The Radical Reformation: the Mennonites and their peers

Christopher asked (2026-11-07) how many groups grew up alongside the Mennonites in the same years, and for a history of them all. Historians call them together the Radical Reformation: reformers who thought Luther and Zwingli had not gone far enough. The term comes from George H. Williams’s classic survey, The Radical Reformation (1962).

The family’s place in it.

• The Swiss lines (Ramseyer, Neuenschwander, Lehman, Sprunger, Mast, Hochstetler, Mishler and others) descend from the Swiss Brethren. Some became Amish after 1693.
• The Wiebe line descends from the Dutch Mennonites of Menno Simons, by way of Prussia and Russia.

How many were there?

There is no fixed count. A fair summary:

• Four independent Anabaptist movements, born in different places between 1525 and 1530.
• Several violent or short-lived offshoots.
• Three other radical currents that did not practise believers’ baptism: the spiritualists, the revolutionaries and the antitrinitarians.

Of all of them, only the Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites survive as continuous communities, plus a small Schwenkfelder church and, much changed, the Unitarians.

Group	Began	Where	Key leaders	Hallmark	Fate
Swiss Brethren	1525	Zurich, then Bern, Basel, the Palatinate, Alsace	Grebel, Manz, Blaurock, Sattler	believers’ baptism, separation, nonresistance (Schleitheim 1527)	survived as Swiss Mennonites; the Amish split off in 1693
South German and Austrian Anabaptists	1526	Augsburg, Nuremberg, Austria, Moravia	Hans Denck, Hans Hut, Balthasar Hubmaier	mystical inner Word (Denck); end-times urgency (Hut); a magistrate-backed Anabaptism (Hubmaier at Nikolsburg)	mostly destroyed by 1530s persecution; remnants joined the Hutterites or the Swiss
Hutterites	1528–33	Moravia	Jakob Hutter, Peter Riedemann	community of goods: shared households (Haushaben)	survived: Moravia, Slovakia, Transylvania, Ukraine, then the Dakotas and Canada (1870s)
Marpeck circle	c.1530–56	Strasbourg, Augsburg, Graubünden	Pilgram Marpeck, a mining engineer	a moderate middle way between Swiss strictness and spiritualism	faded out by about 1600
Melchiorites	1530	Emden, the Netherlands, northwest Germany	Melchior Hoffman	apocalyptic; expected Christ’s return in 1533	split three ways (next rows)
Münsterites	1534–35	Münster, Westphalia	Jan Matthys, Jan van Leiden	armed “New Jerusalem”, community of goods, polygamy	crushed June 1535; leaders executed, cages still hang on St. Lambert’s tower
Batenburgers	1535–c.1580	the Netherlands	Jan van Batenburg	violent underground sect	destroyed; Batenburg executed 1538
Davidites	1536–c.1560	Delft, then Basel	David Joris	spiritualist prophet; inner faith, outward conformity	dissolved. Joris lived in Basel under a false name; exposed after his death (1556) and his body burned
Mennonites (Dutch)	1536	Friesland, Groningen, then Prussia, Hamburg	Menno Simons, Dirk Philips	peaceful regathering of the Melchiorites; strict ban and shunning	survived: split into Flemish, Frisian and Waterlander factions; spread to Prussia, Russia and the Americas

The other radicals (no believers’ baptism)

Current	Who	Idea	Fate
Revolutionaries	Thomas Müntzer; the Zwickau prophets	God’s kingdom by the sword; social revolution	Müntzer beheaded after the battle of Frankenhausen, May 1525
Spiritualists	Kaspar Schwenckfeld; Sebastian Franck; Valentin Weigel	true faith is inner and invisible; outward churches and sacraments matter little. Schwenckfeld suspended the Lord’s Supper	the Schwenkfelders survived in Silesia, came to Pennsylvania in 1734, and still exist as a small church
Antitrinitarians	Michael Servetus; Lelio and Fausto Sozzini; Ferenc Dávid	reject the Trinity; scripture read by reason	Servetus burned at Geneva, 1553. The Polish Brethren (Socinians, Raków) were expelled from Poland in 1658. The Unitarian Church of Transylvania (1568) still exists

The story in brief

1. Zurich (1519–1525). Zwingli’s reformation inspired younger followers who wanted the church rebuilt from the Bible alone, free of the city council. On 21 January 1525 they baptized one another (Grebel, Manz and Blaurock - the founders of the Swiss Brethren, 1525 First adult baptisms in Zurich).

