Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 316 - The Münster Rebellion: Part 1

Episode Date: June 16, 2024

Support the show on Patreon and get the rest of the series right now: https://www.patreon.com/lionsledbydonkeys Check out our YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@lionsledbydonkeyspodcast7424 What starts as a rational critique of the Reformation turns into a wild, sex crazed, blood thirsty, and heavily armed cult ruled by a man who thinks he can cure blindness by spitting in someone's eye while mass executions take place via comically oversized anime sword. The Anabaptists of Munster eventually turn everyone against them from Martin Luther to the Catholics to their own believers who simply like their wives. Content Warning: Everything, throughout the series. Part 1/3 Sources: Anthony Arthur. The Tailor King: The Rise and Fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Munster Peter Vansittart. The Siege. Paul Ham. New Jerusalem: The short life and terrible death of Christendom's most defiant sect

Hey everybody, welcome back to the lines of my donkey's podcast. I am Joe and with me today for the next three weeks is Nate. What's up buddy? Hello. Not a whole lot, you know, it's Friday morning in London. Feels like it's everybody's work from home day. Took the train like usual and on Monday it's basically New York City subway car style standing room only. Except Brits are slow adopters of the the ethereal concept known as take your backpack off in a crowded train. But Friday everyone's got work from home apparently so I got a seat all the way from basically one end of the line to the other but it's the only really convenient way. True London heads will know that although there are far more

convenient buses that is the easiest way to understand the concept of indefinite periods of time. Because it can take 30 minutes and it can take 90 minutes because, my god, the Brits love cars and blocking streets. So I would love to ride my bike, but unfortunately I got knocked over by the plague and was out for a month. And it wasn't COVID, it was something weirder. And so I'm still recovering. I'm still Mr. Weakness. I'm still Mr. Using the handrail to pull myself up the stairs when I'm walking and it sucks but that's life. I am currently going through something similar. About two days ago I injured myself in some unknown way between sports and the gym. I get home and my back just completely gives out on me. We were supposed to record this yesterday, but I actually had to reschedule because I was literally in so much pain. I could not podcast, which is a first. I've had a podcast side lining injury, which is a new low even for me.

Once you get past the age of 35, it's probability counter that ticks on every day. In one eventuality of the probable outcomes You just get hit by that tick-tock about what it's like if you lived on earth But they had the gravity of the Sun and everything just crushes except that's your back That's what my spine feels like right now So I had to wake up early and go to a doctor's appointment Which you know shout out to my general practitioner who's able to get me in very very quickly both yesterday Oh, I wonder what the fuck that's like sorry

I live in I live in England a whole different story, but you're like oh you I like to cancel the podcast because of an injury I was like yeah I had to step out of a podcast because my wife couldn't get a doctor's appointment for a month and I went up having A fucking stroke. Yeah, so yes, I can't make any broad strokes about the Dutch health care system quite yet But my personal experience has been very good. However, it did mean I had to take a train or a tram rather and to Den Haag Central Station at 9 30 this morning, which is effectively rush hour for everybody who commutes into the city. And that was unpleasant. I haven't had to have that experience before because I do not live in Central, or the Centrum area, and getting to experience

rush hour packed into a tram when you're already in a massive amount of pain. It's not great, but now I'm back I feel decent enough I can sit upright in a chair, which is good, because we're talking about a guy, we're gonna talk about a whole episode of history that is about who is sitting in which chair, which I guess is just a way to explain about history and I'm bad at segues. But we love a good rebellion on this show, don't we, Nate? We sure do, yeah.

And we also, we enjoy people willing to fight to the death over the right to sit in an important sounding chair. Yeah, we're gonna have a whole lot of that. I mean, we've talked about samurai getting pissed and fighting back against the tides of change. We've talked about the time a man failed a civil service exam, decided he was Jesus Christ's demon fighting brother, and led a war that killed millions of people. But what if I told you that once upon a time there was a Dutchman who attempted to set

up a theocracy as God's chosen one on earth in this new Zion, as he called it, and it would be in all places, Munster, Germany. I would not have a hard time believing that because I am supposed to move to basically what was once a hardcore Protestant theocracy, the Republic of Geneva, when John Calvin, as his name is anglicized, was basically like, I don't want to, the thing is I don't like comparing it to other religious orthodoxies because that kind of sums across like, oh, it's weird, it's foreign. But like, the closest thing you can think of is basically combination of despot plus Ayatollah basically, but for Protestantism in, I believe the 16th century, the 17th century,

