The Münster Rebellion

I. Münster before the Reformation

Münster in the early sixteenth century was the principal city of a prince-bishopric in Westphalia, in the north-west of the Holy Roman Empire. The bishop was both spiritual head of a large diocese and secular ruler of a territory, but he did not reside in the city, which was governed by a council elected from the leading families and the guilds. The city had about ten thousand inhabitants. Its cathedral chapter, made up of members of the Westphalian nobility, controlled the election of the bishop and held considerable property within the walls. The religious houses, the collegiate churches and the clergy were exempt from many civic taxes and duties, a cause of long-standing resentment among the burghers.

In the decades before the Reformation, relations between the city and the clergy were frequently tense. In 1525, at the time of the German Peasants' War, the guilds of Münster drew up articles demanding that the clergy pay taxes, that the religious houses cease competing with civic crafts, and that the city have a greater voice in religious affairs. These demands were not radical in a religious sense, but they show the combination of economic and ecclesiastical grievances that the later movement would draw upon. The rising was settled by negotiation, but the issues it raised remained unresolved.

The city was also connected by trade and family ties to the Netherlands, especially the provinces of Holland, Friesland and Overijssel. This connection proved important, since the Dutch provinces were in the early 1530s a centre of radical religious movements, many of whose members fled persecution under the Habsburg government. Refugees and preachers from the Netherlands came to Münster in large numbers in 1533 and 1534.

II. Bernhard Rothmann and the Reformation in Münster

The Reformation in Münster was led by Bernhard Rothmann, a chaplain of the church of St Maurice outside the walls, who began preaching evangelical doctrine in 1531. Rothmann had studied at Mainz and had visited Wittenberg and Strasbourg, where he met Wolfgang Capito and other reformers. His preaching won the support of the guilds and of a leading cloth merchant, Bernd Knipperdolling, and in 1532 the council permitted evangelical preaching in the parish churches. In February 1533 the Treaty of Dülmen between the city and Bishop Franz von Waldeck recognised the parish churches as Lutheran while leaving the cathedral and the religious houses to the Catholic clergy.

Rothmann's theology developed rapidly. During 1533 he came under the influence of preachers from the Wassenberg region on the Lower Rhine, who denied the bodily presence of Christ in the Lord's supper and rejected the baptism of infants. In a confession of faith published in 1533, the Bekenntnisse van beyden Sacramenten, Rothmann set out the view that baptism should be given only to believers who could confess their faith, citing Mark 16:16, "Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved", and the accounts of baptism in Acts 2:38-41 and Acts 8:36-38. He argued that there was no command in Scripture for the baptism of infants.

These views brought Rothmann into conflict with the Lutheran preachers sent from Hesse and with the council, which sought to maintain a settlement acceptable to the Lutheran princes. In August 1533 a public disputation on baptism was held, and the council ordered Rothmann to cease preaching. He continued to preach, and his supporters grew in number. By the end of 1533 the city was divided between the Lutheran majority of the council, the Catholic clergy and their supporters, and the growing radical party.

III. The Melchiorites and the Arrival of Jan Matthys

The radicals in Münster were connected with a movement founded by Melchior Hoffman, a furrier from Swabia who had become a lay preacher in the Baltic and later in Strasbourg and East Frisia. Hoffman taught that believers should be baptised as adults, that the end of the world was imminent, and that Strasbourg would be the New Jerusalem from which 144,000 witnesses would go out, on the basis of Revelation 7:4 and Revelation 14:1. He predicted that the end would come in 1533. Hoffman was imprisoned in Strasbourg in 1533 and died there around 1543, but his followers, known as Melchiorites, spread through the Netherlands.

Leadership of the Dutch Melchiorites passed to Jan Matthys, a baker from Haarlem, who declared himself to be the prophet Enoch of the end times and sent out apostles to baptise. Unlike Hoffman, who had counselled patience until the end, Matthys taught that the righteous should prepare to take up the sword against the ungodly. In January 1534 two of his apostles arrived in Münster and baptised Rothmann and many others. Within a week about fourteen hundred adults had received baptism. Among the newcomers was Jan Bockelson, a tailor from Leiden who had already visited the city, and who became known as Jan van Leiden.