2. The peasants’ year (1525). The same months saw the German Peasants’ War. Müntzer died at Frankenhausen, and the Grüningen villages near Zurich refused tithes. Many early Anabaptists came from those villages. After the defeat, the hope of a godly society turned inward into the gathered church (Plague, Reformation and the Peasants’ War - where the family stands).

3. Schleitheim and the south (1527).

• The Swiss Brethren adopted the Schleitheim Confession: separation, the ban, no sword, no oaths (1527 Schleitheim Confession and the drowning of Felix Manz).
• In south Germany, Denck and Hut spread a more mystical, end-times Anabaptism.
• Hubmaier briefly ran an Anabaptist town church at Nikolsburg in Moravia, protected by the local lords. He was burned in Vienna in 1528.
• The 1527 “Martyrs’ Synod” at Augsburg tried to unite the movements. Most of its leaders were dead within a few years.

4. Moravia (1528–1535). Refugees gathered on Moravian noble estates. A group that left Nikolsburg in 1528 pooled their goods. Under Jakob Hutter (burned at Innsbruck in 1536) they became the Hutterites, living in shared households. Their Chronicle is one of the main sources for the whole movement.

5. The north: Hoffman and Münster (1530–1535).

• Melchior Hoffman, a lay preacher, brought an apocalyptic Anabaptism to Emden and the Netherlands (1530 Melchior Hoffman baptizes at Emden).
• His follower Jan Matthys turned it militant. In 1534 radicals seized Münster in Westphalia and proclaimed the New Jerusalem, with community of goods, then polygamy under “King” Jan van Leiden.
• The city fell in June 1535. Its leaders were tortured and executed, and their bodies were hung in iron cages from St. Lambert’s church, where the cages still hang.
• Münster made “Anabaptist” mean “rebel” across Europe for a century (Muenster, the Dutch Mennonites, the 1711 Swiss and the Wiebes).

6. The aftermath in the north (1535–1560).

• The scattered Melchiorites went three ways:
  • violent underground bands (Batenburgers);
  • the inward spiritualism of David Joris;
  • the peaceful, disciplined church gathered by Menno Simons, a former priest who joined in 1536 (1536 Menno Simons joins the Anabaptists).
• Menno’s followers, the Mennonites, spread to the Baltic. Menno himself visited the Prussian congregations (1549 Menno Simons visits the Prussian congregations), the line that leads to the Wiebes (The Wiebe faith trail - Friesland to the Vistula).

7. Persecution and the fringe of the fringe.

• Catholic and Protestant rulers alike executed Anabaptists. Several thousand died in the first decades, recorded in the Martyrs Mirror (1660).
• Spiritualists like Schwenckfeld and Franck were hounded as well, but suffered less because they formed no organized church.
• Antitrinitarians were hunted hardest by everyone. Servetus was burned with Calvin’s approval. They survived only where a ruler protected them: in Poland until 1658, and in Transylvania, where the Edict of Torda (1568) gave the Unitarians legal status.

8. Who lasted, and why.

• The survivors combined three things:
  • a closed community with clear rules (the ban, community of goods);
  • a rejection of violence, which let rulers tolerate them as useful subjects;
  • a protector or a frontier: Moravian nobles, the Dutch Republic, Polish and Prussian landlords, later the Russian tsars and the American colonies.
• The movements that died lacked one or more of these: the revolutionaries, the apocalyptic sects, and the loose spiritualist circles.

A historian’s view

Interpretation, not established fact.

George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation (1962):

• Saw three broad types of radicals: Anabaptists, spiritualists and evangelical rationalists (the antitrinitarians), all rejecting the state churches of Luther, Zwingli and Rome.
• The three Reformations. Williams set the Radical Reformation beside two others:
  1. the Magisterial Reformation: Lutheran, Reformed (Zwingli, Calvin) and Anglican churches, carried out by and allied with the magistrates (princes and city councils), which kept a single state church and infant baptism;
  2. the Catholic Reformation: Rome’s own renewal and the Counter-Reformation (the Council of Trent, 1545–63; the Jesuits).
• His point: the radicals, who rejected any state church, were the third movement of the age. They mattered as much for later ideas of religious freedom and the separation of church and state as the magisterial reformers did for Protestant theology. (The phrase “third force” sometimes used for this is a summary, not Williams’s own term.)

