Late one night in late May 1535, five men warily snuck out of the besieged city of Münster. One man became separated from the group. He wandered in the dark, trying to avoid the enemy troops in the trenches, but eventually decided to give himself up and hope for the best. This man, Henry Gresbeck, was to play a major part in the recapture of the city from the Anabaptists. He would also write the only eyewitness account of what had gone on in the city for the preceding fifteen months. Gresbeck addressed his account to the prince-bishop, possibly to explain his role in the Anabaptist rebellion and his importance to the eventual capture of the city. Gresbeck’s original manuscript seems to have disappeared into the prince-bishop’s archive (eventually turning up in the archives in Cologne). His account had no effect on the sixteenth-century treatments of the events in Münster; it was only rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century. That account is here translated into English for the first time.
The best-known surviving source for the events in Münster was written a generation later by the schoolmaster Herman von Kerssenbrock, who was a boy at the time of the Anabaptist regime and fled the city. He wrote his history in Latin a generation later (in the 1560s), partly using archival information but mostly by borrowing from earlier historians. Kerssenbrock’s magisterial work eclipsed not only the influence of earlier historians, but also the knowledge of Gresbeck’s eyewitness account.
It was only with the 1853 publication of Gresbeck’s account in a collection of documents edited by C. A. Cornelius that his involvement in the {2} fall of the city came to be generally known. Cornelius based his edition of the Low German on two derivative manuscripts. One was a heavily edited copy of Gresbeck’s account from the ducal library in Darmstadt and the other a copy that was edited and converted into High German from a library in Meiningen. Cornelius was unable to consult another manuscript of Gresbeck that was located in Cologne. I have used a copy of the original manuscript that Gresbeck submitted to the prince-bishop to prepare a much better edition of the original text, and that text is the basis of the following translation. The Cologne manuscript appears to be the original manuscript Gresbeck had submitted to the prince-bishop. The translation presented in this volume is based on that early copy.
The narrative presented in Gresbeck’s retrospective account is not without its own difficulties, but not only does it give us the perspective of a common man on very unusual events, it is also the only account written by a man who actually witnessed these events with his own eyes. To judge by his account, Gresbeck was a keen observer of events around him, and he presents his story with verve and humor.
The Anabaptist regime in Münster was brief—from February 1534 to June 1535—and the fact that the city was under siege resulted from one of the most remarkable events of the early Reformation in Germany.1 In the years before 1533, the city of Münster was gripped with reforming fervor, which was adopted in part by the dignitaries of the local city council. The city was under the control, however, of the prince-bishop of Münster, who held both religious and secular powers. The city council had extorted wide-ranging privileges that amounted to autonomy from the newly appointed Bishop Francis of Waldeck in 1533, but these would prove to be short-lived. The Reformers were intent on going much further in their religious innovations {3} than the Lutheran-inspired members of the city council were willing to go. One particularly noteworthy element in the Reformers’ beliefs was the rejection of infant baptism. They believed that baptism had to be voluntarily undertaken by responsible adults. Since at that time pretty much everybody would have received baptism as an infant, anyone who underwent a new baptism as an adult was a rebaptizer, or Anabaptist (Wiedertäufer in modern High German, the literal translation of the Latinate anabaptista).
At this time, there were throughout the areas to the west and north of Münster (the Low Countries and Frisia) many followers of Melchior Hofman, who held religious views of a distinctly radical nature, including a belief that the apocalypse was close at hand. Hofman himself was under arrest in Strasburg, but the radical adherents of his views took control of the Münster council during the regular elections in February 1534, and soon moved to expel from the city all those who did not actively support their agenda. The result of this was that many men fled the city, leaving their wives behind to guard the family property. The radical Anabaptists were now in firm control of the city.
The radicals’ leader was a huge, charismatic man from Holland named John Mathias. Under his leadership, the inhabitants organized a military force to defend themselves and undertook raids against neighboring towns. After Mathias died in one such raid around Easter, control of the city was assumed by a biblically inspired council of twelve elders. During this early period of Anabaptist rule, a sort of communal form of ownership was dictated for the city. On the grounds that it was wrong for one Christian to have more than another or to take advantage of a fellow Christian through shady dealing, coins and precious metals (gold and silver) were confiscated; food and clothing were added to the list of items to be held in common and doled out to the populace on an as-needed basis by public officials.
The prince-bishop responded to what he took to be disobedience on the part of his subjects by gathering an army. He stationed his troops outside the city, hoping for an opportunity to retake the city. A major assault in May failed because some of the troops attacked prematurely. Another assault in late August came to grief in the face of stiff resistance from the defense. The prince-bishop’s finances were now exhausted, and he sought the assistance of neighboring princes. They agreed to fund the military campaign against the city, but took over command of the operation, which they placed in the hands of Count Wirich of Falkenstein. In the fall, the expensive steps were finally taken to fully surround the city {4} with a complete circuit of manned trenches, eventually cutting it off from the outside world.
Meanwhile, their seemingly miraculous success in driving back the assault on the city in August led to exaltation among the Anabaptists in Münster. In the aftermath of John Mathias’s death, John of Leiden, a onetime tailor, had assumed leadership of the radicals. He was seen as the instrument of God’s expected victory over his foes, and he soon instituted a full regal court. A prominent figure in the court was Bernard Knipperdolling, a member of the traditional ruling class of Münster who had taken the radicals’ side in the religious disputes of previous years. Both John of Leiden and Knipperdolling used state violence to suppress opposition to the Anabaptist regime.
The radicals did not face resistance only from outside. The radicals caused widespread discontent in July 1534 when they abolished traditional monogamous marriage and replaced it with a polygamous scheme based on Old Testament precedents. A more practical reason for the innovation may have been the large excess of adult females compared to males. This surprising move was bitterly opposed by many and produced a revolt in the city, which the Anabaptists managed to put down only with difficulty.
In the fall, before the city was put under a tight siege, embassies were sent out to neighboring communities to stir up revolt. These embassies were uniformly unsuccessful, and the envoys put to death. By the winter of 1535, things were looking bad for the Anabaptists. Their king hoped to stir up revolution among sympathizers in the Low Countries, but these expectations proved to be as illusory as the efforts to convert the towns around Münster. By the springtime, while the king’s court was still living rather comfortably on the confiscated provisions of the community, the regular populace was beginning to suffer from starvation and there was widespread discontent. The king resorted to appointing “dukes” who were supposed to rule the earth in the king’s name after the final victory of the Anabaptists. In practice, their purpose was apparently to keep the growing dissatisfaction with the king’s rule under control. It was under these circumstances of desperation and suppression that the five men mentioned above were driven to flee the city.
Two of these men had plans to capture the city: Henry Gresbeck, a local cabinetmaker, and Little Hans of Longstreet (Henseken van der Langenstraten), a renegade soldier from the prince-bishop’s army who had fled to the city but later regretted his decision. After the men became separated, {5} Gresbeck revealed his plan to the officers in the pay of the neighboring princes, while Little Hans was eventually put in touch with the prince-bishop by his former commander. Both Gresbeck and Little Hans collaborated in preparations for the attempt to seize the city through a secret nighttime assault on the city’s massive defenses, but only Little Hans took an active role in implementing the plan, leading the troops into the city. At first, the closing of a gate locked the first wave of troops in the city, and a battle raged throughout the final hours of the night. Eventually, however, additional troops from outside gained entry, and the Anabaptists surrendered. Many were slaughtered at the time of the town’s capture, and after three days of plunder by the victorious troops, the Anabaptists’ property was confiscated. John of Leiden, Knipperdolling, and one other of the king’s main supporters were put to death in February 1536.
Little Hans was hailed by the prince-bishop for his role in the city’s capture, and he figures prominently in the surviving accounts written by the Anabaptists’ enemies. Gresbeck, on the other hand, is entirely ignored in these accounts. In order (it would seem) to vindicate his role in the city’s capture (and presumably to gain restitution for his confiscated property), Gresbeck wrote his long account of the Anabaptist episode in Münster.
Though there were certainly some challenges to its claims, the Latin-speaking Roman Catholic Church of the later Middle Ages was dominant throughout Western Europe until the Augustinian monk and theology professor Martin Luther began in 1517 a series of attacks on practices and doctrines that quickly developed into the widespread rejection of the traditional church and the establishment in many places in northern Europe of new forms of ecclesiastic organization.2 Although the Anabaptists shared many ideas with the earlier Reformers, their distinctive interpretations set the radical reformers of Münster at odds with the more conservative Lutherans.3
{6} The immediate issue that Luther raised was that of indulgences (remission from punishment in purgatory as a “reward” for meritorious behavior). Luther denied that the pope had the power to “obligate” God to do anything, and this argument quickly resulted in a rejection of the church’s ability to make innovations by its own authority (ultimately based in Catholic thought on the “power of the keys” granted by Christ to St. Peter). The Anabaptists certainly agreed with Luther in the rejection of papal authority and of the validity of “medieval accretions” (practices not based on the New Testament). Luther’s followers made a concerted effort to set up a new organization of their own, and tried on numerous occasions to win the radical Anabaptists over to their new conception. The Anabaptists refused to join the Lutherans, but all parties took for granted the need for some sort of ecclesiastical organization.
An important difference between the Anabaptists and the Lutherans was their views on baptism. Luther considered baptism part of the mechanism by which God distributed his grace to Christians. Since God’s grace was entirely dependent upon his omnipotent goodness, human activity had nothing to do with the granting of grace, and so Luther saw nothing wrong with infant baptism. In effect, since God’s grace was freely available to all Christians, there was no need for the individual’s will to be involved in the acquisition of it, so grace could just as well be given to infants. In fact, it made more sense for baptism—as a symbol of God’s universal grace—to be bestowed at the start of life. The Anabaptists, however, would have a quite different interpretation of the biblical institution. For them, baptism represented the active conversion of an adult fully aware of the significance and consequences of the act.
The two groups also disagreed on the subject of the Eucharist. In the traditional Catholic interpretation (transubstantiation), during the Eucharist, the ceremony commemorating the Last Supper (for the New Testament evidence, see Matthew 6:17–30, Mark 14:12–26, Luke 22:7–38, John 13–17), the wine and bread were literally converted into the blood and flesh of Christ (with the consumption of the former reserved for the officiants). Luther retained the Eucharist, feeling that this sacrament was another vehicle by which the word of God was made available to Christians; but Luther not only made the wine available to the congregants but also somewhat {7} reconfigured the traditional notion of transubstantiation. In his view, while there was a union of the physical wine and bread with the blood and flesh of Christ, it was the case both that the materials retained their original composition and that the blood and flesh were also there. He famously compared the result to an iron heated in a fire: it retains characteristics of both iron and fire. This view is traditionally termed “consubstantiation,” though some Lutherans are adamant that consubstantiation is a different concept and Luther’s idea should be called sacramental union. Regardless of the terminology and the exact details of Luther’s view, while he rejected the complete conversion of the wine and bread, he nonetheless did feel that in some way the blood and flesh were also present in the sacramental food and drink. This was an interpretation the Anabaptists would reject. For them, the Last Supper was symbolically commemorated in a communal meal in which the bread and the wine had no mystical power, but retained their regular nature.
For Luther, infant baptism signified that all the baptized Christians in the community belonged to the recognized church. That is, he took it for granted that all nominal Christians belonged to the church, whatever their personal failings. The radicals of Münster adopted a much higher standard for acceptance as a “true” Christian. Only those who properly lived the Christian life (as they understood it) and who overtly manifested their resolve to do so through adult baptism were considered Christians, and all others were enemies of the true faith. Loyalty to God was taken to have priority over any other considerations, and in the final analysis the Anabaptists agreed with the medieval view that there was a unity between secular and religious authority. Whereas for Lutherans, the state consisted of all valid Christians within its territories, the radicals’ exclusivist understanding of the Christian community would lead them to either forcibly convert or drive out those who rejected their teachings.
