World Famous Cults and Fanatics (10 page)

When he met Storch, Thomas Muntzer was already growing dissatisfied with the teachings of Luther.
Luther taught that man does not need the Church to forgive his sins; he only needs faith in God.
Muntzer went a step further.
Man can actually
communicate
with God and hear his voice.
Once this happens, a man becomes the vessel of the holy spirit, and he actually
becomes God
.

Muntzer, who had been a bookish young man, now suddenly abandoned reading, and went preaching among the poor, particularly the silver miners and the weavers of Zwickau.
He said such unpleasant
things about the Catholics in the area, and even about Luther, that the Town Council dismissed him.
His friend Storch led an uprising, which had to be suppressed by force.
Many weavers were
arrested.
Muntzer went off to Prague – which, a century later, was still seething with anger about the execution of John Huss – and told his audiences that he was founding a new Church
which would consist solely of the Elect.
The Town Council lost no time in expelling him.

He became a wandering preacher for the next two years, suffering great hardship – which only deepened his sense of mission.
In 1523 he was invited to become curate in the small Thuringian
town of Allstedt, where he performed the Latin service in German, and became a celebrated preacher.
Peasants came from miles around to hear him.
But so did Duke John of Saxony, who was worried
about what he heard of this revolutionary firebrand.
At his request, Muntzer preached a sermon stating his belief that the Millennium was at hand, and would be preceded by great battles and
appalling suffering.
Duke John went away looking deeply thoughtful, and Muntzer congratulated himself on impressing him.

Perhaps he did.
But when some of his followers came to Allstedt, telling him that they had been evicted from their homes by their landlords, he began to change his opinion of Duke John, and
preached a sermon declaring that tyrants were about to be overthrown and the Millennium about to begin.
Martin Luther heard about Muntzer’s messianic ideas, and wrote an open letter to the
Princes of Saxony warning them about Muntzer.
Muntzer replied with a pamphlet accusing Luther of being (with some confusion of the sexes) the Whore of Babylon, and a corrupt slave of the ruling
classes.

This was hardly fair to Duke John and his elder brother Frederick the Wise, who were amongst the most tolerant princes of the time.
Luther had raised tremendous political storms, most of which
centred in their territories, and they were doing their best to remain open-minded.
So they sent for Muntzer and asked him what the devil he thought he was up to.
The hearing at which he was asked
to defend himself lasted several days.
In all probability, he would have been sent back to Allstedt with a warning to behave himself.
But Muntzer decided not to wait for the result.
He climbed over
the Weimar city wall one night and made his way to the city of Mulhausen, which was in the midst of a power struggle between the poor – led by another revolutionary called Heinrich Pfeiffer
– and the respectable burghers.
The burghers soon ejected him.
But a few months later, Pfeiffer took power from the Town Council and Muntzer hurried back.

By the time he arrived, Germany had plunged into its own Peasants’ Revolt.
The poor were on the march, inspired by Luther (who hastened to disown them), and they skirmished with the troops
of the local princes, and attacked monasteries and nunneries.

By May 1525, Muntzer was heading his own peasant army of about eight thousand, and was determined to lead them to the victory foretold in the scriptures.
There can be no doubt that he was now
convinced that he was a messiah – or at least, a reincarnation of the prophet Daniel.
His chosen symbols were the sword and the rainbow.

His luck took a turn for the worse when Frederick the Wise died, and was succeeded by Duke John.
The Duke finally decided that he had to take sides.
He appealed to the young commander Philip of
Hesse, who had just put down a rising in his own territories, to come and do the same in Thuringia.

Muntzer summoned his own forces and marched out to meet him.
The two armies faced one another on 15 May 1525, Philip’s highly trained and well-equipped army looking down on the unruly mob
of peasants – armed with clubs and pickaxes – from a hilltop.
Philip experienced a softening of the heart.
He sent a message offering not to attack if the peasants would hand over
Muntzer.
The peasants looked up at the army looming above them, and suddenly felt that this was not such a bad idea.
But Muntzer once more revealed his skill as a leader; he made a magnificent
speech in which he promised them victory and immunity from the cannons.
“I will catch their cannonballs in my sleeves!”

Anabaptists taking the Sacrament

As he spoke, a rainbow appeared in the sky.
His followers needed no further convincing, and marched to confront the enemy.
As they came closer, Philip of Hesse ordered his cannons to open fire.
As the balls cut a swathe through their ranks, the peasants turned and scattered in panic.
Philip’s cavalry cut them down as they fled.
It was a total rout, and six thousand peasants were to
die.

Thomas Muntzer escaped to nearby Frankenhausen, but the triumphant army soon overran the town.
Soon afterwards, they took Mulhausen too.
Muntzer was found hiding in a cellar in Frankenhausen,
and was taken captive and tortured.
On 27 May 1425, he and Heinrich Pfeiffer were beheaded.
That was virtually the end of Germany’s Peasants’ Revolt.