I can't quite remember the dates. We're going to get to that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. He had a dude who he beefed about theology burned at the stake publicly in Geneva. Like, so yes, I can believe about a Protestant, maybe not even Protestant, depending on the time, but a Western European Zion messianism, strange rebellion, etc. So this does have something to do with Protestantism, because we're talking about the Munster Rebellion. And it has a lot to do with the concept of Anabaptism, which we will talk about for people

in a way. So we're going to be talking about all sorts of weird orthodoxies as well as the Catholic Church. I actually don't know anything about Anabaptism. I've heard the term used talking about specific historical things, but I actually don't know anything about it. So this is one of those things where I'm just going to listen to you. They still exist today under a different name which I will hold in my pocket till the end because it's probably gonna slap you in the face. Correct me if I'm wrong but a lot of them died in the 50s in the

Netherlands because they're like we can't we have to go to church on Sunday you're like yeah but the Dykes failed and the whole country is flooding and they're like gotta go to church on Sunday? Kind of. A lot of them are gonna die during this series but before we get to that we have to talk about our sources that I use for the series. The first is The Taylor King, The Rise and the Fall of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Munster by Anthony Arthur. Then there's The Siege by Peter von Deschartz. And lastly, New Jerusalem, The Short Life and Terrible Death of Christendom's Most defiant sect by Paul Hamm. But you know check our show notes for our folded bibliography as always. But in order to

talk about the Munster Rebellion we have to talk a little bit about the Protestant Reformation and the resulting so-called radical Reformation that birthed the sect that we are going to be talking about the most, the Anabaptists. However I should point out here before anybody gets mad at me that this is not an exhaustive history of either of those things, but rather a primer so we can get into the meat of the Monster Rebellion. So nobody get mad at me that I didn't talk about Martin Luther for like 16 hours, okay? I'd love to talk about Martin Luther for 16 hours. What a fucking weird guy. Just a weird weird man he is alive during this entire period I have to say also if you ever have a chance some of the old woodcuts

the pro-protestant woodcuts pro-luther woodcuts are very funny because they're sort of like Ben Garrison cartoons from the 16th century and they're just absolutely they're absolutely ridiculous like Albrecht Durer style woodcuts but it's like the disgusting freak pope and all the weird Catholics just hoarding their gold while Jesus Christ himself is like on the cross, but turning to look at Martin Luther and listen to him preaching because he's actually good Ben Garrison is going to go to the, the, the stairs of the Capitol and nail that cartoon that he had that was a, the, like the Capitol

being the swamp. Swole Trump, I get it. Yeah, no, he didn't nail the picture of swole Trump to the capital. Yeah, exactly. Now, if you were born in, say, the 1500s in Germany, and, you know, of the lesser extent, the low countries, the time and place that we will be focused on for this, you're almost certainly Catholic. This isn't a choice that you or your family would have made. It was just a normal part of life. That and, you know, shitting out your insides and dying by the age of 20 after

already having like 19 kids with your probably miserable underage wife to use as farm labor. Virtually all writing, education, and social circles in this hypothetical person's life were church related. And remember, this is an era where the Catholic Church is one that preeminent world powers and economic, military, and geopolitical matters. It was drilled into everybody's head were church related. And remember, this is an era where the Catholic Church is one of the preeminent world powers in economic, military, and geopolitical matters. It was drilled into everybody's head that questioning or going against the church in any way was going against God himself.

The church was the go between people and God, and that was it. They were strong, they were fantastically wealthy, and they ruled both of those things with an iron goddamn fist. Also at this time Italy was not unified at all. There were lots of warring dukedoms, fiefdoms, states, etc. And the Vatican was just one of those powers. Yeah.

The Papal States was just one of those powers, yes. The authority of the church was more important than anything it actually believed in. I know it's probably not very shocking to anybody. The authority, of course, meant massive corruption in virtually every level of administration from the local level to the geopolitical. And this is the era of the Holy Roman Empire, just to underline how corrupt and powerful everything was. I would also say, if you want to have fun, it's not good history at all. I wouldn't even say it's necessarily good TV, but it's very fun. Watch the strangely pan-European production series

that I believe was on Netflix at one point. Borgia, Faith and Fear featuring John Domen, the police chief from The Wire playing Rodrigo Borgia, the Pope. There was also the HBO show just like called The Borgias. The Borgias, yeah, I think that's a better show. The one I'm talking about is just like an excuse to show topless women nonstop. It's incredibly European in that regard, but it's absolutely ridiculous and it goes into a lot of depth. So you will get a potted history,

but you will at least get a sense of the sort of what the Catholic Church was up to at the time. It's a lot of fun, but it's emphatically not watching on your iPad in public or in the airport because it's just like kind of entertainment because it's just basically soft core porn. I personally like to watch like Red Shoe Diaries on my international flights on my iPad, but with Pope hats. I'm going to be showing my age with that one. Yeah. Red Shoe Diaries is a real, yeah, I was going to say that's some full on, they unlocked Cinemax for a month on basic cable kind of deal. Or you're watching scrambled porn on very basic cable kind of deal or you're watching scrambled porn on

very basic cable I can confirm that it when I was watching Red Shoe Diary it was scrambled like static static static oh I think that was a nipple taxi cab confessions is another good one yeah all that kind of shit what I was thinking was last thing on my digression the costumes the fits unbelievable I just I strongly recommend it it's stupid as hell and I absolutely love it. It's just a dumb, enjoyable, guilty pleasure for me. But anyway, that's, that's set basically around the time of the discovery of the new world, the end of the 15th century. And that would give you some sense of sort of like what the, what the sort of general vibe of the Catholic church was at the time.