All baptisms recorded in the New Testament involved adults. The Gospel of Mark describes John the Baptist as proclaiming “a baptism of repentance for the remission of sins” (1:4), and Jesus himself states, “Whoever believes and is baptized shall be saved” (Mark 16:16).4 It is hard to see, {8} the Anabaptists argued, how an infant could believe, and even if one is inclined to disjoin the notions of belief and baptism in the second passage (contrary to the surface sense of the passage), an infant can hardly repent.5 On this basis, the doctrine arose in the 1520s that baptism is a rite that should be undergone by an adult in full knowledge of the tenets of the faith, and the term for this sort of baptism is “believer’s baptism.” In the context of the sixteenth century, when everyone who adopted the new rite would perforce have previously received traditional baptism as infants, such believer’s baptism would be a second baptism or rebaptism, and the term Anabaptist (from the Greek for “rebaptizer”) arose to characterize them. (Gresbeck uses the German version of this, wedderdopper in his Low German, the equivalent of the High German Wiedertäufer.) Naturally, since the radicals rejected the validity of the initial infant baptism, there could be no “re”-baptism for them, and the term is in origin one of hostility. Nonetheless, the term is useful to describe those who adhered to the doctrine of believer’s baptism, especially because in the absence of “Anabaptism,” there is no common term to define this (rather variegated) strain of Protestant thought. The theological disputes about the nature of baptism began in the early to mid-1520s in southern Germany, and the radical interpretation spread rapidly.
In his attack on the traditional church’s monopoly of access to God, Luther had criticized the separation of the priesthood from the full body of believers. He argued that every Christian was in effect a priest, though only those who had been called upon by the community or authority to exercise this function in a formal manner were proper priests. Although a number of radical religious leaders were, like Luther, renegade Catholic priests (Ulrich Zwingli, Balthasar Hübmaier, Menno Simons), others had no formal religious training before embarking on the propagation of the new faith as they saw it. One such man was Melchior Hofman, whose brand of Anabaptism was to be the ultimate inspiration for the remarkable turn of affairs in {9} Münster.6 Born in about 1495 in Swäbisch Hall in southwestern Germany, Hofman was a furrier by trade, and he eventually ended up in Livonia on the Baltic in 1522. Already an adherent of Luther, he got into trouble as a preacher in assorted German towns along the eastern shore of the Baltic (at one point his preaching resulted in an iconoclastic riot), and by 1526 he held a position as preacher in Stockholm. In 1527, his preaching yet again caused rioting, and he had to flee. He took up residence in the Baltic port city of Lübeck, but once the municipal authorities became aware of the radical nature of his preaching, they too sent him packing. He then sought to establish himself in Denmark, where the king was attempting a reformation. Hofman soon became embroiled in doctrinal disputes with the Lutheran preachers, and he traveled to Wittenberg to get a letter of commendation from Luther. Hofman had gained Luther’s approval back in 1525 by concealing his doctrinal differences, but now Luther repudiated him.
What separated Hofman from Luther was not only his iconoclasm and allegorical interpretation of the Eucharist but also his apocalyptic eschatology. Already, in a work of 1526, Hofman predicted that the cataclysmic war between God’s chosen and the godless as foretold in the book of Apocalypse (also called Revelation) would take place seven years later, in 1533.7 The only element lacking for the program that would cause such turmoil in Münster was the doctrine of believer’s baptism. A disputation was set up in the duchy of Schleswig (controlled by the Danish king) in 1529 to “test” Hofman’s views, but it was clearly intended to provide an authoritative venue in which to reject them. In April, Hofman was ordered to recant or leave; he refused to recant and was duly banished. He moved to East Frisia (a German area on the North Sea coast to the southwest of Denmark to the eastern shore of the estuary of the River Ems), which was then in religious foment under the influence of Zwinglian ideas, and there he collaborated with Andreas Karlstadt, Luther’s erstwhile colleague who was now his radical opponent.8 Once more, Hofman ran into trouble with the Lutherans, and in June he moved to the city of Strasburg, one of the great centers of Reformation thought.
{10} Hofman was at first welcomed in Strasburg, but his doctrine had become even more radical, and he soon earned the enmity of local Zwinglian religious leaders. He saw himself as a prophet of God, and added to his apocalyptic views a conviction of the validity of believer’s baptism. (Exactly when or under what circumstances this happened is unknown; perhaps Karlstadt had recently influenced him.) Swiss Anabaptists had arrived in Strasburg back in 1526, and although Wolfgang Capito had a certain amount of sympathy for them, the other Reform leaders in the city were implacably opposed to their teachings. After being rejected by the religious authorities, Hofman consorted with the so-called Strasburg prophets, a group of lower-class individuals who claimed to receive visions from God. Hofman was completely convinced of the validity of these prophecies and even published a book about them. Despite the city’s rejection of him, however, Hofman officially declared that Strasburg would be the New Jerusalem mentioned in the book of Apocalypse and would form the center of resistance against the godless in the impending cataclysm that would mark the end of the world in 1533.
In April 1530, Hofman rashly asked the Strasburg city council to grant the Anabaptists a church, and for his efforts he was duly expelled. By the next month he was back in East Frisia, where he now began to spread his apocalyptic version of the doctrine of Anabaptism. He acquired several hundred followers in this area, which was riven with strife between Lutherans, Sacramentarians, and Catholics, but he was first forced to withdraw from Emden, the main city, in May, and he had to leave the entire territory in the fall. Apart from a visit to Strasburg in December 1531, Hofman’s movements between there and his final arrival in Strasburg in 1533 are somewhat obscure, but he seems to have been successful in spreading his apocalyptic beliefs in the Low Countries and Frisia. In the Low Countries, the Sacramentarian movement, which rejected the actual presence of Christ in the bread and wine of the Eucharist, was widespread, and it was tolerated by the local magistrates, who were reluctant to uphold the repressive orders of the central government (the regency was held in the name of the absent Emperor Charles V by his aunt Margaret and then by his sister Mary after Margaret’s death in November 1530).9 Hofman’s doctrines were propagated {11} in Sacramentarian circles, and it was the prohibited practice of adult baptism that attracted the attention of the (reluctant) local authorities.
A change in Hofman’s policy on encouraging adult (re)baptism was brought about by the actions of one of his followers. John Voelkerts had been baptized by Hofman in Emden, and began to act as his emissary in Amsterdam. (Among the first to be baptized by Voelkerts was Bartholomew Boekbinder, who would later spread the good word to Münster.) Initially the authorities were tolerant of Voelkerts’s activities, but Voelkerts wished a martyr’s death. Even though, when he was first arrested, the authorities all but invited him to escape, he not only refused to do so, but even revealed the names of those he had baptized. Eventually nine others were arrested, and on December 5, 1531, they were beheaded in The Hague. This news shocked Hofman, who thought it pointless to court a martyr’s death, and he ordered a halt to adult baptism until the end of 1533.10 For the next year, the temporary suspension (Stillstand or “standstill”) of adult baptism brought a virtual halt to the execution of Melchiorites (as Hofman’s followers may be termed). This makes it hard to track the exact spread of Hofman’s sect in this period, but it would seem that its message of impending doom proved attractive to Sacramentarians.
In March 1533, Hofman returned from his peregrinations (most recently in East Frisia) to Strasburg, the city that he was sure would be the salvation of mankind in the last days. The city council, which had recently been taking a turn towards Lutheranism, was not at all pleased with his faith in their city; when he was accused in May of plotting rebellion, the council ordered his arrest. Hofman welcomed this as part of the apocalyptic last days, as he had been predicting since 1526 that a great council would imprison one of the two witnesses mentioned in Apocalypse 11; as it turned out, this was himself. When he was brought to trial before the city’s synod in June, the charge of plotting rebellion was dropped and he was tried for his views on various technical theological points. Since there was no proof of any plot to stir up rebellion, there was no cause to execute him, yet he had large numbers {12} of followers, and his unshakable faith in his prophecy of the world’s demise made him dangerous. He would remain in close and isolated detention until his death (under obscure circumstances, apparently in 1543).
As the end of 1533 approached, and the time predicted for the apocalypse came ever nearer, the prohibition against believer’s baptism began to chafe among the Melchiorites of the Low Countries, because they believed that such “real” baptism was the equivalent of the seal that distinguished the pious from the godless in Apocalypse 7:3 and 9:4. There was nothing the imprisoned Hofman could do, so John Mathias (or Matthys) took advantage of this discontent to replace Hofman as the direct leader of the Melchiorites.11 A baker by trade, Mathias had long been involved in the Sacramentarian movement, and for his views, he had been sentenced to having his tongue pierced in 1528. He now proclaimed that he was Enoch, the second of the two witnesses mentioned in Apocalypse 11 as the leaders of the godly in the last days. The Melchiorites continued to view Hofman as the new Elijah, but previously the role of Enoch had been bestowed upon Cornelius Polderman, another of Hofman’s followers.12 On All Saints’ Day (November 1), Mathias lifted the prohibition against adult baptism, and the same day he met and baptized John Bockelson of Leiden, who would eventually succeed Mathias as the Anabaptist leader in Münster and be crowned its king. At that time, Mathias also decided to abandon his previous wife, and took as his new “spiritual” wife the beautiful young Diewer, whom John of Leiden would in turn marry upon Mathias’s death in battle. Mathias sent emissaries (including John) to various Melchiorite communities in the Low Countries to assert his authority, and his leadership was generally accepted once he managed to overawe the Melchiorites of Amsterdam, who included some of Hofman’s earlier adherents, such as Bartholomew Boekbinder and William de Cuiper. At year’s end, with his leadership now generally recognized, Mathias sent off further emissaries, who were not only to proclaim the resumption of adult {13} baptism but to bid the faithful to assemble, as they would constitute the 144,000 pious people who were to oppose the Antichrist according to Apocalypse 7:4 and 14:1. Boekbinder and de Cuiper were first sent to Leeuwarden, and after delivering their message there, they continued on to Münster. There, on January 5, 1534, they baptized Bernard Rothman and the other radical preachers, who were dominant in the city and would soon take over the city. Eight days later, another pair of Mathias’s emissaries, John of Leiden and Gerard de Cuiper, appeared in Münster, and in early February, Mathias himself arrived. These Melchiorites would take advantage of the religious discord within Münster to establish that city (rather than Strasburg) as the New Jerusalem that would witness the final conflict predicted in Apocalypse.
Modern scholars debate whether the men who seized control of Münster were the “legitimate” heirs of Melchior Hofman. The very question is prejudicial, in that it implies that Hofman had some sort of copyright on his ideas, and those who “infringed” this control through misinterpretation are inherently wrong and misguided. It is preferable to consider the question from the point of view of the internal logic of ideas. The men in Münster seem to have genuinely believed that the last days would begin in 1533, and that events would unfold just as related in the book of Apocalypse. Both Hofman and Mathias shared this belief, but differed on the stance that they, as the prophets who would lead the pious in the coming conflict, should adopt towards this conflict. Hofman took a rather more passive attitude and thought that God should be left to implement the conflict without human intervention. Mathias, on the other hand, decided that it was necessary to prepare the faithful to take an active role in the events foretold for them. If words like “delusional” are to be used of Mathias, Bockelson, Knipperdolling, and other leaders of the radicals in Münster (and this judgmental tone is still frequently used of them), then it should be pointed out that they were no more deluded than Hofman. They simply acted upon their beliefs, whereas Hofman waited for events to take place of their own accord while he languished in his prison cell.
The Münster radicals’ views on theology and other aspects of religion were unique in several respects.13 Given the Sacramentarian background of so {14} many of the radicals from the Low Countries, it’s not surprising that they rejected the traditional belief in transubstantiation (as well as Luther’s modified consubstantiation), which saw a real transformation of the Eucharist bread and wine into Christ’s flesh and blood. (For more on this, see folio 29r in Gresbeck’s account and note 149 in the translation.14)
The nature of the relationship between Christ as the Son of God and God himself—a concept that caused much dispute in antiquity but was generally uncontroversial during the Middle Ages—again became a matter of great dispute at the time of the Reformation. The notion that had been accepted as orthodox since antiquity held that the three “persons” of God (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit) were seen as manifestations of a single God, and this threefold conception of God is called the Trinity. A different line of thought in antiquity known as Monophysitism held that the divine nature of Christ supplanted the humanity of the fetus of Jesus that was conceived in Mary; Hofman adhered to a similar idea that arose in the 1520s (he famously compared the birth of Christ through Mary to the passage of water through a pipe). In his final days after his capture, John Bockelson of Leiden (the erstwhile king of the Anabaptist kingdom) showed himself willing to recant a number of his views, but he balked at the notion that God was born of a human.15 One interesting side effect of the emphasis on the divinity of Christ was that they had a tendency to assimilate Christ to God the Father. A notable aspect of the Münster radicals’ conception of God is their constant invocation of “The Father,” which for them meant the vengeful and jealous God of the Old Testament.
