66 - Munster Concluded

I think we are on lesson 66, and we are continuing the saga of the rebellion at Munster.

If you're visiting with us, we are just about to wrap up our church history series, which does not mean we're anywhere near the current period, but at least what we're covering, but have to have to spend some time talking about what happened at Munster.

And so in the last episode of As Munster Turns, J .R.

was shot, and we were left wondering who in the world did that, and which

I mentioned that, I think, on the dividing line, and I had a bunch of people on social media going, who's

J .R.? And I'm just like, man. I got my cane out, whacked myself a few times with it, and it's like, oh gosh.

J .R. Ewing? No, you don't remember Dallas? I'm looking at you, brother.

Yeah, you don't know who J .R. Ewing was. You never watched Dallas. Gosh. When was that?

1978 -ish? It was the biggest cliffhanger ever, right? The end of the season.

J .R. Ewing, who was the guy in I Dream of Jeannie. Yeah, it was a soap opera, but on prime time.

And in the last episode, he walks around the corner and somebody shoots him.

And then the season ended, and the whole summer was spent, who shot J .R.? I mean, it was a massive cultural thing.

Anyway, okay. So, let's review.

Jan Mathis has come apart, literally. He has ridden out with a dozen of his followers to vanquish the prince -bishop's armies, and of course, that battle lasted only a matter of moments.

And he is torn apart, his head's put on a pike and put outside the city gates.

And so the people inside the city are like, this was the man that we were following, we thought he was a prophet of God, and God told him to go do this, he was going to deliver us, and he's dead, and everybody along with him.

And so the rumors started traveling around the city that he was going to rise in three days, which, given that he was already chopped up into pieces, is a little bit of a difficult thing to understand.

But anyway, and then along comes Jan of Leiden.

We talked about the fact there were two Jans, Jan Mathis and Jan of Leiden. And in reality,

Jan of Leiden is the much better known of the two Jans because Jan Mathis is really only there at the beginning, he's the one that gets it all started, but he dies fairly quickly, and Jan is going to be in charge in Munster from Easter of 1534 to the final fall of the city in June of, summer of 1535.

So he's much more responsible for everything that goes on, even though he was second fiddle at first, until Jan Mathis did his thing.

And so, he at first is just simply the leader, and he continues what

Jan Mathis was doing, and as I mentioned, one of the primary things that the two

Jans are intent upon doing is establishing what could only be described as a fully communist state there in Munster.

And so, it really does become a reign of terror over the next number of, well, for the rest of the time, only the terror increases, and then as starvation begins to become a reality, you have this insane mixture of people dying of starvation and the desperation that comes from that, and yet Jan and his court, because in a few months,

I'll mention in a moment, he'll be made king, so you have a monarchy in a communist system, which is rather odd when you think about it, but what happens is you're supposed to bring all of your, basically all of your worldly goods, you're only supposed to have a certain amount of clothing, and all the rest of the clothing you bring into the storehouses, and all your gold or your silver or riches or anything is brought to the storehouses, and then as you have need, as anyone has need, you just go to the storehouse and get what you need, but everyone's supposed to be on the same level.

And so, Jan continues this, but then there is also an increase in, well, as I mentioned before, the

Old Testament is the primary scripture of the Anabaptists, or whatever you want to call them, in Munster.

And so, there is a strong theocratic concept. It's almost divine revelation.

Jan Mathis was more open about sort of being a prophet, but once you get started, people can come along, and once you've sort of expanded the canon and allow for new revelation, then other people can come along, and how can you be overly critical?

Somebody just pops up and says, God just told me X, Y, or Z. If you've got your power because somebody before had said

God told me X, Y, and Z, then it's hard to be overly critical about what someone's saying now.

And so, what happens is that during one of the public processions,

Jan has, you know, as basically, well,

I'm getting ahead of myself, let me back up. There is a fascinating reality that takes place, and that is, did

I mention to you the first whoops attack against the city?

Yes, no, maybe, I guess not. The Prince Bishop, Van Waldeck, is under a lot of pressure to attack the city.

