The Tailor-King

by Anthony Arthur

  Such at least appears to have been Matthias’s argument. The adults whose books he burned could at least retain their memories of books read and lessons learned. But the sight of those fresh-faced young children, marching hand in hand in double rows to the Overwater Church for their education from men who burned books, must have saddened more than one parent, for most of these people were not so zealous as the Prophet. Later events suggest that it also profoundly disturbed the schoolmaster, Henry Graes.

  Jan Matthias’s other major action during this period was better received, at least by the poor who had made their way to Münster in response to Rothmann’s widely circulated assertions that private property was a curse, as was all commerce: “Everything which has served the purposes of self-seeking and private property, such as buying and selling, working for money, taking interest and practicing usury, or eating and drinking the sweat of the poor—that is, making one’s own people and fellow creatures work so that one can grow fat—and indeed everything which offends against love—all such things are abolished amongst us by the power of love and community. And knowing that God now desires to abolish such abominations, we would die rather than turn to them. We know that such sacrifices are pleasing to the Lord. And indeed no Christian or Saint can satisfy God if he does not live in such a community or at least desire with all his heart to live in it.” Or, as the ever-succinct Bernard Knipperdolling summed up Rothmann’s idealistic community: “One God, one pot, one egg, and one kitchen.”

  Now Matthias confiscated the houses of the departed unbelievers and installed the newcomers in them. He took all the bedding, furniture, food, and clothing that he could find and placed them in central depots under the charge of seven “deacons,” whose names were revealed to him after three days of prayer. He assigned one deacon for meat, one for grain, one for beer, one for clothing and shoes, one for furniture, one for weapons, and one for valuables, including jewelry. As all property and goods were now held in common, Matthias decreed that all debts and obligations were abolished. He gathered up the account ledgers and IOUs left in shops and businesses, churches and private homes, and burned them all. As might have been anticipated, he abolished currency itself, along with the idea of working for pay; all would contribute their labor for the greater good, and would receive what they needed in return free of charge.

  But opposition to the dark prophet, as some were calling Jan Matthias, was growing within Münster even as the Bishop’s preparations for attack floundered. The religious fervor of its citizens was matched by—on the part of some—their stubborn resistance to arbitrary rule, no matter what its source was. The powerful merchants like Knipperdolling, educated and articulate, had provided the spear point of the original resistance to Catholic dominance of the city, but they would have been helpless without the cooperation of the guilds and their leaders. Builders, blacksmiths, weavers, carpenters, tanners, millers, brewers—these were men who worked with their hands and trained and directed others to do so. Often hostile to the merchants by reason of temperament and class, the tradesmen were hardworking and thrifty, early models of what would later be called the Protestant ethic of self-discipline and self-denial. Many had actively supported the farmers in the Peasants’ War, and some of them had died for their allegiance to the rebellion. There were many of these men in Münster, devoutly religious but not fanatical. Two were friends and colleagues: Herbert Rusher and Henry Mollenheck. Both would offer courageous challenges to Jan Matthias, at great personal cost.

  Initially, Rusher’s enthusiasm for the new order had seemed boundless, as was evident when he let himself be lashed through the streets during the carnival a few weeks earlier. His disillusionment must have set in almost immediately, for now, in mid-March, he was arrested and charged with treason. As plausibly reconstructed by the German novelist Helmut Paulus, using contemporary sources, Rusher was standing guard one freezing midnight with a recent arrival, a young carpenter called Henry Gresbeck, and Mollenheck, among others. As the men listened to the Bishop’s soldiers singing and carousing, warm and comfortable around their blazing campfires, Rusher grew indiscreet in voicing his complaints. Why was it that the Hollanders and the scum they had brought with them never stood guard duty? Why did they have to stand in the open, exposed to the northern night wind with no shelter, no fire? Why should he have to stand guard after working all day at his forge? Who gave the stranger Henry Krechting the authority to throw their women and others who complained into the Rosenthal Church dungeon? How could they concede to Jan Matthias the right to take all of their hard-earned property and cash? Rusher grew more vehement in his denunciations of Jan Matthias. He no doubt believed he was among friends who would not betray him; but Matthias had already instructed his preachers to tell his followers that children must report their parents for slanders against the Prophet. Families, neighbors, friends—all had to recognize a greater loyalty to God’s anointed messenger than to anyone else.

