Rothmann himself denied inciting anyone to violence or to rebellion. But if war was to come, the cornerstone for their faith had been securely laid and the walls of the city greatly strengthened. No matter how powerful the Papists might appear, they could never destroy the new Company of Christ. Remember the words of Saint Paul, Rothmann exhorted: “Night is passing, a new dawn is coming.”
Bishop Franz was by now almost beside himself with fury. On January 20, 1534, he complained in a letter to Philip about the “disgusting heresies of this damned sect of Anabaptists and their misguided leader Bernard Rothmann, who along with his helpers is trying to pull everything down.” They were particularly dangerous, he complained, because they spent so much time with the poor, telling them that when they adopted their proper Christian way of living there would be “no poverty—on the contrary, all property, as in the time of the Apostles, would be commonly shared by all neighbors.” He went on to complain about the rejection of infant baptism and about their denial of all authority, including the Pope’s. He warned that “if the growing number of Anabaptists get the upper hand in Munster” there would be a bloody confrontation ahead. Shortly afterward, von Waldeck wrote directly to the city council, saying, “We, Franz, Bishop of Münster by the Grace of God, do hereby declare that the damned, forbidden, and treacherous teachings of the Anabaptists are being spread by heretics,” whom the council must expel or suffer the consequences. He summoned Jaspar Jodefeld and Dr. von Wyck to discuss the matter with him in Telgte on February 2.
When Jodefeld announced the coming meeting to the council, Knipperdolling insisted that two other men be included in the party. One was the shoemaker Herman Redeker, the other a formidable thug, a gigantic man called Tile Bussenmeister and nicknamed the Cyclops because he had only one eye—a signal advantage, as some joked, in sighting a rifle. Knipperdolling must have known that the presence of Redeker would have been enough by itself to sabotage any attempt at a meeting, for the shoemaker was charged by the Bishop with having looted a Catholic church in an earlier disturbance; Bussenmeister’s villainous presence was an even greater affront. When the odd delegation arrived at Telgte, the Bishop was outraged at its constitution and sent a messenger to turn it from his gate. He was particularly insulted that Dr. von Wyck, an attorney, should have joined company with thieves and rogues. The attorney should know, the Bishop told him through his messenger, that he was placing his life in great danger.
Back in Münster, the Anabaptists reacted gleefully to the assurance, at last, of an attack by the Bishop that would confirm their apocalyptic expectations. Seething with religious fervor, they began to call for the expulsion of all who were not prepared to fight in their holy war. The nonbelievers, especially the Catholics, would have to leave the city or convert to Anabaptism. Some of the more extreme rebels even called for the execution of the godless ones, as they called their opponents.
It was in this context, then, that Bernard Rothmann went to the convent at Overwater Church on the evening of February 6, 1534, and terrified the nuns with his prediction of coming disaster. He was very convincing: most of the nuns fled the convent, taking their belongings with them to the houses of Rothmann’s supporters, leaving only the Abbess Ida von Merveldt and a few others behind. The wayward nuns joined the huge crowd that gathered during the hour before midnight to watch the cloister’s promised destruction. When the twelfth hour had been tolled by the great bell at St. Lambert’s without the collapse of the cloister, Pastor Bernard Rothmann was unabashed. Surely they must all know, he shouted to the waiting faithful, that a prophet is not false simply because his prophecy fails to take place at a given time. “Jonah foretold that Nineveh would be destroyed in forty days. But the inhabitants repented, and the city remained standing. The anger of the Heavenly Father had been allayed.” So it was now with the convert; it did not fall because the nuns had seen the errors of their ways, causing God to be merciful. This was an occasion of great joy, as great almost as that of the final moments that were still certain to come, sometime. They should all shout their gratitude to the heavens, Rothmann declared, proceeding to lead them all on their mad merry dance through the streets of Münster.