And remember, he has been given these huge canon, the devil and the mother of the devil, and all sorts of other artillery pieces.

And so, in May, they decide it's time to move against the city.

He doesn't want to do this, because it's his city. He doesn't want to blow it up. He's got to repair all of this anyways. So, they start firing canons and try to blow holes in the walls of Munster, and they're going to attack the next day.

Well, the problem is, almost everybody in the army are mercenaries, and mercenaries tend to like to drink.

And so, there was one group of mercenaries that really liked to drink. And so, as the canons are going boom, boom, boom, they're pouring it down.

And they sort of pass out, and at least enough of them wake up at sunset.

But they're so confused, they think they missed the call to head toward the city at sunrise.

And so, they're worried that they're not going to get any booty once they get, because that's where the mercenary, you get to go into the city, sort of ransack stuff.

And if you run into some rich guy's house, you stick some stuff in your pockets. That's how you make all your extra money. And so, they're like, oh, dude.

I don't really think it's the terminology they use, but the sort of old German version of, oh, dude.

And so, they start running toward the city, because they figure they've been left behind.

So, all the other soldiers who are just getting ready to go to bed are like, did we miss something?

Well, now they're going to get all the booty. And so, all of a sudden, there is this at dark, utterly disorganized attack on the city, with the sun going down instead of going up.

Well, the Anabaptists rush to the walls, and it does not take very much for them to get rid of drunk soldiers in the dark.

When you're up on the walls, throwing stuff down at the people down below, and the attack is repulsed with basically no injury to the people in the city.

And so, nobody but numerous, especially the drunk soldiers, ended up at the bottom of the moat, dead, or whatever else it might be.

So, the whole attack of the next day is called off, and the

Prince Bishop is like, oh, good grief. And the people inside the city are like, yeah, we've been delivered. So, that was the first thing.

Then, during the summer, there was a

Johann Dusenstier from Wadendorf, a lame goldsmith.

He had a powerful talent for arousing his listeners to a fervent pitch of enthusiasm.

I'm reading from the Taylor King here. Not even Rothman, or Krechting, or Nipperdaling praised

Jan so effusively. So, this was a big hit. And so, there's this one day where Jan comes before the people, and he's all humble, and I just don't know if I can do what

God's called me to do. You people deserve such better leadership, so on and so forth. And he's humbling himself.

In the midst of this, this Johann Dusenstier, the goldsmith, the lame goldsmith, comes forward, and he starts preaching.

He says, did Jan's people realize, he says to the growing crowds, that they had a powerful biblical hero in their midst.

Jan was no mere prophet. He was the one that the prophets anticipated. He was more than a man.

He was a veritable David, a return to be their king. And so, somehow, he opens up his bag, and what does he have in his bag but a scepter, and a crown, and royal accoutrements that he just happens to have with him.

And he places them upon Jan's head, and Jan sits upon a throne, and at first, he's just very,

I'm just so humbled that the Lord would do this for me. But then, very quickly, in the same hour, he's really taking to this, and basically saying, now you all need to get with the program now, and I'm going to assign a royal court, and the whole nine yards, and a lot of people are sort of like, hmm, this seems extremely convenient that this all worked out this way, but A, you've already pretty much invested yourself in this visions from God stuff and things like that, and Jan cracks the whip hard against anyone who would question his rulership.

And so, in August, he's now king, and he's assigned people to be the court executioners, and you can bring people before him for judgment, and if you have a rebellious wife, for example, you can bring her before King Jan, and if he finds that she has not been obeying as she is supposed to obey, well, sometimes you had imprisonment, but very often,

Nipperdaling or one of the others had that sword, which you can still see in the museum in Munster to this day, and you didn't just run people through, beheading happened a lot in Munster, so one nice fast swing, and you've taken care of that particular issue.

And so, there is a rules are passed, for example, you cannot lock your door, you cannot close your door, it always must remain ajar, and at any point at any time, someone can simply walk through your door and make sure that you're doing what you're supposed to be doing, that you're being a good citizen of Munster, and there were certain people in the city that liked doing that kind of thing, and we all know those kind of folks, and so there was great fear that is going on within the city.

