The Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster

The Reformation of the 1520s released not one movement but many. Alongside Luther and Zwingli, small groups of believers concluded that baptism should be given only to adults who freely confessed their faith. Their enemies called them Anabaptists, meaning rebaptisers. Both Catholic and Protestant rulers treated them as dangerous, and from 1529 imperial law made rebaptism a capital crime. Most Anabaptists responded by withdrawing from public life, refusing oaths and weapons, and waiting patiently for God’s judgement.

A minority expected that judgement very soon. In the Low Countries and northern Germany, the wandering preacher Melchior Hoffman taught that the end of the world was near and that Strasbourg would be the New Jerusalem. Hoffman himself was imprisoned in Strasbourg in 1533. Among his followers, a baker from Haarlem named Jan Matthys claimed to be a prophet with a sharper message: the godly should not merely wait, but prepare the way, and the chosen city was not Strasbourg but Münster.

Münster, the seat of a prince-bishop in Westphalia, was already in turmoil. Its guilds had pressed for reform, and the popular preacher Bernhard Rothmann had moved from Lutheran ideas to rejecting infant baptism. In early 1534 Dutch emissaries of Matthys arrived and rebaptised hundreds of citizens. In February Anabaptists and their sympathisers won the council elections, with the cloth merchant Bernhard Knipperdolling as mayor. Matthys entered the city, and those who would not accept rebaptism were driven out in winter weather. Anabaptists from the Netherlands and the surrounding region streamed in to join the saints.

Prince-Bishop Franz von Waldeck gathered troops and laid siege to his own city. Inside the walls, the new order took shape quickly. Private property was largely abolished, food was distributed from common stores, and books other than the Bible were burned. Matthys predicted that the end would come at Easter 1534. Around Easter he rode out with a handful of men against the besiegers, apparently expecting divine protection, and was killed.

Leadership passed to Jan van Leiden, a young tailor and former actor in a chamber of rhetoric, a kind of amateur theatre society. He replaced the council with twelve elders on the model of the tribes of Israel and, in the summer of 1534, introduced polygamy. The city contained far more women than men, many of them followers whose husbands had left or been expelled, and the leaders justified the measure by the example of the Old Testament patriarchs. It provoked an armed uprising inside the city, which was crushed and its leaders executed.

Women played a visible part in the besieged city. They helped repair and defend the walls, and the sources tell of a young woman, Hille Feicken, who in June 1534 slipped out of the city intending, like the biblical Judith, to kill the bishop; she was caught and executed. Such stories show how deeply the inhabitants read their situation through the Bible. For believers, the siege was not merely a political conflict but the final battle between the saints and the godless, and every hardship confirmed that the end was near.

At the end of the summer of 1534 a goldsmith who claimed to be a prophet proclaimed Jan van Leiden king of the New Jerusalem. He held court with a crown, royal robes and a throne in the market square, and he took several wives. The defenders beat back two major assaults, and the city sent out emissaries to rouse Anabaptists elsewhere, but these efforts largely failed. Neighbouring princes, Catholic and Lutheran alike, sent aid to the bishop, and the blockade tightened through the winter.

By spring 1535 the city was starving, and some inhabitants were allowed to leave, many of them meeting death or capture in the no man’s land between the lines. On the night of 24–25 June 1535, two deserters helped the besiegers through the walls. Most of the remaining defenders were killed in the fighting that followed. Rothmann disappeared, probably killed in the fighting. Jan van Leiden, Knipperdolling and another leader, Bernd Krechting, were captured, interrogated and, in January 1536, publicly executed. Their bodies were placed in three iron cages and hung from the tower of St Lambert’s Church as a warning.

Almost everything popularly known about the kingdom of Münster comes from its enemies. The most detailed eyewitness, Heinrich Gresbeck, was a citizen who escaped and helped the besiegers. Catholic and Lutheran writers had every reason to paint the city as a den of tyranny and lust, and the image of the tailor-king with his many wives proved irresistible to pamphleteers. Some stories, such as the claim that Jan van Leiden personally beheaded one of his wives, appear in these hostile accounts and are hard to check.

Historians today see Münster as a real and frightening episode, but also as an extreme case shaped by siege conditions, apocalyptic expectation and a flood of refugees. Some modern interpreters have read it through other lenses: nineteenth-century socialists saw it as an early communist experiment, while Norman Cohn placed it in a long tradition of medieval millenarian movements. Specialists such as Ralf Klötzer stress its roots in the ordinary politics of an urban reformation.

For centuries, Münster was used to discredit all Anabaptists. Rulers cited it to justify persecution, and the word Anabaptist became shorthand for sedition. Yet the great majority of Anabaptists had never shared the Münsterite programme. The Swiss Brethren had committed themselves to non-violence in the Schleitheim Confession of 1527, and the Hutterites in Moravia lived in peaceful communities of shared goods.

In the Netherlands and northern Germany, the former priest Menno Simons gathered the scattered survivors after 1536 and insisted firmly on non-resistance, condemning Münster as a grave error. His followers became known as Mennonites. From these traditions came the Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites who live today across Europe and the Americas, known for pacifism and community service rather than revolution.

In Münster itself, the cages remain on St Lambert’s tower. The church was rebuilt in the late nineteenth century, and the original cages were rehung on the new tower. They have become one of the city’s best-known sights, a reminder of a moment when expectation of the end of the world turned into a besieged kingdom.