Elias Trip, who died at the beginning of January 1636, was a very successful man. The son of a barge captain from the town of Zaltbommel, he rose to become one of the wealthiest and most powerful merchants in Amsterdam. His trading contacts extended to the remote corners of Europe and far beyond. The scale of his transactions was often astounding, and his fortune no less so. The total value of his estate is estimated to have been around 1 million guilders, a tremendous amount in those days, when a labourer earned only 200–250 guilders a year. Such wealth had not been amassed overnight, however. Elias's precise date of birth is unknown, but he was probably born in 1570. In 1592 or 1593 he married Maria de Geer, the sister of the Liège merchant Louis de Geer. It was around this time that Trip moved to Dordrecht, where he began trading in iron – he acquired his stock in trade from the rural areas around Liège – a line of business that had just begun to flourish. Trip's contacts with De Geer stood him in good stead, for by 1602 he had become the largest iron merchant in Dordrecht. In that year Elias Trip signed a contract with the States General in which he agreed to supply 90,000 guilders' worth of bullets, which he obtained in Liège, as well as farther afield in Germany and France. Trip's trading network grew rapidly.