He handed the letter to the attorney. Von Wyck read it and responded angrily. Even if he had offended the Bishop, it was not possible that he should be secretly charged, tried, and executed. He demanded a proper trial. Von Morrien interrupted the lawyer and begged him not to blame him for ordering his death. He reminded him that he, von Morrien, was bound by a holy oath to follow his orders, and that his own life was forfeit if he failed to do so. Von Wyck reproached him, saying that a man had a higher duty to God when he was given such an order, and that God alone had the right to determine his guilt or innocence, not the Prince-Bishop. All his protests were in vain: the messenger had arrived with both a priest and an executioner, who waited below in the courtyard. Von Wyck rejected the ministrations of the priest with contempt, commended his soul to Heaven, and bared his neck to the executioner.
When news of the execution reached the city council in Münster, they sent a message to the Bishop asking the cause. He responded promptly that von Wyck had not been condemned as a supporter of the Anabaptists but because he had been a “rebel” who used his office in Münster to challenge the old ways and to stir up agitation. Any further hope on the part of the council for mercy from the Bishop was buried with the Bremen attorney.
As the model of tempered good sense and goodwill in the person of Dr. von Wyck passed from the stage, another, very different, kind of man entered onto it. When Jan van Leyden sent his message to Jan Matthias, saying that the time for his presence had come, it was as a pupil to a teacher, or as a servant to a master, for Matthias had himself baptized the younger man two years earlier. But Matthias was much more than one man’s exemplar: he was now the titular head of the Anabaptists, in place of the jailed Melchior Hoffman. For him to come to Münster was analogous to a visit from the Pope or the Emperor, but it was even more significant to his followers because he was seen as the revivified presence of the Prophet Enoch, sent hither to announce the Second Coming.
Jan Matthias had been a humble baker in Amsterdam until he was converted and baptized by Melchior Hoffman in the 1520s. After that, he dedicated his life to following Hoffman, baptizing thousands of men and women and gradually assuming dominance over the now-imprisoned leader. At some point in recent years, he had determined that Hoffman’s pacifism was completely wrong; the only proper response to oppression was violent resistance. It was not Christ that the Anabaptists should choose as their model but Jehovah, the God of wrath and vengeance. As official repression grew during the 1520s, so did Matthias’s propensity for violence, though as yet it had borne little fruit.
Now in his mid-fifties, Matthias’s tall figure was gaunt and stooped, his muscular baker’s forearms wasted. His skull, almost bald, was enormous, his black eyes huge and piercing, and his flowing beard reached almost to the rope belt of his black robe. He stalked the streets of Münster, always accompanied by his beautiful dark-haired wife Divara, a former Carmelite nun some twenty years his junior. The vivid contrasts in their physical appearance were heightened by their dress: Matthias always attired in black robes, Divara in white. They were both attended constantly by worshipful crowds. It was not difficult to see him as an Old Testament prophet, in spirit if not in fact, as he inveighed against the evils of the godless ones who still infested the New Zion—that is, the Catholics and Lutherans who had refused to undergo a second baptism. There were no figures among his allies to challenge Matthias, even if they had been so inclined. Bernard Rothmann, for all his eloquence, paled in comparison to the Prophet, as did Bernard Knipperdolling, for all of his fervor and passion. Only Jan van Leyden seemed able to maintain his composure in the presence of Jan Matthias.
The Prophet had not been in Münster more than a few days when he asserted that the city council had to be changed; the people should be represented by those who “did not follow the instinct of the flesh but of the spirit”—the council should be composed entirely of Anabaptists or those who were about to convert. Only a few months earlier the truly representative city council had been replaced by one more amenable to the demands of the radical Lutherans and their Anabaptist allies. Now these men were in turn dislodged from power as insufficiently devout. A second special election returned only six of the twenty-four men to office. The new members were all declared Anabaptists or soon to become so. Losing their positions were Jodefeld, who had already fled, Henry Mollenheck, the prominent leader of the blacksmiths’ guild, and Herman Tilbeck—who, despite his valuable service in betraying the city and the recent public baptism of himself and his family, was not fully trusted, perhaps for reasons of class.
