Believers and Rogues
Such was the fevered and delirious atmosphere in the Westphalian city of Münster in February 1534 that residents reported seeing three suns in the sky, easily recognized in that era as the same portent seen after the death of Julius Caesar that foretold the Second Triumvirate of Octavian, Mark Anthony, and Lepidus.
This vision particularly energized a new Protestant sect known as the Anabaptists, who rejected the traditional Catholic practice of infant baptism, and instead rebaptized new converts into the faith as adults. A Catholic named Hermann von Kerssenbrock, who had observed the events of 1534 as a young boy, later recorded that “The sky seemed to gape open, splitting into long cracks from which terrifying fires flickered out. . . . [Peasants] saw the city as if ablaze, and when they rushed to investigate, they found that the flames had not only been harmless to the city but had disappeared altogether.”92
The young von Kerssenbrock wondered at the madness of the street scene, and described the Anabaptists as
. . . so deranged, so unbalanced, so driven by frenzy that they also surpassed the Furies described in poetry. They rushed about in the marketplace in quite a shameless manner, some with their hair streaming, some with clothing loose and flowing, some with their wimples blowing in the wind. Some lifted themselves up in crazy dances as if about to fly with the help of their mania. Some collapsed face down on the ground, forming the shape of the cross by sticking out their arms. . . . Some lay in the soft mud, rolling themselves over and over. Some fell to their knees and bellowed. Some howled with gleaming eyes. Some frothed at the lips. Some made threats while shaking their heads and gnashing their teeth, and some ostentatiously uttered lamentations while striking their breasts. Some cried, some laughed. We, on the other hand, did not so much laugh at their crazed madness as grieve.93
Less than a decade after Thomas Müntzer’s short-lived, bloody, and inept revolt, another cohort of Joachim’s children would execute their fevered visions of the end-times with far greater competence in the town of Münster. There, between 1533 and 1535, the so-called Anabaptist Madness consumed the municipality before it too succumbed to a final assault by the powers that be.
Following the disastrous German Peasants’ War, the focal point of the evolving crowd madness moved north, to what is today western Germany and Holland. This area had for decades enjoyed the increasing prosperity of the Hanseatic League, a loose confederation of trading states that stretched along the Baltic and North Seas, roughly from today’s Estonia to Flanders. In contrast to the Peasants’ War, which mainly sprang from social discontent, the folk rebellion in Germany and Holland was driven by a new religious doctrine, Anabaptism.
In the late eighth century, Charlemagne had conquered Münster, east of modern Holland and south of Emden, and dispatched a missionary named Ludger to proselytize the region and forcibly convert its inhabitants to Christianity. There, on the bank of the river Aa, Ludger built a monastery (monasterium, in Latin), from which the town derived its name. As Münster grew prosperous within the Hanseatic economy, its opulent cathedral and numerous grand churches heightened the outward appearance of municipal prosperity.
Münster’s ecclesiastical splendor came at a cost: Church tithes necessary to support it fell hard on the backs of the faithful, the clergy themselves paid no taxes, and the land cultivated by the monks and the looms worked by the nuns competed with local farmers and cloth producers. Such ecclesiastical rapacity was hardly unique to the town; all over Europe, the Church’s behavior fanned the flames of religious strife and public anger.94
Anabaptism itself had its origins in a series of arcane theological discussions a decade earlier in Zurich, where a Catholic priest named Ulrich Zwingli established a reformed church in 1519. Zwingli had participated in a series of formal doctrinal disputes sponsored by the town council, of which he was declared the winner. One of the issues discussed before the council concerned the timing of baptism. (“Anabaptism” derives from the Latin, anabaptismus, “rebaptisim” or “second baptism.”) Logically, only an adult acting of his or her free will can give meaningful obedience to Christ, as described in the gospels of the New Testament. Despite this, infant baptism became well established by the third century, and was near universal and unquestioned Church practice by the time of Luther and Zwingli.
One of Zwingli’s opponents in the city council disputations, a merchant named Conrad Grebel, opposed infant baptism—“child washing,” as his theological descendants would later disparage it. Following the disputations, Grebel rebaptized one of his friends, George Blaurock, and the two of them then began baptizing anew other adults.
At the time, not much was made of this. Zwingli himself remarked that little theological daylight separated him and Grebel, save for “unimportant outward things, such as these, whether infants or adults should be baptized and whether a Christian may be a magistrate.”95
But the Anabaptist fuse had been lit, or, more accurately, two fuses: one leading through the Baltics and Low Countries (modern Netherlands and Belgium and the estuaries of the Rhine, Ems, Scheldt, and Meuse rivers), and the other through Münster. Both the Münster and Baltic/Low Countries fuses burned separately until 1534, when they would combine in Münster to ignite one of history’s most tumultuous mass delusions.
Melchior Hoffman, a German fur trader who plied the profitable routes among the Hanseatic cities, lit the Baltic/Low Country fuse. A decade younger than Luther, he gained the Wittenberg professor’s approval around 1523 and spread his reformist heresies as he traveled. A few years later, Hoffman took the Book of Revelation to heart, departed from Luther’s teachings, and began to preach the imminence of an apocalyptic battle between the forces of good and evil.
As have apocalypticists before and since, he enthusiastically applied home-brewed eschatological math. Hoffman calculated that Christ died in a.d. 33, and the apostolic period lasted one hundred years, until a.d. 133. For the sins of the Judeans, he believed, mankind received a punishment of three and a half years, which was increased by a factor of twenty during the Babylonian period, and by a another twenty-fold for the falling away of the Church from Christ, i.e., 1,400 years. Therefore, the apocalypse would occur in 1533 (133 + 1,400), a prediction that precipitated riots and mayhem in multiple Baltic trading cities, including Lübeck, Stockholm, and some Danish ports, a trail of chaos that earned him expulsion from each.96
By its nature, Anabaptism was an appealing but decentralized theology whose adherents were unified by little else than the belief in adult baptism. Eventually, Anabaptist communities sprung up all over western Europe, particularly along the Hanseatic trade routes. Hoffman’s apocalyptic brand of Anabaptism met its greatest success in the Low Countries, especially in Emden, the largest city in East Frisia, a coastal area of Germany just east of the modern Dutch border.
The Habsburgs had inherited the Low Countries from the Burgundians in the late fifteenth century. During this period, their cities had become among the most prosperous on the Continent, and their inhabitants, empowered by Luther’s destruction of the Church monopoly on scriptural interpretation and Gutenberg’s printing press, congregated in small, unofficial groups, called conventicles, which became hotbeds for a wide variety of religious sects.
