As these men were being executed, thousands more were marching from all over Holland toward a harbor village on the Zuider Zee (IJsselmeer). They were responding to copies of a secret letter from Matthias signed “Emmanuel,” carried by trusted preachers and circulated by word of mouth far beyond the preachers’ range. Entire families had left their farms, their houses, and most of their belongings behind to travel by horse and on foot through the late-winter rains to the harbor. There they were to board boats and be taken across the harbor to the designated meeting place in Hasselt. Guides from Münster would then lead them to the New Zion, where they would force the Bishop to raise his siege.
Something of Matthias’s appeal to his followers as well as his judgment of their needs is revealed in the great numbers of people in the Netherlands willing to give up everything in response to his call. Even the preachers he had sent with his message had anticipated far fewer recruits; according to confessions later extracted by the authorities, the preachers had believed that only those who were most visibly persecuted would respond, at most a few hundred. Instead, as many as fifteen thousand uprooted and troubled souls converged on Hasselt. But the Prophet’s political naïveté was evident in his assumption that his incendiary letter could be kept secret, or that so many thousands of people could openly travel hundreds of miles in a country infested with both Dutch and Spanish governmental agents.
On March 27 the great trek to Münster was rudely aborted. It had progressed far enough so that some three thousand Anabaptists were ferried across the Zuider Zee to the meeting place at Hasselt, carrying with them a quantity of weapons: fifteen hundred spears, many guns, halberds, and swords, and four flag standards and drums, clear indications of martial purpose. The weapons were not used, however, and no resistance was offered when a handful of Dutch officials arrested the lot and took them into custody. Eventually the Court of Holland ruled that most of the sojourners were simply “poor and innocent people” and sent them home, minus whatever weapons and money and valuables they had brought with them. But about a hundred men were executed, this constituting what was considered a mild response to a dangerous provocation.
There is no record of precisely when the terrible news of the rout at Hasselt became known in Münster. Spirits there seemed to have been high enough on the morning of Good Friday, April 3, nearly a week later. In a typically theatrical episode, the Anabaptists had found a new way to assault the sensibilities of the Prince-Bishop. They brought out the treaty that Philip of Hesse had arranged the previous fall, guaranteeing peace to all sides, and conducted a new mock treaty ceremony, accompanied by bellicose sermons and street festivals. The highlight of the morning came when the treaty was tied to the tail of an old nag. To the sound of pealing bells, blaring bugles, and raucous laughter, the massive Ludger Gate was opened and the horse was driven toward the Bishop’s soldiers, dragging Philip’s treaty in the mud.
The rulers of the New Zion, the two jans and the two Bernards and their confederates, had cause to feel confident in their power. The more vocal dissenters such as Rusher had been killed or frightened into silence, and the continuing excitement of incoming supporters and their stories of rebellion brewing throughout the region raised the morale of the rest. Wisely, though, the ordinary rituals of calmer times, such as weddings and funerals, were permitted to continue as before. One of these events, the wedding of two recent immigrants from Holland, occurred on the evening of Good Friday, and was attended by the young carpenter Henry Gresbeck, who by now had come to occupy a position on the Anabaptists’ periphery of power, and whose journal of his adventures perfectly complements that of Kerssenbrück.
The host for the celebration was a Münster native, Evart Riemensneider, who kept a tavern near the Ludger Gate that could seat the several dozen members of the wedding party and guests. Radical though the Anabaptists were in matters of faith (and matrimony, as would soon be revealed), this seems to have been a typical German wedding, which would have meant a long table covered with white cloth and fir branches, groaning under the weight of roasted ox, broiled chicken, fried pork chops, heavy dumplings, sauerkraut, and strudel, and maids pouring dark beer into steins from Riemensneider’s shelves and into the chalices looted from the Catholic churches. We can be sure that lusty drinking songs and coarse jokes about food and sex drifted through the smoke-filled air—Anabaptist doctrine, as they consistently asserted, held that that the Lord intended His people to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh when they could. Only the always sober and reserved Knipperdolling and the constitutionally dour Jan Matthias abstained.