Well, a few months after the failed attempt, again, more pressure is mounting on von

Waldeck, the Prince Bishop, to get this over with, and so they finally command that no one drink one day, and plan that with the attack, it's best to have sober soldiers than drunk ones, and so in August, late

August, 1534, they again open up with the devil and the devil's mother, and they're blowing holes in the wall, and of course then the women are running in and filling up the holes with all sorts of stuff, but there's a lengthy period of bombardment, and then the attack begins.

Let me read you a description of the attack. The bishop's men were confident that their overwhelming numbers and the long bombardment must have terrified the

Anabaptists. They always, just my comment here, they always thought of the people in Munster as just simply shopkeepers, and just had a very low opinion of them as far as having any military ability.

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 were hardened professionals, veterans of campaigns in Spain, Italy, and France, and accustomed to violence and hardship.

Their opponents were only shopkeepers, smiths, tailors, and housewives, but they were fighting both 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 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 surviving soldiers managed to make their way back across the inner moat and through the breached outer wall to the second moat.

There, in a narrow defile of thorn hedges, hundreds of the company of Christ were hidden in the bushes, lying in wait to slaughter the soldiers as they returned in panic from the horror they had faced the walls.

As night fell, the Anabaptists retreated into the city and raised their voices in song, a mighty fortress is our

God. Okay, we have some approval there.

Now, there were hundreds of Van Waldeck's soldiers that were killed in the attack.

I think there were 15 Anabaptists that lost their lives in the attack.

So it was a major victory. King Yan, by all accounts, even by those who did not like him at all, said that despite arrows raining down and the bombardment and bombs and everything else, he rode around the battle lines on a white charger, just evidently, utterly insensible to the dangers given commands, and did a great job, and obviously greatly increased the stature that was his in the city.

And of course, it was decided after this that what needed to be done was to completely cordon off the city now with a wall and starve them out.

Despite how many head of cattle they still had and things like that, this was the only way to be able to do it.

During this time, in the late summer, fall period,

Yan sends out 12 apostles. You can still get small numbers of people in and out at night, because you don't have night vision goggles and stuff like that, and there's woods around.

He sends out 12 apostles to get help in the fight against the

Prince Bishop. Of course, inside the city, there's very quickly rumors, for example, of the conversion of the

King of England. The King of England has been converted, and he's going to come help us against the

Prince Bishop, and this, that, and the other thing. These 12 apostles are having great success.

The reality is that they were all very quickly rounded up, and all but one were executed brutally and cruelly forthwith.

But one of these individuals was

Henry Graze, the former schoolmaster in Munster. And he, in fact, when he was captured, was going to be executed, but hearing someone speaking in Latin, which he himself could speak, he was a schoolmaster, he began a conversation with someone, and because of his education, was not looked upon as just a bumbling someone from Munster, and he basically struck a deal.

And the deal was, he would go back into Munster. They would come up with a believable story.

He would go back into Munster, and he would spy upon the city, and then escape to give the Prince Bishop the information he needed to bring about the end of the siege.

Evidently, he, at the beginning of everything, he had sort of stood against it, but then evidently became a believer, but then became an unbeliever once he got out.

So the story he came up with was that he was in his prison cell about to be taken to the gallows, and an angel of the

Lord appeared and instructed him what he was to do. And the next thing he knows, he finds himself, well, what they did is they took him at night, and they snuck him to one of the gates in chains, and then left him under a bush.

And so he starts crying for help out there, and it's during the winter, so it is frigid cold, but they couldn't exactly wrap him up in an ice cloak or something, so he's out there freezing.

Well, the guards hear him inside, but they figure it's a trap, we'll wait for sunlight.

So by the time they finally come out and find him, he's about dead. So they start rubbing on his body, and they bring him in, because they recognize who he is.

And he recovers and tells this story of the deliverance by the angel of the

Lord back to Zion, the holy city. And he's believed, and is very quickly, once he fully recovers, brought into the very inner circle of King Jan, and gets to observe everything in a straightforward fashion.

