Faustus: The Life and Times of a Renaissance Magician

by Leo Ruickbie

  Church and town enjoyed an uneasy relationship – easier for the Church than the town, as usual. The Church communities were exempt from taxation, its members exempt from military service, and their self-sufficiency contributed nothing to the local economy whilst offering the local farmers, artisans and merchants serious competition. Following the upheaval of the Peasants’ War in 1525, Münster had made itself independent from the Church, grudgingly granted by the Prince-Bishop Friedrich von Wiede, and enjoyed self-rule through the offices of a council and two mayors.

  The first signs of religious mania were evident in 1531 when the former priest Bernard Rothmann, enthused by radical Lutheran ideas, led a mob to destroy the ‘idols’ in his old church of St Mauritz. He had studied under Melanchthon, but found the teachings of the mild-man of the Reformation too passive, too academic. Melanchthon was known to have remarked to Luther that Rothmann would either turn out to be ‘extraordinarily good or extraordinarily bad’.1 He was not wrong.

  Rothmann left Münster to evade the consequences, but returned again in early 1532 to resume preaching. Anabaptist themes crept into his sermons, alarming Catholics and Lutherans alike. Fearing that civil order was being undermined, von Wiede ordered him to desist. Rothmann gave in, but his obedience lasted only a few short weeks. This time the Bishop ordered Dirk von Merveldt, Bailiff of the Cathedral, to make the council expel this troublemaker. But there were those on the council, like the merchant Bernard Knipperdolling, who supported Rothmann.

  Having secretly pledged their allegiance to the cause in Knipperdolling’s house, Rothmann, Knipperdolling and others marched into the church of St Lambert’s and destroyed the stone sarcophagi that held the mouldering bones of long dead clerics. Excited by their desecration, the mob rampaged through the streets, burning piles of votive candles, priestly vestments, paintings, tapestries and books. Rothmann threw his own sermons into the fires, exclaiming, ‘The truth of Holy Scripture shall triumph’.2

  Von Wiede’s retirement forestalled the armed conflict that seemed inevitable. The ailing von Wiede was succeeded by Franz I von Waldeck (1491–1553), welcomed by the Catholics of the town as a ‘brave and righteous knight’.3 The Lutherans’ opinion of him was diametrically opposite. They saw him as a whoring, hunting, drinking, swaggering noble, not a ‘bishop’ in any sense of the word. It was true that he was not an ordained priest and had had several children by his mistress, but his sympathies were inclined towards the Lutheran cause.

  His portrait shows a heavily-jowled and bewhiskered man, his fat right hand closed tightly round a sword, his bishop’s crosier pulled protectively to his chest. There is a look of sullen stupidity mixed with an aggressive possessiveness about him. History has remembered him as having lived a dissolute life.

  The new Bishop prevaricated, awaiting the Emperor’s ruling on the situation. Knipperdolling seized the initiative. He organised an illegal armed guard for Rothmann and forced the council to effectively deny Roman Catholics the right to practice their faith. Rothmann reigned from the pulpit of Münster’s grandest church, St Lambert’s, enjoining his congregation to enjoy the God-given delight in feasting and the flesh. A witness to these events, Herman Kerssenbrück, later described Rothmann’s religious services as being closer to the rituals of Baal or Satan than to Christianity.

  At his court in far-away Regensburg, the Emperor received report of the disturbances and furrowed his brow. He suspected that von Waldeck’s indecision was more than mere weakness and a sign of secret sympathies. He demanded that strong action be taken against the troublemakers.

  The town council ignored the Emperor’s message and von Waldeck retaliated with a blockade. With their prosperity threatened, the townspeople turned to neighbouring Landgrave Philipp I, a known Lutheran sympathiser, to intercede on their behalf. The councillors also put out appeals to their neighbouring cities, but their support was not forthcoming. Philipp intercession fell on the Bishop’s deaf ears. There was nothing for it but to hire mercenaries.