Around 1530, Hoffman passed through Strasbourg, then a beehive of Reformation activity. The city was home to, among other doctrines, the mild Swiss version of Anabaptism, which he grafted onto his apocalyptic creed. In 1531, echoing Revelation, he decided that Strasbourg would be where Revelation’s 144,000 holy messengers would assemble and prevail against a great siege of the city by the forces of evil. Petitioning the Strasbourg city council to establish his own church earned him one more exile, whereupon he returned to the Low Countries and rebaptized large numbers of adults, three hundred alone at a single sitting in Emden’s main church.97
In December 1531, authorities of the Holy Roman Empire, the Low Country’s ostensible rulers, captured one of Hoffman’s disciples, Jan Volkerts, who had rebaptized fifty converts in Amsterdam. They all but invited him to escape, but he chose martyrdom instead and was beheaded along with nine followers. In response, Hoffman lowered the sect’s profile by forbidding adult baptism.98 In 1533, Hoffman unwisely returned to Strasbourg, where a synod convicted him of relatively minor heresies and imprisoned him in a series of abysmal prison cells. He greeted his grim new surroundings with equanimity; since the Apocalypse was imminent, he wasn’t going to be there long, a sunny assumption that proved incorrect. He survived imprisonment for a decade, during which burghers on the street below occasionally heard him softly chant psalms and endlessly repeat “Woe ye godless scribes of Strasbourg.”99
Upon Hoffman’s incarceration, one of his followers, a baker named Jan Matthys, turned up in Amsterdam, declared himself the prophet Enoch, and, to the joy of the faithful, resumed adult baptism. Enoch was one of only two Old Testament characters taken by God to heaven while alive, the other being Elijah, whose identity Hoffman had already appropriated. Further, some Anabaptists cited Revelation 11:3–12 as proof that Enoch and Elijah were the two unnamed witnesses who ascend to heaven. As 1533 passed into 1534, Low Country believers were forced to postpone the apocalypse to 1535 and moved its venue north from Strasbourg to the more religiously tolerant town of Münster.
In March 1534, at least three thousand Amsterdam Anabaptists attempted to reach Münster by sailing across the Zuider Zee. They were blocked by Habsburg troops, whose response to the attempt was considered mild for that era: they executed only about a hundred heretics and let go the rest as innocent dupes. The next day several “apostles” brandished swords and paraded through Amsterdam’s streets to warn of a Judgment Day just before Easter; they were caught and killed. By that year, the Habsburg authorities in The Hague had deployed “flying columns” to round up Low Country Anabaptists, who were tortured and presented with the choice between recantation and execution.100
On a frigid night in February 1535, a group of Anabaptists ran naked through Amsterdam and shouted “Woe to the godless!” Public nakedness symbolized to the faithful innocence before God, and was also common in Münster; the men who refused to put on clothes were executed, and the women who refused were drowned. (The sword and naked walkers left the Dutch language with two new words, zwaardlopers and naaklopers.)
Anabaptist insurrections broke out in numerous other Dutch cities as well, which brought more executions. By mid-1535 as many as 20 percent of Amsterdam’s population may have undergone adult baptism. Many, if not most, of the anointed were outsiders, refugees from spiraling repression and resistance that included several large-scale pitched battles. On May 11, armed Anabaptists occupied the city’s main market, and before being arrested cried out, “Whoever loves God, join us!” Three days later, the authorities tore out the hearts of eleven of the ringleaders; that summer, the authorities cut off the tongue of an Anabaptist leader because he used it to preach; his right hand because he had used it to baptize, and finally, his head.101
Even for the era, the suppression of the Anabaptists was brutal, certainly more than that applied to the followers of Luther and Zwingli; that these last two groups abrogated the Church monopoly on scriptural interpretation was bad enough, but at least they respected private property and the authority of secular governments. The Anabaptists did neither; in most cases they advocated the confiscation of concentrated wealth—particularly the Church’s—and denied the legitimacy of existing governments. The Anabaptists compounded their sedition with belief in an imminent End and, in many cases, actions that might hasten it.
Numerous as the Dutch Anabaptists were, the Habsburgs had far too tight a grip on Holland for them to succeed; they needed softer political ground, which meant, in practice, a city not under the thumb of the Habsburgs. They found it in Münster, where the second fuse to the Anabaptist Madness would be lit.
Many of the Hanseatic towns, such as Danzig and Lübeck, were so-called “free cities,” essentially independent of the distant and increasingly impotent Holy Roman Emperor, and so owed only a nominal fealty to him. Most of these nearly independent municipalities were ruled by a local nobleman, in Münster’s case a “prince-bishop,” chosen by the local cathedral but confirmed by the pope, often at a steep price, and who often ruled more as a feudal master than as an ecclesiastical figure who combined both civil and clerical authority.
In 1525, Münster’s prince-bishop, Frederick von Wiede, frightened by the Peasants War, devolved power to a town council of twenty-four members that included two co-mayors. Less than a decade later, the council, which, unlike the Low Country governments, was largely free of Habsburg influence, would become the wedge with which the Anabaptists effected their frenzied, violent mayhem.102
Most historians assign Anabaptism’s beachhead in Münster to one Bernard Rothmann, born around 1495 to a blacksmith who, along with his ancestors, had stood accused of witchcraft. Young Bernard was described as having a “fickle and clownish temperament,” and being too poor for schooling, found himself under the tutelage of his uncle, a vicar at St. Maurice’s Church in Münster, where he became a choirboy and eventually made a living singing. By the time puberty cut short his vocal career, he had earned the wherewithal to study at Mainz, where he earned a master’s degree. In 1529 he returned to St. Maurice’s.103
Sometime around 1530 Rothmann, by now a persuasive preacher, acquired the financial support of wealthy cloth merchant, guild leader, and city council member Bernard Knipperdolling, who first converted to Lutheranism and subsequently, under Rothmann’s influence, became a secret Anabaptist. Knipperdolling printed Rothmann’s tracts, which fanned Anabaptism’s flames, not only in Münster but also in the Low Countries.
The modern understanding of the Anabaptist Madness owes much to two observers, the aforementioned Hermann von Kerssenbrock, and Heinrich Gresbeck, the latter an Anabaptist-convert carpenter who remained through most of the episode and played a small but critical role in its end. Both von Kerssenbrock and Gresbeck left detailed written accounts that, when interpreted in the light of their respective biases, seem credible.104
Von Kerssenbrock described how, initially, Rothmann faithfully taught Catholic doctrine, but then
gradually he began to mix into his sermons doctrines that seemed to be inimical to Catholic dogma, and as he began to incite the commons to anger against the clergy, he attracted to himself some among the burghers who were eager for novelty.105
His superiors at St. Maurice’s decided to protect their flock from Rothmann’s increasingly radical views and so loaned him twenty gold florins for further study in Cologne. He neither made it there nor repaid the loan; instead, he headed straight to Wittenberg, home of Luther and Melanchthon.
