← Prophets of Doom - Dan Carlin's Hardcore History
Prophets of Doom - Dan Carlin's Hardcore History
Hardcore History 48 - Prophets of Doom
04:28:01
Murderous millennial preachers and prophets take over the German city of Munster after Martin Luther unleashes a Pandora's Box of religious anarchy with the Protestant Reformation.
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It's hardcore history. This is one of those stories that once I started doing this history podcast, I knew I was gonna tell someday. And I knew I was going to wonder about whether it was the right thing for me to do if I did decided to tell it. And then what happened after the last podcast is what? Pretty much assured that now would be the time that I would try to tell this story that maybe my better judgment argues I shouldn't tell. Basically what happened is this. We finished up the last series, which was a five part series on the Mongols, which was, you know, a little traumatizing for us to do. Those five part series are very hard. But I'm on an assembly line here and if I don't pick the next topic within like 10 or 12 days, everything gets backed up on the assembly line. It's a very fragile sort of production system here. And one little fly in the ointment, to quote something I said far too often on a recent visit on someone else's podcast, you just throw the whole thing into disorder if there's any delays at all. So I'm like two weeks after the last show, still recovering, answering email, cleaning up my office, doing all these things I always do once the show's over and I haven't got a new topic for the next show. And what's more, I have a bunch of stuff I want to get into, but all of them are going to be multi part topics again. And I desperately wanted to do one of these single shows, so I have this one sitting in my notebook. It's one of those long term, you know, get to this sometime before you die topics. And I thought, listen, it's short. There's not a lot on it in the English language. It ought to be something I can do in about an hour and a half, you know, oh, to heck with it, I'm desperate. Do it now, right? Great story. I've always loved it. It's twisted and weird and all those things I like. And so we're doing it today. The reasons why I shouldn't do this story though, are twofold and I'm gonna lay them out at the outset and, and hopefully defuse some of the problems that are likely to arise. Because I shouldn't have done this topic in the first place. The first is, is that I have the potential to step on about a bazillion landmines of offensiveness. This is one of those wonderful shows where I have the potential to offend people of religious faith while simultaneously offending people of no religious faith. At all. There are very few topics where you can offend religious people and atheists at the same time. This is one of them, especially the way I walk these tightropes. So if you are of either one of those persuasions, my apologies in advance. If you've heard enough shows from me, you know, I love everybody. If this is the first show you've ever heard, I love everybody. So don't. So don't take anything I say personally and realize that when you're dealing with time periods where the people's cultures are much more nasty in many respects than our culture today, that even the religious institutions are going to reflect that. Because the priests and the middle managers and the heads of these religions are all human beings that grew up in that much more twisted culture. It's impossible for them not to bring some of that twistedness into the faith. So I think we all know that religious belief of, oh, I don't know, 500, 600, 700 years ago might in many respects be of the sort that the modern day versions of those same religions might protest against today if they were both around at the same time. I mean, we're going to be talking about an earlier version of Christianity and Catholicism and things like that that are of such a sort that if they, like I said, existed in some country today, you could expect modern day Roman Catholics and modern day Protestants and people like that to be out there with signs protesting against it. Okay, so I'm likely to offend a lot of people with this program. I hope I don't. The second reason I probably never should have picked this is because there are many sources, well, comparatively on this wonderful story, but not very well known in English story. If you go to a place like Germany or the Netherlands and if you've ever seen my list of notes for a show we've done, I prefer to have between 35 and 50. I know it sounds crazy sources to work from for one of our good long shows. Makes me comfortable. You get confirmation, you can throw, you know, different people's viewpoints around and, and compare and contrast and it allows you to really three dimensionalize these stories as much as you can three dimensionalize something from the past. This story has like one book on it in English, another translation of a primary source. I mean, there's very little which isn't in and of itself bad as long as there's very little in total when there's very little in English. But there's quite a bit more in languages that I only read in the case of German at Like a kindergarten level. Well, then you have the potential for a problem. You're gonna do a program where you're gonna tell people what you know in English. And the people in Germany may have access to books that totally contradict what you're saying or that give other perspectives you don't have access to. So in many respects, this is a dumb show for me to pick. Let me tell you why it's not, though. This is a show that has everything I love in a historical tale. You know, there's a quote from the guy who was the lead singer of the Doors once, Jim Morrison. And they put it on the biography of the first record album that they released. And I should have brought the quote with me here into the studio, but I didn't. But it said something like, I'm interested in anything that has to do with chaos and revolt or overthrowing the old order. Or things and activities that seem to have no meaning. It was one of those kind of quotes. And I love it because I'm interested in those things, too. And this story has a lot of that sort of stuff. Add to that the twisted elements from other time periods. Well, mostly. I mean, I think you could still find this stuff today. But when I think about them, whether today or in the past, they always fall into that category of I'm glad I'm not there. Whether we're talking about. I'm glad I'm not in the Middle Ages where they did that to people. Or whether we're talking about. I'm glad I'm not in one of those weird, repressive countries where they do that to people. Same sort of thing. In other words, what I'm telling you in this story today, they probably do things as bad as this to people in parts of the world now. But once upon a time it was common. And once upon a time it was common in all the best, most sophisticated, most morally adept cultures in the world. Now it's an aberration. And it's something most of the world sneers at and gets angry at and, you know, punishes and chastises. Case in point, how I first became aware of this story. Let me tell you about my bookshelf for a minute. Because some of you may have a similar kind of situation going on in your home. I have a lot of books. My weakness in life. Well, one of them, anyway, is books. And I have a lot of them. And they run the gamut, right? If you come over to my house and you're one of those people that judges a person by the books they have. I'm going to be one of those hard to judge people because I have books on everything, right? You go. You go down my long list of bookshelves and you can see that it's one of my weaknesses, right? And you go. And you look. And here's the problem with my bookshelf. People sort of get drawn to certain books on the bookshelf. In other words, do they notice the classics I have up there? No. Do they notice those interesting books you wouldn't think I would have. No, they don't notice that. They'll notice books that sort of stand out. I mean, out of thousands of books, what do they notice? Oh, there's a book on torture sticking out of the bookshelf somewhere. And I guess if you have one book on something like, you know, medieval torture techniques or whatever, people would probably go, oh, that's a strange book to have. Well, whatever. If you have several books, though, on one of those weird topics, what begins to look like maybe it just ended up in your library? As a curiosity goes from that to, wow, this guy kind of has, you know, he has nine books on torture. Maybe he's a. Maybe I should make sure I know where all the exits are in this house before I sit down. Now, thousands of books, right? Maybe like nine books on torture. What's wrong with that? Well, if you're in my house and you just happen to have an eye for books with, you know, real red covers and things that look kind of nasty, I have a few books on some really nasty things. But it's partially because I can't imagine going back in time and living at a time and a place where they did this stuff to people routinely. Although I know there are countries in the world today where they do stuff like this to people routinely. Anyway, the story I want to talk to you about today caught my attention the first time I ran into it. I think it was like 13 years old because of what you could probably call the climax of this story. It's one of those incidents that's so nasty. Again, you have to go to one of my torture books on the bookshelf to really understand what's going on there. That it conjures up one of those moments that's sure to grab me. The moments that, you know, oh, my God, I'm glad I don't live back then moments. Right? I have these all the time, and they often form the basis for a hardcore history show. And it's why we call it hardcore history, right? It's hardcore because it involves a lot of moments you're darn glad you're not involved in in this case. I read once about an execution. This execution happened. The date, the actual date is January 22, 1536. Now, 1500s are a weird time in Europe anyway. These kinds of executions are not uncommon. In fact, the execution that happened to these three guys on that date in a German city named Munster is not only not that uncommon, but apparently German law at the time had very specific rules for how much pain you could sentence the condemned to experience before you mercifully let them die. The execution I'm talking about was witnessed by people. There was a large crowd to watch it, big stage set up, or, you know, little stage, depending on who you believe. I think they took a number of wagons together, parked them side by side, put a bunch of planks on top of it, and there you have, you know, sort of a rudimentary stage in addition to the crowd that showed up to watch, the thing you have sitting in an open balcony, we're told, in the middle of this town square in one of those prosperous early Renaissance homes on an open balcony is the ruler of this era, that Munster is sort of the crown jewel of. And he's called the Prince Bishop, and he's watching this whole affair too. Because what you're seeing in 1536 in Munster is the state carrying out, you know, sort of the official punishment of people who break the law. And back then in that place, in that time, what the state did to people as part of, you know, lawful justice is worse than anything Charles Manson did to the people that he had killed in his name right there. It's fascinating to me what Charles Manson's followers did to the Manson murder victims is merciful by the standards of the lawful justice. In the time period we're talking about. This is an era where if they cut your head off with a sword, you go, whew, got off easy. Think about that for a minute. When I was a kid, I would read these stories of things that we human beings did to other human beings. And it is so mind blowing that you at once can't believe it. And a person with my personality, and probably your personality, if you're listening to can't believe it either. It's like, why do I. Why have I been fascinated by the Manson murderers throughout my whole life? Am I a murderer? Do I like to look at that stuff? No, I'm just. It's wild to me that people can do this to each other. And it's one thing if the people doing it to each other are whacked out weirdos on the fringes of society like Charles Manson. Or instead, you go back in time to 15:36, and instead of Charles Manson doing these amazingly unbelievable things to other human beings, it's the state doing it. And before we think, it's this vile state that holds people captive, you know, and nobody's for this, and they're all a bunch of victims. Most of the people that showed up to that execution in 1536 wanted to be there because one, they wanted to watch it. You know, you don't have basic cable back then. What else are you gonna do? Grab some popcorn, get your friends, meet downtown Munster, we'll watch the execution. The other thing is, most of the people in that audience thought the guy deserved it and thought that when you commit the kind of crimes that guy does, this is what you do to people. It's God's will. Bring the popcorn. I'll meet you there. I mean, folks, that's part of what makes humankind so twisted. We're not different than those people. DNA wise, almost identical. If I take you as a baby, put you in the time machine, take you back to the 15, let's just take you back to the 1510s, let you grow up in that culture. By 1536, when your friend comes and says, hey, we're gonna have one of those great executions in the city center, are you gonna be there? You're gonna say, oh, my God, yeah, I'll get the popcorn gone. I mean, my point is, the people in this story are us in a different culture, in a different time, and look at what they, like, think is correct and live with every day. Now, I'm not going to tell you yet what was done to those people in the execution, because if I tell you now, it sounds like gratuitous violence and it doesn't make any sense. If I tell you at the end of this story what they did to them, you kind of go, hmm, I get it. It's not gonna make any sense to you. You're not going to approve of it. It's going to be as shocking to you as it was to me when I first read it. But it's going to have context, which is all you ever hope to get from these stories. And you're going to probably be offended. If you're religious or atheist, doesn't that cover pretty much all of you? And if you're German or Dutch, you're probably going to sit there and shake your head and go, I Can't believe how wrong Dan got that story. If he'd only called me, I would have read him some German sources and he would have known how flawed those few books he has to go on are. Alright, with all of that in mind and understanding how late we were in picking a topic, this is a story I've wanted to talk about forever. It's been on my to do list forever. And it's one of these pieces that they know quite a bit about in Germany, but is almost unknown in the English language. And I remember in 1993, I was a news reporter at a news station, a CBS News affiliate, and we were glued to what was called the news feed. Most of these news, I can't even talk about how they are now. Back in the day, you'd have a bunch of different TVs set up in any newsroom and one of them would be the feed television. And the feed television is showing you the raw video that doesn't get sent out over the air, you know, to the public to watch. It's just what the cameras are seeing. And then all that stuff is relayed to the guy at the news station who tapes it for you. And then you cut up your video from stuff that was on the feed. So you get to watch everything as it unfolds. And. And we were addicted to watching what was going on in the Texas city of Waco because this was the time period when a splinter group of. A splinter group of, you know, I mean, nine times removed off a legitimate group of Christians who call themselves the Seventh Day Adventists, a group that called itself the Branch Davidians, had a compound. And in this compound lived a bunch of different families. And they had sort of. I don't want to do them any injustice because there's still a bunch of unknown stuff about this too. But in that compound was a kind of a prophet or a messiah figure, somebody who was supposed to have many wives and have fathered children by many wives and who, you know, could quote the Bible, you know, from memory at length and had a bunch of people who thought this person could tell them what God wanted. And his name was David Koresh. And this whole thing turned into a siege where the government was kind of holding these people and telling them to throw down their weapons and surrender and all this kind of stuff. And eventually the people inside didn't. And either the government started a fire inadvertently or the people inside the compound set it. And a ton of people died. And I remember while I was watching that thinking, oh my goodness, it's just another manifestation of the same sort of factors that go into that story from this German city of Munster that I've been so fascinated with so long. Because in the city of Munster in the late 1520s, early 1530s, you have all the conditions you need for an absolute disaster to strike. Munster is like a city that's waiting for something to happen. If you're an insurance investigator, historians are sometimes like coroners or insurance investigators. And they go in and they try to look at the evidence available and decide why something happened. If you walk into the German city of munster in the 1520s and you're a historical coroner or a historical insurance investigator, you know, you see frayed wires everywhere. You see dynamite and gasoline haphazardly stored near the fireplace. You see a tinder dry roof that's been struck by lightning, and you see a bunch of children playing with Bic lighters. I mean, the whole place just seems ready to explode. And so it shouldn't be any surprise when it did. The whole era was combustible and monsters sort of at the center of the whole area. One of the reasons it's combustible is because the world of Europe at that time is involved in a massive amount of change that's happening very quickly. These are always combustible moments. Europe is coming. I mean, I'm gonna, gonna broad brush here for a second, but Europe is coming out of a funk. In the 1500s, historians have named that coming out of the funk, the Renaissance. The people who lived during that time period had no such knowledge. Those are historian type, you know, divisions. We divide people who are history people divide history into eras. And usually we'll say, okay, things go along for pretty much the same for a long period. Now this, this period, things get different. So we're going to call this the end of one epoch and the beginning of another epoch. And we'll call this epoch the Renaissance. The people who are living through it don't know this at all. All they know is that certain stresses and strains are bothering their society. I mean, folks, I guarantee you right now we're living through one of those changes. That histor will mark the end of one era and mark the beginning of another. But we don't know what they're gonna call those eras. We don't know what they are. We don't call ourselves living in the eras that history will say we're living in, but we know we're living through a time of change. The people living in the 1500s probably knew the same thing because they had evidence of it all around them. You see, the people in Europe were recovering from the equivalent of a civilization stock market crash, I guess you could say, to simplify this in a simplistic way, think about how great Europe, most of Europe was doing western Europe before the Roman empire fell. That was a pretty high level of civilization. In the 200 ADCE, 300 ADCE level, a lot of people were bathing, A lot of people were going to schools. A ton of infrastructure work was being done all over Europe, and aqueducts and colosseums and plays and writing. I mean, there's pretty darn sophisticated time, as a matter of fact, maybe the most sophisticated time in European history, almost certainly up until that point. And then when Rome in the west, because in the east it lasted a thousand years longer. Remember when Rome in the west fell, probably more accurate to think about it, like the lights going off at different times. And it starts on the periphery. Lights go off in Britain now the lights go off in, you know, Romania. I mean, the different areas that lights went off happened at different times. But within a hundred years, you go from essentially the civilization stock market high in European history to a market crash that we used to call the dark ages. Now, if you want to be correct, you call it, you know, the late antiquity, early middle age period. Nonetheless, the reason they used to call it the dark ages was because you were off of your, you know, civilization stock market highs. When Rome fell and went away, the people in western Europe didn't have anything really to replace that with. I mean, look at Britain and think about that as being pretty representative of what the people had to deal with in Britain. They get a message one day from the Roman emperor, you know, who's obviously beleaguered near the end of the empire in the west. And he says to the Britons, listen, who become, by the way, just Roman citizens at that point. Throughout most of Britain, they're in the hot bath, They've got the aqueducts. The Roman legions are there protecting them. They're sharing in the wonderful civilization highs of western Europe. And then one day, the emperor sends a message and says, I need my legions back. Got trouble here at home. Don't really have the money to pay for you anymore. We're simply gonna pull back out of Britain. Good luck. Imagine if that happened to you where you live, and the central government just decides one day can't afford to maintain your RO and your police and fire protection and your schools and the army and all. I mean, sorry, you're just gonna have to figure out how to do without us. And in Western Europe, the way that they figured out how to go from the warp speed of, you know, the Roman Empire at its height was to resort to what you'd call in a Star Trek episode, impulse power. Something they just keep the most basic of services in place because, you know, it's the best you could do. And the entity that did that in Western Europe for most places in most times was the Catholic Church, which, of course, was set up, as most churches usually are, to be a spiritual organization. When the Western Roman Empire falls. Now they have to become like a governmental organization through necessity. You know, Europe has gone to a point where it's like returning to infant status again. And the church is going to be the parent. They're going to help you walk. They're going to teach you how to ride a bicycle. They control education because nobody's educating anybody. It's kind of an irony of the church that the famous battles that the Catholic Church will have with science during the times of Copernicus and Galileo and all that stuff, where the Church is really the enemy of science. If you go back a little ways to, like, 800 ADCE when it's really, really bad in Europe and you want to learn the best science that Europe can teach you during that time period, it's kind of ironic that you're going to go to a church school to learn it, right? So during this time period where we've gone off the warp power and we're on the impulse power and Europe is just struggling to, you know, maintain some semblance of what it was like when the Roman Empire was around, the church is the one doing that for you. The problem steps in. And this is the way my Carmelite Catholic great aunt nun used to put it. This is where the church, though, runs into problems. Because when you become like a governmental entity, you develop the traditional problems that governmental entities have. Bureaucracy, corruption, people who are in it for the wrong reasons, you name it. Now, fast forward a thousand years. Imagine the church doing this impulse power job for a thousand years, and how much things tend to grow and calcify and evolve and all these kind of things over time. And you have the church of the early 1500s, and it's a Catholic Church in the west with a lot of problems, problems that no one was denying, including the Catholic Church. In fact, they get a bunch of popes in power during the 1400s that are very concerned with reform, and they should be, because they've just gone through the 1300s where you probably was probably the low Point for popes, because the popes in the 1300s were wild men by the standards of popes. Many of them, you know, cavorting with mistresses, making lots of money, really enjoying some of the good things in life. The sorts of things you can't imagine popes doing. Not just that the Catholic Church is making a lot of money, but like a government, they never have enough. They're awash with stuff. Lots of gold, lots of properties, and they've got monasteries that are churning out students and great wine and all the. I mean, lots of land owned by the Church all over Europe. And they're still just in desperate need of money all the time, just like most governments. And they're always coming up with good ways to make more. They don't usually. Again, like governments, this is what the Church has become during this time period. They're really an arm of society. You know, you have the king, the church, the army. I mean, you know, this is how the government is set up. The Catholic Church at the time period, instead of saying, you know what, we have a lot of gold, we have a lot of land, let's sell this stuff off so that we don't have to raise more money from our parishioners. Governments don't do that. And the Church of this period didn't either. They just found new ways to get money from their parishioners. And they had great ideas. If you're a business, if you're not a spiritual organization, if you're a business, they had great ideas. One of them was, I mean, think of the genius. This is the idea of selling indulgences. Now, the whole idea of indulgences is a little wacky and interesting, too, and it's worth going into for a second because it was the number one complaint some people inside the church had. The selling of indulgences involves, I think Will Durant called it a get out of purgatory sooner insurance policy. Now, you have to understand purgatory first. If you're a pretty good person, you're probably going to go to heaven, is the way they used to teach you in Medieval year, probably. But even the best person probably has some bad stuff on their record they have to expunge before they get to heaven. And that's what this temporary, not so nice place named Purgatory is for. It's not for people that should burn in hellfire. It's for people that sort of need a little transition between, you know, the ungodly unclean earth and this wonderful place called heaven. And the place where you purge the sins is Purgatory. And you're going to spend a different amount of time in it depending on your record. But we can reduce the amount of time you spend in Purgatory because it's not very nice there. If you buy an indulgence or you're given and indulgence and you didn't just have to do this for yourself, you could do it for a loved one. If your mother had a few sins about her and you knew this, but you really loved her, and she dies and you know, she's got this time in Purgatory, you could give the Church an indulgence, maybe some money, and this would reduce the amount of time your mother had to spend in Purgatory, which any nice son or daughter would try to do, right? And the Church claims that they had a whole logical system for this. The way it happens is when Christ dies on the cross and when a lot of these apostles and saints in the Church die these horrible deaths, they earn an unlimited number of credits. And these credits can be taken by the Pope, you know, and applied to people who help the Church. You give the church money, the Church does good things with the money. It's all good, right? A lot of people didn't like this. And human beings, being clever individuals as we are, a lot of people figured out the loophole instantly. The loophole is, why do I have to be a good person? Why do I have to be a good Christian? I can just live my life any way I want, sin till the cows come home, and then right before I die or leave it in my will, give the Church a bunch of money, buy into some of those unlimited credits that Jesus earned us on the cross, and it's all good. I wash away all those sins. In 1517, somebody complained about this. He wasn't the first person to complain about this, which shows how brave a move complaining about this was. Because when people would complain to the Church in the couple of centuries before this period about things like selling indulgences and other things that the Church had gotten into, the Church was not at their most critic friendly era during this time period. There was a guy, for example, named John Huss in Czechoslovakia that raised a few issues about these kind of things and was burned at the stake. There was a guy in Italy named another. These are all good Catholic priests and stuff. Another guy named Savonarola did it in Italy. They hung him and then he burned his body. So in other words, making complaints against the Church during this time period, even Though everyone, including the popes, knew that a lot of this stuff was wrong was really dangerous, right? So when in 1517, a German monk named Martin Luther nails up a list of complaints on the church door, which during this time period was a little like the giant bulletin board at your local college. I mean, anyone who had something to say, nail it to the church door. And every morning, people would go to the church door and see what was up there. Martin Luther nails a list of complaints about the Catholic Church. Now, folks, have you ever had an email where, you know, maybe you're writing your boss or writing somebody really important and it's late at night, maybe you've had a few beers or whatever, and you're thinking, do I really want to send this note? And they always tell you, don't ever send that note. Don't ever hit that send button because you can't take it back. Wait till the next morning, reread it in the cold light of day, and see if you still like it. I've always wondered if Martin Luther was in that position five minutes before he puts this list of complaints on that German church door. You know, five minutes before Martin Luther does, is he looking at the thing going, should I really post this? Because, folks, doing that is setting yourself up to be burned at the stake. Have you ever done anything that has the potential for that kind of a response? Do I send this email? Don't I? I could be burned at the stake if I send it. Oh, well, what the hell? Boom. Send. Martin Luther is a