Hofman’s doctrine included a strong belief in divine inspiration. He went so far as to publish the prophetic dreams of some of his followers, and it was such a dream that led him to return to Strasburg, where he was arrested. Such divinely inspired prophets were not uncommon among the more radically minded (e.g., the “Zwickau prophets” whose visions threatened the social order in 1522). Although the established church of the Middle Ages did what it could to suppress or at least check such spontaneous revelations {15} from people who were not in holy orders, it is not surprising that in their careful reading of the Bible, some reformers were led by Acts 2:1–21 to think that God would again speak directly to the common man. It is noteworthy that Acts 2:38 connects (seemingly adult) baptism for the remission of sins with the reception of “the gift of the Holy Spirit.” The radicals of Münster would not infrequently invoke this “spirit of the baptizer” (fols. 66v, 73r, 100v).
The Münster radicals often referred to the Reformation notion that biblical precedent was necessary for any ecclesiastical practice to be considered valid (they often professed to be willing to admit to error if it could be demonstrated through citation of the Bible), and they concomitantly rejected any practices that could not be validated in this way. The latter brings with it the notion that any papist practices from the past that do not pass muster by the standard of the New Testament are mere human accretions that had to be eradicated.
A very specific form of rejection of the traditional forms of worship is the destruction of the religious art that adorned the churches. Of course, a prohibition against the worship of images is one of the Ten Commandments (Exodus 20:3–4; Deuteronomy 5:8), and in both the Old Testament and the works of the early church fathers, idolatry was associated with the worship of false gods. Hence, hostility to traditional religious art was a prominent feature of the early rejection of the Roman Church. Karlstadt had disagreed with Luther over the issue, and Hofman was forced to leave first Dorpat in Livonia and then Stockholm after his preaching resulted in iconoclastic rioting. A notable aspect of the Münsterite Anabaptists was their destruction of the city’s churches and their art, which Gresbeck describes at length (fols. 111r–114v).
The events of Münster are incomprehensible without a clear understanding that the main driving force behind the radical leaders was the belief that the events portrayed in the book of Apocalypse were about to come to pass and that they would play a prominent role as the 144,000 who would do battle with the forces of the Antichrist.16
In the early books of the Old Testament, God promises the Israelites that if they worship him properly, he will assure them of success as a people in the secular world (the locus classicus is Deuteronomy 28). But this does not {16} in fact result in military triumph. This failure works itself out in two related ways. First, the history of the Israelites is portrayed in the Old Testament (especially in Kings and Chronicles) as a recurring cycle in which the Israelites renege on their end of the bargain by worshipping the pagan gods of their neighbors and God, in retaliation, withdraws his support, causing them to suffer military defeat at the hands of their enemies. The Israelites would then repent, God would restore his favor, and the pattern would repeat again and again. Second, the prophets, who claimed to be speaking for God, came forth with various visions and dreams in which they described (often in rather obscure “mystical” language) the ultimate humiliation of the Lord’s (and the Israelites’) enemies and the triumph of his chosen people. The one text from early Christianity written in this tradition that made it into the canon of the New Testament is the book of Apocalypse, whose author calls himself John. This author was identified in antiquity with the evangelist John, though the identification was disputed even then and is unlikely to be correct.17 In any case, the bizarre imagery of the book, with all its beasts and swords and its gripping (if surreal) depiction of a final war between the forces of good and evil, had a strong influence on the mystically inclined throughout the Middle Ages.18 The vision in Apocalypse of the struggle between the pious and the wicked could be associated with various statements of Jesus in the Gospels, which express hostility towards the wealthy (e.g., Matthew 19:23–24, Mark 10:23–25, Luke 18:24–25) and indicate an eventual inversion of the social order when people will be judged according to their religious merits (Matthew 19:30, Mark 10:31, Luke 13:30).
Though the book of Apocalypse stands on its own as a Christian work, its imagery calls to mind works of the Old Testament which either inspired that book or were written under the inspiration of the same models, and the radicals informed their interpretation of Apocalypse with such texts as {17} Daniel 7, Ezekiel 9, and 2 Esdras 4. These violent images of a relentless and savage God (the Father) who protects his chosen people against their (and his) far more numerous (and wicked) foes had recently inspired Thomas Müntzer in his support of peasant attacks on the social order back in the Peasants’ War, and the same spirit infused the radicals of Münster.
As good reformers who wished to return the church to the pristine state of the apostolic age, the radicals naturally found much inspiration in both the Old and the New Testaments. To some extent, this is a variant on the point about accepting as valid only those practices that could be justified in the text of the Bible. In this case, however, the point is not to vet current practice against the apparent usage of the Bible, but to attempt to recreate the state of affairs that the Reformers thought was laid out in the text. Acts 4 seemed to validate direct inspiration of men through the Holy Spirit; verses 32 through 37 were taken to mean that the followers of Christ should share their goods communally, and the radicals’ confiscation of the property of the faithful in Münster was one of the more shocking events to sixteenth-century (and later) sensibilities.19
Inspiration based on the New Testament was not out of the ordinary at a time when the cry ad fontes led to various efforts to recapture the spirit of the primitive church (however interpreted). What is rather distinctive in the thought of the Münster radicals is the extent to which their emphasis on the apocalypse caused them to dwell upon the Old Testament. This is perfectly understandable given that the book of Apocalypse overtly harkens back to the Old Testament by referring to the pious as being raised from the twelve tribes of Israel (7:4–8) and describes the city that will descend from heaven after the final triumph over the godless as the New Jerusalem (21:2). The fact that Apocalypse was written after the model of various prophetic visions from the Old Testament contributed to a natural inclination to interpret the events it predicted in terms of the Old Testament story of the Israelites.
The radicals seem to have taken to its logical conclusion both the association of the pious in Apocalypse with the Israelites and their assumption {18} 20 The cathedral yard was named Mt. Zion (cf. Apocalypse 14:1). John of Leiden gave out names for newborns on the basis of the nomenclature of the Old Testament patriarchs (fol. 110r). The use of music and banners in the military was justified by the practice of the Israelites (fol. 35v). The “dukes” chosen by the Anabaptists towards the end of the siege were overtly equated with the leaders of the twelve tribes of Israel who led the Israelites to triumph in the book of Judges (fol. 134r).
There was one more element of biblical imitation that undoubtedly went the furthest in branding the radicals as unredeemed perverts in the eyes of their contemporaries, and this was polygamy.21 The introduction of the practice may have been motivated by the circumstance that there were far more women than men in the besieged city, and in contemporary thought a woman needed a man to look after her. In any case, the radicals justified it by the example of the Old Testament patriarchs (fol. 38v).
To understand the geographical setting of the events that took place in Münster, it is necessary to erase the borders of the modern (nation-) states of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxemburg, and Germany. All of these territories were regions within the Holy Roman Empire, and while the circumstances that would eventually lead to their establishment as autonomous states already existed at the time of the events in Münster, {19} they were certainly not autonomous at the time. First, all of these were areas in which Germanic dialectics were spoken (with the exception of French-speaking Wallonia at the south of Flanders, in modern Belgium). The low-lying territory along the North Sea and (very roughly speaking) to the west of the rivers Rhine and Ems may be neutrally described as the Low Countries.22 This region achieved some sort of conceptual unity in the fifteenth century when the dukes of Burgundy (a branch of the French royal family) acquired control over various counties and duchies. In 1477, the rash Duke Charles the Bold was killed in battle, leaving his many territories to his daughter Mary. Most of the Burgundian territory in what is now eastern France was lost in war, but Mary’s husband Maximilian, the son and heir of the Habsburg Holy Roman Emperor Frederick III, retained control of the Burgundian holdings in the Low Countries. Though these territories remained distinct, there had been attempts to impose centralized oversight of the various territories under the rule of the dukes of Burgundy, and this inchoate unity was strengthened when the area remained loyal to Mary. In 1515, Maximilian’s grandson Charles (soon to become the Holy Roman Emperor) entered his majority in the Low Countries. Upon Charles’s abdication in 1555, his Low Country territories passed to his son Philip II of Spain. The effects of the Reformation were strong in the north and the territories, faced with a Catholic ruler, revolted and established a Calvinist republic in 1588. The south meanwhile remained under Habsburg control (first Spanish, then Austrian) until 1794. Thus, the historical accident of Habsburg control of the southern area led to the establishment of a separate identity for that region. If not for that fact, these areas speaking a dialectical variety of German might today simply be regions of a German state without a distinct literary language of their own.
But at the time of the Anabaptist kingdom, all of these developments lay in the distant future. Gresbeck’s world consisted mainly of the northwest of modern-day Germany. The broader area is known as Westphalia, a subdivision of the old dukedom of Lower Saxony (so called to distinguish it {20} from the later kingdom of Saxony to the southwest), and one region of this was the Münsterland, whose major city was Münster and which was under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Münster.
Use of the term “German language” causes difficulties in understanding the linguistic situation in the region around Münster in the sixteenth century. The ancient West Germanic language group consisted of a number of related dialects spoken in central and northern Europe. Eventually, a form of southern (High) German became the accepted literary language of all Germany, and all the other varieties were relegated to the status of socially inferior dialects, which are now mostly in the lamentable process of dying out. In the early sixteenth century, High German was beginning to gain its predominant position; this was the dialect of eastern central Germany, and had already begun to gain wide currency elsewhere in German-speaking territory, when Luther’s use of it for his influential biblical translations and for his other writings gave it additional prestige in the Protestant north. But there was still a lively literary form of northern German known as Low German (Niederdeutsch or Plattdeutsch), which was spoken (and written) all along the North Sea and the Baltic from the area of the northern Low Countries as far to the east as the German towns of Livonia, where Melchior Hofman began his preaching. Already at this time, written Low German began to adopt High German forms, and by the middle of the seventeenth century, it had been supplanted by High German as the language of the educated elite. Gresbeck’s own language (Low German) gives clear evidence of High German influence.23 One of the dialects of this area was Westphalian, the form of German used in the Münsterland. The modern Dutch language is the descendant of Old Low Franconian (Franconian is the name for the dialects of central Germany). This Franconian dialect intruded to the northwest into the Low Countries, and displaced Frisian (a variety of Low German). Although Dutch had a slightly different origin from the Low German dialect of Westphalia, the Low Franconian language adopted certain characteristics of Low German, and in any case, unlike the other Franconian dialects, it did not participate in the so-called second (or High) German consonant shift, which is the primary distinction between the Low and the High German dialects.
{21} While there were perceptible differences between the Westphalian dialect of Münster and the language of the Low Countries directly to the east, these were comparatively minor, and it is anachronistic to think that the present-day border between Germany and the Netherlands had any significance in the early sixteenth century. To people of the time, there would have been no absolute distinction between “German” speakers in the Münsterland and “Dutch” speakers to the immediate west. Nonetheless, regional loyalties and rivalries did exist, and Gresbeck clearly had a bad attitude about Hollanders (fol. 93r). The future histories of the Netherlands and Belgium lay far in the future, and the notion of the Dutch language as an independent language would have been meaningless.24 This is not to say that the Low Countries did not have certain peculiarities of their own. They were culturally far more subject to French influence, and the Sacramentarian tendencies of the 1520s were to some extent at least the result of various pietistic movements that were characteristic of the fifteenth century. Nonetheless, in the early sixteenth century, the various territories that constituted the Habsburg possessions in the Low Countries were simply another part of the empire, and this very similarity would contribute to the ease with which the Melchiorite movement of the Low Countries was so readily received in neighboring Münster.
The events of Münster played themselves out against the background of the political decentralization of the Holy Roman Empire. In the budding nation-states of England and France and in the kingdoms of the Spanish peninsula, the monarchy had certainly suffered setbacks along the way, but by the early sixteenth century, the central authority had established its control over the anarchic forces of local feudal territories. In Germany, the prolonged struggle of the house of Hohenstaufen against the papacy had {22} resulted not simply in the destruction of the dynasty but also in the collapse of central control over the vast number of territories—large and small, hereditary and ecclesiastical—into which the empire was divided. These local authorities assumed responsibility for such government as was exercised, and the emperor had no direct control except to the extent that he himself was a territorial magnate (Charles V held the most expansive collection of territories within the empire). Although the emperor could issue edicts on his own and preside over the imperial diet (the assembly of the princes and cities who were directly subordinate to him) and pass laws through it, he had no ability to enforce such laws without the cooperation of the local powers. It was this situation that first allowed the Lutherans to establish themselves in various territories, and it also contributed to the unique circumstances that allowed the Melchiorite takeover of Münster.
