In Our Time

by Melvyn Bragg

  At the heart of this concentration on cities was the idea of finding or building the new Jerusalem.

  DIARMAID MACCULLOCH: Melchior Hoffman, this furrier who travels, gets the idea in his head that it’s not Münster actually to start with, it’s Strasburg, one of the biggest cities in Europe, a very tolerant city. Hoffman was just so impressed by that, he thought this must be the new Jerusalem. Hoffman preached Strasburg in the very early 1530s and, unfortunately, the city authorities weren’t that impressed by being cast as the new Jerusalem, so they chucked him in jail.

  Münster had been a prince-bishopric, a city of the Holy Roman Empire run by its bishop as a secular ruler until he had been thrown out by a reformation inspired by Luther. There were many factions in that city, Charlotte Methuen explained, following the unrest of the Peasants’ War. There were tensions between the guilds and the higher priests around the bishop who, until 1532, had not been ordained, and the lower clergy and citizens. The Lutheran faction was gaining the upper hand in 1532–3.

  Situated in the north-west of Germany and near the Netherlands, a long way from Melchior Hoffman’s Strasburg, a lot of preachers were passing through Münster.

  DIARMAID MACCULLOCH: It’s very natural for them to look at this great wealthy city, with its great cathedral, its walls, and think, ‘Well, actually this is likely to be the new Jerusalem.’ And it’s one Dutchman who actually had that idea, not Strasburg, as Melchior had said, but Münster, the local big city. And his name was Jan Matthys.

  There was one preacher in particular who set the scene, Charlotte Methuen explained, and this was Bernhard Rothmann, who emerged initially as a Lutheran with Zwinglian interests, and he became the city preacher in Münster in 1532. He did not agree with Luther over the sacraments, as became obvious when the city council said it wanted a Lutheran liturgy.

  CHARLOTTE METHUEN: Bernhard Rothmann says, ‘Well, I don’t want to give you Lutheran liturgy.’ He doesn’t approve of infant baptism any more, he wants to give them an Anabaptist liturgy. And that causes enormous tensions within the city, but it also provides the moment for Jan Matthys, who was looking for places to preach. He sends emissaries into Münster in early 1534 and baptises Bernhard Rothmann.

  Within two years, Münster had changed from being run as a Roman Catholic prince-bishopric to somewhere the Anabaptists could seize power.

  Jan Matthys, Diarmaid MacCulloch suggested, was someone whose charisma was more evident than his theological scholarship. He was a traveller who could draw people to him with an arresting simple message: ‘Come to the new Jerusalem.’ When people had been disappointed by the mainstream Protestants, here was someone saying he could show them the way forwards, that the last days were going to happen and together they could make them happen.

  DIARMAID MACCULLOCH: What you’re doing, of course, is empowering ordinary people in a world where they don’t feel they have any power. And people have been driven into a state of excitement by the fact they’ve seen the powers of this world being thrown down, the pope’s power going, the prince-bishop’s power going, those Lutheran councillors being pushed aside by more radical figures. And, in that situation, any leader with charisma can step in, and that’s what Jan did.

  Jan Matthys.

  What Matthys managed to do, Charlotte Methuen said, was get Rothmann converted, who then started to proclaim the coming of the new Jerusalem, the coming of a community in which all people would be equal. In 1534, they declared that all things belonged to all people.

  CHARLOTTE METHUEN: And they burn the city archives so that all records of ownership, of land ownership, for instance, disappear. What we’re getting from Rothmann, and then with him from Matthys’s emissaries, is a sense that the divisions of society (we have to think of this as a very, very hierarchical society – we have a clerical hierarchy, we have a secular or temporal hierarchy) are being wiped away and all people are going to be equal.

  When Luther wanted to dress down, Lucy Wooding added, he liked to dress in courtly garb, very much part of the establishment. People like Matthys were much more down to earth, and the idea of having goods in common was much more appealing to the poor than it was to the rich. These people were taking Luther’s freedom of Christianity very seriously in a way Luther did not anticipate them taking it, Charlotte Methuen continued, where they were not just removing the difference between spiritual and temporal but also getting rid of the differences within temporal hierarchies.

