Finally a force of two hundred retreated behind a formidable barricade in the Cathedral Square; it was constructed out of the sixteen armored war wagons that had so impressed Henry Gresbeck, and the defenders were under the capable command of Henry Krechting, Jan’s chancellor. They had enough ammunition for their cannons and their organ pipes to hold out for at least a day, and to make von Dhaun and Steding pay dearly for killing them. Steding offered to let Krechting and his men leave the city unharmed if they would give up their weapons.
Both the offer and the acceptance of it, which came almost immediately, seem surprising. Even more so is the surreptitious passing of ten gold pieces to Krechting by the Bishop’s supreme commander, Johann von Raesfeld; they had once been comrades in arms in foreign wars, and had participated together in the great Sack of Rome in 1527. Krechting and twenty-five of his men were escorted to the gate and allowed to leave. The others, who presumably could have done so, chose to return to their homes to say farewell to their wives and were cut down in the streets by enraged soldiers who were killing anything that moved.
These soldiers had waited for sixteen months through summer heat and winter cold, forgoing pay and the possibility of booty elsewhere. The Bishop had required them all to swear that they would abide by the articles of war; these required little of them beyond not injuring pregnant women and those who had just delivered children, or members of the clergy—not a category intended to include the Anabaptist preachers. Any booty had to be turned over to commanding officers for later distribution and sharing in lots. But to their dismay and their fury, the Landsknechte found little loot besides clothing and kitchen utensils. Then one of the soldiers who had been held as a prisoner revealed the existence of a treasure trove of gold and silver in the city chancellery. After torturing the keepers of the treasury into revealing its precise location, the soldier and his friends led fifty looters to the City Hall. Steding stopped them and executed seven of the ringleaders on the spot. The rest were stripped, bound with ropes and covered with white shirts, then escorted out of the city; their clothes were returned to them and they were sent on their way, minus their fair share of the booty.
They were not much out of pocket, as it happened: the share per man, after all was said and done, was sixteen guilders per man, not much of a bonus for a year’s time. (Sixteen guilders would equal about eight hundred of today’s dollars.) They found no money hoards in the houses of the Anabaptists; other than some silver, most of the money had been sent out of the city with the apostles in December and with Jan van Geelen in January to raise troops and to buy weapons.
Realizing that they had wasted a year waiting to steal an empty purse, the soldiers took out their frustrations on their helpless antagonists, running wild. “The murder was too terrible to describe,” in the words of one contemporary writer, Dietrich Lilie. Kerssenbrück has no such reservations, regarding what happened as poetic justice: “Bernard Swerte, who had a house full of children, Magnus Kohüs, master of the royal wardrobe, and many others were rooted out of their hiding places and run through in the alleys with knives and swords,” he says. Johann Estmann from Warendorf, a heavy, gray-haired man, claimed that he had remained in Münster only because of illness, and would have been allowed to live except that his brothers in Christ betrayed him to the soldiers.
Also meeting a sad but fitting end was the former Bürgermeister Herman Tilbeck, the respected leader who had betrayed the city first by refusing to pass along the Bishop’s offer to defend it against the Anabaptists and who later led the counterattack against Mollenheck. Tilbeck was found hiding in an outhouse by the Agidii Cloister. He was stabbed to death and his body dumped into the cesspool, a burial fit for a dead donkey, according to Kerssenbrück.
The butcher Johann Boventorp was fixed to a pillory with an iron collar and cloven in two. The tailor Gerd Kibbenbrock, former co-mayor, the father of eight children, was dragged from his house by the Market Square and killed. Henry Sanctus, a coppersmith named recently by Jan as the Prince of Mainz, was beheaded in front of the City Hall. Evart Riemensneider, in whose tavern Jan Matthias had received the vision that sent him to his death, was found after a soldier billeted in his house discovered that his bread rations were disappearing in the night. A search found Riemensneider hiding on the roof with the former nun he had married and two other wives. He was executed the following week with one of the women and with his son, Jaspar.
