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The Tailor-King
The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster
By Anthony Arthur St. Martin's Press
Copyright © 1999 Anthony Arthur
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-7043-3
CHAPTER 1
A NEW DAWN
And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand; and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven.
— Revelation 11:13
HERMAN KERSSENBRÜCK WAS destined for life as a theologian and a schoolmaster but he was also blessed with an eye for lively detail and a keen dramatic sense. The story that he would experience and, unlike many others, live to tell about, began long before the night of February 8, 1534, but it was then that it reached its first critical point. From those frantic early-morning hours in the cobblestoned streets of his temporary home in northern Germany until the conclusion of the drama nearly two years later, a handful of men would lead thousands of devoted followers not to God, as they promised to do, but to their destruction.
It was unclear to the young Latin scholar, only thirteen on this fateful night, whether he was witnessing a comedy or a tragedy, but he had a secure sense even then of the stage and of the characters who would dominate it. The place was the north German city called Münster in Westphalia. Secure from attack behind its double walls and double moat, its ten gates were guarded by small stone bastions or "roundels"; wealthy from commerce and farming, proud of its independence as a powerful city-state on the far fringes of the Holy Roman Empire, it had perhaps grown arrogant in its presumption thatGod thought it especially worthy of his concern. The time was that of the early Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, still deeply rooted in the Middle Ages but bursting with energetic demands for change, for justice, for freedom of choice in all matters both secular and religious. The characters on the crowded world stage included John Calvin in Geneva, Henry VIII in England, and the young Emperor Charles V in Germany — and, transcending borders of language and national identity, towering above all of them in terms of his ultimate importance, the apostate German priest, Martin Luther.
The small city of Münster had its own important men. Foremost among them was the merchant-prince Bernard Knipperdolling; fifty years old, tall and burly, with a thick beard, square-cut in the fashion of the day, always soberly dressed in heavy gray robes, Knipperdolling was a cloth merchant who had warehouses and offices in several cities besides Münster, including Lübeck and Amsterdam. He had two grown daughters and, after the death of his first wife, had recently married a wealthy widow. He was a prominent member of the city council, a man who spoke seldom but always with weight and point to his remarks. The most visible symbol of his success was the magnificent three-story gabled house that stood on the Market Square, at an angle to the stately St. Lambert's Church and a block away from the renowned City Hall.
Now, as the young Herman (who was not only a devout Catholic but, like most adolescent boys, a confirmed cynic) tells it, this dignified and respectable man appeared in the doorway of his grand house, arm in arm with a much younger, slighter man, a newcomer from Leyden called Jan Bockelson, a "bastard Dutch tailor and bawdy-house keeper." Both men were screaming and pointing to the sky, shouting, "Repent! Repent! For the hour of the Lord is now upon us!" They were not alone in their frenzy: the Market Square, lit by torchlight reflected against the low clouds, was like a Witches' Sabbath to Herman and two schoolmates as they crouched fearfully in a doorway to watch. It was a carnival of madness, a gathering of demons, who in the light of day wore the familiar faces of carpenters, blacksmiths, and merchants, of schoolchildren and nuns, even of the august members of the city council. Among these moved a dark-robed, stocky figure, the third of Kerssenbrück's lead players, the hot-tempered and brilliantyoung Anabaptist preacher Bernard Rothmann. A few years earlier Rothmann had been an earnest intellectual who had studied with the great Melanchthon, Luther's disciple. Now he thrust his short, broad-chested figure through the crowd, his eyes rolling, demanding that "all repent!"
The mob surged around the preacher, terrified and exhilarated. Many, like Knipperdolling, were hysterical, with a slather of foam issuing from their mouths. The shrill voice of an impassioned young woman standing on the steps of St. Lambert's Church cut through the clamor; the daughter of the tailor Jurgen tom Berg was calling for repentance so effectively that her father, inspired by her passion, raised his arms to the flame-reddened heavens and cried, "I see the majesty of God and Jesus, who bears the flag of victory in His hands. Beware, you Godless ones! Repent! God will reap His harvest and let the chaff burn in the all-consuming fires. Cease from sinning! Repent!" He leaped into the air as though he might fly, then threw himself on his face in the dirt and dung in the shape of a cross.
