Two days later, on February 25, the rebels sent a force of men outside the city gates to the St. Mauritz Church, a few hundred feet from the city’s outer wall. The high and sturdy stone walls of the old church would have provided the attackers with an excellent platform for their cannons. The Anabaptists set explosive charges and blew it up, leaving the Bishop a heap of rubble for his cannon mounts.
The expulsion of the unbelievers two days after that had been the final insult. The Bishop was now forced to respond in earnest; the rusty, creaking machinery of late-medieval warfare was about to grind into action.
To begin with, von Waldeck had no artillery of his own and had to borrow cannons, wagons, and horses from various sources. Philip of Hesse sent two gigantic siege cannons, nicknamed the Devil and the Devil’s Mother. Lighter cannon and field artillery pieces arrived from other sources, including the Prince of Cleves, the Archbishop of Cologne, and the Prince of Bentheim. A total of forty-two heavy weapons would ultimately be positioned in front of the Judefelder Gate, the Hörst Gate, and the St. Mauritz Gate; in the latter location they were protected from attack by the defenders of the city by the fallen stone walls of the destroyed church, but elsewhere they were screened by more than three thousand “good, strong, portable” lattices of braided reeds and rushes and tree branches, each eight by twelve feet in size.
Huge quantities of munitions and other supplies arrived in wagon convoys from near and distant cities: nearly three hundred barrels of powder from Brabant and Amsterdam, an equivalent amount of saltpeter and sulfur from Mengen, iron musket balls from Deventer, three hundred and thirty wheelbarrows and twenty-two hundred shovels from a variety of sources. Secure armories were built to contain these materials as well as the weapons the soldiers needed—muskets, halberds, lances, spears, small portable bombs for blowing up wooden gates. Powder mills and smelters in Osnabrück and Iburg were commissioned to replace supplies as they were depleted.
The soldiers who were to enforce the Bishop’s will began to assemble during the middle of February, as the Anabaptists had already observed. While many were from nearby, not a few had come great distances—from the Rhine Valley, from Saxony, from the Netherlands, from Denmark. By May there would be nearly eight thousand of them, almost all mercenaries who fought only for money. At their best, these Landsknechte lived up to the model set in the Middle Ages by the Swiss guards, whose discipline, courage, and long lances had become legendary. With their fantastically colorful costumes and their freedom from the ordinary constraints of life, they may now appear to us as romantic figures. More often, though, they were neither heroic nor romantic, living lives that, in Thomas Hobbes’s memorable phrase, were nasty, brutish, and short. Victims of their century—peasants, laborers, and artisans whom plague, religious wars, and economic dislocations had turned into wandering adventurers—they roamed the continent with their wives or their camp followers, with their horses, their dogs, and their weapons ready for hire.
Such men were often notoriously unreliable and undisciplined. Many who wound up fighting for the Bishop had come to Münster after hearing rumors that the Anabaptists were willing to pay well for professional protection. The Bishop’s men told the mercenaries that they had two choices, neither of which included being allowed to fight for the Anabaptists: they could either sit out the siege in chains or they could join the Bishop. Once they were hired, all soldiers were subject to clear and harsh rules of discipline, violation of which meant torture or death. The rules of engagement included division of the booty after victory, which provides insight into what the Bishop hoped to accomplish in Münster. In addition to pledging that they would “fight bravely” for their commanders, the soldiers had to acknowledge that they were aware of the following: (1) powder and bullets taken from the enemy have been promised to the Bishop; (2) the Bishop is not obligated to pay any soldier who engages in plundering; (3) the City Hall is not to be plundered or damaged, whatever booty is found there belongs to the Bishop; (4) anything found belonging to the Church officials who had been expelled from the city must be returned to them; (5) everything must remain in the private houses after the conquest, including carpets and wall hangings; (6) the soldiers must formally acknowledge the authority of the Bishop once they are in control of the city; (7) the soldiers must leave the city within eight days after the trumpet sounds victory—during this period they will receive their assigned shares of the booty and the salary still owed to them; (8) the soldiers must not kill the leaders of the rebellion but try to capture them alive, in which case they will be amply rewarded.