The new co-mayors were Bernard Knipperdolling and the wealthy clothier Gerd Kibbenbrock, a tiny man famous for his hot temper. These two were the only men of property on the council; the rest, in a radical departure from the principle that only men with a large personal stake in the fortunes of the city should serve, were workmen—carpenters, tailors, masons, blacksmiths, and furriers. Communist dialecticians a few centuries later would praise the results of this election as the first dictatorship of the proletariat. For Jan Matthias, it was the realization of the theocratic state that he vowed would destroy the larger state that contained it.
The destruction began as the Anabaptists celebrated the election with drunken parties in the streets, which soon became violent. The Bishop was hanged in effigy. Houses that had been decorated with straw crosses were looted and their owners beaten. Abbess Ida von Merveldt and the Bailiff of the Cathedral, Dirk von Merveldt (the two were not related) had already fled the city with the lesser clergy, along with Melchior von Buren and his men. The great domed Cathedral, now undefended, was invaded by men carrying axes, sledgehammers, and long knives. Latin Bibles and a painting of the Virgin Mary were smeared with human feces. The tombs of long-dead Church leaders were broken open and the bones and ashes strewn on the floor. The altars were hammered to kindling and the stained-glass windows shattered with arrows and axes. Other paintings were destroyed and their frames turned into toilet seats for the guardhouses. Wooden statues were burned, those of marble shattered. A collection of medieval manuscripts assembled by the poet Rudolf Lange and other books not hidden by the staff were burned. The great organ was torn down and its brass pipes hauled away to be melted into shell casings. Bronze plates were pried loose from coffins for a similar fate. The glass and gears and finely inlaid wood of the recently completed great ornamental clock had no utility when the clock was destroyed and were merely left on the cold stone floor.
Such barbarous vandalism was neither aimless nor irrational in the eyes of the Anabaptists: the contemptible and disgusting symbols of Catholic religious authority had to be desecrated and destroyed—and, most of all, made vulnerable to attack, in order for the institutions of Church and state themselves to be overthrown. Much of Jan Matthias’s power came from the simplicity of his message to people who had long suffered from oppression and were not open to subtleties of argument and debate: his message was as direct and forceful as a boot in the face, to paraphrase George Orwell’s later observations about fascism. Insofar as Matthias had a coherent ideology, it consisted of destruction in order to achieve salvation: “We preach the separation of the world. The state is to be used to destroy the state.” He demanded a theocracy devoted to the worship of God the Father, the jealous and demanding and wrathful Father, not his meek and mild and loving Son. He railed against Satan, who spread himself outward like the limbs of a great oak tree, against the wicked idols of Moloch, against unbelievers in the saddle, against false Christs and false prophets. And he spoke fervently of the New Zion in Münster, where only the newly baptized could expect forgiveness from the Lord. All others would be executed or expelled into the outer darkness.
The Catholics, many of whom had roots in Münster going back for centuries, began to leave their home in mid-February 1534, in the first of two major departures during that month. The first time, the departing citizens were allowed to take what they could with them, except for food; it was clear to the Anabaptists that
the Bishop would be forced to besiege the city, and they were already filling the warehouses with provisions. Some ingenious women, looking at a long few days on the road, tried to smuggle sausages under their skirts. One of them, Kerssenbrück says, was intercepted by the furrier Sundermann, on guard at the gate, who thought she looked uncommonly fat, and upon feeling her body in a very familiar manner discovered the sausages. Guards then began to force the evacuees to hand over their heavy coats and to open their bags for inspection, and men were assigned to poke through mattresses and bedding with long knives. Any protests were met by mockery and curses such as “On your way to the hangman, you gallows birds—you’ll never come back here!”
