One of the most despised leaders, Herman Schlachtscape, was not with the others that evening but home in bed with his four wives—“two beside him and two in a roll bed underneath him,” according to Gresbeck. Schlachtscape was Jan’s vice-chancellor, responsible for order and discipline, a task he notoriously enjoyed. Now he was dragged to the stocks outside City Hall, where angry women pelted him with stones and clods of manure. “Do you have enough women now?” they taunted him, promising that more would soon be present. Mollenheck rescued the chancellor and ordered him locked up with Jan and the others.
So far the counterrevolution had gone smoothly, but now the leaders faltered. Mollenheck seems to have made three false assumptions: first, that if he and his wife, who had been such strong supporters of the New Zion, could now reject it, then almost everyone else must feel the same way; second, that everyone was as prepared as he was to act on his principles—that his bold rebellion would lead to a popular uprising against the Anabaptists; and third, that once Jan was shown to be vulnerable, his almost supernatural sway over the people would be broken.
Whatever the reason for his actions, or for his inaction, Mollenheck clearly had no plan beyond placing Jan in custody and then waiting for instructions, presumably from a city council that had regained its influence and its senses. While the blacksmith sat pondering in the second-floor chamber where the deposed leaders had met, Knipperdolling, Rothmann, and Jan were free to shout their plight through barred windows to supporters on the street. They were unhindered by the rebels, who broke open the wine casks in the main cellar and then lounged drunkenly around the Market Square, after which they looted the treasury and passed around the money and jewelry that had been forcibly taken earlier.
If Jan and his men had been remarkable for their discipline, Mollenheck and his were notably lacking in it. Many of the blacksmith’s men were indeed soldiers, but not the kind to stake one’s life on; they were deserters from the Bishop’s army who had been lured by Jan’s promise of regular food and pay, at about the same time as Hille Feyken had been captured the previous month. Their leader had been an earlier defector, Gert von Münster, a local mercenary and previously one of the Bishop’s chief lieutenants. Nicknamed “the smoker” for his addiction to tobacco, still a novelty, Gert and half a dozen other renegades had gotten obnoxiously drunk on free beer and schnapps in the tavern of Evart Riemensneider—“the old preacher,” in Kerssenbrück’s words, “and his secret whore,” a former nun. When it was nine o’clock and time to close, the soldiers refused to go. “Du Galgenstrick! Du Halunke!” he said: “You gallows-bait, you treacherous rogue! You’re not the master of your own house!” Reimensneider and his wife left while their servant ran to the cellar to fetch more beer for the soldiers. In a few minutes the landlord returned with armed guards, who took Gert and the others into custody. Thinking they would be allowed to sleep it off in jail and then be punished with no more than a fine or a whipping, as drunk and disorderly soldiers were customarily treated, the men went without protest.
The following morning Gert and his men were led into the Market Square and summarily sentenced to be executed. The punishment, according to Kerssenbrück, was a novel one. The men were taken to the Cathedral Square and their heads pushed through metal collars that hung from the branches of a linden tree; they hung there, their hands tied behind them and their toes barely touching the ground, as the Anabaptists riddled them with arrows and musket shots until “the divine will of the heavenly Father had been done.”
This incident had occurred only a few weeks earlier, in mid-June, almost at the same time as Hille Feyken’s death was reported. Clearly the brutality on both sides of the wall was increasing. Now the renegade soldiers who had been intimidated and angered by what happened to Gert the Smoker had joined Mollenheck’s band, moved by thoughts of revenge and drink and booty. Perhaps if Gert had been alive and sober, he would have suggested to Mollenheck that he should try to capture the city gates, but no such attempts were made, and they remained firmly in the hands of Jan’s soldiers. Gert probably would not have been eager to call in the Bishop’s army that he had deserted, but according to Helmut Paulus, Mollenheck never even considered appealing to the Bishop: “He is the enemy of the city,” Paulus has him say. “What have I to do with him?”