James M. Stayer, Werner O. Packull and Klaus Deppermann, “From Monogenesis to Polygenesis” (Mennonite Quarterly Review, 1975):

• Rejected the older Mennonite story of a single, pure, peaceful origin in Zurich. They counted three main independent origins: Swiss, south German and Austrian, and Dutch.
• Their point: the Mennonites, Amish and Hutterites are the surviving, peaceful branches of a once much wider and wilder movement, Münster included. That family history is not as tidy as later church history made it.

Stayer’s argument in more detail

The older story (“monogenesis”).

• In 1943–44 Harold S. Bender gave the address “The Anabaptist Vision”. It became the charter of 20th-century Mennonite identity.
• In it, Anabaptism had one true beginning, the Swiss Brethren in Zurich in 1525. It was one consistent vision: discipleship, a voluntary church of believers, and an ethic of love and nonresistance.
• Münster, Hut’s end-times preaching and the spiritualists were treated as outsiders: not “real” Anabaptists, or later corruptions of the true movement.
• That story suited its time. In the 1940s American Mennonites were defending conscientious objection and their place in American Protestantism.

What the “polygenesis” historians found (1970s).

• Three independent starts, with three different characters:
  1. Swiss, Zurich 1525: Biblicist, born of Zwingli’s circle and the tithe-refusing villages.
  2. South German and Austrian, 1526 onward: Hans Hut, who preached that the Turks were God’s scourge and that Christ would return at Pentecost 1528, and Hans Denck, a mystic. This stream grew from late-medieval mysticism and Müntzer’s apocalyptic teaching, not from Zurich (Werner Packull, Mysticism and the Early South German–Austrian Anabaptist Movement, 1977).
  3. Dutch and North German, 1530: Melchior Hoffman’s end-times preaching, from which both Münster and the Mennonites came (Klaus Deppermann, Melchior Hoffman, 1979).
• The movements were not peaceful from the start. Stayer’s Anabaptists and the Sword (1972) found three positions among early Anabaptists:
  • apolitical nonresistance: no sword at all (Schleitheim, 1527);
  • “realism”: a Christian may be a magistrate and wield the sword (Balthasar Hubmaier, who ran an Anabaptist town church at Waldshut and then Nikolsburg with the lords’ backing, and defended the right to defend it);
  • crusading: the elect would soon kill the godless (Hut’s expectation; Münster’s practice).
• The Swiss beginning was also messier than the legend.
  • Grebel and his friends preached to villages that were refusing tithes in 1525 (Grüningen).
  • Anabaptist preachers worked in Waldshut while it was allied with the rebel peasants.
  • Some early Swiss leaders expected whole communities, not small separated congregations, to be reformed.
  • The strict separatism of Schleitheim came after the peasants’ defeat and the first executions.
• The Peasants’ War connection. In The German Peasants’ War and Anabaptist Community of Goods (1991) Stayer argued that the commoners’ programme of 1525 lived on in Anabaptism. That programme was godly law, communes choosing their own pastors, no tithes or serfdom, and goods shared in need. The Hutterites’ community of goods and Münster’s both grew from it.

What it means.

• Nonresistance and separation from the world were a choice made in the late 1520s and 1530s. The movement learned them through defeat, persecution and the shock of Münster. They were not its original, universal starting point.
• The groups that survive (Mennonites, Amish, Hutterites) are the branches that made that choice and found protectors. The others (Hut’s apocalypticists, Hubmaier’s sword-bearing church, Münster, the Batenburgers) died out or were destroyed.
• For this tree:
  • The Swiss lines come from the branch that made the turn at Schleitheim in 1527.
  • The Wiebe line comes from the branch that made it after Münster in 1535, under Menno Simons.
  • The family’s peace tradition is real, but it was forged, not inherited unchanged from 1525.

The reply from Mennonite historians.

