Münster Rebellion (1534–1535): The Anabaptist Kingdom

The Münster Rebellion was the seizure of the German city of Münster by radical Anabaptists in February 1534 and their attempt to build a “New Jerusalem” there under siege. Led first by the prophet Jan Matthys and then by John of Leiden, who had himself crowned king, the community held out until June 1535. Its violent end, and the iron cages still hanging on St Lambert’s Church, made Münster a byword for religious extremism across Reformation Europe.

Background: the radical Reformation

The Reformation set off by Martin Luther’s 95 Theses quickly produced groups that wanted to go much further than Luther. The Anabaptists (“rebaptisers”) rejected the baptism of infants and baptised adult believers instead. The first adult baptisms took place among radical followers of Zwingli in Zurich in January 1525.

Anabaptists were persecuted by Catholics and Protestants alike, partly because the German Peasants’ War of 1524–1525 had made authorities fearful of any movement that challenged the social order. Most Anabaptists were peaceful, but one branch, inspired by the preacher Melchior Hoffman, expected the imminent end of the world.

Münster was the capital of a prince-bishopric in Westphalia, ruled by a Catholic bishop but with a powerful town council and guilds. From 1531 the preacher Bernhard Rothmann led a Lutheran reform movement in the city, and by 1533 he had come to reject infant baptism.

The Anabaptist takeover

In early 1534 followers of Jan Matthys, a baker from Haarlem who claimed to be a prophet, arrived from the Netherlands. Among his envoys was John of Leiden (Jan Beukelszoon), a young tailor. Mass adult baptisms followed in Münster, and Anabaptist refugees streamed in from the surrounding region and the Low Countries.

In the council election of 23 February 1534 the Anabaptists and their supporters won control, and the cloth merchant Bernhard Knipperdolling became one of the burgomasters. Within days those who refused rebaptism were driven out of the city. Matthys declared Münster the New Jerusalem, the place of refuge for the faithful before the Last Judgement.

The prince-bishop, Franz von Waldeck, gathered troops and began a siege at the end of February 1534. He was later helped by other princes, including the Lutheran Landgrave Philip of Hesse, since both Catholic and Protestant rulers saw the city as a threat.

The New Jerusalem under siege

Matthys predicted that the end of the world would come at Easter 1534. On Easter Sunday, 5 April, he rode out of the city with only a handful of followers and was killed by the besiegers.

John of Leiden took his place. He replaced the council with twelve elders on the model of the tribes of Israel and enforced a strict regime based on his reading of the Bible. Private ownership of money was abolished and food and goods were placed under common control.

In the summer of 1534 John introduced polygamy, justified by the example of the Old Testament patriarchs and by the fact that women greatly outnumbered men in the city. A revolt against the new order at the end of July was crushed and its leaders executed. Polygamy shocked contemporaries more than anything else that happened in Münster.

The defenders beat off major assaults in May and at the end of August 1534. Soon afterwards John was proclaimed king of the New Jerusalem, held court in great splendour and took many wives, among them Divara, the widow of Matthys.

The fall of Münster

The besiegers then tightened their blockade, building earthworks around the city to stop supplies getting in. By the spring of 1535 Münster was starving, and many inhabitants tried to escape or were sent out of the city.

On the night of 24–25 June 1535 troops entered Münster with help from deserters who had revealed a weak point in the defences. One of them, the craftsman Heinrich Gresbeck, later wrote an important eyewitness account of life in the city. Hundreds of defenders were killed in the fighting and the massacre that followed; Rothmann’s fate is unknown.

John of Leiden, Knipperdolling and another leader, Bernhard Krechting, were captured. After months of imprisonment and questioning they were publicly tortured with red-hot tongs and executed in the market square on 22 January 1536. Their bodies were placed in three iron cages and hung from the tower of St Lambert’s Church as a warning.

Key people

• Jan Matthys (died 1534): the Dutch prophet who proclaimed Münster the New Jerusalem and died in a sortie on Easter Sunday 1534.
• John of Leiden (c. 1509–1536): Matthys’s successor, who introduced polygamy and ruled as king until the city fell.
• Bernhard Knipperdolling (c. 1495–1536): a local merchant and burgomaster, one of the Anabaptists’ chief supporters among the citizens.
• Bernhard Rothmann (c. 1495–c. 1535): the preacher whose writings gave the movement its theology.
• Franz von Waldeck (c. 1491–1553): the prince-bishop who led the siege and restored his authority.

Consequences and legacy

Münster was restored to the bishop’s rule and to Catholicism, and its civic freedoms were reduced. Across Europe, rulers used the episode to justify persecuting all Anabaptists, peaceful or not, for generations.

Within the Anabaptist movement the disaster led many to renounce violence and prophecy. The former Dutch priest Menno Simons, who became an Anabaptist leader in 1536, condemned Münster and taught non-resistance; the Mennonites who took his name, and later the Amish, carried that peaceful tradition to North America.

The three cages still hang from St Lambert’s Tower, which was rebuilt between 1887 and 1898. Since 1987 small lights placed in them by the artist Lothar Baumgarten have recalled the episode. Münster has since become a city of peace commemoration, being one of the two places where the Peace of Westphalia was negotiated in 1648.

Sources and debate

Almost everything known about the Anabaptist kingdom comes from hostile or partisan witnesses. The most vivid account is that of Heinrich Gresbeck, who lived in the city throughout the siege and wrote after its fall; he had every reason to distance himself from the leaders. A longer history by the Catholic schoolmaster Hermann von Kerssenbrock, written later in the sixteenth century, was openly polemical. Rothmann’s own pamphlets, such as his Restitution, show what the leaders believed and hoped.

Historians have read the episode in very different ways. Older Protestant and Catholic writers treated it as proof of the dangers of heresy and fanaticism. Some nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers, including socialist historians, saw the common ownership of goods as an early experiment in communism. More recent scholars stress the apocalyptic expectations of the Melchiorite movement, the pressures of siege and famine, and the fact that many of the measures taken in Münster, including polygamy, were improvised responses to a desperate situation rather than a long-prepared programme.

Timeline

• 1525, January: first adult baptisms among radical reformers in Zurich.
• 1534, January: Anabaptist envoys of Jan Matthys, including John of Leiden, arrive in Münster.
• 1534, 23 February: Anabaptists win the council election.
• 1534, late February: non-Anabaptists are expelled and the bishop’s siege begins.
• 1534, 5 April: Jan Matthys is killed in a sortie on Easter Sunday.
• 1534, 31 August: a major assault by the besiegers is repulsed.
• 1534, September: John of Leiden is proclaimed king.
• 1535, 24–25 June: the besiegers take the city.
• 1536, 22 January: John of Leiden, Knipperdolling and Krechting are executed.

Why it matters

The Münster Rebellion was the most extreme episode of the radical Reformation. It hardened the hostility of both Catholic and Protestant authorities towards dissenting movements, and it pushed surviving Anabaptists towards the peaceful, separatist faith that shaped the Mennonite and Amish traditions.