And so what he is going to eventually do is get another vision from God, where he is to go to southern

Germany, and raise support in southern Germany. This is months later. And he leaves

Munster, goes straight to the Prince Bishop, and gives him all the information on what's going on inside the city.

And this is a part of what ends up happening in the eventual downfall.

So, for example, one of the rumors when they first sent the apostles out, Henry VIII had been re -baptized into their faith, and now recognized

King Jan as his sovereign. An Anabaptist army was about to invade

Rome, the citadel of Satan, and overthrow the Pope. In the Netherlands, thousands of supporters were arming their ships for an expedition shortly after the new year to rescue the besieged city of Munster.

So everybody wanted to believe the good news. The problem is, all of it was completely false.

And that's what happened in that situation. Now, let me see here.

There are a bunch of these quotes I wanted to make sure to get in here. Just to give you an idea of how bad things got in the city itself.

On September 25th, as on other days, the fanfare of trumpets announced the imminent arrival of the King and his court.

Now, it wouldn't be so bad in September, but by December, January, February, March, the

King's court was still eating well while the people were starting to eat each other. That was one of the bad things.

Riding his white stallion, preceded by nipper -dolling and correcting on foot, all enclosed within a moving box of bodyguards,

Jan rode slowly into the square and took his place on the throne. On one side of the throne, a young boy, a page, held a copy of the

Old Testament. On the other, an older and stronger boy held a naked sword. A young woman was led before the throne, her head bare and her hands tied.

Before her, her name was Elizabeth Holshurn. She was charged with having three times denied her husband his conjugal rights.

The young woman said she had been assigned to her husband. Okay, stop. Shortly, not overly short, but shortly after,

Jan becomes King. He announces a revelation from God that in light of the privileges of the patriarchs, the fathers in the

Old Testament, that God had commanded that the city of Munster adopt polygamy and that every single woman must be married.

And this, I mean, Anabaptists were sort of known, think of Mennonites, okay?

This is way beyond the line. There is a brief and successful coup.

Some men actually managed to capture Jan and most of his upper court and imprison them.

Problem was they hadn't thought through what to do now. And Jan's signaling through the jail window to supporters outside, and they're grabbing their cannon and rolling them up the street.

And if they had had a plan, if they had opened the city gates, if they had signaled something, it could have ended right then.

They didn't have a plan, didn't know what to do, didn't act quickly. The rest of the people in the city responded quickly.

They were re -overthrown. Jan was put back in place, and everybody that was involved with the brief rebellion was torturously executed, publicly torn apart and so on and so forth, over the next few weeks in the city square.

So there had been a rebellion. And so as soon as Jan gets back in power after that, now he really cracks the whip and the polygamy goes into full effect and everybody has to be, every woman has to be married to somebody, even if they don't want to be.

So it is in that context then. She was charged with having three times denied her husband with conjugal rights.

The young woman said she had been assigned to her husband against her will, despite the preacher's earlier assertions that no woman should be forced to choose a husband, and she did not regard him as having any rights over her at all.

She said in James Steyer's translation, Heavenly Father, if you are almighty, see to it that I never move, never more in my life have to climb into this marriage bed, end quote.

With that, King Jan decreed that she must pay with her life for violating the will of God. The two guards who had led the woman before the throne,

Forrester O 'Neill and Bernard Nipperdaling, though he was no longer the official sword bearer, cut off her head with a single stroke.

The next day, September 26th, Catherine Kockenbecken was executed in similar fashion because she had taken two husbands.

In the company of Christ, as Steyer aptly puts it, polygamy was the Lord's will, polyandry the devil's.

And so, I mean, can you imagine in a relatively small city, not small by standards back then, but from our standards today, there are public beheadings going on every single day.

Every single day. Not only does this help with the food supply issue, obviously, but it keeps the people in charge in charge.

They have everyone under tremendous pressure.

Now, in January 1535, this is interesting, Jan sends a book called

Restitution that Bernard Rothman has written to Philip of Hesse, Luther, and Melanchthon.

And if you remember the Marburg colloquy, it was Philip of Hesse, Luther, Melanchthon, Zwingli, Zwingli's dead now, and others were the ones that had met there in Marburg.