One organ for local cooperation consisted of the imperial circles (Reichskreisen) into which the empire was divided in 1500. Soon numbering ten, these units were more or less contiguous blocks of local authorities directly subject to the empire. Among other administrative functions, the circles, which met in a local assembly known as a Landtag, were responsible for maintaining public order within their territory, and the prince-bishop of Münster, whose lands fell within the Upper-Rhenish/Westphalian circle, would eventually turn to the other members of the circle for assistance in suppressing the Anabaptist takeover of his see.
One of the peculiarities of Germany was the large number of prelates who controlled extensive territories. In the distant past, emperors had exercised power through bishops and other prelates appointed by them, and this practice had led to the prolonged Investiture Conflict in which the emperors opposed the papal claim to the exclusive right to bestow episcopal positions. The emperors had long since lost control of episcopal appointments, and in the case of Münster, the chapter (a college of clerics) of the cathedral had the right to appoint the new bishop, who then had to secure confirmation from the pope (at a high price, which had to be paid by his temporal subjects). The cathedral chapter (the members of the chapters are known as canons; the vernacular term in Münster was Domherren or “cathedral lords”) was controlled by members of the local nobility, and they would elect someone of the high noble rank as the bishop, who was known as a prince-bishop by virtue of his control over both secular and ecclesiastical jurisdiction. Thus, not only was the central ecclesiastical administration controlled by noblemen, but the prince-bishop himself did not even have {23} to be a priest. Francis of Waldeck did not get around to being consecrated as a priest until 1543, eleven years after his election by the cathedral chapter.
Although the story of the Anabaptist radicals centers around the city of Münster, from the point of view of the prince-bishop, it involved his entire diocese. The wealth and fortifications of the city allowed it to stand up to the prince-bishop in a way that was not feasible for the smaller towns, but the latter were affected by the religious turmoil of the times and did show a certain inclination to reform (though this was suppressed without too much difficulty). In any case, the bishop in his capacity as secular ruler had to deal with the estates of the diocese, that is, with those entities who had traditional claims to direct interaction with their overlord—apart from the diocesan capital in Münster and the other recognized towns, the nobility of the diocese acted as a corporate body in relation to the prince-bishop—and these groups met as separate estates in the diet (assembly) of the diocese. For the most part, the nobility (who had a vested interest in the traditional order through their control of the cathedral chapter) supported the prince-bishop in his efforts to bring the city to heel.
Like the population of any late medieval and early modern city, the residents of Münster were divided into a number of distinct status groups, mostly hereditary.25 At the top were the knights of the bishopric.26 Their main residences were on their rural estates, but they also had elaborate houses in the bishopric’s main city. The knights were exempt from the city’s jurisdiction.
The residents of the city who held political rights were divided into two subgroups.27 At the top were the patricians.28 These men belonged to families that had been wealthy in the past and had established a hereditary claim to political leadership of the city. Over time, however, the patricians wished to become assimilated to the knighthood and so withdrew from participation in the city government. Most patricians would side with the {24} prince-bishop after the Anabaptist takeover of the city, but some, like Knipperdolling and Gerard Kibbenbrock, were themselves adherents of Anabaptism and would become prominent leaders in the new regime (much to Gresbeck’s retrospective outrage).
The main body of citizens of the city was the burghers (High German Bürger). This group consisted of all the residents of the city who had the right to vote in municipal elections but didn’t belong to a patrician family. This status wasn’t exactly hereditary, but in practice the present burghers were the children of past ones. This group was divided into two. Certain particularly wealthy families of non-patrician status routinely held office on the city council.29 These families were distinguished from the general mass of the citizenry, to which Gresbeck belonged. Even if he was not of a prominent family, Gresbeck is obviously proud of his status as a burgher, referring to himself throughout his third-person account of his flight from the city and participation in its capture as “de borger” and specifying his status as a burgher in his signature at the end of both his letter to his previous employers (appendix, document 2) and his narrative of the Anabaptist regime (fol. 156v).
In addition to these citizen residents, the city was home to a number of people excluded from participation in its government. These were mostly serfs (people who were in the possession, after a fashion, of rural landowners) and freemen (people who were of serf origin but whose ancestors had acquired a certain independence from their lords without becoming entirely free).30 There would no doubt have also been immigrants of varying wealth but mostly of lowly status who came to the city from other places. Gresbeck makes no reference to such people as such, but presumably his phrases like “the poor people” (“dat arme voelck,” “de armen lude”) largely encompasses such people at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy who were carried along by the events around them. (See also the discussion of Gresbeck’s attitude towards the “simple” people in section 5.1.)
The city’s electoral system and form of government do not enter into the narrative except to the extent that the Anabaptists won the election of 1534 and then promptly abolished the old system. Still, it may be useful to give a brief overview of the system that everyone in the city would have been familiar {25} with.31 The city was divided into six electoral wards, which were the same as the city’s regular parishes.32 The voters of each district voted for electors who would do the actual voting for the members of the city council.33 Four parishes (St. Lambert’s, St. Ludger’s, St. Martin’s, St. Tilgen’s/Giles’s) chose two electors each, and two (The Jews’ Field/St. Servatius’s and the Parish-Across-the-Water/Our Dear Lady’s) had one each, for a total of ten. These ten electors then chose the twenty-four members of the city council. The elections took place on the first Monday in Lent. Once elected, the council members distributed the various offices of municipal government among themselves. The most important of these were the two burgher masters (the rest exercised various administrative and judicial functions).
There were two further elements in the deliberations of the council. First, there were two aldermen who were elected to represent the entire citizenry.34 Next, the heads of the sixteen guilds (the professional organizations for the important crafts of the city) could also give their views to the council.35 Because of their ability to give voice to the immediate concerns of important segments of the city’s population (the skilled workers and the general populace), the guild masters and aldermen could have a decisive influence on the council’s decisions.
One aspect of public life of sixteenth-century Germany that may seem puzzling is the right of the local ruler to raise troops on his own authority. By virtue of this authority, the prince-bishop of Münster would gather an army against the rebels in the city. The later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries saw a swift development in military organization, as the spread of small firearms led to semiprofessional infantry armies (in place of the knighthood and ad hoc feudal levies of the previous period).36 The {26} extensive use of mercenaries began when the highly effective infantrymen of Switzerland began selling their services in the later fifteenth century; soon similar troops were raised in Germany, and these were known as Landsknechte (termed simply milites, or “soldiers,” by Kerssenbrock).37 These freebooting soldiers were hired by private contractors (who also served as their colonels) to fight for a particular political authority. The prince-bishop incurred huge expenses maintaining his army (the spiraling costs of military activity proved to be an ongoing headache for earlier modern rulers), and he was soon forced to seek the financial support of neighboring princes, who thereby gained control over the operation against the city.38
The field tactics of such armies required that the soldiers be trained in field maneuvers. At first, the Anabaptists of Münster showed hostility to this sort of training and organization, but practical realities soon forced them to give way to regular military usage in those areas (fol. 35v). Though Gresbeck writes often of military training in the city, as things turned out, there was to be little opportunity to practice maneuvering in open formation since the Anabaptists remained hemmed in, in the city.
A notable development in military technology during the late fifteenth and early sixteen centuries was increasing prominence taken by firearms. By the end of the fifteenth century, armies tended to have equal numbers of pikemen (soldiers armed with a long pole known as a pike and fitted at the end with a sharp metal tip) and arquebusiers (soldiers armed with a somewhat cumbersome handheld firearm known as an arquebus).
For centuries, the use of artillery had been restricted to sieges. It was only in the fifteenth century that armies began to frequently use mobile field artillery, and it was only in the early sixteenth century that the wide varieties of artillery began to be regularized. This regularization increased the efficiency of the guns, since previously each gun had to have its own peculiar size of ammunition. Although Gresbeck seems to be quite clear {27} about the different varieties of guns, these cannot be precisely determined in terms of length or caliber; only the general nature of the guns can be given.39 Whereas two of the Low German terms directly correspond to the translations “falconet” and “serpentine,” the word “slange” is a general term for “gun,” but here it almost certainly corresponds to the English term “culverin.” Though other terms were used, among the various varieties of mobile artillery, culverins were the largest (firing shot of perhaps twelve pounds up to just under twenty pounds), falcons were in the middle range, and the smallest major pieces were falconets (shot in the range of three to five pounds). The culverins were commonly divided into a larger regular version and a somewhat smaller variety called “demi.” As Gresbeck indicates, there were often oversized culverins of unusually large size, which he calls a “field gun [slange].” Seemingly, Gresbeck is here using “falconet” for the variety often called “falcon,” and “demi-falconet” for “falcon.” At any rate, it would seem that “demi-falconet” is not a commonly used term. As for “serpentine,” this was the term for the smallest sort of artillery (rather than infantryman’s firearm), which was a breech-loading piece made of iron (as opposed to the bronze used for casting larger pieces); as a breechloader, it is also known in English as a “chamber cannon.”
As it turned out, the Anabaptists’ use of their new field army was rather limited. In the early days of their regime, they would march out on raids and would sometimes exchange volleys (schuetgefar or “exchange of fire”) with the besiegers, but these raids were soon given up. At the start of the siege, the prince-bishop’s troops set up a loose system of fortifications outside the city. Undoubtedly, the prince-bishop hardly expected that the Anabaptists in the city would be able to hold out for long against a professional army. But hold out they did, and the besiegers responded by trying, in turn, two methods of taking a heavily defended position: the direct assault on the city walls, and the slow starvation of the city.40
The direct method of attempting to end a siege was an assault on the walls. The besiegers launched two assaults against the city’s walls, and both failed. Eighty years earlier, the mighty walls of Constantinople had {28} been breached by the huge artillery train of the Ottoman emperor, but in fact, the use of artillery against fixed fortifications was still in its infancy, and the theoretical study of how to defend and defeat fixed fortifications would continue from the late fifteenth century until the eighteenth century. The city of Münster had very elaborate fortifications (fols. 127v–128r), which included walls, artillery placements, and an elaborate moat system designed to deny the besiegers access to the walls.41 The two stormings of the walls involved the use of ladders to try and climb over the walls, but the defenders were able to defeat these efforts. The Anabaptists were apparently clever in their use and improvement of the city’s fortifications. Even their religiously motivated destruction of the city’s churches was tempered by the need to maintain suitable platforms for their artillery (fol. 112r). The besiegers too used their artillery against the city’s fortifications, but even the prolonged bombardment carried out for several days before the second assault failed to make much of a dent (as it were) in the city’s defenses (fol. 52r), and even this damage was soon made good by the defenders (fol. 53r).
Another method of taking a fortified position was through starvation. After failing to take the city by storm, the besieging armies established a tight siege, with a full system of trenches dug around the city and elaborate blockhouses for the stationing of the besieging troops. This costly effort was intended to cut off the city’s communications with the outside world and to eventually starve out the defenders. These siegeworks were built in the fall of 1534, and by the spring of 1535 the general population in Münster was starving (though not the Anabaptist leadership, much to Gresbeck’s retrospective outrage). Yet, there was no particular sign that the Anabaptists were ready to surrender when Gresbeck and Little Hans of Longstreet escaped from the city in late May and separately offered similar plans to take the city by subterfuge, taking advantage of the slackened diligence of the defenders to sneak a force into the city at night. No doubt one reason why the besiegers were so keen to implement this plan was the desire to end the costs of the prolonged siege through a coup de main. And so the city fell.
Apart from two letters written right after the capture of the city that discuss Henry Gresbeck’s role in that capture (appendix, documents 3 and 4), our knowledge of Gresbeck’s life mostly derives from two texts, both written by the man himself.42 The first is a letter (appendix, document 2) that he tried to smuggle out of the city towards the end of the siege to his old patrons and employers, a pair of local squires and their mother. The other source is his account of the Anabaptist regime. These two sources provide rather limited information about Gresbeck’s life. Gresbeck was a “young man” at the time of the city’s capture (fols. 142v–143r). While there is no way to tell exactly what this means, it is hard to see how he could have been much older than twenty-five, which would place his birth about 1510 to 1515. He had at some time served for an unknown period of time as a landsknecht (fol. 142v), and had after that gone on to acquire the profession of cabinetmaker (fol. 156v). The time necessary for this seems to put him in the upper range of possible age. He was a burgher of the city of Münster (fol. 156v), though according to his letter he was employed outside the city at the time of the Anabaptist takeover in February 1534, being in the employ of two local squires. He claims in the letter that he went to the city at that time to look after his mother’s property, which suggests that at the time his father was dead. He also indicates that he got married in the besieged city. His mother died in 1542, leaving him her house because of his merit in the city’s capture. Perhaps, this last detail indicates that he had siblings whose exclusion from the inheritance had to be justified. In any event, at the time he lived in the neighboring bishop’s see of Osnabrück.43 Nothing seems to be known of his later fate.