The young priest returned to St. Maurice’s in 1531 a confirmed Lutheran who, intoxicated by the pleasures of demagoguery, proved adept at attracting crowds to the small church that lay outside of the city walls. As recorded by von Kerssenbrock,
Many people, especially those weighed down by debt, revered him like some godhead, hung from his every word, and were convinced that he was driven in his actions by the Spirit of God. Despite official orders to the contrary, they followed him in crowds from the city on account of their eagerness to hear him speak, their desire to do so being so great that they considered that there were no preachers but him and despised, condemned, and cursed the others along with the entire clergy.106
Von Kerssenbrock, a loyal Catholic, sniffed that Rothmann preached “not so much with solid arguments as with clumsy aspersions. The ignorant commoners, however, who cannot distinguish eloquence from bombast, thought that he had spoken excellently.”107
Rothmann by this point had been removed as a priest at St. Maurice’s, and soon enough he led a mob to the church that smashed idols, knocked over altars, crushed a silver chalice, and burned paintings of the Blessed Virgin. The authorities once more expelled him, and he repaired yet again to Wittenberg, where he impressed both Luther and Melanchthon, the latter of whom is said to have presciently remarked that “Rothmann would either be remarkably good or remarkably bad.”108
Rothmann again returned to Münster in 1532, where he began to espouse frankly Anabaptist views. This was a double-edged sword. Adult baptism aroused not only the approval of his audiences, but also the approbation of the Church, which had by then shown scant compunction at burning Anabaptists at the stake or drowning them by tying rocks to their neck and tossing them into the water, “a little bit of a theological joke,” in the words of Anabaptism scholar Christopher Mackay.109
At this point, the prince-bishop, von Wiede, still controlled the city and so forced the preacher to cease his blasphemies. He complied for a few weeks, but then threw caution to the wind and wrote to von Wiede, that “because my conscience is clear, I have no doubt that I can rely on God’s mercy. He will protect me and rescue me from danger.”110
In February 1532, Rothmann preached a sermon in the yard of one of the city’s main churches, St. Lamberts, and so swayed the congregation that they spontaneously chose him as their pastor. More importantly, he had won enough support on the town council to prevent his expulsion. Münster’s religious fervor was not limited to Anabaptism; churches all over the city were installing radical Lutheran preachers, all of them, except for Rothmann, from other cities.
Rothmann’s success in converting the city to Anabaptism matched that of Hoffman and Matthys in the Low Countries. Shortly after Rothmann’s St. Lamberts sermon, von Wiede resigned in frustration, and his immediate replacement died before he could be consecrated; in June Francis von Waldeck, the son of a count with little ecclesiastical background, ascended to prince-bishop. Late in the year, he blockaded the city, now fully under the control of the rebellious Anabaptists, who responded with a successful raid on von Waldeck’s headquarters just outside the city walls. In February 1533, a compromise was reached: the parish churches could practice Lutheranism, while the cathedral would remain Catholic.111
Despite this compromise, time was running out for Münster’s Catholics and Lutherans. Rothmann’s pamphlets, underwritten by the wealthy Knipperdolling, had permeated the Low Countries. These flysheets labeled private property as a source of great evil: “God had made all things common, as today we can still enjoy air, fire, rain, and the sun in common, and whatever else some thieving man cannot grasp for himself.” Rothmann portrayed Münster as a city of plenty that would welcome the faithful with open arms, and hundreds of the wretched from the Low Countries made the pilgrimage south to the new Anabaptist Jerusalem.
In early 1533, the city contained an uneasy mix of Catholics, conventional Lutherans, and Anabaptists, the last of whom had no intention of honoring the prince-bishop’s compromise. At the same time, enough Anabaptists had flowed in from the Low Countries to trigger a special council election in March that resulted in a radical Lutheran majority, a substantial Anabaptist minority, and no Catholics.112 The city council began its new reign by fining families who baptized babies in the cathedral.
Meanwhile in the Low Countries, Jan Matthys performed his first rebaptism on a man from Leiden named Jan Bockelson. Whereas Matthys, like Hoffman, was an impulsive, fiery preacher, Bockelson would fashion his theatrical skills and calculating nature into a formidable political force. Born into bitterness and disappointment as the bastard son of a town mayor and a serf woman, he was provided by his parents with rudimentary schooling and an apprenticeship in tailoring, at which he proved maladept. Nature, nonetheless, had endowed him with other attributes that he would shortly deploy in Münster: blond good looks, grace, cunning, oratorical prowess, and acting talent. In the words of millennialist scholar Norman Cohn, he used these gifts “to shape real life into a play, with himself as its hero and all Europe for an audience.”113
In late 1533 Matthys sent several emissaries to Münster, who arrived the following January. These included Bockelson, who had himself visited the city the previous summer. Once there, they found that Rothmann and his followers had already rebaptized approximately one-fifth of the city’s adults, and that as many as one-third of the population believed that the Apocalypse was imminent; Matthys himself came on February 9, 1534.114 The arrivals of Matthys and Bockelson mark the merging of the two Anabaptist fuses: Rothmann’s persuasive homegrown Münster Anabaptism, and the Low Country–derived hypnotic end-times delusions of Melchior Hoffman, then languishing in a Strasbourg prison cell. To both parties, the meaning of their arrival in Münster was crystal clear. In the words of scholar Ralf Klötzer,
That a prophet sent out his messengers to baptize was interpreted as a sign that God was preparing the end of the world. Within this context, wars, plague, and inflation, along with the Reformation in the Empire, suddenly became portents of the last days.115
From this point, things moved rapidly. The Anabaptists sent envoys to neighboring cities with the message that by Easter of 1534, God would return to punish the wicked and that few would survive; safety and salvation could be had only in Münster, the New Jerusalem. The end of the world was nigh.
On February 6, 1534, Rothmann performed an opéra bouffe for the nuns of the Convent Across-the-River:
He gave a sermon in praise of marriage, and with the wondrous battering rams of his oration he broke open the barracks within which their virginity was enclosed. He seemed to be urging the virgins to propagate the human race, an act to which they were not particularly averse. Next, to make them completely crazy instead of merely stupid, he convinced them that the tower of the convent along with its entire structure and all those living in it would collapse at midnight on the following day. . . . The oracle brought the nuns not so much distress as joy. For their spirit, which was ablaze with lust, hated the monastic life.116
The young ladies, who had nowhere else to go and perceiving Rothmann as a man of God, decamped with their possessions to his house. Throughout the city, citizens went sleepless to greet the End.
It did not come, and to save face, the preacher deployed a ripe biblical chestnut, the story of Jonah, who had in error foretold the fall of Nineveh, the Assyrian capital, which the Almighty then spared out of mercy. Two mornings later Rothmann’s Anabaptist colleagues, fearful that his forecasting incompetence had devalued their stock, comically attempted to reinflate their credibility by rushing through the streets and declaiming loudly with “horrifying shouts and insane bellows” for nonbelievers to repent. That afternoon Bockelson and Knipperdolling joined the act, yelling over and over, “Repentance! Repentance! Repentance! Repentance!” Their remonstrations recruited others, who variously jumped up and down, rolled their heads, and flopped in the mud. One Anabaptist galloped through the streets on horseback, announced the End, and told all who would listen of the tens of thousands of angels he had beheld.117
The madness so energized the Anabaptists that later the same day, five hundred of them seized the city market before the mainstream Lutherans finally pushed them back. The Lutheran comeback proved short-lived; the Anabaptists finally took complete control of the city council in the election of February 23. At month’s end, armed Anabaptist enforcers gave the non-Anabaptists an ultimatum: rebaptism or expulsion. “Get out of here, you godless! God will punish you!”118
The Anabaptists destroyed church altars and spent days plundering the cathedral’s gold and silver and burning its statues. They also received copper tokens bearing the letters “DWWF” (das wort wird fleisch—the word becomes flesh) that allowed them to pass the now heavily defended city gates. By the end of the month, the prince-bishop’s troops had begun their siege of the city, and Bockelson informed the faithful that the scriptures demanded that when faced with end-times, the Lord granted Christians not the other cheek, but rather a heavily armed defense.