2
THE GODLESS EXPELLED
And the Lord your God, he shall expel them from before you, and drive them from out of your sight; and ye shall possess their land, as the Lord your God hath promised unto you.
—Joshua 23:5
THE FRANTIC REVELRIES of thanksgiving inspired by Rothmann had served to obscure a more sinister aim. As the gray winter dawn broke over Münster a few hours later, on February 9, most of the city council clustered apprehensively behind the heavy stone walls of the Overwater Church Square, next to the river Aa which ran through the heart of the city. With them were several hundred supporters who had rushed to their aid upon hearing that the Anabaptists were about to mount an attack on the City Hall and overthrow the council. One of these was Assola, the young maid of Hermann Kerssenbrück’s landlord, Dr. Johann Wesseling, who had sent her to the church with a musket concealed beneath her long skirts. Discovered by the Anabaptist guards who now controlled the Market Square through which she had to pass, Assola was deprived of her weapon and roughly treated until a friendly neighbor intervened on her behalf and she was allowed to pass.
There was no shortage of arms among the more than five hundred Anabaptists who now circulated outside the City Hall, waiting for instruction from their leaders as to their next step. The initial attempt to capture the council had failed with its escape into the Overwater Church and the partial destruction of the wooden bridge across the river. Now the two factions—Lutherans and Catholics on the one hand, Anabaptists on the other—faced each other and tried to determine what the third party to this dispute, the Bishop, was about to do.
The immediate cause of the Anabaptists’ attack was the rumor, circulating now for several days, that the Bishop had gathered several hundred knights and soldiers in addition to three thousand farmers outside the city. The Bishop had made it known that he considered the Anabaptists his major enemy, not the council. As Knipperdolling and the increasingly influential young Jan Bockelson, or, as he was usually called, Jan van Leyden, saw it, the council’s persistent attempts to rein in Rothmann were not prompted by the desire to ensure religious freedom for all but to placate the Bishop. They thought that Jodefeld and the other moderates had lost heart and were negotiating to save their own skins and deliver the Anabaptists up for certain execution. Also alarming was the report that Dr. von Wyck, the Bremen lawyer who had been responsible for holding the factions together, planned to flee the city; if this prudent man foresaw disaster, then only drastic action on the part of the Anabaptists, as they must have seen the matter, could now save them.
While it seems unlikely that the council did intend to surrender so easily, after years of staunch resistance, the actions of the Anabaptists indicate a sincere belief that an attack by the Bishop was imminent. Several cannons were set in the tower of St. Lambert’s Church, capable of firing over the city walls or into the square below if the Bishop’s men broke through. Others were dragged by teams of horses into critical intersections. Streets were blocked with iron chains, and barricades were constructed of cobblestones, wagons, and furniture lowered from apartment windows. A last-ditch defensive redoubt was established in the Cathedral Square. The day wore on, the Anabaptists waiting for the Bishop to attack them, and the council waiting for an assault from the Anabaptists.
Soon the collusion between Bishop and council that the Anabaptists feared seemed about to take place, though it was probably their own actions that prompted it: a messenger managed to reach von Waldeck with a desperate plea from the city council to send military help. The Bishop had indeed been gathering his forces in nearby Telgte, probably more from a hope to intimidate the city into surrendering than because he planned to attack. Word came back that the Bishop would send his delegate Melchior von Buren, the knight charged with the military protection of the
Cathedral, with a message for the city’s representative. Herman Tilbeck, the co-mayor, was safely seen through the gate near the Overwater Church and taken to von Buren’s open campfire beyond the outer wall.
Tilbeck was the logical choice for this mission, despite the earlier incident with the cattle that had resulted in his being held hostage. He was on an approximately equal social level with von Waldeck, as the only member of the present council to come from the local landed gentry, the “patriciate,” and he had a reputation as a reasonable man. He returned from his meeting with only an oral message, and that a discouraging one: the Bishop would not make any kind of a deal.
