The Tailor-King

by Anthony Arthur

  There was little room for compromise or negotiation between opponents who both detested and disdained each other as godless: to the Catholics, Knipperdolling and Rothmann seemed to be crazed fanatics, resistant to reason or to compromise. The merchant and the renegade priest, for their part, charged that the Church and its minions were exploiters, thieves, and tyrants. Armed conflict seemed inevitable in 1532. Both sides, surprisingly, took heart when the ailing and frustrated Bishop von Wiede chose to retire early that year rather than pursue the fight with Rothmann and was succeeded by the nobleman Franz von Waldeck. The Catholics were encouraged because they saw in von Waldeck a “brave and righteous knight,” endowed with new authority from Emperor Charles V to quell this troubling source of unrest in his realm. The Lutherans for their part regarded von Waldeck as anything but “righteous”: he was not even an ordained priest but a typical lusty baron who lived for the hunt, for drink, and for women—in addition to his wife he had an official mistress who had borne him a son. He owed his power to family connections with Philip of Hesse, himself a Lutheran, and insofar as he had any religious leanings, he was inclined to sympathize more with the Lutherans than with the Church of Rome. The radicals in Münster thus saw von Waldeck as a greedy, lascivious political hack, utterly lacking in conviction and most unlikely to kill the golden goose, the city that was the commercial heart of his domain.

  A painting of Franz von Waldeck by a later artist reveals a different man from either the “righteous knight” or the corrupt wastrel. In it we see a broad-chested man in bishop’s regalia. His hands are enormous, with fingers the thickness of fat sausages. The left hand loosely supports the symbol of the Church, the shepherd’s crook. His right hand clasps firmly the hilt of a heavy sword, the symbol of the state. The sword is at the ready, opposed to and dominant over the passive shepherd’s crook. Heavily lidded eyes gaze from under bushy eyebrows past the sword; the nose is thick and prominent, the lips full and sensuous. The curled side-whiskers and down-turning mustache accentuate the deeply threatening aspect of his presence. Franz von Waldeck’s potential for ruthless force is obvious through a centuries-old painting; how much more so it must have been to his contemporaries who saw him in the flesh.

  But the rebels seemed for now to have taken von Waldeck’s measure: Münster was formidably defended and would cost a fortune to subdue. The new Bishop was forced by his own prudence and by his advisers to tell the city council that he would delay an action against Rothmann until he had received guidance from Emperor Charles V; as he and they both knew, Münster was by no means unique in its religious disputation, and a decree was due soon from the Emperor concerning methods of resolving these matters peacefully, if that was possible.

  This unexpected passivity in the face of aggression encouraged the rebels to further demands. Knipperdolling openly challenged the new Bishop by appointing an armed guard to protect Rothmann, himself, and their allies. Even more significantly, he forced the council to impose a code of sixteen articles that virtually denied Roman Catholics the right to practice their faith in Münster. Chief among these articles was a complete proscription of the Catholic Mass, of communion, of prayers for the dead, of the use of Latin in any form, of the worship of Mary, of “smearing oil” on the dying to ease the departure of the soul to Heaven, and of various other Catholic habits of “disgusting idolatry.”

  Rothmann justified these attacks on Catholic doctrine and practice at every opportunity. As was often the case with the Anabaptists, then and later, many of his explanations have seemed soundly reasoned to later theologians. The Holy Communion supper, he said, should be kept only as a reminder of Jesus and a way of expanding their fellowship, not as a religious sacrament—the belief that the wafer and the wine were literally the body and blood of Christ was wrong, for these were symbolic, not literal. In addition, human delight in food and sex were God-given and divine, and not to be denied by foolish fasting or priestly chastity, which were seldom observed in any event. Rothmann’s own religious services were enlivened by song and by dance, and communion celebrations became veritable feasts—practices fit for the voluptuaries of Baal and Satan, according to Kerssenbrück, rather than acceptable ways of celebrating fellowship.