The first Catholics to depart were allowed to take their possessions, except for food, which was already in short supply; the last ones out went with just the clothes on their backs, usually minus their buttons and golden hooks, which were confiscated.119 The Anabaptists, with the memory of the Lutheran counterattack against their coup still fresh in their minds, concentrated their ire on the menfolk. For their part, the Lutherans and Catholic men fully expected the prince-bishop to recapture the city, and so left behind their women to guard their houses and possessions. The resultant excess of women within the city’s walls would soon produce dire consequences.120
Whereas in January the Anabaptists had merely volunteered all their physical possessions to the cause—since the world would end at Easter—in March the city council forbade private property, and Rothmann and Bockelson demanded that all silver, gold, and money be handed over at the city hall. In order to encourage the donations, Bockelson preached that there were three classes of believers: good Christians who totally divested themselves, those who held back some of their possessions and needed further prayer to a vengeful God, and those baptized only for convenience’s sake who should expect nothing but fire at the End.
Matthys and Bockelson gathered all of the town’s men in the cathedral square and shouted at them that the door to mercy had closed and that God was angry. Those who had been baptized were put to one side, and the rest, about three hundred men in all, were disarmed and forced to prostrate themselves and pray for mercy for an hour, expecting death at any moment. They were then led into the cathedral and forced to beseech God on their hands and knees for three more hours, at the end of which Bockelson, who had remained outside, theatrically threw open the doors and announced, “Dear brothers, I shall inform you for God’s sake that you have mercy from God and are to remain with us and be holy folk.” The next day, he repeated the process with the town’s two thousand unbaptized women.121
As March ended, the city had undergone a religious cleansing; approximately two thousand Catholics and unbaptized Lutherans had been expelled, and a roughly equal number of Anabaptist immigrants had arrived from Holland and East Frisia, which left the population roughly unchanged at around nine thousand. Not only had the religious makeup of the town changed, but so had its psychological makeup as well. Non-suggestible Catholics had been replaced by far more suggestible Anabaptists, which aggravated the mass delusional behavior that had already become manifest. Further, the expulsion of the godless and in-migration of the faithful served only to strengthen the apocalyptic certitude of the new prophets—Rothmann, Matthys, and Bockelson—that the End was truly near.
Not only did the Anabaptists embrace the future; they would also exterminate the past, and so they ordered the destruction of all of the municipal records, especially debt ledgers. The zealots burned books, Luther’s along with Aquinas’s. In some homes and churches only the Bible remained. Eventually, Bockelson would also generically rename the city’s gates and streets (St. Ludger’s Gate, for example, becoming simply South Gate) and assign newborns’ names according to alphabetical order.122
The new prophets began to brutally punish dissent; a blacksmith named Hubert Rüscher, who had lost his council seat in the February election and was unhappy, among other things, at the destruction of records, was brought before Bockelson, theatrically pardoned, then just as theatrically retrieved from his confinement, made to cry for mercy, and then stabbed in the back with a halberd. The vigorous and heavily muscled blacksmith survived the wound, so Bockelson then shot him in the back with a pistol; it took Rüscher eight days to die.123
Shortly before Easter, Matthys attended the wedding of some friends; Gresbeck recorded him prophesying his own death:
He sat for an hour long, slapping his hands together, nodding his head up and down and sighing heavily, just as if he was about to die. . . . Eventually, he started to wake up again and said with a sigh, “Oh, dear Father, not as I will but as you will.” He stood up, gave everyone his hand, and kissed them on the mouth. He said, “God’s peace be with you all,” and went on his way with his wife. (And at that time, the rebaptizers didn’t have many wives yet.)124
In 1534, Easter fell on April 5, Jesus did not materialize, and the world did not end. On that day, Matthys and perhaps a dozen followers departed the city gates and rode toward the prince-bishop’s landsknechts, who slaughtered them. Gresbeck reported that the besiegers cut Matthys’s body into a hundred pieces and playfully struck each other with the gory fragments, affixed his head to a pike, and yelled back to the city that the inhabitants should retrieve their mayor.125 The deluded Matthys may have been trying to entice Jesus to come, or, alternatively, to fulfill the passage in Revelation 11 suggesting that the deaths of Enoch (himself) and of Elijah (Hoffman, still rotting in a Strasbourg prison) would signal Jesus’s return.
Bockelson’s years of preaching around the countryside, which included a visit to Münster the previous summer, had honed his theatrical tradecraft. In nearby Schöppingen, he supposedly healed a sick girl by baptizing her, and by the time he arrived back in Münster in early 1534, a price was affixed to his head. He had likely been preparing for this precise moment. Until then he had kept a relatively low profile in Münster, but upon Matthys’s death, he appeared high above the crowd in an upper-level window of a church clothed in a white robe and bathed in candlelight, with Knipperdolling to his right and Diewer, Matthys’s beautiful and mysterious wife, whom history remembers by only her Christian name, to his left.
Bockelson shocked the crowd by telling them that Matthys deserved death for his vainglory and by taking so many along with him. He gestured to Knipperdolling and told the crowd that while living under his roof, he had a vision of Matthys’s gory disembowelment and that the landsknecht who did the deed told Bockelson not to be afraid: Matthys would be judged by God, and he, Bockelson, must marry his widow, Diewer. As proof, Bockelson again pointed to Knipperdolling, who purported to also have witnessed the landsknecht’s speech and confirmed its truth. The crowd became excited at the divine vision, and not a few tore off their clothes and danced. No one needed to be told that Bockelson had inherited Matthys’s mantle.126
He also inherited a problem from Matthys and Rothmann, for he had to explain to the faithful yet another no-show by Jesus. Christ, he divined, would now not return until the New Jerusalem had been purged of all impure elements.
Bockelson proved not only a brilliant demagogue, but also a competent military commander. He tightened the city’s already formidable defensive cordon of twin walls, moats, and stone-roundel-guarded gates. Only nine thousand citizens faced a roughly equal number of largely mercenary landsknechts, and no dead weight was allowed: women not only assisted men at the gunpowder mill, but also fashioned flaxen wreaths dipped into boiling caldrons of pitch and quicklime to be dropped on the assaulting mercenaries from the city walls. At night, Bockelson’s men slipped into their tents, cut throats, and left notes to the survivors that encouraged them to convert and join the Anabaptists.
On May 25, Bockelson’s forces easily repulsed an assault by the prince-bishop’s troops, many of whom defected into the city (though six of them soon had to be executed for drunken disorder).127 The victory greatly inspired the Anabaptists; surely, God was on their side, and the defeat of the prince-bishop’s troops solidified Anabaptist control of the city.