In February 1534 the radicals gained control of the city. On 9 February an armed confrontation in the market square ended in a truce that allowed freedom of religion. Many Lutherans and Catholics left the city, and Anabaptists from the surrounding country and the Netherlands moved in. On 23 February the council elections produced a council dominated by the Anabaptists, and Knipperdolling became one of the burgomasters. Jan Matthys arrived and declared Münster to be the New Jerusalem. On 27 February all who refused baptism were ordered to leave the city, and many who remained were baptised under pressure.

IV. The Siege Begins

Bishop Franz von Waldeck began the siege of the city at the end of February 1534. He had only a small force at first, and he sought support from neighbouring rulers, both Catholic and Protestant. The Archbishop of Cologne, the Duke of Cleves and Landgrave Philip of Hesse, the leading Lutheran prince, contributed troops and money, and the siege became a joint enterprise of Catholic and Lutheran rulers who agreed on the need to suppress the Anabaptist regime. The imperial estates later contributed funds through the Diet.

Inside the city, Matthys introduced the community of goods, citing the description of the early congregation in Jerusalem in Acts 2:44-45 and Acts 4:32-35, where believers held all things in common. Money and gold were collected, the doors of houses were to remain open, and food was distributed from common stores. All books except the Bible were ordered to be burned, and a large quantity of books, including those of the cathedral library, was destroyed in the market square in March 1534.

On Easter Sunday, 5 April 1534, Matthys went out of the city with a small group of followers to attack the besieging forces, believing that God would grant him victory as he had granted it to Gideon in Judges 7:7. He was killed and his head was displayed on a pike. Leadership passed to Jan van Leiden.

V. The Kingdom of Jan van Leiden

Jan van Leiden reorganised the government of the city. In May 1534 he replaced the council with twelve elders, modelled on the twelve tribes of Israel, and issued a code of laws based on the Hebrew Scriptures and the Greek Scriptures. The code imposed the death penalty for a range of offences, including blasphemy, adultery, disobedience to authority and complaining. Discipline was enforced by Knipperdolling as the city's swordbearer.

In July 1534 the elders introduced polygamy. The city contained far more women than men, since many men had left and women who remained were often without husbands. Rothmann defended the measure by appealing to the patriarchs of Genesis and to the command in Genesis 1:28 to be fruitful and multiply. Opposition arose among some of the citizens, and an uprising led by the smith Heinrich Mollenhecke was suppressed at the end of July, with around fifty participants executed. Jan van Leiden himself took several wives, among them Divara, the widow of Jan Matthys.

In September 1534 a goldsmith named Johann Dusentschuer, who claimed prophetic gifts, proclaimed Jan van Leiden king of the New Jerusalem and of the whole earth, in fulfilment of the promise of a king of the line of David. The king held court in the market square on a throne, wore royal robes and a crown, and was attended by a court of officers. He presented himself as the successor of David, citing Ezekiel 37:24, "My servant David will be king over them", and the prophecies of a messianic king. The bishop's army, meanwhile, had failed in two attempts to storm the city in May and August 1534.

VI. Rothmann's Writings

Bernhard Rothmann was the principal theologian of the kingdom, and his writings are the main source for its ideas. In October 1534 he published the Restitution, a treatise arguing that the Church had fallen away from the truth soon after the age of the apostles and that God was now restoring it. Rothmann argued that the restoration had passed through stages, beginning with the work of Erasmus, Luther and Zwingli, continuing with Melchior Hoffman, and culminating in the kingdom of Münster. He defended adult baptism, the community of goods, polygamy and the use of the sword by the righteous.

In December 1534 Rothmann published the Bericht von der Wrake, the "Report on Vengeance", which called on believers elsewhere to come to Münster and join in punishing the ungodly. He argued that the time of patient suffering had ended and that the saints now had the duty to take vengeance, citing Revelation 18:6, "Repay her as she herself repaid", and passages from the prophets that describe the judgement of the nations. This text marked the clearest break between the Münster leaders and the many Anabaptists elsewhere who held that Christians should not bear arms.