  On Boxing Day 1532, a force of 900 armed men stormed the Bishop’s stronghold of Telgte in a daring midnight attack. They had hoped to surprise the Bishop at home, but von Waldeck was holidaying at his residence of Billerbeck. They returned instead with eighteen hostages, some of them high-ranking ecclesiastics.

  The Bishop was forced to parley. The town was granted full religious liberty in return for its promise of obedience and tolerance of Catholic worship. Rothmann himself was forbidden from public preaching, but paid little heed. Other preachers gave him their support and he again began to publicly spread his views.

  Tensions in Münster had momentarily distracted the Emperor from the more pressing problems posed by François I and the Ottomans. The news of the stand-off must have travelled far and been the talk at every inn and castle court. Knipperling’s basement printing press had been churning out Rothmann’s sermons and leaflets for months. His message of the common ownership of all goods was one that not just the religiously inclined could be moved by. Rothmann wrote that the poorest were now the richest in their town, once despised they were now the most distinguished. To this carrot he added a large stick, warning that because God was about to ‘punish the world’ everyone should ‘get ready to go to the new Jerusalem’.4

  These leaflets and rumours of the new preaching at Münster were drawing large numbers of pilgrims, the poor and many others who believed they had nothing to lose and everything to gain. All along the highways of the Empire, religious fanatics and the destitute were on the move, seeking the road to a better life as one of the Company of Christ in Rothmann’s new Kingdom of Zion. In the opposite direction went the oppressed Catholics and others who did not need an astrologer to tell them that this growing throng of the dispossessed boded ill.

  News must also have reached Faustus’s ears. We have no information on his religious persuasions: his associations with the Lutheran von Sickingen and the Catholic Georg III suggest that this was a matter of indifference to him, at least so far as his clientele was concerned. As a philosopher versed in the Greek and Latin classics, as a Hermeticist steeped in occult lore, as an astrologer learnéd in the motions of the stars, and as an alchemist who had separated and recombined the elements of the earth, he did not need wild-eyed preachers to interpret the world or the Word for him. But as one who claimed to be able to recreate the miracles allegedly performed by Jesus, even to better them, he too, might have made that journey north. His fellow Faustians, Agrippa and Paracelsus, did not seal themselves within Hermeticism but also joined the religious debates of their day – neither of them much to their advantage.

  The influx of new disciples tipped the balance in Münster. Radicals replaced the moderates on the council. Draconian and summary punishments were introduced against morally objectionable behaviour. In late 1533 mass baptisms, conducted by hordes of newly arrived preachers such as Jan Bockelson (1509–1536), the tailor’s apprentice from Leyden (and more usually known as Jan van Leyden), started taking place. In one week alone, 1,400 people were re-baptised. The poor were put to work strengthening the city’s defences. The able-bodied were organised into militias. The freedom the citizens had won was beginning to turn into another tyranny, but they would not feel the weight of this new yoke until it was too late.

  Tensions between the different factions within Münster were also escalating. Lutherans and Anabaptists were not seeing eye-to-eye. As usual the trouble centred on Rothman. When the Lutheran co-mayor ordered Rothmann and his most vocal acolyte Henry Roll to be arrested and expelled from the city, hundreds of armed supporters turned out ready to defend them. Anabaptist women, demanding the reinstatement of Rothmann, chased the Lutheran preacher out of St Lambert’s and pelted the councilmen with dung when they tried to reprimand them.

  The Bishop despaired at the mounting chaos and sent furious letters hither and thither, to Landgrave Philipp I, to the council. He demanded that the Anabaptists be expelled, but was again rebuffed. Rumours circulated that the Bishop had am
assed an army and was preparing to attack. Using this as a pretext the Anabaptists now moved against the Lutherans and the remaining Catholics, striking first at the council. The councillors barricaded themselves inside the Overwater Church, defended by their own militia of armed supporters. Meanwhile armed peasants entered the city, ready to defend the Bishop’s cause and the Catholic faithful. Stalemate ensued, broken only by the treachery of co-mayor Tilbeck. Sent to parley with the Bishop, he burnt their offer of truce and told his fellow councillors that the only option was to side with the Anabaptists. The peasants withdrew without a fight – pacified by an innkeeper’s liquid incentive – and the council surrendered to the Anabaptists. At sunset the phenomenon of parhelion split the sun into three burning orbs and set the clouds on fire. Münster was bathed in golden light. The triumphant Anabaptists took this as a sign of God’s grace and celebrated with wild abandon: ‘Nothing could have been more frightful, more insane, or more comic’ reported Kerssenbrück.5

