The Tailor-King

by Anthony Arthur

  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.

  The city fathers of Strasbourg, impressed with Hoffman’s piety though worried about the unrest his message inspired, treated him gently when he returned there in 1533 to await the end, along with hundreds of his followers. The true believers were chased out of town and some of their leaders executed. Hoffman was spared, his integrity shining through his probable madness, but he was clearly too dangerous to leave at large; he was locked in a cage within a tower, his hoarse voice drifting to the street below where the people could hear him chanting psalms and crying, “Woe, ye godless scribes of Strasbourg!” There he remained until his death a decade later. In the meantime, his followers changed the designated site of the Second Coming from Strasbourg to Münster, over two hundred miles to the north, near the Dutch border, and the year from 1534 to 1535.

  Like Strasbourg, most of the cities where the Anabaptists gathered were governed by prudent and, if need be, ruthless men who either evicted or executed their antagonists when they became troublesome. However, many of these same cities were essentially sympathetic to the goals of religious freedom and economic justice for which the Anabaptists seemed willing to die. The more radical Lutherans, who were becoming increasingly strong during the decade after Luther’s defiance in Wittenberg, viewed the Anabaptists as eccentric allies rather than dangerous heretics. Individualistic and scattered in small groups throughout northern Europe, the Anabaptists were generally committed to non-violence, and they had been stripped of their leadership by bloody governmental and religious persecution. They were dangerous not so much for their numbers as for the power of their message, with its vision of a pure restoration of the original Church and its vision of Jesus Christ welcoming them to a certain future in Heaven. Among these long-suffering true believers, however, were some men who believed in the redeeming power of revenge, retribution, and violence. Where they appeared, Anabaptism began to justify the fears of those who saw it as a disruptive, indeed a satanic, force.

  Such would be the case in Münster, for a variety of reasons. Shortly after the Reformation started, Münster had become in many ways both a model of the conditions against which Luther protested and an example of how opposing Catholics and Protestants could live together peacefully—but the tensions remained severe. The name of the city came from the Latin word for “monastery,” and it had been a bishopric for half the lifetime of the Church itself, beginning in A.D. 805. Now, though, the humble traditions of the early monks were belied by the sumptuous splendor of the Church. This small city of slightly more than nine thousand people supported not only the magnificent St. Paul’s Cathedral, but also ten churches, five of them grander than those found in much larger cities, plus sev
en convents, four charitable foundations, and four monasteries. Lovers of religious art and architecture crossing the plains as they approached Münster were thrilled by the sight of dozens of spires ascending toward the heavens; but the citizens whose taxes paid for much of it could not be blamed for regarding the Church architecture as a testimony to ecclesiastical indifference to their welfare.

  Following long-established tradition, the Church paid no property taxes to the city. It contributed no men to the periodic military levies enacted by the Prince-Bishop. The monasteries and convents farmed their own plots and thus bought little from the local farmers; on the contrary, they sold their surplus on the open market or gave it away, failing to support, if not actively undermining, the tax-paying farmers of the region. They engaged in active competition with the businessmen and artisans of the city: the nuns were busy at their looms, weaving tapestries and fabrics, and the brothers made furniture and tools in their shops. In sum, as all Protestants and not a few Catholics agreed, the Church contributed little to, and took much from, the local economy.

  Until Luther, all this was as it had been for centuries, and the peasants and tradesmen and artisans on whose weary backs the Church rested had voiced few audible complaints. Mostly illiterate in Latin, they depended as Roman Catholics on their priests to explain what the Latin Bible meant to them, and they learned that complaints against the Church would earn them eternal damnation. But when Luther translated the Latin Bible into everyday German, the first version of the New Testament appearing in 1522, he released millions from dependence on the priests for their instruction. Within a few years of Luther’s translation, hundreds of his followers had spread through central Europe with what they called the original word of God, as opposed to what Rome claimed it was.

  The inevitable result of millions of people being encouraged to think for themselves was resistance to arbitrary authority, slow and hesitant at first, then insistent, and finally violent. Luther himself, the very father of the Reformation, not only advised against violent revolt against either Church or state, he counseled rulers to hang and burn without mercy renegades like Thomas Müntzer, who had incited the peasants to violence in 1525. The Peasants’ War, however, did prompt the authorities in many places to grant more self-rule, as happened in Münster. There the then—Prince-Bishop, Frederick von Wiede, felt compelled to grant the city, in 1525, a considerable degree of the independence from Church authority that it had lost in recent decades. The city was now to be ruled by a council of twenty-four men, two of whom acted as co-mayors. The men, Catholics as well as Lutherans, were members of the crafts guilds (smiths, tailors, furriers), merchants, and property holders. Housed in the splendid City Hall whose ornate facade rose a hundred feet above the Market Square, the council achieved for a few years a tenuous equanimity.

  Like Martin Luther, Bernard Rothmann had not intended to rebel against the Church, which had some reason to expect gratitude from him. The son of a blacksmith, Rothmann had been raised in poverty and could easily have died poor, ignorant, and unknown. His gifts were too obvious, however, to remain unnoticed; his uncle, a vicar in Münster, had recognized the boy’s potential and rescued him, first sending him to school, then securing for him a position as chaplain of the church of St. Mauritz, just outside the city gate. By 1525 the energy, intelligence, and personal charm of the blacksmith’s son had won him a sinecure for life.