The next day, February 10, Bernard Knipperdolling approached the Overwater Church. “You must repent!” he shouted to the defenders within. The elderly Jaspar Jodefeld rushed at the merchant with a spear, intent on running him through, before he was restrained. Knipperdolling was thrust into a cell with half a dozen other Anabaptists whom the council had discovered among their ranks and warned that his life would be forfeit if his fellow believers attacked them.
As the day wore on, farmers by the hundreds began filtering into the city, admitted by the council through the gate which it still denied to the Bishop’s soldiers. The farmers were armed with scythes, pitchforks, heavy hammers, clubs, and wooden staves. They must have looked to the Anabaptists, whom they now threatened, like the peasants in Brueghel’s paintings: sturdy, superstitious, and ignorant, their brutality and potential for violence obvious in their heavy shoulders and thick-featured, low-browed faces. To the Catholic citizens of Münster, however, who had placed straw crosses on their doors to signify their fidelity to the Bishop, the farmers were devout companions in the only true faith and their potential saviors.
The pressures for some kind of rapprochement between the two city factions grew more intense. Mayor Tilbeck argued that the council should make a pact of mutual defense with the Anabaptists. Supported by an apparently shaken and repentant Knipperdolling, and despite the reservations of Jodefeld, the council agreed to meet with Jan van Leyden and Rothmann. A truce was struck by mid-afternoon. Prisoners and hostages were to be immediately released; each side agreed to refrain from interfering with the other’s right to worship as it chose; and each swore to support the other in their common quarrel with the Bishop.
When word of the truce between the supposedly responsible Lutherans and the heretic Anabaptists was passed to the Bishop’s officers waiting outside the gate, they received it, according to Kerssenbrück, “with tears and sighs.” The Bishop said that the truce was the work of the devil. He felt that he had made the city a legitimate offer that had been spurned and he was angry—justifiably so, for as was later revealed, his offer had never reached the council: Herman Tilbeck, the reasonable man, the patrician, had secretly joined the Anabaptist cause sometime earlier and was functioning as Knipperdolling’s agent when he received the Bishop’s message. That message was not the dismissive oral communication that Tilbeck conveyed to the council, but a written document in which the Bishop swore that he wished only to defend and guarantee the freedom of the city. The Anabaptists were his enemy, and he would destroy them if the council would see to it that the gate by the Overwater Church was opened for his soldiers. The others who had resisted him, including the council, would not be harmed. Tilbeck burned the Bishop’s offer and misled the council into thinking it had no other course than a truce with the Anabaptists.
The last chance to avoid disaster had just been lost to treachery and deceit, but few could see that at the time. The farmers, who had earlier looked so menacing, stacked their scythes and crowded into the taverns for beer and sausage before they “made their way home to their wives.” At sunset, as the last one disappeared, the main gate was pulled shut and locked, and the Anabaptists burst into songs of thanksgiving. They could not doubt now, Rothmann and the other preachers assured them, that God was on their side—they all knew from their memories of the Peasants’ War that you did not often buy off a mob of fanatical farmers with a few beers!
But it was well for the peasants that they had left, for now, as Rothmann wrote shortly afterward to a friend, a wonderful event occurred: the setting sun was not just one sun but three, a true miracle sent from God. The clouds appeared to be on fire, and the faces of all of the faithful were golden, as were the stones on the street. The divine flames that illuminated the faithful, they all knew, would also destroy their enemies: “If the farmers had remained a half hour longer,” Rothmann said, “they would have been consumed by these flames and sent to Hell.” He sent off messengers immediately to Holland and Frisia with descriptions of this miraculous salvation and manifestation of God’s saving grace. At the same time, Jan van Leyden sent a message to the man who had replaced the pacific Melchior Hoffman as the leader of the northern Anabaptists, Jan Matthias. The time has come at last, the younger Jan informed Matthias: he must come immediately to Münster.