very, very, very, very, very brave guy when he posts that list of complaints on that German church door. And if the same thing happened to him that had happened to the other people who just did what he did, he wouldn't have made any history at all. He would have been burned at the stake. And somebody else, probably considering the way things were starting to go, would have done what Martin Luther had done in Germany. They had been waiting for somebody to do this for quite some time. There was even a line around Germany where some of the powerful people were saying, when are we going to get some old fool? And that's a quote who will stand up to what the church is doing here in Germany. Martin Luther became the fool in air quotes who was willing to do that. And the reason he's so important to world history was because he was the one who got away with doing it. If John Hus had been able to do this, you know, in the century beforehand, we'd be talking about John Hus instead, because the complaints had to be made. The church had become so much like a governmental entity during this time period, and the contradictions were so bad. And the forces that were starting to arise in what we now call the Renaissance were so powerful that somebody was going to do this. Luther was the one who got away with it. And he got away with it because the forces were such that he had powerful backers who would keep him from falling into the hands of the people who wanted to burn him at the stake. That's the difference, folks, is that when the church said, this Martin Luther character is out of control, hand him over to us. We're going to have a little talk with him. And most of those people never returned from the talk. There were powerful leaders in Germany that said, no, no, you can talk to him from where you are. He doesn't need to come to Italy and put himself in your power to have this discussion. And that's what changed the world. What Luther kicked off is something known to history as the Protestant Reformation. Protestant means protester. Protester. And that's what Luther was doing against the Catholic Church. This is like an explosion, folks. See, one of the things that. Because we are not as religious people as we used to be, I'm not making a judgment call on that one way or the other, but it makes it difficult to assess the importance and the intensity of something like what Luther's doing here. Luther is challenging so many parts of the old order at the same time with this list of. A modest list, folks, really a modest list of complaints. He's not asking for a new religion. He's simply saying, these things are wrong with Catholicism. We need to talk about changing them. And everything explodes for a lot of reasons. First of all, Luther's character. You know, we always talk about whether or not a long time ago, they used to have the great man theory of history. Then they had these trends and forces theories of history where you would say that everything was ripe in Germany for somebody like a Luther to come around. And if Luther hadn't come around, somebody else would have done it. But they'd have to be like Luther, because there's this interplay between the forces and trends of the time period and the people that step up to take advantage of them. If Martin Luther hadn't been Martin Luther, who knows what would have happened? But he was one of these guys you just don't mess with. He's got a temper, first of all. He's a real guy. I love that. He used to complain that he would eat and drink too much. He would Say I eat like a bohemian and I drink like a German. Thank God, a big beer drinker. And you just didn't. He had a temper and you just didn't push him, right? So what would happen is, you know, he'd get into this discussion with the church and everything would be cool for a while and then somebody would go too far and it was like, you did not say that to me. And boom. You know, sometimes Luther gets mad and you can read what he wrote when he gets mad. And this is part of the time period too, because you have something during that time period that helped make it ripe for an explosion. You know, we said that the historical insurance investigator is going to see, like the explosives stacked near, you know, the fireplace. They had something during this era that you could almost compare to the Internet today in terms of how the Internet is changing things. This was the era where the printing press was invented, the modern style printing press. And that doesn't seem like anything to us now, but during this time period where ideas were considered to be so dangerous that we burned people at the stake if they had the wrong ones, to have a machine that could put these ideas on a piece of paper, which could then be carried from the original person who had the ideas by some other entity, and then given to new people who can then spread that even more. Think of a disease and now think of a disease that is instead an idea. An idea that's a disease, that's an intellectual contagion. That's how these people saw Luther's ideas. And it's bad enough if you have a Martin Luther walking around sharing the ideas, but he doesn't have to. He can stay in Germany, write them down, have somebody do them on this printing press. He could hand hundreds of pamphlets to several individual people and tell them to run around with the pamphlets and hand them out to people and then say, somewhere on the pamphlet, once you've gotten done reading this, hand it to someone else. This is like the church's worst nightmare. 100 years before this time period, that was not a factor they had to deal with. It's like the US government trying to deal with WikiLeaks. That's a whole new threat. I mean, you didn't have that 50 years ago, 40 years ago, 30 years ago. If the Church could kill Martin Luther, the whole Reformation goes away with that one guy's death. But the Church can't get their hands on Martin Luther. And he's got a printing press and he just stays, stays in safety where he is and spreads these Intellectual germs all over places like Germany and the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, and this is how the Reformation spreads. The reason so many countries and rulers are ready to do this and jump on board and say, you know what? A hundred years ago, we'd have stood by the Church, but now we're standing by Luther has to do with a lot of reasons that weren't spiritual at all. First of all, the Church had a ton of money, and money was becoming a big deal in Europe during this time period. As a matter of fact, this is the time period where money begins to change things in a way we can all relate to now. Europe hadn't had a lot of money since the fall of the Roman Empire. Europe had seen some places drop so far off the fiscal cliff during what we used to call the Dark Ages, that they did away with money altogether. There wasn't enough money running around. They got back to the barter system in some places, but they'd gone from a very sophisticated, relatively modern financial system with Rome, and boom. When that civilizational stock market crash happened, nobody had a lot of money, so it didn't make a big difference. This era that historians call the Renaissance begins to dawn, and all the money kind of starts to come back. First of all, you discover the new world the age of discovery becomes, which will spread this whole Protestant Reformation Reformation issue like a blast radius to whole new areas of the world. They'll be fighting between Protestants and Catholics in a whole part of the world that didn't even know Europe existed 15, 25 years before this era. Right. So there's that to consider. But that also opens up new markets, brings in new resources. I mean, the economy is redeveloping. There are places that never shared in the prosperity of the Roman Empire at all. Northern Germany, Scandinavia, places like that that are in the mix now. Whole new commercial leagues are formed. There are famous ones like the Hanseatic League and the Schmalkaldic League. These are basically proto corporate cabals. Corporations in the modern sense, make a return. There's even laws passed to try to, you know, constrict the power of corporations in their reach. It sounds very modern indeed. But all this money put huge strains on Europe's basic structures. Take the social structure as a perfect example. Since the fall of the Roman Empire, Europe's had a pretty solid social structure. It's not the same everywhere. For example, they had democracy and republics and stuff like that in small states in Italy. But by and large, you have this social order composed of aristocrats, yeomans and peasants, you know, kings, dukes, all these things. And it's pretty stable for a long time until money begins to destabilize it. Because think about this for a minute, folks. Let's say you are a nobleman, right? And your people have been running things for a very long time. But you're like the fourth son of this duke and you spend your inheritance and you're broke. Now you got no money, but you got blue blood. Are you higher on the social scale than some commoner who goes into business, starts a cloth making corporation and all of a sudden becomes filthy rich doing it? Got no blue blood. Millions of dollars or florins or whatever you want to call them during this time period. You have no money, but you've got blue blood. He's got a bazillion florins and commoner's blood who's higher on the social scale. This began to be an issue, right? In fact, right during this time period, there is a rebellion by knights who are upset that their social position isn't being better preserved against all these nouveau riche people who've gotten a bunch of money, have no blue blood and think they're better than we are. Wasn't just the knights rebelling, by the way, the peasants were rebelling too. And again, this has to do with market forces. You could even say the peasants were more valuable than they used to be, which screwed up everybody's monetary system. Do you know why they were more valuable? Well, one reason was, is because there wasn't as many of them as there used to be. Europe had had all these plagues. The plagues had wiped out a lot of the population. A lot of these peasants had died. What's the iron law of wages supposed to say? Well, if you have less peasants out there to do the work, they should make more money, right? They should be able to command more from the market. This wasn't a free market, though. The peasants tried to command more from the market. And the people that run the market happened to be the aristocratic blue bloods who looked at them and said, what? What, you're going to charge me more money or you're going to go to the farm of the duke who lives across the valley. And eventually they said, no, you're not. I don't care if they're offering you more money, you can't go. And eventually the peasants found themselves constrained by new laws that said, we don't care what you can make elsewhere, you can't even leave the land. You're not going to screw up the entire economy the way we've been doing things here a thousand years. Peasants are divinely ordained by God to do this work. And you're not gonna charge me more than I can pay. I'm a nobleman. I don't even have as much money as that stupid, you know, wool manufacturing commoner who lives down the street and has that corporation. We're gonna put a stop to this right now. I'm gonna pass some laws saying you can't leave the farm. Da da da da. Long story short, the peasants start exploding in a bunch of different places. The social order is under siege. So you got this social order under siege because of all these major trends going on in the world. And then you get the peasants acting out, and you get the knights acting out. And then you get Martin Luther, you know, taping this list of complaints against the one group that's so divinely ordered, you can't complain against them. And folks, you must have thought, if you were living in that era that you were losing your mind. And it's hard to explain, by the way, how popular Luther's writings were. I mean, this is the, you know, we called it an intellectual contagion with the aid of a printing press. This is really the original idea of something going viral, the way we would describe it today. And Luther's pamphlets were unbelievably popular, especially among students. People would read this stuff and hand it to other people, and then it became like a forbidden fruit because the church prohibited Luther's writings anywhere they could. And so if you were in one of these Catholic places where simply having Luther's writings would get you in terrible trouble, you know, it was like smoking pod in the 60s or something. It was like this secret thing you did, and look what I have and I'll hand it to you. And you became like a clandestine rebel. Then Luther did something that really changed the world and made the church go ballistic and doesn't really register to the modern mind very well. It's one of the greatest things he ever did in his life in terms of impact on the world. Luther translated the Bible into a vernacular language, a language people really spoke because priests and whatnot could speak Latin, but it wasn't a generally used language as people walked around and talked. So the Bible as it had existed before Luther's time was this secret sort of tome. And the people who could read it had this special access to something that's unbelievable, that's hard for the modern mind, unless you're a deeply religious person to really grasp these People thought this was the Word of God, the actual Word of God. This was secret information though, because only the priests could really read it or people that were educated, highly educated in Latin. Because of that, it became like this text that somebody had to explain to you what was in it. And over a thousand years of church history where the Church became more like a government, certain parts were emphasized over certain other parts. You know, when the Church becomes the official state religion of Rome, they start excising parts of the Bible that are deemed to be controversial or perhaps seditious or maybe don't work so well with things the ruler wants, what have you. What Luther does is he totally jumps over the Latin version of the Bible. He doesn't translate the Bible from Latin into German. He translates the Bible from the original New Testament Greek into German and thereby turns over this amazing power of knowing what God wants to regular people. Now you have to understand what a big deal this is for the Catholic Church to lose a monopoly of this kind of power. I mean, imagine being a Native American in 1491 and you're living in Cuba and you've got your own religion and you're pretty darn sure what the gods or whatever want. And then these people, these strangers arrive from the sea in a ship and they tell you that everything you thought you knew about the supernatural and God and all that and the right way to live and everything, it's all wrong. But don't worry, because they know what's right. And it's your lucky day. They're going to tell you, but they have to tell you because you don't have the language skills to actually read the word of God. You have to just trust these weird foreign people who may not have your best interest at heart, that what God wants and says in that book is what they're actually telling you. Compare it today and those of you who have a drinking game that every time I mention aliens can drink. Now imagine today that aliens came down. We had that long awaited first contact with Earth. And the aliens didn't destroy us in this first contact. They cured cancer, they gave us green energy, all those good things that could happen, but at the same time, they came with the most disruptive thing they could possibly have. And I have a book that's supposed to be like a scientific book on UFOs. And this is actually one of the things the book has as a reason that the government might want to keep contact with aliens secret. And the reason is what it might do to religious belief. Imagine for a minute, folks, that the aliens have the real Bible, and that's what they say. They say, listen, you people have been dealing with a lot of mumbo jumbo, or you've got the real word of God, but you've got it as it was written for practically chimpanzees. It's no wonder you people can't understand it today. It was written for much more simple people. We have a Bible that's written for scientific intelligence. And people like yourselves, you're almost at the point where you can understand it. Unfortunately, it's written in Alpha Centaurian, but we'll explain it to you. What kind of power does that convey to the people who are going to explain it to you? You just kind of have to take their word for it, don't you? And if you honestly believe this is the word of God, that's a hell of a lot of power. That's the power the church had before Luther translates the Bible into a vernacular language. And believe it or not, there was a huge argument over whether or not this was the smart thing to do. The great thinkers of the age were hashing out the question about whether or not you can trust regular people with this incredibly powerful information. I mean, take the Dutch humanist, a famous guy named Erasmus. There's a quote we have from Erasmus from a letter. He was sort of having like a correspondence debate with another guy over whether or not this was a good idea to let the regular people see the word of God for themselves and not have an interpreter to kind of help them understand it. Here's the quote that I have from Erasmus making his point that he thinks it's a good thing to have regular people reading the Bible, but it kind of shows you how interesting the debate must have been. I strongly disagree with the people who do not want the Bible after it has been translated into everyday language to be read by the uneducated. Did Christ teach such complex doctrines that only a handful of theologians can understand them? Is Christianity strong in proportion to how ignorant men are of it? Royal secrets may be best concealed, but Christ wants his mysteries told to as many as possible. I want the lowliest women to read the Gospels and Paul's letters. I would like to hear a farmer sing scripture as he plows a weaver to keep time to his moving shuttle by humming the Bible. The traveler to make his journey better by such stories. End quote. That was written in 1516, by the way, at the height of these kind of debates. Now what Luther did when he translated the Bible into German was, first of all, break some more of the church's rules. If you were caught with Luther's German Bible in a place where the Catholic Church was powerful, that is a punishable offense. It could get you killed. Think about that for a minute. The modern mind, which is so used to sort of an open kind of information superhighway era, reels at the thought that you could be killed for simply having a Bible in a language you could read because nobody trusted you to read it, right? Here's the problem. Luther is a partial revolutionary. He wants a partial revolution. He wants the church reformed. He doesn't want the social order, you know, uprooted from the bottom up and everything. But the way he sort of conducts his Protestant Reformation opens Pandora's box of religious anarchy and lets loose the forces that create the story that I want to talk about today. Because Luther doesn't just say you can read the Bible for yourself. He says you can interpret it for yourself. And as if that wasn't enough, he says, listen, there's no reason to believe that God has stopped talking to people. After all, we wouldn't have a Bible if God wasn't talking to prophets and important apostles and inspiring people. There's no reason to believe God has stopped such a practice. So it's possible that you could actually have the Holy Spirit talk to you. Maybe you're trying to understand a key verse in the Bible and the Holy Spirit will pop in and make sure you have a better understanding. Think about what that does, though. You've just told everybody that while you have your own interpretation of things and it differs from the Catholic Church, everyone else is allowed to have their own too. Now, this is exactly the sort of heresies the Catholic Church used to be so good at stomping out in the good old days, before there was a Lutheranism. You know, you'd have some weird sect crop up in Bohemia. A bunch of weirdos would decide this is what they believed, and there'd be a couple of thousand of them celebrating their own kind of Catholicism. The Catholic Church would go in there, burn a bunch of people, stamp out the heresy. No big deal. They were good at that. Lutheranism was such a big movement and involved so many powerful people providing sort of an umbrella of COVID for all these heretics, that this became less of a heresy in the Catholic Church and more of an outright schism, the same sort of schism that they had between Catholicism and what became orthodox Christianity in the East. I mean, this was a real breaking of the church and this Protestantism in the places where it sort of Held sway, sort of provided an umbrella of defensive cover for a bunch of people who wanted this revolution. Luther started to go farther than Luther ever anticipated. And because he said you could interpret the Bible for yourself and you might even get guidance from the Holy Spirit, he kind of washed his hands of his ability to control how far this revolution came. After all, Luther can't say that I know what God wants when he just said that you, Joe Schmo, might get a visit from the Holy Spirit. That told you, listen, Luther's right about this and wrong about that, and what you had to feel was just as valid as what Luther had to say. Here's how author of this period and millennial movements and all this sort of stuff, here's how author Norman Cohn describes the obvious loophole in this whole thing that anyone should have seen, but that caught even a guy like Martin Luther by surprise. The Lutheran Reformation was accompanied by certain phenomena which, though they appalled Luther and his associates, were so natural as to appear, in retrospect, inevitable. As against the authority of the church of Rome, the Reformers appealed to the text of the Bible. But once men took to reading the Bible for themselves, they began to interpret it for themselves, and their interpretations did not always accord with those of the reformers. Wherever Luther's influence extended, the priest lost much of his traditional prestige as a mediator between the layman and God and as an indispensable spiritual guide. But once the layman began to feel that he himself stood face to face with God and to rely for guidance on his individual conscience, it was inevitable that some layman should claim divine promptings which ran as much counter to the new as to the old orthodoxy. Luther opened up the possibility for lots of people to claim divine inspiration and reinterpret Christianity for themselves. This is where a group of people called the Anabaptists first arrive on the scene. Anabaptism means rebaptism, or to baptize again. It was one of the fundamental tenets of this offshoot of Protestantism. They're often considered to be a form of Protestant belief, but they're part of something known as the Radical Reformation. So you have the Protestant Reformation, then you have this offshoot called the Radical Reformation. And a lot of the radicals in the Radical Reformation are these Anabaptists folks, these baptizers again. And when you examine their belief system, there's a certain logic to it. They believed that the Catholic practice of baptizing little infants was illegitimate because the little infant had no say or understanding what it was Getting into and to the Anabaptist way of thinking, although there are so many different Anabaptists because they all interpret the Bible differently, that I tread into dangerous waters pretending like there was one overriding belief. So take this with a grain of salt. But in general, their attitude was that one of the reasons you have so many people living in a non Catholic, non religious way is because they never agreed as adults who could really think about this thing that they wanted in the religion. You're just kind of in the religion. When you're born in a Catholic society, in a pre Lutheran Europe, the Anabaptists believe this is something you should enter into with a complete understanding of what you were agreeing to do and how you were agreeing to live. And you'd have a much better world if the only Christians out there were people that got into it, knowing what they were getting into. To kind of logical in that respect. Absolutely life threatening though, in Europe at this time, if you believe this, people who believed the Anabaptist belief system were being killed at an amazing rate during this time period. Even with the COVID provided by this Lutheran, you know, revolution that was going on. And the way Anabaptists were being killed is in the most brutal fashion you can imagine. I mean, the lucky ones are beheaded. As we said at the very beginning of the show, this is a time period where if somebody just cuts your head off, you thank your lucky stars. One of the other methods that was classic in dealing with people who had broken off from Luther's Protestantism and started one of these Anabaptist sects was to drown you. And the way that they would often drown you during this time period is they would strap you to something like a ladder, right? So you're totally tied to the ladder. And then a bunch of people would hold the end of the ladder that you're strapped to and just dunk it down in the water vertically till it was over your head, leave you there for five or ten minutes and then pull you up. Some people jokingly in bad taste referred to this as the third baptism. Because for Anabaptist, the first baptism was the one you got that you didn't agree to as an infant. The second baptism was the real one that counts because you were a grown up person deciding you wanted into the faith knowing everything involved. And then the third baptism was the drowning that the state authorities gave you when they killed you for being an Anabaptist. But by far the most nasty punishment that your average Anabaptist could face was burning at the stake. And what's interesting is there's these falsities of history that crop up sometimes. One of the false truths. False truths of history is that in the early American colonies that a lot of witches were burned. You'll hear about the Salem witch trials and all these people being burned. And the truth of the matter is that in the Americas, almost nobody was ever burned for anything. It was very rare to have anybody burned. And most of these witches were drowned or whatever. Witches, as though it's true. I mean, most of these people accused of witchcraft were drowned or what have you. The place where people got burned in massive numbers and where it happened all the time was Europe in this time period. And a lot of the people who were being burned were Anabaptists. Now, what was happening is that people were starting to convert from Catholicism to Lutheranism. And they didn't even convert. They just sort of adopted Luther's beliefs. And then they would just. Naturally, some of them want to go farther than Luther. And that's where people would stray. You know, first you start as a Catholic priest, for example, as many of these people did. Then you stray into Lutheranism, and then you stray into Anabaptism. And how it often happened was in deciding that Luther's ideas didn't go far enough, you would read the Bible for yourself. And one of the most scary parts of the Bible to the state had to do with this biblical figure of Jesus Christ. The one thing you notice when you read the Bible is that Jesus Christ looks a heck of a lot like a poor person, and he surrounds himself with other poor people and the dregs of society today, we would say prostitutes and homeless people and drug addicts and all. All these. The bad people in society. And he was preaching essentially a certain equality of the sort that in the American Revolution, they will write down, and it will become such an amazingly controversial phrase that all men are created equal. Today, that doesn't sound controversial at all. To a Europe that had extremely set social strata, and the classes were not just immutable theoretically, but divinely ordained, if you were a peasant, you were a peasant because God wanted you to be a peasant, and you would toil and do your job as God dictated in this life, and you would be rewarded in heaven. The Bible showed a place for poor people that seemed to contradict the narrative that people had been taught. Again, maybe why the church didn't want people reading this. It was an Inconvenient truth. Isn't that what Al Gore's global warming book was called? That's what this was. The Bible itself, when translated into the vernacular, where regular people, including poor people, could read it, was like an inconvenient truth to them. And many of these Anabaptists were people that said, we want to take the church back to what it was when Jesus and the apostles were running around. We want to get back to the primitive church. Now, to modern minds, this doesn't sound like that big of a deal. To the medieval and Renaissance mind, it is absolutely revolutionary. And this is the part of the Bible that scared a lot of the educated elite about the idea of letting average people read it. You know, when Erasmus is writing his friend and saying people should be able to read the Bible, it's hard for modern people to understand the point of view of the person arguing against the that except in this period after Luther translates the Bible, you begin to see all these real world things happening that maybe make a good argument for why the people saying don't let them read the Bible might be true. And let me use this as an analogy. Imagine that alien Bible we talked about earlier, that's only in Alpha Centauri. And then you can't read it. Imagine some human Prometheus or some alien turncoat manages to get it translated into a human tongue and we can read it, and we read it. And because of what we actually find out, what God wants and what God doesn't want, it prompts all sorts of unrest and rioting and revolutions on this planet that kill millions. Would you still want it made available, knowing how disruptive it would be? Or would you rather that the aliens keep it to themselves and dole out what they think we're ready for or not? Because in this period when Luther translates the Bible, things are already, as I said, like a tinderbox. Like children playing with BIC lighters near fires with gasoline nearby, and it throws gasoline on the fires that are already burning. Take, for example, just one aspect, something called the Peasants War. The Peasants war started in 1524 and was just the largest of many wars with peasants during this period. For all the reasons we talked about earlier, a lot of