When the festivities were at their peak, Jan Matthias, who had been sitting with his great gray head drooping to his chest, groaned audibly and raised his stricken face upward. Pale as death, he shuddered violently and fell face down on the table before him, completely unconscious. The room grew instantly silent. None dared touch the Prophet for fear that he was again receiving a divine message. At length Matthias lifted his head and stared with unseeing eyes. “Oh, dear Father, my Lord and my God, I hear and obey,” he cried. “Not what I want, but what You demand!” With that he rose unsteadily to his great height and solemnly kissed the lips of every man and woman in the room. To each he said, his hand clasping theirs, “God’s peace be with you and with this city.” And with these words he left the wedding party.
It was left to Rothmann and the other preachers to figure out what the Prophet’s strange behavior meant and to explain it to the people. Matthias, they said, had received word late in the day of the failure of the Dutch mission. The New Zion, unable now to count on help from abroad, was therefore in great peril. The Lord had revealed to the Prophet at the wedding feast that he should don the armor of battle and go forth alone, as David had done against Goliath, as St. George had done against the dragon, to slay the giant beast that was the Bishop and his army. At high noon on Easter Sunday, Jan Matthias would valiantly seek out single combat with the Bishop’s army, taking with him only a few selected members of his honor guard.
Jan van Leyden and the other Anabaptist leaders were practical men as well as religious revolutionaries; he and Knipperdolling and Rothmann must have known that such a suicidal mission could only undermine the faith of those the Prophet would leave behind. And yet these men also believed in both the literal truth of the Bible stories and in divine ordination, which would have made it hard for them to dissuade the Prophet from his folly. As for Matthias, his stricken reaction to God’s command to do battle with the Bishop’s army suggests that he knew he was doomed. If so, how much more terrified must have been the dozen men Gresbeck says went with him?
Everyone in Münster knew of the heroic forthcoming challenge by the Prophet to the Prince-Bishop, and all who could be there thronged the city walls on April 5 to watch. What they saw on that warm April morning was an old man in full armor, carrying a lance and a sword, slowly guiding his horse toward Miller’s Hill, a low promontory east of the Ludger Gate. A dozen or so riders accompanied him. Then a regiment of black riders, the Bishop’s shock troop of cavalry whose horses and armor were of the deepest shining sable hue, rose from behind Miller’s Hill. At a signal, five hundred knights charged the Prophet and his men. Cries of pain, shouts of glee, the creak of horses’ harnesses and the clang and bang of metal against metal, clouds of shimmering dust in the spring sunlight—the pathetic challenge was over in a matter of minutes. Kerssenbrück relates with smug satisfaction that “every limb and part of ‘the new Samson’ was run through with countless swordthrusts until he was entirely in pieces.” The Prophet’s severed head was paraded in front of the watching Anabaptists by a galloping black knight, then stuck on a pole and planted before the city. His private parts, according to one story, were nailed that night to the city gate through which he had departed.
Miguel de Cervantes was born thirteen years after the death of Jan Matthias, and we know that he had models other than religious zealots in mind when he created Don Quixote, our touchstone and archetype of misgu
ided idealism. The fictional knight was a fondly satirized exponent of a collapsed feudal system, good-hearted in the comically confused quest that led him to mistake whores for nuns and windmills for dragons. The semiliterate baker Jan Matthias was all too real to be regarded so sentimentally; and yet there is pathos as well as courage, even a certain nobility, in the picture of the doomed old man in his dented armor venturing forth with only a spear and a sword to slay his dragon.