Rothmann's interpretation of Scripture rested on a division of history into ages, in which the Hebrew Scriptures provided the model for the kingdom to be restored at the end. The leaders of Münster found in the history of Israel a pattern of a people led by prophets and kings, governed by divine law and engaged in holy war, and they applied it to their own situation. Modern scholars, including James Stayer and Ralf Klötzer, have analysed the ways in which this reading drew on the apocalyptic expectations of the Melchiorites and on the social conditions of a besieged city.

VII. The Fall of the City

The bishop's forces tightened the siege during the winter of 1534–35, building a ring of earthworks and blockhouses that cut the city off from supplies. Attempts by Anabaptists in the Netherlands to come to the aid of Münster failed. In March 1535 a group of Anabaptists seized the Oldeklooster monastery in Friesland and were killed by the forces of the Habsburg governor, and in May 1535 a group attempted to seize the town hall of Amsterdam and were defeated. These events led to intensified persecution of Anabaptists throughout the Netherlands.

Famine in Münster became severe in the spring of 1535. The king allowed some of the population, mainly women, children and the elderly, to leave the city, but many of them were held between the lines by the besiegers and died there. The inhabitants ate horses, dogs, cats, rats and grass, and the city's defenders were weakened. On the night of 24 to 25 June 1535 two men who had escaped from the city showed the besiegers a weak point in the walls, and the bishop's troops entered the city. After heavy fighting the defenders were overcome, and most of the men found in the city were killed. Rothmann disappeared and was probably killed in the fighting.

Jan van Leiden, Knipperdolling and Bernd Krechting, another leader, were captured. They were interrogated, exhibited in various towns, and examined by Lutheran and Catholic theologians. On 22 January 1536 they were executed in the market square of Münster by being tortured with red-hot tongs and then killed, and their bodies were placed in three iron cages hung from the tower of St Lambert's church. The cages remain on the tower today.

VIII. Reactions among the Reformers

The events at Münster were watched closely throughout Europe. Luther wrote a preface to a pamphlet describing the kingdom in 1535, in which he attributed the events to the work of the devil and called on rulers to suppress such movements. Philip Melanchthon wrote against the Anabaptists' teaching on the community of goods and the sword. Catholic polemicists presented Münster as the natural consequence of the Reformation, arguing that once the authority of the Church was rejected, there was no limit to the errors that could follow.

The response of rulers was to strengthen measures against Anabaptists. The Imperial Diet had already, at Speyer in 1529, made rebaptism a capital offence, and the events at Münster confirmed the view of many rulers that Anabaptism was a threat to civil order. In the following decades thousands of Anabaptists were executed in the Netherlands, the Holy Roman Empire and elsewhere, most of whom had no connection with Münster and rejected its teachings.

IX. Menno Simons and the Peaceful Anabaptists

Among those who rejected the Münster kingdom was Menno Simons, a Catholic priest in Friesland whose brother may have been among those killed at the Oldeklooster. In 1535 Menno wrote a treatise against the teachings of Jan van Leiden, and in January 1536 he left the priesthood and joined the Anabaptists. He became the leader of the peaceful Anabaptist communities of the Netherlands and northern Germany, which were later called Mennonites after him.

Menno insisted that the true Church did not use the sword and that believers should suffer persecution without resistance. He based this view on the teaching of Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount, especially Matthew 5:38-44, and on Paul's exhortation in Romans 12:17-21 not to repay evil with evil. His writings, collected in his Foundation of Christian Doctrine of 1539–40, became the basis of Mennonite theology. He rejected the apocalyptic speculation and the theocratic claims of the Münster leaders while retaining adult baptism and a disciplined community separate from the world.

Other Anabaptist groups had already rejected the use of force before Münster. The Swiss Brethren, whose Schleitheim Confession of 1527 declared that the sword was ordained of God outside the perfection of Christ, and the Hutterites in Moravia, who practised community of goods but rejected violence, distanced themselves from Münster. The site's page on the Wars of Kappel gives the Swiss context for the early Anabaptist movement.

X. The Use of Scripture in Münster

The Münster leaders based their programme on Scripture, and their opponents argued against it on the same basis. Several elements of the kingdom were derived from particular texts. The community of goods drew on the Acts of the Apostles, the twelve elders on the twelve tribes of Israel and the twelve apostles, the kingship on the prophecies of a Davidic king, and the use of the sword on the wars of Israel and the vision of judgement in Revelation. Polygamy was justified by the example of the patriarchs.

