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Münster 1534-35 - Jan Matthys, Jan van Leiden and the Anabaptist kingdom

Münster 1534–35: Jan Matthys, Jan van Leiden and the Anabaptist kingdom

Christopher asked (2026-11-07) for everything that can be found on Jan Matthys, the Münster rebellion and polygamy under “King” Jan van Leiden. It is the most notorious episode in Anabaptist history.

Why it matters to the family.

A warning about the sources. Almost everything known comes from the Anabaptists’ enemies:

  • the Catholic chronicler Hermann von Kerssenbrock (writing in the 1560s–70s);
  • the deserter Heinrich Gresbeck, who betrayed the city;
  • the confessions of the leaders under torture.

The Anabaptists’ own record is mainly Bernhard Rothmann’s pamphlets. Lurid details, the polygamy above all, may be exaggerated. See “A historian’s view” below.

The people

PersonWhoRoleFate
Jan Matthys (Matthijsz)baker from Haarlem, born c.1500the “prophet”; follower of Melchior Hoffman who rejected Hoffman’s pacifism; baptized thousands in Holland; named Münster the New Jerusalemkilled in a sortie on Easter Sunday, 5 April 1534
Jan van Leiden (Jan Beukelszoon, Bockelson)tailor, born 2 Feb 1509 at Zevenhoven near Leiden, illegitimate son of a village mayor; also an innkeeper and amateur actorMatthys’s disciple; after Easter 1534 the leader; proclaimed king of the New Jerusalem, Sept 1534tortured and executed 22 Jan 1536
Bernhard (Bernd) RothmannMünster preacher, born Stadtlohn c.1495led the town’s Reformation from the late 1520s; became Anabaptist in 1533; the movement’s theologian (Restitution, Oct 1534; Concerning Revenge, Dec 1534)vanished in the fall of the city, June 1535; never found
Bernhard Knipperdollingwealthy cloth merchant and guild leaderelected mayor, Feb 1534; later the king’s executioner and “stadholder”executed with the king, Jan 1536
Divara van Haarlem (Dieuwertje)brewer’s daughter from Haarlem, born 1511wife of Matthys; after his death married Jan van Leiden and became queenbeheaded after the fall, 7 July 1535, with four other women
Bernd Krechtingone of the king’s councilexecuted with the king, Jan 1536
Franz von Waldeckprince-bishop of Münster, Osnabrück and Mindenled the siege; himself sympathetic to Lutheranismrecaptured the city in June 1535
Heinrich Gresbeckjoiner, deserterled the bishop’s men over the walls on the night of 24–25 June 1535wrote an eyewitness account

Timeline

Before 1534: a Lutheran city on the edge.

  • 1525–1532: guilds in Münster rose against the ruling patrician families and the clergy.
  • Rothmann preached reform, and by 1532–33 the guilds had evangelical preachers in every church. The prince-bishop accepted this in a compromise (Feb 1533) brokered by Philip of Hesse.
  • Summer 1533: Rothmann rejected infant baptism, and the Protestant movement split. Dutch Melchiorites began moving to the city.
  • Summer 1533: Jan van Leiden visited for two months, went home, and was rebaptized by Matthys.

January–April 1534: the prophet’s city.

  • 5 January 1534: Matthys’s apostles arrived and baptized Rothmann and about 1,400 adults within days. Matthys declared Münster the New Jerusalem, where Christ would return.
  • February: Matthys arrived. On 23–24 February the Anabaptists won the council election, and Knipperdolling became mayor.
    • Catholics and Lutherans who would not be rebaptized were driven out, in freezing weather, and their property was taken.
    • Matthys wanted the “godless” killed; Knipperdolling talked him into expulsion instead.
  • The new order:
    • community of goods: money abolished for internal use, food and property held in common;
    • iconoclasm: images smashed in the cathedral and churches;
    • all books except the Bible burned, and the city archives destroyed;
    • an Anabaptist coinage struck.
  • Siege: the prince-bishop closed a ring of fortified camps around the city, with troops from Catholic and Lutheran princes alike.
  • Easter Sunday, 5 April 1534: Matthys had prophesied judgment for that day. He rode out with about twelve men, “a second Gideon”, and was killed. His head was set on a pike, and his body was mutilated.