As Gresbeck’s laconic but fairly thorough account makes clear, Mollenheck had badly misjudged his current situation. Aside from Jan, Knipperdolling, Rothmann, and the manure-covered Chancellor, Henry Schlachtscape, none of the other Anabaptist leaders were rounded up until Herman Krampe, a businessman who was now one of Mollenheck’s lieutenants, protested that they could not be allowed to remain free. At the same time, Mollenheck’s own chief advisers, Oykinkfeld, Arnheim, and Bispinck, the three men who might have given some direction to the coup, had themselves been mistakenly arrested by Mollenheck’s men and confined. When they were finally released, toward dawn, and allowed to see their leader, they all knew it was too late. Herman Tilbeck, the former mayor who should have been arrested immediately, had remained at large; he rallied some three hundred armed men and was directing the placement of cannon outside the City Hall. More men would arrive within the hour. The three men left Mollenheck alone to confront his fate and returned to their homes.
Shortly after dawn, Tilbeck’s force had grown to nearly six hundred men, many of them Hollanders, who surrounded the City Hall and aimed their cannons at it. Although the City Hall was one of the revered buildings of the city, foreigners would have no qualms about destroying it if that was the only way to defeat the heretics inside. Some of Mollenheck’s men had already been captured or had vanished; about one hundred and twenty remained with him in the three-story City Hall, posted at the windows with heaps of bricks to throw at the attackers—Mollenheck the weapons-master had neglected to secure enough power for their firearms. Mollenheck stood under the arcade with Herman Krampe and twenty other men, watching Tilbeck’s forces as they assembled and listening to the cries of the Anabaptist women as they shrilled, “Death to the traitors!”
A shot rang out from a nearby house and Krampe fell dead, a bullet through his heart. Mollenheck and the others bolted the doors and retreated to the second floor, leaving on the stairs a barricade of benches, chairs, and desks. Two men used a church bench from St. Lambert’s to break down the door, then ran down to the cellar to release Jan and the other prisoners. The young Prophet emerged at the head of a group of about forty men to confront the cheering crowd of men and women. He raised his arms to command silence and cried, “No mercy toward the enemies of the Lord! No mercy for Mollenheck!”
The battle was soon over. Jan and his men remained under the arcade, protected from the bricks of the defenders, while Tile Bussenmeister led the firing from adjoining buildings and poured bullets through the windows of the City Hall. Mollenheck must have seen the heavy cannons that he had helped to make pointed at the top floor of the City Hall. There was nothing to do but surrender. He stuck his old hat on a sword and waved it slowly out of the window. The counterrevolution had failed.
Given what had already happened to Rusher and Gert, it seems unlikely that Mollenheck expected to survive, but he may have hoped that by surrendering he might save the lives of some of his followers. All of the men were pummeled as they left the building, most viciously by Jan’s women supporters, who stripped the clothes from their backs and cursed them. Nicolaus Dettmar was found to be carrying coins stolen from the treasury and was saved from immediate death only when Jan stopped the beating. Ask him, Jan commanded the women, if it was true that Mollenheck had ordered him to steal the money. Yes, it was true, the terrified man agreed. Then Jan said, ask him if it was true that Mollenheck had sent a message to the Bishop offering to open the city gates to his army. Yes, that too was true, Dettmar agreed.
Now that Jan had established that Mollenheck was motivated by personal greed and treachery, not by revulsion against Jan’s perverted policies, little time was wasted on ceremony. There were no tria
ls, only announcements of condemnation. Mollenheck and two dozen of his men were led out to the Cathedral Square the following afternoon. Each was given a shovel and ordered to dig. Then they were shot and tumbled into their graves. Over the next several days, twenty-five more were killed, including Dettmar, but not so quickly. To let the Bishop’s men hear the noise of gunshots would be unwise, leading them to suspect an uprising; and besides, powder was in short supply.