  Rothmann’s arguments were familiar and to a degree persuasive even to some Catholics, who agreed that discipline was needed to restrain abuses of faith such as the worship of Mary as a divine being. But Holy Communion and the Latin Mass were integral to Catholic faith. To denounce them was bad enough; to forbid them was to declare religious war. The new Bishop would have no choice but to respond with force if Rothmann, the instigator of the trouble, was not now expelled from Münster. But not only was Rothmann allowed to remain and to preach, he was given the grandest church in town for his own, St. Lambert’s, and an apartment over a neighboring shop.

  By this time Charles V, far to the south in his court in Regensburg, was hearing troublesome reports of the events in Münster and decided to intervene, even before he announced his more wide-sweeping measures for the empire. Some measure of the importance of Münster to the young emperor (born in 1500, he was only thirty-two) is suggested by the magnitude of the other problems he had to deal with: war with the Turks, constant contention with the French King Francis I, and resistance and defiance by princelings in every corner of the realm had combined with the incessant religious strife unleashed by Luther to endanger his own survival. The unrest in the small city on the edge of his empire had turned Münster into a bothersome symptom of the larger problems facing Charles. Impatient with von Waldeck’s inaction, and suspecting him of harboring secret sympathies with the Lutherans, the Emperor warned him that the radicals were deluding the ignorant people, leading them into error and away from the true word of God: “If they do not desist there will soon be violence and bloodshed; therefore we earnestly desire that you, the Bishop, remove the Lutherans and expel them from the city. The rebellious citizens should receive the appropriate punishment and be forced to acknowledge and obey their superiors, so that they and the remaining inhabitants should be able to live quietly and peacefully.”

  Von Waldeck forwarded the Emperor’s message to the city council with the strong warning that his “pious wishes and friendly requests should be heeded so that you do not draw down on yourselves his anger and scorn.” At the same time, correctly anticipating that the Lutherans would ignore the Emperor, the Bishop summoned all the wealthy landowners and nobles to his palace in Billerbeck to ask for their support in bringing the city to heel.

  The city did indeed ignore the Bishop; the result, beginning in late October 1532, was a blockade. This was a relatively easy and inexpensive measure designed to bring the city to its senses without actual attack. Münster was situated in the middle of a wide, flat plain like the hub of a wheel; the Bishop now blocked its spokes with soldiers to hinder merchants and traders from entering or leaving the city, including the local farmers who had no other market for their products or source of hardware and other supplies. Even before the formal announcement of the blockade, soldiers arrested a dozen men driving a large herd of oxen to market in Cologne. The Bishop locked the men in a dungeon and sold the cattle for enough cash to maintain a company of soldiers for a month. As reports of this outrage spread through the city, hundreds of angry citizens gathered in the Market Square to shout insults and curses at the Bishop, who was fortunately not on the scene to hear angry voices proclaiming that he was a tyrant and an oppressor, he was unworthy of his honorable name, he was a short-sighted fat-gutted fool.

  The members of the city council, having earlier allowed the Catholics to be deprived of their religious freedom, now grew fearful that their own survival was at risk, along with the freedom of the city. They agreed to appeal their case to a higher political authority, Landgraf (Count) Philip of Hesse, Westphalia’s neighbor to the southeast. Philip was himself a Lutheran sympathizer, a man of great personal integrity and opposed to violence from any quarter. To present its political and legal argument to
Philip, the council also agreed to hire as an adviser another respected outsider, Dr. Friedrich von Wyck, an attorney from nearby Bremen. On the ecclesiastical side, it appealed for help in the battle with von Waldeck to a higher religious authority, the Roman Catholic Archbishop in Cologne; he could offer no more help than to warn the council not to “rush into destruction.” Neighborly appeals to nearby towns for help were mostly fruitless, although one small city, Warendorp, was outspoken in its support and the others were at least neutral. Seeing itself without allies and defenseless if mediation by Philip and von Wyck failed, the council reluctantly decided to hire three hundred mercenary soldiers to protect the city.