April 1534 – June 1535: the kingdom.

  • Jan van Leiden succeeded him. He claimed visions, ran naked through the streets in an ecstasy, and replaced the council with twelve elders, like the tribes of Israel.
  • Summer 1534: polygamy (see the next section).
  • Late July 1534: the Mollenhecke revolt. A former alderman, the smith Heinrich Mollenhecke, led a revolt against polygamy and briefly imprisoned Jan van Leiden. It failed. Mollenhecke and about 48 others were executed.
  • 31 August 1534: a great assault by the besiegers failed. In September a “prophet” named Dusentschuer proclaimed Jan king of the whole world, a new David.
    • Jan wore crowns and robes made from confiscated goods, held court with Divara as queen, and staged public feasts and communions for thousands.
  • Autumn 1534: “apostles” were sent to neighbouring towns to raise revolt. Most were caught and executed. Warendorf fell to them for a week.
    • Rothmann’s Concerning Revenge (December) called on the faithful to take up the sword against the godless.
  • Spring 1535: famine. The blockade starved the city.
    • People ate grass, shoe leather, rats and, by some accounts, the dead.
    • Non-combatants were allowed to leave. Many, including women, were killed, raped or left to die between the lines by the bishop’s soldiers.
    • Jan is said to have personally beheaded Elisabeth Wandscherer, one of his wives, for questioning him or asking to leave. Some historians doubt this was him.

The fall and the punishment.

  • 24–25 June 1535: deserters, Gresbeck among them, led soldiers through the Kreuztor. About 650 defenders were killed in the fighting and massacre. Women were driven out, and in the following weeks most surviving Anabaptists of both sexes were executed.
  • About 3,000 people died during the siege (a contemporary estimate).
  • Queen Divara was beheaded on 7 July 1535.
  • Jan van Leiden, Knipperdolling and Krechting:
    • They were paraded round the bishopric for six months and interrogated.
    • They were condemned at Wolbeck under the imperial Anabaptist mandate of 1529 and the Carolina criminal code.
    • On 22 January 1536 they were tortured to death on the Prinzipalmarkt with red-hot tongs.
    • Their bodies were hung in three iron cages from the tower of St. Lambert’s Church. The bones were removed about fifty years later. The cages still hang there today: taken down in 1881 when the tower was rebuilt, and rehung in 1898.

Polygamy under King Jan

What happened.

  • In July 1534 Jan van Leiden and the preachers proclaimed that the restored church must restore the marriage of the Old Testament patriarchs.
  • Polygamy was introduced, in practice required:
    • every woman of marriageable age had to be under a husband’s authority;
    • an unmarried woman was to accept the first proposal made to her (in some accounts).
  • Disobedience could be punished by death.
  • Jan took about 16 wives. Divara was queen; another was Clara, daughter of Knipperdolling.

Why, according to the sources.

  • Women outnumbered men about three to one. Many men had fled, been expelled or been killed, and many women had come to the city alone as believers.
  • In patriarchal thinking, women without a husband were a disorder in a holy city. Polygamy put every woman into a household.
  • Rothmann’s theology. He at first opposed it, then defended it in the Restitution:
    • marriage is for procreation and for God’s honour;
    • the patriarchs had many wives;
    • “polygamy has not been forbidden by God”.
    • His theology leaned more on the Old Testament than most Anabaptists’.
  • The sources note the irony that the Münster Anabaptists had begun with a strict moral discipline that punished adultery with death.

Resistance. Polygamy was the most bitterly resisted measure of the regime, and the cause of the Mollenhecke revolt. Some women who refused were reportedly imprisoned, and a few executed. Divorce was later allowed to ease tensions.

What it did to the Anabaptist name.