  Accounts vary as to how Rusher was taken into custody: he was in a tavern, he was home in bed with his wife; he was, as Paulus has it, on guard duty. There is some variance as well in what he actually said about Matthias. The polite Victorian version is that he called the Hollander a “lying villain who was misleading others, nothing more than a lying traitor.” Henry Gresbeck, who left a record of his days in Münster, reports that Rusher called Matthias “a crazy lying Scheissprophet [a shit-prophet] who was not worth a baker’s fart”—a livelier and more credible rendition. But the sources agree that Rusher was brought before the Prophet in the Cathedral Square for public exposure and questioning. Rusher was a tall man and, like blacksmiths generally, heavily muscled. He was tightly bound with rope, his hands secured behind him. Hundreds of Rusher’s fellow citizens, all of whom had known him for years, crowded closer, as did the foreigners he had railed against, standing on tiptoe to see him and straining to hear the Prophet’s words.

  Matthias glowered at the frightened blacksmith. “Perhaps this man has gone mad,” he shouted to the crowd, “or perhaps an evil spirit has misled him”—he could not say with certainty. But it was clear that Rusher was “one of the godless ones of whom God had said, ‘You who allow such to remain in your company will become godless yourselves.’” It is not difficult to imagine the mad Prophet growing more excited, his dark forked beard stabbing downward as he worked himself into a judgmental fury. As Kerssenbrück recounts the episode, Matthias proclaimed that the whole Company of Christ was threatened with God’s scornful wrath unless it purified itself through punishment of the evildoer. “He must be cast out of the ranks of the living into death,” Matthias shouted. “It is written!”

  At this point two of the most prominent and influential Anabaptist leaders stepped forward to protest. They were Herman Tilbeck, whose earlier duplicity as co-mayor with Knipperdolling had delivered the city into the hands of the Anabaptists, and Herman Redeker, the shoemaker accused earlier by the Bishop of looting a church. Both now said that although it appeared that Rusher was deserving of punishment, there should first be an official inquiry. He should be locked up until the inquiry had found him innocent or guilty, and then punished if necessary. These were both men who believed entirely in the divinity of Matthias’s mission, and had been ready to plunder churches and to betray their comrades for that mission. For them now to question the Prophet’s authority in public indicates how profoundly troubled they were by this attack on one of their own, even though he was a doubter. Matthias flew into a rage and ordered Tilbeck and Redeker thrown into the Rosenthal dungeon to await his later judgment.

  Turning back to the condemned man, who must have watched with hope and then anguish as Tilbeck tried and failed to help him, Matthias prepared to lift his sword. Gresbeck’s account suggests that he now hesitated to deliver the fatal blow; perhaps some residue of compassion still existed in a man who was, after all, a baker by profession, not a soldier and not a criminal, and there is no record of his having ever killed anyone before. It was Jan van Leyden who c
oncluded the matter; he must have seen that any weakness or hesitation would have doomed them all. Although the young tailor’s apprentice, tavern owner, and actor presumably had no more personal experience of bloodletting than the elderly baker, he now stepped in front of Matthias and, seizing a halberd from one of Rusher’s guards, drove it deep into the kneeling man’s back. Rusher toppled to his side in the street. Though the wound was enough to kill a weaker man, he remained conscious, groaning loudly but nowhere near death. Van Leyden seized a short firearm, a primitive pistol, from another guard, and fired point-blank into Rusher’s back. Still the blacksmith clung to life. Two men stepped out of the crowd and carried Rusher to his home. “He will recover!” Jan said. Rusher lingered in great pain for eight days until he died.