The soldiers were divided among seven tented compounds situated in a line that stretched for nearly four miles around the city, just outside of cannon range. Each compound was about a half mile from its neighbors. All were easily visible from the city gate towers. It was a constantly busy scene. Neighboring village merchants, at first distressed because Münster had been their best customer, set up shop in and between the tent compounds, selling the soldiers whatever they needed in the way of food and drink and supplies. The soldiers’ wives and mistresses hung out their laundry, and their children played in the fields. The scene from the city walls must have looked almost festive with the white pinnacled tents, the vividly colored princely crests fluttering under von Waldeck’s coat of arms, the smoke from cooking fires drifting into the damp spring skies, and the sounds of trumpets and drums as the men practiced their formations …
But it was dangerously expensive as well, not only for von Waldeck but for his numerous creditors—the monthly payroll for the lounging soldiers alone was 34,000 guilders, plus expenses for supplies, transportation, and administration. The Bishop did not lack for allies. Since the Peasants’ War had ended, the Emperor had impressed on all his princes the necessity of mutual defense in time of trouble; anarchy would be loosed in the land if one member of the confederation was allowed to fall. In addition to weapons, supplies, and money provided by Hesse, Cleves, and Queen Marie of Burgundy, von Waldeck received loans from church authorities in Paderborn (2,100 gold guilders), Osnabrück (one thousand gold guilders), and Capenberg (two thousand gold guilders). But far more came in the form of loans from nobles and businessmen—a total of nearly 25,000 gold guilders borrowed at rates of five to ten percent yearly interest. (A gold guilder would be worth about $50 in today’s dollars.)
The economic pressures on the Bishop trickled down to his subjects. He had ordered the Catholic churches in his domain to turn over to him their jewelry and gold and silver; in addition they now had to pay a ten percent yearly tax. The farmers were also assessed a war tax on each “plow and cow,” even as they were compelled to leave their fields during spring planting and dig trenches and earthen assault barriers for the Bishop’s soldiers.
By early May the Bishop’s subjects, his creditors, and his superiors—the Archbishop of Cologne and Emperor Charles V—were reaching the end of their patience with the delay in prosecuting the war. After two months the heretics still owned Münster and seemed to be growing stronger, not weaker, even though it was known that some recent events in the city seemed to signal some fatal flaws in its leadership. But not only had the Bishop not attacked, he also had begun to fall behind on his payments to the soldiers; while many stayed in their camps, hoping eventually to be paid, others were beginning to drift away. Some, including a company-grade officer, Gert von Münster, had even deserted to the Anabaptists, taking with him several of his men.
The Bishop’s hesitation derived, it would appear, from the hope that his huge force would intimidate the defenders into surrendering without a fight. There were those within the city who could have told him he was wasting his time: not only was the city virtually invulnerable to direct assault, it was defended by people who, whatever their theological peculiarities, were well-led, fearless, and fighting for their lives.
Long before the Anabaptists or the Lutherans came on the scene, in the middle of the thirteenth century, Münster had become a virtual state within a state, wi
th the right to levy taxes, issue its own coinage, and elect its own government. It had been, from its earliest days, one of the most securely fortified cities in northern Germany. Lacking the natural advantages of such mountain fastnesses as Rothenburg on the Tauber and Coburg, as well as ready access to large quantities of stone, the engineers who designed Münster’s defenses over the centuries had used the river Aa that bisected the city as the key to its protection. Since the first castle on the site had been built in the eighth century, walls and moats had been added as well as a gun tower, or Zwinger, near the New Bridge Gate, where the Aa leaves the city. There were ten gate towers, connected by a twelve-foot high broad inner palisade with a stone foundation. Each gate led to a drawbridge across the inner moat, nearly one hundred feet across. Beyond the moat was a second, lower, earthen wall, anchored by eight squat round stone towers and the more substantial Zwinger, all of which housed cannons and sharpshooters. And beyond that wall there was yet another barrier, a second moat—all together, the combined defenses of walls and moats kept attackers more than three hundred yards away from the city’s interior.
