by Leo Ruickbie
When the rain finally stopped at the end of August, the Bishop attacked. The seasoned veterans, professional men of violence, were repulsed by the determined defence of the mostly civilian Anabaptists. Their assault driven back from the inner wall by boiling pitch and quicklime, the retreating mercenaries were ambushed and massacred. The Bishop lost forty-two officers and hundreds of men; the Company of Christ, only fifteen. Van Leyden had held the city and his people once again raised their voices to sing ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ – had they not proven it?
The Bishop’s army, once 8,000 strong, was reduced to less than half its former size over the next few months. Whilst some had been frittered away in useless and occasionally comic assaults on the city, most were simply deserting. These men were mercenaries who had not been paid, why should they stay? They owed nothing to the Bishop, who, on the contrary, owed much to them. By late October there were only 3,000 left, hoping that their employer would eventually make good his promises. If Faustus was also in the Bishop’s pay, then he too was undoubtedly feeling the pinch.
Meanwhile, the Anabaptists had sent out secret missions to preach the word to the surrounding towns. Cocooned in his religious mania, Jan van Leyden, or King Jan as he was now, was convinced that the countryside would rise up at their call. Twenty-seven men in all left the city gates at daybreak. In Coesfeld, Osnabrück and Warendorf they readily found sympathisers and performed baptisms. But the Bishop cowed the towns by threat or force of arms into surrendering the Anabaptist preachers. Only one escaped death, returning to Münster bound in chains and barely alive. Somewhere in the Bishop’s camp, or in one of these neighbouring towns, Faustus too would have been aware of the situation: that only by the Bishop’s alacrity and readiness to do violence had the Anabaptist plague been prevented from spreading further.
Part of the Bishop’s alarm must have been due to the realisation of how permeable his cordon round the town really was. Faustus would have observed the increased haste in constructing the planned ring of seven blockhouses with connecting ramparts. By December, Münster was finally sealed in. Even so, the Anabaptists still managed to send out copies of Rothmann’s works to Landgrave Philip I, Luther and Melanchthon. Philipp responded with equanimity and tolerance, suggesting that a peaceful solution was still within everyone’s grasp. Luther for his part replied with typical fury in his tract Concerning the Devilish Sect of Anabaptists in Münster. A thousand copies of Rothmann’s newly finished diatribe Revenge were sent out to rouse the Anabaptists of the Low Countries to join the war against the Bishop.
These were dangerous times. The Anabaptists were not confined to Münster alone. Their network spread out across the Empire, but so too did that of their opponents. Strangers must have been suspect wherever they appeared, for who could tell if they were agents of the Bishop or of King Jan. Law and order was maintained only by the vice-like grip of summary execution. Someone like Faustus, already used to narrow escapes from the authorities in less dangerous times, must have been especially exposed now. It was a dangerous profession. In 1535 his fellow magician Agrippa died under mysterious circumstances in Grenoble, aged just forty-nine.7
Faustus was already a radical figure, making claims that the Church, the Lutherans and the Anabaptists would consider blasphemous and heretical. He had no friends among the religious and few among the Humanists. Frightened by the rumours of necromancy, the towns were inclined to close their gates against him. Only by being under the shield of one of the powerful lords could he hope to survive; his previous work for the Bishop of Bamberg, his calling card and surety.
Reports that Münster was slowly but surely eroding its supplies convinced the Bishop to sit out the siege. Comfortable in his castle at Iburg (Bad Iburg) and safely forty-one kilometres away, he let winter take its toll on Münster’s morale. Still the city did not fall. Facing greater and greater daily privations, the Anabaptists nonetheless continued their defiance. ‘When will it end?’ must have been his constant question, and if he had retained Faustus’s services it would certainly have been directed at the diviner.
From mid-April 1535, van Leyden had allowed the starving to leave the besieged city if they so wished. They left in their hundreds. He warned them that on no condition would they be allowed to return. It seemed like no warning at all: they did not want to return. The Bishop, however, ordered his soldiers to shoot the men and drive the women and children back to the city gates. His calculated ruthlessness saw in these starving people a weapon he could use against the Anabaptists: to bite into their morale, or, if allowed back within the gates, to eat up their reserves.