The surviving peasants felt nothing but bitterness against Luther.
But in retrospect it seems clear that Luther did the right thing.
If he had supported the revolt, he would have been executed
like Muntzer, and Protestantism would have died.
As it was, a law was passed declaring that each German state could make up its own mind whether it wanted to be Protestant or Catholic.
The majority
opted for Lutheranism.
Luther married a nun who had escaped from a convent, had six children, and died at the age of sixty-three, nearly thirty years after he had started the revolution with his
ninety-five theses.

The Massacre of the Anabaptists

The most horrifying episode of this bloody religious war was still to come – the slaughter of the Anabaptists of Munster, under their leader John of Leyden.

Although the German princes had won the Peasants’ War, the spirit of Thomas Muntzer marched on.
In these times of revolt and misery – a new outbreak of the Black Death killed
thousands more in 1529 – the poor continued to believe that the Day of Judgement must be at hand.
The followers of Muntzer called themselves Anabaptists (or rebaptizers – they believed
that Christians have to be rebaptized in adulthood), and after Muntzer’s death, his torch was taken up by a visionary called Melchior Hoffmann, who also taught that the end of the world was
at hand.
Unlike Muntzer, Hoffmann was a peaceable man who advised his followers to wait quietly for the Millennium.
But this did not save him.
When he proclaimed that Strasbourg was the New
Jerusalem in 1533, and that the Last Trumpet was about to sound, his followers held their breath, and so did the burghers of Strasbourg.
But when the year passed without any sign of the end of the
world, Hoffmann was seized by the Town Council of Strasbourg and hung up in a cage to die slowly.

In Munster, the capital of Westphalia, a new Anabaptist prophet called Bernard Rothmann preached against Catholicism; his future father-in-law, a rich businessman called Bernard Knipperdolling,
gave him full support.
The two fanatics ran through the streets calling on the populace to repent, and dozens of nuns who had deserted their nunneries joined in the hysteria, and began writhing on
the ground and having visions.
Munster was beginning to look like a madhouse, and as Anabaptists from a neighbouring duchy flooded in, the Prince-Bishop of Munster, Francis von Waldeck, began to
feel deeply uneasy.
And when disciples of a prophet called Jan Matthyson arrived and announced that Munster was the New Jerusalem, even the Protestants began to move out.
One of the leading
disciples was a tall, handsome, bearded man called Jan Bockelson, who, because he came from Leyden, was known as John of Leyden.

Soon the messiah Jan Matthyson arrived, accompanied by his beautiful wife, an ex-nun.
He proved to be as tall and handsome as John of Leyden, and when he stood up in the market place, dressed in
flowing robes and bearing two tablets under his arms, and told the populace that their city had been chosen by God to be the New Jerusalem, they applauded wildly.
Soon the whole town was awash with
religious ecstasy – the women playing a leading role.
People had visions every day, and – in the manner of the Brethren of the Free Spirit – felt that all this direct contact with
God enabled them to a little sexual licence – after all, what was the point of being involved in a great religious upheaval if you had to stay chaste?

In February 1534, the worst fears of the Catholics were realized when the Anabaptists were overwhelmingly elected to the Town Council and became, in effect, the rulers of the city.
Catholic
churches and homes were sacked.
Catholics who refused to be converted were driven naked out of the city.
The weather was freezing, and many died.

Munster was surrounded by Bishop von Waldeck’s soldiers, but the Anabaptists were not afraid.
God was on their side.
And at Easter, the prophet Matthyson had a vision that convinced him
that he could raise the siege with a few followers.
The next day he issued forth with twenty men – and was promptly cut down.
The soldiers displayed his head on a pike where it could be seen
from the city walls.

A nineteenth-century depiction of a group of Anabaptists

Now John of Leyden was the leader.
A bankrupt tailor to whom life had not been kind, he had become the main hope of thousands of enthusiasts.
The city of Munster now became a religious
commonwealth in the most literal sense – that is, John of Leyden preached the common ownership of property, and made the citizens take their meals all together in great dining halls.
He also
had an idea that made him even more popular.
Men and women were sexually free.
A man could take as many wives as he wanted, and a woman who wanted to become somebody’s wife merely had to go
and join his household.
There was an understandable rush to get into the prophet’s bed, and John of Leyden soon found himself trying to satisfy sixteen women.

Life in the New Jerusalem was delightful; the summer of 1534 turned into one long party, in which the citizens ate their way though twelve hundred oxen and vast quantities of cheese and fish.
There were endless processions and banquets.
Traitors and unbelievers were executed to provide the populace with entertainment.
Money was abolished, but medallions were struck showing John of
Leyden’s face surrounded by the legend “The Word Made Flesh”.