In July, Bockelson declared all previous marriages invalid and ordered all adults to remarry. Women now outnumbered men by almost three to one, a situation exacerbated by the left-behind Lutheran and Catholic women, and so the Anabaptists encouraged polygamy. At first, the more aggressive among the Anabaptist men engaged in a mad scramble through the city in search of young women and virgins on the theory that, in Gresbeck’s words, “The more wives they had, the better Christians they were.” Quickly, the leadership realized the resultant testosterone-fueled free-for-all had destabilized the city. They put a damper on the activity by requiring assent from primary wives, and also by freely granting divorce to all parties. Even so, first wives, understandably unhappy with their newly enlarged households, often mistreated the supernumeraries. In order to encourage compliance with the new regime, the leadership imprisoned the most recalcitrant wives, and decapitated not a few.128
The marriage law sparked an insurrection. About 120 men captured Bockelson and Knipperdolling, the latter of whom by now had been appointed executioner, a job he undertook with relish, before a counterattack freed them. Most of the rebels pled successfully for mercy, but Bockelson had 47 of them shot, beheaded, or, in a few cases, hacked to death. For good measure, he also had executed yet more women who had resisted forced marriage.
In August, another assault by the prince-bishop almost breached the inner wall but was ultimately beaten back. The attackers suffered horrific losses as the climbers looked up to find death in the form of boiling cauldrons and of wooden posts and trees that when dropped would strip several of them off their ladders at once. Deadly ambushes met those lucky enough to escape back through the breached outer wall. In the aftermath, the prince-bishop’s army nearly dissolved.129
The victory buoyed Bockelson’s spirits and grandiosity; he divined that he was the reincarnation of King David, and as such the planet’s only legitimate ruler. He also wisely reasoned that such a startling claim had better come from someone else’s mouth. Earlier that summer, a goldsmith with a limp from a nearby town named Jan Dusentschuer appeared in Münster. The new arrival claimed prophetic powers, and right on cue, after the defeat of the prince-bishop’s second assault, he announced that the Lord had anointed Bockelson king.130
Now monarch, Bockelson declared Münster’s old constitution inadequate to the new divine order, abolished the city council and the two mayoral positions, and replaced them with a royal court. The New Jerusalem was renamed the “People of God.”
After the repulse of the prince-bishop’s summer assault, the neighboring princes reinforced the blockade and appointed a new commander. Consequently, it became nearly impossible to sneak food and supplies into the city; the new king’s subjects clad themselves in rags and slowly starved to death. This bothered Bockelson little. Quite the reverse: his sense of theater and costume took flight. As described by Gresbeck, Bockelson,
made himself a velvet coat, and magnificent hose and doublet of magnificent silkwork, and magnificent golden cap, and a velvet bonnet with a crown, and a sword with a golden sheath and armor dagger with a golden sheath, and many golden chains, which he wore around his neck. . . . and on the chain he had the world hung, just like his coat of arms, with a golden round orb. This was blue speckled like his coat of arms.131
Bockelson’s sense of pomp extended to outfitting his cavalrymen with flamboyant silk “made for half the body, so that one arm was without sleeve and the breast was without coat, so that it was impressive on horseback,” and liveried up his household servants in red coats trimmed with gray and gold rings whose size announced their rank.132
In October, Dusentschuer extended Bockelson’s dominion to the entire Earth and announced that the Lord would blow his trumpets three times to signal the town’s journey to the Promised Land. Just before sunrise on October 31, 1534, the lame goldsmith climbed the tower of St. Lambert’s Church and sounded a cow horn. He then descended and continued through the streets blasting his horn, while compatriots blew other wind instruments. Thousands of inhabitants trudged toward the cathedral square, the men bearing arms, and the women small children and their most precious possessions. More horns blew, and presently Bockelson arrived in full regalia mounted on a white stallion surrounded by a bodyguard of twenty and followed by Queen Diewer in a coach, her ladies in waiting, and fifteen more of his wives.
By now, Bockelson had elevated the art of the missing Apocalypse to high theater. He ordered a respected nobleman, Gerlach von Wullen, to lead a suicidal charge into the besieging forces. The king then had von Wullen announce that it was only a drill designed to test their wills, and that he was pleased to inform them that they had passed. Bockelson removed his scarlet robe and crown and put down his scepter, and he and his “Elders” served a feast to the hungry masses. In addition to their meal service, Bockelson and the Elders engaged the men in lighthearted banter about the number of their wives. Gresbeck wrote,
The brother that had no more than one wife sat shamefaced. Such a man was still an unbeliever, and he wasn’t yet a real Christian. . . . They sat eating and drinking, and were of good cheer. Up at the cathedral square, it didn’t look as if anyone was going to die. Each brother sat beside his wives, and in the evening he could go to bed with the one he hankered after.133
The burghers’ appetites sated, Bockelson rose and tearfully announced in a broken voice that he had failed his people and would abdicate. No sooner had he finished than Dusentschuer relayed yet more news from the Almighty: a command to send forth himself and twenty-six others, listed in a document brandished in his hand, to four nearby towns to spread the Word, so as to speed the Apocalypse.
Moreover, Dusentschuer revealed that Bockelson should resume his kingly duties, prime among which was the punishment of Münster’s ungodly. The goldsmith then placed the crown back on the king’s head and handed him back his scarlet robe and scepter.
This dramatic production was perhaps Bockelson’s finest; at a stroke he had heightened his authority and ridded himself of the potential rivals among the 27 messengers, along with their 134 wives. The king, along with his wives and his court, then had a sumptuous meal; before each course, his servants blew a fanfare. At the supper’s conclusion, Bockelson sat silent for a while, then informed those present that he had received a revelation from God, and commanded that he be brought his sword and one of the captured landsknechts. He commanded the captive to sit down, and when he refused, threatened to cut him down the middle instead of merely beheading him, and so the prisoner complied. Having accomplished God’s will, Bockelson concluded the meal.134
The messengers departed; all twenty-seven were caught and executed by the landsknechts, save one, Heinrich Graess, who was saved by his command of Latin, which attracted the attention of the prince-bishop, so allowing him the opportunity to turncoat.135
Graess returned to Münster with the story of his dramatic escape from the clutches of the ungodly, then left the city with priceless intelligence for the prince-bishop: food and arms were running low, and the city was split between the once loyal but now starving and demoralized populace and the Anabaptist elites, whose privilege allowed them to maintain their spirits and delusions.
Graess would also leave a damning letter to the town on his way out: “All the business that’s now being conducted in Münster is a fraud, accordingly, it’s my humble prayer that you will finally open your eyes—it’s high time!—and see of your business that it’s clearly contrary to God and His Holy Word.”136 Despite the disaster of the messengers, Bockelson comforted the believers that their deaths had been God’s will and sent yet more messengers further afield to the Low Countries to recruit fresh Anabaptists to man the barricades. To prepare for the reinforcements’ arrival, he ordered the manufacture of armored wagons with which to penetrate the blockade back into the city.
The second wave of messengers was likewise never heard from again, and the reinforcements failed to materialize. These continued misadventures, combined with the additional landsknechts sent to the prince-bishop by neighboring princes, smothered any chance of a military victory. Rothmann informed citizens that although they could not rely on the outside world to save them, God would do so. As food and resources grew scarce, Bockelson trimmed back his military forces and concentrated on theological efforts instead.