This putative man of God nevertheless did lasting evil, for it was with the arrival of Jan Matthias that murder became a political tool of the Anabaptists. With him gone, Bishop Franz would have been justified in seeing the threat to Münster as virtually ended. The Bishop was well versed in contemporary realpolitik. In ancient times Spartacus led the slaves to revolt against the Romans, and only four decades before the siege of Münster Savonarola threatened the power of the Catholic Church in Florence; both men were martyred and both movements collapsed upon their deaths, just as countless others had when their inspirational leaders were gone. The Bishop had only to wait for the motley crew of preachers, merchants, and artisans who had inherited the Apostle’s New Zion to beg for a merciful justice.
Modern scholars, in particular Max Weber, have confirmed the Bishop’s grounds for optimism. Weber, a German sociologist and economic historian who died in 1920, described three types of rule. In modern democracies, and as it was in ancient Greece and Rome, there is rule by law, under which the law rather than the person implementing it is what is obeyed. But throughout history most people have lived under “rule by tradition,” either patriarchal tradition, as described in the Bible, or the feudal pattern of the Middle Ages. Both versions of traditional rule required inherited authority, customs, and patterns of organization. They differed in that the older patriarchal systems, most prominent in the biblical chronologies, were based on families; the more recent medieval feudal systems, like the one in which Franz von Waldeck lived, relied more on networks of prominent allies who gave an oath of allegiance but remained in control of their own domains. Both systems depended on obedience to arbitrary commands, such as the one that forced Eberhard von Morrien to allow Dr. von Wyck to be executed in his own house.
The third type of rule, which Jan Matthias represented, is what Weber was the first to call “charismatic.” It is one that our own age of political turmoil sees frequently, and that Weber himself sought to understand through his discovery of earlier exemplars of charismatic leadership. The essential nature of charismatic rule is that it is short and turbulent. The charismatic leader claims special powers, commonly revealed through magic, through visions, dreams, and revelations, through heroic deeds, and through his extraordinary powers of persuasion. He—with rare exceptions, such as Joan of Arc, such leaders are always men—derives his authority not from rules or traditions but from devout followers, disciples who believe in his personal qualities. The charismatic leader is not elected or appointed, he simply assumes command; his followers similarly have no set titles or time of office, and no specific duties or spheres of influence that cannot easily be altered.
Weber says that elements of the patriarchal, feudal, and charismatic types of rule have frequently been mixed, as in the case of England’s Henry VIII. But there are inherent paradoxes in such a mix. The charismatic ruler is hostile to rules or traditions, but he wants his followers to revere his memory and continue what he has begun—and there is always much to be done, for charismatic leaders are prominent in troubled times. During wars, revolutions, plagues, and natural disasters there is a “collective excitement through which masses of people respond to some extraordinary experience and by virtue of which they surrender themselves to a heroic leader.” This leader is commonly seen as “pure” when he first appears; he is indifferent to money, to material goods, to personal comfort; he has no regular occupation, and if he has a family, it is often left behind or rejected. He is “a radical who challenges established practice by going to ‘the root of the matter.’ … [he] dominates men by virtue of qualities inaccessible to others and incompatible with the rules of thought and action” of normal life. “People surrender themselves to such a leader because they are carried away by a belief in the manifestations that authenticate him.”
This “surrender” means that the comforting “external” structures of religion, society, and even family are lost to his followers: he is all that they have left. Followers of conventional beliefs can pretend an external commitment by observing public rituals of church attendance and the like. But no one can fake an internal commitment to a charismatic leader, and it cannot be modified or partial, it must be total. (A favorite passage of charismatic leaders, including those in Münster, is in Luke 14:26, where Jesus says, “If any man come to me and hates not his father and mother and wife and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple.”) Thus the degree of commitment to a charismatic leader will often be far greater and more intense than that to one who rules by law or tradition. His adherents do not “choose” to follow his dictates; it is simply impossible for them not to obey. If they do balk, it means the leader has lost his charisma. Both charismatic leaders and their followers need constant reassurance that they are pursuing the right course of action because the world around them insists that they are wrong. Thus they manufacture emergencies and challenges even when none exist and live in a state of unending tension and instability.
