calvinist minister, and Margaretha Hardenstein. He grew up in Peperga, Scherpenzeel, and Berlikum. Career At the age of 20, Stuyvesant went to the University of Franeker, where he studied languages and philosophy, but several years later he was expelled from the school after he seduced the daughter of his landlord. He was then sent to Amsterdam by his father, where Stuyvesant – now using the Latinized version of his first name, "Petrus", to indicate that he had university schooling – joined the Dutch West India Company. In 1630, the company assigned him to be their commercial agent on a small island just off of Brazil, Fernando de Noronha, and then five years later transferred him to the nearby Brazilian state of Pernambuco. In 1638, he was moved again, this time to the colony of Curaçao, the main Dutch naval base in the West Indies, where, just four years later, aged 30, he became the acting governor of that colony, as well as Aruba and Bonaire, a position he held until 1644. In April 1644, he coordinated and led an attack on the