reasons peasants would be angry. The vernacular Bible, though, and Luther's rebellion against the Church creates a dynamic that fuels the Peasants Revolt in a way that gives it some religious credibility. The Bible becomes something of a document that they can point to saying, you're wrong, we're right, and you've kept this info from us because you know that Jesus would prefer to have no poor people and no rich people. And Jesus doesn't want a bunch of rulers ruling over people. He thinks every person should be created equal. And these peasants go on a rampage. There's no other way to describe it. And by the time it's done, castles and monasteries are burned and noblemen have been killed and more than a hundred peasants are dead. And the only reason more peasants don't die is because they still need to have some peasants to do all the work. During this uprising, the peasants call for all kinds of things that we would think were rather communistic or at least socialistic today. And by the standards of the time, they're unbelievably revolutionary. I mean, they put out a pamphlet saying that they want voting. Every male should vote. Think about how weird that would be in a medieval society. Every ruler and official should be elected. All corporations and capitalistic organizations should be abolished. They wanted price fixing. They wanted free and compulsory education for everyone. This is so wild to the people of the time period that it becomes a wonderful argument to be able to say, see, I told you this would happen. If you let the regular people see the Bible and interpret it for themselves, this is what you get. As historian Will Durant put the religious revolt offered the tillers of the fields a captivating ideology in which to phrase their demands for a larger share in Germany's growing prosperity. The hardships that had already spurred a dozen rural outbreaks still agitated the peasant mind, and indeed with feverish intensity now that Luther had defied the church, berated the princes, broken the dams of discipline and awe, made every man a priest and proclaimed the freedom of the Christian man. In the Germany of that age, church and state were so closely meshed. Clergymen played so large a role in the social order and civil administration that the collapse of ecclesiastical prestige and power removed a main barrier to revolution. The Waldensians, Beghards, brethren of the common life, had continued an old tradition of basing radical proposals upon biblical texts. The circulation of the New Testament in print was a blow to political as well as to religious orthodoxy. It exposed the compromises that the secular clergy had made with the nature of man and the ways of the world. It revealed the communism of the apostles, the sympathy of Christ for the poor and the oppressed. And in these respects, the New Testament was, for the radicals of this age, a veritable Communist manifesto. Though peasant and proletarian alike found in it divine warrant for dreaming of a utopia where private property would be abolished and the poor would inherit the earth. Luther was rebelling against a religious organization, the Catholic Church. He was a heretic in the minds of the Church. These people who wanted to go farther than Luther wanted to cross the line, farther than just heresy, they wanted to get into sedition too. They wanted to overthrow states and rulers and governments and social orders, and Luther wanted nothing to do with it. When the peasants in the peasants revolt sent notes to Luther basically saying, you know, we did this because of you. We did what you said. We interpreted the Bible the way we want. Now are you with us? Luther said, heck, no, I'm not with you. Look at all these terrible things you're doing. And this whole sharing of goods idea you have. Jesus didn't say that. If you want to be like Jesus and the apostles, you share anything you want to share. If you want to share, you share. This idea that you take someone else's stuff against their will is from Satan. Now, some historians think that this is Luther's compromise to keep from burning at the stake. Because the people that have made Luther invulnerable to, you know, the Pope in Rome are these leaders, the very people who the peasants revolt and other revolts are saying need to go. If Luther says, yeah, they need to go too, you can kiss his protection that keeps him from, you know, being part of a Martin Luther barbecue goodbye. So who knows if he's making these concessions because he really believes it or if it just would keep him alive. But he essentially makes the break during this time period. And this is when you get magisterial Protestantism solidified, establishment Protestantism. He's a heretic, but he's not a seditionary. The Anabaptists often are seditious. And it's this seditiousness either because they want to overthrow the governments and create a more, you know, Christ friendly world, or because they won't cooperate with what the state requires. They won't serve in the military, they won't take oaths, they won't do these things that prompt the Holy Roman emperor in 1529 to issue a decree calling for the extermination of Anabaptists wherever they can be found. Men, men, women, children over the age of reason, as it was called. Which is a kind of a slippery slope question there. I mean, I'm sure some very young children were put to death because of this. But the Anabaptists are so dangerous that the state's after them now. And it's one of the few subjects you can get the magisterial Protestants and the Catholics to agree upon. They both dislike the Anabaptists. The difference is, though, the Lutherans have a hard time sometimes determining when someone has crossed the line from simply Lutheran to, you know, a couple extra dangerous innovations. And now they're an Anabaptist. And this worked in the Anabaptist's favor. Oftentimes, by the time rulers realized they had Anabaptist preachers in their midst, those people who had been sort of hiding under the umbrella of Lutheranism had already spread their dangerous ideas to a lot of their followers. So even if the state managed to snuff out the original transmitter of the Anabaptist ideas in their territory, the people that he had infected already were out there spreading the disease even farther. And if you wanted to be like a historical disease investigator, you can trace the actual lines from this person, contaminated this person, to contaminated this person. I mean, for example, there's a whole branch of Anabaptism, which is the one that's important for this story, that's much more violent than most of the other sects of Anabaptism. And it's interesting because it starts with a initial germ that's not very violent at all. A guy in the Netherlands known as Melkor Hoffman. And sometimes this branch of Anabaptism is known as Melkorism. Hoffman wasn't violent, but he was a guy who preached that violence was coming soon. He's one of these millennial type figures who says that the end of the world is nigh. I mean, you can imagine him with one of those signs that says the end of the world is coming. He doesn't believe in violence in order to achieve the end of the world. He simply believes that when it comes, there's going to be a lot of violence associated with it. There was a pervasive belief system, especially amongst these Melkorites, that 1533 was going to be a huge year. 1533, according to their calendars, marked five centuries since Christ had died on the cross. And some of these people, like Mel Gore Hoffman, thought that this was the trigger that was going to bring on the end times. This was going to be the Book of Revelation. This was going to be Judgment Day. This was going to be Christ returning to earth. This was going to be 144,000 saved saints, and everybody else was going to be horribly killed and tortured and all these terrible things. In other words, Melkor Hoffman didn't believe in violence. He simply thought it was coming. And like a lot of people, you know, he'd walk around saying, you know, you need to be saved before time runs out. Unlike most other people, he had A date when he thought time was running out. You know, you hear these people that talk about, well, eventually Jesus is coming back to Earth, but they don't really tell you when. Melkor Hoffman said it was going to be in 1534, which is a big deal if he's telling you this in 1533. What's more, Melkor Hoffman told you where it was going to happen. You have to like the specificity of this guy. He says it's going to happen in the German city of Strasbourg. In other words, he's basically out there advertising for what you might be able to call Judgment Day Palooza. You know, be there, Strasburg, 1534. Get your tickets now. We'll all meet up there and we'll be part of the 144,000 saved saints. But Mel Korhoffman would never make it it to the Judgment Day in Strasbourg to find out, because he gets to Strasbourg along with hundreds of his followers who are now clearly Anabaptist, and they're arrested, as you might expect. I mean, after all, the emperor has already said these people should be exterminated the minute you can identify him. Hoffman must have been such an interesting dude because he's not executed. He's simply locked in a tower for the rest of his life, which is a very unusual punishment for an Anabaptist. So there must have been something very charismatic or special or, you know, you know, they would have said at the time, saintly about the guy that saved his life. But it didn't save the life of a lot of his followers who were executed, exiled, all these terrible things. But he'd managed to infect with this intellectual contagion of his own melkorite strain of this virus of Anabaptism, a bunch of other people. These people had determined that their prophet like leader, Melkor Hoffman, had made two mistakes. His general ideas were completely correct. His mistakes were he got the timing wrong. It was going to happen a little bit later this Judgment Day than he had predicted. He also got the city wrong. Wasn't going to happen in Strasbourg. Was going to happen to the north of Strasbourg in the Westphalian German city of Munster. Which brings us to the story I've spent more than an hour setting up for you. The German city of Munster is the perfect place to choose as an end of the world site, if you're looking at it in the early 1530s, because it is so clearly the spot where the dynamite and the gasoline are stored near the fireplace and the tinder roof is ready to be struck by lightning and the wiring isn't up to code, and all that stuff we keep talking about. Munster is a disaster waiting to happen. And it's had a couple of false starts towards explosions already. So if you're a betting person and you wanted to proclaim the end of the world was going to happen somewhere, Munster was like an odds on favorite already. The city was divided. Munster fell into this weird realm that most cities didn't fall in during the Protestant Reformation. Most cities were either reliably in a Catholic zone or reliably in a Lutheran zone. Munster's one of those cities that's sort of in the middle. And there's a constant struggle inside and outside the city over who's going to dominate. The city is nominally Catholic. On paper, it's ruled by a prince bishop, they're called, but he doesn't live inside the city. The people that do live inside the city have a bunch of interesting city organizations and structures that they've managed to win over the years. For example, they have a town council, which is unusual in Germany. Not unheard of, but unusual. And the town council was sort of a bomb that was thrown to the city of Munster after the peasants revolt as a way to sort of calm people down. Hey, don't worry, you know, you have a little self rule here. Here's a town council. The town council itself was a representation of the changing times. It had some noblemen on it, but it also had a bunch of these powerful nouveau riche corporate types, had a bunch of people who were representatives of the ever increasingly powerful guilds out there in medieval Germany. The guilds are like a combination of a modern day labor union and a modern day chamber of commerce. It's kind of like an organization of both workers and the people who own the businesses that those workers work in. They are a rising power. And so this town council in Munster tends to lean Lutheran. The people who nominally run the city, the prince bishop obviously leans Catholic. And over the late 1520s, early 1530s, you have tons of little skirmishes and squabbles and moments where it seems like Munster is going to explode. But the city also has a wonderful civic togetherness, I guess you could say, where they're very proud of their independence and their city and they seem to like one another. I mean, you really get this feeling that, you know, just before everything explodes, the people of Munster are able to pull together at the last minute, you know, remove the fat from the fire before it starts burning, all in the name of civic pride. And then a guy Shows up to Munster, really returns back to Munster, who almost makes it his life purpose to put a monkey wrench into those repair efforts every time the fat's about to be pulled out of the fire. The guy's name is Bernard Rothman. If I had to describe Rothman's role in this story, the only thing I keep coming back to is a line that baseball player Reggie Jackson told the media after he was traded to the New York Yankees in the 1970s. And the media said, what do you see your role on the team chemistry as being? And Jackson thought for a moment. He says, I'm the straw that stirs the drink. That's what Bernard Rothman is in the city of Munster. Bernard Rothman is the guy that every time tensions die down between Lutherans and Catholics in the city, Rothman stirs them up again. His favorite thing to do, if I had to put a favorite on any of the activities he participated in, was to go after the worship of idols and icons. And this is a fabulously interesting aspect to both Lutheranism, but also Anabaptism and also radical Islam and a bunch of other back to basics versions of religions of the Book, as they're called, biblically religions that sort of stem from the old Hebrew Bible, because there's this prohibition in there about worshiping any false gods, any idols, you know, the whole story of the golden calf from the Old Testament and all that. But basically what Lutherans, and especially Anabaptists claimed the Catholic Church had started doing over the eras was worshiping things that were not God worshiping, for example, icons, worshiping saintly artifacts, worshiping Mary, worshipping stained glass windows and altars and all these kinds of things. Things. And in order to get back to basics, one of the things the Lutherans tended to do was have these very plain churches where you didn't have all the gold and valuable stuff and murals on the walls and all these things. People like Rothman would go in there and exhort his followers to break into Catholic churches in the city of Munster and destroy all this stuff. I mean, if you have a saintly relic in there, maybe the bones of some saint from 200 years ago, they'd go in there and they'd break them open in front of the Catholic worshipers and start stomping on the bones. It wasn't because they didn't believe that this person was an important figure in their religion, but it shouldn't have been worshiped. And again, you can see amazing similarities between that and what you see. Some of the most radical fundamentalist Islamic groups out there in the Middle east doing today, when they will destroy the. The tombs in Timbuktu or statues that are ancient in places like Afghanistan, and the whole world will freak out because they'll say that this is a World Heritage Site and these people are destroying world history, but to them, they're destroying a false God, something that's being worshipped and venerated when you're not supposed to do that. It's the exact same argument that some Lutherans and almost all Anabaptists used when they did similar things. And just when the city of Munster would die down and everybody would mellow out before, you know, something bad happened, Rothman would go in there and do something like this that just made. I mean, people imagine if it happened in your situation, even if somebody just came into your house and started tearing things up. Well, Bernard Rothman was tearing things up. These Catholic people venerated pretty hard to stay peaceful when things are already at a fever pitch and somebody comes in and starts stomping on the bones of your favorite saints. Now, I think while we could all sort of understand how we might feel about having our favorite saint's bones stomped on, a lot of the stuff that Protestants and Catholics were willing to kill each other over seemed like tiny little disagreements, little doctrinal disagreements to most people. Like I said, I'm sure you can still find Catholics and Protestants who'd be willing to almost kill people about this. But most people can't quite get the fervor that medieval and early Renaissance folks were able to get over questions like, take. I'll give you an example of one of the ones that drove people nuts on both sides of this issue. Whether or not the communion wafer that you would eat when you were given Mass or the wine that you would drink were really changed into the body and blood of Christ. Protestants said it wasn't, Catholics said it was. And this was big. In fact, Bernard Rothman would get up there and say, these papist Catholics are profaning our God with this Mass where they say they're eating our God and all this. And the town council, which had a lot of Lutherans on it, would say, bernard Rothman makes a very good point. Let's prohibit that in this city. And then all of a sudden, Catholic people can't have Mass. This happened over and over again. So the Catholics in the town would go to the prince bishop and say, we can't even do Mass anymore. We're sinful. We can't do our religion. We're not able to be Catholics in the city of Munster anymore. And the prince bishop would then say, listen, you have to let these people practice religion or we're going to have a real problem. And many times it almost came to blows. One time the prince bishop had to put the entire city under siege and lockdown until the town council would, you know, say, okay, we'll let them do their little mass thing and we won't make a big deal. The only thing they wouldn't give on is the church. Many times said, get that Bernard Rothman off the preacher's platform. He's dangerous. Don't let him preach anymore. He's not just a Lutheran, he's a Lutheran. Plus a couple of dangerous innovations and that the town council wouldn't do. They protected Bernard Rothman. In fact, they even gave him a bodyguard to make sure nothing happened to him. The main guy who was his ally was the most powerful person on the town council. He's the second guy in this story you have to know. His name is Bernard Nipperdolling. Bernard Nipperdolling is one of the people who is tied to the stake on that execution platform in January 1536. Bernard Nipperdolling is an extremely powerful, non noble figure in the city. He's a cloth merchant who's gotten very rich. He's got outlets all over northern Germany and the Netherlands. He's a powerful leader of the local guilds and they've put him on the town council. And he uses his power as a Lutheran town council member to keep Bernard Rothman out of trouble. These two figures are sometimes called the two Bernards in this story. Bernard Rothman and Bernard Nipperdolling. And together they make Munster a place of constant potential turmoil. Constantly waiting for some little spark to get the inferno going. And every time things die down, the straw that stirs the drink, Bernard Rothman stirs him up again. And Bernard Nipperdolling makes it possible for him to do so. This situation goes back and forth until someone from up north, where the Anabaptists are secretly in large numbers. Places like the Netherlands are like hotbeds for underground Anabaptism. That's where Melkor Hoffman did a lot of his preaching, set a lot of those seeds apart and they're spreading the intellectual contagion. And eventually a guy named Jan van Leyden, John of Leiden, John Bockelson, Jan Bockelson, those are all names for the same character, shows up in the city of Munster. And this is when the spark hits the flame. Now this Jan van Leyden character is aware of something that even most of the people in Munster are not aware of. He's aware that the city of Munster is beginning to lean in the Anabaptist direction because he's been getting constant pamphlets sent to him from Bernard Rothman and Bernard Nipperdolling. Bernard Nipperdolling has a printing press, and Bernard Rothman is using it to take his sermons that he gives to the people inside the city, print them out, and then send them all over northern Germany in the Netherlands so that other people can read them. And slowly but surely, he's throwing more and more Anabaptist thought into his nominally Lutheran sermons. He's starting to talk more and more about the evils of infant baptism. He's starting to throw more stuff into his sermons about how bad private property is. This is an Anabaptist thing right there. I mean, once you start talking about the pseudo God based communism stuff, that's a dead Anabaptist giveaway. And it happens so slowly inside the city that maybe the people there don't realize it's Anabaptist talk. But when Jan van Leyden up in the Netherlands gets these pamphlets printed by Bernard Rol and Bernard Nipperdahling, he knows not just that he knows Bernard Rothman because they both were up there being infected by Melkor Hoffman at one point. He knows that Bernard Rothman's got the Anabaptist germ and he and his mentor are looking at Munster as the real site of the second coming. Melkor Hoffman was wrong about Strasbourg in 1534, but he was right about Judgment Day approaching. Jan van Leyden and his mentor, another Jan. These are known as the two Jans. Jan van Leyden and another guy named Jan Matthias are the ones who have moved Judgment Day palooza from Strasbourg to Munster. And Jan van Leyden shows up in Munster as sort of the advance man for the, you know, Day of Judgment festivities. Now, Jan van Leyden did not show up in Munster until Munster was perfectly set up foundationally for his arrival. That's what Bernard Rothman had been doing all this time. He'd been sending out these pamphlets now for some time of the sort that Van Leyden read too, where he's telling poor people all over northern Germany and Holland and all these places come to Munster, we're going to get rid of private property. I mean, in my community they argue all the time and in places like San Francisco, whether or not you attract more poor people, if you offer more services for the poor, if you don't Denude your surrounding cities of poor people who then come to your area because it's a better life for them if they do well. Munster's secret pamphlets are telling poor people all over the region, come to Munster. We're going to start sharing property. If some of the people inside this city have their way, imagine what that does. Lots of poor people begin flocking to Munster, which changes the internal demographics of the city. Remember, you had this rough balance between Protestants and Lutherans, who all had this real civic pride that kept things from exploding. Now you have a whole bunch of outsiders who are disproportionately poor, who do not have this feeling of civic pride, because they aren't Muensterites arriving in the city, because Bernard Rothman keeps putting out these secret pamphlets. Now, I've told you earlier, I have very few actual books on this subject in English. One of them, though, is written by a guy named Anthony Arthur. And allow me to quote from him, and I'll probably quote from him disproportionately during the show, and probably use less quotes than normal in this show, because I don't have them in English. But here's what he says about Bernard Rothman's sermons that are being printed out in pamphlets and then sent to all these regions that only a few years ago had exploded into a murderous peasants war because there were so many poor people who felt that the system locked them into poverty. Author Anthony Arthur writes this. Rothman's sermons and other leaflets printed by Nipperdolling had been circulating throughout Holland, Frisia, northern Germany. In them, Rothman explained, among other topics, that much human misery stemmed from the idea of private property. The very idea of owning anything, of thinking in terms of this is mine and that is yours was evil. God had made all things in common. He's quoting Rothman here. Now, as today, we can still enjoy air, fire, rain and the sun in common, and whatever else some thieving, tyrannical man cannot grasp for himself. Now quoting the author again, Rothman temptingly portrayed Munster as a rich city that was now prepared to share its wealth with all who came to it as members of the company of Christ. He invited and urged those who could contribute to its holy mission to join him, bringing with them only the weapons they would need to defend the new Kingdom of Zion, as he called it, against the ungodly. Throughout 1533, hundreds and finally thousands of the wretched, the dispossessed and the desperate read Rothman's word and made their way to Munster. As they came in nervous Catholic Citizens and others who had the means to leave the city began to do so. End quote. This change in demographics began to affect the town council. New elections were demanded by the residents of the city, and the newcomers tipped the election against the Catholics. So whereas before you had a town council evenly divided between Catholics and Lutherans, after the election of 1533, the town council was still divided, but now it was divided between Lutherans and Lutherans that were so radical, they could be described as Anabaptist sympathizers. This change in the city's religious demographics seems to embolden people like Bernard Rothman to more openly declare their Anabaptist beliefs. And it's easy to kind of understand why. I mean, imagine being one of these Anabaptist people and living your life underground, meeting in secret, you know, occasionally being found out and having, you know, members of your belief system or even maybe your extended family, you know, pulled out and beheaded or drowned or burned at the stake. I mean, to be a persecuted religious minority. And then all of a sudden, it seems like this one city with very strong walls and double moats and a river that runs through it providing food and water if they're besieged, all of a sudden it seems like you have one city where your kind can practice their faith in relative safety. It must have been an intoxicating sort of belief. Think about how Jews must have felt during the many pogroms that have impacted them during their history. Or take the most outrageous pogrom of all, the Holocaust. Imagine being Jewish, you know, the year after the Nazi regime falls and the Holocaust. Details become understood, and you find out that the Jewish people are in search of and maybe have found a place where they can have a Jewish state. Wouldn't you feel a little like, okay, finally, a place where we can have sanctuary? That's how many of these Anabaptists must have felt, reading the writings that Bernard Rothman was sending out all over northern Germany into the Netherlands, and all these places with these hidden anatomies, Anabaptists hiding throughout the populations. The thing is that somewhere along the line, though, you see, Rothman has become a specific kind of Anabaptist. Remember, I told you this is like an intellectual contagion. And every new preacher who gets their hands on it seems to mutate the germ a little bit their own way. When Melkor Hoffman says that Judgment day palooza is coming to Strasbourg and gets locked up for his trouble, his entire flock sort of turns to his second in command, I guess you could say the person who inherits the mantle of the prophet from Melkor Hoffman. That other Jan, Jan Mathias and Jan Matthias instantly puts his own genetic twist on the intellectual contagion and takes Melkor Hoffman's peaceful Anabaptist views that the second coming, you know, is on the way and we should peacefully wait for it and puts a violent, dangerous spin on it, saying, yes, the second coming is on the way, but we should do everything we can to foster it, help it along, and oh yeah, if we can, we should get rid of the unrighteousness before the second coming arrives. Kill the unbelievers. Now I want to stress once again that this Jan Matthias particular genetic twist on the intellectual contagion is unusual and that most Anabaptists are very peaceful types. But now you have this strain of violent millennialist Anabaptist thinking, and Bernard Rothman is one of the people who's been infected with that strain of the intellectual virus. There's a guy named Hermann von Kirstenbrock, German writer, 13 years old. When all this goes down in Munster, and he lives through it, it as an older person. Realizing that this is the greatest historical event he's ever going to live through, he decides to write his version of the tale. And he's the only primary source I have of the events in Muenster during this time period. Now we need to take him with a grain of salt for two reasons. One, by the time he writes this story, it's decades after the events have happened. Although, to give him credit, he does go back and pull all these records and treaties and agreements and all these things, and he becomes the only source we have for some of those things, for all these events. So he does his research. But the other reason to take him with a grain of salt is that he's a Catholic and he dislikes Lutherans and he hates Anabaptists. He blames these people for everything he had to live through during this period. But even with his biases, we can learn things. We can learn things about the attitudes of the people who were viewing the Anabaptists and such from outside their religion. And you can listen to the things he slams the Anabaptists for. And from the modern perspective, sometimes it's very illuminating. He'll slam them for appealing to the poor and to the commons. And he kind of sneers when he talks about the commons and he sneers when he talks about the Anabaptists. Believing that people are equal, he buys into this medieval class system. Whereas Bernard Rothman, one of the faults he charges Bernard Rothman with. With are the very faults we moderns in places like the United States take for granted. This idea that all men are created equal and all this kind of stuff. This is the kind of stuff von Kersenbrock uses to indict Bernard Rothman. He believes all that kind of stuff. Listen to what he says Rothman says in this pivotal speech in 1533, the speech where Rothman kind of comes out of the closet. The demographics in Munster have swung so much to the Anabaptist side that Rothman