And so, what's interesting is Luther then coined the title of that book

I've mentioned to you, The Taylor King, in his response to Jan of Leiden. He said, quote, for the scriptures and the prophets point to Messiah through whom all was to be fulfilled, and this the

Jews also believed, but you want to make it point to your Taylor King, to the great disgrace and mockery of Christ.

So, that's where the phrase came from, as Luther was rip -snorting in his response to, you know, they were hoping to get support.

They did not get support. All of the magisterial reformers utterly rejected what was going on in Munster, as did

Luther. And so, remember when

Graves had left to go raise support in southern Germany, he actually went to the bishop, and then right around this time, he writes a letter to the people of Munster, and they copy it with his signet ring, and they, this is, that's the postal service of that day, and, letter, sir, you know, message, sir, probably happened more than once.

And, of course, you didn't want to be found with one of them, because Jan would kill you, because the idea was, if you read it, then you'd tell other people about it.

So, no, you know, even if they did find it, it's like, ah, run away, you know, type of thing, but eventually the letter would get to Jan, and this letter came from Graves, that everybody in the city knew, saying, you've been deceived, you've been, you've been misled, this is all, you know, surrender, you know, so this, this was a great danger to Jan's leadership at that particular point in time.

One more story that is fairly lengthy here, but I, it really struck me.

Elizabeth was the blonde, beautiful daughter of Bernard von Scheer, a blacksmith.

She had been married at 19 years of age by force, after the king's decree of polygamy, to a man named Reiner Hardwick, and had tried unsuccessfully to run away from him through the city gate.

Hardwick had then died, and her father had arranged for her to be married to an old man, cadaverous, pockmarked, and bald, one

August Kloterbund. That just doesn't sound good one way or the other.

One day in the late fall of 1534, as the king was holding court in the Cathedral Square, Elizabeth was brought to him for judgment, arms bound behind her by her father and her new husband.

Bernard von Scheer complained that his daughter had been disobedient to him, and that he should be allowed to punish her.

August Kloterbund went further. He said that Elizabeth, though she was his pledged wife, had told him she would sooner sleep in the bushes than with him.

He asked that King Jan pronounce on this rebellious woman an appropriate judgment. Jan asked Elizabeth if she had married

Kloterbund of her own free will. She asked, according to Helmut Paulus's version of the story, how anybody could think that a young woman might want to marry such a stinking old goat.

She would rather be three feet under the ground. The king reprimanded the old man and the girl's father for imposing their will on her unfairly, and had her imprisoned in the

Rosenthal for disobedience. A few days later, she became his tenth wife. Beautiful, spirited, and brave,

Elizabeth was Jan's favorite wife after Queen D 'Vara. Remember, Queen D 'Vara is Jan Mathis's widow.

If you remember Jan Mathis and the whole 1970s rock band cover thing.

In early May, Elizabeth had grown difficult. Accounts varied. Some said she had been disturbed by the sad fate of the refugees

Jan had turned away from the city gates. We're all the way into May for this particular story.

People started to try to get out of the city as they're starving. But the Prince Bishop had said, there's now a wall all around the city.

He said, no, we're not taking you. And it was a pitiful sight. You've got these people, these starving people, begging to be let out, and they're caught in this no man's land.

Because once Jan said, you can leave, but you ain't coming back. And so they were dying out there in the wilderness.

The Prince Bishop's soldiers would just kill the men. Some of the soldiers' wives were organizing food chains.

They'd be throwing food over the wall at these people. It's just a horrible, horrible situation. And Elizabeth had seen this, because Jan wouldn't let them back in.

Some said she had been disturbed by the sad fate of the refugees Jan had turned away from the city gates. Others said she had protested the starvation that was evident all around them, while she and the other members of the court were allowed to eat all they wished.

Whatever the cause, the various accounts agree that Elizabeth reproached Jan for his inhumanity and demanded to be allowed to leave him and the city.

Outraged or in gratitude in her temerity, Jan led her to the market square and before the other wives and the assembled throng.

I think by now he had 16 wives. And the assembled throng that had been summoned condemned her to death.