  Tilbeck and Redeker were released unharmed from the Rosenthal dungeon after a few days, chastened, obedient, and destined to be with the cause until the end. Matthias’s shrewder disciples, such as Jan van Leyden and Henry Krechting, saw that they had nearly lost control of the situation with Rusher. Now they acted to tighten that control. First, they reiterated the demand for all citizens of Münster to bring all of their gold, silver, and jewelry to the City Hall, on the ground that true Christians had no need of such things but the New Zion could use them to pay for its defense. Most obeyed, but many buried or hid their treasures. To guard the new city treasures, Matthias appointed Cord Cruse, a jeweler who had just returned after a seven-year banishment by the prior Prince-Bishop, and Anna Kolthave, formerly the concubine of a Catholic priest, since departed. These two were charged with the task of relieving their Christian brothers of their guilty and heathenish dependence on material possessions.

  But more than reluctant cooperation was needed from the people of Münster. The two Jans knew that many of the new converts, like the elderly woman threatened with death by Rothmann, had only converted to avoid execution or exile. They had to be reminded of their falseness and hypocrisy. Hundreds of the suspect converts were herded into the Cathedral and forced to lie on their faces on the cold stone floor for three hours while Matthias harangued them for their uncertain devotion to his holy cause. Several dozen of the most recalcitrant among them were locked in St. Lambert’s Church to await their fate; given what had just happened to Herbert Rusher, they were reduced after several hours of waiting to a state of nervous terror. When the doors were finally unlocked and Matthias strode among them, they groveled before him and begged him to forgive them their sins. Matthias let himself be softened toward the sinners, as Henry Gresbeck sarcastically wrote in his journal; he knelt beside them and gave thanks to God for having heard his prayers to be merciful to the sheep who had been lost and now were found, who now wept with him and gave thanks.

  4

  DEATH OF A PROPHET

  There is a way which seemeth right unto a man, but the end thereof are the ways of death.

  —Proverbs 14:12

  For when he dieth he shall carry nothing away; his glory shall not descend after him.

  —Psalm 49:17

  THAT TWO DUTCHMEN were able to murder a respected citizen of a German city in full public view shows two things: first, a sudden escalation in the level of violence, far beyond anything that had yet occurred in the city; and second, a loss of control to foreigners whose actions and motives seemed beyond reasonable comprehension. Both the violence and the tyranny become more understandable when seen in the broader context of which Münster was only a part.

  That context includes the cultural and geographical homogeneity of Holland and northern Germany; the languages of Dutch and “low,” or north German, were close enough to be mutually understandable, and many, like Henry Gresbeck, who would leave a written account of his days in Münster, spoke a mixed German and Frisian dialect that modern German speakers need help in translating. There were no geographical features such as rivers, seas, or mountain ranges to separate sections of Germany and adjoining nations such as Denmark and Holland, both of which at various times claimed sovereignty over German-speaking regions; indeed, “Germany” as a nation did not exist, only a collection of rival duchies and principates. Merchants like Bernard Knipperdolling worked as comfortably in Antwerp and Amsterdam as in Bremen and Lübeck, and religious missionaries like Melchior Hoffman and Jan Matthias were indifferent to so-called national boundaries. The “foreignness” that Herbert Rusher had so vehemently opposed, then, was not so much a matter of nationality as of outsiders moving in and taking over, like cuckoos displacing other birds from their nests.

  The violence of official repression was another element of context. The flagrant injustice on the part of secular as well as religious authorities in executing so many Anabaptists for heresy erased any sense of moral obligation to authority that the survivors might have felt. It also provided a compelling model for emulation: Jan Matthias, when he murdered Rusher, was following the logic of the times—how else could one deal with insurrection? He simply dispensed with the state’s charade of a judicial hearing.