Behind the inner wall the cobbled streets and wooden houses of the city lay secure against all but lucky cannon shots or flaming arrows designed to set thatched roofs on fire—all of which were destroyed by the defenders before they could become a hazard. There was in any event abundant water from the river Aa for fighting fires. The river also provided water for drinking and for irrigating crops, in addition to carp, bass, and eels for food. Münster was a market town as well as a commercial trading center, and all of the cottages on the outskirts and many within the city proper had their own vegetable gardens. Smokehouses and granaries, breweries and barns in abundance made it unlikely that Münster would be starved into submission for at least a year, and few medieval sieges lasted that long.
But armed defenders, not walls and garden plots, are needed to protect a city against a professional army nearly as large in numbers as its nine thousand inhabitants. On its face, Münster may have looked woefully undermanned: most of the approximately sixteen hundred men between the ages of eighteen and fifty were not trained soldiers but artisans and merchants; about four hundred adolescent boys and old men might also serve in an emergency. More than half—five thousand—of the total population were women, and two thousand more were young children. In an ordinary army, assuming three guard shifts per day, only about five hundred men would be ready to fight at any given moment. Many of these would presumably be handicapped by fear of what would happen to their families if they failed to defend them adequately.
In Münster, though, virtually everyone became a vital part of the city’s defense; few of the nine thousand were allowed to be dead weight. Moreover, many of the new arrivals were true believers like Henry Krechting, who had not only brought his family but heeded Rothmann’s command to bring weapons: “He who has a knife, or a sword, or a gun should take them along, and if he does not have them, buy them, because the Lord is going to save us through His mighty arm but He requires evidence that we are willing to fight for ourselves and for His Kingdom.” Thus most of the men, though they might not be soldiers by profession, were not only ready to fight but were armed as well; in all, four hundred and fifty muskets as well as shorter firearms, swords, pikestaffs, and bows were available for the defenders, plus eighty-six cannons—twice as many as the Bishop had, and all nicely protected in stone battlements, not hiding behind straw lattices.
From the start the Anabaptists aggressively challenged the Bishop and his soldiers, burning his mills, destroying a brickworks, and killing a number of the enemy. As a warning that the soldiers could expect nothing from them but trouble, they cut off the head of a captured drummer and stuck it on the peak of the Bisping Gate. Night forays into the very tents of the soldiers left some of them with their throats slit and messages inviting the others to desert their godless and losing cause and to join the Company of Christ instead.
But for the most part, more attention was paid in these early days to preparations for defense. The fighting force was divided into ten companies, one for each gate, and it maintained the active watch. Elderly men were assigned to night patrol duties and fire brigades. The older boys, laughing and excited, were given archery lessons by Tile Bussenmeister, the one-eyed giant, and taught how to charge and how to retreat in good order. Older women and young girls prepared meals in the new kitchens and dining halls near each gate where all now took their meals together, presided over by the Anabaptist preachers.
The defenders knew that in an attack the enemy’s cannons would be brought to bear on selected sections of the wall. Repeated pounding with thirty-pound iron and stone balls would destroy any wall, which meant that it had to be reinforced from within, a major project. Trees outside the walls were cut down at night to deprive the Bishop’s troops of cover and dragged back to be used, along with the decorative linden trees that had shaded the city’s streets and squares, to shore up the walls. When these ran out, unoccupied wooden houses were torn down for their heavy beams and structural members. Paving stones, grave markers, and marble slabs wrenched from the Catholic tombs in the churches were used to finish off the reinforced inner wall.