Yeah. And a lot of these corruptions are, you know, very obvious. Anybody who was alive at the time with an education could have absolutely seen the horrible malfeasance of the Catholic Church, and that galvanized one guy, Martin Luther, and you know, one of the things that really upset him, not the only thing, of course, but one of the many things that upset him were indulgences. Now, indulgences for people who don't know or didn't get, you know, stuck in religious summer camp as punishment one year like I did are... It's a pay-to-win scheme when it came to sinning. If you paid the church a certain amount of money, they would forgive your sins no matter what you did. And this is a sliding scale. So obviously, a normal peasant or a normal person in general couldn't afford to pay off

You know God or whatever to get his sins deleted Not only is this hilariously stupid from a dogmatic angle But it was clear to everybody that as long as you were rich You could do whatever you wanted as long as you paid the Pope was effectively hush money for God so basically the hump the humble peasant had to confess and couldn't be forgiven for Cranking one off in the 15th century poor to John which was just the John because they didn't have plumbing It's just cranking what off on a guy named John. Yeah. Yeah, exactly That's how they got the name for it. Look all I can say is people did actually believe in eternal damnation

So this was this was problematic like it wasn't taken lightly yeah this is not like anybody ignoring you know what my mom calls maybe this is like an old-timey term for but like cafeteria catholics you go to church few times a year maybe once or twice and you kind of believe a few things but not all that strongly it's not a deeply held belief, but you know in 1517, that's not the case. This is life or death and Damnation or salvation for people they're like fuck. I'm poor. I'm going to hell. You know I can't afford to Pay off God Yeah, all I was trying to do is crank one off that one time But you know what like just circumstances got the best of me and this guy named John got in the way And you know what now I'm going to hell no matter what I do. So yeah, it was,

theologically, it was, you could see the storm clouds gathering. And this is, again, this is not an exhaustive history of the Reformation, but this among other things led Martin Luther to nail the document called the Disputation of the Power of Indulgences, otherwise known as the Ninety-Five Theses, to the door of Wittenberg Castle Church on October 31st, 1517. Though, small side note here, he probably didn't nail anything to anything. It's a flair, it's how the story is told. But anyway, the document to the Catholic Church was pure heresy. It contended that nobody needed a go between man and God. Nobody could forgive anyone for anything because they too were human and therefore sinners. The general idea was that individuals should be less dependent on the

church and its clergy for spiritual guidance and salvation. Instead, Protestants, as you know, the Lutheranism and the resulting branches of sex that came off these things, believed that people should be Independent in their relationship with God taking personal responsibility for their faith and referring directly to the Bible Which most importantly they should be able to read We're you yeah widely distributed in their languages rather than someone else's interpretation That you would hear preached to you from a pulpit in Latin Yeah, the interpretation would be in the local language But the actual scripture reading would be in Latin right, right

And people didn't speak Latin anymore that they hadn't spoken Latin except for some random very very isolated parts of Italy in Switzerland For a very long time. Yeah now that's only like weird trad Catholic people who go to Latin Mass and shit who give a fuck about it But back then it was very important. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah exactly back back then back then the trad stuff was kind of the norm unfortunately turns out it's just a trad era yeah when you're dirt farming and dying from uncontrolled syphilis that's what's called tradition but not in the zero most still singing about it in Fiddler on the Roof way and the sort of not fun not singing just dying in like the bad Bruegel painting kind of way yeah however some people thought Luther and his followers didn't go far enough,

that they were still far too lenient on the concept of churches or the structure. They had too much deference to the concept of a state, because after all, those were controlled by men. They were not controlled by God. Therefore, they were fallible and inherently full of sin. They saw Luther and his reforms as being too moderate and too geared towards quote unquote respectable society and not for the common man. This led to the radical reformation and the birth of the Anabaptists.

Now Anabaptists, which we'll get to what this name means and everything in a little bit, they saw themselves as the real true Protestants. They rejected anything other than the Bible as their authority. The state and all of its trappings were to be cast off as agents of Satan restricting their religious practices. Especially since where most Anabaptists lived fell under the Holy Roman Empire, they saw no difference between this religious empire and the church. So if they're going to reject the church and this traditional faith, they had to reject the state too. RUT-ROE! I bet that's going to go well. Yeah, it's going to lead to problems.