  But the events of the decade when he came to his maturity, particularly the Peasants’ War, stirred the young priest’s social conscience. He began to challenge the Church for its failure to support the farmers, and finally to accuse it of conspiring with the civil authorities to murder its own followers. He feared that Luther was right, that the Church was irretrievably corrupt. By 1530 Rothmann had earned such a reputation as a radical Catholic dissident that his uncle handed him a bag of gold coins and sent him to Cologne, about forty miles south of Münster, for further religious study and devotional exercises. Rothmann signed a promissory note for the money and vanished for months, never even appearing in Cologne. He returned in 1531 not as a Catholic priest but as a declared Lutheran and soon led a mob through his former church, St. Mauritz, in a rampage of idol-smashing. The altar was toppled, the silver communion chalice was crushed, and paintings of the Virgin were torn from the walls and burned in the church courtyard.

  Rothmann left Münster again in some haste after this episode to visit Luther and the famous theologian Philip Melanchthon in Wittenberg. Whatever his faults, Rothmann was hardly the fool the later chroniclers of the Kingdom of Münster would make him out to be, for he impressed these two brilliant men profoundly, much though Luther disapproved of his actions then and later. Melanchthon, for his part, had even greater doubts about the young convert, fearing that he was mentally unstable; he remarked to Luther that Rothmann had great potential, but it was a toss-up whether he would turn out to be “extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad.”

  Herman Kerssenbrück had no difficulty determining which course Rothmann had chosen by the time he returned to Münster early in 1532, this time to stay: all the “poisonous beliefs that had been festering in him” finally broke out in a series of frenzied denunciations of the Catholic Church. Although still nominally a Lutheran, it seems clear in retrospect that Rothmann had crossed the thin line dividing radical Lutherans from the Anabaptists. He did not make a public pronouncement to this effect, since to do so would mean immediate imprisonment, if not death, but his sermons began to include disparaging references to infant baptism and to the holding of private property, two Anabaptist bugbears. He found his message increasingly well received by growing crowds of eager supporters in the city streets, including not only Lutherans but a number of Catholics. Ignoring the protestations of the Catholic hierarchy and of the mostly Lutheran city council, which he had begun to frighten as well, Rothmann finally acceded for a few weeks to an order from Bishop von Wiede to desist from public preaching, but then reconsidered. In a letter to von Wiede, he challenged the Bishop not to let his “godless oppressors escape the deserved punishment of heaven. Because my conscience is clear, I have no doubt that I can rely on God’s mercy. He will protect me and rescue me from danger, when my enemies fall upon me like the lion. I know that at this moment I am surrounded by a pack of dogs and a horde of evildoers.” He signed this remarkable appeal, “From the humble servant of the merciful Bishop, his soldier in Christ, BR.”

  The Bishop responded by ordering the bailiff of the Cathedral, Dirk von Merveldt, to pressure the council to expel Rothmann from the city. Rothmann refused to leave, asserting that God had protected him with His heavenly wings and the council’s commands were hollow: God only was to be obeyed, not the mere men who tried to deprive the people of the word of God that he was bringing them. Some of the key council members broke away to support the radical preacher, chief among them the merchant Bernard Knipperdolling.

  Knipperdolling, like Rothmann, had by 1532 become a convert to the doctrine of radical resistance proposed by the Dutch Anabaptist Jan Matthias and his followers. Again, this conversion was kept from his fellow council members, who still considered him a Lutheran. Meeting in Knipperdolling’s house in February 1532, a group of prominent citizens signed a pact that in its brave idealism seems to foreshadow the American Founding Fathers’ words two centuries later: they swore to devote their personal fortunes, their reputations, and even their lives to the cause of freedom from oppression that Rothmann now symbolized to them.

  Their subsequent actions were, however, less high-minded. Led by Knipperdolling, the men now marched with Rothmann and with scores of shouting followers to St. Lambert’s Church, forced their way in, and destroyed the stone coffins holding the ashes of long-dead bishops and priests. The crowd became a mob that raged through the city for a full day, sparing from attack only the Cathedral itself, not out of a lingering sense of piety but because it was too securely barred and defended. Huge fires consumed wax votive candles, priestly vestments, paintings, and t
apestries. A massive book-burning took place in the market square: Latin Bibles, devotional texts, as well as secular works from personal libraries—the philosophical works of Boethius and Thomas Aquinas, the poetry of Horace and Chaucer, and the engravings of Heinrich Aldegrever and the paintings of Ludger tom Ring, both well-known local artists—all fed the swirling flames. Rothmann even consigned his own sermons to the bonfire: “The truth of Holy Scripture shall triumph!” he proclaimed, and it alone was exempt from destruction.

  The conflict between the radical Protestants and the ruling Catholic authorities had now moved beyond words into action, the gauntlet insultingly tossed at the feet of Prince-Bishop Frederick von Wiede. The city waited anxiously for his response.

  Many of the dozens of late-medieval “prince-bishops” scattered throughout the German-speaking areas of central Europe were really feudal lords, not ecclesiastical figures. They acquired their possessions by means of marriage, political connections, armed conquest, and sometimes by simply purchasing them from the current owners. Powerful by virtue of the money, arms, and soldiers that they could command from lesser lords, the prince-bishops had nearly unrestrained power to do as they wished with even the most prominent of their subjects. One reason for Bernard Knipperdolling’s devotion to Rothmann was that a few years earlier von Wiede had kidnapped him while he was en route to Lübeck on a business trip. The respected merchant was thrown into jail and kept there for six months, until his brothers ransomed him. When he was released, according to some accounts, he walked with a crooked gait and in obvious pain: his toes, it was said, had been crushed in iron boots. He had been forced to agree not to engage in religious agitation. Instead, he went literally underground, churning out pamphlets based on Rothmann’s sermons on a printing press in his basement. Thus the Bishop turned the merchant from an opponent whose stated cause—the independence of his city—was respectable, into a revolutionary who would finally destroy it.