If Gresbeck served outside of the Münsterland, his parochialism gives no sign of it. While he mentions several small towns around Münster, he exhibits little knowledge of or interest in the broader world. Once he speaks rather vaguely of the wide world that might be infected by the spread of Anabaptism as the “High or Low Countries” (fol. 95r), which signifies upper and lower Germany. He refers to the prospect of help coming from {30} Holland (fol. 75r), and knows some details about an abortive uprising there (fol. 86r). When indicating the origins of the various groups of people who occupied the monasteries in Münster, he names a number of specific towns from the Münsterland, but lumps everyone else under the broad designation “foreign folk” (fol. 118r).44 For whatever reason, Gresbeck decided to latch onto the hated Hollanders and Frisians as the fanatical backbone of the Anabaptists in Münster, but paid little heed to the geographic origins of the other Anabaptists who came to Münster.
It would appear that Gresbeck is less than forthright about his own involvement with the Anabaptist regime. Despite being so willing to speak of his departure from the city and his role in the capture, Gresbeck says nothing about his activities during the first fifteen months. There is reason to conclude that Gresbeck was accepted as a reputable member of the Anabaptist community. He was apparently present (fol. 71v) at the meeting when the missionaries to other cities were chosen in October 1534, and he held a military position right to the end. He speaks in detail of one anecdote that took place at all the gates of the city by describing what happened at the gate where we know he was assigned, and then he says briefly that the same went on elsewhere (fol. 136r).45 Clearly, he was considered a soldier like any other. He also mentions that once his departure was noted in the city while he was still milling around outside, his friends from the city called to him to return (fol. 142v). That’s hardly how they would have treated someone they didn’t consider one of their own. Furthermore, given his willingness to talk about his role at the end of the siege, his complete silence about any early activities of his own has to raise the suspicion that whatever he had done before would not look creditable to the prince-bishop. Presumably, he had supported the Anabaptist regime during the months before his escape and was considered a member in good standing of the Anabaptist community until his flight from the city.
The last portion of his account details his flight from the city and his role in its capture (fols. 141v–151r), so there’s no need to recount this portion of his life here. In the coda of the work, Gresbeck contrasts the lack {31} of greed as a motive on his own part with Little Hans’s purely mercenary motivation in proposing a plan for the city’s capture, noting that in fact Gresbeck’s own property had been confiscated along with that of other Anabaptists (and an attempt to regain this property may well have been responsible for the writing of the work). Nothing more is known of Gresbeck’s life.
The likelihood that Gresbeck wrote in his own clear book hand (see section 6 of the introduction) both the letter and the clean copy of the account indicates that he had had a certain amount of formal learning. Certainly, the very composition of the work (whatever its flaws) is indicative of a fertile mind. On the other hand, Gresbeck frequently mangles the spelling of Latinate words that appear in the account, which suggests that his education was merely a practical one in the vernacular.46
Gresbeck does give some clues as to his earlier religious views. One element of the Anabaptist community that seems to have particularly struck his fancy was the abolition of money and the attempt to establish an apostolic community of property on the basis of the Acts of the Apostles. In retrospect, Gresbeck is rather bitter about this (fols. 21v, 23v, 48v, 117r, 124v, 138r, 154r). He speaks positively of the idea in the abstract (fol. 22v), but constantly disparages the fact that eventually the general populace was reduced to starvation, while the king and his court continued to live in luxury (fols. 57r, 96v, 126v, 137r, 139v). He pointedly notes how people couldn’t get back the provisions and money they had voluntarily surrendered for the common good (fols. 45r, 125r). Of course, one can’t say for sure what inspired him at the start, but his stance in the later account suggests that he had been positively impressed by the notion of social equality of Christians.
The other aspect of the Anabaptist regime that he discusses at length is polygamy. This he is uniformly hostile to, ascribing it to lust (fols. 39r, 47v) and comparing it to “living like cats and dogs” (fol. 46v). Since it was instituted only in the late summer of 1534, long after Gresbeck had been stuck in the city, it couldn’t have had any influence on his initial decision to stay. {32} Certainly, in his letter he states that he acquired a single wife in Münster, and there’s no evidence that he took on a second one. To some extent, this issue has to be left undecided, since after the downfall of the Anabaptists, he could hardly have said anything except how bad polygamy was.
Gresbeck expresses negative views about various other notable aspects of the Anabaptists and their practices. He’s rather derisive about the habit of the Anabaptists to “bear witness” loudly and to invoke their God as “the Father” (de Vader) (fols. 45v, 52v–53r, 65v, 87r, 114r, 117v). He likewise has little regard for the prophesying and divine inspiration that is such a notable element of the Anabaptists’ religious experience (fols. 13v–14r, 15v–16r, 20r, 66v, 73r, 99v–100r), overtly accusing the prophet Henricus Graes of lying about his purported revelations (61r–61v) and derisively parodying the “baptizer’s spirit” that came upon Anabaptist leadership (fols. 26r, 66v, 73r, 99v) as a “fool’s spirit” (fol. 65v). Given the failure of so many of their prophecies to come to fruition, such retrospective disparagement is hardly unexpected. Gresbeck also speaks unfavorably of the Anabaptist destruction of art and architecture, which he describes at length (fols. 111r–114v). And of course he mentions the fact that people were compelled to submit to adult baptism or pay the consequences (fols. 11v–12v). He says nothing about his own baptism, but given his apparent good standing among the Anabaptists down to the time of his flight, it’s hard to see how he could not have undergone rebaptism.
All those elements are very public manifestations of the Anabaptist regime that could hardly have failed to impress someone before whose eyes they had taken place. On the other hand, he has a list of “articles” in which he attempts to lay out the Anabaptists’ beliefs (fols. 115r–117r). This is a confused mixture of actual beliefs and of negative characterization of their behavior by a hostile observer. At the end, he ingenuously remarks that there were a number of other beliefs, but he could not remember them. Seemingly, abstract theological doctrines were not an issue of great concern to him.
One is left with the impression that Gresbeck was an enthusiastic supporter of the idea that a community of socially and economically equal Christians was to be established in Münster. In his letter to his old employers (appendix, document 2), he claims that his sole concern was to protect property, but the letter pointedly asks them to forgive him if he had angered them. Clearly, he needed to apologize for his presence in the city, and so could not have admitted to having favored the most prominent aspect of the Anabaptists’ religious deviance.
There is no introduction or dedication to the work. It launches directly into a general discussion of the background of the narrative, which pretty much begins with the Anabaptist takeover in February 1534. Conceivably, the overall conception and purpose of the work were explained in a cover letter that accompanied it when it was presented to its recipient. But there is one indication within the text of whom it was meant for. At the end of one paragraph (fol. 34v), appear the words “myen genedege her van moenſter” (my gracious lord of Münster). In his 1853 edition of Gresbeck’s work, Cornelius didn’t know what to make of the words and omitted them as an error. But presumably they’re a vocative. In this case, Gresbeck was addressing himself to the prince-bishop, to whom the work must have been dedicated.
Why did Gresbeck do this? To answer this question, we have to consider the last quarter or so of the work, which treats his flight from the city and the aftermath of his capture. Down to his description of his flight from the city, Gresbeck has not written a word in the work about himself, and he tells us nothing about the planning that led him to escape the city. All he tells us is that one night in the late spring of 1534, desperation in the starving city led him to try and sneak out with four companions whom he didn’t particularly trust. Since the fall of 1534, the city had been cut off from the outside world by a continuous circuit of trenches, and the men had to make their way through these trenches without being caught and executed. Milling around tentatively in the darkness, Gresbeck and one other man set off on their own, and towards dawn, after losing sight of the other man, Gresbeck surrendered to some troops. They took pity on him because of his youth—they normally shot all their male captives to death—and he asked them to take him to their captain, as he had important information. What he had was a plan for the capture of the city.
Meanwhile, one of his other companions, a man named Little Hans of Longstreet, managed to make good his escape through the trenches when the drumming at the changing of the guard created a commotion. This man was a renegade from the besieging army (fol. 141v) who had defected to the Anabaptists. Eventually, he regretted this decision, and had to avoid falling directly into the hands of the besieging army, since he would be executed as a traitor (fol. 144r). Instead, he hurried off to the town of Hamm, where a retired old commander of his resided. This commander {34} then asked for a safe conduct for Little Hans from the prince-bishop. This was eventually granted, because Little Hans also had a plan for capturing the city. Gresbeck and Little Hans were soon put together to sort out the details. While Little Hans actually led the assault on the city, Gresbeck was left on the outside during the attack, because he was still viewed with some suspicion as an Anabaptist (though Gresbeck tries to fudge this). While Little Hans would be richly rewarded for his role in the city’s capture, Gresbeck not only received nothing for his contribution to the capture but also suffered the confiscation of his own property (as did all of the rebels).47
To understand the varying treatment of the two men, one has to take into account the command structure of the besieging army. In the late summer of 1534, after the second failure to capture the city by storm, the prince-bishop basically ran out of money. He turned with hat in hand to neighboring princes, who agreed to foot the bill but took over command of the army, putting Count Wirich of Falkenstein in charge.48 This was the man to whom Gresbeck eventually laid out his version of the plan for the city’s capture. Yet, all the subsequent credit for the plan went to Little Hans of Longstreet. For whatever reason, the bishop gave no recognition to Gresbeck, who is entirely unmentioned in any of the sixteenth-century histories of the Anabaptist kingdom. The supposition is close at hand that the bishop included Gresbeck in the resentment he felt against those who had taken over the siege of his city. Presumably, Gresbeck was associated in the prince-bishop’s eyes with the people who had taken his army from him, and he preferred to give sole credit for the plan to the man associated with himself. Hence, the fundamental purpose of Gresbeck’s account could well have been to gain credit from the prince-bishop for his role in the city’s capture and perhaps also secure the return of his confiscated property.
There is no overt indication of when Gresbeck wrote his account. The account ends with a few events that took place in the immediate aftermath of the city’s capture (fols. 154v–156r). He doesn’t refer directly to the execution in January 1536 of John of Leiden, Knipperdolling, and Krechting, but he does allude (fol. 145r) to the fact that Krechting’s body would hang alongside those of the other two, in cages suspended from the tower of St. {35} Lambert’s parish church.49 The work must have been composed at some later date. There’s no way to be more specific, but if Gresbeck’s purpose were to help get his property restored to him, one would imagine that the work was written sooner rather than later.50
There is no indication that Gresbeck consulted any written material in composing his work. Furthermore, he uses the phrase “not retained in memory” four times in relation to names and concepts he can’t recall (Anabaptist preachers, fol. 3r; collaborating ex-burgher masters, fol. 3r; “articles” of the Anabaptists, fol. 117r; names of collaborating burghers, fol. 120r). Clearly, he did not ask anybody to help out with even such a rudimentary fact as the names of prominent men who cooperated with the Anabaptists.51 It is also noteworthy that he apparently had forgotten the name of John Dusentschuer, referring to him generically as the “limping preacher” (fols. 62r–73r). Considering how prominent a role this man plays in the narrative, it’s remarkable that Gresbeck obviously has both forgotten the man’s name and done nothing to find it out. Note also the Lutheran clergyman whose efforts to undermine the Anabaptists are mentioned at some length (fol. 8r). Several times Gresbeck refers to him vaguely as the “Hessian,” presumably because he either never knew or had forgotten the man’s name.52 Perhaps he was a less important figure than Duesenschuer, but also a less controversial one in the aftermath of the city’s fall. Surely, Gresbeck would have had no trouble in finding somebody to tell him the man’s name if he’d had any outside informants. Gresbeck knows the name of two of the three “officiants” in a parody mass, but of the third he remarks that the man was Knipperdolling’s servant whose name was “unknown to {36} me” (fol. 105r). Apparently, Gresbeck had no recourse to make good this ignorance on his part.