feels now that he can kind of openly use some of these code words that show that he's not a radical Lutheran with a few extra innovations. He's really an Anabaptist. And Bernard Nipperdolling will take this sermon, print it up, and send it out to all these Anabaptist areas, leading to even more Anabaptists coming to Munster and swinging the religious demographic even more in his favor. Rothman's done a masterful job throughout 1533, turning Munster into a city that's wide open for Anabaptist settlement, even as the prince bishop who rules the city is killing as many of these Anabaptists as he can get his hands on. Here's von Kirstenbrock's rundown of the speech by Bernard Rothman given in the second half of 1533. And you can hear the strains of violent millennial thinking that come from Jan Matthias teachings up in the Netherlands. Here's what Kersenbrock to make his doctrine correspond to his habits, he urged the people to perform acts of mercy and clamored in all his sermons that it was necessary to live in a restrained manner. He told them that they should enjoy their property in common, help one another with mutual good turns, live in a friendly way among themselves, and embrace each other in mutual love. Love. No one was to exalt himself above another, for no one was superior to another, since they were all brothers and sisters, and they were all invited on an equal basis to the life eternal. Although the other preachers constantly prattled on about the Gospel, he said their doctrine was nonetheless not evangelical. Rather, it was some foolish persuasion, since its works are not good fruits. The Papist dregs had also contaminated the doctrine of good words with the filth of human enactments and ceremonies. Thus, there was virtually no healthy doctrine, and the whole world was corrupt and placed in evil. And for this reason the world would soon be set upon by a horrible and inevitable disaster which no one would escape except God's elect who were marked out with the sign of the covenant to a man. The rest would die of lethal punishments, being uprooted from the face of the earth with cruel death. This would be the end of the world. But the last judgment would follow a thousand years later at the end of the world. Once the impious were suppressed. God's elect who were marked out with the sign of the Covenant would for 1000 years have Christ as their leader and live a new and blessed life on earth without law, without ruler, without marriage. End quote. Look at how seditious that is. To someone of the medieval mentality all men are created equal. Well, heresy. Some men have blue blood, some men are rich, some men are poor, and that's God's will. A person like Kirsten Brock would have believed this idea that you're going to live without law. Well that's sedition right there, isn't it? Even Martin Luther condemned stuff like that. Now none of that's so violent. That's basically the teachings of Melkor Hoffman right there. There's going to be a last judgment and the people who convert to the right faith will be saved. Okay, so sort of peaceful Anabaptist thinking. Here's where Rothman though goes off the Yan Matthias, you know, and you gotta take out the sword side of violent Anabaptist thinking. Kirstenbruck continues again citing this important speech by Bernard Rothman in 1533, quote, talking about Rothman, he kept saying that this destruction of the impious would take place soon since the heavenly Father had even now sent out his angels and ministers whom the people saw in person. And these would roam the world to mark out with the sign of the covenant the elect of God who were scattered everywhere so that they should be snatched away from the impending affliction. Those marked out were to be summoned from the four corners of the earth to a single place. And there their leader Christ would place in their hands the sword of vengeance with which to wipe out the impious. The pious would draw this sword against those not marked out with the sign of the covenant so that the memory of them should disappear from the face of the earth and the pious should live tranquilly. In other words, these apostles of Jan Matthias, the person who'd taken the peaceful ideas of Melkor Hoffman and turned them into violent ones, they were going to go find all of the Anabaptists who thought like this, bring them to a single place, Muenster, and there's where the cleansing of the world, you know, eliminating the impious was going to happen so that the pious could then live tranquilly. This is a violent doctrine, doctrine, folks, but you can't blame them in a sense. You could almost look at this as one strand of the Anabaptist belief system saying the rest of the Anabaptists can be peaceful lambs if they want to, but we're not taking this anymore. No one's going to burn us at the stake anymore and not have us fight back. It's understandable. But it was probably anything but understandable for the longtime residents, both Catholic and moderate Lutherans, of Munster. To them, their city was being taken over, and it was happening rather quickly. For example, they wake up one morning in late 1533 to find out that 1400 of their fellow citizens have been baptized rebaptized in a mere week. The city population is something between 9 and 15,000. So 1400 being rebaptized in a week is huge. Those people have signed their death warrant. The Prince Bishop is killing people for far less than this right outside the city walls. The Lutherans and Catholics inside the city must have wondered how much they were going to be charged with the equivalent of being an accessory to a capital crime. And the fact that so many people could be re baptized so quickly is sort of one of the reasons this idea of an intellectual contagious virus works so well with the animals. Because once an Anabaptist was rebaptized, they then had the power and authority to rebaptize others. So it tended to happen rather quickly. What's more, there were a lot of nuns in the city who had recently thrown off their habits and left the convent. You know, one of the keys to understanding the situation in Munster is all of the defrocked nuns. Because what happened is Bernard Rothman went up to their monastery one day and started reading from the German Bible in a language those nuns could understand, saying, you're not supposed to be these virgin nuns. You're supposed to get out here and be fruitful and multiply. And as many of the sources point out, a lot of these girls didn't want to be nuns to begin with. They're there for the educational opportunities, or they're orphans, or their parents thought that they were wayward girls. I mean, if you were a boy crazy girl in the Middle Ages, you often found yourself inside a convent. And here was, was one of these August preachers telling you that that boy craziness you have is what God meant you to have, and he means you to act on it. Get out here, throw off your habits and join the crowd. And many of them did. And some of these nuns became the most enthusiastic supporters the Anabaptists had. Now, in that speech that Kirstenbrock quotes Rothman as making, Rothman mentions that already these angels, these prophets. Prophets. Are wandering around the city and that the people inside Munster can see them, while one of them introduces himself in dramatic, theatrical fashion on February 8, 1534. And it shouldn't surprise anyone that he does it this way, because the guy has a background in acting. He's Jan van Leyden, one of these two Jans that we've been talking about, a failed actor, failed bar owner, failed capitalist, failed tailor, merely 24 years old at this time. He's failed in a lot in a very short lifespan. But he's movie star, handsome, full of charisma, and has a great understanding how to make a dramatic entrance. And on February 8, he makes one with Bernard Nipperdolling. He's been staying in Nipper Doling's house secretly. And on the 8th of February, they burst out of the front door of Nipper Dolling's house into the market square, because Nipper Darling had this beautiful grand house right in downtown Munster. And when he bursts out of the square, he and Nipper Darling are foaming at the mouth. They are screaming, repent, Repent. Come to your senses. And they're saying that the Second Coming is nigh, and it has a reaction on the city population that is, you can't even imagine it a few years before. The reaction that you get is a sign of how many Anabaptists have arrived in Munster, because the people in the town square freak out. Hermann von kersenbrock is there, 13 years old, with his friends. And they watch, stunned. They think, by the way, Kirsenbruck thinks Nipperdahlling and Van Lyden are faking it, but they think the population has been drugged. That's one of Kirsenbrach's theories anyway, because they are foaming at the mouth, throwing themselves on the dirty medieval roads and writhing around and forming crosses with their body, and everyone is seeing, like, visions in the sky. What's going on here? Could be mass hysteria, could be the power of suggestion, could be a legitimate religious experience. Von Kersenbrock thinks Rothman has probably slipped a drug into the city, you know, water or food. That's one of his theories anyway, and he says Rothman's perfectly capable of it. Now, what could Rothman have put in the city food that would do this to people? Well. Well, there's Something called, in the medieval world, St. Anthony's Fire. And St. Anthony's Fire was known to occasionally strike in certain cities. And when it did, those cities would go mad for days at a time. And modern day science thinks that the culprit is ergot poisoning. Ergot is a fungus that grows on rye. And if your rye that you make bread with is contaminated with ergot, you can have a reaction similar to an LSD experience, because the chemical makeup of ergot and LSD are not that dissimilar. So you have these cities from time to time that would freak out with this St. Anthony's fire. Kirstenbrock is suggesting that Rothman has the ability to do that to a city. And it certainly would explain a lot if that's what happened. Nonetheless, we don't know why it happened. We simply know that it's one more thing that freaks out the locals. Because if they didn't think 1400 baptisms in a week was bad enough to have people foaming at the mouth, seeing visions in the sky, throwing themselves on the ground in the shape of crosses, the Catholics, the few who are left, and even the moderate Lutherans are beginning to think it's high time to get out. If they weren't sure about that. The fact that the Anabaptists then go from this religious experience to taking over the town hall and the marketplace on that same day should have been a sign of things to come. Instead of banding together and overthrowing the Anabaptist threat because they were still a minority in the city, the town council recognizes what's called the principle of liberty of conscience. In other words, they legally recognize the right of the Anabaptists in Munster to be Anabaptist. This goes totally against what the Prince Bishop is preaching. He's busy writing letters right now to all the other rulers in the region saying, you have no idea how dangerous this is. These are a bunch of people telling poor people all over northern Germany and the Netherlands to come here. And as soon as, you know, Christ returns to earth, we're going to share everything. He's scared to death of another peasants war, of a class uprising. And here the town council in Munster has just told these outlaw Anabaptists, these same people who are being killed by the Prince Bishop outside the protective walls, that we are legally recognizing you. This is a sign to anyone who doesn't want to be, you know, lumped in with the Anabaptists whenever the authorities get a hold of the city again, that it's time to go. Here's how author Norman Cohn explains the the Anabaptists thus won legal recognition for their already large and powerful community. Many well to do Lutherans, alarmed at the prospect of ever increasing pressure from their opponents, withdrew from the town with all their movable belongings. The majority of the remaining population was Anabaptist, and the messengers and manifestos were sent out urging the Anabaptists in nearby towns to come with their families to Munster. The rest of the earth, it was announced, was doomed to be destroyed before Easter, but Munster would be saved and would become the new Jerusalem. Food, clothes, money and accommodation would be ready for the immigrants on their arrival. But they were to bring arms. The summons met with a vigorous response from as far afield as Frisia and Brabant Anabaptist stream to Munster until the number of newcomers exceeded those of the Lutheran emigrants. As a result, in the annual election for the town council on February 23, an overwhelmingly Anabaptist body was elected, with Bernard Nipperdahling as one of the two burgomasters. On the following days, monasteries and churches were looted, and in a nocturnal orgy of iconoclasm, the sculptures and paintings and books of the cathedral were destroyed. End quote. In other words, on February 1, 1534, the city is much as it had been. By the end of February, the Anabaptists are in control. And that's when Jan Matthias, the actual prophet who took the peaceful Judgment Day ideas of his mentor and turned them into a Mansonesque, violent we're going to kill all the unbeliever sort of belief system arrives in Munster himself. Now, of all the people in this story, Jan Matthias might be the one that fascinates me the most. Most. First of all, he looks like something that belongs on the COVID of a Led Zeppelin album. Tall, gaunt, bald, but with a big, long black beard that goes all the way to his waist. He dresses only in black, in these hooded cloaks with, like a rope belt. Big, huge head, huge eyes. He looks like an Old Testament preacher, and that's kind of what he's going for. Look wise. To make the whole contrast between sort of his darkness even more apparent, he travels with his wife, who's 20 years younger than he is. She's a former nun who, like many nuns, has left the convent for, you know, this new approach to religion. She dresses all in white. She's beautiful. And the two of them go around together all the time. And so you have this remarkable contrast between this tall, ugly, scary, dark dude dressed in Black. And this beautiful ex nun, 20 years younger than him, wife dressed all in white. Yan Matthias is the epitome of how things can get out of hand with a doctrine like Luther's idea that you can actually be inspired by the Holy Spirit. I think what Luther was talking about is the occasional burning bush sign from God that you read about in the Bible every now and then. That very extraordinary page people could get once in a bazillion years. Yan Matthias doesn't talk to God that way. Yan Matthias has like a walkie talkie to God that's always going. Now I have this impression of him that's like half Charles Manson and half Exidore from Mork and Mindy. And I didn't want to bring up the Exidore thing because it's one of these analogies that only like 1% of the audience is going to get. So it's not a very smart one to use. But in my mind, that's how I always see him. Mork and Mindy was a show where an alien had come down to earth and it was a comedy and Mork was this alien. But the fun you have with the show is that Mork doesn't understand what's normal and what's not. So he's constantly getting into these situations where really abnormal things are treated normally by him because he doesn't know the difference. And he runs into one of those, you know, the end of the world is nigh repent kind of crazy people, you know, who's trying to get a whole bunch of people together to flee to Venus when the world ends up. A guy who continually talks to an invisible entity that isn't there, has arguments with him. The invisible entity interrupts him sometimes. This is Exidor, and that's what Jan Matthias is like. He doesn't just talk to God. God's like standing behind him and occasionally interrupts with him. And sometimes Matthias will start talking to him, you know, out of the blue. And he doesn't really need to read the Bible, even though it sounds like he can quote it at length. He can just turn around over his shoulder and say, now what did you mean by that? And how would you approach the situation? Okay. And he does this many times in the story. I mean, if there's ever a controversy, he'll turn around, have a quick little walkie talkie conversation with the invisible entity that's not there, and then turn around and go, okay, God and I are agreed. That's all right. I mean, it's a fascinating situation. Jan Matthias is a religious fanatic. In a time where almost anyone, if you brought them in a time capsule back here, would be considered a religious fanatic. You bring, you pluck any of those people from medieval Germany, bring them to now, they're going to appear like a religious fanatic to us. Jan Matthias is a person that appeared like a religious fanatic to them. I think it's fair to say he was probably insane and again, difficult to tell during this time period. One wonders how many clinically insane people got into high positions of power over the era. Matthias seems to me to be, as I said, Mansonesque and like exodor. I mean, to me he seems totally insane. To the people of Munster, he was the return of a biblical prophet. He and Jan van Leyden together with the second coming of Elijah and Enoch, they were going to usher in the new age. And the new age wasn't some nice Jesus turn the other cheek sort of, you know, render under Caesar what is Caesar's New Testament stuff. Yan Matthias is a preacher who invokes the Old Testament. He sees his Anabaptist followers as akin to, you know, the Jews as the chosen people of the Old Testament God. But now it's these Anabaptists that are the chosen people. And the God they worship is a fire and brimstone and pillar assault God. This isn't a God that turns the other cheek when somebody wrongs you. This is a God that strikes your enemies down. Yon Matthias is preaching death and repentance before the second coming. And those who are not part of the chosen people are going to be horribly killed. And Matthias wants it that way. In fact, one of the first things he does when he arrives in the city of Munster is tell his followers they need to kill everyone in the city who's not Anabaptist right now. This happens near the end of February 1534, and Bernard Nipperdolling is horrified by what Jan Matthias has said. When Jan Matthias says, we need to kill all your neighbors and all these people. You know, Bernard Nipperdahling, you served as their representative on the town council. Now you have to help us kill them. He goes up to Matthias and tries to talk him out of it. He says, listen, if you kill all these people, you're going to turn all of Germany against us. It's a great way to get the entire country mobilized. I mean, we will be snuffed out before anything even get started. And Matthias, in one of those wonderful moments, listens to what Nipper Darling says and then turns around and has one of these conversations with God where they kind of, well, what do you think about this God? And then he turns back to Nipper Darling and says, okay, we'll just exile them. And that's what they do. One morning, The Chronicles say, February 27, 1534. The Anabaptists with weapons go door to door first thing in the morning at like sunrise and start rousing their neighbors. Anyone who's Catholic is immediately tossed out of the city. You're not allowed to take anything either. You have to just leave all your stuff, all your wealth, and remember, this is an era where people didn't have a lot of electronic funds, didn't have a lot of money in the bank, didn't have stocks. What you owned and had accrued over not just your lifestyle, but perhaps what you'd inherited from your family over the eras, the accrued wealth of your entire family for who knows how long, stays behind. Just to make matters worse, it happens to be a snowy, sleeting day and they're throwing people out with just the clothes on their back. And of course, you have the traditional stories of women who've just given birth and pregnant women and all these people being thrown out onto the roads, you know, starving, whatever. Now, some of the Lutherans are given the choice of converting. Now, think about this for a second. These are people who already had the choice of converting. So one assumes that if they had leaned Anabaptism already, they would have converted. But the message that's being sent by these Anabaptists who are taking over the city, let's not mince words here, is that if you want to keep your stuff, you can, but you've got to be re baptized and become one of us. Now, this is a weird idea considering the fact that the Anabaptists are very soon going to say, we're all going to share everybody's stuff. But that's essentially what a lot of people get out of this message. If I want to keep my stuff, my house, all of my things, I need to be rebaptized. And some people are. Maybe they figure, I'll just do this now when the whole thing blows over, you know, I'll still have my stuff. I'm seeing what's happening to my neighbors. But a lot of Lutherans, you know, leave the city as well now as you might expect from human behavior. Some people stay anyway. They simply don't want to leave everything that they've accrued, you know, through maybe generations of wealth hoarding. And they won't Leave. And Jan Matthias begins to preach in the city that these people then must be killed. I allowed everybody else to leave voluntarily, but these people who insist upon staying need to be wiped out. And he gives public speeches about this. Here's what Anthony Arthur writes. Quote. But many Catholics remained in the city, unwilling to give up their homes and their belongings and hoping that the Prince Bishop would somehow intervene to save them. Matthias now demanded again in a public sermon that not only the Catholics but the Lutherans be killed. So that now quoting Yann Matthias quote True Christians can serve God the Father without hindrance. End quote Arthur continues. The translation by the Victorian scholar Baring Gould endows Matthias with a degree of rhetorical elegance. And here's the Victorian translation. The Father demands the purification and the cleansing of his new Jerusalem. Our Republic cannot tolerate the confusion sown by impious sects. I advise that we slaughter without delay the Lutherans, the Papists, and all those who are not of the right faith. None may remain alive in Zion but those who can offer the Father a pure and pleasing worship. The only way to preserve the righteous from the contagion of the impure is to sweep them from the face of the earth. We are supremely strong and can do this immediately without fear of interference from within the city or without. Arthur then points this A more accurate sense of what Matthias actually sounded like can only come from seeing his words in the original breathless German. And here's the translation of Everywhere we are surrounded by dogs and sorcerers and whores and killers and the godless and all who love lies and commit them to me. What's so fascinating about what Matthias is saying is he's using the same argument for wiping out Catholics and Lutherans that Catholics and Lutherans are using to wipe out Anabaptists. He's saying that they'll contaminate the faithful with impious and unrighteous interpretations of the religion and the Bible. The very same things that the authorities are saying that the Anabaptists do. The Anabaptists under John Matthias see these other sects as intellectual contagions. The very same thing the Prince Bishop thinks Jan Matthias is. It's fascinating that at no point do people see the irony of this. And Matthias is so frickin dangerous because he's the guy who can say what God wants and what God doesn't want gives him the same power the Spaniards had arriving in the new world, the same sort of unquestionable authority that the aliens would have if they came down here with the real galactic Bible. What are you gonna say to a guy who not only can interpret the Bible, you know, supposedly with a prophet's acumen, but when he has questions about it, can simply turn and ask God, what did you mean when you wrote that? And if you argue with him, he's going to suggest in very strong terms, you know, saying things like whores and sorcerers and dogs and lovers of lies, that you be killing killed. And this happens pretty darn soon in the city. Now, before it does, the prince bishop acts in the same way that Anthony Arthur said. Gosh, some people are hoping the prince bishop would act. The day after the Anabaptists toss out the Catholics and the Lutherans in the city into that snowy, sleety weather, the prince bishop puts the city under siege one day later. I mean, it's pretty obvious the demographics in the city have now changed. You don't have a city with Catholics, Lutherans and Anabaptists. You have a city that's almost all, all Anabaptists. So the prince bishop bites the bullet, puts his own city under siege, pays money to hire troops and to get cannon from surrounding rulers and essentially knock down the walls of his own city, which he'll then have to pay to rebuild. But he puts it under siege. But it's not a very good siege. There's still holes. The city's three miles in circumference, after all. And the. The writings of Bernard Rothman, expounding the sayings of Jan Matthias, are still being smuggled out of the city, printed on the printing press of Bernard Knipperdolling. And Anabaptists throughout northern Europe, who are of the sort Matthias is trying to appeal to, not the peaceful Anabaptists, but the militant ones are ecstatic. To them, it looks like Judgment Day Palooza is actually going to happen. They've captured a major city. They're in charge. Yam. Matthias is running the show. You better get there fast. And instead of maybe the hundreds that the Anabaptists inside the city thought might, you know, slip away from their communities secretly in ones and twos, thousands, try to get down to Munster. Now, thousands of people of a condemned faith, armed to the teeth, are not going to escape the notice of the authorities. And these thousands of Anabaptists heading down to Munster don't. Most are either killed, some are turned back, which is a pretty lenient thing, but when you consider the numbers involved, it kind of makes some sense. I mean, at one point, there's, like, boats on the way down the river full of Anabaptists and they're either sunk or turned back or captured. And then inside the city you get your first challenge to the authority of this John Matthias. There's Anabaptists inside that city that didn't see this coming. They didn't see the Manson exidor person in their future when they decided to become Anabaptist. And now you get an idea about what this new Jerusalem is going to be like to actually live in. What happens when you insult the prophet or the people. In the city of Munster, we're about to get a live demonstration. You can understand though why yon Matthias actions would have provoked some backlash from people because no one had said in advance this is what it was going to be like. When Matthias takes over, for example, example, after he expels the godless, he orders every book in the city that isn't a copy of the Bible to be burned. They have these big bonfires and they actually go door to door into homes and search in basements and under mattresses for hidden contraband and they throw it all in the fire, including religious books that have the sermons of Luther where he's debating this or that point in the Bible. There's not going to be any debates, there's not going to be any discussion of, of questions in the Bible. Matthias is going to solve all that problem for you. And they throw all these books in the fire and burn them. Now books in this era are not like books today. They are extremely rare and valuable and precious things. There is no Wikipedia during this era. The accrued knowledge of mankind, as the medieval people understood it, are contained in the books in the city. To throw all those books in the fire and burn them is Yam Matthias way of saying nothing matters before the Bible or other than the Bible. And you see this in fundamentalist faiths elsewhere even today. Not just that. Matthias then turns a theoretical communism that the Anabaptists and people like Bernard Rothman had proclaimed and begins to turn it into reality. He says private property is banned. Buying and selling is banned. Working for money is banned. Lending money for interest is banned. Making any sort of profit off the sweat of other people's work is banned. And they literally go and try to find evidence of the debt that poor people in the city may have and they rip up IOUs and all these things. Whereas this might be hugely popular. And it was amongst people who were in debt to some of the people in the city who maybe were counting on some of the repayment of money that they had loaned or who perhaps were saving up for a rainy day or who had some very valuable books of their own. People started grumbling. And the people who are grumbling are the ones who are the biggest problem to Yan Matthias. One of them is on guard duty one night and he makes the mistake of griping about this crap prophet, as he calls him. He uses a word a little bit more explicit than that. And the people around him kind of shut their mouths because. Because here's somebody saying maybe something they secretly believe about this extremely dangerous biblical kind of figure. And word gets back to Jan Matthias that somebody was talking crap about him on guard duty, and he realized that this person is a cancer in the new Jerusalem that just like talking about Catholicism and Lutheranism can, you know, infect people with a dangerous. There's intellectual contagion. So can somebody spreading bad information about the prophet. And it's not going to be allowed. And here's how Hermann von Kersenbrock explains Jan Matthias dealt with people like this. An important early challenge to his leadership of the new Zion. The man who had uttered the comments against yon Matthias was a blacksmith named Hugo Hubert Reuscher. And as soon as John Matthias hears about what Reuscher has said, he has him brought to the major field in the city, bound, some sources say with chains, others with ropes. But he has the entire city's population brought to the field and stands over this bound blacksmith in front of the people in the town. This is where Matthias is going to show the people of Munster what the new regime is really like and pardon the pun, to put the fear of God into them. Here's how Hermann von Kersenbrock explains the Once they had gathered, the prophet had Hubert dragged before them and said to the crowd, brother Christians, Hubert, the famous blacksmith here has been led terribly astray by an evil spirit, reaching such a pitch of madness that in public he dared to despise the prophet