They believe that people should be radically involved in their religion from self-education and fulfillment to even baptism. Now obviously in traditional religious belief, in most religions, you're baptized shortly after your birth. Now, that is the Catholic faith, that is like going even older than traditional Catholic faith like the Armenian church baptizes people when they're first born as well. You're baptized at birth to be forgiven of original sin, effectively.

Long story short. Yeah. Basically, every religion has rituals, prayers, etc. things that are performed at birth. In some cases it's deemed, you know, critically important. I remember a friend of mine in Nepal, a Nepalese guy explaining to me that I think the way they practice Hinduism, for example, there are certain prayers that have to be said when you're born. And basically if they aren't said at that time, you kind of can't be Hindu. Right. Like I don't know if that's the way it's interpreted everywhere, but like specifically he said like you can't really convert to that kind of Hinduism. I don't know if that's the way it's interpreted everywhere, but specifically he said, you

can't really convert to that kind of Hinduism because I don't know if it's specific to Nepal. But basically, as I understand the conception of it, especially in this era, if you were not baptized, you were not going to go to heaven if you died. And obviously, baptism had to be validated and baptism had to be performed quite quickly when you think about it because child mortality was incredibly high. Right, right and same same for back then as well like you know the whole concept like you need to be forgiven because like if a strong wind blows through another baby died you know. Yeah. And this is mostly for Christian belief as well I mean there's

some faiths that simply do not accept converts specifically like Yazidiism comes to mind where you can't really convert, you have to be born into it. But this is very specific baptism concept in the context of traditional Christianity at the time. By that I mean Catholicism and mainstream Protestantism. The Anabaptists or the radical Protestants believed that baptizing a child was pointless because the child had no idea what they're committing to. The child did not choose to join a faith and they did not choose to be saved by God.

Only adults could be baptized fully knowing what they were getting involved with because Baptism and the concept of faith should be a conscious and willing choice. This will become ironic later, but this is what they believed. Yeah, all right. Yeah, slowly vibing with this. Yeah, you can kind of get it, right? Yeah, that makes sense. I'm not a religious person, but like to me, that's a good concept of faith. If you want to practice religion, yeah, practice it, you know, but you have to make the choice. You can't just be dragooned into it, drafted into it. I was shanghaied into the Catholic Church.

Press ganged into going to... Oh wait, I kind of was. I was as well. Yeah. For about three or four months when we first moved back to America, when I was a little kid, I went to a Catholic school in New Mexico and because it was the end of third grade, they were all prepping for their first communion. And I had no idea what the fuck was going on because I'm not Catholic. I'm not Christian, but I was in a Catholic school. So I got to sit in the cathedral and

not do anything while my classmates were practicing for their first communion. So know a little bit about it. And then when I started in public school the next year, there was a teacher whose last name was Mrs. Mass. And I saw that on the thing on the calendar, it said Mass. I was like, fuck, no shit, fucking hate that, no. And I was like, oh wait, no, it's not, it's not Mass. It's just, that's her name. I went through a very weird religious thing as a child

because my mom was raised Catholic but hated the Catholic church. So of course I was baptized Lutheran, which is on brand for this episode. And also on brand for this episode, again, I am not a very religious person, but one of the things that the Anabaptists believe is that the church need to go back to the day of how the church was led during the era of the Apostles, which is known as Apostolic Church, right? Well, then I was then baptized in the Armenian apostolic church. So I've kind of followed the trend of the Anabaptists leading this rebellion minus the theocracy part, but I'm still young.

I got time. It's funny too, because my mom is Jewish, but her family, almost all of them assimilated. Her mom did not really practice very much. My dad's family is Episcopalian, which is the American version of Anglicanism. And my dad's family are Huguenot. So you was never actually aware of what an Episcopalian was until I break this moment. It's the Church of England basically, it's the Anglican Church sort of everywhere, but

it's a strain of it. And because my dad's family are Huguenot, they are, that's where our last name comes from, but it's French, but it's been mangled by the successive countries they moved to and how it was pronounced and spelled there. And those successive countries were the Netherlands and then England and then United States, well, the colonies. So I was stationed at Fort Bragg and then later on moved to England. And I'm definitely either going to be moving to Geneva, the Huguenot protection, Calvinist Protestant Citadel and or the Netherlands, also a place that Huguenots went to. So I'm retracing my ancestors steps on my dad's side at least just about 500 years later 450 years likewise baby I was gonna say you and I both yeah like we're following

those lines in parallel aren't we now one of these early Anabaptists was a German man named Melchior Hoffman what a fucking name Melchior is a name should that should only be reserved for supervillains, but also it kind of rules. Supervillains and professional wrestlers. I know that it's a name that I've heard more recently among Dutch people. I've never encountered a German named Melchior. I know it was a German name at the time, but I believe I've seen more contemporary things where Dutch people are named Melchior.

