On Friday, May 22, the attack began in earnest. For each of the next four days, thirty-five cannons would each lob twenty shells per day toward the city’s gate towers and defensive walls, a total of seven hundred cannonballs made of stone and iron a day—it was impossible for any defensive positions to withstand such a barrage, the Bishop’s commanders said. In Telgte, twelve heavy wagons and a hundred horses were gathered to carry munitions, grappling hooks, and eighty-five storming ladders to the battle site. The foot soldiers who would take the walls after the bombardment (for double their usual pay) were backed up by the cavalry, which would drive through the gates once they were opened. On the afternoon of May 25, before the attack scheduled for the following dawn, soldiers readied huge bundles of straw, to be placed after dark over the spongy earth of the drained area of the moat. The soldiers would pass easily over these mats to attack the now vulnerable outer wall.
The Bishop was so confident of his plan’s success, wrote Philip of Hesse to the King of Denmark, that he was sure he could release all of his soldiers within two weeks. The defenders, to be sure, were not idle. Teams of women assembled heaps of earth and manure to patch the holes in the walls that enemy cannon would create. The old men and boys in the fire brigades practiced passing leather buckets of water to smother the flames started by burning arrows shot over the walls. Hundreds of armed men patrolled the walls and waited by their cannons at each of the ten city gates. But the men capable of battle were hugely outnumbered by a professional army that had been preparing for months for an attack. As the sun began to set on the evening of May 25 and his troops gathered themselves in readiness for the coming attack, the Bishop’s optimism seemed to be well founded.
It was severely shaken when he sat down at the end of the next day to write a report to Philip of Hesse. Because of a few drunken soldiers, he said, the attack had been a disaster. The soldiers had begun drinking early in the afternoon of May 25, it appeared, then had lapsed into an alcoholic stupor. On awakening they saw the thin edge of the sun on the horizon—they had slept through the night, they told each other with alarm, and the designated moment of attack had arrived! The soldiers, still drunk, raced through the camp crying “Charge!” Before the commanders could intervene, an attack was in full swing, uncoordinated and unled, other than by half a dozen drunks who could not distinguish between a sun setting in the west and one rising in the east. Stumbling into the swampy moat, where there had not yet been time to place the straw mats, the soldiers were easy targets for the alerted defenders. Two hundred died or were wounded in the short battle that ensued. The Anabaptist shopkeepers suffered virtually no casualties, and the city’s reputation as an unconquerable citadel under God’s protection received a healthy boost. The soldiers, thoroughly humiliated, were “beginning to be rebellious,” wrote von Waldeck.
The incompetent attempts of the Bishop to destroy the Anabaptists were a dramatic contrast to the military order and imagination that had so far marked their resistance. Jan clearly had a talent for psychological warfare; his taunting of the Bishop and his men humiliated them and endeared him to his followers, who could now see the justification for his stringent discipline. Religious enthusiasm, however, was by definition hard to control; even as it made the Anabaptists so difficult to conquer it sometimes led them into disaster. On the same evening as the Bishop’s misbegotten assault, a chimney sweeper called Wilhelm Bast received his own vision: he was to go forth and burn everything he could within the Bishop’s realm, beginning with the powder storehouse in Wolbeck. He was captured soon after setting a few huts ablaze and condemned to die by fire in the most painful manner conceivable. Wood was piled around an iron post, at the top of which was a short chain, a few feet long, on a swivel. The victim’s wrist was secured to the chain and the fire was lighted. He had enough room to run around the fire, but not enough to escape being slowly roasted alive. A song about Wilhelm Bast later noted that he had received what he had hoped to give to the town of Wolbeck.
While Jan no doubt found it useful to have a martyr in Wilhelm Bast, he also had only fifteen hundred fighting men under his command and could ill afford useless sacrifices. As spring edged into summer, his situation was beginning to deteriorate, even as the Bishop’s forces began to regroup for another attack. Ultimately, Jan hoped enough support would arrive from the Netherlands, despite the earlier disaster at Hasselt, to let him break out of Münster. United under his leadership, the Anabaptists could effect a reprise of the Peasants’ Revolt of nine years before; only this time the princes and bishops would die, not the rebels. In the meantime, he must have regretted the loss of an able-bodied man. But there were plenty of women who, if they chose to offer themselves up as martyrs, need not be dissuaded. In mid-June he approved the suggestion by a fifteen-year-old Dutch girl, Hille Feyken, to save the New Zion from the evil Prince-Bishop by reenacting the biblical story of Judith and Holofernes.
The story that inspired Hille Feyken began in the sixth century before Christ. Judith was a wealthy and devout young widow who had hidden her beauty under the sackcloth and ashes of mourning since her husband’s death a few years earlier. Her home was the small city of Bethulia, in the mountains of Gilboa north of Jerusalem. Several years earlier, the Assyrian King Nebuchadnezzar had waged war on his rivals, the Medes, and demanded the support of all the subject peoples in his realm. Many refused to help Nebuchadnezzar; accordingly, when his conquest of the Medes was complete, he sent his greatest general, the magnificently powerful and ruthless Holofernes, on a mission of punishment throughout the region. Holofernes’s army of one hundred and twenty thousand men and twelve thousand cavalry terrified most of the offending nations into submission and utterly destroyed those that resisted him. Only Judea remained to fall, and only Bethulia, guarding the pass above the Valley of Esdraelon, prevented him from conquering Jerusalem.
Rather than attack the Jews in their mountain fastness, Holofernes settled in to starve them into submission. Within a month the defenders were dying of thirst and hunger and ready to sue for peace. They agreed among themselves that if God did not rescue them within five days, they must abandon their resistance and their faith. Judith, who as a mere woman had not been consulted on this decision, rebuked the people, saying God would not be “threatened or cajoled,” and that they were not being punished but tested. The chief magistrate thanked her sarcastically for her advice and told her to pray for them. She would do more than that, Judith said; she had a plan. But they must ask her nothing about it.
That night Judith prayed for God to give her, a woman, the courage she would need to embark on her plan and the wit she would need to carry it out against a fierce enemy. “Observe their arrogance and bring your fury on their heads. Put into my hand—a widow’s—the strength I need … Break their pride by the hand of a female! For your strength does not depend upon numbers nor your might upon powerful men. Rather, you are the God of the humble; you are the ally of the insignificant, the champion of the weak, the protector of the despairing, the savior of those without hope.”
Judith now took off her ugly widow’s weeds and bathed in warm scented water. Her maid dressed her in her finest clothes and the jewelry she had not touched for three years, since her husband’s death. The two women, carrying enough simple food to sustain them for several days—roasted grain, dried fig cakes, unleavened bread, a jug of oil, and a skin of wine—passed through the city gates in the dead of night; the guards were struck silent by the widow’s great beauty as they watched her pass by them and disappear into the silent desert.
The soldiers of the Assyrian patrol that shortly intercepted the two women took Judith to Holofernes, who lay “resting on his bed under a canopy, which was woven of purple, gold, emeralds, and other precious stones.” He rose and came toward her, “preceded by silver lamps,” and Judith prostrated herself before him. “‘Courage, woman!’” he said “‘Don’t be afraid. For I have never hurt anyone who chose to serve Nebuchadnezzar, king of the whole world … . You are
safe now. Don’t worry; you will live through this night and for a long while to come, for no one is going to hurt you.’” Judith responded that she was not afraid and that she had valuable advice to offer the general. His siege, she said, had driven the defenders to the verge of great iniquity: they were prepared to drink the blood of their cattle and to eat unclean food. Her own loyalty was to her God more than to her people, and for this reason she had fled. Within three days God would reveal to her that the citizens of Bethulia had violated His laws and thus forfeited His protection. “‘I will then come and report it to you,’” Judith promised Holofernes; “‘and you shall march out with your whole army … . I will guide you through the heart of Judea until you reach Jerusalem … . You will lead them like sheep that have no shepherd! Nor will a dog so much as growl at you! I have been given foreknowledge of this; it was announced to me, and I was sent to tell you.’” She knew that Holofernes had the “wisdom and adroitness” to heed her words, she told him: “‘The whole world knows that you, above all others in the kingdom, are brave, experienced, and dazzling in the arts of war.’”
Holofernes was entranced by Judith’s beauty, her wisdom, her piety, and her courage, not to mention her keen appreciation of his manly attributes, and was not offended when she refused his offer of food and wine lest she offend her God. She had brought her own provisions, she said. For the following three nights Judith and her maid were passed through the soldiers’ lines into the desert, where they bathed beside a cool spring and prayed. On the fourth day Holofernes complained to Bagoas, his servant, that his patience had reached its end; he would become a laughingstock if he did not bed this beautiful woman, who, after all, was his captive and his slave. Bagoas diplomatically conveyed the general’s message: “‘May this lovely maid not hesitate to come before my lord to be honored in his presence and to enjoy drinking wine with us and act today like one of the Assyrian women who serve in Nebuchadnezzar’s palace.’” Judith accepted the invitation with alacrity: “‘Who am I that I should refuse my lord? I will do whatever he desires right away, and it will be something to boast of until my dying day.’”
When Judith arrived in her finest gown, her servant preceded her “and spread upon the ground opposite Holofernes the lambskins which Bagoas had provided for her daily use to recline on while eating.” Watching her lie down next to him, “Holofernes was beside himself with desire, and his brain was reeling; and he was very eager to have relations with her.” Judith gladly accepted his invitation to drink with him, “‘for today is the greatest day of my whole life.’” The evening wore on pleasantly. Holofernes drank “a great deal of wine, more than he had ever drunk on a single day since he was born.” The servants after a time left the two alone. Holofernes, the great moment of his long-anticipated conquest within his grasp, fell sound asleep.
And so “Judith was left alone in the tent with Holofernes sprawled on his bed, dead drunk.” She rose and stood beside his bed and prayed silently: “‘Lord, God of all power, look in this hour upon the work of my hands for the greater glory of Jerusalem, for now is the opportunity to come to the aid of your inheritance, and to carry out my plan for the destruction of the enemies who have risen up against us.’ She went up to the bedpost by Holofernes’s head and took down from it his sword, and approaching the bed, she grabbed the hair of his head and said, ‘Lord God of Israel, give me the strength, now!’ Then she struck at his neck twice with all her might, and chopped off his head. Next, she rolled his body off the bed and yanked the canopy from the poles. A moment later she went out and gave Holofernes’s head to her servant, who put it in her food sack.” The two women passed through the guards as they had for the previous three nights, carrying what appeared to be their food and clothing for their regular evening of prayer in the desert.
Within the hour they were inside the gate of Bethulia. “‘Here is the head of Holofernes,’” Judith declared, “‘and here is the canopy under which he lay in his drunken stupor. The Lord has struck him down by the hand of a woman!’” The head of Holofernes was then nailed to the city gate, where his men saw it in the first rays of the morning sun and fled in panic. The entire army was soon destroyed. It took the Israelites a month to loot the Assyrians’ rich camp. When they were through, Judith was presented with everything that Holofernes had owned, and the women of the city crowned themselves with olive leaves and danced and sang in her honor. Judith composed a song of thanksgiving about her conquest that told “how the Assyrians had made frightful boasts about what they would do to Israel and how God had foiled them by the hand of a female.” Not the strong army of a mighty warrior had brought the great man down, but the beauty of a slender woman: “Her sandal ravished his eyes; her beauty captivated his mind. And the sword slashed through his neck!”