Helmut Paulus, adding a novelist's insight to the documents describing this incident, imagines

Elizabeth's last moments as she hears the king say, God has commanded that you must die. This is the same test that Abraham faced.

I cannot escape it. How strange those words sound to the young woman. Her lips draw back in scorn, but her eyes are shocked when she looks into the face of the king who stands before her.

He is back to the crowd. His eyes gleam with animal savagery. His lips are pulled back from his teeth. In great fear, she tries to stretch out her hands against the truth now revealed in his face that a mask had previously hidden.

But her hands are bound behind her. She wants to scream, but she is gagged. She sees how the king takes the sword from the hand of Master Nihiland.

Her hands are unbound and she is lifted with inhuman strength and forced to kneel with her head on a block. She clasps her hands before her as she hears, and this actually happened, hears

King Jan reproach the other wives. Listen to this. Why don't you sing?

Sing. She hears the frightened voices of the women weakly like an exhalation singing in excelsis

Deo. Glory to God in the highest. She sees a flash of light, feels a terrible pain and drops into a dark sea.

All now is peaceful and dark. Several graphic sketches of the king dancing with his other wives around the headless corpse of Elizabeth Wanchir have come down to us as perhaps the most vivid documentation of his depravity.

And it was this incident more than any other that led serious observers to see Jan as indeed the devil in human shape.

But perhaps the true devil in this scene is the one omitted by Paulus in his reconstruction, the former

Catholic priest Bernard Rothman, who looked on as the king in his court danced and said, glory to God in the highest.

So here, as it's getting bad, Jan decapitates his second favorite wife and then forces the other wives to dance with him around her decapitated body in front of the populace.

This is what has happened in Munster. So there is a fellow by the name of Henry Gresbeck who left

Munster in May, May 23rd. He managed to find some kind guards on the wall, explained that he was himself a former soldier.

He was taken to Prince Bishop. Over the next few weeks, he took men to secret entrances, demonstrated he'd get in and out of the city.

They then sent about 200 men with him.

They snuck into the city and invaded, but were discovered.

And so there is fighting going on in the city. One of them managed to get away from the others who had taken up a defensive position, get up on the wall and signal for the

Prince Bishop's troops to come. The Anabaptists had abandoned their post to go inward for the fight.

And so this is how eventually the Prince Bishop's army was able to breach the city, get in.

There is fierce fighting for an extended period of time during that day. The Anabaptists had created what we would call tanks.

They were armored carts, 16 of them in the city square, with cannons and everything. I mean, they were going to use them to try to break out, but then once they ate their horses, that wasn't going to work very well.

So, and so, but they were, you know, the Prince Bishop's forces were really concerned about those things because they didn't really have anything to deal with them.

But eventually the city is taken. These soldiers had all been charged to not kill the leaders.

The leaders had to be executed properly. And so what's interesting is they never found

Bernard Rothman, the guy who wrote all the sermons. 20 years later, his wanted posters were still in Europe.

What happened to him, no one knows. He could have been just so horribly mauled by the soldiers that didn't know who he was that he could have been blown up into pieces, who knows.

Or he might have gotten out. We don't know. We just don't know. He never surfaces again. There's just no knowledge.

But Nipperdahl and Creshting and Jan of Leiden are all captured alive.

And pretty much everyone else is killed. Certainly all the men. All the

Anabaptist men in the city. Thousands. It doesn't matter. If you're found in a house, even if you weren't involved in the last fighting, you're just brought out in the street, you're run through with a sword and left to die.

And you just pile the bodies up. And most of the women were killed as well. It was an absolute slaughter in the city.

There is a period of time that passes while these people are imprisoned where there is conversation.

Jan even suggested to the Prince Bishop that he build three cages and parade he and Nipperdahl and Creshting in the cages around the

Anabaptist areas where they could tell people that it was all foolishness and that they're wrong and so on and so forth and try to hold things down.

And maybe the Prince Bishop could make up some of his losses by charging to see the prisoners.

But he knew what was going to have to happen. If all his followers had already been executed, then he had to be executed as well.