Everywhere Herman Kerssenbrück looked he saw similar small dramas of ecstatic possession. The blind Scottish beggar who had somehow ended up in Münster, dressed in a motley assortment of colored rags, his great gaunt frame made even taller by high-heeled boots, ran about in circles crying that he could see, he could see again. A crowd gathered around him as he turned the corner into King Street, shouting that the heavens were about to fall on their heads, at which moment he tripped and fell into a pile of dung, and the crowd deserted him in search of more reliable visionaries. The miller Jodokus Culenberg galloped around the square on a borrowed white stallion, calling for all to repent. An old woman who had lost her voice in the excitement raced through the crowd, shaking a bell. Although fires of such heat usually burn themselves out quickly, the midnight tumult seemed to go on and on. When, young Herman must have wondered, would it end? And how, later generations would ask, had it all begun?
The immediate cause of this night's revelries lay in what had not happened at midnight, as foretold by Pastor Bernard Rothmann. That was the hour, he had announced two days earlier, for the Catholic Convent next to the river Aa to crumble before the might of the Lord, taking with it the bodies and souls of the scores of nuns it so invidiously sheltered. This improbable event was announced by Rothmann after he marched into the Overwater Church, as it was called, at the head of a mob of guildsmen and farmers and forced the Abbess, Ida von Merveldt, to assemble her trembling charges. This convent, Rothmann told the women, was an offense in the eyes of God. "It is your holy duty," he admonished them, "not to withhold your bodies for Christ but to go forth and multiply. You must have men, you must marry, you must bear children."
In fact, this would not have been an unpleasant injunction for some of Rothmann's listeners — young women were often dispatched by their families to convents for other than religious reasons, and some of them might even have set their caps for the handsome preacher had he not recently married a wealthy young widow. Others, like the Abbess, were devout Catholics and horrified by Rothmann's presumptuous attack. Devout or inclined to stray, each of the nuns heard Rothmann explain how he had come by the information that she was in danger of losing her life. This "salutary announcement has been made to me," the pastor said, "by one of the prophets now present in this city, and the Heavenly Father has also favored me with a direct and special revelation to the same effect."
Twenty years earlier Bernard Rothmann's attempt to frighten the nuns would have been met with laughter or blank stares of incomprehension. That he could succeed now derived in part from his compelling personality and his undoubted moral intensity, but even more from the example set earlier by a man whom Rothmann resembled in some ways, Martin Luther.
The critical event of the sixteenth century occurred near its beginning, in 1517; it was then, as every schoolboy and -girl has learned ever since, that the young Catholic priest Martin Luther challenged the Church of Rome to reform itself. Private protests having proved futile, Luther took the irreversible step of publicly announcing an invitation to discuss his objections and demands, nailing them, as tradition has it, to the door of the Cathedral in Wittenberg. This and later acts of protest and defiance led the Pope to order Luther to Rome for "examination." Justly fearing that he would not live to leaveRome, where far more powerful men than he, including popes and princes, were routinely murdered, Luther refused to budge from Germany or to recant. In 1520 he was excommunicated, and central Germany became the throbbing heart of the most profoundly divisive and destructive, yet at the same time creative and energizing movement in Western history — the Protestant Reformation.
Albrecht Dürer, Luther's contemporary then living in Nuremberg, perfectly captured the destructive aspects of their time in his famous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which depicts the scourges of famine, fire, pestilence, and war riding over the land. Within a few years of Luther's defiance of the Pope, Rome itself was sacked and destroyed, in 1527. At almost the same time, in 1525, starving farmers in Germany had formed themselves into a vast army, attacking landowners, the Church, and the Emperor's armies until they were slaughtered; more than a hundred thousand farmers and their urban allies in the trade guilds died in what came to be called the Peasants' War. Thus within two turbulent years the two great pillars of the western world, those of the Church and of the state, were severely shaken; the so-called Holy Roman Empire was in danger of imminent collapse.
In the midst of this chaos arose a new group that caused great alarm among both religious and civil authorities. They were called the Anabaptists, and they provided Catholics and Protestants with a rare common cause: their extermination. The original concept of Anabaptism, as first formulated by a Swiss reformer, Conrad Grebel, in 1523, sounds reasonable enough to modern sensibilities, shaped by a heritage of democracy and a belief in a degree of free will. The true faith, Grebel said, is not a matter of being born into a belief because of what your parents profess, or of having it imposed upon you because you happen to live in a certain place. It is a voluntary community of believers who have freely entered it as responsible, thinking adults through the symbolic act of baptism. Thus, infant baptism is meaningless; the only true baptism has to come later, when the act can be understood as a conversion and as a true commitment to God.
Grebel and later believers never referred to "re-baptism," because they did not believe a first baptism had ever actually occurred. They usually called themselves "the brethren" or, as in Münster, "the company of Christ." Nevertheless, they became notorious throughout Europe as the "Wiedertäufer" or "Ana-baptists" (the prefix coming from the Greek for "again") because their Catholic enemies could then condemn them to death for violating a key church law against second baptisms of any kind.