Not everyone was as Machiavellian. Count Ulrich von Dhaun protested to the Bishop against such cruelty. Ignoring him, the Bishop planted no-man’s-land with dead Anabaptists tied to posts and wagon wheels. By early June there were approximately 800 men and women and a great number of children trapped between Münster’s walls and the Bishop’s ramparts. The butchers were busy, despatching up to fifty men a day, but it was clearly going to take some time – and an excess of inhuman cruelty – to hack through this mass of desperate humanity.
The Bishop took to his bed with a fever and eventually von Dhaun could stand no more. He took all of the refugees into custody, releasing the foreign women on condition that they swore to keep the peace and holding the others until the end of the siege. This humane action came too late to save the 600–700 unarmed men who had already been put to death.
After fifteen months of expensive, wearisome siege, von Waldeck was handed the keys to Jan’s kingdom on a plate. A group of guards who had had enough, deserted their watch and escaped under cover of darkness. Two of them independently revealed, not only the entire condition of Münster’s defences, but also a secret way through the city walls. The Bishop still did nothing. He still thought that Münster would surrender. It was a fool’s hope. By massacring all those who had so far tried to surrender (only von Dhaun or the information they carried had saved some of them from that fate) he gave the city’s defenders more than enough incentive to fight on until their last breath.
Enter the Necromancer
After sixteen months of siege, the Bishop finally decided to take the city. As von Dhaun made arrangements, especially forbidding the consumption of alcohol after the last debacle, a stranger arrived in camp.
Franciscus [Franz] I, by the grace of God, son of Philipp II by his second marriage born, Bishop of Münster, in the year 1535, 25 June, besieged and surrounded the city of Münster which had been occupied by the Anabaptists and, with the support of imperial princes led by Hensel Hochstraten, captured it … At which time the distinguished Nigromanticus Dr Faustus, himself turning aside from Corbachii, predicted that, without doubt, the city of Münster would be captured by the Bishop that same night.8
The Waldeck Chronicle from which this quotation comes is a late source, written around 1650 by Daniel Prasser, and often overlooked. Despite this lateness, the reference is both dated and geographically located, unlike almost all of the legendary material that grew up after Faustus’s death. On this basis we should not dismiss it out of hand, even though it is impossible to verify its accuracy.
He seemed to arrive at just the right time from a town called ‘Corbachii’, which is modern Korbach some 148 kilometres away by today’s roads. It might be expected to take almost a week to cover that distance, depending on how Faustus travelled, and there is no hint of a demonic horse or flying cloak here. It seems that he had stayed a safe distance away from the troubles in Münster, but – if we are to believe this account – was clearly well aware of the situation. During the course of this extraordinarily long siege, it is entirely conceivable that Faustus made the journey more than once and may have visited other locations in the area during that time.
Korbach is in the county of Waldeck, lying on the intersection of the Cologne-Leipzig and Frankfurt-Bremen trade routes. It was a flourishing trading centre, a member of the Hanseatic League and safe behind a double wall with five well
-guarded gates. Korbach was also the seat of Franz I’s brother, Philipp III (1486–1539), Count of Waldeck.
One can imagine Faustus strolling by the Gothic Spukhaus, the so-called ‘haunted house’, dating from 1335. With its steeply crow-stepped gable facing onto the street and punctuated with sinister black holes for windows, this old warehouse looks like it easily lives up to its reputation. Local tradition records that he stayed in the Hanxleden Manorhouse on Kirchstraße, which was unfortunately torn down in 1965 and only one wall remains.9 Mixing with the Feldhühner, or ‘partridges’ as the people of Korbach were called, and avoiding the night watchmen, known as ‘gunpowder heads’ because of their zealous over-attention to duty, Faustus would have found an eager audience amongst the travellers and traders, not to mention the Bishop’s brother.