  In the meantime, on the day after Christmas 1532, about nine hundred armed men conducted a midnight raid on the Bishop’s stronghold in Telgte, yet another palace, this one only a dozen miles distant. They hoped to capture von Waldeck himself, but the Bishop was away for the holiday at his residence in Billerbeck, and they had to settle for taking eighteen men as prisoners. Among these were high church officials as well as humiliated military officers whose negligence had allowed the attack to succeed. There were no injuries and the prisoners were adequately housed in Münster. The audacious raid itself lifted the spirits of the rebels, and the hostages gave the city a much improved bargaining position with the Bishop, who still held their own men, the cattle merchants, captive.

  Drawing back now from open warfare, the two sides during the next five weeks worked out a settlement that was signed in mid-February 1533. Knipperdolling was, after all, a merchant, and he could understand the deadly economics of a blockade. For his part, the Bishop agreed to release the men he had imprisoned for trying to sell their cattle, and to pay a fine to their leader, Herman Tilbeck, for compensation. He also agreed to the city’s municipal independence, saying the Church would not interfere with its business. Finally, the six smaller churches taken over by the Lutherans would remain Lutheran; however, the larger churches, such as St. Lambert’s and the Overwater Church, as well as the Cathedral and the cloister church, would remain Catholic. The city had to promise that Catholic parishioners would not be subject to harassment; all citizens would be subject only to the civil authority of the magistrates. There would be no more heretical preaching by Rothmann or his associates. There were to be no reprisals against the supporters of the Bishop who had fled and would now return, and all property and goods taken from them would be restored. High and low clergy alike would be allowed to pass through the city streets unhindered. Finally, von Waldeck would receive the traditional oath of submission from the city three months hence, in May 1533.

  The city’s autonomy was preserved, as was the Bishop’s dignity, by the truce that Philip of Hesse had sponsored. But Knipperdolling and his allies blamed the council moderates for giving ground and immediately stirred up noisy protests against these men. The radicals were supported by hundreds of zealous newcomers; for months now, despite the blockade, Rothmann’s sermons and other leaflets printed by Knipperdolling had been circulating through Holland, Frisia, and northern Germany. In them Rothmann explained, among other topics, that much human misery stemmed from the idea of “private property.” The very idea of owning anything, of thinking in terms of “this is mine and this is yours” was evil. “God had made all things common, as today we can still enjoy air, fire, rain, and the sun in common, and whatever else some thieving, tyrannical man cannot grasp for himself.” Rothmann temptingly portrayed Münster as a rich city that was now prepared to share its wealth with all who came to it as members of the Company of Christ. He invited and urged those who could contribute to its holy mission to join him, bringing with them only the weapons they would need to defend the new Kingdom of Zion, as he called it, against the ungodly. Throughout 1533, hundreds and finally thousands of the wretched, the dispossessed, and the desperate read Rothmann’s word and made their way to Münster. As they came in, nervous Catholic citizens and others who had the means to leave the city began to do so.

  By March 1533, there were enough of these newcomers in town to help the radicals force a new election; some of the foreigners, like the preacher Henry Roll, were even more intemperate in their demands than Rothmann, and none was reluctant to meddle in the politics of his host city. The consequence was a special election in March which resulted in a new council. All sixteen of the twenty-four members who had agreed to the pact with the Bishop were replaced by hard-liners. Now there were no Catholics and no moderate Lutherans on the council, only declared opponents of the Bishop. These were divided into two factions. The first, slightly larger and more conservative, consisted of Lutherans who thought negotiation was still preferable to conflict, and was led by the respected but elderly clothmaker Jaspar Jodefeld. The second, consisting of Anabaptist sympathizers who thought war was inevitable, was led by the equally respected patrician Herman Tilbeck, who had been among the imprisoned cattle dealers. These two men were the new co-mayors. Serving with them were twelve artisans, mostly guildmasters, and ten businessmen, including Bernard Knipperdolling.

  The new council, strongly influenced by Knipperdolling and Rothmann, set out to right some old wrongs and to correct some problems of behavior among the citizens. The supervision of the schools was taken away from the priests and given to the Lutherans, under a schoolmaster from the town of Borkum, Henry Graes. The poor were given clothing, food, and shelter and put to work on civic projects, including strengthening the city walls. The Catholic monasteries and convents were forced to open their dining tables to the newcomers. Private behavior was closely scrutinized; reports of marital discord and even children’s misbehavior were speedily investigated and resolved. A new sense of moral order and discipline infused the city.

