The Tailor-King Read online

  Dedicated to the memory of my sister, Helen Wishart

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  INTRODUCTION

  1 - A NEW DAWN

  2 - THE GODLESS EXPELLED

  3 - A MIGHTY FORTRESS

  4 - DEATH OF A PROPHET

  5 - THE BISHOP AND THE MAIDEN

  6 - COUNTERREVOLUTION

  7 - KING JAN

  8 - THE RETURN OF HENRY GRAES

  9 - RESTITUTION AND REVENGE

  10 - FLIGHT

  11 - ATTACK

  12 - PUNISHMENT

  13 - THE LEGACY OF THE TAILOR-KING

  NOTES FOR THE ILLUSTRATIONS

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Also by Anthony Arthur

  CAST OF CHARACTERS

  CHRONOLOGY

  NOTES

  SOURCES AND WRITINGS ABOUT THE ANABAPTISTS

  BIBLIOGRAPY

  INDEX

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  INTRODUCTION

  WE HAVE TWO choices when we learn about extraordinary events and people. They can be taken as typical and representative of human nature and history, or they can be seen as aberrant exceptions to the norm. This is a story about a group of religious enthusiasts called Anabaptists who took over a north-German city nearly five centuries ago, turned it into a militant theocracy, and held it for over a year against overwhelming military odds, until they died. The sequence of actions is so strange, and its participants so apparently bizarre, that the Anabaptists have long been viewed as belonging to the second group—to the one characterized by a Victorian writer as “freaks of fanaticism.”

  My own view is that the Anabaptists in Münster, though certainly “fanatical” in many ways, were not “freaks,” if by freaks we mean barely imaginable distortions of the norm; and that, for good or for evil, they were far more representative than not of human nature and history. My reason for telling their story is that I think it provides insight into our own time as well as theirs.

  Late-medieval Germany, however, differed so radically from modern Europe and America that a few introductory reminders are in order. The most important point is that if you were born in Europe prior to 1517, you were probably a Roman Catholic. This was not a matter of choice, any more than susceptibility to gravity or to the autonomic nervous system is a choice. It was natural to believe in the Holy Trinity as it was explained by the Church; it was unnatural not to. To go against the Church was to violate both God and nature.

  Yet the Church had become undeniably corrupt. In Fyodor Dostoevsky’s last novel, The Brothers Karamazov (1880), he imagines Jesus returning to earth during the time of the Spanish Inquisition in Seville, at the end of the sixteenth century. The “Grand Inquisitor” recognizes Jesus and immediately has him thrown into a dungeon. He visits Jesus in his cell and demands to know why he has returned. Jesus never answers, merely gazing with compassion at the aged Inquisitor. The priest says that Jesus erred in his original insistence that man must be free to choose whether to follow God or Satan; what men want, the priest says, is not freedom but bread. They want comfort, security, and the certainty of being saved if they follow the dictates of the Church.

  Jesus, by returning, threatens the elaborate structure that has taken the Church many centuries to construct, the priest says. That hierarchy is based upon three critical concepts that all must accept, or die in the flames of the Inquisition. The first of these is Miracle; the second is Mystery; the third, and most important, is Authority. A challenge to any of these is pernicious; a challenge to all three is deadly. Because he personifies the purity of the original faith, before the structure of Miracle, Mystery, and Authority had replaced it, Jesus must now die again. In parting, the Inquisitor reveals that he belongs not to the party of God but to that of Satan, and that he and Jesus are therefore mortal antagonists; then, despite himself, he relents and orders Jesus to leave the dungeon.

  Martin Luther shook the structure that Dostoevsky’s Inquisitor described, but, according to the Anabaptists, he did not go far enough—he insisted on obedience to the state while trying to work out a satisfactory compromise. The Anabaptists held that, in particular, Authority had to be denied and defied, if necessary, because it was often an agent of Satan. Luther saw the Anabaptists’ intransigence as endangering the survival of the Reformation itself, and denounced them as bitterly as did the Catholics. Emperor Charles V ordered their extermination. Within a decade after their first appearance, in 1523, most of the responsible leaders of the Anabaptists, who essentially asked merely to be left alone so that they could re-create the purity of the original Christian Church, had been killed or, like Menno Simons, virtually silenced. But some of the most radical and dangerous leaders had survived, generally by going underground and forming secret cells of true believers.