Given the care for the task that seems to be implied by the effort to carry it out, it seems unlikely that sheer laziness or indifference was to blame for this procedure. Could it be that for whatever reason Gresbeck felt it best to keep the project secret until the work was ready for presentation to its intended recipient and so felt constrained from asking for anyone’s assistance, even with such a seemingly innocuous question as the name of the preacher? On the other hand, Gresbeck notes that virtually no male Anabaptists survived the fall of the city (fol. 127v), and so, since his account mostly relates to events he witnessed himself, perhaps he wasn’t in contact with anybody who would be in a position to give him any substantive help with such matters.53
The basic structure of Gresbeck’s account is chronological. That is, the overall course of the narrative is from the start to the beginning, but there is a tendency for specific stories of a thematic nature to be inserted into a certain stretch of the narrative without strict chronological ordering. For instance, the later permission for divorce is confusingly inserted into a discussion of the problems caused by the initial introduction of polygamy (fol. 79r–v), and the section on the Anabaptist reaction to the revelation of Henricus Graes’s betrayal (fol. 76r–76v) includes a number of tangential thoughts. First comes the taunting letter that Graes subsequently sent to the city (fol. 77r). Discussion of Rothman’s way of handling this letter leads to a notice about how Rothman similarly treated a letter sent by Landgrave Philip of Hesse, which in turn leads to a discussion of the theological issue referred to in the letter (fol. 77r–v). This sort of association caused a major failure in the chronology. When he discussed the failure, in the fall of 1534, of Rothman’s book Restitution to bring about efforts in the Netherlands to {37} relieve the siege, Gresbeck recalled an incident of the time when the king carried out an execution and said that people should do the same if relief didn’t arrive by Easter (fol. 78r). Gresbeck proceeds to discuss how the king dealt with this situation the subsequent spring (i.e., March 1535) when the relief did not in fact appear. The subsequent narrative is thrown off when he goes on to treat events that took place later in 1534 as if they took place after Easter.54 This failure was presumably caused by Gresbeck’s reliance on his own memory without any outside assistance.
The work is divided into distinct sections that generally cover a single topic. With one exception (the section on matrimony, starting at fol. 38v) there is no overt indication of the subject of these sections. Some consist of just a few sentences (e.g., the one about Knipperdolling’s arrest on fol. 3v or the one about new plans on fol. 134v), and a few can be quite long (e.g., the one about the special meal on fols. 104r–107r or the one about a day’s entertainment on fols. 87v–90v) but most cover a page or so.
Gresbeck’s sensibilities often seem to have a sort of cinematographic feel about them. Instead of analyzing a concept like the Anabaptists’ derision of traditional practices, he narrates one striking illustration of this (the parody mass described on fols. 104r–106v). He tends to show rather than tell.
Gresbeck is pretty much uniformly hostile to John of Leiden, whom he characterizes as a mercurial tyrant and who he says was possessed by a devil (fol. 100v, also fols. 43r, 65r, 73r; Knipperdolling also had a devil, fol. 99v; the “Father” to whom the Anabaptists so often appealed was also a devil, fol. 117v). One particularly remarkable aspect of his account is the drawn-out effort to shift the blame for the events in Münster to outside elements. As we have seen, he clearly refers to himself as a burgher of the city, and he repeatedly speaks of the evil effects of what he calls “the Hollanders and the Frisians (the criminals),” a phrase that is a constant refrain (fols. 2v, 23v, 29v, 47r, 48r, 52v, 67v, 81r, 118v, 119r, 122r; the epithet “criminal” is also used of the Anabaptists in general, fols. 86r, 107r, 114v, and of their leadership, {38} fols. 33v, 126v). Seemingly, he can’t refer to them without making their culpability for the criminal acts overt. He’s also very bitter about the cooperation of the local notable Bernard Knipperdolling with the outsiders. He notes at the beginning that the Anabaptist leadership consisted of Hollanders and Frisians, but among them there were also locals like the ex-burgher masters Knipperdolling and Gerard Kibbenbrock (fols. 2v–3r). At one point when the natives are close to rising against the king, he bitterly notes how Knipperdolling’s failure to rally the opposition meant its failure (fol. 140r). Furthermore, it was Knipperdolling, Kibbenbrock, and other burghers who supported the Anabaptist movement who were ultimately responsible for allowing the foreign elements to seize control of the city (fol. 153v; see also fol. 122r). Fundamentally, if Gresbeck’s immediate purpose was to gain credit for his role in the city’s capture and to avoid any association with its excesses, from a civic point of view, he wanted to exculpate the city’s population for the Anabaptist excesses by shifting responsibility to these outside elements.
While Gresbeck generally equates the foreign Hollanders and Frisians with the “real rebaptizers” (fols. 26v, 35r, 39r, 57r, 67r, 73v; cf. 48v),55 he also distinguishes the category of the “real baptizers” (fols. 14v, 23v, 24r, 35r, 87r, 99r, 117r, 122r) from those who were carried along by enthusiasm but were not really committed. Not only does the latter category encompass the burgers of Münster who were compelled by the Anabaptists, but also “foreigners” who abandoned their lives at home to follow the “false prophets,” much to their later regret (fols. 33v, 45v–46r).
Gresbeck devotes an entire section to the eloquence of Anabaptist preaching (fols. 45v–46r). Here he relates this eloquence to persuading foreigners to abandon their property and families and come to Münster, a decision that he says they would come to regret. Presumably, this power of persuasion also applies to the adherence of local burghers to Anabaptism, though he does not make this connection himself. Though he generally tries to contrast the city and its residents in the abstract from the Anabaptism (that is, it is imposed on the city), he nonetheless notes that there was a substantial local element that helped keep the Anabaptists in power (fol. 81r), and he even has a list of collaborators whose names he can remember (fols. 119r–120r), noting that these men were an integral {39} part of the king’s court and played a key role in keeping the population under control (fol. 120r).
In speaking of the Anabaptists in Münster, Gresbeck makes a recurrent distinction between the “simple people” who “knew no better” because they did not have the mental capacity to perceive how misguided the “real” Anabaptists and their teaching were (fols. 60r, 75r, 95r, 99r) on the one hand, and those on the other who “knew better” but were unable to say anything because of the intimidation imposed on them by the real Anabaptists through their use of violence. A recurrent theme is the extent to which the Anabaptists maintained their regime through force, in both a passive and an active sense. This force (Low German “dwang,” translated as “duress”) was used initially to intimidate the population into acquiescing in their domination (fol. 17r). The ongoing threat of such violence kept the population restrained from actively opposing the Anabaptists (fols. 22v, 25r, 25v, 119r, 120r, 130r, 133r, 134r, 145r), kept people from fleeing the city at the end of the siege (fol. 122v), and restrained people who felt reservations about the Anabaptist regime from speaking their minds (fols. 125v, 129v, 136v). This force also drove them to carry out actions that they otherwise wouldn’t have done, such as tear down churches (fol. 7v) and submit to polygamous marriage (fols. 46v, 50r). On this basis, Gresbeck distinguishes those who were “truly guilty” (as he characterizes John of Leiden and Knipperdolling) from those who got caught up in a situation that they had at first sought out or acquiesced in but would eventually come to bitterly regret (fols. 12v, 33v, 40v–41r), as well as those (such as himself?) who were simply caught up in circumstances not of their own making (fol. 46v). He makes a related distinction between simple people who weren’t in a position to know any better and those who did know better but were compelled to keep their misgivings to themselves (fols. 95r, 99v).
Gresbeck’s account is literally unique in that nobody else who had actually lived under the Anabaptist regime in Münster wrote an account. Kerssenbrock (and others) did write accounts on the basis of information that ultimately derives (in part) from those who were themselves eyewitnesses, but such information is of course at least secondhand. In any event, what Gresbeck says can, to some extent, be checked through comparison with the external sources. Certainly, two contemporary accounts of the capture {40} of the siege (see documents 3 and 4 in the appendix) amply attest to the accuracy of Gresbeck’s account of his role in the city’s capture. Hence, in this regard, Gresbeck stands vindicated in the face of Kerssenbrock’s version, which is completely unaware of Gresbeck and ascribes exclusive credit for the city’s capture to Little Hans of Longstreet.
For the earlier part of the story, Kerssenbrock and Gresbeck are in general agreement, though, as indicated in the notes, there are numerous discrepancies over details. In these matters, there’s no fixed procedure for resolving who is right. Kerssenbrock is of course writing at a much later date on the basis of earlier accounts, but those accounts may well have preserved an accurate record. Gresbeck, on the other hand, was writing within a year or so of city’s fall, but on the basis purely of his own memory without, it would seem, any external assistance. It should not be surprising if his memory at times failed him, especially in matters of detail and chronology.56
One point in favor of Gresbeck’s reliability is not so much what he does say as what he doesn’t. He chooses not to say anything about his activities before the fall of the city. As noted above, this presumably means that these activities would not have reflected well on him, so he thought it best to say nothing. And yet who could have gainsaid him if he undertook to portray himself in a favorable light? Few adult male Anabaptists survived the city’s fall, and they presumably would have had little opportunity or motive to contest Gresbeck if he had shown himself acting in some way hostile to the Anabaptist regime. And even if he considered such a presentation of himself potentially dangerous, what would have prevented him from talking about his own supposed mental reservations, including himself overtly among those who “knew better” (fol. 103v) but were forced to keep silent (fols. 125v, 129v, 136v) because of the Anabaptists’ intimidation? Yet, even under such circumstances, Gresbeck preferred to equivocate by simply remaining silent rather than fabricate a self-serving story that nobody would have been in a position to refute.
As a retrospective account that is clearly meant to please the sentiments of the Anabaptists’ enemies and that could hardly have failed to be {41} influenced by the disastrous outcome of the Anabaptist regime, Gresbeck’s version of the affairs of the city during this tumultuous period obviously cannot be taken at face value, particularly in terms of his evaluation of facts as opposed to the events themselves, and even those “facts” are clearly subject to the uncertainty of his ability to recall events that took place under stressful circumstances a year or two in the past. But he was just as obviously an intelligent man with keen powers of observation, and within the parameters of the reservations laid out, there’s no reason to consider his account to be anything but a mostly accurate presentation of his experiences.
As for his negative assessment of the Anabaptists and their leaders, this is a reflection of his disenchantment with a religious and social movement that presumably fired his imagination at the start, but soon developed a very dark aspect, and eventually resulted in death for many of its followers, ruination for Gresbeck’s beloved Münster, and personal catastrophe for himself. What we have is a guarded but sincere account written by a common but intelligent man who lived through very uncommon times.
Gresbeck’s work was first published by C. A. Cornelius in 1853 in an antiquarian collection of documents relating to the Anabaptist takeover of Münster. Cornelius based his text on two manuscripts, the first substantially more important than the second.57 The former was Handschrift 105 in the ducal library in Darmstadt, which is now housed with the same number in the Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Darmstadt.58 This manuscript was written in the 1560s for Eberhard Graf zu Solms und Herr zu Münzenberg, who was a descendant of one of the commanders of the besieging army. It retains the Low German of the original version, but with substantial deviations. It routinely changes the orthography of the text and also mostly incorporates the editorial changes made on the original manuscript (these are discussed below). The second manuscript Cornelius used is preserved in the Herzogische Bibliothek in Meiningen (now in the Thüringisches Staatsarchiv Meiningen) and was a conversion {42} of the text into High German (and likewise includes the editorial changes). For this reason, the Meiningen manuscript was used by Cornelius only to restore the text in passages where the Darmstadt manuscript was clearly defective.
In his preface, Cornelius mentions that after mostly completing his text on the basis of the two manuscripts already described, he found a better one in Cologne. Unable to consult it fully at the time, he states his intention to report at a later date on the relationship of the Cologne manuscript to the ones he used.59 As far as I know, he never fulfilled this promise. The text translated here is based on this third manuscript, which belongs to the City Archive (Stadt-Archiv) of Cologne. Pagination shows that the manuscript was originally conceived as a single text, and the coda at the end shows that the manuscript is complete.60 At an unknown date, the manuscript was bound tightly into a manuscript, and a new pagination was added. The Cologne manuscript is also the basis of the edition of Gresbeck’s Low German text that is a companion volume to the present one. The pagination from the original manuscript is included in both the translation and the Low German text to facilitate comparison between the two.