sent to you by the Father for your salvation and to revile him with unspeakable, bitter and scurrilous jibes. From this it is clear that he is an impious disturber of the general peace. He taught that it was necessary to set examples of what happens when covenants are broken, so that one man's crime could not be ascribed to the entire peace people, since many people had often been punished for the fault of one. For this reason, Matthias said, this man must be quashed. He must be pulled up by the roots from the midst of the pious and removed from Israel. For it is written, it is time for judgment to start with the house of God, end quote. Now, when he says this, the crowd all of a sudden realizes what Matthias is talking about, that they're talking about killing this man here and now. And several of the important people in the city come forward and say, listen, you can't do this. We have rules. I mean, if he's gonna be killed, he's gotta go through a trial. And you can't have the same person be judge, jury and executioner. We have established procedures for this. And this freaks out the prophet, who realizes at once that these people don't understand that he's totally in charge, and he has these people instantly arrested and taken away. The people in the crowd are now starting to realize what's going on here. And the only protections they have are the very same protections these important men have just said the blacksmith has. And now the important men who protested what was being done to the blacksmith are carted off to prison themselves, so nobody has any protection. Kersenbrock says that Matthias becomes visibly, almost insane at being contradicted in public by those two important figures in the town. Kirstenbrock then says that as this challenge to Matthias's authority is happening, somebody jumps out from the crowd, seizes a halberd, which is a spear with an axe as part of it, and shoves it between the shoulder blades of the blacksmith lying tied up on the ground. Other sources say it was John Matthias himself that did this. But regardless, somebody stabs the blacksmith on the ground. Kirstenbruck says it was Jan van Leyden and has him saying, with death shall he be killed. He is not going to live a single day more from on high. The Father has granted me the power that everyone who opposes this divine command will fall by my sword, which is plied by this hand. End quote. This is the first time that Jan van Leyden sort of stood steps forward as the second in command, the toady for Jan Matthias. The only problem is he doesn't have a lot of experience killing people. And when he shoves this halberd between the shoulder blades of the blacksmith, he doesn't kill him. The blacksmith is a pretty strong, powerful guy anyway, but now he's sitting on the ground screaming in front of this crowd that is stunned at what's happening. So Van Lyden then grabs a handgun, a pistol that someone has in the crowd, picks it up and shoots the blacksmith in the head, who still doesn't die, but lays there screaming. Eventually, some in the crowd grab the blacksmith, who's known to all of them. It's not that big of a town. These are people that all know each other, takes him up to somebody's house, puts him in a bed, and eight days later he dies. But the city is now stunned. And at the same time, they're crazy. I mean, they're. They're running around singing songs and dancing and. And chanting hymns. And so you have this weird dichotomy. It's part of what makes up this entire story. You have murderous craziness with religious joy and almost ecstasy. A lot of times when something like this stabbing happens, the people will be told to sing and praise God and they will. So murderous insanity with religious ecstasy. It's quite a witch's brew of emotional contradiction here. And Jan Matthias plays it like a musical instrument. The killing of this prominent blacksmith, whose only crime was to simply question what this prophet was pushing, pushed a bunch of people over the edge. This city is not yet whittled down and shorn of the people of sort of questionable allegiance. There's still a lot of people who aren't quite sure they're all in with what's going on. And Matthias, for all of his faults, is extremely cognizant. He can feel these things and he knows that there's a lot of people of dubious loyalty. So in what is a brilliant, totalitarian, psychologically torturous move, he says so he says there's a lot of people in this town who don't believe, you know, wholly in this Anabaptism that he's preaching, that they're sort of converts for convenience. Maybe they wanted to save their stuff in the city or what have you. And he says everyone who converted after a certain date is suspect. And he ordered them all into a cathedral and said that depending on what God told him, they might have to be killed there. Men, women and children over a certain age are herded into this cathedral and left there for several hours to think about what's happening. Now, can you imagine actually being in that room and the tension that must have built up? I mean, you just saw this horrible incident. Now you've been told that, you know, maybe you're not faithful enough and the prophet is going to talk to God and see what God thinks, but it's not looking good for you, and you're all probably going to have to be killed in the cathedral. And he lets you stew for several hours while you think about it. The sources then say he shows up in the cathedral several hours later with armed men. Here's how author Norman Cohn puts it. Quote the Terror had begun, and it was in an atmosphere of terror that Matthias proceeded to carry into effect the communism which had already hovered for so many months. A splendid millennial vision in the imagination of the Anabaptist. A propaganda campaign was launched by Matthias Rothman and the other preachers. It was announced that true Christians should possess no money of their own, but should hold all money in common. From which it followed that all money and also all gold and silver ornaments must be handed over. At first, this order met with opposition. Some Anabaptists buried their money. Matthias responded by intensifying the terror. The men and women who'd been baptized only at the time of the expulsion were collected together and informed that unless the Father chose to forgive them, they must perish by the sword of the righteous. They were then locked inside a church where they were kept in uncertainty for many hours until they were utterly demoralized. At length, Matthias entered the church with a band of armed men. His victims crawled towards him on their knees, imploring him, as the favorite of the Father, to intercede for them. This he did, or pretended to do, and in the end informed the terrified wretches that he had won their pardon and that the Father was pleased to receive them into the community of the righteous. After this exercise in intimidation, Matthias could feel much easier about the state of morale in the new Jerusalem. Other sources, though, have an even more exidor like account of of him that when the people inside the cathedral say, please, you know, you're the favorite of the Father, talk to him for us. That he goes right down on his knees and then steps up and says, I've talked to him, he's cool with it. I mean, that kind of thing where you just go, what? Again? The walkie talkie to God is remarkably convenient. And anyone who decides that it looks a little hokey and that they're not quite sure they can believe this is going to shut their mouths now, because look what happens to anyone that even offers a shadow of contradiction to this guy. The terror had begun. Indeed. But I'd like to stress again, I pointed it out a second ago, but I can't stress this enough. Even though this terror is happening and we moderns, looking back on it, you know, it's like watching a horror movie and you can hear the scary music coming and you can see the person who's unaware simply walking down the corridor and you're thinking to yourself, don't turn that corner. There's a guy with a. An axe or a chainsaw and a leather mask and you can hear the scary music and you can see the future. But the people inside the story can't. The only people who seem to have awoken to the terror of the situation are the ones in the periphery of the Anabaptist belief system. The less fanatical you are in your Anabaptist belief, the more likely you are to see the situation inside Muenster for what it really is. And because they've been purging continually, the people who are the least enthusiastic, the majority of people inside Munster see this situation in a completely opposite way. From the way we see it, they aren't terrified, they're ecstatic. They feel like they are blessed to be there because they believe the end of the world is coming and the only people that are going to be saved are the people who are right there. And they believe this Yan Matthias guy is talking to God on his virtual walkie talkie. In which case, don't you want to be where that guy is? Certainly he's going to be in the place where God saves people. The people to be pitied are the ones who aren't in the New Jerusalem. They're going to die these horrible, terrible deaths. What's more, these people inside the city are almost certainly aware that this move that they've made inside Munster has fired up Anabaptists all throughout Northern Europe. All these people who've been laying low and staying underground, and maybe these Anabaptists inside Munster are aware that this is a lot of people that are secretly Anabaptists. And now they've been told that many of them, thousands of them, are on their way to the city. Why be scared of the thousands of troops outside the walls that are continually arriving to swell the Prince Bishop's army? And why be scared of these cannon he's putting together and this blockade that. That, you know, however porous it might be that he's thrown around the city, because thousands of Anabaptists armed to the teeth, will be here any day. They, with God's help, will sweep away the Prince Bishop's forces. Sometime before Easter Sunday, which happens on April 5, 1534, Yan Matthias and his cabal, his leadership cabal, gets insider info that these thousands of Anabaptists that they've been told are on the way, aren't on the way anymore. As we said, the authorities had intercepted these people, killed a lot of them, turned a lot of them back. The Prince Bishop, when he finds out that Anabaptists in large numbers are on the way, tells all of the leaders in the region, and they've got cavalry patrolling all the roads. You're still getting these Anabaptists and these poor people slipping in through the blockade in very small numbers. But these thousands of people that are going to turn the tide of this siege aren't coming. The population of Munster doesn't know that. But at some point before Easter Sunday, Yam Mathias does. And what happens next is pretty much proof. And, you know, I'm not a historian, I'm just a fan of history, but I don't read many people who think differently about. This is pretty much proof that Yan Matthias is not a charlatan. He may be insane, maybe a lot of other things, but when he has these, you know, walkie talkie conversations with God, he believes he's getting a response. And you can tell because of what happens just before Easter 1534, at a wedding and festivities that are going on inside the city. Again, this is part of the twistedness of the situation. Whereas these people are basically facing horrible death if the Prince Bishop can break down the walls or slip in or through treachery somehow, you know, get inside the city. These people are celebrating, having a good time, eating, drinking, partying. And the Anabaptists believed that partying and drinking and sex and all that stuff was okay as long as it was in the confines. You know, for example, you could enjoy sex as long as you were married. There were mainstream religious thinkers during that time period who thought even if it was procreation, if you enjoyed it, it was sinful. The Anabaptists didn't think this way. And they're having a wedding, we're told, right before Easter 1534. Everyone's having a good time and Jan Matthias is there. It's an outdoor kind of affair. And he's like a movie star. So anyone you know at this festivities, probably keeping like one corner of their eye on the movie star, as you might if there were a movie star at a wedding you were at. And all of a sudden, you know, amongst the commotion and the celebrating, Matthias appears to have what a medical expert today, Mark, might call something similar to an epileptic seizure. You know, he begins to turn white and groan and look up at the sky, and you can imagine his eyes rolling back in his head. Then we're told his head drops down on the table with a kerplunk and he faints, basically. And you have to imagine everyone at the party just stopping dead, and all of the sound and the clinking of the silverware and everything just stops and Everyone looks at the movie star person in the room, and then all of a sudden Matthias's head pops up from the table and he looks up and he's talking to someone who isn't there, exador style. And we're told that he says something to the effect of not my will, but thine. Thy will be done, Father, and stands up and begins to kiss people on the lips and shake their hand and say, God bless you in this city, and then kind of staggers off, you know, away from the party. And everybody is just stunned. Now, the people who explain to the stunned population what just happened are these people who form sort of Jan Matthias's leadership cabal, Bernard Nipperdolling, Bernard Rothman, and most of all Jan van Leyden, the other Jan. They explained the population that Jan Matthias has just been given the information from God that the promised help from these thousands of Anabaptists streaming towards Munster, armed to the teeth, who are going to sweep away the Prince Bishop's besieging forces, isn't going to come once again showing that the prophet is receiving insider information from God concerning the, you know, grand tactical or strategic situation. And he's gone off to do something about it. What he's going to do is proof that he's maybe crazy, but not a charlatan, because Jan Matthias claims that God has told him that like St. George slaying the dragon, or like David venturing out alone against the scary and dangerous and unbeatable Goliath, that God has told yon Matthias that he is to don armor, strap a sword to his side, carry a lance, and with a very small group of 10 or 12 people to act as sort of an honor guard, they must have felt so fortunate he is to venture out of the city walls on Easter Sunday and himself destroy the Prince Bishop's army. The Prince Bishop's army at this stage in the game is somewhere between three and 8,000 men strong. One can only imagine the reaction of the crowd. And crowd it is because at high noon on April 5, 1534, as the gates open up and this small group of 10 or 12 cavalry, led by an old man in full armor, head out of the city. The people of Munster jump on top of the walls to look and watch what's going to happen. And because munster has like 80 cannons in it, and these church steeples that are high up above the city have been turned into gun platforms, and because there's, you know, the ability to shoot back at the Prince Bishop's besieging forces, there's this huge dead zone between the outer wall of the city and where the Prince Bishop's lines are. He sets up outside of, you know, cannon range. So there's several football fields, maybe like 10 or 20 football fields distance between the outer wall of Munster and the besieging forces. So you have to imagine this kind of dead zone zone where there's nothing because you'd be in range of the cannon if you stayed there. And so the Prince Bishop at some point, and his troops at some point are aware that this is not a group of people exiting the city, coming bearing some sort of parlay or message or negotiation. This is a group of people who intend to come and fight. And so after the shock wears off, the Prince Bishop sends 500 elite cavalry to intercept this tiny group of people and charge them. I'm not Quite sure what 500 cavalry charging 10 looks like, but I imagine it must have been quick. And the people on the walls of Munster get to watch the person that they have put all of their hopes and, and dreams and their life and their soul. Remember, we're dealing with religious people from the Middle Ages who are probably as concerned about their immortal soul as they are about their lives. And they watch this person, who is God's favorite, who is talking to him via a walkie talkie, and they watch him get cut up by this cavalry, literally. We're told that one of the Prince Bishop's soldiers runs a spear through the side of Yann Matthias. And as he pulls it out, Jan Matthias guts all come out with it and blood spills on the ground and he falls on the ground from his horse. And by the way, this is not a gratuitous, violent description. There's a reason for it. But then they chop him up in front of the horrified eyes of the Munsterites, cutting his arms off, cutting his legs off. They put his head on a stake in front of the walls of Munster so that the people can see what happened to their beloved prophet. And then overnight, at some point, one of the Prince Bishop's soldiers nails to the gate of one of Munster's gates the genitals of the prophet. The people are horrified and they're stunned. You have to try to imagine, you know, put yourself in their place. This is, if not a wake up call, then a state of shock. And Anthony Arthur explains it in a way that sort of gives you a feeling of how quickly everything has happened here. And then what an exclamation point, watching their prophet have this happen to him is. He writes for six weeks the passionate Matthias has dominated most of the 9,000 inhabitants of this walled and isolated city. Those who were born there have more or less willingly allowed him to take over their city government, to appropriate their houses and their money. To chase away the godless and replace them with foreign zealots. To incite the Prince Bishop to armed warfare against them and to enlist them them as soldiers of Christ in the final battle of good against evil. Now the great leader to whom they'd entrusted not their lives but their souls has delivered himself up for slaughter. What could anyone say to so many people torn with anxiety and fear for their own future? What explanation could account for such a sudden and overwhelming catastrophe? Who could save them now from the Bishop's so called party of order? End quote. They have the rest of the day to wonder about questions like this. And they're wandering the streets of Munster and we're told that they're meeting their fellow citizens and they're saying should we kill ourselves? Should we throw ourselves on the mercy of the Prince Bishop? I mean, what's to be done? And then with an actor's flair for the dramatic, the people are summoned that evening to a window, like a second story window where they have to look up where the crowd looks up and the window is lit by candlelight. And there's a man there dressed all in white. A beautiful man. To one side of him dressed all in white as well is the widow, the beautiful widow of the man who just got cut up that day in front of the crowd. Yann Matthias wife devos. To the other side of this beautiful man dressed all in white is the renowned and well respected Bernard Nipperdolling. The man who's sat on the town council, who's won elections in the city that the guilds all respect. And the man dressed in white is Jan Matthias's second in command, Jan van Leyden. Van Lyden told the crowd that yon Matthias fate was what the father intended. And this right there must have quashed one of the rumors that was circulating throughout the city. That Yan Matthias would after three days rise from the dead like Jesus Christ and take the city back. Van Lyden said that what had happened to Matthias was punishment for Matthias arrogance and for him trying to steal the glory of of the victory over the Prince Bishop's forces from God. And that he had indeed been told to go out there and take on the Prince Bishop. But he hadn't been told to take a bunch of men to their deaths with him and that he was supposed to give the credit to God, but that he was trying to take the glory for himself, and that had he done it the way God had told him to do it, he would have been successful. Instead, this is what he got. And then Van Lyden said he'd known that this was going to be the result for eight days because he'd already seen it in a dream, that the Holy Spirit had told him that Matthias would be stabbed in the side and that Van Lyden had seen it in a dream and seen the soldier pull the spear out of Matthias's side and the guts spill out onto the ground, and that he'd been terrified by the dream, but that the soldier that had just spilled Matthias's guts out on the ground turned to him in the dream and said, and this is straight out of Hermann von Kersenbrock's writings on the do not fear, man of God, or be in any way terrified. Instead, press on with your calling and plan for this specific judgment of God concerns not your life, but that of Matthias, whose wife you should marry. All accounts then say that Van Lyden could hear almost an audible intake of shock from the crowd, and he then played to it again, like an actor saying, I too was much amazed by what had happened and was worried that no one would believe me. So I told Bernard Nipperdolling right then and there so I would have a witness. And at that moment, Nipper Darling steps forward to the window and says, it's all true. He told me eight days ago this would happen. Now, what Jan van Leiden has just so cunningly done is throw a bunch of people whose entire future had been cast adrift all of a sudden, an emotional and spiritual lifeline. He'd given them hope again. What were they going to do about it? Well, part of this now relies on the specific character of Van Lyden, and it creates a situation in Munster during this time period that is almost without pressure, precedent. And this is something that has been written about significantly, people like Max Weber talk about it, Anthony Arthur talks about it where throughout history we've seen occurrences where you get this charismatic leader who's able to almost spellbind to people and hold them entranced. Everyone from an Adolf Hitler who does it on a very grand scale, to a David Koresh or a Jim Jones who does it on a very strong small scale. These things are not uncommon in human history at all. What is uncommon is for anyone to be able to succeed such a charismatic leader and continue the spellbinding effect. For example, imagine if Adolf Hitler had died or had given up command of the Third Reich and turned it over to Hermann Goring, who had been his second in command at one point, or Heinrich Himmler, or to the guy who commanded the Third Reich after Hitler's suicide for like five seconds, Admiral Karl Donitz. It wouldn't have worked, would it? The entire thing sort of depended upon the unique charisma of an Adolf Hitler, the unique charisma of a David Koresh, the unique charisma of a Jim Jones. The charisma is what built the whole thing. You take that away and it's like all the supports instantly collapse. There's no institutional support. It's based on the charisma of a single human figure. What happens in Munster after Jan Matthias death is that another person who has, even if possible, more charisma than the initial person who built the whole spellbinding effect takes over. Now, as Anthony Arthur points out, Jan van Leyden hasn't made it clear that he's taken over the city, but he's managed to make himself the only viable candidate if someone were going to do that. He's the only viable candidate because he's the guy who does the equivalent of picking up Yam Mathias walkie talkie. And now he's the only guy who can speak directly to God. He's the one who possesses the power to know what God wants and what God doesn't want. In other words, if you are a city based on revelation type ideas, there's only one guy who's going to lead you. The guy who's the conduit between the people and the Almighty. And about a week, less than a week actually, after Matthias is cut up on the battlefield, Van Lyden shows up in the town square in Munster buck naked. Now, if I were casting the movie of this story, Jan Matthias, the scary, you know, prophet of doom character, I cast someone like, like Christopher Walken in that role or Anthony Hopkins from Silence of the Lambs. We've gone from that sort of a mood to a successor who I would get an actor like Matthew McConaughey to play. You don't get the feeling that he's a charlatan necessarily because he kind of believes in this. You wouldn't go this far if you didn't believe in all this. At the same time, he's not as grave or as serious or as, as, you know, strict as someone like Matthias. You get the feeling if Jan van Leyden were walking past a baker shop and saw a donut he wanted in the window and didn't have enough money in his pocket, he'd turn to the baker and go, God just told me he wants me to have that donut for free. A little bending of the rules here or there doesn't seem to bother a guy like Van Lyden. And his revelations are so much more theatrical than Matthias's were. So he shows up naked one day in Munster, you know, movie star, handsome and naked. Matthew McConaughey, naked in the city. And then he runs through all the streets screaming and yelling, people of Zion, you know, wake up. All these kind of things, very theatrical, collapses in front of Bernard Nipperdolling's house and signals that he's unable to speak. And they hand him writing utensils and he writes down that the Father has struck him dumb for three days while he gives him an important revelation. And everyone in the city is like on pins and needles for three days waiting for, what is it gonna be? What is it gonna be? What is it gonna be? And then he says, well, God has told me that he's not happy, happy with this whole idea of a town council. Even though we've remade it twice and put Anabaptist in charge of the whole thing, it's still a construct of man and it needs to go. God, the Father wants a government much more like he had in Old Israel. He wants 12 elders running a council. And of course, Van Lyden had the name of all of the people God wants on the council. The council is going to be made up of a bunch of people obviously loyal to Jan Van Lyden, and they're all given swords by Bernard Rothman as a sign that they now have the power of life and death over the people in the city. Bernard Nipperdolling, the person who actually sat on the town council for so long, is not given a place in the council of elders, but he's given a special made up position now of chief executioner in the city. And they're gonna need one. Because one of the things that God has told Van Lyden is that it's time to reinstitute a bunch of old and long ignored rules from the Old Testament. Not just the Ten Commandments, but a bunch of the little Leviticus type rules too. And the punishment for almost every violation is death. The biggies, of course, murder, rape, robbery, theft, all those things. Death, adultery, death, lying death, slander, death, gossip, death, you know, not obeying your parents or your husband, death. You get the picture. What historians have basically pointed out is that Jan Van Leyden had instituted a system of laws that it would have been almost impossible for people not to violate. But he had the power to commute any one sentence because of course, God could simply tell him, I don't want this person killing. So the whole city has been condemned to death, essentially, with Van Lyden having the power to commute anybody's death sentence. This is totalitarian, folks. This is the power of life or death resting in the hands of one man who knows what God wants. He also mandates that everyone's door is to be left ajar at all times so that people can come in, you know, make sure everything's kosher. Inside the city, children are encouraged to inform on their parents and families if things. Things aren't looking very godly inside the homestead. Van Lyden organizes the entire city into what you might call military communism, where people are organizing bakers, tailors, blacksmiths, housewives into military companies that are trained. They're all given specific tasks so that when the Bishop attacks, which everybody thinks is coming soon, everyone's got a specific job to do. Whatever stuff had not already been requisitioned into to the central depots of the city are now requisitioned. There are, I'm using air quotes here with my fingers, deacons put in charge of all these and, you know, metal is melted down into bullets. Everything is put together so that they're just waiting for the Bishop's attack, so that everybody can sprint to their jobs as required when the attack comes. The first sign that the attack is imminent comes on May 22, 1534, when the many guns that the Bishop has been laboriously placing around the city, including some extremely large cannon that had been lent to him by a local count, they were so large, they had their own names. The big one was known as the Devil, and the big one that it came with is called his mother, meaning the Devil's mother. The prince Bishop didn't have a lot of military gear himself, but a lot of the local rulers around him were happy to lend him stuff because. Because they want this intellectual contagion shut down as much as anyone. They don't want it spread into their regions. So he's got companies of troops that are lent from all these different rulers, and he's got this sort of polyglot army waiting outside the walls for the assault of the city to begin. On May 22, the guns open fire. The actual storming of the city is scheduled for dawn May 26. Now, here's the thing to bear in mind when it comes to these companies of mercenary Troops, or really any fighting before the modern era. These soldiers serve for pay, obviously, but there are certain fringe benefits, traditionally for storming a city. They are the classic rape, pillage and loot. Fringe benefits and rape, meaning literally rape. I mean, again, the modern mind reels, but a lot of these people are thinking, we're gonna go in there, we're gonna get some chicks, we're gonna get some gold, and who knows what you'll find? It's like a grab bag. We'll run into homes and take whatever we find. The problem is the. The mentality amongst these soldiers is a little like the mentality amongst those shoppers who show up for those midnight sales in big, long lines and wait for the doors to open. And then when the doors open, everybody rushes in and no one wants to be the last person in line because by the time you get to the aisle with the stuff you want, it's all going to be heavily picked over by the people who got there before you did. So there's this little bit of a tendency to want to be first or at