In the meantime the Anabaptists celebrated their victory in the streets with what Kerssenbrück described as shameless abandon. They leaped into the air “as if they wanted to fly,” especially the women, who let their hair down and opened their garments or threw them away entirely, and flung themselves in the street in the shape of a cross, rolling in pig- and cow-dung. Their shrieking reminded the boy of a thousand squealing pigs. Men and women raced about in circles, foam spilling from their lips: “Nothing could have been more frightful, more insane, or more comic.” A single incident combined all three of these elements for the young Catholic; the clouds referred to by Rothmann were not simply on fire, one man declared. They were fiery horses on whose backs rode angels with waving swords. Looking up, the boy saw only a beautiful sunset whose rays reflected blindingly from a weather vane in the shape of a gilded cock. As he watched, another believer, presumably suspecting witchcraft, shot it from the roof with an arrow.
The celebrations shortly took on a more organized character: it was carnival time, the pre-Lenten festival that had traditionally served as a release for Catholics before the stringent observances of the Easter season. The Anabaptists seized upon the occasion to parody the Catholics and Bishop Franz himself in a public procession. A company of maskers dressed as priests, monks, and nuns led a parade of revelers, singing hymns with obscene lyrics. They were followed by a chariot pulled by six men wearing the habits of different religious orders; on the box sat a mock Bishop with a miter looted from a city church, urging his steeds forward. Behind him a priest wearing hugely exaggerated spectacles intoned a parody of the last rites over a “dying” man. A sturdy blacksmith named Rusher had harnessed himself to a farm cart in which two young men rode and pretended to scourge him with whips.
Within a few days the persuasive accounts of their deliverance from evil sent abroad by Rothmann drew scores of ardent supporters to Münster, who passed with contemptuous ease through the Bishop’s all-but-abandoned blockade. Among them were the two Krechting brothers: Henry, the surveyor with whom Jan van Leyden had lived for several months in Schöppingen, had brought with him not only his younger brother Bernard but his own wife and their two sons, both under ten years of age. These men, like hundreds of others, were so certain of the righteous cause of the New Zion that they did not hesitate to risk the lives of their families as well as their own.
They took the place of other men who saw nothing but trouble ahead and chose to flee, like Jaspar Jodefeld, who soon found safety in the small city of Hamm, and like the Bremen attorney, Dr. Friedrich von Wyck. Jodefeld was too old to be effective and was no great loss. Von Wyck, however, was a much more impressive man, a true statesman who would have been capable of great work in the right setting. He had left his lucrative practice in Bremen at considerable personal sacrifice to help his birth city regain its balance, but he was compromised by being caught in the middle. His frustration had peaked earlier when he had been saddled with Redeker as part of the truce team during their failed negotiations with the Bishop: the Anabaptists hated him for calling Redeke
r a thief, and the Bishop had threatened him for allowing that same thief to accompany him, and for choosing to help the city separate itself from his power.
The Bishop’s soldiers overtook von Wyck shortly after he left Münster, quietly and in the dead of the night. He was taken first to Bevergen, then to Iburg, and finally to Fürstenau. There he would remain in the charge of one of the Bishop’s most trusted men, Count Eberhard von Morrien, until von Waldeck decided his fate.
Until now the unrest in Münster had resulted only in physical intimidation and harassment; neither the Anabaptists there nor their opponents had been charged with any deaths. Von Wyck must have assumed that he would be punished by having to ransom his freedom. Von Morrien and he were well acquainted, and he was made as comfortable as if he were an honored guest and not a prisoner. But one morning soon after his arrival, as the knight and his illustrious guest were playing their customary leisurely game of chess, a messenger arrived with a note from the Bishop. It was the Bishop’s order, he said, that the message be read immediately. Von Morrien broke the seal and read the letter. His face grew pale. Von Wyck asked him what was the matter. “Herr Doktor,” von Morrien replied heavily, “it has to do with your life. The Prince orders that you be beheaded immediately.”
The Tailor-King Page 4