  In 1534, in February, the ousted prince-bishop of Münster, Franz von Waldeck, laid siege to the city and continued for eighteen months. The Lutherans were alongside him as they were panic-stricken that the Reformation was getting away from them, and they wanted to win Münster back. Jan Matthys predicted the Second Coming would happen at Easter in 1534, but he had to reassess that once Easter had passed. He had a new revelation, which was that he should go out to face the bishop’s forces with twelve chosen apostles.

  LUCY WOODING: He saw himself as David going out to encounter Goliath and he said that this would unleash an apocalyptic confrontation and that the last days would start to unfold from this. It’s actually quite a pathetic scene in many ways. By the standards of the time, he’s quite old, he’s in his fifties, on a lone horse riding out. And he must have had in his heart the conviction that this is what God wanted him to do.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Were the twelve behind him?

  LUCY WOODING: They must have been terrified, or perhaps they, too, were carried forwards by their godly zeal. They were hacked to pieces. Münster had lost its prophet.

  There was consternation, but then another charismatic young man stepped forth, Jan Bockelson, who came from Leiden and whose name was to strike terror in Europe. He was twenty-five, born the same year as Calvin, and he ran Münster under the siege for another fourteen months or so. He was a tyrant, Charlotte Methuen said, and in charge of a city that now had three times as many women as men. He introduced polygamy and forcible marriage for the women, some of whom had been left behind by their husbands to look after the property in Münster and some of whom were Anabaptist sympathisers who had come to be part of the new Jerusalem.

  CHARLOTTE METHUEN: He sets himself up in Matthys’s house with a great palace next door for his own sixteen wives, all of whom, except one, were under twenty, interestingly. He keeps a very, very strong, strict discipline within the city. He stops torture happening but he’s quite capable of summarily executing anybody who stands against his leadership. And the situation in the city really starts to deteriorate.

  He was a very charismatic tyrant with an extraordinary sense of theatre and, Lucy Wooding said, reportedly dabbled in theatricals before this stage of his career. There are two eyewitness accounts of what happened in the city during the siege, and they may well have been biased as the writers were trying to distance themselves from events, but, on one day, it seems, John of Leiden appeared stark naked in the marketplace.

  LUCY WOODING: Nakedness, of course, is a sign of purity, going back to Adam and Eve before the Fall, but it’s going to get anyone’s attention. And he then went into a trance for three days, during which time he couldn’t speak, so he claimed. And [he] then emerged from that to say, ‘Well, we’re going to have a new system.’ They get rid of the council, they bring in twelve elders. But he had a chilling way of trying to get people ready for the latest revelation and then unleash it upon them.

  He also issued gold coins, which he distributed all through Europe, with his head on, proclaiming the message of the last days with a statement that he was a king for all Europe, for all Christendom, for all the world. Yet, in Münster, there was an insane lack of proportion. The city was starving but the court of John of Leiden and his wives was not starving, there was enormous luxury at the centre of it.

  DIARMAID MACCULLOCH: They gather together, the court, to honour God, because this is God’s representative on earth. But, around them, people are just dying of hunger and thirst. People are being executed if they stand up, if they expr
ess their despair. It’s a nightmare world. It reminds one of Kampuchea in the 1970s.

  CHARLOTTE METHUEN: And they say that they washed the whitewash off the walls of the churches and sold it to people as milk. The level of starvation among the people themselves was just horrendous.

  They held out partly because they were very well organised, they had a charismatic leader and they had to defend the city or surrender and face a very unpleasant death. In the end, the city fell, as they were betrayed and the bishop’s men were let in.

  LUCY WOODING: There was horrible carnage – thousands of people probably died. And the ringleaders were kept back for a very unpleasant execution, in January of 1536, where they were, effectively, tortured to death, because that point had to be made.

  DIARMAID MACCULLOCH: It is really chilling going to Münster, because you can still see the irons that were heated to red hot with which their flesh was torn and pinched.

  CHARLOTTE METHUEN: And you can still see the cages in which their bodies were then hung on St Lambert’s Church. As you walk up the main shopping street in Münster, there are three cages in which the bodies were hung on the church tower.

  The Anabaptists were left with a reputation for crazed barbarity, Diarmaid MacCulloch said, which was completely different from the nature of most Anabaptists. There was a certain terrorising aftermath in the Netherlands, where an organisation called the Batenburgers went on attacking clergy. Largely, Anabaptists were appalled by what some of their number had done.

  DIARMAID MACCULLOCH: A priest from Friesland, called Menno Simons, gathered the shocked remnants and committed them to pacifism. The future of Anabaptism and all the radical strands of religion around it was a commission for pacifism for the future, which is still there. They’re passionately committed against violence and that’s the result of this particular trauma.

  The siege of Münster left Protestants terrified of disorder. Calvin made it clear that his followers were not that sort of Protestant and would respect the order of government, and that became significant for the status of Protestantism for the rest of the century.

  HILDEGARD OF BINGEN

  If you had walked into the abbey of the monastery at Disibodenberg in Germany 850 years ago, it is quite possible that you would have heard a solo chanting voice singing a piece of sacred music by the twelfth-century composer Hildegard of Bingen. Little known until thirty years ago, the music of Hildegard is now regarded as among the best of the Middle Ages. But, remarkably, the music is only a small aspect of her overall achievement. Hildegard was a twelfth-century nun and a scholar of impressive breadth. Sometimes known as the ‘Sibyl of the Rhine’, she wrote a series of works documenting prophetic visions she had experienced. She was an accomplished theologian and also wrote about science, medicine and the natural world. Held in high regard by royalty and religious figures alike, she has long been revered as a saint, although it was not until 2012 that she was officially canonised by Pope Benedict.

  With Melvyn to discuss Hildegard of Bingen were: Miri Rubin, professor of medieval and early modern history at Queen Mary University of London; William Flynn, lecturer in medieval Latin at the University of Leeds; and Almut Suerbaum, associate professor of German at Somerville College, Oxford.

  Hildegard was born around 1098 in the Rhineland, which, as Miri Rubin explained, was part of the Holy Roman Empire, a vast political entity covering most of today’s Germany but also Italy and parts of eastern France.

  MIRI RUBIN: This is a vast continental bloc that was ruled, from the year 800 on, by an emperor. What makes an emperor different from a mere king is that this is an emperor crowned and endorsed by the pope. In the Middle Ages, and until 1802, in fact, the Holy Roman Empire is a confederation of large parts of Europe, and this obviously creates a tremendous political challenge.

  The emperor did not have a standing army and could not tax everywhere and, during most of Hildegard’s life, there was civil war to establish which family should hold the imperial crown and also, most importantly for Hildegard, what the emperor owed to the pope. Throughout this restless period, there were thriving monasteries and nunneries that were extremely important as centres of religious life.

  MIRI RUBIN: These institutions are founded by the elite – indeed, by emperors and empresses themselves – but are also inhabited and run, on the whole, by elite persons. You have to bring a sort of dowry if you are a nun. You have to have some property to contribute, so this is a way of life that is deeply privileged and has tremendous impact.

  Hildegard came from this kind of elite background, William Flynn continued, and her family were landowners. She was born in Bermersheim, her father was Hildebert, her mother was Mechtild, and, from the age of five, she reported that she had visions. She was given into the care of another noblewoman, Jutta of Sponheim, from the age of eight, when Jutta was only fourteen. Her biographer, Guibert of Gembloux, said that she was the tenth child of Hildebert and Mechtild, though Guibert was an unreliable witness who tried to make her into a perfect Benedictine saint.

  WILLIAM FLYNN: The Sponheim family was regionally one of the more powerful families. It was a good move on the part of a noble family that didn’t have as much capital, really. Also, Jutta had insisted, against the will of her family, that she was going into a religious life. Jutta seems to have resisted her family quite a bit; she wanted to go on pilgrimage, but they manoeuvred her into deciding to become part of a monastery.

  Together, in 1112, they entered the male Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, which had only started being built in 1108. According to Guibert, Hildegard and Jutta were ‘completely inured as if they were dead’. They received food and water through a window, and their priest might have lived in a cell next door and contacted them through a window. This was an intense religious life.

  WILLIAM FLYNN: Jutta would have been quite reasonably educated at home; she would have known how to read Latin. She taught Hildegard how to read, certainly, and recite the psalms, and that is about the extent of what Hildegard acknowledges as her education, because she does call herself, later on, ‘an unlearned woman’. It seems that Hildegard, who is obviously a bright star intellectually, feels somewhat constrained by the life that she has been put into.

  According to Guibert, Hildegard learned to play the ten-stringed cythera, but that may have been meant allegorically, an allusion to the Ten Commandments and the virtuous life. It is more likely that she learned to sing by way of the normal monastic instrument of the monochord.

  The Benedictine monasteries were very important politically and for theological learning, as well as being places of intellectual learning, with libraries for the monks and, at Disibodenberg, for the women associating with them.

  ALMUT SUERBAUM: The day is structured by a variety of activities; they pray regularly, but, in between those spaces, they also listen to readings of texts by the Church Fathers, they listen to gospels that are explained through the commentaries of the Church Fathers, and, in almost all Benedictine monasteries, we know they also spend time writing, creating the books that they will then read and study.

  Unlike those in the scholastic tradition, Hildegard did not use quotations when she wrote. Almut Suerbaum challenged the description of her as indoctus, or ‘unlearned’, which, she argued, did not mean that she was uneducated but that she was not writing in the Benedictine format, which was imbued with the range of texts the monks had read. Supporting her in this work for sixty years was a male confessor, Volmar, who acted as her secretary, companion, aide and perhaps tutor.

  ALMUT SUERBAUM: It is clearly a relationship of dialogue between them – he is her secretary. Bernard of Clairvaux had at least three secretaries simultaneously, so it is a common practice, that’s not just something for women who themselves can’t write. It is a relationship that is clearly about theological discussions, he is her confessor and her spiritual guide.

  MELVYN BRAGG: Why do you think it lasted so long?

  ALMUT SUERBAUM: They clearly worked tog
ether very well. She comments on the fact that he advises in the composition of the Scivias, but so does one of her nuns, so it is a group of people with whom she talks.

  In 1136, or thereabouts, Jutta died and, quite soon afterwards, Hildegard founded her own establishment near Bingen. It was a bold step and required a lot of political negotiation as well as theological determination, something that seemed to have been one of her strengths. She met a lot of resistance not only as it was an unusual thing for a woman to do but also for economic reasons. As Almut Suerbaum explained, the aristocratic women who had come to join the convent at Disibodenberg had come with very large dowries, so the monks were not keen on losing either their main spiritual attraction, by that time, or those dowries.

  Hildegard receives a vision in the presence of her secretary Volmar.

  Earlier, Miri Rubin mentioned the civil wars in the Holy Roman Empire and the tension between the emperor and the pope. The Church had an idea from the mid-eleventh century that it should be free from interference from secular authorities. The popes had increasingly demanded that they, not the emperors, should appoint the bishops, as they were meant to be spiritual leaders and not political ones. The emperors wanted to appoint them, owing to their political significance. This could lead to schism between the emperor and the pope.

  MIRI RUBIN: Sometimes the emperor goes and appoints his own pope, an anti-pope, and then what do you do? Who is a bishop in Germany to be loyal to? Who, indeed, is an abbess to be loyal to? Which pope? The local one appointed by her emperor, or the one appointed by the pope in Rome? Who is the head of the whole Church organisation? And Hildegard finds this extremely vexing.