Yeah. I've met a few Melchior's in the Netherlands. It's a name of a guy who's carrying a sword bigger than him. We will also get to that guy specifically, he doesn't have nearly as cool of a name. Now nobody is sure what year Melchior was born, but he was born in the town of Swabian Hall to a dirt poor Catholic family. By 1522 he became a Lutheran and began hitting the road as a traveling preacher. To him he saw the Bible as a book of love and compassion, which stood in harsh contrast to the world of violence and corruption that he was surrounded by.

And he was confused and puzzled by what this glaring disconnect was for a group of people who called themselves Christians. He decided the fault laid squarely at the feet of the Catholic Church. Hoffman fell into a camp of what could be and what would eventually be called Anabaptists, because he saw Lutheranism as not going far enough. To him, he saw the Reformation as something for rich people, for the privileged, for the merchant class and above. It didn't do anything for the common man.

He wanted to tear up the root of corruption as he saw it from the ground up. And like I said, the only way he thought that a church could exist while still serving the people was returning to the church's most basic foundations, that is, apostolic churches ran by apostles from the very beginning. And he lived it. Going off the Bible of how God dressed early man, he wore what amounted to a lambskin rag and nothing else in germany that's a pretty bold choice they call it freikörperkultur nowadays when you

go around naked all the time but like back in those days it would have been pretty bold yeah now you have to go to like a designer to find this sort of thing but back in the day wearing lambskin rags and no shoes is just like you know balance yaga x Anabaptism. It costs like 6,000 euro. Yeah, and the Balenciaga version of the sandals are way fucked up looking, like completely impractical. Sandals if designed by Kanye.

Actually that kind of tracks because Hoffman really hated Jewish people too. I was going to say like, is the new invention, the new revision, or the original source the most antisemitic? We don't know. Very quickly, Hoffman got one hell of a following, mostly because he carried himself as a poor man. He was a poor man, in contrast to the Catholic Church, who like the modern day version of the Catholic Church

is obviously the Catholic Church. But like a good example is, you know, in a lot of apostolic or orthodox churches, you'll have patriarchs who show up to preach to the poor and they'll pull up in like a Bentley with like two watches worth more than anybody makes in 10 years. This is a very common thing in a lot of these churches. And that's effectively what the Catholic Church was doing back then in Catholic priests. Well, he showed up wearing rags and no shoes.

Also, he read directly to people from the Bible in German rather than Latin. So people could understand him. Then he would ask them like, what do you think about that? Like simple questions like this is a passage from the Bible directly translated into German. What's your opinion? Which is like revolutionary for the day. Right.

The cashed up flexing patriarchs cannot handle Christian youth group leader. See, he's going to walk up, spin the chair backwards, sit down, pull his head around backwards and be like, let's rap. Let's yeah. Let me drop some knowledge on you. And he only meets at YMCAs that are also skate parks. I mean, you know, when you think about hygiene standards of the day, he might have been a white guy with dreads. That is true.

That is true. Now, so everybody understands him. They're able to come up with their own opinions on biblical passages. And for most, this is the first time they had ever heard the actual Bible in a language they could understand rather than someone's opinions on it. And of course, Melchior Hoffman was one hell of what we know today as a fire and brimstone preacher. Melchior Hoffman just sounds like guy who invented world's coolest anti-tank missile.

Like there's just something about it. It's just like an anti-tank missile that plays fucking bitching guitar chords while it's being fired. Like I just, you can't have a name like that and not do something Well, you can't not rock out is what I'm saying You can't not bring the heat one way or the other though the round leaves the barrel the sable falls off and freebird starts blaring as the Melchior model to hurdles towards its target

Fucking god yeah, you show a low country's peasant freebird, it would have changed the course of Western history. You go today to the Dutch Bible Belt, just blaring Leonard Skinnerd and everybody just assumes that they're being invaded by the Catholics again or something. Shit. That's their activation song. Echoing through time. The windmills all rapidly transforming to Gundams in self-defense. Melchior was, he had the

zhuzh on stage. He was a showman, which obviously Catholic priests don't have, right? Yeah, they don't have riz, they don't have swag. Yeah, they don't got it. They can't flex it, they can't drop bars, you know what I mean? They just simply, they don't have that factor that lets you get people charismatic, get people worked up. Yeah, he's whipping people up. He's calling the Catholic Church agents of Satan. that factor that lets you kind of get people charismatic, get people worked up, you know? Yeah, he's whipping people up. He's like calling the Catholic Church agents of Satan. He called the priests crows of the night, which I assume was much more cutting back then. He called the

nuns the brides of the devil and whores of heaven, which is an absolute metal band name somewhere. That's exactly what I was gonna say. Like everything about this sounds like the behavior, attitudes, and even like nomenclature could just be a Band from Sweden that they all went to prison for burning churches. Yeah. Yeah He's nor he's a Norwegian black metal artist hundreds of years before that was a thing He called the Catholic practice of the Eucharist for people in a way that's when you you know, eat a cracker and drink wine It's the body and the blood of Christ, right? He called it cannibalism. And he called the mass the hooting of pigs. This guy's spitting bars. Impossible. You know what I mean? Just line after line, banger after banger.