The Dutchmen, Gresbeck reports, had wanted to kill all one hundred and twenty of the captured men immediately. Forty-seven were condemned out of hand, and the rest were told they had to prove that they had only joined the rebellion that morning, not the night before. Of those, most escaped with their lives, after being advised by the egregious Schlachtscape that they should consider themselves fortunate to be taken back into the arms of the Lord. Years later Kerssenbrück was still pained by what he had to recount: “No pen can describe the rage with which their adversaries fell upon them, and the refinements of cruelty to which they became victims,” he writes. After being “overwhelmed with blows and curses, [the rebels] were imprisoned,” but the Anabaptists, in Baring Gould’s translation of Kerssenbrück, “continued inflicting upon them such horrible tortures that the majority of these unfortunates would have a thousand times preferred death.” When death did come, it was gruesome; Bernard Knipperdolling, the erstwhile cloth merchant, now sword-bearer of the Kingdom of Zion, took personal charge of the executions. In the passionless but compelling words of Henry Dorp, the contemporary Lutheran historian sent to Münster after it fell to write the official report, Knipperdolling beheaded “several” men; others he cut in half at the waist; still others had their arms lopped off, after which they were tied to posts and shot point-blank. Others were bound together around gravestones and shot. Gresbeck describes how one man was cloven in two as he begged only to be allowed to return to his house to say good-bye to his wife and children. Dorp reported a total of forty-nine killed, and concluded sadly that the devil was truly revealed in Jan van Leyden to be not merely a liar but a murderer.
In the midst of this carnage, knowing full well what would happen to them, three men gathered a crowd around them in the Cathedral Square to denounce the killings. They were imprisoned for several days, chained hand and foot without food or water under the roof of a house baking from the August sun. Then they were beheaded by Knipperdolling for their courage. They were Johann Oykinckfeld, the notary, who had earlier, Kerssenbrück asserts, “burned many official documents and consequently bore a considerable share of the blame for what had transpired”; and Henry von Arnheim, a Frisian nobleman, and Hermann Bispinck, the former councilman, both of whom had failed earlier to oppose the “uproar” caused by the Anabaptists. Belatedly, but with great courage, they had paid in full for their misdeeds and for their failure to help Henry Mollenheck when he needed it.
Now only the prudent, the terrified, and the fanatical remained at large in Münster.
7
KING JAN
Behold how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity.
—Psalm 133:1
“NOW THAT NO-ONE remained to offer opposition” to Jan’s decree, Kerssenbrück writes, “the Prophet took as his first wife” the widow Divara, the former nun who would rule over his ultimate harem of sixteen wives. The men rushed to follow his example, including such formerly upstanding citizens as Tilbeck, the hot-tempered little co-mayor Kibbenbrock, and Rothmann himself, apparently now converted to the cause. Many of the nuns, both noble and common, willingly gave “themselves over to license and debauchery.” “One took a soldier, one a shoemaker, one a fast talker; one a laborer, one a farmer, one a burgher, one a noble—they went where the spirit led them.” The prurient details are omitted by Kerssenbruck, who, in Baring Gould’s entertaining translation, says, “We must draw a veil over what took place, for we should scandalize our readers were we to relate in detail the outrageous scenes of immorality which took place in the town, and the villainies which these maniacs committed to satisfy their abominable lusts. They were no more human beings, they were foul and furious beasts.”
Henry Gresbeck’s account is both more personal and less heated than Kerssenbruck’s, concentrating more on resistance by women to the new decrees than on license. For his own part, he married a young woman named Clara Clevorn for her protection, as he represents it, and moved her in with his mother in their small house near the Overwater Church for a time, before moving the entire family into the Clevorn house for greater security. Even though he was a guard and a minor official within the Anabaptist hierarchy, Gresbeck, like everyone else, had to leave his door not only unlocked but ajar. Anyone who wished to enter could do so at any time. The foreigners from Holland and Frisia were particularly demanding, according to Gresbeck, barging into houses and demanding that all the females line up for their inspection. Girls as young as ten and eleven were taken away as wives by men old enough to be their grandfathers. The more wives a man had, Gresbeck wryly noted, the better a Christian he must be. Many of the young girls resisted and were beaten so badly that their arms and legs were broken. Some of the older women tried to help, including a “woman doctor” who brought fifteen injured girls back to health. One woman was thrown fully clothed into the river Aa and held under water until she drowned. Her body, kept afloat by her billowing skirts, drifted down the river toward the moat.