The soldiers did obey the Bishop’s strict orders to take the more important Anabaptists alive. The first to be captured was Bernard Krechting, Jan’s chief of staff, hiding in the Agidii Cloister; despite his pleas to be allowed to die, he was thrown into prison. The nobleman Gerlach von Wullen, commander of the king’s cavalry and of his bodyguard, was also captured; von Wullen had married the daughter of Christian Kerckering, whose other daughter had married the Bishop’s bastard son Christoph. Christoph himself had fled in May. Von Wullen and Kerckering, recently appointed by Jan as “the Prince of Westphalia,” represented special problems for the Bishop as members of the nobility, and were kept in separate confinement.
King Jan himself almost escaped, managing in the confusion of the last battle to reach the Agidii Gate. Popular accounts by the hundreds recount Jan’s capture. Some depict him as cravenly deserting his people in their hour of greatest need, while Knipperdolling fought bravely in the Market Square for the entire day. Others have Jan bravely stepping forward when capture was inevitable, as opposed to the skulking Knipperdolling, who had vanished entirely, along with Bernard Rothmann. Helmut Paulus, in his modern version, has Jan pursued through his palace by a soldier on whom he turns and kills before he is captured. Paulus seems to have picked up and revised the account left by a soldier named Röchell, who later became a sexton in the Cathedral when Herman Kerssenbrück was its schoolmaster and was constructing his account of the Anabaptist kingdom. According to Röchell, he entered the palace, von Buren’s mansion, and chased Jan, waving his sword and shouting for him to stop, through the house and up to the top story. Jan closed the door of his chamber against his pursuer and hid behind it. When Röchell forced the door open and rushed into the room, Jan slipped from behind the door into the hallway and ran down a circular stairway to the street. In his panic Jan hurled his halberd at Röchell, which slowed the soldier down enough so that he lost sight of the king as he disappeared in the direction of the Agidii Gate. He was captured by Steding’s men, who disregarded Jan’s haughty command not to lay a hand on his royal person; then Ulrich von Dhaun, hearing of the capture, commanded Steding to turn his prize catch over to him.
Although Jan was the Bishop’s primary antagonist, it was Bernard Rothmann, along with the merchant Knipperdolling, whom he blamed for inciting the city to rebellion in the first place. Rothmann’s end, like his demon-driven life, remains a mystery. According to eyewitness reports, he had appeared in a white gown with a sword in his hand, like an Old Testament hero, to do battle. He was said to have received a spear thrust to the side, like Jesus. Anxious to assure himself that Rothmann was in fact dead, the Bishop later ordered the burial crews that were digging mass graves in the Cathedral Square to inspect each body before they stripped it and tumbled it into the ditch with the others. Rothmann failed to turn up, alive or dead.
A few days after the fall of the city, Ulrich von Dhaun had all the captured women, numbering more than three thousand, brought to the Cathedral Square. He told them that if they promised to abjure their heretical vows they would be free to go from the city, leaving whatever they still owned behind them. One exception was offered: if any of the women knew and would reveal the hiding place of Bernard Knipperdolling, still at large, she would receive a complete pardon. Catharina Hobbels asked von Dhaun to repeat his pledge. He promised her that if she could help him, she would be pardoned. With that, she told him that Knipperdolling was hiding in the attic of her house on New Bridge Street; she had already told Knipperdolling that he had to leave, protesting that he was putting her life and tha
t of her husband in danger. The merchant who called himself the Just One, the fearsome sword-carrier for King Jan, was quickly found and taken to prison. Von Dhaun kept his bargain with Catharina Hobbels; she was not harmed. Her husband, however, who had been found along with Knipperdolling, was not protected by her bargain. He was brought to the Market Square and immediately, as Kerssenbrück puts it, rendered “a head shorter” than his previous height.