So finally, on January 22nd of 1536, in Munster, where all of this took place, carts were tied together with boards placed across them with a central pole in the middle.

The Prince Bishop sat up in Nipperdahling's upper floor window, the same one where Jan of Leiden had introduced himself to the people after Jan Mathis's death, to watch the proceedings.

And the law was that for this execution, each person had to be tortured for exactly one hour.

And they had to be conscious during the one hour. So if you passed out from the pain, they would revive you and subtract how long you're unconscious and keep track of a full hour.

The three men were all chained to the same pole. They had collars that had spikes facing inward on, so they really couldn't go anywhere.

But you'd be, you know, there'd be, you know, if you got three people around one pole, you can sort of figure, you can sort of see one person over to one side or maybe, you know, like this, you might be able to see some things.

But you were only tortured one at a time. So, like, the last guy would hear two hours worth of the torture of the other guys before he got it.

That's, in my opinion, he had it worst. The first one to go had it easiest.

They had a, they had tongs, sets of tongs in fire.

So they were glowing red hot. And so what they would do is for an hour, they would tear your body apart.

They just grab, pull, grab, pull, muscles, tendons, whatever, and just pull you apart for an hour, slowly, to the entertainment of the crowd.

And then once your hour was up, they would just simply take a long knife and put it through your heart and you would be released from your suffering.

And then they moved on to the next guy, who has been listening for an hour, knowing that his hour is coming, and then finally to the last one.

So these three, Janne Leiden, Bernard Nipperdaling, and Kersting, were the ones who were executed in this, you know, seems to us to be outrageously barbaric fashion, but this was, this was agreed to by everybody in Europe.

The Protestants and the Catholics together. Yes, that's what needs to happen. There wasn't anybody going, ah, mercy.

No, no. Look at what these people did. Look at the barbaric, barbaric situation they brought into existence.

Their bodies were put in three cages and hoisted up above the clock on the

St. Lambert Church Tower, which is one of the only church towers that Janne Leiden hadn't had torn down.

And there they stayed for 50 years, their rotting corpses, dropping pieces of flesh on people attending church for 50 years.

50 years later, so about 1585, they pulled the cages down, took the bodies out, and then they put the cages right back up.

And if you go to Munster, Germany today, they're still there. The very same three cages.

In the 1800s, they had taken them down to restore them. They were really well made. They cleaned them up, put them back up.

World War II, a bomb hit that church, damaged the steeple, knocked one of the three down.

They repaired the steeple, put it right back up. And within the 21st century, a referendum was held in Munster.

Should we take the cages down? The popular vote was, keep them up there. Keep them up there.

And that's in the 21st century. Almost 500 years after the events.

They're still there today. You can get on your smartphone right now, if you've got Google Earth, go to St.

Lambert's Cathedral, Munster, Germany. Go down to street level, zoom around. There it is.

You'll see it on your own phone. They're still there. That, obviously, was the essence of the response and reaction of everyone in Europe.

And of course, remember, it's not just the thousands of Anabaptists that died in Munster, but there were thousands that were killed trying to get there.

And there would be thousands that would be killed over the next centuries, over the next two centuries, two and a half centuries, in Europe.

And the primary impetus was, Munster, look at what these people do. This is what they are.

And so, that's also the primary thinking that Luther has the rest of his life about Anabaptists.

The rest of the Reformers. Calvin's converted right around this time period. He's converted just before Munster happens, like a year before.

And so, do you think he's going to be listening fairly to any Anabaptist that tries to say, have some nice conversation about baptism?

No, not going to happen. Not going to happen. That's what happens.

That's what happens. Now, the big question you all have, and we're out of time, is, why hasn't

Hollywood made a movie about this yet? I don't know, because you wouldn't have to exaggerate anything.

It would be absolutely amazing just to tell the story as it actually happened.

A lot of lessons we can learn from it. Well, how cults start and things like that. But we are completely out of time.

So, let's close. Father, once again, we thank you for this time.

And as we look back, we are truly amazed as we consider what has happened in the past. Help us to ponder these things, learn from these things, and be wise as a result of these things.