  The insistence on the integrity of the primitive Church survives today in the United States among the placid descendants of Menno Simons, the Mennonites, as well as among other denominations. So also, in different groups, does the belief in a coming Last Judgment survive. The Anabaptists of the sixteenth century believed more strongly than any group today that the time was imminent for the apocalyptic final battle between God and Satan. It would occur in the years 1534–1535; the place would be in northern Germany, in the small Westphalian city of Münster. They began to gather there by the thousands in 1533, invited and encouraged by some of the natives of the city. By early 1534 they had displaced the elected council, composed of Lutherans and Catholics who had managed to establish a peaceful relationship. They evicted all “unbelievers” from the city and dared the Prince-Bishop in whose domain it lay to attack. When he did, they regarded it as confirmation that they, the Anabaptists, had been specially ordained by God to engage in the final battle between good and evil.

  The Anabaptists were so badly treated during the years preceding this battle that, despite the irrationality of their beliefs and their self-righteous stubbornness, they attracted many sympathizers to their ranks. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries they would be praised by communist ideologues as the first proletarian revolutionaries, precursors to the French revolution of 1789 and the Russian revolution of 1917. Unhappily, as in Russia and France, the revolution in Münster was soon taken over by terrorists and tyrants.

  The story of the Anabaptists is, then, an archetype, not an exception or an anomaly, despite the apparent remoteness of the time and place. But what allowed them to survive for so long, in the face of overwhelming military power available to be used against them? It is true that Münster was a heavily fortified walled city, with ample supplies of water and food, but the Bishop had thousands of men at his disposal, as well as heavy cannon capable of lofting “solid shot” stones and iron balls weighing up to thirty pounds for hundreds of yards.

  The essential answer is provided by an incident that occurred much later in southern Germany, during the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon’s progress was blocked by an immense stone fort high on a mountain near Passau; it had withstood any number of solid-shot cannon sieges during the Middle Ages. Napoleon informed the defending commander that he could destroy his mighty fortress within a matter of hours, but that he preferred not to. The fortress was surrendered intact, and remains so today. The signal difference between 1534 and 1800 is in firepower—if the Bishop’s soldiers had had Napoleon’s array of explosive projectiles available to them, they could have obliterated the city walls within hours, and the story of the Anabaptist rebels in Münster would have remained merely an anecdote, instead of becoming a saga.

  Thus both the religious attitudes and the military technology of the early sixteenth century differ radically from those of our day. But the aspects of human character that impel people to do strange and terrib
le things, as well as to seek their causes and explain their meaning, remain much the same. Many scholars have addressed themselves to this particular story both in Europe and in America, but there have been few successful efforts to reach a wide audience with a readable, yet reliable narrative. What follows is such an attempt.1

  1

  A NEW DAWN

  And the same hour was there a great earthquake, and the tenth part of the city fell, and in the earthquake were slain of men seven thousand; and the remnant were affrighted, and gave glory to the God of heaven.

  —Revelation 11:13

  HERMAN KERSSENBRÜCK WAS destined for life as a theologian and a schoolmaster but he was also blessed with an eye for lively detail and a keen dramatic sense. The story that he would experience and, unlike many others, live to tell about, began long before the night of February 8, 1534, but it was then that it reached its first critical point. From those frantic early-morning hours in the cobblestoned streets of his temporary home in northern Germany until the conclusion of the drama nearly two years later, a handful of men would lead thousands of devoted followers not to God, as they promised to do, but to their destruction.