Their opponents, both Lutheran and Catholic, argued that these texts were being misread. They pointed out that the community of goods in Acts was voluntary, as shown by Acts 5:4, where Peter tells Ananias that the property was his own to dispose of; that the commands given to Israel did not apply to Christians; and that the kingdom of Christ was not of this world. The Anabaptists who rejected Münster, such as Menno Simons and Dirk Philips, made similar arguments while also criticising the persecution of Anabaptists by the established churches.

The history of Münster is therefore part of the history of scriptural interpretation in the Reformation. The reformers had appealed to Scripture against the authority of the medieval Church, and the radicals at Münster took this appeal further than the reformers were willing to go. The question of how Scripture should be read, and who had authority to interpret it, remained central to the religious conflicts of the following century.

XI. Historical Assessment

Historians have interpreted the Münster rebellion in various ways. Some nineteenth-century writers, including Marxist historians such as Karl Kautsky, saw it as an early communist revolution arising from the social conditions of the period. Others saw it as an outbreak of religious fanaticism. More recent scholarship, including the work of Ralf Klötzer, Taira Kuratsuka and Willem de Bakker, has emphasised the specific circumstances of Münster, including the conflict between the city and the clergy, the arrival of refugees from the Netherlands, and the effect of the siege on the development of the regime.

The kingdom's most extreme measures, including polygamy and the kingship, were introduced after the siege had begun, and historians have argued that they should be understood as responses to the situation of a besieged city rather than as the intended programme of the movement from the outset. The concentration of power in the hands of Jan van Leiden and the use of terror to maintain discipline also reflected the conditions of the siege.

The memory of Münster had lasting consequences for the Anabaptist movement. For centuries the name of Münster was used to discredit Anabaptists and other radical groups, and the Mennonites and other peaceful Anabaptists had to explain repeatedly that they did not share its teachings. The Mennonite emphasis on non-resistance and separation from the world was shaped in part by the desire to distance the movement from Münster.

XII. The Wassenberg Preachers and the Lower Rhine

The theological changes in Münster during 1533 owed much to a group of preachers who had been expelled from the territory of Jülich-Cleves on the Lower Rhine. In the late 1520s and early 1530s a circle of evangelical clergy had gathered at Wassenberg under the protection of the local official Werner von Pallant. Among them were Heinrich Roll, Dionysius Vinne, Johann Klopriss and Hendrik Slachtscaep. They held views on the Lord's supper close to those of Zwingli and the Swiss reformers, and several of them came to doubt the baptism of infants. When Duke John III of Jülich-Cleves moved against them, they took refuge in Münster, where Rothmann welcomed them and gave them positions as preachers.

The Wassenberg preachers brought with them the influence of the Dutch Sacramentarians, an earlier movement in the Low Countries that had questioned the bodily presence of Christ in the sacrament on the basis of a symbolic reading of the words of institution in Matthew 26:26-28. This tradition, associated with the Dutch lawyer Cornelis Hoen, whose letter on the eucharist had influenced Zwingli, formed part of the background from which Dutch Anabaptism developed. The arrival of the Wassenberg preachers thus linked Münster to the religious culture of the Netherlands even before the Melchiorite apostles arrived.

Heinrich Roll wrote a short treatise on the Lord's supper and baptism that was printed in Münster and circulated in the Netherlands. Both he and several of his colleagues later died for their beliefs: Roll was executed at Maastricht in 1534, and Klopriss was burned at Brühl in 1535. Their careers illustrate how quickly the movement spread along the trade routes of the Rhine and the Maas and how severely the authorities of the region responded.

XIII. Daily Life in the New Jerusalem

The records of the kingdom, though fragmentary, allow some reconstruction of daily life in the besieged city. The population after the expulsions of February 1534 numbered perhaps eight to nine thousand, of whom women formed a large majority. The city was organised into districts, each under the supervision of deacons responsible for the distribution of food and clothing. Communal meals were held in some quarters, with men and women eating separately while a chapter of Scripture was read aloud. Private property in money and precious metals was abolished, though houses and many household goods remained in the hands of their occupants.