On New Year’s Day of 1535, Bockelson issued a manifesto that ordained, among other things, that “only those governments that orient themselves by the word of God shall be preserved” and that “legal decisions are the prerogative of the king, his regents and judges.” Also, “a government that refrains from unchristian coercion may not be interfered with, even if it has not yet accepted believers’ baptism.”137
Children as young as ten were executed for stealing food or on suspicion of treason. When it became apparent that a recently departed Danish nobleman named Turban Bill had been a spy, three women who had known of his activities were beheaded in the cathedral square. One of them was Knipperdolling’s mistress, whom he had not added to his wives because she had been a prostitute. As she was led to the chopping block, she defiantly denounced Knipperdolling’s treachery; enraged, Knipperdolling seized a sword and decapitated her.138
By Easter the relief force from the Low Countries hadn’t materialized, and Bockelson declared that all along he had defined “victory” in a spiritual, and not a military, sense. Even stray cats and dogs had been eaten, and the starving citizens were allowed to depart.
Bockelson gave the emigrants a three- or four-day window in which to leave. They were made to change out of their own clothes into rags; those who were caught leaving Münster outside the approved time were hung. The unfortunate few who accepted this offer were slaughtered by the landsknechts, their heads displayed on stakes. As Gresbeck explained this Hobson’s choice: “All the same, they defected from the city, such great hunger did they have in the city. For they much preferred to get themselves killed than to suffer in such great hunger.”139
Several weeks later, Bockelson, in order to save food, allowed men to disown their lesser wives and their children so that they could leave, and Bockelson did the same with his wives and children. Observed Gresbeck, “Some rebaptizers would certainly have taken a piece of bread in exchange for a wife, if someone had offered it to them. There’s poor holding of court when there’s no bread.”140
By this point, the landsknechts were beheading up to fifty male escapees daily, allowing women and children to huddle together in the no-man’s land outside the walls, a hellish landscape a few hundred yards wide and four miles in circumference. The women and children languished there without sustenance or shelter for more than a month. The besiegers finally allowed the foreign women and children within to proceed home, and interned the locals until after the city fell.141
Around May 23, the carpenter Gresbeck and several others fled the city. As had most of the previous escapees, they were captured, but were lucky enough not to be killed; in Gresbeck’s case, because of his youth, appealing nature, and the individual kindness of the landsknechts who caught him, he was granted the mercy of imprisonment.142 His successful escape from Münster encouraged hundreds of others to flee the city, almost all of whom were slaughtered.
Gresbeck drew an earthen map for his captors on the floor of his cell that delineated how their troops could enter the city. On the night of June 22, Gresbeck and one of the former besiegers named “Little Hans of Longstreet,” who had previously defected to Münster and then escaped along with Gresbeck, swam a small floating footbridge into position across the moat, which thirty-five landsknechts quickly crossed, killed the sleeping sentries, and opened the gate with a key that Little Hans had created. At least three hundred more landsknechts followed over the short, tenuous causeway before the defenders finally closed the city gate. (The besiegers trusted Little Hans more than Gresbeck, perhaps because of Hans’ original loyalties, and so he led the assault while Gresbeck stayed behind at the bridge.) Bockelson’s troops nearly annihilated the invaders, now trapped within the city walls, but the invaders’ crafty commander, Wilhelm Steding, stalled for time with sham negotiations that allowed the prince-bishop’s main corps to stream into the city and mop up the remaining Anabaptists in brutal hand-to-hand fighting.143
The landsknechts slaughtered six hundred residents, and whatever guilt they may have felt disappeared when they found out that their individual booty shares amounted to 50 guilders for a year’s brutal work (about $1,600 in today’s money). Christian Kerckerinck, the Anabaptist moat captain, and possibly Queen Diewer were quickly executed, but Bockelson, Knipperdolling, and another lieutenant, Brend Krechtinck, were interrogated at leisure and condemned for various theological crimes, theft, and murder. A few days after the capture, the prince-bishop ruefully asked Bockelson, “Are you a king?” to which he insolently replied, “Are you a bishop?”144 Among the revolt’s leaders, only Rothmann possibly escaped, and in any case was never heard from again.
On January 22, 1536, two executioners began with Bockelson. Adhering to the procedure prescribed by the empire’s new criminal code, they rendered him immobile with an iron collar attached to a pole and ripped off his flesh with glowing hot tongs. According to von Kerssenbrock, “When touched by the tongs, the muscles gave off visible flames, and thus made such a strong stench that it revolted the noses of the bystanders.”145
On witnessing this, Knipperdolling tried to choke himself with his collar, upon which the executioners immobilized him firmly on his stake with a rope secured around his gaping mouth before returning to work on Bockelson, who silently withstood the torture. The other two did not stand up as well; the executioners tore at the throats of all three with the tongs and finally stabbed them in the heart. When done with them, the executioner stuffed their erect bodies into iron baskets, which were then hung from St. Lambert’s tower for all to see.146 Their bones remained there for fifty years, and the three cages can still be viewed from the street.147
The successors of the Münster Anabaptists learned from their experiences; the precept of adult baptism survives today mainly among the Amish and Mennonites, both quiet and peaceable sects.
A third large-scale medieval apocalyptic spasm played out amid the chaos that engulfed mid-seventeenth-century England. During the early 1600s, Parliament warred with the Stuart monarchs, who continued to claim the divine right of kings. Much of the discontent involved Charles I’s support for High Anglicanism, which struck dissenters as near-Catholic.
The conflict, though, mainly revolved around fiscal issues. Unable to raise the necessary funds for his military adventures, Charles I attempted an end run around Parliament’s power of the purse with a number of illegal strategies, most notably the right to raise “ship money.” This ancient royal levy applied only during wartime, and only to coastal towns. His application of an extra-parliamentary tax in peacetime and extension of it to inland communities sparked a series of three separate conflicts known collectively as the English Civil War, which led to his beheading in 1649 and the brief establishment of Oliver Cromwell’s commonwealth and protectorate. Cromwell’s rule, and particularly his succession by his less capable and less politically engaged son Richard, proved disastrous enough to allow the monarchy’s restoration under Charles II in 1660.