He believed that the Catholics were engaged in simple idolatry with the saints and the paintings and all of the gold and the mass of churches, which is still not an unpopular opinion today, depending on what religion you happen to belong to. He wasn't alone in this idea. Other Reformation thinkers like Andreas Kochben and Andreas Karlstadt wrote at length about how these things were all heresy and they shouldn't be ignored, they should be destroyed, which you can see how they're kind of edging towards militancy. They and Hoffman believe that these things needed to be torn down and the wealth of the church that had been accumulated all of these years through the exploitation of the masses

should instead be shared with the common people. And in fact, all property should be held in common. They're doing Christian communism. Yeah, the anarchist Baptists. That will come. Now, this is not an idea that's devoid of biblical reference, because remember, political ideology doesn't really exist yet to these people. All of these things are coming from the Bible, and they pulled this idea of property being held in common from the book of James. So people were like, fuck yeah, like God says we should do it. Why aren't we doing it?

Why are we giving everything to the pedophiles dressed in wizard robes? It's not the exact same thing. And I don't want to make a fast out comparison, but if you look at 20th century liberation theology in the Catholic world, like it's kind of a comparable thing. Like, Hey, what if we did this and I've actually applied it? And then the Pope was like, I'm about to ex communicate the fuck out of all of you. I'm about to send the Swiss guard going door to door to beat you to death while they're dressed as clowns. They have those halberd. Normally they keep use those halberds to keep women from voting, but they're going to use

them on you. Hoffman was so popular, he started being fooled around from spot to spot where he preaches effectively like Anabaptist groupies, right? It's like the the DLC for Civilization six where you have the rock band that turns people Christian. It's like the real version of that. Which said actually a thing. Yeah, you can. There's a thing where you can have bands and they can spread your

religious influence or cultural influence. Civ 6 has Creed in it? Basically, yes. November Kelly once made the comment about like, I'm playing a game where I have a rock band that played an epic show that now turned everyone Muslim. And like, that is, you can do that in Civ 6. Fuck yeah. It's the, I can't remember what the DLC is. It's it's very Fuck yes, I know the only reason you're probably wondering like why didn't the church just kill him because this is obviously illegal for the day

Right. He was just too popular and the church knew that like look if we knock off this fucking mouthy German People will be really mad at us So we need to we need to figure out other ways to get rid of them, right? And also like for news to get to the Pope, to get to the Vatican, like it takes some time. Yeah. I was going to say a guy with syphilis and gout has to get on like a horse that's really straining and that horse also has syphilis. Exactly. Every single sentient being in this person's journey has syphilis. I mean, syphilis was new. As I understand it, syphilis was relatively new in Europe at the time. Don't you worry. We will talk about syphilis. I mean, syphilis was new. As I understand it, syphilis was relatively new in Europe at the time. Oh, don't you worry. We will talk about syphilis. It comes up.

It's a Colombian exchange thing. That's is that we got the powerful Mesoamerican slash South American diet, but we also got some diseases and European fuck practices, unfortunately, caused some issues. We will talk about at length of the syphilis outbreak of the quote-unquote French disease in a little bit Yeah, the English vices being gay the French disease is syphilis Europeans love each other pan-european brotherhood And so he isn't being arrested. He isn't being murdered by the church for all of these things So they try to think of other ways to get rid of them namely he had no license to preach Which was a thing at the time you had to have a license from a parish to preach.

Being a barber in Delaware, shaking hands with being a preacher in the 16th century, requires a license from the government and some weird certification class. Some highly illegal preaching going on here. It's the pirate radio of it today, and they were dropping bangers. According to the Latvian Guild of Beer Carriers, which is a great source of very happy I was able to cite, in 1524, one such sermon of a group of people all gacked out on the word of God broke into two Catholic churches and began smashing icons and symbols, any relief they could find.

In another case, after hearing him speak, the entire convent of nuns renounced their vows and apparently fucked him in a mass of orgy. I mean, that's the thing about the Hanseatic League is they loved keeping records of stuff. And normally the records are like, fat piece of shit, lost my cargo of lumber. But sometimes it can be amazing, amazing stories like this. You worked for the Latvian Guild of Beer Carriers and you're noting frantic quills scribbling about how this weird dirty German showed up and fucked all the nuns. We have invented the concept of Burgheim before anyone knew anything about Friedrichshain.