  Some citizens, however, were uneasy at the draconian punishments, such as public whippings, jail, even threats of death, imposed on those “stiffnecked and wayward” types who persisted in whoring, drunkenness, lying, and blasphemy. The driving force behind the earlier agitation of the Lutherans against Bishop von Wiede had been the desire for freedom—for democracy rather than autocracy in government and for religious independence from the Roman Catholic Church. Now those who had achieved that freedom, the moderate Lutherans working with the Catholics, had been driven from office. Their successors, who had claimed an even greater devotion to freedom, were either Anabaptist sympathizers or radical Lutherans, and they were beginning to act like tyrants themselves.

  A key turning point occurred late in 1533, when large-scale public baptisms began, conducted by dozens of newly arrived preachers, including the young tailor’s apprentice from Leyden called Jan Bockelson. Within one week alone, a total of fourteen hundred people became declared Anabaptists, and by no means were all of them the dispossessed or the ignorant rabble, as the Bishop asserted. Many of the new converts were women, some of them merchants’ wives who immediately donated all of their jewels and fine clothes to the cause. Many more were farm girls who worked for these wealthy ladies as maids and housekeepers. And not a few were nuns from the Overwater Church Convent, where the Abbess Ida von Merveldt wrote despairingly to the Bishop that her charges were becoming obstreperous, singing German psalms in church instead of Latin chants, not wearing their habits, ignoring her commands and her tears alike.

  Older men and children above the age of twelve were also baptized during this period. As 1533 drew to a close, it was estimated that as many as one third of the population of Münster consisted of people who were sure that the apocalypse and the Second Coming were at hand. Many of the converts were men whom Jan Bockelson and other leaders immediately organized into armed quasi-military units that operated independent of the city’s own defensive force of mercenary soldiers.

  Jaspar Jodefeld, the co-mayor and leader of the Lutheran faction of the council, saw the city slipping into chaos. The Bishop would feel justified in destroying all of them unless Rothmann and his noisiest assistant, Henry Roll, were stopped. On November 4, 1533, Jodefeld told the council that he intended to send an armed g
uard to evict the two preachers from Münster, in what would be the first armed encounter between the erstwhile allies. As a council member, Knipperdolling knew of the plan and led the preachers to safety in St. Lambert’s Church, along with hundreds of their armed followers. Jodefeld and the other mayor, Herman Tilbeck, who sided in this instance with the less extreme faction of the council, established their own redoubt in the City Hall, a stone’s throw down the street. The two sides exchanged fiery messages until Dr. von Wyck, the Bremen lawyer, persuaded them both that they were guaranteeing a victory for the Bishop by their behavior. A resulting agreement stipulated that the Anabaptists, including Rothmann and Roll, would be allowed to stay, on condition that they refrain from public disturbance. The principle that all were free to choose their own faith was reasserted.

  As part of the settlement between the factions, a Lutheran minister from the court of Philip of Hesse, Dietrich Fabricius, arrived to preach in St. Lambert’s Church. There, in the citadel of the Anabaptists, Fabricius charged that Rothmann was violating the rules of the recent agreement by continued public agitation. On January 4, 1534, a crowd of Anabaptist women rebuked Fabricius for his foreign tongue—Latin—and chased him out of St. Lambert’s, saying the church was properly Rothmann’s, not his. When the mayors admonished the women to go home and look after their children and husbands, Kerssenbrück reports, they withdrew, cursing. They returned to the City Hall the next day with half a dozen apostate nuns from the Overwater Church Convent, who had “shamefully” removed their habits. The women loudly demanded the return of Rothmann to St. Lambert’s; the mayors refused, and were berated by the women, “the nuns the loudest and most profane.” Fabricius was a villainous imposter who deserved to be hanged, the women screamed. When reprimanded by the city fathers, they picked up clods of sheep, pig, and cow dung that lay about the street and hurled them at the hapless men until they retreated behind the locked doors of the City Hall.