least not want to be last. And on May 25, the day before the attack is supposed to begin, the companies of troops are arrayed around the city. The guns are shooting at the walls and the gates, you know, to presumably make holes that the troops can then run through and attack the city. And these various contingents of the Bishop's troops are drinking. One company in particular from modern day Belgium or the Netherlands, is drinking particularly heavy, heavily, we're told, all day long the day before the attack is scheduled. And after all, if you were scheduled to rush a city the next morning, you might want to drink too. But we're told that they are so drunk by the time the sun starts to set the night before the attack is supposed to begin, that they confuse the setting sun of May 25th with the rising sun of May 26th. And they think that the dusk all of a sudden is the dawn. And they panic, thinking that they're about to miss the assault and that they're going to be the last people in the, you know, special Walmart sale where everyone's lining up in line and they grab their stuff and their weapons and go off running toward the city, screaming and shouting and charging as the sun is setting on the night of May 25th. Now, this might not be so bad if that was the only contingent that did this. The problem was is that all the other contingents then saw this contingent doing it. They may not have been as drunk, but they were just as Concerned about not wanting to be the last people you know in the rape, pillage and loot line. So they grabbed their weapons and charged toward the city as well as the sun is setting. Meaning you're going to be conducting this attack haphazardly in the evening when it's dark. And the most shocked person in the whole county must have been the Prince Bishop who turns around and notices that the attack has begun. The commanders aren't out there. He's not out there. They've gone and done this themselves. And I have to tell you, hundreds of people are gonna die in this. So it's not a funny thing, but in my mind's eye I see something from the old Benny Hill Show. Again, another analogy most of you probably won't get. But the Benny Hill show was an English comedy and usually once in every episode they would speed up the film so that it was high speed, and they would play yakety sax, that funny little, you know, song. And, and, and to me it's like the Benny Hill show high speed film in my mind's eye, playing yakety sax as directed by Quentin Tarantino. It's bloody, it's horrible. And yet part of you still can't help help but laugh at the weirdness of it all. Needless to say, these are not the conditions that are conducive to a successful attack. And this one isn't successful. One thing you can say about these Anabaptists inside the city, for all their faults, they were not drunks and they were sober and they were behind these wonderful defenses of Munster, and they were organized into military companies. And for all of his other faults, Jan van Leiden was brave as hell. Hell rode around on a white horse, exposed himself to bullets, was here, there and everywhere. The women, every time a hole would open up in the wall, would grab, you know, manure and mud and stones and plug up the hole, and these people launched themselves drunkenly against the city walls and were crushed. They eventually, in the dark, rushed back toward their own lines, having lost about 250 people. The Anabaptists inside the city walls lost less than 10. The people inside the city reacted much as you would expect. People who figured that they were under God's special protection would act. They looked at the victory over the Prince Bishop's forces as a sign that they were on the right side and that God was with them and that God wouldn't let them down. Jan van Leyden is sending out speeches by Bernard Rothman via the printing press of Bernard Nipperdahling. All over northern Europe trying to rouse up the Anabaptists again. Trying to tell poor people all over this area remember who had risen up in that peasants war not that long beforehand, and who were still upset trying to raise them and get them all up in arms. This is his best chance for securing outside help because he has no way to launch any sort of offensive attack against the Prince Bishop's forces. He can beat off those soldiers when they attack the walls, but he can't go outside the walls and attack the Prince Bishop's forces with any hope of success. So he's stuck on the defensive. He's got no way to finish the war unless he can get outside help. So he's trying to. But meanwhile the siege goes on and conditions are slowly but surely getting to be not that wonderful in the city. Although you wouldn't know it from the way the Anabaptists were acting. They would still do these things where they would have meals, for example, in common. It's very communistic now. And so the tables are set and everybody eats together at these meals and somebody will sit there and read the Old Testament aloud to the people. And one day a 15 year old Dutch girl approaches Jan van Leyden and the leadership of the the Council of Elders with a plan. A plan she almost certainly got from one of those readings of the Old Testament that they did in the city. She heard the story of Judith and Holofernes from the Old Testament, which is a story of a woman who saves a city in the old Jewish kingdom of Judea from an enemy foreign king who puts the city under siege. Very similar situation to what's going on in Munster. And the way Judith saves the city is she pretends she wants to sleep with the enemy leader and she's very beautiful and all that. And then she gets him drunk in his tent, kills him, and when she kills him, his whole army just sort of disintegrates out of terror and, you know, worried about their own fate and all that. So this young 15 year old Dutch girl approaches the leadership in Munster and says she wants to try to be like Judith. And she's got a plan which includes a poison shirt that she's had made. She's woven it with her own hands and it's supposed to be very beautiful and yet it's totally saturated with poison. Some sources also say that it was made from the cloth of people who had died from leprosy too. Who knows what you can believe. But she brings this plan to go into the Prince Bishop's camp. Camp. Pretend she's a defector and give him this shirt and kill him. Jan van Leyden and the leadership don't care. Sure, what have we got to lose? Just one 15 year old girl. We can sacrifice you. So in what is a tragic story, this 15 year old girl dresses in the most finery she can find in the city. She goes to one of the main depots where they give her the jewelry that everyone has turned into the city because it's communistic, but the jewelry's everywhere. So she puts on all this jewelry and finery and slips out of the city and is quickly captured. And she tells her captives from the Bishop's forces that she's a defector, which is happening occasionally from the city, so it's not unusual. And she says she has proof that she's on the Prince Bishop's side and that she wants to help and that she can tell him, you know, where all of the weak points in the city's defenses are and everything. But she has this shirt that she wants to give the Prince Bishop. Now, no one can quite know what would have happened had the Prince Bishop bought this story, but there was another defector from inside the city who left right around the same time period this young Dutch girl did. And he told the bishop that this plan was going to happen and that this Dutch girl was going to try to give him a poisoned shirt. And she is taken and she is put under horrible late medieval, early Renaissance torture. She's put on a giant wheel, and they call this breaking on the wheel. And somebody takes a big iron bar when you're strapped, you know, with your arms up diagonally from your head and your legs spread eagle and they smash your limbs, they just break you. And she's broken on the wheel, but her spirit never breaks. Eventually she will be brought before an executioner and she will tell the executioner, who's about to cut her head off, that he has no power over her. And he says, we'll see about that. And we're told that he severs her neck with a stroke that was so strong it would have gone through the slender necks of three adolescent girls. And, you know, this is already a long show and there's a lot of detail I'm leaving out. But I don't want to give you the impression that the Anabaptists inside the city are simply passively allowing this siege to continue without striking back at all. All they may not have the strength to sally out of the castle and attack the Bishops, you know, veteran mercenary forces, but they are launching what amounts to commando raids all the time. Force 10 from Navarone style attacks, usually using secret tunnels that the Prince Bishop's forces are unaware of. And they have one advantage over the Prince Bishop's forces. The Prince Bishop's forces tend to drink a lot, and the Anabaptists tend not to. And so it'll be nighttime and the Prince Bishop's forces will all be getting drunk, or they'll get drunk and pass out and fall asleep, and all of a sudden, you know, 50 Anabaptists will emerge out of a secret tunnel, slit the throats of a bunch of soldiers, spike some cannons, blow up an ammunition dump, steal some supplies and maybe take some captives and boom, run back in the tunnels and go back into the city, you know, demoralizing the Prince Bishop's forces and once again giving the people inside the city a reason to believe that God is on their side. And why shouldn't God be on the side of the Anabaptists in Munster? If you're an Anabaptist living there, you must think that you have a huge advantage over most people who simply read the Bible and try to figure out what God wants from the texts. You have a conduit, you know, what God wants and what God doesn't want, because you have a prophet who can tell you, why shouldn't you be living the righteous life? Well, if this story wasn't weird enough for you already, it's about to get a lot weirder because the righteous life is about to change about 180 degrees from what the people in Munster are currently living. And nothing in this story will be as divisive for the people inside the city of munster as this 180 degree change that the prophet who knows what God wants, allegedly is going to propose. What God wants, according to Jan van Leyden, is what the HBO script writers who would be working on this story, if they were indeed working on this story, would want. You could just see those Hollywood scriptwriters going, yes, it's a great story, Violence, drama, all that stuff. But you know, it's really missing some sex needs some sex. And the weirder the better. Well, it seems like the prophet Jan van Leyden might have felt the exact same way, because we're told, in late May, early June 1534, Jan van Leyden tells his council of elders something which apparently you kind of have to read between the lines on this seems to have shocked them. How much do you have to shock a bunch of people who think you're a Prophet, for them to turn on you and give a significant level of pushback, because it appears like they did. He doesn't announce this new policy to the people until July 1534. By then he seems to have won over his council of elders to his new idea. It was such a controversial change in the way things were done in the city that it sounds like Jan van Leyden had to say, do you want to bring the wrath of the Father down upon us all? In other words, I'm the prophet, do this or else. And they knuckled under. And in 1534, the Council of elders led by Jan van Leyden has the people assemble and announces what God wants from them now. And I can think of nothing that would have been more shocking to these Anabaptists than the announcement of this new policy. Because, you see, you have to think of the Anabaptists, us like the most conservative Christian groups wherever it is you live here in the United States. I always think of Quakers and Amish and Mennonites, these people that are so modest in terms of the way they conduct their lives. You know, you think of people who use spinning wheels in their homes and drive buggies and don't have TVs and radios because of the sinfulness of it and who wear hats and bonnets to show their devotion to God. And the women tend to, and to not wear any makeup. And you know, we in the, you know, sinful, R rated general society that these people tend to withdraw from into their own, you know, more modest communities would call them prim or proper or perhaps even prudish. That's what you have to think of when you think of these Anabaptist types. Now imagine having someone announce a new policy in the city and it's not voluntary, it's mandatory. You know, you and your spouse show up for this new announcement. You've got your kids with you and you've been, you know, under all this pressure with the prince Bishop's armies outside and death hanging over your head, which has even brought your family even closer together. And there's such an emphasis on the family unit in Anabaptism anyway, as in most cultures, societies and religions don't want to minimize that. But here you are at this announcement where the prophet from God is telling you what God wants and the prophet tells you God wants. It's polygamy. And it's not an option, it's a commandment. Polygamy. One man, a bunch of wives. Now imagine these prim, proper, prudish, old fashioned Christian Types in wild group sex partner swapping orgies. That's like Hustler magazine publisher Larry Flint's, you know, wildest dreams come true, right? Conservative Christian group sex orgies. And yet this is sort of what the Anabaptist siege at Munster or the siege of the Anabaptist at Munster is most known for. You may even be able to make the case that the reason this story hasn't totally been forgotten by history is this lascivious, titillating sexual anger that has turned on and captivated the deepest, darkest, most hidden, forbidden thoughts of the God fearing ever since. I mean, imagine the Puritan era which comes after this era, and how reading about the Anabaptists at Munster must have captivated their minds, horrified them, and secretly perhaps fascinated them at the same time. And all I can think of when I think of Jan van Leyden and this council of elders announcing this to the stuns certainly population of Munster is that you wish you could film that with a camera, because it's like something out of a prank show that my kids watch, or when I was a kid we used to watch Candid Camera where they would, you know, do a gag and then film the reaction of the people who were the victims of the gag. You half expect Jan van Leiden to yell April fool. After having, you know, allowed 30 seconds for the shock to sink into the crowd that he's just announced this to. These are people who think that some of the worst things you can do are what they call adultery and fornication. And they believe that you marry for life and there's no divorce and you're joined by the soul to this one individual. And then here's your prophet telling you basically that God wants the exact opposite of what you believed with all your heart and soul all this time. And it would be logical to wonder why. It's something that the people who have chronicled this story ever since have wondered about. What's the motivation behind this? Because there's two ways of looking at this. One is that Jan van Leyden is acting from sincere beliefs that this is what God wants. That like Yan Matthias before him, he literally believes that he's hearing voices telling him what to do, and that these voices are telling him to do this and that this is what God wants. And there's a whole bunch of reasons that he apparently gave to his council of elders or that they came up with after he told them that this is what God wants to justify it. Because. Because five seconds after they announced this new policy, he's got These preachers and the council of elders explaining their biblical rationale and the logical rationale behind it. Because the first question you'd ask if you were in the crowd would be, exactly how do you. Is there anything in the Bible that justifies this? You'd have a lot of questions, wouldn't you? But of course, the other potential motivation for this is a lot more human in nature, isn't it, Jan? Then lied Biden just might want to have sex with a bunch of different people and have that be okay. This is exactly what the extremely biased primary sources who hate the Anabaptists and hate Jan van Leiden say is going on here. This is the equivalent, you know, we used the analogy earlier of him passing by a donut shop and not having any money to pay for the donut and then saying, well, God wants me to have a free donut. You know, the primary sources make it sound like Jan van Leiden's basically saying here, God wants me to have a lot of women. And it's not adultery and fornication. It's. It's Old Testament stuff. It's David, Solomon. Solomon had 700 wives. I mean, why can't I? If you go and you check out similar kinds of situations to this over history, you run into the same problem of trying to figure out motivations. Look at the Branch Davidian 1993 Waco situation with David Koresh. You had the same thing going on. Koresh claiming the right to have many, many, many wives, perhaps up to hundreds of them, including underage wives. And it's the same sort of thing. You go, now, what's going on with Koresh? Is he just a sex maniac who wants lots of women, or does he really believe this biblically? I read a National Geographic story not that long ago about a weird little offshoot cult of the Mormon church in a southwestern town. And I guess they controlled the whole town. Mormons. In the 1800s, some of the church of the Latter Day Saints believed in polygamy. The main church has renounced all that quite a while ago. But there are still offshore sects unconnected to the main religion. Just like David Koresh was unconnected to Seventh Day Adventists, Just like these Anabaptists in Munster were unconnected to the rest of the Anabaptists. And in this small southwestern town, a bunch of old men run the town. They apparently, according to the article, drive all the young men out of town so that there's more women for them to marry. And again, the article focuses on the exact same question that the Koresh issue focuses on and that this focuses on. Do these old men just want to have a lot of young women and they're just full of lust and this is all really human based or is it biblical? Do they really believe that? This has nothing to do with me wanting to have tons of young wives. It's what God wants and I really believe that. It's very difficult to determine motivations. Here's what Herman von Kersenbrock says, though. Basically he portrays John van Leiden as a sex maniac. This guy is, after all, the Anabaptist version of a rock star. He's handsome, he's a prophet, God loves him. And you have to look at the evidence. Certainly he's not living the clean life so far because when Jan van Leiden arrives in Munster, he's a married man. He left his wife behind in Leiden. She's either going to join him or he's going to eventually leave Munster and go back to her. So he's a married guy. Problem is, when he comes to Munster, he's not there very long before he marries Bernard Knipperdolling's daughter, making him a bigamist. Now he kind of throws her to the side. He doesn't divorce her, that's not really an option. But he just kind of ignores her. And then, according to Herman von Kersenbrock, he's caught in the bed with one of the household maids in Bernard Nipperdolling's house. Again, not exactly the sort of behavior that makes a man of God look very prophet like in eyes of an Anabaptist. Unless of course, you can then turn around and say that God wanted me to be in bed with the maid. God wants me to have that donut for free. It's that kind of same analogy. Here's the way Hermann von Kersenbrock explains the story from his angle. He claims that a soldier who defected from the Prince Bishop was staying in Nipperdolling's house while he was sort of being debriefed. Just like Jan van Leiden was staying in Nipperdolling's house. House. And according to Kirsenbrock, this soldier witnesses the indiscretion with the maid and won't shut up about it. Now, by the way, in this quote, when they talk about the commons, they basically mean the population of the city, the regular folks inside the city of Munster. Here's how Kirschenbrock describes the story and again take into account his overwhelming bias. A few days later, a private soldier deserted to the Anabaptists From a camp, he was brought to Nipper Darling for testing and for instruction in the doctrine of the faith, and stayed at his house for some days. During the night he saw Bockleson, also known as John van Leyden, who also enjoyed Nipper Darling's hospitality, sneak into the bed of a female servant. The deserter was quite astonished that the prophet, a man of God who had a lawful wife, should nonetheless befoul and pollute himself by having sexual relations with someone else's wife. Wife in a most vile act of adultery, in violation of God's commandment. For this reason, he began to mock the prophet's sham piety and saintliness, not concealing what had happened from the common crowd. Fearing that his influence with the commons would be destroyed, the prophet first stopped up the deserter's mouth with lavish promises, and then, in order to clear himself in case his theft became known to the commons, he consulted with Rothman and the other preachers about polygamy. Being themselves devoted to lechery and impudence, they readily decided that by the example of Abraham, Jacob, David and the other patriarchs of the Old Testament, whose way of life they themselves reproduced, it was permissible to have several wives. Now you can tell how much of a bias Kirsenbrock has there, because Rothman and those other Council of Elders guys were not only not so receptive to the idea, but we know that they argued, you know, their side of the case pretty aggressively. But the Council of Elders was destined to lose this argument against Jan van Leyden because obviously he's got the walkie talkie to God and they don't, which is exactly what happened. So the Council of Elders, along with Van Leyden, put together a list of justifications, because you had to expect that the crowd of Anabaptists, when they are told of this 180 degree shift in the policy on marriage, are going to have some questions and they're going to need to have some sort of biblical and other justifications to back up what the council's saying. And so they have a whole long list of things. Some of them are biblical. For example, one of the things they throw out there is they point to the Old Testament, which is the Munsterite favorite book of the Bible. Most Anabaptists and most Christians generally favor the New Testament over the Old Testament. One of the things that makes the Anabaptists and Munster different is they tend to see themselves as, you know, Israelites, and they refer more to the Old Testament. And in the Old Testament you have polygamy all over the place you have King David, for example, who God loves. He's one of the favorites. And his son, for example, David's son, Solomon, you know, he of the wisdom of Solomon. King David had multiple wives. King Solomon allegedly had 700 wives. And the Anabaptists would say, well, what made it okay for those people who God loved to have all these wives? But now you only get one. Where can you point to in the Bible where God repealed that old rule, where it was okay in the old days, but it's not okay now. And if it's not okay now, are you saying that God didn't really love these people in the Bible that the Bible says he loved? So you get to these biblical logical arguments, then there's also a category of justifications that fall into the logical logical argument category. Take for example, the imbalance of women to men. In the of State city, we're told that there are three women for every man. This is a problem because in the city it's been proclaimed that if you are adulterous or involved in fornication, which basically means sex outside of marriage, you get your head cut off. Well, what do you do about all these women who have no men to marry? A lot of these women, by the way, are nuns. People that Bernard Rothman had convinced to leave the convent based on his biblical argument that they need to be fruitful and multiply, that God doesn't want a bunch of virgin nuns, he wants women who are having children. So they leave the convent, they come out into the besieged city of Munster and find that there's no one for them to be fruitful and multiply with. And if they act upon their emotions and their biological urgings, they will get their heads cut off. What do you do for all those people? Well, the Anabaptist leadership decided that really the problem is that those people need to get married. And it's less of a problem that they marry people, people who already have wives, than it is that they have sex outside of marriage. So you have your logical, logical arguments, and then finally you have the clincher. I went and downloaded one of the many pieces of work out there where biblical scholars are trying to sort of get into the heads, not to justify what the Anabaptists did, but to try to understand the arguments they made, even to each other and to themselves. One guy, and I hope he doesn't mind me lifting a paragraph of his one, a very interesting scholar named Darren T. Williamson, writing something for Simon Fraser University, did a whole piece on this, trying to explain the thinking that the Anabaptists had. Because Bernard Rothman, actually, you know, for his medieval Renaissance version of his blog, if you want to call it that, that he smuggles out of the city all the time, was forced to write a piece defending polygamy to all these people outside the city of Munster because he knew darn well that once it became clear to everyone outside the city city that they were doing this, that it was going to be a really bad piece of propaganda making the people in Munster look bad, right? It's very easy, as Herman von Kersenbrock did, to make them look like a bunch of sex fiends. So Bernard Rothman has to write all these intelligent tracts explaining the thinking we're not sex fiends. This is what God wants, and I can prove it. This, that, and the other thing. But as Professor Darren T. Williamson says, the clincher to this whole thing is that the Anabaptists and Munster believes in the prophet. And a prophet has the right, you know, by the thinking of these people and this religion to simply decide that the rules are supposed to be different because God wants them different. Here's what he along with an emphasis on the Old Testament as normative for his community, Bernard Rothman also viewed revelations through prophets and visionaries as authoritative for his theology. The story of Anabaptism in Munster, including its precursors in the Netherlands, is replete with changes in direction and belief based on the assertion of divine inspiration. Obi Phillips, an ex melchorite and contemporary observer of the events in Munster, located much of the blame for the failure of the Anabaptist kingdom in the acceptance of false prophecy enforced by spiritual tyranny. This principle, he says, is important to an understanding of how polygamy would eventually come to be accepted by the vast majority of Munsterites. Some Anabaptists, he writes, might object to an interpretation of the Bible which viewed Old Testament polygamy and exhortations to be fruitful and multiply as fragile evidence for the propriety of polygamy. But few would deny the practice if bolstered by the claims of divine inspiration. John of Leyden's primary tool for persuading the hesitant preachers to his position had been his prophetic office. The 12 elders of Munster, shortly after the institution of polygamy, declared that what the elders, in common deliberation of this new Israel have found to be good is to be proclaimed and announced by the prophet John of Leiden as faithful servant of the Most High end quote the professor continues, in essence, his position as highest Prophet gave him the ultimate authority. In Anabaptist Munster, any scruples about ambiguous scripture reference used to support polygamy were swept away by the authority of the prophet. End quote. I know what God wants and I know what God doesn't want. What an amazingly powerful authority that gives somebody. It's interesting too that a contemporary and a person who had been in this movement blames this for what he calls spiritual tyranny. And I can hear the atheists in the audience saying it's a perfect example of why religion is so dangerous. I would just suggest this. I think tyranny is what's dangerous. I think how you get to the tyranny is merely a tool. Is spiritual tyranny any worse than secular tyranny or vice versa? I mean, Joseph Stalin was a secular tyrannist. He managed to do quite a bit of damage with just that. To me, the problem here isn't the divine part, it's the tyrannical part. And tyranny is exactly what it must have felt like to all these people who had to make the transition from this theoretical idea, yes, we need to live with polygamy to the actual day to day living with polygamy. Me, it's a very different thing to talk about it than to live under it. And there are all these stories about the various tragedies involved. I mean, for example, women who were already married, but married to someone who wasn't an Anabaptist, had their marriages annulled by the leadership. Women whose husbands had fled or left or were supposed to come back, but hadn't come back for a while, their marriages were annulled and were told that they were forced to marry somebody else and be unfaithful to their husbands. That's very tough. Even tougher is to be a parent with your door left ajar. Remember, the rule is you can't close your door anymore. And have the authorities from the city periodically walk into your house, make your family line up, and then all of a sudden decide your 11 or 12 year old daughter is old enough to get married, pull her out of the house and marry her to someone across town who's old enough to be your grandfather. How long would you as a parent put up with something like that? Well, things like that divided the Anabaptist in Munster. All of a sudden you had the extremely devout who would put up with anything. Yes, you can have my 11 year old daughter. It's God's will. And the people in Munster who wouldn't? Those people in late July after living with polygamy for a couple of weeks, rebelled and launched a coup. And they, for a very short time, were incredibly, almost unbelievably successful. In one evening, working together, they had managed to capture the entire leadership. Jan van Leiden, Bernard Nipperdolling, Bernard Rothman, all of them locked him in the jail of city hall. And then they didn't know what to do. The people in the city were