The defenders built their own powder mill next to the Cathedral and a charcoal kiln in the nearby Rosenthal Church. Crews of women brought the charcoal to the men operating the mill. Others scraped the accumulated deposits of saltpeter from the caked walls of animal stalls and dumped them into vats of boiling water; what remained after the water had boiled away was saltpeter ready for use in making gunpowder. Pitch and quicklime were readied for cauldrons on the ramparts; the older women fashioned wreaths made of flax and hemp and dipped them into the seething cauldrons. The younger women would, when the time came, light them with torches and hurl them as flaming necklaces upon the enemy soldiers as they tried to scale the walls.
A foundry was placed in front of Melchior von Buren’s house near the Cathedral Square, and lead from the destroyed church tower of St. Maurtiz was melted down for bullets. Blacksmiths hammered out spearheads and sword blades and reinforced rims for the wheelwrights to use in making heavy carts for moving the cannons. The stablehands groomed the horses and fed them well to be sure they were strong and ready for battle. Private gardens were taken over as city plots and readied for an early planting during what was proving to be an unseasonably warm spring.
The city’s only serious and irremediable deficiency was sulfur, necessary for gunpowder, and throughout the siege it would be essential to use their firearms sparingly.
It was Jan van Leyden, aided by Knipperdolling and Henry Krechting (who had been a soldier with the German troops when they sacked Rome in 1527), who devised the plan of defense and organized the different units effectively. This was no small achievement, and for a time the new Company of Christ achieved a kind of perfect balance; outside the walls was the enemy, the Bishop and the Church and state that he represented—brutal but incompetent and incoherent. Inside were they, the Chosen Ones, a family of brothers and sisters whose Father was the Lord and whose essence was unity and clarity of divine purpose.
Morale was high and kept so by mass meetings and religious assemblies. Aflame with religious passion, the Company of Christ was assembled to the sound of trumpets at all times of the day and night to hear public announcements by one or another of their leaders. After these gatherings the people lifted their voices in song, led by Jan van Leyden’s clear high tenor. The sight and sound of thousands of devout believers joined in song must have deeply stirred the members of the besieged community, whose musical preferences were less radical than some of their other tastes, tending toward familiar Lutheran hymns that they adapted. Among the most popular was one drawn from Psalms 124:7, celebrating an escape from evil pursuers: “Our soul is escaped as a bird out of the snare of the fowlers: the snare is broken, and we are escaped.” Bernard Rothmann adapted another from Psalms 6:9, concerning the return of David to the world and the joy of his follow
ers at the destruction of the godless. The most stirring song of all was “Ein’ Feste Burg Ist Unser Gott” (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God”), too famously Luther’s own words to be denied by the Anabaptists, much as their author was by now despised. The Bishop’s soldiers, within easy earshot, surely heard the singing as it lifted over the walls:
A mighty fortress is our God
A bulwark never failing;
Our helper He amid the flood
Of mortal ills prevailing.
Even now, Luther’s source, Psalm 46, conveys the emotional force that the Anabaptists must have responded to: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble” (46:1), and “The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted” (46:6).
But the defenders’ delicate sense of community and common purpose was soon challenged by two acts of Jan Matthias, who had a genius for discord. The first involved, among others, Henry Graes, the schoolmaster from Borkum, who continued to meet daily with his charges, assisted by several other preachers; in mid-March, his task was complicated by the decision of Jan Matthias to burn every book in the city, including schoolbooks, finishing the job he had begun earlier. Every house was scoured for hidden books, as well as the churches, cloisters, and convents, and a second great bonfire was built for them in the Cathedral Square. Even religious works that were unconnected to the present controversy were destroyed. Only the Bible was spared. The justification for this action was that there was no past, no history, other than what the Bible recorded. Fruitless theological speculations such as those of Aquinas and Augustine vanished in the flames, as did Luther’s quarrelsome and nitpicking disputations. Guidance in the meaning of the Scriptures would now be provided only by the Bible and by the preachers who helped their flocks to comprehend its message.
The Tailor-King Page 6