But many Catholics remained in the city, unwilling to give up their homes and their belongings and hoping that the Bishop would somehow intervene to save them. Matthias now demanded again in a public sermon that not only the Catholics but the Lutherans be killed, so that “true Christians can serve God the father without hindrance.” The translation by the Victorian scholar Baring-Gould endows Matthias with a degree of rhetorical elegance: “The Father demands the purification and the cleansing of His New Jerusalem. Our republic cannot tolerate the confusion sown by impious sects. I advise that we slaughter without delay the Lutherans, the Papists, and all those who are not of the right faith. None may remain alive in Zion but those who can offer to the Father a pure and pleasing worship. The only way to preserve the righteous from the contagion of the impure is to sweep them from the face of the earth. We are supremely strong and can do this immediately without fear of interference from within the city or without.” A more accurate sense of what Matthias actually sounded like can only come from seeing his words in the original breathless German: “Draussen aber sind die Hunde und die Zauberer und die Huren and the Totschläger und the Abgöttischen und alle die die Lügen lieben and tun!” (“Everywhere we are surrounded by dogs and sorcerers and whores and killers and the godless and all who love lies and commit them!”)
Such mad passion was beyond the Prophet’s chief disciples, who thought the city was not yet strong enough for a full-scale war with the Bishop. Only Knipperdolling had the courage to challenge Matthias and his plan to exterminate the godless ones. They would ruin themselves by so doing, Knipperdolling argued. It was not that he valued the lives of the Catholics or indeed of the Lutherans—his townsmen and business partners for many years though they had been. And it was true that the Bishop by himself could do them little harm at this stage of the conflict. But if the Schmalkaldic League, the association of northern cities of which Münster was a part, grew fearful that any city could find a third of its population murdered, then it would give the Bishop enough arms and men to overwhelm them. Until we are stronger, Knipperdolling advised, let us settle for simply expelling the godless ones from the city. This time, however, those who were driven away would have to leave everything they owned for the benefit of the Company of Christ. Thus would the city be purged of those miserable wretches who refuse the New Covenant and at the same time be enriched by their wealth. Matthias reluctantly agreed to settle for the expulsion of the unbelievers.
The next morning, February 27, was bitterly cold. A hard frost had glazed the cobblestones. A sleeting rain, driven almost sideways by a fierce north wind, would normally have kept most people indoors, but the squares were thronged with armed Anabaptists who had been told of the coming expulsion and some worried citizens who did not know what was going on. Hooded preachers carrying long staffs moved among them, kissing the true believers, both men and women, on the lips, as Jesus was said to have done. Those few who resisted were clearly not of the faith, and were driven toward the main gate, where a double guard thrust them out of the city. Matthias appeared now, taller than any of the others and looking like the very Angel of Death in his hooded black robe. Facing the shuttered windows of the houses that lined the square, behind which, he knew, cowered the unbelievers, he screamed threats and warnings: “Turn, turn, O sinners. See the storm of sleet and snow that the Father has sent against you? The very elements themselves despise your presence if you do not join us now!” He threw himself face down into the freezing slush and, his arms extended, fell into a trance. Rothmann, Knipperdolling, and Jan van Leyden rushed to his side and announced that the Lord was about to reveal Himself through His Prophet. Matthias opened his eyes like one awakening from a dream, rose to his full height, and said, “Hear now the word of your God! Cleanse this holy city of its impurities! Drive away the sons of Esau! This place, this New Jerusalem, belongs to the sons of Jacob!”
Released now to action, the Anabaptists roamed the city, invading every house, scouring every garret, every cellar, driving from their hiding places old men and women, entire families, invalids, kitchen maids and laborers as well as their masters, whose fine clothes and jewelry were stripped away and tossed into baskets. The men were pushed and shoved if they moved too slowly, or if, like the hapless Fabricius, they had made themselves known as opponents. Matthias himself stopped a wagon driven by the old clergyman Dr. Johann Dungel, of St. Mauritz, and put a spear to his chest: “You won’t escape unpunished, you old traitor! You can keep either your money or your life.” Dungel protested that Knipperdolling had assured him he would be allowed to leave unmolested, to which Matthias responded, “I never made such a promise!” He pulled the rings from the old man’s fingers and finally let him go, minus the wagon, on foot.