  It was unclear to the young Latin scholar, only thirteen on this fateful night, whether he was witnessing a comedy or a tragedy, but he had a secure sense even then of the stage and of the characters who would dominate it. The place was the north German city called Münster in Westphalia. Secure from attack behind its double walls and double moat, its ten gates were guarded by small stone bastions or “roundels”; wealthy from commerce and farming, proud of its independence as a powerful city-state on the far fringes of the Holy Roman Empire, it had perhaps grown arrogant in its presumption that God thought it especially worthy of his concern. The time was that of the early Renaissance and the Protestant Reformation, still deeply rooted in the Middle Ages but bursting with energetic demands for change, for justice, for freedom of choice in all matters both secular and religious. The characters on the crowded world stage included John Calvin in Geneva, Henry VIII in England, and the young Emperor Charles V in Germany—and, transcending borders of language and national identity, towering above all of them in terms of his ultimate importance, the apostate German priest, Martin Luther.

  The small city of Münster had its own important men. Foremost among them was the merchant-prince Bernard Knipperdolling; fifty years old, tall and burly, with a thick beard, square-cut in the fashion of the day, always soberly dressed in heavy gray robes, Knipperdolling was a cloth merchant who had warehouses and offices in several cities besides Münster, including Lübeck and Amsterdam. He had two grown daughters and, after the death of his first wife, had recently married a wealthy widow. He was a prominent member of the city council, a man who spoke seldom but always with weight and point to his remarks. The most visible symbol of his success was the magnificent three-story gabled house that stood on the Market Square, at an angle to the stately St. Lambert’s Church and a block away from the renowned City Hall.

  Now, as the young Herman (who was not only a devout Catholic but, like most adolescent boys, a confirmed cynic) tells it, this dignified and respectable man appeared in the doorway of his grand house, arm in arm with a much younger, slighter man, a newcomer from Leyden called Jan Bockelson, a “bastard Dutch tailor and bawdy-house keeper.” Both men were screaming and pointing to the sky, shouting, “Repent! Repent! For the hour of the Lord is now upon us!” They were not alone in their frenzy: the Market Square, lit by torchlight reflected against the low clouds, was like a Witches’ Sabbath to Herman and two schoolmates as they crouched fearfully in a doorway to watch. It was a carnival of madness, a gathering of demons, who in the light of day wore the familiar faces of carpenters, blacksmiths, and merchants, of schoolchildren and nuns, even of the august members of the city council. Among these moved a dark-robed, stocky figure, the third of Kerssenbrück’s lead players, the hot-tempered and brilliant young Anabaptist preacher Bernard Rothmann. A few years earlier Rothmann had been an earnest intellectual who had studied with the great Melanchthon, Luther’s disciple. Now he thrust his short, broad-chested figure through the crowd, his eyes rolling, demanding that “all repent!”

  The mob surged around the preacher, terrified and exhilarated. Many, like Knipperdolling, were hysterical, with a slather of foam issuing from their mouths. The shrill voice of an impassioned young woman standing on the steps of St. Lambert’s Church cut through the clamor; the daughter of the tailor Jurgen tom Berg was calling for repentance so effectively that her father, inspired by her passion, raised his arms to the flame-reddened heavens and cried, “I see the majesty of God and Jesus, who bears the flag of victory in His hands. Beware, you Godless ones! Repent! God will reap His harvest and let the chaff burn in the all-consuming fires. Cease from sinning! Repent!” He leaped into the air as though he might fly, then threw himself on his face in the dirt and dung in the shape of a cross.

  Everywhere Herman Kerssenbrück looked he saw similar small dramas of ecstatic possession. The blind Scottish beggar who had somehow ended up in Münster, dressed in a motley assortment of colored rags, his great gaunt frame made even taller by high-heeled boots, ran about in circles crying that he could see, he could see again. A crowd gathered around him as he turned the corner into King Street, shouting that the heavens were about to fall on their heads, at which moment he tripped and fell into a pile of dung, and the crowd deserted him in search of more reliable visionaries. The miller Jodokus Culenberg galloped around the square on a borrowed white stallion, calling for all to repent. An old woman who had lost her voice in the excitement raced through the crowd, shaking a bell. Although fires of such heat usually burn themselves out quickly, the midnight tumult seemed to go on and on. When, young Herman must have wondered, would it end? And how, later generations would ask, had it all begun?