By 1529 Charles V had become so concerned that the dangerous doctrines of Anabaptism were "getting the upper hand" that he ordered the wholesale extermination of "every anabaptist and rebaptized man and woman of the age of reason. [They] shall be condemned and brought from natural life into death by fire, sword, and the like, according to the person, without proceeding by the inquisition of the spiritual judges; and let the same [punishment be inflicted on the] pseudo-preachers, instigators, vagabonds, and tumultuous inciters of the said vice of anabaptism."
From Switzerland in the south, throughout central Europe and Germany, and as far north and west as England, where Henry VIII burned a dozen Anabaptists at the stake, thousands of men and women were subjected to the most terrible persecution. Many of the more moderate leaders who abjured violence were martyred, leaving a gap in the leadership that was often filled by men of little education but much passion. In some parts of northern Germany and Holland a few princes offered the Anabaptists a degree of protection, but even there they were severely restricted. Many Anabaptists accordingly began to meet in small, secret cells, known only to themselves — thus adding another reason for the authorities to fear them and to hunt them down.
Luther himself detested the Anabaptists. A radical only in the religious sense, he depended on the goodwill of princes to keep him from the fires that punished heretics, and he declared that a good Christian must obey the secular laws of the state. Church and state should be separate, but people owed obligations to both. The Anabaptists denied any such obligation. As the self-proclaimed Elect of God, they acknowledged allegiance to no authority but their own: not to the city, not to the state, and certainly not to any established Church, be it Roman or Lutheran.
Even Ulrich Zwingli, the radical Swiss reformer whose follower Conrad Grebel had once been and whom Luther thought too extreme, denounced the Anabaptists. He said infant baptism was a traditional ritual of immense value to the adults and older children who participated in it. He said the denial of public obligation to city and state was not only impractical but arrogant — the Anabaptists claimed that the whole world except for themselves was damned; that they were, as Norman Cohn later put it, "small islands in a sea of iniquity." Yet because they sinned as much as anyone else, Zwingli said, the Anabaptists were not only impossibly self-righteous but hypocrites as well. Their emotional indulgence in religious ecstasy led them to ranting demonstrations of babbling idiocy. Finally, their belief that all property and goods should be held in common — their primitive communism — led when put into practice to all kinds of economic dislocation and abuse.
In short, their opponents of whatever persuasion agreed, the Anabaptists threatened the unity of the family, the stability of the state, the structure of all religious institutions, and the divine injunctions of God. But what made the Anabaptists particularly dangerous was their unshakable conviction that the world was about to end soon in the bloody Second Coming of Christ, as foretold in the Book of Revelation. All the signs indicated that this miraculous event, the most significant since the birth of Christ, was going to happen very soon, not just as an allegory, as in Dürer's representation, but as a literal series of events.
Ideas of all sorts, both useful and crackbrained, require gifted advocates for them to come alive, and Münster was to suffer the presence of more than one of these. But before these men had come the eloquent Melchior Hoffman, a gentle soul who must bear the blame for much of what was to happen in Münster, though he never set foot in the city. Born in southern Germany in 1495, the son of a furrier, Hoffman was first a Catholic, then a Lutheran, then a follower of Zwingli, and finally the "Anabaptist Apostle of the North." He wandered for years through northern Europe, from Frisia to Scandinavia, trading furs and preaching that Christ would soon return to begin his thousand-year reign on earth.
Hoffman thought of himself as the new Elijah, the storied prophet of Gilead who heard in a cave the "still, small voice" of God and went forth to save his people. Only those who had been properly baptized would be saved, so Hoffman devoted his energies in the tumultuous decade of the 1520s to making converts to Anabaptism. He found his richest soil in Holland, where he brought a semiliterate baker called Jan Matthias, who would later figure prominently in the story of the Anabaptists in Münster, into his fold.
Barefoot and humble, like the holy fathers of the early primitive Church, Hoffman himself renounced the initiation of violence but was sure it would soon arrive in the form of terrible oppression. The designated year was 1534, the place Strasbourg. At that time, Hoffman proposed to gather with the rest of the 140,000 messengers of world regeneration described in revelation 14:1. He and they would suffer a bloody siege of the chosen city, but would then recover their strength and destroy the ungodly. With the victory of the Chosen Ones, the Second Coming would be at hand.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Tailor-King by Anthony Arthur. Copyright © 1999 Anthony Arthur. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
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