In March 2009, the building housing Cologne’s City Archive collapsed, seemingly as the result of improperly conducted excavations being carried out underneath it for a new subway tunnel. This disaster caused the old archives in which the Gresbeck manuscript was housed to be buried in rubble and perhaps damaged by water. The great majority of the archival material was rescued and freeze-dried to prevent further water damage, but the project of attempting to recover the material preserved in this state may take decades. At any rate, the state of the Gresbeck manuscript is unknown at this stage, and it’s impossible to know when, if ever, it will become available again for study.
Luckily, I secured a digital copy of the manuscript in 2007. Only after the collapse of the archive did I discover that three folios had been inadvertently omitted from this digitized copy. At that point, it was of {43} course impossible to have the overlooked pages digitized, but the error could be made good by a feeble microfilm that was taken of the manuscript around 1970. This microfilm copy is close to illegible, but with the use of Cornelius’s text and a familiarity with Gresbeck’s orthographic practices, it’s possible to make sense of the microfilm text to recover the manuscript’s text.
The Cologne manuscript may well be Gresbeck’s clean copy of his account, written in his own hand, to judge by a comparison of its handwriting with the handwriting in the letter Gresbeck sent out of besieged Münster in the spring of 1535 (appendix, document 2). That letter must have been written by Gresbeck himself, for the following reasons.
a. He tells at some length of the adverse consequences when someone in the city shared his intention to defect from the city with someone he considered his friend, and that person betrayed the plan to the king (fols. 123r–123v). This event most likely took place before Gresbeck sent the letter out of the city. It clearly impressed itself on his memory at the time, and under such circumstances he ought to have been very leery of sharing his plan for escape with anyone else.
b. The letter itself shows Gresbeck’s wariness by specifying that any response shouted back to him from outside the city was to be addressed to a pseudonym lest his identity be revealed.
c. Gresbeck was very circumspect in dealing with his companions in defecting from the city (fol. 141v).
Given these circumstances, one would imagine that he would be unlikely to entrust the task of writing the letter revealing his intentions to anybody else. And even if he did, the likelihood that such a person would survive the capture of the city and remain available to copy over Gresbeck’s account is remote. It is thus almost certain that Gresbeck wrote both the letter and the Cologne manuscript with his own hand.
The handwriting of the letter is somewhat tidier and squarer than that of the historical account, but perhaps the difference is due to the clearly different nib of the pen used for the letter and an attempt to write the comparatively short letter in as tidy a manner as possible, whereas the account, being much longer, was written in a somewhat more flowing and careless manner. In any event, the two documents share a number of orthographic {44} quirks (like dotting the letter “y” and using a symbol that resembles “66” for the vowel in the pronoun “ju”), though it is true that the two documents do diverge in some regards (for instance, the letter uses the letter form “w” in word-initial position, whereas the account regularly uses “v” for both the sounds /v/ and /w/). Perhaps Gresbeck tried to improve his spelling in preparation for writing down his account for presentation to the prince-bishop. In any event, the orthography of the two texts is very similar, and even if the Cologne manuscript was written by another person, that person was not only copying a draft written by Gresbeck but introduced into the text corrections that must have been composed by Gresbeck.
The Cologne manuscript has a number of corrections on it. A large number of these were written over by the original scribe (most likely Gresbeck himself) as he was copying the text over in this final version. Sometimes these edits take the form of marginal additions and changes to the text. At other times, a sentence was started, then words were struck out and the text continues with a variant version of the same sentence. In these instances, Gresbeck apparently decided to rewrite the text while he was copying it. There’s no way to tell when the marginal edits were made, though it’s perhaps more likely that they were made on a paragraph-by-paragraph basis rather than forming part of a complete revision made after the whole manuscript was written. For the most part, these corrections are simply additions for the sake of clarifying some perceived ambiguity in the text as written. At one point (marginal insertion at fol. 120r, line 21), a similar sort of correction is made by a noticeably different hand (presumably for some reason Gresbeck had someone else write in his own correction). This second hand is boxier and more angular than Gresbeck’s but still has a formal appearance.
In addition to these improvements made by the original scribe, there is a separate set of corrections made to the completed text by a subsequent editor or editors in the early modern period. These editorial corrections fall into two related but clearly distinct categories. First, a small number of notes are written in Latin in a clear, formal humanist hand; some of these comments pertain to content with some special interest to an ecclesiastic. They include a large heading about the destruction of the churches (top of fol. 111r), and a point where some comment had been made that seems to have related to the issue of the rebaptism of adults, but this was struck out heavily and can no longer be read (start of the new section {45} on fol. 47r).61 There are also a number of instances where a picture of a hand with extended index finger points to noteworthy text (often further specified with a line drawn along the margin). More frequently, however, this ecclesiastical commenter expresses his disapprobation of what he takes to be repetitiveness in Gresbeck’s account, this sentiment often being expressed in mordent terms. At times, large amounts of text are struck out on these grounds.62
The other early modern editor writes in German. He uses a shoddy, brown ink that’s clearly distinguishable from the still-black ink of the original text (and seemingly of the Latin comments). In addition, this editor’s corrections are distinguishable by his much sloppier and more cursive Gothic hand . This editor made certain orthographic changes (for example, Gresbeck’s frequent use of “v” for /v/ is frequently modified into “w” with the addition of a stroke at the start of the letter), but he was mostly concerned with the style of the text. He changes a lot of words, seemingly simply on the grounds of rejecting Gresbeck’s vocabulary (sometimes replacing a Low German word, like “warde,” with its High German equivalent, like “Wahrheit”), and he sometimes rewrites the text from a stylistic point of view. In particular, he couldn’t abide Gresbeck’s quirk of beginning a sentence with the odd phrase “so den lesten” (“eventually,” “in the end,” with the Low German preposition “tho” apparently confused with the adverb “so” and perhaps also the High German “zu”), which he very frequently strikes out, mostly replacing it with some other connective expression.
The stylistic concerns of the German editor seem to be rather similar to the views expressed by the Latin editor, and remarkably the German editor at one point actually replaces the German “vorrede” with the Latin term “aduocatus” (fol. 59v, line 22). It would certainly be easiest to assume that {46} the same man was responsible for both the Latin and the German comments, and simply used a sloppier hand when writing in the vernacular. It should be noted, however, that the excision indicated for fol. 165r, line 28, through fol. 156v, line 7, was made on top of text that had already been annotated with the addition of parentheses, and it would seem that the immediately following deletion of “so dem leſten” is also by a different hand. This suggests that the large excision was marked by a second reader, though it is also possible that a single man first went through the text, making corrections, and subsequently marked out large amounts of the text for excision.
In addition, there are instances where the original text has been struck out without being replaced. The most remarkable instances of these involve John of Leiden’s court. In Gresbeck’s long list of committed Anabaptists (fol. 119r–v), certain names have been struck out. This calls to mind the trouble that Kerssenbrock landed himself in when he related in his history of the Anabaptist events the roles of certain people whose important descendants objected to his attempt to preserve activities that the descendants would prefer to be forgotten (conflict over this matter was one of the factors that thwarted his efforts to get his work published in his own lifetime).63 In addition, a reference to Little Hans of Longstreet’s services with the king are struck out (fol. 94r–v), which perhaps suggests that this was done by someone associated with the prince-bishop, who wished to delete information that reflected poorly on Little Hans (though it should be noted that a later reference to his service with the king is left alone in fol. 147r). Whoever struck out the names and Little Hans’s role presumably had some specific motives in selecting the names to be excised from the account. On the whole, the names don’t appear as significant figures in Kerssenbrock’s account or in Kirchhoff’s list of known Anabaptists, and I leave for others the task of attempting to divine the reason for the excisions.
Gresbeck writes in a charmingly unaffected style that clearly reflects a spoken idiom rather than the more stilted syntax characteristic of literary German (and this difference may have contributed to the annoyance that the ecclesiastical editor clearly felt in reading the text). In rendering this into {47}English, I have tried to retain the colloquial feeling, which leads not only to the use of simple vocabulary but the occasional retention of constructions that are not, strictly speaking, logical in a written context, especially the use of fronted nominal subjects that are recapitulated with a pronoun.64
Names can cause a problem, as some individuals are variously known by High German, Low German, and Dutch forms of their names. Following the practice of my translation of Kerssenbrock’s history, I’ve routinely rendered given names in their English form (for instance, the “king” is known as “John” rather than “Jan” or even “Johann”). Apart from any other considerations, since all the names have English versions, this practice makes the characters seem less alien.
1. For a short (generally narrative) introduction to the events in Münster, see Klötzer, “Melchiorites and Münster.” For the general history of the city in the late medieval and early modern period, see Lutterbach, Der Weg in das Täuferreich. Arthur, Tailor-King, is an unreliable popularizing treatment. Due to disputes with the city council of Münster at the time, Kerssenbrock was unable to get his work published, and it remained in manuscript form until the Latin text was finally published in 1899, edited by Detmer on the basis of one particularly good manuscript. (I’ve been informed by Berndt Thier of the Stadtmuseum Münster that other good early witnesses [i.e., other versions] to the Kerssenbrock text have come to light, but the new textual information provided by them has not been published.) The only modern translation of Kerssenbrock’s work is my own: Kerssenbrock, Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness, ed. Mackay.
2. For a good general introduction to the state of the medieval church on the eve of the Reformation, see MacCulloch, Reformation, 3–52. For the medieval church in general, see Logan, History of the Church. See Duffy, Siege Warfare, for an extensive (if biased) discussion of the sorts of popular piety that the Reformers objected to (the treatment is, of course, of English practices and beliefs, but these wouldn’t have been greatly different from those in Germany).
3. For the classic treatment of the “radical” reformation, see Williams, Radical Reformation. For a more succinct treatment, see Goertz, “Radical Religiosity in the German Reformation,” 70–85. For a solid introduction to Luther’s life and thought, see Oberman, Luther.
4. Of course, the absence of any text after Mark 16:9 in the manuscript Sinaiticus (also called Aleph), the best witness to the ancient text of the New Testament, shows that this verse is a later addition to the text. No one in the sixteenth century knew this, and the English here is simply a translation of Luther’s rendering of the text.
5. The traditional explanation of the remark about the remission of sins in connection with baptism is that this refers to original sin. Even if one grants this theoretical possibility, the specification of repentance ought to exclude such an explanation.
6. For a full analysis of Hofman’s views (though a chronologically confusing biography), see Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman.
7. The figure of seven years was apparently reached by adding the forty-two months assigned to the two witnesses in Apocalypse 11:3 to the similar figure given to the Beast in 13:5.
8. For a discussion of Karlstadt’s influence on Hofman (plus an extensive treatment of Hofman in his own right), see Pater, Karlstadt as the Father, 173–253.
9. For the Sacramentarian setting in the Low Countries, see Williams, Radical Reformation, 528–35. The term “Sacramentarian” is in origin a hostile one used by Luther to denigrate the more radical reformers who refused to accept his comparatively conservative views about the Eucharist. It is nonetheless a convenient one (and it is hard to see what to use in its place); for the origin and modern usage of the word, see ibid., 85, 95–96.
10. Since Hofman predicted that the apocalyptic end of the world would take place in 1533, the rebaptism could wait until then. In any case, he justified his action by analogy with the two-year suspension of the rebuilding of the great temple in Jerusalem that is recorded in Ezra 4:24.
11. For Mathias’s usurpation of authority among the Melchiorites, see Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman, 333–39.
12. Strictly speaking, the two witnesses are not named in Apocalypse, but in popular medieval eschatology these two were identified as Old Testament figures Enoch and Elijah. For the sixteenth-century context in general, see Petersen, Preaching in the Last Days; for the broader context in medieval eschatology, see Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium, 145.
13. For a general discussion of the policies of the Münster regime, see Klötzer, Die Täuferschaft von Münster.
14. Folio numbers from the original Low German manuscript on which the present translation is based are given within the translation, placed in square brackets before the first word on the page, with the numeral indicating the sheet (folio) and “r” and “v” indicating the recto (front) and verso (back) of the sheet. For more on the pagination of the manuscript, see note 60 below.
15. See Kerssenbrock, Anabaptistici furoris, ed. Detmer, 872.
16. For a quick overview of the Münsterites’ apocalyptic views and the origins of these in the ideas of Hofman, see Kirchhoff, “Die Endzeiterwartung der Täufergemeinde,” 20–24.