Friedrichshain didn't exist. It was a bog. Most things are bogs. Keutzbach didn't exist either. It was also a bog. All of what was later Berlin, bog. But they invented Burgheim. In the town of Tartu, he unleashed a massive riot. The town was already bankrupt and its people were starving while the local government, obviously, was living very well. So this man, he was covering some miles.

Yeah, it takes months and years for him to do all this. Yeah. Not to mention, he's not wearing shoes, so he's walking quite slowly. Ugh. Can you imagine giving the pedicure to this man? You're going to have to have a belt sander just to get the layers off to get down to foot. Before we recorded I was actually cutting off a padlock with an angle grinder and it's like that's how you do skin care on this man's feet.

Yeah, it's like the callus on the bottom of his foot is probably better quality than my combat boots were. We all bought those fancy Nike boots when actually what you need to do is just be a heretic in the eyes of the 16th century church in Western Europe and you would get the toughest feet ever. You'd be the best infantryman ever. What kind of footwear are you wearing? Anabaptists. You just like smash a hammer against the sole of your own foot and don't even flinch.

And still it looks less fucked up than regular Balenciaga shoes. It's almost certainly true. Halfman point out like you're all starving. You have nothing, look at your clergy, look at your government leaders like why aren't they sharing it with you right? He immediately got a warn out for his arrest right and his followers hid him in their homes and when soldiers came for him his flock instead of you know surrendering or running out of the city with them engaged in running street battles with the troops before storming the Russian Orthodox cathedral and smashing up the place. Because why not? Get it. Whatever. You know what I mean? They're not, they're eating good.

You're not. This man's bringing you fucking proto death metal, you know, proto Scandinavian black metal. He's telling you, he's telling you some real shit. Yeah. There's gonna be a band like 500 years called mayhem that you guys are gonna love yeah please don't look into any further no please don't this left local authorities the problem they had to deal with this guy and you know technically there's you know because he has problems with Lutheran and Protestant churches as well so the Protestant faith is like we also have to get rid of him how the fuck do we get rid of him? However, Luther fucking hated him. He denounced Hoffman at every turn and other radicals as well

due to their acceptance of violence against other denominations in order to get their way. And not to mention, he was preaching, you know, the all property held in communal ideas, like those proto-communist belief where Luther absolutely did not believe in that. Luther hated him. So other rulers like, he has to get a license to preach. And the only way to get that, since he's kind of sort of professing Lutheranism and Protestantism in some way, is to go to Martin Luther personally and get a license, which everybody knows he'll get rejected for. Right. But he does have the ear of the, what is it, the Latvian Beer Haulers Guild. And that is a way to work your way into Martin Luther's good graces. That's true. So with that Hoffman's like, okay, fine. I will walk back to Luther's office and I'll get a fucking license. And he gets back

to Wittenberg and 1525. And this is right after the German Peasants War had come to a very, very bloody close. And I'm not going to talk about the Peasants War too much, but to make a very long story short, the German Peasants War erupted largely as a result of the Reformation. The peasants were sick of rampant taxation, they were sick of church corruption, they were sick of the indulgences and the indignities of the church and the imperial authorities had pressed on them, they rebelled and they were led and encouraged by a radical reformer named Thomas Munser. Munser had been a Catholic priest who became a follower of Luther until he became deeply disillusioned with the kind of faith Luther was preaching, again deciding it wasn't going far enough. The two had a falling out.

Munzer tried to get Luther to support his rebellion only for Luther to turn against him and tell him to fuck off. Munzer raises an army, fights rebellion, it's crushed. Munzer is then tortured and executed. And back with Hoffman, this is why Luther is like, oh fuck, I have to denounce Hoffman because I'm gonna have another Munzer on my hands. Not good PR. So Hoffman meets with Luther

and Hoffman lies his ass off about his real radical beliefs and explains the actions of his followers were something he had no control over. And he uses Moonser as a direct example. He's like, well, you didn't tell Moonser to do that, did you? I don't tell my followers to do what they do either. They have their own agency. I can't control them. You know what happens when my followers drink a bottle of syrup and get all antsy in the pancy.

Sometimes they burn down half of a city. You know, sometimes they punch cops in the face and smuggle me away. And Luther kind of had to admit, yeah, you have a point. I can't control what everybody does. I can just say I disapprove of it. And Hoffman tells him, he's like, I'm not violent. Sometimes my followers just get too high on Jesus juice and they fuck some shit up. And Luther's like, okay. And he gives him a license. So Melchior Hoffman defeated Martin Luther in the logic dojo, swinging his Buster Sword that's five times his body size, just completely delivered a limit break on Martin Luther.