More of the people (added 2026-11-07)

PersonWhoWhat they didFate
Hille FeickenFrisian woman from Wirdum; wife of Psalmus van Utrecht; gave away their property at Sneek before coming to Münsterworked with the women strengthening the walls. On 16 June 1534 she slipped out of the city to seduce and kill the prince-bishop, like Judith and Holofernes; she said it was her own ideacaught, interrogated and executed, 27 June 1534
Elisabeth Wandschererone of Jan van Leiden’s wives from June 1534in the famine of 1535 she said openly it could not be God’s will that the people starved while the king’s court lived in luxury. She returned the jewellery he had given her and asked to leavearrested and beheaded on 12 June 1535, reportedly by Jan himself (doubted by some); the story became a staple of anti-Anabaptist propaganda
Clara Knipperdollingdaughter of the mayorone of the king’s wives after polygamy beganunknown
Heinrich Mollenheckesmith, former aldermanled the revolt against polygamy, late July 1534; briefly imprisoned the kingexecuted with about 48 others
Johann Dusentschuergoldsmith from Warendorf, a “prophet”proclaimed Jan van Leiden king of the whole world, Sept 1534
Heinrich and Bernd KrechtingbrothersHeinrich was the king’s “chancellor”; Bernd sat on the councilBernd executed with the king (Jan 1536); Heinrich escaped and lived out his life as a Reformed official in East Frisia
Hermann Tilbeckpatrician, former mayorjoined the Anabaptists; the king’s “court marshal”killed in the recapture, June 1535
Christian Kerckerinckpatrician judgejoined the Anabaptistsexecuted after capture, 1535
Jan van GeelenMünster emissaryled the risings in the Netherlands in 1535 (below)killed in the Amsterdam rising, May 1535 (some say he escaped)
Hermann von KerssenbrockCatholic schoolmaster, a boy in Münster at the timewrote the main chronicle of the kingdom (c.1564–73)his account is hostile and lurid
Heinrich Gresbeckjoinerled the bishop’s men in; wrote an eyewitness account about ten years later, partly to justify his betrayalsurvived

The Dutch risings of 1535

Münster’s emissaries tried to start the kingdom in the Netherlands too:

  • Oldeklooster, Friesland (30 March – 7 April 1535): Jan van Geelen led about 300 Anabaptists who seized the Oldeklooster (Bloemkamp) monastery near Bolsward. It was stormed after a hard fight, and 55 survivors were executed at Leeuwarden. Pieter Simons, Menno Simons’s brother, is said to have died there. This is part of what turned Menno from the Catholic priesthood to the peaceful Anabaptists the next year (1536 Menno Simons joins the Anabaptists).
  • Amsterdam (night of 10–11 May 1535): van Geelen and about 30 men seized the town hall. They were overwhelmed, and the city answered with mass executions.
  • Earlier, February 1535: naked “prophets” ran through Amsterdam’s streets crying woe to the city. They were executed.

Polygamy in more detail

How it was introduced.

  • July 1534: after days of preaching from the Old Testament patriarchs, Jan van Leiden and the preachers announced it, and resistance was crushed (the Mollenhecke revolt).
  • Corrections within days: according to Auke Jelsma, the leaders found abuses and freed women who had been forced to marry against their will. Divorce was later allowed.
  • Jan’s own verdict: after his capture he told two Lutheran ministers that the introduction had been untimely and therefore wrong, though in his view not sinful.

Why it happened, in the sources and the research.

  • Women outnumbered men about three to one.
    • Many wealthy citizens fled in early 1534 and left their wives and children behind, expecting to be back in days.
    • Many nuns left their convents and joined.
    • Women came from the Netherlands to join husbands, or alone.
  • The patriarchs as a model. Rothmann’s Restitution argued that marriage exists to bear children for God, and that the patriarchs’ polygamy had never been forbidden.
  • Control. Putting every woman under a husband’s authority kept order in a city under siege.
  • Kerssenbrock’s version: a deserter caught Jan van Leiden in adultery in Knipperdolling’s house, and polygamy was proclaimed to cover it up. Jelsma calls this far too simple.