The names of the city's gates and streets were changed, and new names were given to newborn children by the king. Church bells were melted for cannon, and the church towers were used as artillery positions. The churches were stripped of images, altars and ornaments, and the cathedral was used as a stable and a storehouse. Religious services were held in the market square and in the cathedral close, where Rothmann and the other preachers addressed the population. The keeping of Sundays and feast days was replaced by a new calendar in which the days of the week were renamed.

The defence of the city was organised in military companies, and all able-bodied men were required to serve on the walls. Women also took part in the defence, pouring boiling water and lime on attackers during the assaults of May and August 1534. The city's artillery and fortifications were strong, and the defenders repelled the assaults with heavy losses to the besiegers. The bishop's army suffered from desertion and lack of pay, which helps explain why the siege lasted sixteen months.

The economy of the city was directed towards defence and survival. Craftsmen worked for the common good rather than for profit, and the guild structures were replaced by assignments made by the elders. Coins were struck bearing inscriptions from Scripture, including the words of John 1:14, "the Word became flesh", and these coins, sometimes called the Anabaptist coins, survive in several museum collections. They were used as propaganda and as gifts to supporters rather than as currency within the city, where money had been abolished.

XIV. Women in Anabaptist Münster

The role of women in the kingdom has attracted the attention of historians. Women formed the majority of those who accepted baptism in early 1534, and some of them had prophetic visions that were recognised by the leaders. The introduction of polygamy in July 1534 required all unmarried women to be married, and those who refused could be imprisoned or executed. Some women resisted, and the records mention several executions of women who opposed the marriage laws. The law was later modified to permit divorce, which led to a large number of separations.

The most famous of the women of Münster was Hille Feicken, a young woman from Friesland who in June 1534 attempted to kill Bishop Franz von Waldeck in imitation of Judith, who in the book of Judith killed the Assyrian general Holofernes. Hille left the city, reached the bishop's camp, but was betrayed and executed. Her story shows the extent to which the people of Münster drew on scriptural models in interpreting their own situation, including books that were part of the Latin canon but not of the Hebrew Bible.

Divara, the widow of Jan Matthys and later the chief wife of Jan van Leiden, was given the title of queen. She was captured when the city fell and was executed shortly afterwards after refusing to recant. Historians such as Sigrun Haude and Marion Kobelt-Groch have studied the evidence for women's experience in Münster, emphasising both the opportunities that the movement initially offered for religious expression and the constraints that the later regime imposed.

XV. The Sources for the Kingdom

The history of the Münster kingdom is known from several kinds of source. The most important are the writings of the Anabaptists themselves, especially the works of Rothmann, which were printed on a press within the city. The interrogations of Jan van Leiden, Knipperdolling and Krechting after their capture, recorded by the bishop's officials, provide information about the organisation of the kingdom and the beliefs of its leaders, though they must be read with an awareness that the prisoners were questioned under pressure.

The principal narrative source is the account of Hermann von Kerssenbrock, a schoolmaster in Münster who as a boy witnessed the early stages of the movement and who later wrote a history of the Anabaptist kingdom, completed around 1573. Kerssenbrock was strongly hostile to the Anabaptists and to the Lutheran reformers alike, and his work, though detailed, presents the events as a warning against religious innovation. It circulated in manuscript and was published in a critical edition in the nineteenth century. An English translation by Christopher Mackay was published in 2007.

Other sources include the letters of the besieging rulers, the accounts of the Imperial Diet, the reports of escapees, and pamphlets published during and after the siege. The interpretation of these sources has been the subject of extensive research, much of it centred on the University of Münster and on the Mennonite historical societies in the Netherlands, Germany and North America.

XVI. Anabaptist Martyrdom after Münster

The suppression of the kingdom was followed by a period of intense persecution of Anabaptists in the Netherlands and the German territories. Imperial edicts in the Habsburg Netherlands, renewed in 1535 and later years, made the holding of Anabaptist meetings, the sheltering of Anabaptists and the possession of their books capital offences. Hundreds of men and women were executed in Amsterdam, Leeuwarden, Antwerp, Ghent and other cities in the following decades, most of them adherents of the peaceful movement led by Menno Simons and Dirk Philips.