The great problem for the followers of the charismatic leader is that his is always a “uniquely personal response to a crisis in human experience,” often the result of a vision that only he sees. Thus the alchemy that produces him is impossible to pass along to a successor. When a charismatic leader dies or is proved unworthy, the followers are not only distraught but powerless; they have neither the external structures that sustained them before he appeared—church, family, government—nor the internal conviction that he inspired. On those rare occasions when the leader does designate a follower to succeed him, or his disciples pick one, the result is always less intense than the original. Sometimes, as with Christ, when the leader’s influence is benign, the followers are able to create a traditional structure to replace the original charismatic rule. More often, though, charismatic leaders see themselves as the end rather than a means, and the movements they establish simply disintegrate when they die.
That is what by all rights should have happened in Münster. Bernard Rothmann and Bernard Knipperdolling were persuasive and clever but not charismatic figures; it took the intervention of Jan Matthias to turn them into his disciples and into willing accessories to the murder of Herbert Rusher. With the death of Matthias, the catalyst that had turned rebellion into religious war was gone. The feudal structure that supported Franz von Waldeck could easily survive his death because it relied on institutional authority. Until Luther, no rebel had yet been able to create a counterbalancing authority, and Jan Matthias was certainly no Luther. Nevertheless, the rebellion in Münster did not fail after the death of Jan Matthias; it grew more intense under the direction of a second, even more charismatic leader, an event with few if any precedents or sequels.
To appreciate what young Jan Bockelson, or Jan van Leyden, was able to accomplish, we must consider the situation he faced. It is now April 5. For six weeks the passionate Matthias has dominated most of the nine thousand inhabitants of this walled and isolated city. Those who were born there have more or less willingly allowed him to take over their city government; to appropriate their houses and their money; to chase away the godless and replace them with foreign zealots; to incite the Prince-Bishop to armed warfare against them; and to enlist them as soldiers of Christ in the final battle of good against evil. Now the great leader to whom they entrusted not their lives but their souls has delivered himself up for slaughter. What could anyone say to so many people torn with anxiety and fear for their own future? What explanation could account for such a sudden and overwhelming catastrophe? Who could save them now from the Bishop’
s so-called Party of Order?
The answer would come that very evening, after a day of despair and confusion in the streets: they should surrender … they should kill themselves … no, they must wait—Jan Matthias would return from the dead in three days … . Then, at dusk, trumpets sounded, summoning the frightened people to a small church near the Cathedral. There they saw a figure standing high above them, his white-robed form illuminated by candlelight in the tall, narrow bay window of the third level of the church. It was Jan van Leyden, the young Hollander who had sent for the Prophet and who had been his constant companion and closest adviser.
As he waited for the milling crowd to grow silent, it must have been an extraordinary moment for this young man, barely twenty-four years old. How far he had come from the nearby village where the mayor had made him a bastard, then let his mother take him away to be raised in poverty in Holland! He knew he had been destined for greatness even as a youth when, despite his humble origins, his keen mind, quick tongue, and blond beauty led him to a prominent place in a local public-speaking club. Creative and imaginative, and fascinated with the still-popular medieval mystery and miracle plays, he began to write his own sketches, in which he always played the lead role, wearing colorful scarlet and green colors that showed off his handsome figure to its best advantage. Women sought him out and gave him whatever he asked of them.
But despite his gifts he was condemned by poverty and class to be no more than a tailor’s apprentice in Holland. He set out, accordingly, to make his fortune in business, traveling as far south as Portugal and later residing for more than a year in England before returning in 1530, no richer than the day he left, to marry a sailor’s widow in Leyden. They had two children and ran a seedy harbor tavern, the Inn of the Two Herrings. The handsome young orator, playwright, and actor had come to a dead end, barely into his twenties.
The Tailor-King Page 8