Arriving in the Bishop’s camp, he prophesied rightly. Using the secret entrance, a group of soldiers gained entrance to the town during a vicious downpour, easily overpowering the guards who had taken cover from the rain and fallen asleep. These commandos occupied the Anabaptists until von Dhaun’s main force scaled the outer walls and swarmed through the streets. The Anabaptists’ secret weapons, the rolling fortresses, were immobile – the horses had been eaten – and the commander who took refuge behind them with 200 armed men was bought off by the offer of his life.
Expecting rich bounty, the Landsknechte were sorely disappointed. For more than a year they had sat out winter cold and summer heat, and endured the impecuniousness of the Bishop only to plunder an empty coffer. They reacted as sixteenth-century soldiers do, leading one contemporary, Dietrich Lilie, to write ‘the murder was too horrible to describe’.10 The ringleaders were rounded up and cast into prison while the Bishop dreamt up the most terrible way to execute them. Prasser’s Waldeck Chronicle has a brief account of it:
The farcical Johann of Leyden, who named himself King of Israel and Zion, was humbled togther with Knipperdolling and Kretching, their bodies being torn with glowing, burning-hot pincers, confined in iron cages and suspended from the tower of St Lambert’s, the 23rd of January in the year 1536.11
Each man was publicly tortured for a full hour before being stabbed through the heart. A contemporary, the Lutheran theologian and inquisitor Antonius Corvinus, recorded ‘the courage with which [Jan] proved himself, giving only once a cry against the pain’, but any admiration of this stoicism was countered by his belief that ‘it is certain that Satan is able to lend strength and courage to those he catches in his web’.12 This was not an isolated view. People, especially Luther, really did believe that the forces of good and evil had waged war over Münster.
The broken bodies of the three leaders were then taken to the foot of the west tower at the north end of the Prinzipalmarkt and hoisted 200 feet for all to see. Ravens gathered to pick their bones clean, their raucous cries the only funeral lament for these heretics. The cages are still there today and in the city museum one may see the pincers that were heated until they glowed white hot.
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Beyond the Black Forest (1535–1536)
Old antipathies between France, the Empire and Venice split Christendom and invited Europe’s ancient foe, the Turk, to plunder her. War was everywhere, but where was Faustus? Would he again lend his wand to the Emperor’s cause as he had allegedly claimed before? Faustus was now in his late sixties. He had seen many of his former clients and possibly friends die before him. He needed to find security and that meant money, a position, or another wealthy patron. At this stage in Faustus’s career we begin to see a cluster of locations around the place generally identified as Faustus’s final destination. There would be no more adventuring in Italy or in the dangerous borderlands abutting the Ottoman Empire. Towards the end of his life he seems to have travelled south, into the Black Forest and beyond.
The Restless Guest
During his wanderings across Europe Faustus must have found himself occasionally calling upon the kindness of strangers for shelter. There was an extensive network of private inns along the major trade routes, but one alternative to the notoriously flea-ridden inns was the monastery. Christianity had spread its long tentacles throughout Europe and where there were a few monks, there was a roof for a stranger. There are two accounts of Faustus seeking such refuge. The first was told by Johannes Gast (d.1552) and published in the second edition of his Sermones Convivales in 1548. The story told by Gast has a certain authority because he claimed to have actually met Faustus, but unfortunately there is no date or location ascribed to it. In spite of his own claims, we should approach Gast’s testimony with a degree of caution. He was, after all, writing a book of anecdotes to be told after dinner rather than an historical treatise.