17. Some of the earliest “Christians” still felt themselves to be close to the Jewish tradition; that strain of Christianity is represented by the Gospel of Matthew and Apocalypse. Other Greek-speaking Christians distanced themselves from Jesus’s Jewish background and were receptive to Greek culture, notably the Gospels of Luke (this tendency is also noticeable in Acts) and John. The obscure allegory of the book of Apocalypse is hardly compatible with the influence of Greek philosophical thought in the Gospel according to John, which sets it apart from the other three canonical gospels.
18. The classic treatment is Cohn, Pursuit of the Millennium; although really a sociological study of the cultural settings that favored millenarian ideas and behavior, Cohn discusses the development of millenarian thought. For a treatment of the apocalyptic strain in the radical strain of Reformation thought, see Klaassen, Living at the End of Ages. The book of Apocalypse did not appeal to more rationally inclined religious thinkers such as Erasmus and Luther, though their dislike of the work was based on rather different reasons; see Backus, Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse, 3–11.
19. And the fallacious notion that this religiously inspired attempt to establish a community without personal wealth was a precursor of modern communism led to much scholarly misinterpretation in East Germany (similar strains in the thought of Müntzer were handled in the same vein). For a treatment of the theoretical underpinning of the policy of communal property in Münster, see Stayer, German Peasants’ War, 123–38.
20. Kerssenbrock, Anabaptistici furoris, ed. Detmer, 773, with notes.
21. Kerssenbrock routinely portrays John of Leiden as a libertine satyr, as if the institution of polygamy were a fraud concocted to satisfy his lust.
22. This is basically an English version of the French term pays bas. “Netherlands” is the English equivalent of the Dutch “Nederlands,” which has become restricted in application to the Dutch Republic/Kingdom. The fact that the name of the province of Holland (only the most prominent of the provinces that constituted the new republic) was adopted in English as a popular designation of the Dutch Republic shows that there had not previously existed any self-evident term for the area.
23. Though his language is clearly Low German, he does admit High German forms like essen alongside the Low German form eten, and he even occasionally uses the High German pronoun er in place of the Low German he (just like English).
24. The eventual development of Dutch as a national language of education and literature has led to the designation of its late medieval ancestor as Middle Dutch rather than Middle Low Franconian. If the Habsburg association had not led to the distinctive and independent development of the Low Countries, Low Franconian would simply be one more “dialect” of German that would now be in the process of being driven into extinction by High German. (Note that the English term Dutch is simply a deformation of deutsch, the German word for “German,” and in the Netherlands the language is known rather neutrally as nederlandisch.) Naturally, none of this talk of what would have happened if the Low Countries had not gone their own way should be taken as a disparagement of the present-day countries or their sometimes complicated linguistic situations. The point is that the present independent status of these regions should not be read back into the early sixteenth century.
25. Kerssenbrock discusses the city government in chapter 8 of his introduction.
26. Kerssenbrock, Anabaptistici furoris, ed. Detmer, 104–5.
27. For a general discussion of Münster’s citizen body, see Lutterbach, Der Weg in das Täuferreich, 46–51.
28. Kerssenbrock, Anabaptistici furoris, ed. Detmer, 107–8, 108–9. For a modern discussion, see Lahrkamp, “Das Patriziat in Münster.” They lost their dominance within the city as a result of the civil strife of the 1450s (on which see Lutterbach, Der Weg in das Täuferreich, 54–57), and their refusal to accept outsiders into their ranks and insistence on marrying among themselves meant that the number of patrician families gradually shrank through natural extinction, which further undermined their control of the city.
29. For these prominent non-patrician families, see Lahrkamp, “Das Patriziat in Münster,” 199.
30. Kerssenbrock, Anabaptistici furoris, ed. Detmer, 109.
31. Ibid., 105–7.
32. Strictly speaking, there were seven parishes, but St. James’s Church, which was located by the cathedral, was for the use of canons rather than the general populace (ibid., 46).
33. Such a system was designed to thwart any troublemaking tendencies among the broad group of voters by entrusting the final selection to the presumably more prudent electors selected by them. This presupposition lies behind the electoral college used for selecting the president of the United States, though in practice the electors very quickly gave up any independent deliberation and became bound by the popular voting of their states.
34. Ibid., 112.
35. Ibid., 111–12.
36. For an evaluation of the thesis of a military revolution (i.e., a revolutionary change in military practice) during this period, see Black, European Warfare, 32–54.
37. The classic treatment of the independent officers who raised such troops on behalf of sovereigns who pay them for this service is Redlich, German Military Enterpriser. For a handy (if dated) treatment of the Landsknechts in our period, see Oman, History of the Art of War, 74–88; and for a colorful (if not exactly academic) treatment, see Miller, Landsknecht; and Richards, Landsknecht Soldier. For extensive treatments in German, see Blau, Die Deutschen Landsknechte; and Baumann, Landsknechte.
38. Kirchhoff, “Die Belagerung und Eroberung Münsters,” discusses at length the often tiresome arrangements between the prince-bishop and the other princes.
39. For a quick discussion of the varieties of cannon, see Arnold, Renaissance at War, 30; for a fuller treatment, Egg, “From Mariagnano to the Thirty Years’ War.”
40. For a somewhat disjointed discussion of siege warfare in this period, see Duffy, Stripping of the Altars. For a more succinct treatment, see Black, European Warfare, 84–88.
41. For Kerssenbrock’s discussion of the city’s fortifications, see his introductory chapter 4 (Kerssenbrock, Anabaptistici furoris, ed. Detmer, 18–26). Kerssenbrock was to be criticized by the city council for divulging this information; see Kerssenbrock, Narrative of Anabaptist Madness, ed. Mackay, 40, 43.
42. According to Kirchhoff, Die Täufer in Münster, 222, Gresbeck also used “Averdinck” as his last name, but there’s no evidence for this in our texts. His letter (appendix, document 2) gives the spelling “Gresbeckke.” He spells his given name “Hynryk.”
43. For the details, see Kirchhoff, Die Täufer in Münster, 222, 223.
44. Gresbeck was not unaware of the origin of individuals from places other than Holland and Frisia. He refers to one man as coming from Brabant (fol. 121r) and another from Jülich (fol. 141r).
45. Cf. the procedure in describing the parody mass, with the second performance (fols. 104v–106v) being described with much more detail than the first one (fol. 104r). Presumably, Gresbeck attended only the second performance.
46. Mostly, these instances involve a spelling reflective of a colloquial pronunciation that ignores the etymological origin of the word: “knoeynkesye” (fols. 2v, line 13, and 10v, line 31) for “canonickesei”; “ordennansee” (fol. 3v, line 6) and “ardenanssie” (fol. 40r, line 6) for “ordenantie”; “koer” for choir (fol. 17r, line 9, 120v, line 11); “instrament” for “instrument” (fol. 37v, line 2); “kuenkebynen” for “concubinen” (fol. 54r, line 24); “argelyest” for “organist” (fol. 66v, line 7); “akermente” for “sacramente” (fol. 71r, line 14); “tyespessassie” for “disputatie” (fol. 97v, line 21); “septtor” for “scepter” and “pentencie” for “penitencie” (fol. 103v, line 13); “artychker” for “artychkel” (fol. 117r, line 8); “sellen” for “cellen” (fol. 155v, line 16); “prynssepall” for “principal” (fol. 156r, line 25).
47. For a discussion of the extent of the confiscations and their disposal, see Hsia, Society and Religion in Münster, 9–10.
48. Kerssenbrock, Anabaptistici furoris, ed. Detmer, 747.
49. The cages in which the bodies were displayed were left as a permanent warning and are still there today (the decayed original cages had to be replaced with replicas in the nineteenth century).
50. Cornelius, Berichte der augenzeugen, lxxii n28 thinks that Gresbeck’s discussion (fol. 7r–v) of whether or not the people who brought Anabaptism to the city were still alive shows that Gresbeck composed his text some time later than the events he describes. However, since Gresbeck also thinks that very few people survived the capture of the city (fol. 127v), the factor of time doesn’t seem relevant. In any event, Gresbeck is clearly thinking in that passage of those responsible for the debacle, and comparatively few of these men (as opposed to the general mass of Anabaptists) survived the capture of the city (see fol. 152v for the general carnage of the Anabaptists in the aftermath of the capture).
51. Note also his confusion (fols. 4r, 5r) of Eric of Brunswick-Grubenhagen (bishop of Münster, 1532) with his predecessor, Eric of Saxony (bishop, 1508–22). The confusion of the ephemeral later bishop with his much longer serving predecessor is explicable enough, but it would seem that nobody was in a position to correct this error of memory on Gresbeck’s part.
52. Conceivably, Gresbeck had less interest in this foreign figure. At any rate, he had no trouble with the name of the local clergyman (Master Tynen) who got into an altercation with Rothman (fol. 3r–v).
53. It is true that in fol. 20r, Gresbeck notes in passing that a man who had witnessed some strange behavior on the part of John of Leiden survived the fall of the city, receiving pardon under unspecified circumstances. He also notes emphatically in a later passage (fol. 120r) that some of the people that he had just listed as Anabaptist collaborators were still alive, and specifically cites the man who was chosen as the duke assigned to the Cross Gate as one of those who managed to escape from the far side of the city at the time of its capture. He even overtly notes that the survivors are still astonished at what they saw (fol. 127v). Hence, there were some men available for Gresbeck to consult, but perhaps it would have been safer for him to avoid the company of such people.
54. Events that are narrated later but took place prior to Easter include the extended confrontation between Knipperdolling and the king (fols. 98r–103v), which apparently took place in October (see also note 502 to the translation), the parody mass (fols. 104r–106v), which seems to have taken place on Christmas (see also note 528 to the translation), the renaming of the gates (fol. 107r–v), which was already going on in December (see also note 538 to the translation), and the destruction of the churches, which actually began at the time of the Anabaptist takeover but was resumed with a vengeance in late January 1535 (see also note 564 to the translation).
55. Note that the “real” rebaptizers were even physically distinguishable by the unnatural paleness of their complexion and expression (fols. 98v–99r).
56. A major example of chronological confusion is the error in dating the expectations of relief from outside (see also section 5.1). Errors of detail would be represented by Gresbeck’s ascription of leadership of the Anabaptists during the uprising of July 1534 to Tilbeck rather than Radeker (fol. 49r and also note 252 to the translation) and his failure to note the “limping prophet” (Dusentschuer’s) role in the proclamation of John of Leiden as king (fol. 62r with note 342 to the translation).
57. For a full discussion of the various manuscripts and their relationship to one another, see section 1 of the German edition.
58. For a discussion of this manuscript (by Berndt Thier) plus a few illustrations of artwork contained in it, see Albrecht, Das Königreich der Täufer, 111–12.
59. Cornelius, Berichte, lxiii n2.
60. Throughout the manuscript, pairs of folios are numbered consecutively with Roman numbers starting with the second pair. That is, the fifth page (the recto side of the third folio, which marks the start of the second pair of folios) is marked with the number “ij” (=2), and the seventh page (the start of the third pair of folios) is marked with “iij” and so on throughout the manuscript. This peculiar notation is then used sporadically to mark tens of folios (i.e., the numbers 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70, 80, 90, 110, and 120 are marked, mostly in Roman but occasionally in Arabic numbers).
61. Above the section on the small number of survivors that starts at the top of 127r, the editor writes as if a heading “infantes subiungi possint” (“the infants could be added below”). The exact sense of this comment is unclear.
62. Text is marked for excision in fol. 93r, line 26, to 93v, line 6, with the words “ante dictum est, propterea excludatur” (“it’s been said before, so let it be cut out”). The text at the end of the supposed articles of the Anabaptists seems to have been particularly annoying to the editor, earning three comments: “eadem habes fere in principio horum gestorum” (“you have pretty much the same material in the beginning of this account), “quere et inuenies eadem in precedentibus” (“look and you’ll find the same material in what precedes”), and “et hec predicta sunt” (“this material too has been said before”). A very long excision from 127v, line 5, to 128v, line 16, is accompanied with the words “eandem semper cantilenam canere vitio datur, propterea hec omissa sunt” (“Always singing the same song is considered a fault, so this passage has been omitted”). A final excision from fol. 156r, line 28, to fol. 156v, line 7, has no comment.
63. For this rather flimsy charge, see Mackay, Narrative of the Anabaptist Madness, 41–42, 44.
64. An example in English of a fronted subject in English would be “my brother, he’s a doctor.” Such phrases are standard in some languages (e.g., the famous “l’état, c’est moi”), but are not standard in English and virtually never seen in print, though common enough in colloquial speech.
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