  Messengers were sent out urging other Anabaptists to join them, for the time had come. Over the following days more zealots flooded in. Amongst them was Jan Matthias. A former baker from Amsterdam, Matthias was in his fifties, a tall, stooping figure, dressed always in black, with the beard of a prophet and the burning eyes of a ‘true believer’. He was regarded as another Enoch sent to herald the Second Coming. By his side was the beautiful runaway nun Divara, younger by some twenty 20 years, dark-haired and always dressed in white. If Münster had become a tyranny, then its tyrant had arrived.

  Faustus would not have found a welcome within Münster’s gates now. Matthias frothed during one of his sermons that ‘Everywhere we are surrounded by dogs and sorcerers and whores and killers and the godless and all who love lies and commit them.’6 Matthias had all those who would not be re-baptised expelled – Knipperdolling’s intervention saved them from a worse fate. Faustus, if he had been here, would now have been thrown out and undoubtedly glad for it. The indications are that he was here, if not in Münster itself, then nearby.

  A Mighty Fortress Is Our God

  As the exiles trudged out through the city’s ten gates, beyond the double walls and across the two moats to who knows what future, the Bishop was laying his siege. He had already executed several Anabaptists in neighbouring towns and confiscated their belongings. Such summary actions betrayed his weakness: he was not yet able to move against heavily defended Münster. He lacked artillery and had to borrow Landgrave Philipp’s prized siege cannons known colourfully as the Devil and the Devil’s Mother. From the Princes of Cleves and Bentheim, and the Archbishop of Cologne came forty smaller cannons. Wagon convoys brought in supplies from near and far: almost 300 barrels of black powder from Brabant and Amsterdam, salpetre and sulphur from Mengen, iron shot for the harquebuses from Deventer, cartloads of halberds, spears and fire-arms, and wheelbarrows and shovels for the engineers. Then there were the soldiers, almost all of them mercenaries, some 8,000 men marching from the Rhineland, Saxony, the Low Countries and Denmark with their trains of camp followers, to hire out their lives for a few gulden. The Bishop negotiated loans from his allies and extorted more tax from his subjects to meet the expenses – the Landsknechte alone cost 34,000 gulden a month.

  Although the later legends always situate Faustus in the company of students and scholars, in the historical documents we often find him in the company of knights and princes, boasting of winning all the Emperor’s victories in Italy and claiming title in the warlike Order of St John of Jerusalem. It is perhaps now with the Landsknechte, rather than the zealots, that Faustus takes the road to Münster. From experience he knew that military men also looked to the stars, to the signs and portents, and thus to the astrologers during their campaigns.

  Marching to the fife and drum of some mercenary band, perhaps in the company of old friends from the Italian Wars, or picking his own way north through the bad roads and inclement weather, Faustus would have arrived to find the Bishop’s army already encamped outside Münster. Divided into seven compounds, the camp stretched across four miles, pennants fluttering from the white tents. Soldiers drilled while wives did the washing and children played in the fields. Local merchants arrived and set up shop. The camp had become a second Münster, made of canvas and rope instead of seasoned wood and stone.