Under the title ‘Of Faustus the Necromancer’, Gast related his tale:
He puts up before night at an exceedingly wealthy cloister, to stay the night there. A brother sets before him vile wine having no quality. Faustus asks that, from the other cask, he draw the best wine, which is customarily given to nobles.1
We should remember that Faustus had claimed to be a Commander of the Order of St John, a position that ordinarily required nobility. His request, then, would be entirely in keeping with his status. The problem was that the monk did not have the keys. The prior kept those himself and, as the monk explained, ‘it is a sin to awaken him’. However, Faustus had espied them lying in the corner: ‘Take them and open that cask on the left and give me a drink’ he ordered. The monk refused; the prior had not given him permission to serve any other wine. Faustus now lost his temper: ‘In a short time you shall see marvels, you inhospitable brother.’2
Faustus left early in the morning without saying goodbye, but that was not the end of the matter. He sent a ‘furious demon’ to pester his hosts that Gast said moved things about in the church and the monks’ cells.3 This ‘furious demon’ is clearly what we would call a poltergeist today. What is interesting is that Faustus is able to send this entity to plague the monks and, in a fashion, possess the monastery. It is the threat allegedly made to Melanchthon realised.
How could Faustus send such an entity? In the third book of his Occult Philosophy, Agrippa divides necromancy into two classes: one which he calls necromancy and concerns ‘raising the carcasses’ and the other he calls sciomancy, which is ‘the calling up of the shadow’. Forced by incantations and the use of their remaining physical substance, these shadows could aid the necromancer in a variety of operations to ‘kindle unlawful lusts, cause dreams, diseases, hatred and such like passions’.4 If Faustus, a supposedly self-styled necromancer, was to invoke a ‘furious demon’, then this could have been the method he chose.
According to Gast the problem grew so great that the monks seriously debated leaving or even destroying the monastery. The prior wrote to the Count Palatine for help and he generously took the monastery under his protection and threw out the monks. Gast noted that from time to time the Count sent the monks some supplies. The Count reported no problem with troublesome spirits, but Gast maintained that whenever a monk set foot inside there was such a commotion that he could not stay.
The only clue to a location is reference to the ‘Count Palatine’. At the time this would have been Ludwig V (r.1508–1544), son of Philipp ‘The Upright’, whom we encountered earlier. He ruled a large, irregularly shaped mass of land extending along the Rhine south of Mainz and reaching out far to the west. The size of this territory helps little in pinpointing the scene of the drama related by Gast, beyond establishing a rough idea that Faustus was somewhere in the southwest of Germany.
In the sixteenth-century Zimmerische Chronik we read a remarkably similar account, this time with a named location.
The monks at Lüxhaim in the Wassichin had a ghost that he [Faustus] sent to their cloister, which they could not get rid of for many years and greatly molested them, only because at one time they had not wanted him to stay overnight, that is why he sent them a restless guest.5
There is today a town called Lüxheim near Bonn,
but the mysterious region of ‘Wassichin’ is thought to be the Vosges mountains, some considerable distance from Bonn. Bonn is furthermore several hundred kilometres to the north of the Palatinate, whereas part of the Vosges mountain range did lie within Ludwig V’s territory. Looking for somewhere that could conceivably be this ‘Lüxhaim’, I came across the very similarly named Lixheim, a small town west of Strassburg in the Vosges region in today’s French Lorraine.6 Triangulating the points of agreement in Gast and the Chronik, Lixheim must be ‘Lüxhaim’.
There has also been a Benedictine monastery, or priory, there since 1107. One hopes that by the time Faustus arrived the monks had repaired the damage inflicted on it during the Peasants’ War. It was secularised in 1550–1551 and finally destroyed during the Thirty Years War. Up until the nineteenth century there were two houses in Lixheim known as the ‘remises’ (sheds) of Doctor Faustus.7
In the Zimmerische Chronik there is no attempt made to date this story; it is just another tale of Faustus. In Gast, the story’s textual proximity to his Basel story and both Basel’s and Lixheim’s relative geographical proximity to Staufen – the town generally acknowledged to have been the place where he died – suggests a date towards the end of Faustus’s life. It is possible that he may have stayed in Lixheim monastery whilst making his way south from Münster, the last dated reference we have for him. Thus at the earliest it could be late 1535, or at the latest 1538.
Dinner in Basel (c.1535)
After recounting his tale of devil-summoning in Lixheim, Gast continued with ‘Another Story about Faustus’:
