The Tailor-King

by Anthony Arthur

  Very little changed as the result of Hille’s efforts or her death. Herman Ramert was allowed to go free for his treachery and was promised that his wife and children would not be harmed when the city fell. Hille was soon forgotten in the rush of events that followed her death, and even later scholars have often ignored her story as an irrelevant intrusion. Judith herself has always been something of an anomaly or an embarrassment for Jews and Christians, achieving as she did a righteous end through treachery and violence. Hille never had a chance to emulate her model fully, and was either ignored or dismissed as pathetically weak-minded or insane.

  Friedrich Reck would later say that Hille’s story begins as poetry and ends in prosaic realism, and that the Anabaptists as a group were more naive than Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. The chief indication of naïveté is that, although it may have flashed into Hille’s mind with enlivening freshness, the story of Judith was well known in Germany at that time, especially since Luther had given it his close attention. The fact that the historical accuracy of the story was questionable (to begin with, Nebuchadnezzar was the king not of the Assyrians but of the Babylonians) had led Luther to see the story as a poetic allegory, a passion play in which Judith is the people and Holofernes “the heathen, the godless and unchristian Lord of all ages.” Many artists had been drawn to the story as well. In addition to the well-known paintings by Michelangelo and Botticelli, there were others by Albrecht Dürer, Hans Shäufelein, and Hans Baldung. Schäufelein even made a wall-size mural for the Nördlingen City Hall in southern Germany, and in northern Germany the Schmalkaldic League, of which Münster was a member, adopted Judith as one of its symbols.

  It is a certainty, then, that the Bishop’s bailiff von Merveldt knew the story of Judith. Why did he not see at once that Hille was following in her footsteps? He may have been misled by her thespian ability, but it seems more likely that the subtle minds of educated people find it impossible to imagine simpler folk finding moral lessons in the Bible and acting accordingly. As with Hille, at least potentially, it was the Anabaptists’ undeviating insistence that the Bible meant what it said and was to be closely followed that made them such formidable opponents.

  Friedrich Dürrenmatt, the Swiss playwright who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978, would recognize the dramatic potential of the opposition between naïveté and cynicism in his 1946 play about the Anabaptists, It Is Written (Es steht geschrieben). Dürrenmatt credits Friedrich Reck with the inspiration for his play, which is not only one of his earliest works but which, like Reck’s book, is intended to be read as an allegory of the Nazi rule that had so recently been terminated. Most of the play is a kind of bloody fantasy, which has Knipperdolling and Jan skipping hand in hand over the rooftops of Münster as the city burns below. One of its more compelling scenes is the Bishop’s interrogation of Hille after her capture. Dürrenmatt has turned the Dutch girl into Knipperdolling’s daughter, who has married Jan van Leyden (as she did, in fact), and named her Judith. The Bishop, a very old man in this version, questions “Judith” kindly but says, “You poor child, you have sinned” in marrying Jan. She responds meekly that she is aware of her sin. The Bishop says, “And why have you come to see me now?” She is silent. “Not to repent, I think,” he says. “You are very beautiful. You have read much in the Bible. You have read the story of Judith and the evil Holofernes.” “You know everything, Reverend Father,” she says. “You cannot lie to me, Judith,” he says, “and that pleases me greatly.” He kisses her on the forehead and says, “I must allow you to die.”

  More recently, feminist and “new historical” criticism has brought poor Hille back to life, in a sense, not as a naive victim or a unique aberration but as a strong woman, one of many during the late Middle Ages who had the courage to die for their beliefs. The author of one such work, Marion Kobalt-Groch, notes that Hille was in fact married, to a man she identified only as “Psalmus.” “Psalmus” may have been Peter Simons, who was later killed in an attack on a monastery in northern Holland. Peter was also the brother of Menno Simons, the pacifist leader who opposed Jan vigorously and who became the leader of the faction that still bears his name today, the Mennonites. Perhaps, this author suggests, Jan saw in Peter Simons a threat to his own leadership; additionally, given Jan’s attitude toward women, he may have also seen Hille as a threat to his rule. Her death, then, would not have unduly troubled him. Other women would soon fare little better at his hands.

  6

  COUNTERREVOLUTION

  Sacrificial killing is the basic experience of the sacred.

  —Walter Burkert, Homo Necans

  THE TEXT FOR his sermon, Pastor Bernard Rothmann announced one morning in mid-July, was from Genesis 1:22, in which God commands all creatures to “be fruitful, and multiply.” It is the continuing duty of every man and of every woman therefore to have children, within the sanctified confines of marriage. The husband’s charge is to command and the wife’s to obey, following Paul, who had said, “The head of every man is Christ, and the head of every woman is the man.” Through her husband, the weaker sex finds not only protection but the path to God.

  Rothmann’s congregation would have found nothing to object to in this. The hierarchy of authority and submission had been long established in Catholic and Protestant theologies, even radical ones. But Anabaptist women did not consider themselves oppressed; throughout Switzerland and Germany they had in fact achieved an unprecedented degree of independence and equality with men, becoming their “peers and companions in the faith, [and their] mates in missionary enterprise and readiness for martyrdom,” in the words of the great historian of the Reformation, George H. Williams. Freedom of conscience underlay the concept of re-baptism for all adult believers, not just men. For Williams this signified a major departure from patriarchal authority in favor of women’s emancipation.

  Hille Feyken’s martyrdom was the most dramatic evidence of the important roles women could play in Münster. The conversion of the nuns from the Overwater Convent suggested that they saw Anabaptism as a release from virtual slavery to the Roman Catholic Church; no longer the submissive brides of Christ, they were now equal partners with their sisters and brothers in the Company of Christ, their voices heard, like those of the other women, in elections and public debates, their physical contributions noted not just at the cooking pots but on the defenses of the city walls. Women also outnumbered men three to one. All of this suggests that women played a major role in the Anabaptist movement, and that the resistance to the Bishop’s attack on Münster could not have been carried out without them. In practical as well as spiritual terms, the women of Münster were the ballast of this theocratic ship of state; without that ballast, Jan’s ship would soon founder.

  Such at least had been the general perception. Now, however, it appeared that the men who saw themselves as chief among the Elect, the Anabaptist preachers led by Jan, had charted a new course, reactionary rather than revolutionary. As Rothmann’s sermon continued, he warned that those women who indulged in sexual congress outside of marriage were no better than whores and were condemned in the eyes of God. It was commonly the case that many men were so “richly blessed” by God that they could have children by more than one woman. These men had a double obligation, first to be fruitful and multiply, and second to protect the poor unattached women from whoredom and the fires of hell. The way to achieve both of these goals was simple: one man, several wives. We have only to look to the Bible, Rothmann said, for the stories of the great Hebrew patriarchs, Abraham, Jacob, and David, each of whom had many wives. So it would now be in Münster. Every woman above the age of fifteen who was not already married would now have a husband and a protector; the first wives of the men would greet their new sisters in Christ with the warmth and generosity that the Lord required.

  The preachers justified the new order of marriage not only by Scripture but for spiritual and practical reasons. Of all the sins that flesh is heir to, they said adultery and fornication w
ere the most pernicious. Women were morally weak and would fall victim to their licentious impulses if not restrained. Medical science lent its support to religious doctrine in the writings of the influential alchemist Paracelsus, who explained, “It so happens that God has always created many more women than men. And He makes men die far more readily than women. And He always lets the women survive and not the men.” God had ordained marriage as sacred and commanded fidelity to the marriage vow, but He had not prescribed the number of wives a man could or should have. If the sanctity of marriage was to be preserved and adultery and fornication avoided, then, given the imbalance of numbers, it was clear that some men should have more than one wife.

  Within a few days of Rothmann’s sermon the particulars of Jan’s new policy became known. They were sweeping and wide-ranging. To begin with, all existing marriages were tainted with having been approved under the old order and were therefore invalid until approved anew by the preachers. All single women were obliged to take a husband; but so also were those whose husbands were no longer present—many had remained behind to look after the children or elderly relatives when their husbands had been expelled during the great purge of the previous February. Even those women past the age of child bearing were required to find husbands, so that, Jan said, they would have protectors.

  Unfruitful marriages could be canceled without prejudice to either party, and the woman reassigned to another husband. If a man impregnated one wife, he had the right and the obligation to repeat the act with a second, and a third, or, theoretically at least, as many as possible. He also had the right to dismiss any of his wives, so long as he followed the proper procedures. The preachers and the elders would decide the merits of whatever cases were presented to them. Stubborn opposition to their findings would be punished with death, as would a wife’s resistance to her husband’s commands.

  Rothmann’s sermon was one of many preached during the month of July, but his ardor was at least partially feigned. Neither he nor the other preachers had been enthusiastic about the idea when Jan had broached it to them in late May. Until now there had been much to unify the men and women of Münster: the expulsion of the unbelievers; the appropriation of their property; the common tasks of feeding, clothing, and housing thousands of people; the shared fear and exhilaration attendant on defying the evil Prince-Bishop … . Now Jan proposed to sow the seeds of violent discord among a people who, no matter how radical their religious and political inclinations might be, were centered on the idea and the fact of family.

  The preachers argued with Jan that women who had been drawn to Anabaptism because it freed them would now see themselves doubly enslaved, and men who had tired of their old wives and lusted after their neighbors’ lissome daughters were all but commanded to indulge their wildest sexual fantasies in the name of the Lord. There were also men whose wives had preceded them in coming to Münster, and who were expected to arrive at some time soon in response to Jan’s call for support. How would they react when they found their spousal beds occupied by other men? Within these new households of one man and several wives, where giving birth meant favor and barrenness could mean expulsion and death, how many newborn babes would die unexplained deaths at the hands of vengeful first wives too old to bear children?

  During the years before Münster many enemies had condemned the Anabaptists for undermining the four foundations of all civil and religious order. The more familiar of these were the attacks on property, on infant baptism and other sacraments, and on the duty to obey Church and secular authority, and they were all bad enough. But they were all to some extent matters of theory. Polygamy, however, was attacked as a direct assault on the institution of marriage in particular and on women generally. Anabaptist or not, women found nothing theoretical about sharing their husbands’ beds with one or more other “wises.”

  Furthermore, while most Anabaptists could find merit in the first three areas of disputation, differing mainly in approach and degree of their commitment, almost all of them condemned the “many-wives” doctrine. Menno Simons, who would later lash out at the “blasphemy” of Jan van Leyden, attacked polygamy at its source: it was true that some of the patriarchs had many wives—“Abraham had his own sister for wife; Jacob had two sisters for wives, Leah and Rachel”—but this was before the Law was handed down by Moses, after which such practices were strictly forbidden in Israel. Moreover, “under the New Testament we are not pointed by the Lord to the usage of the patriarchs before the Law nor under the Law, but to the beginning of creation, to Adam and Eve. Therefore we teach, practice, and consent to no other arrangement than the one which was in vogue in the beginning with Adam and Eve, namely, one husband and one wife, as the Lord’s mouth has ordained.”

  Menno’s reputation for piety and goodness even within the ranks of the Anabaptists in Münster was unquestioned, and many of the preachers doubtless shared his reservations about polygamy. Had he been on the scene to provide a counterweight to Jan, he might well have dissuaded the preachers from their folly (though it seems more likely that he would have been murdered). In his absence, however, Jan persuaded most of the preachers to go along with his decision. Some remained stubborn until he finally ordered them to appear before him in the City Hall. There he tore off his cloak and threw in on the floor before him; then he held before him the New Testament and shouted that it had been revealed to him here that he was ordered to do as he had ordered the preachers. He slammed the Bible to the floor on top of his cloak: did the preachers want to disobey the word of God?

  The preachers went along, but there was growing resistance within the city. The real reason for the decree, it was whispered, was not divine at all—it was simply Jan’s ungovernable lust. Although Jan had married Knipperdolling’s daughter and moved into his house within weeks of arriving in Münster in January, the couple had soon separated. Rather than Jan moving out, the daughter had left. Then Jan had announced that he would protect and ultimately marry the mysterious Divara, the widow of Jan Matthias, after the Prophet’s untimely death in April, though as yet they lived in separate quarters. Now one of the Anabaptist soldiers who was on guard at the Knipperdolling residence reported having seen Jan slipping up every night to the maid’s room. His behavior could be explained no other way except as rank betrayal of both the merchant and his daughter, not to mention Divara.

  Looked at objectively, the spiritual leader of the Anabaptists in Münster had already deserted one wife and his two children in Holland; married a second time in Münster and driven his bride out of her own house; and even, it was widely rumored, incited the mad Prophet Matthias to seek his own death so that he could inherit his widow and his leadership. Now he dallied with the farmer’s daughter who served as Knipperdolling’s wife’s maid. Jan offered the man a bribe to hold his tongue but the word was out, he feared.

  As Max Weber might have noted, the leader’s charisma was by now severely tattered. If Jan was widely perceived as simply driven by physical desire, he would be a common (though extraordinary!) hypocrite, neither more nor less worthy than a dozen other men, and quickly deposed, if not killed. He was like a circus rider perched barefoot atop two charging horses. One horse kept its course—his revolutionary zeal and genius for organization had led him to great victories over the Bishop; but the other—his unbridled passion for dominance over women—threatened to lead him out of the ring entirely and into a fatal split. The only way to salvage his movement was to institutionalize his own perversity, to make adultery, bigamy and fornication the law of his strange land because he declared that it was the word of God.

  One of Jan’s most important supporters until this time had been the city’s leading blacksmith, Henry Mollenheck. Leader of his guild and a resident of Münster since his birth, Mollenheck was an imposing figure physically and widely respected as honest and fair. Capable both of directing his half dozen apprentices and of fixing anything that came to his hand, he had been designated the city weapons master in March.

  Mol
lenheck and his wife Elise lived in a house on Magdalen Street with their twelve-year-old son. Deeply devoted to his wife and the sacrament of marriage, yet a true believer in the Anabaptist cause, Mollenheck was now forced to choose between them. Earlier, when his friend and colleague Herbert Rusher had been killed so brutally by Jan after challenging Matthias, Mollenheck had apparently persuaded himself that Jan was nevertheless acting according to the will of God and had not wavered in his support. Now he decided that he had to take a stand against the leaders who would impose polygamy upon him and his city. Encouraged and aided in his planning by three leading citizens, a notary named Johann Oykinkfeld; Henry von Arnheim, a nobleman from Frisia; and a deposed councilman, Herman Bispinck, Mollenheck planned his counterrevolution.

  On the evening of July 30, the horn of the watchman in the tower of St. Lambert’s Church signaled nine o’clock. It was an hour when worthy folk should be in their beds, but at least two hundred armed men were gathered in groups of twenty and thirty around the city. Mollenheck waited with his group under the linden trees in the Cathedral Square; another group waited behind the City Hall, still others behind St. Michael’s Chapel, the Agidii Church, and the Overwater Church … . In the lingering twilight of a northern summer evening these groups now converged on the City Hall, where Jan and his lieutenants were meeting in the great room on the second level. The guard at the front door challenged Mollenheck and was quickly taken into custody as the rebels rushed up the stairs, swords at the ready. Jan, Knipperdolling, and Bernard Rothmann were placed under arrest and locked in the cellar of the City Hall.