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.

At the age of 20,[10] Stuyvesant went to the University of Franeker, where he studied languages and philosophy,[11] but several years later he was expelled from the school after he seduced the daughter of his landlord.

[12] 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 (GWC).

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.

[14] A year later, in May 1645, he was selected by the company to replace Willem Kieft as Director-General of the New Netherland colony, including New Amsterdam, the site of present-day New York City.

Only a small number of villages remained after Kieft's wars, and many of their inhabitants had been driven away and returned home, leaving only 250 to 300 men able to carry arms.

[14] Certain that righting New Netherland was the work which God had saved him for, Stuyvesant told its people "I shall govern you as a father his children," and began the task of rebuilding the physical and moral state of the colony.

[15] In September 1647 he appointed the Nine Men, an advisory council composed of representatives of the colonists,[16] to help rebuild relationships with them, temper his rule with their guidance, and restore New Netherland to the kind of well-run place that the Dutch preferred.

[15] In 1648 a conflict began between him and Brant Aertzsz van Slechtenhorst, the commissary of the patroonship Rensselaerwijck, which surrounded Fort Orange (present-day Albany).

Building codes were established for houses and other structures, including fences in an effort to control the widespread problem of wandering livestock about the town.

As governor, Stuyvensant forbid the construction of wooden chimneys, and imposed a tax of a beaver skin, or its trade equivalent, on every householder to finance the cost of two hundred and fifty leather fire buckets and hooks and ladders, which he had sent from Holland.

The treaty of Hartford of 1650 was advantageous to the English, as Stuyvesant gave up claims to the Connecticut Valley while gaining only a small portion of Long island.

The colony's settlers refused to fight, forcing Stuyvesant to surrender and demonstrating the dilemma of domestic dissatisfaction, small size, and overwhelming external pressures with inadequate military support from the Company that was fixated on profits.

In 1653, a convention of two deputies from each village in New Netherland demanded reforms, and Stuyvesant commanded that assembly to disperse, saying: "We derive our authority from God and the company, not from a few ignorant subjects."

In 1654, Stuyvesant signed a deed for an allotment of land 10,000 square feet (930 m2) that corresponds to the modern-day Financial District of lower Manhattan.

[22] In the summer of 1655, he sailed down to the Delaware River with a fleet of seven vessels and about 300 men and took possession of the colony of New Sweden, which was renamed "New Amstel."

[24] During the late 1640s, authorities in the neighboring English colonies of Connecticut and Maryland encouraged New Netherland slaves to escape there, refusing to return them.

[26] Although it is commonly thought that Stuyvesant was New Netherland's largest slaveholder, he only owned two slaves, purchasing them as part of the farm he bought from the GWC in 1651.

[27] Stuyvesant did not tolerate full religious freedom in the colony, and was strongly committed to the supremacy of the Dutch Reformed Church.

As he wrote to the Amsterdam Chamber of the GWC in 1654, he hoped that "the deceitful race, — such hateful enemies and blasphemers of the name of Christ, — be not allowed to further infect and trouble this new colony.

A pear tree that he reputedly brought from the Netherlands in 1647 remained at the corner of Thirteenth Street and Third Avenue until 1867 when it was destroyed by a storm,[40] bearing fruit almost to the last.

He died in August 1672 and his body was entombed in the east wall of St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery, which sits on the site of Stuyvesant's family chapel.