  It was, ironically, the state itself that Matthias looked to for the salvation of Munster—the officially sanctioned repression of the Anabaptists in the Netherlands would drive them by the thousand to Münster as their sanctuary. From there the invincible Company of Christ would issue forth, sweeping the puny forces of the Prince-Bishop aside and establishing with the cross and the sword a thousand-year kingdom of God throughout Europe. Or so Matthias hoped.

  In practical terms, this meant that the Dutch Anabaptists, over whom Matthias had such influence, had to be incited to revolution and to the support of Münster. In the middle of February, shortly before the expulsion of “the godless,” Matthias sent a group of nearly thirty men to spread the word throughout the Netherlands. They were armed with Flugschriften, or leaflets, written by Rothmann and printed in Knipperdolling’s basement. Rothmann was a master propagandist and understood that even the faithful would respond best to appeals based on self-interest as well as on duty. Münster had become the promised land of milk and honey, he wrote, because now all shared equally in the wealth: “The poorest among us, who used to be despised as beggars, now go about dressed as finely as the highest and most distinguished … By God’s grace they have become as rich as the mayors and the richest in the town.”

  Rothmann also appealed to his listeners’ sense of duty and of self-preservation: “God has made known to us that all should get ready to go to the new Jerusalem, the City of the Saints, because he is going to punish the world … No one should neglect to go along and thus tempt God to punish him, because there is an insurrection all over the world. As it is written in Jeremiah 51:6, the Lord decrees that every man must flee out of Babylon and deliver his soul, for this is the time of the Lord’s vengeance. I do not simply tell you this,” Rothmann continued, “but command you in the name of the Lord to obey.” He reassured those who were concerned about leaving their property and families behind that there was enough food and clothing for all in Münster, in addition to housing. As for unbelieving wives and families, they were best left behind in any event.

  Rothmann’s command invitation found a ready audience in the Netherlands, already stirred by considerable agitation. On February 10, seven men and women had stripped off their clothing and run through the streets of Amsterdam, proclaiming the “naked truth” to the godless. This kind of behavior, common in Münster and elsewhere, tended to alarm those who wanted to see the human species as either rational or spiritual: surely only lunatics or the demon-driven could act in such a fashion. As the Anabaptists saw it, they were simply following the implied directive of Melchior Hoffman, who had said that all true believers would ultimately come to the Kingdom of God “completely naked, having put the old Adam aside completely.” Hoffman was clearly referring to the curse of Original Sin that caused Adam and Eve to cover their nakedness with leaves from the Garden of Eden. His followers read the biblical symbolism as literal truth. If clothes were invented to cover sin, then those who were innocent of sin should shed their
clothing and go naked.

  Such extreme insistence on the literal truth of symbolic statements may or may not have been madness, but the frenzied naked dashes through the streets that resulted from it must certainly have estranged the believers from ordinary citizens, let alone the authorities who had to keep order. The naked seven in Amsterdam, who had burned their clothing before they took to the streets, were hardly chastened by their arrest; thrown into cells with their clothed brethren, they made them strip as well. Unfrightened and unrepentant, they called their trial judges “bloodsuckers” and went proudly to their deaths, along with a Catholic woman who had been swept up by the prevalent hysteria and had joined them in the streets.

  At about the same time as the incident in Amsterdam, “flying columns” of soldiers sent out by The Hague were roaming throughout the Netherlands, rounding up hundreds of Anabaptists and imprisoning them. Tortured into recanting their re-baptism, flogged when they hesitated, beheaded and drowned when they refused, the Anabaptists were harried mercilessly. Still they persisted. On March 22, another outburst occurred in Amsterdam when five prominent Anabaptists were arrested after they had wandered through the city streets waving swords and crying out “Repent!” and “Woe, woe to all the godless!” Three were tortured and executed. A Dutch Anabaptist who had not been involved in this current disturbance, Obbe Phillips, went in disguise to watch the execution because he knew that among these men he would find the one who had baptized him and given him his calling. But the bodies of the men were so “frightfully” distorted by the effects of fire, smoke, and the rack and the wheel that he could not recognize any of them.