The turmoil spawned two major movements: the Levellers, who favored rule of law, democratic reform, and religious tolerance; and the Fifth Monarchists, a millennialist group whose eschatology espoused rule of the “saints,” a self-identified cadre of the righteous, that was, like the Münster Anabaptists, anything but democratic, tolerant, or even modest. There would be no rest for the righteous after the Fifth Monarchists had brought England under their rule, a blessed act that would mandate the subsequent conquest of continental Europe. Although neither group survived intact, the Fifth Monarchists nearly gathered up the reins of government in the short-lived “Barebones Parliament” of 1653 (so named after one of its members, Praise-God Barebone), one of the dizzying succession of Cromwellian parliaments.148
As had been the case since Joachim, hard times yielded a bounty of number mysticism and apocalyptic arithmetic. An English diplomat, John Pell, wrote in 1655:
Some that have heard that the end of Paganism is placed in the year 395, and that then there was not one heathen temple left standing in the Roman empire, will easily be induced to believe that the famous number, 1260, ought to be added to it; and then this year, 1655, must needs be pointed out for an apocalyptical epocha. Others pitch upon the year 1656, because, having summed up the lives of the patriarchs in the fifth chapter of Genesis, they find 1656 years from the creation to the flood, and thence infer, that the coming of Christ will be the next year, because it must be as in the days of Noah. Others will wait three or four years more, hoping that the 1260 years must be reckoned from the death of Theodosius, and the division of the Roman empire between his sons. Nor need we wonder, if we find some confident that eleven years hence we shall see the fatal change, because of the number 666 [that is, in the year 1666].149
A Fifth Monarchist named Arise Evans produced easily the silliest estimate. One of the key elements of the group’s eschatology was the current-day identity of the book of Daniel’s “little horn,” which likely represented Antiochus Epiphanes. Most Fifth Monarchists identified the current-day little horn as King Charles I, which enraged Evans, a staunch supporter of the late monarch and his archbishop, William Laud. To Evans, the latter’s name clearly dated the Apocalypse: the Roman numerals in VVILLIaM LaVD added up to the year 1667.150
At the other end of the intellectual spectrum, Isaac Newton devoted a large number of essays to the interpretation of apocalyptic scripture (posthumously collected into a single volume, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John), though he wisely refrained from predicting the Second Coming’s date.151
Perhaps the most influential computation was made by a preacher named Henry Archer, who in 1642 published The Personall Reign of Christ Vpon Earth, a fifty-eight page treatise that reinterpreted the shattered beast of Daniel’s dream as four monarchies: the Assyrian/Babylonian, Mede/Persian, Greek, and Roman. The coming Fifth Monarchy would be that of Christ, from which the name Fifth Monarchy is derived. Archer’s calculations placed His coming in either 1666 or 1700. Such a schema lay entirely within the realm of accepted Protestant theology; Luther himself considered both the Fourth Monarchy and the beast metaphors for the papacy.152
Many of the Fifth Monarchists were key participants in the English Civil War and in Cromwell’s parliaments and protectorate. They saw themselves as passive observers of Christ’s imminent return and judgment, and during the English civil wars, the most prominent of the group, Thomas Harrison, who rose to the rank of major general, demonstrated great courage and ability. He also served as a member of Parliament, where he advocated reform.
Most Fifth Monarchists, like Harrison, sought change by legal means, but a small minority, particularly a firebrand preacher named Christopher Feake, exhorted the public to a violent revolution that would usher in a millennialist theocracy of “the saints,” an elite cadre of the pious, that is, themselves.153
Things started out well for the Fifth Monarchists, who had fought in and, as had Harrison, held high command in the New Model Army, which drove Cromwell’s overthrow of the “Rump Parliament” of 1648. But over time, Cromwell proved either unwilling or unable to accept their political and theological demands, and their alliance frayed. The Fifth Monarchists reached the apex of their power in the evanescent Barebones Parliament in 1653. With its dissolution and the subsequent establishment of the dictatorial Protectorate, relations between Cromwell and the Fifth Monarchists worsened. Although Cromwell intermittently detained many of the Fifth Monarchists, including Harrison, he generally handled his old allies gingerly and executed none for their millennialist beliefs. For example, in 1654 Harrison, who may have been elected to the new Protectorate Parliament by as many as eight different constituencies, presented a petition that urged the restoration of “a state of perfect liberty.” Cromwell spoke in opposition to it, detained Harrison, then released him after a few days with a mild warning.154
In the words of historian P. G. Rogers, Cromwell treated the Fifth Monarchists “like naughty, misguided children whom he disciplined against his will, and whom he did not wish to keep in confinement a day longer than was necessary.”155
With the restoration of Charles II in April 1660, the Fifth Monarchist’s luck finally ran out. The new king cast a jaundiced, vengeful eye on the group. Harrison, who had both guarded his imprisoned father, Charles I, and later played a prominent part in the judicial proceeding that condemned him to death, warranted special attention. Six months later the crown tried Harrison and his fellow regicides, some of whom were Fifth Monarchists. Most were convicted, and Harrison found himself first on the block, informed that he was to be
drawn upon an hurdle to the place of execution; and there you shall be hanged by the neck, and being alive shall be cut down, your entrails to be taken out of your body, and, you living, the same to be burnt before your eyes, and your head to be cut off, your body divided into four quarters to be disposed of at the pleasure of the King’s Majesty.156
Diarist Samuel Pepys, who had also attended Charles I’s beheading, recorded on October 13,
I went out to Charing Cross, to see Major Harrison hanged, drawn, and quartered; which was done there, he looking as cheerful as any man could in that condition. He was presently cut down, and his head and heart shown to the people, at which there were great shouts of joy.157
In the event, the King’s pleasure saw Harrison’s head and quarters displayed around the city. Two days later, Pepys attended the execution of another prominent Fifth Monarchist regicide, John Carew, who was “hanged and quartered at Charing Cross; but his quarters, by great favor, are not to be hanged up.”158 159
For several years a small Fifth Monarchist faction, led by a cooper named Thomas Venner, had labored under the delusion their popular support was great enough that they could trigger the Second Coming through armed insurrection. Considered harebrained by more sober Fifth Monarchists like Harrison, Venner lived up to that reputation in April of 1657 when he plotted an uprising that was uncovered before it could be executed.
With typical tolerance, Oliver Cromwell had merely imprisoned Venner and his colleagues in the Tower of London; upon Cromwell’s death, his son Richard released the inept plotters after less than two years’ confinement. With the restoration of Charles II and the deaths of Harrison and the other Fifth Monarchists involved in the regicide, Venner’s group, newly freed, grew desperate and decided to act. In December of 1660, one of Venner’s drunken confederates bragged to a man named Hall that he was about to participate in a “glorious enterprise” (the aforementioned Second Coming). When Hall asked what it was, he replied, “We’ll pull Charles out of his throne . . . for the Saints must reign.” Hall promptly reported the conversation to the authorities and was then brought before the king himself, who ordered the arrest of the remaining known Fifth Monarchist discontents.
Venner and his band of about fifty confederates were not among the detained, which left them free to execute their plot on the night of January 6, 1661, a date chosen in the hope of finding the city’s watchmen inebriated at the conclusion of the Twelfth Night revelry. They broke into St. Paul’s cathedral and posted a guard outside, who promptly shot a passerby who, when asked about his loyalty, unluckily declared it to the king. Thus was the plot exposed, and Venner’s woefully small force found themselves pursued through London’s streets by a swelling group of “train-bands,” as the city militias were called, later augmented by the king’s troops. Over the next three days, Venner’s men, now vastly outnumbered, fought an increasingly desperate and brutal series of house-to-house battles.
In a diary entry written on January 10, Samuel Pepys succinctly described the group as
these Fanatics that have routed all the train-bands that they met with, put the King’s life-guards to the run, killed about twenty men, broke through the City gates twice; and all this in the daytime, when all the city was in arms—are not in all above 31. Whereas we did believe them (because they were seen up and down in every place almost in the City, and had been in Highgate two or three days, and in several other places) to be at least 500. A thing that was never heard of, that so few men should dare and do so much mischief. Their word was, “The King Jesus, and the heads upon the gates.” Few of them would receive any quarter, but such as were taken by force and kept alive; expecting Jesus to come here and reign in the world presently.160
In the end, roughly half of Venner’s followers were killed in the running battle, and most of the rest later hung, though the crown applied to only Venner and his chief lieutenant the full half-live disembowelment previously accorded Harrison and Carew.161
During the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, northern Europeans sought escape from the travails of this world to the comforts of the wondrous one to come via compelling end-times narratives. In the case of the Swabian Peasants’ War, Thomas Müntzer’s apocalyptic theology was merely tacked onto what had initially been a largely secular populist uprising, with disastrous results, whereas the Anabaptist Madness and Fifth Monarchist revolts were end-times affairs from their starts to their equally disastrous finishes.