Some of the women refused to recant and were executed: Queen Divara, who had been first a nun, then the wife of the Apostle Jan Matthias, and finally the consort of King Jan, chose to die; so also did Tilbeck’s sister, Knipperdolling’s mother-in-law, Clara Brand, and his wife, Martha, whom he had forced to stand in the Market Square for disobeying him. Others also refused to recant but had wealthy families who could ransom them. Some were set free on high bail of six thousand guilders. Those who recanted were allowed to return to their native villages. Only a few came back to Münster; a year later the recovering population of Münster included only two hundred and sixteen women and nineteen men who had been Anabaptists and who had forsworn their heretic faith.
On Tuesday, June 29, Prince Bishop Franz von Waldeck’s splendid coach, drawn by six white horses, was escorted through the Agidii Gate by three companies of soldiers in their finest dress uniforms. Ulrich von Dhaun and Wilhelm Steding stood at attention as the portly Bishop descended from the coach. Von Dhaun knelt before the Bishop and held out to him on a blue velvet cushion the keys to the city, which the Bishop took with solemn ceremony. Steding then knelt and offered the Bishop the true signs of his conquest: King Jan’s crown, with its sword-pierced globe, his ring, his golden spurs, and his golden-hilted sword.
Jan himself was there to see his regalia handed over to the Bishop, according to Gresbeck. He had spent the last six days in his dark cell in the Rosenthal Church. Always vain of his appearance, he was now unwashed and unshaven, barefoot, wearing only heavy chains above his rags. The withering scorn in the voice of Franz von Waldeck, noble lord, as he spoke to the doomed wretch who stood before him, echoes through the centuries in Gresbeck’s terse account: “Bist du ein Konig?” asked the Bishop, using the familiar “du” reserved for children, close friends, and inferiors: “And are you a king?!”
The response was immediate and, considering Jan van Leyden’s talent for public performance, inevitable. It was also, in its own way, just:
“Und bist du ein Bischof?”
12
PUNISHMENT
Be not over much wicked, neither be thou foolish: why shouldest thou die before thy time?
—Ecclesiastes 7:17
THE TRAGEDY OF Münster always had its element of farce, as Jan’s insolent reply to the Bishop illustrates. He had also joked with the crowd that gathered outside the dungeon in Dülmen to watch his arrival. “Is this the king who took to himself so many wives?” they shouted. “I beg your pardon,” he answered with mock indignation. “I took maidens and made them wives!”
He was no less cheeky after a month in his cell at Dülmen, when the Bishop came to reproach the upstart king again, with “pointed words.” Did he have any idea, he asked Jan indignantly, how much money it had cost him to crush his miserable kingdom? King Jan, chained to the wall and wearing an iron collar around his neck, shrugged off the complaint. He had a splendid plan, he said, that would amply remunerate the Bishop for all his expenses. “Let an iron cage be built,” Jan said. “Put me in it along with Knipperdolling and send us out on the road, throughout all of Germany. Charge everyone a penny to take a look at us. You’ll earn more money than you ever spent in our war.”
Considering that Jan knew full well that his fate was certain to be as horrendously painful as the man sitting opposite him could conceive, his insouciance is remarkable. For centuries afterward, the legend grew that he, Krechting, and Knipperdolling were indeed trundled around the country for six months, each in his own iron cage, as reminders of what happens to traitors and heretics. This did not happen; but it may have been Jan who gave the Bishop the idea to have three cages constructed, each large enough to hold a man, all three sturdy enough to have lasted, as they have, until today.
Jan was more serious during his extended visits with a team of inquisitors led by Antonius Corvinus, a Lutheran theologian, the record of which provides a remarkable insight into Jan’s personality and into the system of justice and punishment at the time. It was not enough for either the Lutherans or the Catholics simply to defeat and execute their doctrinal opponents; they had to persuade them of the error of their ways, to allow them to recant and die in the faith.