• The polygenesis view is now standard.
• Later scholars such as C. Arnold Snyder (Anabaptist History and Theology, 1995) argue that, despite the separate origins, the groups shared a common core: believers’ baptism, the church as a disciplined community, and Scripture read for daily obedience. Bender’s “vision” is a later ideal, Snyder says, but not a fiction.
• In short, the debate has moved from “one pure origin” through “many unrelated origins” to “several origins converging on a shared core”.

Claus-Peter Clasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618 (1972):

• Counted the Anabaptists in the records and found them few: in most regions a few thousand, mostly artisans and peasants.
• His point: the fear they caused was out of proportion to their numbers (How many Anabaptists were there).

Why the fear was out of proportion

Clasen and later historians give several overlapping reasons why a few thousand artisans and peasants frightened emperors, princes and city councils.

1. They rejected the bonds that held society together. In the 1500s society rested on three things the Anabaptists refused:
   • the oath: courts, guilds, citizenship and loyalty to a lord were all sworn;
   • the sword: every householder was expected to defend the town and serve the lord;
   • infant baptism: it made every child a member of one church that was also the community.
   • Refusing all three looked like withdrawing from society itself, not just holding different beliefs. A ruler could not see how a town could survive if such people spread.
2. Heresy was treated as a crime against the state. Church and government were one. To break the church’s unity was sedition. The imperial Diet of Speyer (1529) made rebaptism a capital crime across the Empire, on the authority of an old Roman law against the Donatists.
3. The Peasants’ War was fresh in memory. About 100,000 people had died in 1524–25. Anabaptism appeared in the same months, in many of the same villages, with some of the same demands: no tithes, communes choosing their pastors, goods shared. Rulers saw it as the revolution going underground.
4. Münster seemed to prove the fear. The kingdom of 1534–35, with its community of goods, polygamy and armed prophets, became the image of what every Anabaptist secretly wanted. After 1535 even the most peaceful Swiss or Dutch group was suspected of being a Münster in waiting.
5. They were hard to see, so they seemed to be everywhere. They met at night, in barns and forests, had no buildings or clergy lists, moved often, and used false names. Authorities could not count them, so they imagined them as a hidden network. Rumour and interrogations under torture multiplied the numbers.
6. They were a contagion, not an army. The fear was not of their present numbers but of their growth: wandering preachers, the poor and the young, women converting before their husbands. Their steadfastness under torture and at execution impressed onlookers and won converts. Executions in public could backfire, which is why Bern and others later preferred expulsion, galleys and secret drownings.
7. They threatened the other reformers’ legitimacy. Luther, Zwingli and Calvin had to show princes that Reformation did not mean disorder. The Anabaptists drew radical conclusions from the reformers’ own principle of Scripture alone. Attacking them was a way for the magisterial reformers to prove their own respectability, so they denounced them more fiercely than the Catholics they were also fighting.
8. Print and propaganda. Pamphlets and woodcuts of “Anabaptist” crimes, true and invented (polygamy, communism, murders), spread across Europe faster than the people themselves ever could. See Saints and sinners - a documented list of sexual scandals and morals discipline and Münster 1534-35 - Jan Matthys, Jan van Leiden and the Anabaptist kingdom.

Clasen’s figures.

• In the Swiss, German and Austrian lands he studied, he found roughly 13,000 identifiable Anabaptists, 1525–1618, apart from the Moravian Hutterite communities. Most regions had only a few hundred.
• About 850 executions fall in the same lands, most of them before 1535.

Bern’s version. Bern kept up its campaign for 200 years against a rural minority of a few thousand. That was not because they were dangerous, but because their refusal of the oath, the militia and the state church challenged the very basis of Bernese rule (1659 Bern creates the Anabaptist Chamber).

Links

• Wikipedia: Radical Reformation · Anabaptism · Hutterites · Münster rebellion · Batenburgers · David Joris · Pilgram Marpeck · Hans Denck · Hans Hut · Thomas Müntzer · Kaspar Schwenckfeld · Schwenkfelders · Socinianism · Edict of Torda
• GAMEO (Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia) has entries on each Anabaptist group and leader: gameo.org
• Related vault notes: Swiss Brethren, Amish, Low German Mennonite, Faith traditions, Saints and sinners - a documented list of sexual scandals and morals discipline

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.