Beginning in the eighteenth century, entire nations would seek succor not from God, but rather from Mammon, as a succession of financial mass delusions swept through Europe. On their surfaces, the religious and financial events appear to represent different phenomena, but they were powered by the same social and psychological mechanisms: the irresistible power of narratives; the human proclivity to imagine patterns where there were none; the overweening hubris and overconfidence of both their leaders and followers; and, above all, the overwhelming proclivity of human beings to imitate the behavior of those around them, no matter how factually baseless or self-destructive.
92. Hermann von Kerssenbrock, Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness, trans.Christopher S. Mackay (Leiden: Brill, Hotei Publishing, 2007), I:182.
93. Ibid., II:493.
94. Von Kerssenbrock, I:87–91, 104–138; and Anthony Arthur, The Tailor-King (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 1999), 12.
95. Allan Chibi, The Wheat and the Tares (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2015).
96. This calculation has also been ascribed to Bernard Rothmann, see Ralf Klötzer, “The Melchoirites and Münster,” in John D. Roth and James M. Stayer, Eds., A Companion to Anabaptism and Spiritualism, 1521–1700 (Leiden: Brill, 2007), 211–212; and von Kerssenbrock, I:12–18. The date of Hoffman’s apocalypse has been placed by some in 1534; see Anthony Arthur, The Tailor-King (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 1999), 12.
97. Klötzer, 219–220.
98. Ibid., 220–221; Christopher S. Mackay False Prophets and Preachers (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2016), 11. This superb volume contains an extensive translator’s introduction to Henry Gresbeck’s account. Hereafter referred to as Mackay/Gresbeck.
99. Arthur, 12.
100. Arthur, 60–63.
101. Klötzer, 222–224.
102. For a detailed description of the city’s premadness social and political structure, see Mackay/Gresbeck, 22–25.
103. Von Kerssenbrock, I:213–214.
104. For further critical discussion of von Kerssenbrock’s and Gresbeck’s books, see the translator’s introduction of both, Mackay/Gresbeck, 1–63.
105. Von Kerssenbrock, I:214.
106. Ibid., I:217.
107. Ibid., I:361.
108. Ibid., I:121, 215, quote 215; Arthur, 15.
109. Christopher S. Mackay, personal communication.
110. Arthur, 16.
111. Klötzer, 225–226; Mackay/Gresbeck, 23.
112. Arthur, 23–24.
113. Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), 267–268.
114. Von Kerssenbrock, II:477n23.
115. Klötzer, 226–230, quote 230.
116. Von Kerssenbrock, II:479.
117. Von Kerssenbrock, II:480.
118. Klötzer, 234.
119. Mackay/Gresbeck, 51, 67–68, 77.
120. Christopher S. Mackay, personal communication.
121. Mckay/Gresbeck, 73–77.
122. Mackay/Gresbeck, 208–215.
123. Arthur, 54–58.
124. Mackay/Gresbeck, 89–90.
125. There’s some doubt about the date, see ibid., 90, n138.
126. Arthur, 69–72.
127. Ibid., 50–51, 107–108; and Mackay/Gresbeck, 102–110.
128. Mackay/Gresbeck, 114–119, quote 115.
129. Ibid., 120–130. For the precise dating of the marriage proclamation and insurrection, see 124n242.
130. On the political effects of the May and August repulses of the prince-bishop attacks, personal communication Christopher S. Mackay.
131. Mackay/Gresbeck, 140.
132. Ibid., 139.
133. Ibid., 163.
134. Klötzer, 230–246; Arthur, 118–124; and Mackay/Gresbeck, 166–167.
135. Mackay/Gresbeck, 168–169, 205n527.
136. Arthur, 138–142; Mackay/Gresbeck, 285.
137. Klötzer, 246–247.
138. Arthur, 144–146.
139. Mackay/Gresbeck, 237.
140. Ibid., 256.
141. Arthur, 147–149.
142. Ibid., 151–153.
143. Ibid., 156–178; Mackay/Gresbeck, 33–34, 259–265.
144. Mackay/Gresbeck, 281. As to the uncertainty over the queen’s death, see 282n895.
145. Von Kerssenbrock, 715.
146. Klötzer, 246–250; Arthur 177–178, 184; von Kerssenbrock, 715–716, 716n9.
147. The church tower was later replaced; and in the 1880s the rusted cages themselves underwent extensive renovation, which was repeated following bomb damage in 1944.
148. B.S. Capp, The Fifth Monarchy Men (London: Faber and Faber, 1972), 14.
149. Robert Vaughn, Ed., The Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and the State of Europe During the Early Part of the Reign of Louis XIV (London: Henry Colburn, Publisher, 1838), I:156–157.
150. The lowercase a in the archbishop’s name, which has no Roman numeral equivalent, presumably carried a zero value. An obscure royal prerogative was the ability to cure scrofula; after the Stuart restoration, Charles II rewarded Evans for his loyalty by touching the latter’s afflicted nose.
151. Isaac Newton, Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel and the Apocalypse of St. John (London: J. Darby and P. Browne, 1733).
152. P.G. Rogers, The Fifth Monarchy Men (London: Oxford University Press, 1966), 11–13, 136–137; Capp, 23–24; and Henry Archer, The Personall Reign of Christ Vpon Earth, Early English Books Online, http://eebo.chadwyck.com, accessed June 16, 2017.
153. For a detailed description of the Fifth Monarchists’ theological and political range, see Capp, 131–157.
154. Capp, 105–106.
155. Rogers, 69.
156. C.H. Simpkinson, Thomas Harrison, Regicide and Major-General (London: J.M. Dent & Co., 1905), 223–251, quote 251.
157. Samuel Pepys, The Diary of Samuel Pepys (London: Macmillan and Co., Ltd., 1905), 51.
158. Ibid. For a discussion of the meaning of “hanged, drawn, and quartered,” see Brian P. Block and John Hostettler, Hanging in the Balance (Sherfield Gables, UK: Waterside Press, 1997), 19–20; and Ian Mortimer, “Why do we say ‘hanged, drawn, and quartered’?,” http://www.ianmortimer.com/essays/drawing.pdf, accessed June 19, 2017.
159. In England before the seventeenth century, the most severe punishments featured live emasculation along with disembowelment, which may or may not have been applied to the regicides. Live evisceration was not formally abolished until 1814, though by the middle of the eighteenth century, executioners softened the procedure by hanging the condemned to death before eviscerating them. Quartering had by then fallen into disuse, but was not explicitly outlawed until 1870.
160. Pepys, 64.
161. Rogers, 84–87, 112–122; Capp, 117–118, 199–200.