Interestingly, Corvinus in his report calls Jan “the king,” with no hint of satire: “When the king was brought out of prison, we greeted him in a friendly manner and asked him to be seated before the warm fireplace. We asked him how he was getting along in prison, and if he was cold or sick. The king answered that he was obliged to endure the cold and the sins that weighed on his heart with patience, as was God’s will.” By means of this amiable approach, having already determined that this was the only way to reach him, Corvinus says he was able to get Jan to talk openly about what he had done.
“Dear Jan,” he begins, “we have heard unbelievable and terrible things about your kingdom. If what we hear is true—and regrettably it seems to be—we find it impossible to understand how you could have done such things in the name of Holy Scripture.”
The record of Jan’s answer to this and other questions—a record that Corvinus attests is “word for word” what he said—does not suggest madness or even unreason on Jan’s part, and certainly no lack of intelligence or wit. Equally, there is no sense of shame or guilt. He says he will answer to God for what he did and for what he taught, and let Him decide if he had been wrong.
What about the passage in Holy Scripture where Jesus says, “My Kingdom is not of this world”?
Jan knows the passage well, and says that if he had erred in Münster, it was not so much in trying to create a kingdom in the image of Christ but in allowing himself to become king; he let it happen only because Dusentschur claimed he had a vision from God demanding it. The kingdom itself was now a dead issue.
Jan denies Corvinus’s charge of “novelty” against the Anabaptists by noting that while the Catholics might make such a claim, the Lutherans had been around only a few years longer than he had. He feels kinship with Luther, moreover, in that he agrees to Luther’s central idea, the necessity of justification by faith rather than deeds.
Concerning the Eucharist, which his followers had so often parodied, Jan’s objection is that he considers it a matter of symbolism, not of the literal transformation of bread and wine. For Lutherans as for Catholics, the bread and wine were not merely symbols but actualities; whether those who received them believed in them or not did not affect the reality. This would mean that an unbeliever who went through the motions of the communion actually partook of the “body and blood of Christ,” and Jan “cannot conceive” of how this could be possible. Corvinus rebukes Jan for being perverse: “It is clear that what we believe or do not believe cannot add to or detract from God’s power.” Jan says that if Corvinus is right, then “unbelievers must have partaken” of true communion, but that he cannot believe it.
Corvinus now constructs a new approach, asking Jan, “Why was the sun created?”
“Scripture teaches that it was made to rule the day and to shine,” he responds, correctly.
“So, if you were blind, would the sun still shine?”
“I know of course that my blindness or yours would not keep the sun from shining.”
“And so it is with all the works and ordinances of God, especially with the Sacraments,” Corvinus says, proceeding to the heart of the matter, baptism. If a baby were capable of understanding his faith and professing it, that would be good; but baptism is, regardless, a “precious, noble, and holy sacrament, what St. Paul calls a regeneration and renewal of the Holy Ghost because it is ordered by God’s word and g
iven His promise.” In other words, to deny the efficacy of infant baptism is to deny God; therein lay the Anabaptists’ heresy. Jan does not budge on this issue.
Corvinus then asks Jan about his concept of marriage. He had always, Jan replies, “held marriage to be God’s work, and that no higher or better estate exists in the world than the estate of matrimony.”
Why, then, “have you so wildly violated this estate, against God’s word and common order, and taken one wife after another?” Corvinus asks, continuing, almost plaintively: “How can you justify such a proceeding?”
“Why should we be denied what was permitted to the patriarchs in the Old Testament?” Jan responds. “What we have always held is this: he who wanted only one wife was never to be forced to have more than one. But we felt that a man who wanted more than one wife should be free to do so because he was obeying God’s command to be fruitful and to multiply.”
This would not do, Corvinus insists. The patriarchs took their many wives before the law of the land forbade them to do so, and were therefore innocent of wrongdoing. What other texts could Jan cite to justify polygamy?
Jan cleverly refers Corvinus to Paul’s assertion that a bishop should be the husband of one wife. “This implies that laymen must have had more than one; otherwise, why would the bishop be specifically limited? There you have your text.”
The Tailor-King Page 20