  The immediate cause of this night’s revelries lay in what had not happened at midnight, as foretold by Pastor Bernard Rothmann. That was the hour, he had announced two days earlier, for the Catholic Convent next to the river Aa to crumble before the might of the Lord, taking with it the bodies and souls of the scores of nuns it so invidiously sheltered. This improbable event was announced by Rothmann after he marched into the Overwater Church, as it was called, at the head of a mob of guildsmen and farmers and forced the Abbess, Ida von Merveldt, to assemble her trembling charges. This convent, Rothmann told the women, was an offense in the eyes of God. “It is your holy duty,” he admonished them, “not to withhold your bodies for Christ but to go forth and multiply. You must have men, you must marry, you must bear children.”

  In fact, this would not have been an unpleasant injunction for some of Rothmann’s listeners—young women were often dispatched by their families to convents for other than religious reasons, and some of them might even have set their caps for the handsome preacher had he not recently married a wealthy young widow. Others, like the Abbess, were devout Catholics and horrified by Rothmann’s presumptuous attack. Devout or inclined to stray, each of the nuns heard Rothmann explain how he had come by the information that she was in danger of losing her life. This “salutary announcement has been made to me,” the pastor said, “by one of the prophets now present in this city, and the Heavenly Father has also favored me with a direct and special revelation to the same effect.”

  Twenty years earlier Bernard Rothmann’s attempt to frighten the nuns would have been met with laughter or blank stares of incomprehension. That he could succeed now derived in part from his compelling personality and his undoubted moral intensity, but even more from the example set earlier by a man whom Rothmann resembled in some ways, Martin Luther.

  The critical event of the sixteenth century occurred near its beginning, in 1517; it was then, as every schoolboy and -girl has learned ever since, that the young Catholic priest Martin Luther challenged the Church of Rome to reform itself. Private protests having proved futile, Luther took the irreversible step of publicly announcing an invitation to discuss h
is objections and demands, nailing them, as tradition has it, to the door of the Cathedral in Wittenberg. This and later acts of protest and defiance led the Pope to order Luther to Rome for “examination.” Justly fearing that he would not live to leave Rome, where far more powerful men than he, including popes and princes, were routinely murdered, Luther refused to budge from Germany or to recant. In 1520 he was excommunicated, and central Germany became the throbbing heart of the most profoundly divisive and destructive, yet at the same time creative and energizing movement in Western history—the Protestant Reformation.

  Albrecht Dürer, Luther’s contemporary then living in Nuremberg, perfectly captured the destructive aspects of their time in his famous Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, which depicts the scourges of famine, fire, pestilence, and war riding over the land. Within a few years of Luther’s defiance of the Pope, Rome itself was sacked and destroyed, in 1527. At almost the same time, in 1525, starving farmers in Germany had formed themselves into a vast army, attacking landowners, the Church, and the Emperor’s armies until they were slaughtered; more than a hundred thousand farmers and their urban allies in the trade guilds died in what came to be called the Peasants’ War. Thus within two turbulent years the two great pillars of the western world, those of the Church and of the state, were severely shaken; the so-called Holy Roman Empire was in danger of imminent collapse.

  In the midst of this chaos arose a new group that caused great alarm among both religious and civil authorities. They were called the Anabaptists, and they provided Catholics and Protestants with a rare common cause: their extermination. The original concept of Anabaptism, as first formulated by a Swiss reformer, Conrad Grebel, in 1523, sounds reasonable enough to modern sensibilities, shaped by a heritage of democracy and a belief in a degree of free will. The true faith, Grebel said, is not a matter of being born into a belief because of what your parents profess, or of having it imposed upon you because you happen to live in a certain place. It is a voluntary community of believers who have freely entered it as responsible, thinking adults through the symbolic act of baptism. Thus, infant baptism is meaningless; the only true baptism has to come later, when the act can be understood as a conversion and as a true commitment to God.