not even aware that a coup had happened and a couple hundred guys had taken over the whole thing. Had they opened up the gate, swung a white flag for the bishop and negotiated a deal, the whole thing might have been over. But they sat around and deliberated. You know, one idea was to do just that. Maybe we should throw ourselves on the mercy of the bishop, start negotiating. Another idea was, to heck with the bishop. He's still our enemy. Let's get together the old town council with the old wise men that used to help run this place and, you know, use their brains to come up with a good idea. And while these guys are trying to figure out what to do, the Munster rights in the city that are loyal to the cabal that's now in jail in city hall are running around the town spreading the word. Hermann von Kersenbruck says all the people that love polygamy, meaning all the sex fiends, are finding out that, you know, the people who legitimized sex fiend behavior are in jail and they're gonna overturn this. And so they start grabbing weapons and converging on the city hall. And by the time the coup plotters realize what's going on, there are cannon being wheeled up the cobblestone streets and pointed where they're staying inside the building. Someone gets the keys to the jail, opens it up, and Jan van Lyden, the actor who knows how to make a wonderful entrance, steps out of the jail with sort of a regal bearing and a dramatic sort of turn of phrase and tells everybody that God has willed that they be free. And death to the coup plotters, which quickly follows, it becomes yet another example of the situation in the city descending to a murderous new low, as these people who plotted the coup are executed over the next several days, dozens and dozens and maybe hundreds of them killed in every imaginable way you could think of. Once again, it's becoming much more of a bloody business. And now the Anabaptists, under pressure from both the siege and the increasingly erratic and strange leadership, are beginning to devour their own. There was one side benefit. If you're Jan van Leyden and the leadership in Munster to this coup that has just been crushed. And that's that. It exposed the bravest and most disloyal elements in the city. You were, day after day after day after the coup was crushed, executing and ridding the company of Christ of the most dangerous individuals that had been in its midst, leaving the most hardcore, the most fanatical, or at least the most sheep. Like if they weren't happy with the state of things behind. Now, while this is going on and the executions are continuing, people having their heads cut off, nipperdolling, cutting people in half with, with his sword hangings and you know, the age old totalitarian method of making them dig their own graves and then shooting them from behind. While all this is going on, the Prince Bishop is once again trying to negotiate some sort of deal. He's being rather liberal because he doesn't want to knock his own walls down and have to pay for rebuilding. Jan van Leiden and the council turned down his negotiation attempts. So on August 28, he launches his second assault on the city walls. This is really his first assault, if you take into account that the first time he attacked the city, it was that drunken mess at nightfall, without orders. This time they were going to attack the right way. And the assumption was it would have worked the first time if it had gone off the way it was supposed to. This time it did. All the guns that were ringing the city opened up first thing in the morning, including those two giant ones, the devil and his mother. The devil's mother were told that when they shot their stone or iron cannonballs, that windows broke in towns all around that you could hear the cannon 75 miles away, which sounds incredible to me, but if it's only half true and you half that number, it's still an amazingly loud noise. And everyone figured that the city walls are just gonna fall down and we're gonna walk inside there and it's gonna be a cakewalk. But every time holes are created in the walls, the Munsterite women, who are amazing, are filling it up as fast as they're falling down, throwing manure, gravestones taken from the cemeteries, stone, everything, and plugging these holes up. The people inside the city have been organized into strict military companies and they're drilled and trained every day. They've been waiting for this attack. And of course, you know, because God's on the side of the Munsterites, the weather turns sour and you get a pouring rainstorm and everything turns to mud. But it doesn't stop the Bishop's forces from assaulting the city walls. Here's how Anthony Arthur relates what happened when the Bishop's troops stormed the walls of Munster on August 28, 1534. The Bishop's Men were confident that their own overwhelming numbers and long bombardment must have terrified the Anabaptists. Within minutes, the attackers had sent across scaling ladders and grappling hooks, set explosive mines against the gates, and established a position at the base of the inner wall. Soldiers hoisted the long, heavy ladders into place and scrambled awkwardly up them, encumbered by their armor and their weapons. These men, Arthur writes, were hardened professionals, veterans of campaigns in Spain, Italy, and France, and accustomed to violence and hardship. Hardship. Their opponents were only shopkeepers, smiths, tailors, and housewives, but they were fighting both for their lives and for God. The hapless mercenaries could not have anticipated the fury they would encounter on this summer morning. Some had their hands hacked off as they grasped the top rungs of their ladders. Some were battered through their helmets with heavy notched clubs. Some were cloven with broadswords. Some run through with spears. Those climbing behind the leaders looked up to see the strong arms of two men on either side of their ladder, holding posts and tree limbs between them, which they dropped together, stripping the ladder of five or six men at a stroke. The women who had for months stirred their cauldrons of boiling pitch and quicklime in anticipation of this day, dashed the caustic liquid in the faces of the enemy soldiers and poured it down their army armor, or made lighted necklaces which they threw upon the men as they scurried frantically around the base of the wall. The men on the ladders fell backward into the moat, and some of those waiting below jumped into it, hoping to escape the quicklime that dissolved their flesh or the pitch that seared it, only to find the weight of their armor dragging them to their deaths. The Anabaptists had planned for this day so well that they even had a bunch of them stationed behind a hedge of, like, rose bushes. That was the area that the troops who were assaulting the wall, once the assault had failed, would retreat past. And as they retreat past it in disorder, licking their wounds, feeling lucky to get away from the walls alive, these people rose up from the rose bushes and opened fire on them, killing many more. Once again, the bishop, this time with an organized assault, not some drunken, chaotic mess they could blame on, you know, troops who were out of control again lost hundreds, and once again the Anabaptists in the city lost about a dozen people. After this the bishop decided he could no longer risk another assault and was determined instead to pay the cost, suck it up and just starve these people out. The idea of starving the people of Munster out, though, is not very popular with the other rulers in the region, who have lent the prince Bishop money and troops so he could quash this rebellion and stop the spreading of this intellectual contagion. Bernard Rothman, even with a siege completely surrounding the city, is still getting out. His damned blog is the way they would look at it if they were trying to sum it up with modern terminology. And he's even able to seemingly explain away the polygamy, which is perhaps the hardest thing for him to justify in terms of the Anabaptists in Munster. How do you justify polygamy? If you read the primary sources too, they take every opportunity they can to shove the knife in when it comes to the evils of polygamy. They bring up underage girls, which you can see in things like the David Koresh story in Waco, or you can see in that National Geographic story on the weird outlaw Mormon sect that I talked about earlier. The underage girls thing is something brought up all the time, whether it's true or not, and the lasciviousness of the entire thing. In other words, this can't be a godly kingdom because these people are perverts. Listen to how Herman von Kirschenbrock describes it and you get an idea of the kind of propaganda that Bernard Rothman's propaganda had to counter. Here's what von Kersenbruck writes about the lust in the city now that polygamy is the law of Munster. The prophet immediately became the husband of three women. Among these was the widow of the prophet Yan Matthias, who had been killed in battle and torn apart by the enemy. The other preachers and very many of the townsmen followed the example of this very saintly man. Many nuns from the various convents, both high born and lowly, also made use of this opportunity to ruin themselves, giving themselves to all the most criminal blackguards. These maidens, who had otherwise lived respectably in cloisters, under the strict watch of the men in charge of them, lost their virginity and chastity. All the nuns from the convent across the river and the convent of St. Gillis, who had not left the city, looked for husbands, this one finding a soldier, that one a tailor, this one a foreign governor, that one a native, this one a priest, that one a reeve, this one an advocate, that one a ploughman, this one a nobleman, that one a burgher or whomever the spirit urged. As for the heat with which the rebaptised boiled over in their righteous living, the unrestrained madness of the passion in which they assaulted the female sex with more immoderate lustfulness than any beast, the insatiability with which they indulged in the most foul couplings, the monstrosity of the sexual hankerings with which they were ablazed, is it is better to pass over these matters in silence than to offend modest ears. He then goes on, though you know, to offend modest ears by pointing out how many of the 11 and 12 year old girls were almost raped to death in the city, as a way of pointing out how little these so called spiritual people in Munster cared about, you know, the well being of the youngsters in their midst. And one can only imagine what the parents of those youngsters must have thought if they weren't totally overcome with fanaticism. The people who resist this are being killed all the time, we're told. Women who put up a fight about, you know, their husbands taking multiple wives into their home get their heads cut off. This is happening daily inside the city. It is becoming more and more like this weird totalitarian theocracy. The only thing missing is an actual prophet king. And yet, soon after the Prince Bishop's recent attack fails on the city walls, even that will come to pass. And what's about to happen is just another example of why I couldn't resist telling this story as a topic for our podcast. Because perhaps its greatest attraction to me is that there is no solid floor on the weirdness scale. Just when you think the story can't get any stranger, the bottom drops out and it shows you a whole new low on the weirdness thermometer. You know, we've already had a ton of weirdness already. What can get any stranger than this? Well, around about September 1, 1534, we find out when we're told a lame, meaning sort of crippled, handicapped goldsmith person who works with jewelry is going around Munster proclaiming that the people in the town don't know how amazing this Persona of Jan van Leyden is, that he's greater than just a mere prophet. As if a prophet's considered to be a mere thing. He's not God, but he's something between the prophet and God. Somewhere on the scale, you know, below God and above prophet, he's more like the second coming of some great figure out of the Old Testament. This lame goldsmith, whose name is Johann Dusenture, is saying that Jan Van Leyden is the second coming of like a theocratic biblical king, like a King David. And in what amounts to a virtually staged managed affair, he's called in front of the council of elders when news erupts that he's proclaiming weird things about Jan van Leyden. And they ask him for clarification on what he's saying. And here's how. Anthony Arthur and one of the best passages I think in his whole book, which is worth picking up, it's called the Taylor King explains this stage managed event that catches even the people who've lived through everything that the city of Munster has already gone through off guard and puts Jan van Leyden into very rarefied territory when it comes to your, you know, messianic cult leaders. The twelve elders called Dusenture before them to explain what he meant, meaning when he was talking all this stuff about Jan van Leyden being greater than a prophet. As Gresbeck, who's one of the chroniclers, records the event. The goldsmith said God had told him in a vision that Jan van Leyden, famous as a soldier and prophet, prophet, was to be their new David. He will cast the mighty down and raise the lowly. He will seize the crown and the scepter and the throne of Saul. He will take in his hand the sword of justice and bring the divine word to all the peoples of the world. Dusenter took out a sword and handed it to Yan, saying that with that sword Yan would rule until God himself took it from him. He commanded Yan to bend his head and anointed him with all, declaring that Jan was the true inheritor of the throne of the great King David. Dusenter then reached into a bag by his side and withdrew a gold crown and a gold chain emblazoned with the apple, the scepter and the sword, symbols of divine majesty, and rings for each of the king's fingers, fashioned by the goldsmith from the confiscated treasures in the city hall. All of these he reverently bestowed on the young man who stood silent silently before him. End quote. Now, the reaction of Van Lyden is wonderful. It's like the way some of the great Caesars would accept appointment to the throne, where, you know, the people would come and say, you need to be Caesar. And they go, oh no, no, there's plenty of people more than me. I'm not worthy. And you have to sort of beg them. And then they would take the job again. Author Anthony Arthur quote, the newly anointed king reacted with becoming modest, throwing himself to the ground in Prayerful humility, he rose and looked out upon the people. He was too young for such a heavy burden, he said, but he would do his best to bear it well and wisely. In like manner, he reminded his new subjects, was David, a humble shepherd anointed by the prophet at God's command as the king of Israel. God often acts in this way. And whoever resists the will of God calls down God's wrath upon himself. Now I am given power over all the nations of the earth and the right to use this sword to the confusion of the wicked and in defense of the righteous. So let none in this town stain himself with crime or resist the will of God, or else he shall without delay be put to death with the sword. End quote. And then all of the sources say that you can hear the murmuring of the crowd kind of wondering, okay, wait a minute. You have to try to wonder how much of this people can take before even the fanatical start going, wait a minute, this is too much. And apparently Van Lyden can feel the reaction, the emotional response of the crowd. And he has no problem chastising all of them for not having enough faith in this lame goldsmith that they hardly knows divine prophecy. And he says, shame on you for complaining against the ordinance of the Heavenly Father. Even if all of you join to oppose me, I will still rule not only over this city, but over the whole world. For the Heavenly Father has said it should be so. My kingdom, which begins today, shall never fail. And end quote. Wow. Again, just when you think the story can't get any weirder, all of a sudden you have King Yun. And anyone who makes a move to say otherwise is going to get their heads cut off. Now, again, this story enters into a phase now that's just theatrical and farcical because remember, they're under siege. They don't have enough stuff. The food is dwindling, their supplies are dwindling. What does Jan do? He goes out and he starts to anoint people as his royal court. I mean, Bernard Rothman, for example, is the royal orator. Everybody in the old council of elders, all the top guys, they get their new jobs and they're all royal appointments. They take what little stuff they have in the city's depots that was taken for communistic reasons and begins to create special clothing, royal clothing for not just the king and his coins court, but all of their retainers. And all of these royal officials now go running around the city with 12 or 15, you know, henchmen around them. Like when Jan walks Around the city. He's in a special, you know, royal robes and outfits, and he's got 12 or 15 retainers who walk around with him, all in their royal robes and outfits. And he's got that symbol that the goldsmith, you know, gives him, that globe with a cross on top of it and two swords, you know, pointing out of it from the top at angles. And this becomes their version of, you know, a swastika or a hammer and sickle or a star or any of these, you know, iconic trademark images you can think of. And it's on all their clothing. So imagine the swastika armband. Well, now all these people in the king's court have, you know, the symbol of the eternal new Zion of Munster on them. He even has flags made where the symbol's on the flags. He has these coins produced where the symbol is on the coin. Now, think of the irony involved in all this, by the way. Very soon, the number of people who are involved in this royal court one way or the other are like 800 people. This is in a city of 9 to 10,000, a city that's on the verge of starvation. And yet now you have this special elite group raised up among the crowd and over the crowd, crowd. How much is this like how communism went in a place like the Soviet Union, where ostensibly everybody's equal, but you fast forward 10 or 15 years and the leadership all has these special vacation dhakas on the Black Sea that the regular, you know, proletariat have no access to, you know, and when people raise objections to this idea, you know, we're all supposed to be equal. There is no mine and thine anymore, right? King Yan says, oh, it's not me. He specifically says, I'm dead to the flesh. I don't need any of this stuff. But God requires a certain amount of magnificence for himself, not for me. So I have to have all this special stuff, otherwise it'll look like we're shortchanging God, that we're not pious. So it's not him. This is where the charlatan side of Jan van Leyden. To me, anyway, this is an opinion, and, you know, I'm not a historian, but this is where he so very obviously looks like a human being who's found power. And to be honest, he may believe some of this stuff. I mean, I don't think he joins up with Yan Matthias originally because he's thinking, ah, yes, a place where I can find some power. I think at some point he gets drunk on the possibilities and all of a sudden, the guy is as a monarch with a system of class and divisions amongst ranks of people that mirrors what the outside world has. The very world the Anabaptists were escaping because of all of its ungodliness, class system and, you know, inequality. And now inside the city of Munster, you've reached a sort of osmosis, like stasis, where now it's hard to tell the difference between the Prince Bishop and the nobility and aristocracy and blue bloods who are besieging the city. And King Jan and his aristocracy and his blue bloods and his proletariat inside the city. And as crazy as it sounds, Jan van Leyden and the people inside the city, at least the ones you know, who you know about in the leadership, are still talking about the Anabaptists inside Munster, you know, taking over the world from Munster and killing all the godless, you know, on the entire planet. It's so grandiose. You just have to wonder how many people inside the city are still buying this. This is a bunch of people hearing this kind of nonsense about, you know, world conquest in a city that can't even break out of the siege it's currently experiencing. How's this guy gonna take over the world? He can't even break the siege. Now. We don't know the sources. You know, you wouldn't believe him anyway. But they don't really say how many of the people inside the city are still buying all this stuff. Obviously, there's a hardcore that is. And we hear of muttering and all that when Van Lyden is made king, from people who obviously are less than totally enthusiastic. But you can kind of read between the lines and see that Van Leyden senses this too. Because in October 1534, we're told in one of his many theatrical moves, he will call the whole, you know, city together, thousands of people, nine to ten thousand people together. He will have one of the Prince Bishop's captured soldiers brought in front of the crowd, and after a little farcical game that he plays with them, he will personally cut his head off with a sword. And then he will use this occasion to announce to the people of Munster that they can stop worrying about the siege, that the outcome has been foretold through divine vision to Jan van Leyden. And God is going to save them, and he's going to save them soon, he Sundays by Easter 1535. That's March 1535, the Prince Bishop's siege will be over and the people of Munster will begin their conquest of the world and their destruction of the godless. And that if this doesn't come true, this is kind of, I guess you could say, a celestial guarantee that the people of Munster should cut off the head of Jan van Leyden or burn him at the stake. Now, there's no need to make a radical, dangerous prediction. If you're Jan van Leyden like this to the Munsterites, unless you think you need to. It's a sign, perhaps, that the people, even the hardcore fanatics, might be wavering, might not be buying this stuff so much. And one reason why might be the fact that they're starting to starve. Van lyden and his 800 or so special royal officers are getting the best food the city has left, as are the guards, you know, outside the moat, you know, on the castle walls and everything. But everybody else is starting to be eating just nothing but barley and even grass pulled up from the ground. And they're not that far from boiling shoe leather. And that tends to impact your outlook, too. You start to watch your children get skinnier and skinnier in front of your face. That'll leech the fanaticism right out of you. Fanaticism, though, is what this city runs on by this point. And every decision made by the leadership seems to come directly from God. There is no deliberation and thinking anymore. It's all pretty much a direct conduit from the Almighty to the decision makers, and they just follow God's orders. For example, also in October 1534, that same lame goldsmith who initially saw the vision that said that Jan van Leyden should be made a king has another vision, and this one concerns what he's calling the lame goldsmith is calling apostles. The city is to send out apostles, and they're to get through the siege, and they are to raise Anabaptists all throughout northern Europe to come to the aid of the besieged in Monst, presumably by Easter, Right? And, you know, as with any really good clear vision, this lame goldsmith doesn't just have the vision about these Anabaptists who are supposed to leave the city as apostles. He has names, all of them. So God's getting very specific now with these names. And these people are brought forward. They're all given a mission. They're all given a letter from van Leyden, and they're all sent out of the city secretly to go to all these different parts of Europe and raise all the Anabaptists in a maneuver that's very similar to that one Jan van Leiden made a long time ago. Now, you know, seeking help from outside the city. And they send these apostles out to bring back help. And almost all of them are killed quickly. The Prince Bishop is not falling for the same thing again. All of the surrounding rulers are on the lookout for just this kind of thing. And no sooner does, you know, when Apostle arrive in some town to raze the town to the Anabaptist cause, then the authorities are on top of them, you know, beheading, burning, breaking on the wheel, all the good stuff, because the Prince Bishop's got spies. Now, the situation inside the city is such that defectors are arriving to his camp and they're beginning to inform him what's going on inside. And his intelligence allows him, you know, his spy intelligence allows him to counteract any maneuvers that Van Leyden's making from within the city. And he's got these spies twisted around his finger because oftentimes these defectors who come to the Prince Bishop and say, please spare me, also have families inside the city. And the Prince Bishop offers to spare their families, but only if they continue to give this good service. For example, one of these people sent out in the October release of the Apostles to go raise help is captured and he isn't killed. He offers his services to the Prince Bishop. He says, I'll go back, I'll work for you inside the city. And the Prince Bishop says, okay. And a wonderful scheme is adopted to tie him up in chains and leave him outside one of the gates on some frosty morning so the Anabaptists can find him. And he tells this story about how God saved him from the fate all the other apostles, you know, ran into. And he becomes a trusted guy inside John van Leiden's leadership now because, well, he says he saw God too. Meanwhile, while all this is going on, everyone can look out over the walls and see the Prince Bishop with thousands of workers putting up a giant wall with block houses and gates all around the 3 mile circumference of Munster. Remember I told you earlier that there was this dead zone between the cannons on the walls of Munster and the Prince Bishop's military lines, they were outside of cannon range and there's this several football fields dead zone between them. Well, that dead zone still remains. But now instead of the Prince Bishop's army being the barrier, on one side of the dead zone there's a giant wall. Think about a castle that has a wall. And then every so often you have a giant tower. That's what the Prince Bishop's building around the city of Munster. And we're told that the walls are so wide you could drive a cart driven by seven horses along the top of the wall. It costs a fortune, but it assures that no one is getting out of Munster alive. And it's a certain sign to the people inside that Easter can't come fast enough. Those same people who are hoping for deliverance on Easter are beginning to starve the situation inside the city for all the people who aren't part of Jan van Leyden's special royal court are beginning to eat shoelaces. And the spies inside the city working for the Prince Bishop tell him so. So he takes another opportunity to try to broker a deal. He organizes a truce. Van Lyden agrees to it. And he sends his representative into the city to discuss this. And basically say, let's work out something. He's not allowed to meet with any. Anybody but Van Lyden, who basically says, you can give up anytime you want to. We'll accept your surrender. Prince Bishop. Look how strong the walls are. And he says he can see the 16 wives that by this time Jan van Leyden has. And occasionally he'll see somebody poking their heads out of a window. But nobody's allowed to come out and hear what the Prince Bishop has to say. All information is now routed directly through Van Lyden. In the way you would expect a totalitarian regime to control. Control information. And you can see how uncomfortable Van Lyden is with anybody hearing what the Prince Bishop has to say. Because as soon as the Prince Bishop's representatives come back and say, we weren't allowed to talk to anybody. And Van Lyden's not gonna do anything, he has his soldiers shoot blunted arrows, thousands of them, into the city over the walls with messages attached to them. And the messages, considering that they're burning people at the stake outside the city for very little other than suspicion, are extremely generous. The Prince Bishop is saying, overthrow your government and we won't kill you. Van Lyden says anyone found with one of these messages or one of these arrows. Or seen picking up one of these arrows gets their head cut off instantly. He's not comfortable with anyone being told what the deal is. Because he's too busy telling everybody that their only choice is to stick with him till Easter. Munster. Cause they'll die if the Prince Bishop gets their hands on him. When the truth of the matter is, according to what the Prince Bishop is saying, only Jan van Leiden and the leadership in Munster can be sure that they're not going to survive. He, like many of these cult Leaders has a vested interest in tying everyone's destiny to his own. Nobody gets to find out that there's any alternative to sticking with the leader other than sure Death. Death by January 1535. The idea of sure death is motivating the people inside Munster to try new things. For example, Bernard Rothman smuggles out a couple of very sophisticated and well argued religious essays. One entitled Restitution, the other entitled Revenge. And these are, by the way, still studied today. And he sends these out, including copies that he sends to the great luminaries of the Reformation. Martin Luther gets one, for example. And what Rothman is trying to do is say, look, this is how we think. Can't you see how we got this from your point of view? Can't you see how you're kind of in a way tied to what we're doing here? And Martin Luther, in his wonderful bombastic way, when he gets mad, thunders back a reply. He won't even address it to Rothman and the leadership. He addresses it to all the Anabaptists inside the city and basically says, you know, don't you know the difference between a divine inspiration from God and something that is, you know, the word of Satan? Basically saying that the leadership in Munster isn't getting divine revelations from God, they're being controlled by Satan, and that this is what you get. He doesn't sound very sympathetic at all. And it makes you think. Bernard Rothman must have said to himself, okay, no more letters to Martin Luther. And needless to say, you can imagine that the people inside the city never heed that the great Martin Luther, the man who started all this in terms of breaking away from the Catholic Church, thinks that their prophet, their Messiah, their King David come back to earth, is really someone working for