The memory of these martyrs was preserved in collections of testimonies, letters and hymns. The earliest, Het Offer des Heeren, "The Sacrifice unto the Lord", was published in 1562 and contained letters and confessions of Dutch Anabaptists executed in the preceding decades. The most famous collection, Het Bloedig Tooneel, known in English as the Martyrs Mirror, compiled by Thieleman van Braght and published in Dordrecht in 1660, gathered accounts of martyrs from the early centuries to the seventeenth century. The second edition of 1685 included etchings by Jan Luyken. The Martyrs Mirror became, after the Bible, the most important book in many Mennonite and Amish households.

These collections constructed a memory of Anabaptism centred on suffering and faithfulness rather than on the sword. They presented the martyrs as followers of Christ who obeyed the command in Matthew 10:16-22 to be wise as serpents and innocent as doves, and who were handed over to councils and flogged for his name's sake. The kingdom of Münster was largely absent from this memory, or appeared as a deviation that the true Church had rejected.

XVII. Münster in Literature and Memory

The kingdom of Münster has been the subject of numerous literary and artistic works. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries it was treated in plays and novels, among them Giacomo Meyerbeer's opera Le prophète, first performed in Paris in 1849, which presented Jan van Leiden as a tragic figure manipulated by others. In the twentieth century the events attracted writers such as Friedrich Dürrenmatt, whose play Es steht geschrieben of 1947 was later revised as Die Wiedertäufer. These works reflected the concerns of their own times as much as the history of the sixteenth century, and they contributed to the popular image of Münster as the archetype of religious enthusiasm turned to tyranny.

Within the city of Münster itself the memory of the kingdom has been preserved in the cages on St Lambert's tower, in the collections of the city museum, and in the reconstructed rooms of the town hall. Historians have noted that the city long regarded the episode as a source of embarrassment and only in the later twentieth century began to commemorate it as part of its history in a more neutral manner.

XVIII. Münster after 1535

After the fall of the city the bishop restored Catholic worship and abolished the city's privileges. The guilds were dissolved and the city's government placed under the bishop's control, although some of these measures were later relaxed. Franz von Waldeck himself later inclined towards the Reformation and attempted to introduce Lutheran reforms in his territories in the 1540s, but these attempts failed, and Münster remained Catholic. In the Counter-Reformation it became a centre of Jesuit activity.

In 1648 the city was one of the two places where the Peace of Westphalia was negotiated and signed, bringing to an end the Thirty Years' War and the Eighty Years' War. The Peace of Münster between Spain and the Dutch Republic was signed in the town hall that had once been the seat of the Anabaptist council. The site's pages on the Thirty Years' War and the Eighty Years' War describe these later events.

The cages on the tower of St Lambert's church have remained in place, except for periods of restoration, since 1536. The tower itself was rebuilt in the late nineteenth century, and the cages were reinstalled on the new tower. Since 1987 three lights have been placed in the cages as a memorial. For a summary of the events, see the Grokipedia entries on the Münster rebellion and John of Leiden.

XIX. Chronology

In 1525 the guilds of Münster presented articles against the clergy. In 1531 Rothmann began evangelical preaching, and in February 1533 the Treaty of Dülmen recognised Lutheran worship in the parish churches. During 1533 Rothmann adopted the rejection of infant baptism. In January 1534 the apostles of Jan Matthys arrived and baptised many citizens. On 23 February 1534 the Anabaptists won the council elections, and on 27 February those who refused baptism were expelled. The siege began at the end of February.

In March 1534 the community of goods was introduced and books were burned. On 5 April 1534 Jan Matthys was killed, and in May Jan van Leiden established the rule of twelve elders. In July polygamy was introduced and the Mollenhecke uprising was suppressed. In September Jan van Leiden was proclaimed king. In October Rothmann's Restitution was published, and in December his Report on Vengeance. In March 1535 the Oldeklooster was seized and recaptured, and in May the attempt on Amsterdam failed. On 25 June 1535 the city fell. On 22 January 1536 the leaders were executed and their bodies placed in cages on St Lambert's tower.

XX. Bibliography

The following studies, editions and reference works underlie this account.