Herman Kerssenbrück and his landlord Dr. Wesseling were among the expelled though both remained in the vicinity of the outer wall for the day, hoping they would be allowed to return. Until recently the boy had regarded what he had seen as a comedy. Now he saw terrible things that imprinted themselves on his memory, to be recalled years later as the last of his personal experiences with the Anabaptists. “The women carried their naked nursing babies and begged in vain for rags to clothe them in. Other women, driven from their maternity beds, gave birth in the streets. Miserable children, barefoot in the snow, whimpered beside their fathers. Old people, bent by age, tottered along calling God’s vengeance down upon their persecutors.” Unmoved by pity, the preachers watched the old and the sick, women and children, leave through the gates for an uncertain fate. It was unfortunate, said Pastor Bernard Rothmann; but they had to be sacrificed for the sake of the chosen who remained as the Company of Christ.
Those who could not bring themselves to leave town and who consented to conversion were subjected to a chilly baptism in the Market Square, where the preachers poured water over their heads from large copper vats. Others who were physically unable to leave were carried to the square and baptized. One doughty old woman resisted Rothmann’s efforts to convert her, saying that she had been baptized already, as had her ancestors; she did not require another ceremony. Rothmann grew impatient. “Then you must be separated from those who do believe by death, so that the wrath of the Father does not descend upon us.” “Well, then, let it be so,” she replied. “You may baptize me in the name of the devil, for I have already been baptized in the name of God.”
The revolution was now complete, but its leaders were shaken immediately by two events. The first was the arrival of bad news from Amsterdam. A week before the expulsion of the unbelievers, the most militant of the Anabaptists, Henry Roll, had left Münster for the Dutch city of Maastricht. His mission was to raise support for Münster among the Anabaptists in Holland—their money, their weapons, their physical presence, if they were fighting men. However, the Spanish rulers of Holland, alarmed at the increasing unrest in neighboring Westphalia, were keeping a close watch on their own religious rebels. Now word was received that Roll had died, burned at the stake in Utrecht, his ashes scattered in the neighboring fields. More disturbing even than the news of his death was that he had prophesied it and done nothing to avoid easy capture. The Anabaptists professed to envy him his selection for the special blessing by the Lord, but they must have seen that suicide was not the message they wanted their converts to receive.
The sec
ond event was less surprising, as it had been both anticipated and provoked. The morning after the expulsion, on February 28, the fog lifted from the moat to reveal the figures of hundreds of laborers erecting earthen barriers around the three-mile circumference of the city, several hundred yards beyond the range of the defenders’ cannons. Behind the barriers, barely visible, were the first few of what would be dozens of white-walled tents with the Bishop’s crest dangling limply from their peaks. The siege of Münster had finally begun.
3
A MIGHTY FORTRESS
A mighty fortress is our God
A bulwark never failing;
Our helper He amid the flood
Of mortal ills prevailing.
—Martin Luther
MÜNSTER WAS OFTEN compared to a wasps’ nest during this period of frantic, aggressive consolidation of power by the Anabaptists. Franz von Waldeck, for his part, was like a lethargic, lumbering bear as he approached the nest, uncertain how to grasp it. On February 3, immediately following his disgusted dismissal of von Wyck and Redeker, he had ordered his knights to prepare for an attack, only to find them resistant and anxious to pursue further negotiations. Lashing out at easier targets, von Waldeck executed several Anabaptists in nearby towns: five women and one man were drowned in Wolbeck, and in Bevergen four women were drowned and two men burned at the stake. Everywhere in his bishopric the belongings of those who, like the Krechting brothers, had joined the rebels in Münster were confiscated. When the Anabaptists, undeterred, welcomed Jan Matthias and took over the city council on February 23, the Bishop met with his command staff yet again to discuss the growing probability of a siege. His chief lieutenants were Johann von Buren, Hermann von Mengerssen, Eberhard von Morrien, and Johann von Raesfeld as his commander-in-chief. He assured them that their services would only be needed for one or two months, at most.
The Tailor-King Page 5