Even as Jan performed forced marriages during open-court sessions three times weekly in the Market Square, he annulled others of long standing: “The wife complained about her husband, the husband about his wife, and divorces were granted to couples who had lived together in peace for twenty or thirty years.” Women who refused to marry or to accept divorce were taken to the Rosenthal Church, now a prison, and warned they would be beheaded if they continued to disobey.
But the outraged protests persisted through the month of August, and the preachers were finally forced to establish some rules for husbands in search of supplementary wives. The situation was getting out of hand, they said: “Dear brothers, you should enter a house alone and ask your sister if she wishes to join you in marriage. If she has chosen another, you should leave her and seek elsewhere.” The woman as well as the man should have the right to choose, so that the unions formed would be fruitful in the praise of God.
The uproar subsided momentarily, due less to the preachers’ calming advice than to the renewed threat of attack by the Prince-Bishop. After the first unsuccessful attempt to take the city had failed in May, the Bishop’s soldiers and even some of his commanders, like the unfortunate Gert the Smoker, had begun to desert, and those who remained were disinclined to attack again so soon. Moreover, the outer moat, repaired and full of water again, frustrated the commanders at every turn. Some suggested filling the moat with dirt instead of again attempting to drain it, but the officer in charge of the attack refused to press it unless the moat was drained. Now several refugees from the city who were familiar with the moat assured the Bishop’s engineers that this could be done in four or five nights, in front of the St. Mauritz Gate. The commanders doubted and dithered. They preferred to build blockhouses instead, and shoot flaming arrows into the city from them.
In June Queen Marie of Burgundy, concerned that the assault on Münster was taking too long and thus breeding discontent and rebellion in her own lands, offered the Bishop whatever help he needed to end the affair. The leaders of Trier, Cleves, and Cologne grudgingly agreed to provide more soldiers and money for the Bishop to hire farmers to dig trenches for the anticipated assault and to disable the moat. The digging began in earnest on June 7, when twenty-eight hundred farmers began to work; they were joined on June 13 by another four thousand men. However, the continued cannon fire and sniping from the city walls was devastating the morale of these impressed laborers, and the soldiers were constantly terrorized by the night raids of the Anabaptists.
In mid-June the officer in charge of construction recommended a change in t
actics. The new plan would require the step-by-step construction of a moving earthen wall that would be shoved up against the dam controlling the flow of water through the moat. The Bishop hoped that some nine thousand farmers could be drafted for this immense project, assuring his confederates that the lives of their subjects would be protected behind the high mounds of dirt. A much smaller number actually showed up, following the lead of their masters whose reluctance to get involved they more than shared. The work progressed, but slowly. At night the soldiers would put in place huge screens of straw, behind which the farmers worked from sunup to sundown, at a pace of no more than a few feet per day. By the end of July it seemed as though it would take another three months to reach the moat. Finally the Bishop’s desperate appeals for more laborers were heeded; the dam, near the Hörster Gate, was reached by mid-August, and the moat at the Judefeld Gate had again been drained.
Following established custom, the Bishop’s war council now, on August 25, formally declared a three-hour truce with the Anabaptists in order to offer them a chance to surrender. A small delegation was allowed to enter the city. They saw few people on the streets, and those whom they did see turned away from them fearfully, they reported upon their return. It was forbidden on pain of death for anyone other than Jan himself to speak with the Bishop’s representatives. Jan’s message to the Bishop was a vow that “he was ready to fight until his last drop of blood if that was what it took to honor the word of God.” The messengers had the impression that Jan was certain of help coming from the Netherlands.
When the Bishop learned that his offer had been rejected, he had several hundred copies of a message made up for the defenders. He promised mercy to any of the innocent citizens of Münster if they would now leave the city, and threatened them with great punishment if they remained and came into his hands after the city fell. He extended the period of truce for three days to give them time to decide. The Bishop’s archers tied the messages around blunted arrows and shot them over the walls. Jan, however, had learned of the Bishop’s ploy and threatened instant execution for anyone found with an arrow or a message. No one left the city.
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