Back in May I was visiting Giles in Munster. Aside from meditating on what exactly a symmetry restricted group should be, and going to see Detective Pikachu, we did a fair amount of cycling back and forth across the city. Munster enjoys a reputation (perhaps self-proclaimed) of being the cycling capital of Germany, and with all the cycle paths and low levels of automobile use it is not hard to fall in love with the place and wonder why we aren’t all living is such a fashion.
If you are observant enough while wandering around the city, you will notice three metal cages hanging from the steeple of St Lambert’s church. Those cages once held the mutilated remains of religious radicals who had been so jazzed up by the Reformation that they had declared Munster the New Jerusalem and announced the imminent apocalypse, Jesus’s return, and all the rest of it. So deplorable was their rule of the city (and embarrassing) that both Catholics and Lutherans united to lay siege to the Munster to bring an end to New Jerusalem.
Giles was good enough to lend me his copy of New Jerusalem: The short life and terrible death of Christendom’s most defiant sect, by Paul Ham. (A good alternative source is this episode of In Our Time on the Siege of Munster, although the reintroduction polygamy is not even given a mention). It makes for quite remarkable reading. To a contemporary reader the most obvious parallel is to ISIS. I would go so far as to say that everything you could find in the rise and fall of ISIS you can also find in the history of New Jerusalem. Down to the beheadings.
The founding of New Jerusalem was the culmination of the work of many personalities. They were all united in the Anabaptist cause: abandoning infant baptism as a perversion of the “true” gospel by the church in Rome. While the followers of Luther took a more pragmatic, and even conservative, approach to religious reform, these “re-baptisers” were revolutionaries outside any kind of religious establishment who were provocative to the point of inciting violence. (Baptism is no small point; you will still find many protestant churches today which require adult baptism for membership.)
Melchior Hoffman, an Anabaptist preacher, prefigured the events in Munster when he declared Strasbourg to be the New Jerusalem, and the site of the apocalypse the following year, 1533. The authorities back then took such rantings seriously enough that they threw him in a dungeon, where he could safely be forgotten. Then came John Matthais, a self proclaimed prophet, who received the divine revelation (or simply decided, depending on your point of view) that Hoffman had got the time and place wrong, and that Munster was in fact the right location. Initially it seemed that this prophesy was realized, as in February 1534 the city was taken into Anabaptist control. This turn of events was seen as an embarrassment, nuisance, and danger to the various authorities involved. Ultimately it fell to Bishop Waldeck — more a nobleman or prince than an actual religious leader — to marshal an army and lay siege to the city. Due to the commitment and tenacity of those under siege, Munster’s excellent fortifications, and the drunkenness of the mercenaries that Waldeck employed, the whole sorry business lasted a year and a half.
John Matthais would go on to have himself cut to pieces by the armies of Bishop Waldec in possibly the most ill advised cavalry charge in history. It is Matthais’ second in command, John of Leiden, who takes over control of New Jerusalem and ruled it through most of the rebellion. Leiden’s rule quickly becomes a tyranny marked with the reintroduction of polygamy and summary executions by decapitation. The whole episode was marked with a strange combination of farce and grim horror.
While ISIS is the most obvious modern parallel, with its explicitly apocalyptic mission, reading the accounts of meetings between radical preachers and Luther calls to mind the general dangers of political radicalism.
Instead, Rothman set off on the well-worn pilgrimage to Wittenberg, as reform-minded novitiates tended to. There, Luther and Melanchthon deigned to meet this impassioned young man, as they had met Hoffman and so many other zealous young preachers. They noted his intelligence and eloquence, yet something about Rothmann troubled them. His passions were unguarded, and untutored. His self-righteousness lacked the grace of humility. They concluded that he was probably mentally unfit for the job. As Melanchthon observed, Rothmann might turn out to be exceptionally good or exceptionally bad.
New Jerusalem, Chapter 7 — Paul Ham
I find the reformation, or at least what little I understand about it, deeply fascinating. It is on the list of subjects that, once you understand a little of what it meant and continues to mean, you are staggered by the degree with which you misunderstood so much of what is going on in the world today.
(For whatever it is worth, Detective Pikachu was fun but completely disposable.)