Lucifer. Nonetheless, the people inside the city may not have heard that, but they knew that an important due date was approaching the March 26 celestial guarantee due date that Jan van Leyden promised way back in October 1534. You can cut my head off, you can burn me at the stake if the city of Munster isn't freed. But back then, he must have thought his apostles he was sending out were going to be bringing back help. Now it was clear nothing like that was coming. The city was completely ringed with the prince bishop's walls and troops, and no one was going anywhere. What was Jan van Leyden going to do? And you know, it's been five centuries since then, and you can almost still palpably feel the tension, the building tension days in advance that people must have felt what's going to happen, what's going to happen. And Jan van Leyden certainly felt the pressure, because we're told that days before the due date happens, he puts himself in seclusion and he doesn't talk to anybody. And he struck dumb again, some sources say. And then he comes out and says God has spoken to him again. And it's at this moment, ladies and gentlemen, gentlemen, that you can wipe away any doubt that JAN VAN LEYDEN 100% believed in what he was doing, that he wasn't a charlatan. Because Jan van Leyden tells the assembled crowd of Munster that his great compassion had caused him to mishear the word of God. That God told him that he had taken on so many of the sins of the people of Munster upon his own back, that he was confused and that he misunderstood God's original message. That God had not said that the people of Munster would be physically delivered from their situation. They weren't going to be freed from the siege, they weren't going to get a whole bunch of food. They were going to be spiritually delivered. And that they were now, as of Easter, they were amongst the righteous. Their souls were purified, cleansed, and they were now amongst the elite. And that this was better than physical delivery. Remember, this is the man who was second in command to Jan Matthias, the prophet of doom from the Led Zeppelin album cover, who, when he heard God telling him things that might be bad for yon Matthias if he wasn't very faithful, he listened. When told to go fight the Bishop's army, basically by himself, he did. Jan van Leyden hears the word of God and it comes as a reprieve. Oh, yeah, that guarantee I made to you to make you feel good for those last few months. Oh, I'm off the hook. God has spared me. And basically he says, the reason I was confused to begin with was I took all your sins on my back. It's kind of your fault. If you didn't have so many sins, that never would have happened. You can kind of see who we're dealing with now, one way or another. Regardless of his initial motivation, Jan van Leyden is some kind of charlatan. And in case that point needed emphasizing, somebody writes a letter that spells it out in terms that no one can mistake. One of those spies who'd been working inside Munster, who had defected to the Prince Bishop and gone back to work, you know, from the inside for him, defects again, leaves the city and leaves a note on one of the doors outside one of the city gates. The note isn't found by Van Lyden and the leadership until so many people have read it that there's no denying it's out there. You can't pretend like it's one of those arrows shot over the wall with a message from the Prince Bishop and you can stop him before anyone's read it. By the time Van Lyden is aware that this note was left, everyone knows what it says. It's from Henry Gress, the apostle who had left the city in October and who survived and started working for the Prince Bishop. Well, he went back to the Prince Bishop, but he made sure he left a note telling the people inside the city what many people inside the city must have already figured out. The note said, Dear fellow citizens, God has opened my eyes so that now I see how what we have wrought in Munster is false and poisonous. He has commanded me to hold up for you the mirror of your wickedness as he has held it up for me. I beg you to open your eyes. It's high time and to see that what you have done is against God and his divine command. All the prophets are only men like me. You poor stupid fools have been deceived, betrayed and misled. I know everything. You may still save your lives if you will turn from your path and leave this godless business behind. This is God's command so that you will be sure to believe that this letter comes from me, Henry Grese. I've sealed it with my signet ring, which you all know. End quote. Now to me there is no doubt and the sources indicate too that this double blow to the credibility of the man who knows what God wants certainly took some people from the camp of the undecideds or the true believers and moved them over into another camp. What's fascinating to me, and it says something about human nature. You'd love to have a modern day psychiatrist or psychologist debrief these people and tell us what we had going on. But it's how many people stayed with the prophet and stayed true to this belief that he's the man God wants to lead them and that he actually talks and knows what God wants. And there are things that happen from time to time that perhaps bolster their confidence. For example, you know, even with all the bishops siege mechanisms, information reaches the people in Munster of this or that uprising of Anabaptists somewhere in northern Europe. In reality, the apostles that went out for Jan van Leyden stirred up enough trouble so that maybe three or four thousand Anabaptists lost their lives trying to help hundreds, for example, will take over a monastery in the north and will have to be destroyed almost to a person by the local rulers. So those are things that perhaps bolster the confidence of the truly faithful inside the city from time to time. But it's becoming harder and harder to maintain that confidence level when you're starving to death, which we are told more and more is happening. Hermann von Kersenbrock gives long rundowns about how they go from eating, you know, cattle to horses, how they go from horses to dogs and cats, how they go from dogs and cats to mice to slugs, to grass growing on the side of the river, to stripping the bark off trees, to eating their dead, digging them up in the graveyard and eating them, eating their stillborn children, killing their live children and eating them. And his descriptions of these people, you don't even have to imagine them in your mind's eye. They sound exactly like the photos you can look at at of the people when the concentration camps are liberated. Dachau, Auschwitz, those places, they have that translucent skin just sagging off their bodies. They're so devoid of energy that they can't even really mentally process things anymore. And they're dying in the streets. The king, Jan van Leyden, tells them, this is the test. The father's testing you through famine to see if you're truly loyal to him. And don't worry, he'll turn the cobblestones into bread for you. To which Hermann von Kersenbrock writes this. The city was full of death everywhere. Large numbers of people collapsed on the street and suddenly died. And in order to prevent a stench, their corpses were quickly heaved into a wagon specially prepared for this purpose at the King's command, and carried away. They opened large graves for the burial of these corpses, and these were gradually filled up as bodies were cast into them in reliance on the King's promise. Some people were confident that the father would turn the paving stones into loaves of bread before they died of starvation. For this reason, when they were being tormented by horrible hunger, they tried to bite these stones. But when they found out through experience that the stones had not undergone any metamorphosis of their substance or accidental qualities, their old faith began to form flag. And in tears, they silently bewailed the fact that they had been led most terribly astray. Every place resounded with groans. Every place was filled with women's lamentations. Every place screeched with the commons complaints. Every place was permeated with the wailing of children. Every place was disturbed with the sobbing of the old and sick. Kirsenbrock says, though, that they didn't fail to notice that Jan van Leyden and his special class of people were still all eating well. Finally these starving people start asking Jan van Lyden to let them go, knowing full well the fate that awaits them when they arrive at the Bishop's lines. They know they're going to be killed. They don't care they're dying now. They just want it to be quick. King Yan tells them, listen, I'll let you go. You don't have to stay, but you can't come back. You can't come back once you've lost faith into the company of Christ. So I'll let you go, but don't come knocking on the doors after I do. And he lets these people go. And the Prince Bishop doesn't want them either. That no Man's land that existed between the walls of Munster and the Bishop's lines now had a giant wall around it. It and these people exited the city, made their way like starving concentration camp victims toward the Bishop's lines, and were told that the Bishop's troops fired upon the men as they approached, killing them. And they left the women and children in this no Man's Land to starve. And you have this mental image of 50 to 100 people dying in the no Man's Land every day and just walking around eating grass and rolling on the ground and literally dying in front of both the people inside the city of Munster who can see them from the city walls, and the Prince Bishop's forces that can see them from the walls of the siege towers. And we're told it gets so bad that the wives and girlfriends of the Prince Bishop's soldiers are smuggling bread and food to these dying families in the no Man's Land whenever they can. Obviously, this is a state of affairs that can't continue indefinitely, and it doesn't. We're actually told via rumors that have cascaded, you know, down through the pages of history for more than five centuries, that perhaps there was a secret plan inside the city to torch the entire town, end up with some sort of fiery apocalyptic end, while at the same time sort of giving the middle finger to the Prince Bishop and saying, well, you may have crushed us, but you don't get to have your city either. Take that. And if they had done that, it would have been a remarkably similar end to the way the 1993 siege of the Branch Davidians at Waco ended. Also wouldn't be that different than Jim Jones and Jonestown, where the 900 people there committed suicide. But that isn't what happened. What happened involved people leaving the city and defecting to the Prince Bishop. Again, something that you could probably expect with the starvation at the levels it is. Of course, it's not that easy of a thing to do, though, if you're a man trying to get out of the city of Munster and to the Prince Bishop's lines. Well, they're shooting men who are approaching the Prince Bishop's lines. So who knows how many defectors were on their way to help the Prince Bishop and were killed on the way nonetheless, eventually, law of averages at play here. A couple of them get to the Prince Bishop. He keeps them in isolation. The defectors don't know that there are other defectors. This way, the Prince Bishop can compare the validity of the information that they're giving. You know, if one defector gives a password, the Prince Bishop compares that with the password the other defector gives to make sure he's not being fed false info. He's been burned already many times by these Anabaptists, walked into many well laid traps. He's being as careful as he can be. By June 22, 1535, he's pretty sure he's got the passwords, the weak points, and he knows that the people inside the city are at their low ebb and he can expect to have minimal resistance. Once again, though, he's not taking any chances. He picks 400 men to make up a commando team, and he makes some of these defectors go with the commandos, so that if there's any treachery at all, they are the first ones who die. And then, under cover of yet another one of these thunderstorms that seem to enjoy breaking out whenever the Prince Bishop decides to assault the city. Under cover of that and darkness, they slip into the city in one of these weak points that the defectors told them about. They get deep into the city using the passwords that the defectors give them. They murder, knife, kill in their sleep. All these guards that they run into, and all of a sudden, you know, they're in the city. And it's hard to make out what's being said by the sources, but it seems like all these troops of the Bishop, once they get into the city, instead of doing what you would think they would do, which is run to the front gate, kill anybody guarding it, open the gate and say, come on in, they form up for battle inside the city, like 400 guys and kind of wait for the Anabaptists to find out they're there, which they do in short order. But it's the middle of the night, it's dark, it's chaotic, and you know, you get this story from people like Herman von Kersenbrock and you can't tell if it's the truth or if it's written to be a better dramatic tale where there's lots of ebbs and flows. And now the Anabaptists almost win, and now the Bishops troops almost win and it goes back and forth. Sometime around three in the morning though that a truce is called and you know, you'd be on good ground wondering why the Anabaptists have any fight left in them at all. We're told women and children are throwing heavy objects out of second story windows on the heads of the Prince Bishop's troops. We're told that they're yelling insults. I mean you would think these people would be happy to have it over, but they're fighting tenaciously. During one of these truces called in the middle of the night, King Yon himself shows up at the battle lines and yells over the din of the crowd to the Prince Bishop's forces that they have no desire to kill them, that they can leave. Put down your weapons, leave your standards and you can all walk out of here free men. We don't want to hurt you. Once again, making everybody for centuries afterwards wonder, you know, are these Anabaptists really portrayed in a more murderous light than they really were? Again, the sources are all one sided. Nonetheless, the troops say that they won't leave if they have to leave their weapons and standards behind. Either they don't trust the Anabaptists to keep their word, or they just don't want the disgrace and ignominity of walking out of the city disarmed. Sometime during the negotiations, the commander of the Prince Bishop's forces tells one of his standard bearers to sneak up with a standard up onto the city walls of Munster and wait for dawn. When dawn breaks, you know, the standoff still going on between the commando forces of the Prince Bishop and the Anabaptists inside the city. At one point in the morning, the standard bearer raises himself up on the battlements, screams the secret code word, you know, so that they know he's not an Anabaptist spy, and starts waving the Prince Bishop's banner and screaming to the Prince Bishop's forces on the other side of the moat that they need to charge now that his forces inside the city are surrounded and beleaguered and that everyone who would defend the walls against them are busy fighting, you know, the 400 commandos, or however many are left, and the Prince Bishop's forces charge the walls, throw up the ladders, and the crowds that are usually there to throw them back aren't there. The city's broken into, and we're told by the sources that the resistance of the Anabaptists breaks like the popping of a bubble or the dissipation of a spell, and all of a sudden everybody runs. They put up spirited resistance in certain places where hundreds of men will organize themselves, like in the marketplace, for example. We're told Bernard Nipperdolling organizes a couple hundred guys and they hold the marketplace for a couple hours. And you get these desperate rear guard actions, but it's over. They're killing every man they get their hands on, and they're killing a lot of women, too. 24 hours later, the city's in the Prince Bishop's hands and people are going door to door. They're looking under beds, behind cabinets, up in attics, and they're dragging out all the male Anabaptists they find. And as soon as they have them out in the streets, they're cutting their heads off, they're cutting them in two, they're running them through. I mean, anyone who's seen any of these artwork showing medieval massacres knows what this looks like. Now. The Prince Bishop has given orders to his troops that they are not to kill, but are to capture the cabal of leaders who are responsible for this whole mess. They never find Bernard Rothman. We're told that the great preacher, the Joseph Goebbels, if you want to believe the propaganda about the Anabaptists, the great propagandist, the great thinker and writer of the theocratic Anabaptists in Munster, is supposed to have donned white clothing with a sword, looking like some figure out of the Old Testament, and waded into the crowd and the fighting and taken a spear in the side like the biblical Jesus Christ, and supposedly dies right there, but his body's never found. They will search all the bodies as they're throwing them into mass graves, trying to find the gods. And eventually, for years afterwards, there will be wanted posters with his information on it as they try to track him down. But he probably, historians think he probably died somewhere in the fighting, was just so mutilated he couldn't be identified. Bernard Knipperdalling will command, supposedly command very bravely, some of these rear guard actions, and then disappear, only to turn up several days later in the attic of a home, after the woman who lives there betrays him so that she can have her own freedom. And he is taken captive. Jan van Leyden. I wish I could tell you for sure what happened to him, but there are multiple stories. Some are cowardly, you know, where he essentially tries to slip out of the city in cowardly ways. Others have him bravely resisting. We don't know how he was captured, we just know that he was. Eventually, the city is taken. The vast majority of men are killed, and a lot of the women who will not renounce their faith are too. Jan Matthias, widow Davara, who Jan van Leyden married, you may recall, will not renounce the faith and she's beheaded. Soon after this, the defenses of the city of Munster, which have turned out to be so amazingly strong that their own ruler couldn't break into the city, will be torn down so that this never happens again. And the leadership of the Anabaptist rebellion in Munster is in the Bishop's hands now. There are no casualty figures I should point out, for how many people inside the city of Munster died. We know that there were between 8 and 10,000 of them. And almost none of the men were left alive. And a lot of the women were killed too. So it's safe to say thousands of people in Munster died. Thousands upon thousands of Anabaptists who, around northern Europe were trying to heed the call of Jan van Leyden when he asked for help. And Jan Matthias before him when he asked for help, died as a result of these preachers in Munster preaching that they knew what God wanted. And God wants all the Anabaptists to come down here and help us. So many, many people died as a result of what happened in the city of Munster. And that's some of the stuff that Jan van Leyden and his co conspirators, I guess we could call them by this point, will be charged with. They will spend seven months in captivity, being tortured, being, we would say today, debriefed. Jan van Leyden will try to find several clever ways to extend his lifespan somewhat. For example, at one point, we're told the Prince Bishop comes in and visits him and says, do you know how much money you've cost me with all of this? And Van Lyden is supposed to cleverly and quickly retort, I have a plan to get your money back. Put me in a cage, take me around northern Europe, put me on display and charge a penny per person to visit and see me. I'll make your Money back and more, that is, is not something he's taken up on, nor is he taken up on his other suggestion. He tells the Prince Bishop that he should be allowed to live for a while so that he could go to all these, you know, Anabaptist friendly cities and tell all the ones who have any militant leanings, which is a minority even now, that they're misguided and that Jan van Leyden knows from experience that that's not really what God wants, no matter what he thought beforehand. He's not taken up on that offer either. Then we reach the point where the story comes full circle. The morning of January 22, 1536, where, as we told you before, a platform has been set up, a bunch of wagons pulled side by side, a bunch of planks thrown on top of them, the Prince Bishop watching from, ironically, Bernard Nipperdolling's second story open balcony from his house overlooking the main square in Munster, where so much of this story took place. On that stage that's been set up is a stake which may or may not have had three wooden planks sitting out at right angles from the vertical stake that a person could straddle and sit on. There were several charcoal braziers set up on the platform. Think of an elevated hibachi, and you're not that far wrong, with heavy hooks and tongs in them. With sparks shooting up, we're told, white hot coals in the braziers and the tongs glowing. Next to the stage are three large cages that look like transparent telephone booths, if anybody can remember what telephone booths look like anymore. And we're told at 8 o' clock in the morning, with a large crowd watching and the city gates locked just in case there's trouble, three condemned prisoners are marched into the marketplace, the square, and they're brought up to the platform, some of them looking quite peaked indeed. As I said, they've been badly tortured up till now. One of them is Jan van Leyden, another is Bernard Nipperdolling, and the third is another member of the leadership of the Anabaptists. We're told that when Bernard Nipperdolling sees the tongs and the braziers, he is struck dumb with terror. Jan van Leyden goes to his knees and begs forgiveness of the father. Here, a legal representative of the state reads out the charges against Van Lyden, as recorded by Hermann von Kersenbrock. And it's pretty much anything you can think of someone being charged with. I mean, these days we talk about piling on charges sometimes When a district attorney wants to make sure he gets someone on as many charges as possible. Here are the charges announced publicly against King Yan. The king was immediately accused of sinning against God and ruler, reviving the Anabaptist errors which had been condemned by the councils of the Holy fathers and the civil laws, polluting all sacraments, tearing down and plundering churches and shrines, profaning things sacred, stirring up sedition, casting down the lawful ruler, substituting himself by his personal authority and making himself king. King, besmirching himself with the crime of treason and driving into grievous exile burghers whom he had stripped of their property and forced from the city. All of which crimes, it was said, were so manifest and so well known to all the men of the Holy Roman Empire, whether of the highest or lowest status, that they needed no demonstration. End quote. In other words, this is a guy who sinned against the church, he sinned against the state. He was seditious, he was heretical, he was treasonous, he tried to upset the social order with his divine centered communism. This is a guy who gets the ultimate penalty that the state can dole out. But it's not that unusual of a penalty. And there's lots of people in the crowd who've come to watch. As we said, all three men are attached to this same pole by their neck. A collar with spikes on the inside of the collar to keep them immobile is put around their neck. And they're essentially all sort of back to back to back around this same stake. So that each of them can feel through vibrations through the wood stake, smell and hear everything that's going on. And they get to be tortured to death one at a time. So the people next in line get to see exactly what's coming, and they get to feel it and they get to smell it too. The first one who gets the treatment is Jan van Leyden. And we are told that as he sits there or stands there with his neck attached to the pole, unable to move these two men, and again, you wonder what sort of human beings forget about watching this with pleasure, like we're told the people in the audience do. How do you do this to somebody? And yet every time I start to accuse people of being medieval or being raised in this culture or consigning this to a different era, I have to remind myself that we have people who are darn good torturers today, working for many countries at many high levels. So perhaps this is a gene, maybe it's sadism. Whatever it is, we've always produced these people. I joked with a guy who did some tests on me for carpal tunnel syndrome, which require use of an electrified needle in your joints. And I said to him, I said, you have the gene that used to be used for torturers. He just put it to a good use and he laughed and then hit me with another jolt. In any case, we're told that these two executioners grab these heavy, glowing iron tongs and they take a position on either side of Van Lyden. They touch the tongs to the skin underneath his armpits and both at the same time pull down. Hermann von Kersenbruck says, the minute the tongs touch human skin, it erupts in flame. Jan van Leyden will be torn apart. He will be torn apart for an hour, and the law requires it to be an hour. And if he faints, he will be revived. And that time where he was unconscious will be subtracted from his hour. He's required to suffer for a full hour. And they will get to the point where they are ripping tendons and muscles out of his skin while Bernard Nipperdolling and the other compatriot listen and imagine what it's going to be like in 20 or 30 or 40 minutes when it's their turn. I can think of nothing worse than this. We're told van Lyden hardly yells out at all. Finally, his tongue will be torn out, the tongs will tear at his throat, and he will have a knife thrust into his heart to end the suffering. An hour after it begins, Nipperdolling is so horrified by all of this, he tries to strangle himself by putting all of his body weight on his neck and that spiked collar and choke himself out. Out. When the executioners, reportedly, von Kirsenbrach says, anyway, see this? They raise him back up and they put a rope in his mouth and cinch him up to the pole again. So he can't do that anymore. He gets to suffer his hour as well. And when they're dead, their bodies are cut off this pole and they are stuck in those cages. Each one gets their own cage. The cages are hauled up to the one remaining tall steeple in Munster that the Anabaptists didn't knock down and kept there as a warning to everyone else about the power and authority of the state. The tongs themselves that ripped the skin and muscles off these guys are put up in a prominent place in the city square where everyone can see them too. Those cages that held the bodies of these three men. Men are still in Munster today and they're still up hanging from that church steeple. And you can go see a picture of them online. We're told that people watching enjoyed the spectacle. Now maybe we've always produced sadists who make good torturers and executioners and maybe those people are still around today. But I have a hard time believing lots of us would enjoy watching a crime like this, even if the most heinous offender you can think of was being tortured. And yet it was only in our grandparents day, most of us maybe great grandparent, if you're particularly young, where those people were going to the lynchings of African Americans here in the United states in the 1930s and watching people tortured with blowtorch churches and sending postcards to their friends with pictures of burned African Americans burned to death and writing on them. We had a great barbecue here last night. Wish you were here. Stuff like that. So again, maybe we haven't come as far as we thought. Be sure to follow us on Twitter. The address is ardcore History. Hi everyone. Dan here with a little message for you. You know it's hard to reach you in between shows, which is why we're encouraging you to sign up for our Twitter feed, hardcorehistory. That'll help us reach you. But since the last series of shows we finished the Wrath of the Khan series, we've managed to get out the extra show that goes with that for the three or four people in the listening audience that didn't get enough mongols in five shows. If you'd like to get that, you can certainly get it from our website. Same low price as always, $1.99. If you don't mind paying a little bit more though. And you're looking for convenience, maybe you don't want to use paypal or don't want to send us a snail mail check. Well, Ben, if he really exists, after years of trying by hook or by crook, has managed to get our archived shows finally into the itunes music store. Now they're classified as albums in the spoken word musical genre. Perhaps a little hard to find. Just type my name into the itunes search box. Everything we have on itunes should come up. Go down to the album section. You should see the special black album art with the red eye. That's our archived stuff. Go there. Download any of the old shows you want to on there. Download the extra shows if you want to. We charge a little bit more on itunes because it costs us a little bit more on itunes. If you don't like those prices, we haven't changed them on the website at all. And depending on where you live, those prices may vary. We have no control over that at all. As I said, we haven't changed anything on the website. So if it's a little too spendy for you on itunes, never mind, come on over to the website. We'll take good care of you. Otherwise. Finally, after all this time, you now have itunes as an option as well. And also, since we don't get to write a description on itunes, and since my titles that I choose are not necessarily all that descriptive, if you have the time on your hands, why not go write a review view for your favorite archived hardcore history show and tell the listener who's never heard of us at all what the heck that show is about so that, well, they have some idea before they decide to download it. And once again, folks, I just want to thank you. I know it's a long time between shows. I can't tell you how much pressure we feel to get it right and to get it done and the whole thing. But that's because you folks are so good to us and we wouldn't be here without you. So, as I've said to you many times, but I can't tell you enough, we are eternally grateful.