  Two months of inactivity passed, stretching the patience of the Archbishop of Cologne and the Emperor. Von Waldeck was already falling behind with his payments to his soldiers and slowly some of them began to desert. Gert von Münster, known as ‘the smoker’ for his enthusiastic addiction to the new drug of tobacco, deserted with a troop of his men to the Anabaptists. The Bishop’s soldiers marched up and down, maintained watches and patrols, and fought off night forays and surprise attacks from the Anabaptists. Behind the impassive walls, sounds of the Anabaptists’ preparations could be heard as the defences were strengthened, black powder and charcoal manufactured, lead roofing melted down for bullets, iron hammered out by the blacksmiths into spearheads and sword blades, and pitch and quicklime made ready in cauldrons along the ramparts. They would also have heard their trumpets and singing. A snatch of a hymn like ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’, taken from Luther, drifting on the air, reminded all that this was no ordinary siege. They would have seen smoke rising from continued mass book burnings as Matthias purged his people of every written word except that of the Bible.

  We should not picture Faustus sitting with the Landsknechte, sharing their boredom and money worries, but rather seeking out the Bishop, his commander-in-chief Ulrich von Dhaun, or his lieutenants, Johann von Buren, Hermann von Mengerssen and Eberhard von Morrien. Prasser’s Waldeck Chronicle mentioned a Hensel Hochstraten as the military leader. Only these noblemen and officers of rank could afford his services, or required them.

  On 5 April 1534 Faustus may have watched as a divinely inspired Jan Matthias and a bodyguard of a dozen at best rode out of Münster’s Ludger Gate to challenge von Waldeck’s army to single combat. There would be no toying with this token gesture. The Bishop’s finest cavalry, 500 men-at-arms in black armour mounted on black horses, charged this sixteenth-century David and cut him to pieces. A black rider paraded Matthias’s head before the walls of Münster before it was stuck on a spike and set up in view of the city, and that night the bloody lump of the Prophet’s genitalia was nailed to the wooden doors of the Ludger Gate.

  With their leader gone, and so ignominiously, von Waldeck must have been confident that Münster would fall, but it did not. Neither Knipperdolling nor Rothmann were charismatic enough to fill his place; instead it was the young Jan van Leyden who now stood up and donned the mantle of power (as well as marrying – his third concurrent marriage – the newly widowed Divara).

  The Bishop still did not act – a bold move now would have taken advantage of the chaos that enveloped Münster after the death of its prophet and which van Leyden was now bringing to order. Sieges are often won by inactivity, the aggressor simply waiting until the defenders are starved into submission, but Münster enjoyed a high degree of self-sufficiency and, as any competent commander would have seen, would not easily succumb to hunger.

  Faustus may have stood with the Bishop and watched the clouds of dust rising up from Münster as they pulled down the steeples – symbols in stone of the Pope’s power and that of his Bishop. The Anabaptists turned the ‘Jewel of Westphalia’ into ruins, except the spire of St Lambert’s and a few other towers that were saved for use as artillery platforms.

  After some preliminary mining to try and drain the moat, the Bishop eventually began the siege in earnest on 22 May. He opened with an artillery barrage, firing, it has been estimated, around 700 cannonballs a day for four continuous days. Equipment for storming the walls – grappling hooks and long ladders – and straw mats to cover the muddy bottom of the exposed floor of the moat were made ready in anticipation. But the soldiers had started drinking earlier on the afternoon before the planned dawn assault. Waking up to see a sun glowing red on the
horizon, they mistook its setting for its rising. Screaming Attacke! they staggered forward in a chaotic, drunken charge. They forgot the straw mats and became bogged down in the moat, easy targets for the defenders. About 200 were either killed or wounded with little or no losses to the other side.

  Towards the end of July the sounds of shots and cries from within the walls could be heard, all that was evident to the besiegers of the failed coup led by the blacksmith Henry Mollenheck. It was another missed opportunity for the dithering von Waldeck.

  After months of mining to try and re-drain the moat – it had filled once more – the Bishop was ready to mount another offensive. Did he turn to Faustus and ask, ‘Are the stars propitious?’ The answer was lost in the roar of cannon-fire as ‘the Devil’ and his ‘Mother’ and their numerous offspring bombarded the city. The main gate of St Mauritz took a heavy pounding and the walls were breached, but answering fire from the Anabaptists prevented the Bishop’s men from pressing their advantage. That night the walls were shorn up and torrential rain turned the ground to mud, bringing von Waldeck’s army to a wet and boggy standstill.