We need for a moment to think ourselves into the mind of the devout young Dutch girl who hears this story for the first time in her life. How precise the parallels are! Here they are, the Company of Christ in the New Zion, besieged by an army afraid to attack and trying to starve them into submission. Here is Franz von Waldeck, the Prince-Bishop, notoriously brutal and corrupt, a man of the sword who kills the pious without compunction, a Catholic “priest” who has never taken orders and who suffers so from burning lust that he has a mistress as well as a wife. And here is she, beautiful, as she has been told, with the full breasts and sensuous appeal of a woman, but also clever and brave. Why should the Prince-Bishop not be susceptible to her wiles, as Holofernes had been to those of Judith?
Hille proposed her plan to Jan, Knipperdolling, and Rothmann, who seem to have regarded it as unlikely to succeed but worth a try—and to have been utterly without regard for the risk it involved for the girl. Certainly Judith’s story had elements of theatricality and melodrama that must have appealed to Jan, and even of comic farce as the general drinks himself into insensibility at the moment of his assignation. If Hille could emulate the sinister yet comic punishment of the great Holofernes, the siege would surely collapse and his, Jan’s, fame would be immeasurably enhanced. If she failed, little was lost save her life.
A contemporary portrait of Hille, with an inset illustration of Judith carrying a sword and the head of Holofernes, shows a pretty young woman as she presumably appeared on the evening of June 16, 1534, when she was met by the Bishop’s men outside the walls of Munster. She had, Kerssenbrück tells us, “enhanced her already generous attributes of beauty” with fine clothes and jewelry provided by the city treasury. She wore a pearl necklace and three rings, two set with diamonds, and carried with her twelve guilders. She also carried a beautiful shirt for the Bishop, made of the finest linen. It had been soaked in poison that would kill him instantly; according to one report, it had also been taken from the body of a man who had recently died of leprosy.
Hille was taken to see not the Bishop but his high bailiff, Dirk von Merveldt. He took her money and her jewelry and asked her why she was leaving her fellow believers behind in Münster. Hille said that she had married a man she loved despite her parents’ objections; they then had been forced to leave Holland for refuge in Münster. Now they were disgusted with the false teachings of the Anabaptist preachers. Hille knew that if her husband tried to leave he would be killed either by Jan or by the Bishop’s men, so she had come to ask for asylum for them both from the Bishop. In return for this and for her husband’s life, she was willing to reveal to Bishop Franz all that she knew of the city’s defenses, which she had learned about from her husband. She would even be able to show them a secret entrance into the city that would allow the Bishop to conquer it without the loss of a single man. She would only convey this information to the Bishop himself. As a sign of her good faith, she showed the bailiff the fine shirt she had made for von Waldeck.
Von Merveldt asked Hille how she had come to own such fine clothes and especially her expensive jewelry. She answered that her husband had been on guard at the city treasury and had advised her to take the jewelry and money in order to buy her saf
e passage. Hille must have been persuasive, for the bailiff finally agreed to take her to Iburg to see the Bishop in two days.
On June 18, another refugee was led into von Merveldt’s tent. It was Herman Ramert, the citizen of Münster with whom Jan Bockelson had stayed two months during his first visit there in 1533. Ramert also sought asylum, claiming that he had been forced to convert and had fled for his life. To show his good faith, he now wanted to warn the Bishop of his danger: Hille Feyken’s entire story was a lie, beginning with her supposed husband. Hille was not married, she was hardly fifteen years old. She had been supplied with the fine clothes and jewelry by Jan and Knipperdolling. And she was on a mission to assassinate the Bishop with her poisoned shirt.
Hille was immediately tortured and soon revealed that she had intended to become a second Judith in order to save the city from the Bishop. She was now ready with calm courage to suffer her punishment, she said, knowing that it was for the glory of God and that her soul would never die. After further torture on the wheel, Hille faced her executioner with a smile and assured him that he had no power over her. “We shall see about that,” he answered, and struck off her head.
The Tailor-King Page 10