Rumour came before practice.

  • Months before polygamy, the besiegers and refugees were already spreading stories of orgies and wife-sharing in Münster.
  • The Anabaptists’ early pamphlets denied this and invited critics to come and see. Rothmann’s confession of faith said they did not share wives and kept the rules on forbidden degrees of kinship.
  • Jelsma notes that a supposed Anabaptist seduction line, “my spirit desires your flesh”, echoes a medieval devotional phrase about desiring Christ’s body in the Eucharist (from Thomas à Kempis). It may have begun as mockery of Catholic piety, or as invention by enemies.

The numbers.

  • “About 16 wives” for Jan van Leiden is the standard figure. No complete list of names survives in the sources found.
  • Named wives: Divara (queen), Elisabeth Wandscherer and Clara Knipperdolling.

After Münster

  • Bocholt, August 1536: the scattered Melchiorites met to keep unity. The issues dividing them were polygamy and the sword. David Joris proposed a compromise (no more violence for now), but the movement split anyway:
    • Batenburgers: violent and polygamous, an underground sect. Jan van Batenburg was executed in 1538.
    • David Joris: inward spiritualism.
    • Obbe and Dirk Philips and Menno Simons: the peaceful church that became the Mennonites (1536 Menno Simons joins the Anabaptists).
  • Prince-Bishop Franz von Waldeck restored Catholic worship. Münster stayed Catholic, and in 1648 it was one of the two towns where the Peace of Westphalia was signed.
  • In memory:
    • the three cages on St. Lambert’s tower;
    • the torture tongs in the Münster city museum;
    • Meyerbeer’s opera Le Prophète (1849);
    • Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s plays Es steht geschrieben (1947) and Die Wiedertäufer (1967);
    • Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen’s anti-Nazi novel Bockelson (1937), which used Jan van Leiden as a stand-in for Hitler;
    • the Italian novel Q (Luther Blissett, 1999).
    • In Dutch, “to do something with a Jan van Leiden” means doing it carelessly.

A historian’s view

Interpretation, not established fact.

Norman Cohn, The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957):

  • Placed Münster in a long line of medieval revolutionary millenarian movements, in which poor, uprooted people followed prophets who promised a coming kingdom of the saints.
  • His point: Münster was less a deviation of the Reformation than a late outbreak of an old apocalyptic tradition. His book compared it with 20th-century totalitarian movements.

Karl Kautsky, Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation (1897):

  • A Marxist reading. The picture of Münster rests almost entirely on its enemies, who needed to justify a bloody reconquest. The real story was an experiment in social equality and communal living by the urban poor.
  • His point: the scandal stories are war propaganda; the community of goods was the real threat to the authorities.

James M. Stayer, Anabaptists and the Sword (1972), and Ralf Klötzer, Die Täuferherrschaft von Münster (1992):

  • Münster was not a freak. It was one end of a real spectrum of Anabaptist views on the sword. Its radicalization (from community of goods to holy war and kingship) came step by step, driven by the siege, the famine and the failed prophecies.
  • Their point: extreme measures like polygamy and terror grew out of a city under siege, not from Anabaptism as such. Without the siege the experiment might have looked very different.

Auke Jelsma, Frontiers of the Reformation: Dissidence and Orthodoxy in Sixteenth-Century Europe (1998), chapter on Münster polygamy:

  • The stories of Münster’s sexual depravity were circulating before polygamy existed, spread by refugees and besiegers.
  • Polygamy itself was a response to a disordered city full of abandoned wives, ex-nuns and lone women. It was partly corrected within days, and its own author later called it a mistake.
  • His point: Münster’s marriage practice needs a more nuanced judgement than the propaganda tradition gives it. It was a crisis measure, not the essence of Anabaptism.

Record compiled 7 November 2026.

About this research

Supporting documentation is linked throughout. This project is an exercise in AI-assisted research and development, and I haven’t manually verified every link or conclusion. All transcriptions and translations of Swiss parish records were made with AI, and their accuracy should be treated accordingly.

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