He could not fight back. Well yeah, Luther had no defense of the Knights of the Round, it's true. This is why I really like podcasting with you, Joe, because you actually get the references. It's not just the Buster Sword. You actually played Final Fantasy VII and you clearly went on the fucking side quest

to get Knights of the Round, which I did too, and then didn't save and immediately was like, I've got Knights throughout, I'm going to go fight Emerald Weapon, immediately died and lost all my Chocobo breeding, everything, lost. I was not a smart 13 year old and I haven't gotten much smarter. As we were talking, I'm replaying through Final Fantasy X. I am still the same person I was in many ways back in the day. When I was recovering from COVID, I broke out an emulator and played Final Fantasy Tactics front to back. And it's still, it's fun as hell. It's still hard as hell. Beat it. Cause you know what? I've got more patience for just endless, endless XP grinding. But yeah, you know what?

I appreciate that about you. That's one advantage that being in your 30s has over being like 16 is like yeah I can sit here and fight the same fucking battle over and over again. I don't give a shit This is distracting me from life. Don't ask me about anything else about my life. Don't ask me about my back but also yeah, you can tell our age because I made a super troopers reference which is just like Extremely you were born sometime between 1980 and 1989 and And the less said about the second Super Troopers movie, the better. Never seen it. You shouldn't. Nobody ever should. It's terrible. Never seen any other broken lizard films. Don't even care.

They're all terrible. Super Troopers happened and it was, we laughed so hard Al Qaeda had to do 9-11 on us. God damn you broken lizards. Yeah, exactly. You in the first Shrek movie, you just brought too much joy into our lives in the summer of 2001. You know what broke the lizard? Plane crashing into it. Anyway, moving on. What's this gonna say? The World Trade Center was made out of lizards? Good job, David Icke. Now fully official, Hoffman returns to preaching, more powerful than ever and becoming increasingly

apocalyptic in his messaging. Everywhere he went, he incited riots, but he did not take part in them. He slowly kind of backed out as the violence erupted and right before a king of wherever he happened to be banished him or put a warrant out for his arrest. Within three years of giving him his license, Martin Luther called him a lunatic and the two severed all links with one another. After this, Hofman found himself in Schleswig-Holstein under the rule of the Danish king Frederick I. Now this was something of a safe haven as the king ordered a strict form of religious tolerance in the area. Nobody would be persecuted or prosecuted for the beliefs. You know, assuming those beliefs are still Christian,

of course. You know, he's not that progressive. Schleswig-Holstein is not that woke, sorry. They haven't achieved it yet. They haven't invented jewels. They haven't invented astrology. Well, actually, they probably have invented astrology and they use it in place of medicine, but you simply cannot be that with it. You can't be that down, but you can preach an approach to establishment Christianity that has a lot in common with vargvirtues. You know what they call that? A real Gemini move. I don't know what that means. Now within moments of being there, he accused the nobility and the Lutheran church of stealing everyone's money and said they should

all be executed and the peasant should revolt. He was then stripped of all of his belongings, including his holy books and his portable printing press, even the shoes that he had just finally bought, and banished from Denmark. He did not last long. Boo. The Danes banished him. They took his shoes, they took his fit, they made him walk home naked. He was banished from Denmark because he couldn't drink like eight beers before lunch. Banished from Denmark because he was like, I actually think liver paste is weird. You know what I enjoy? The sun. Get out! Get the fuck out

of here. So do we and the three days of the year it shines we all get naked. Oh man it was like sunny here for the first time in the spring like a real sunny day and I couldn't go anywhere without seeing just random people sitting in the grass. It's just like like iguanas in Florida after a freeze. 100% and I get it. I fucking get it, man. I had no shame, no shade. I was doing the same fucking thing. I went down to the park and just sat there and enjoyed it. Friend of mine lives in Amsterdam and for a time studying in Switzerland and we had talked about meeting up to go and see a stupid movie in theaters and she was like, yeah, but it's

going to be 36 and sunny and I'm Dutch enough to know you cannot waste that day. Yeah, you have to just sit outside for eight hours. We went out to a lake in Switzerland and just like lake beach and just hung out and got in the sun because we have to, like you said, be like cold blooded creatures, reptilians out in the sun when when Europe is nice, you know. Nobody has introduced the Dutch to a heating rock yet. Like when you buy like a lizard and you keep them in captivity, you just have like an electric rock that gets really hot. buy like a lizard and you keep them in captivity you just have like an electric rock that gets really hot. If you introduced the heating rock to the Dutch office place it would just be full of you know cloaked hill days and yawns just laying on it for 12 hours a day. So what you're saying is that if I want to ingratiate myself to Dutch people when I come

there to help you with the studio I should just bring a huge box of crickets. Okay, here you go guys. Here you go. You having a good day? There's a warm light over there. They're like, oh, just like their tongue shooting out. So after being banished from Denmark, he made for Strasbourg, where a young group of people calling himself the Strasbourg Brethren took them in.

Now, Hoffman's ideas of violent apocalyptic belief mixed well with the Brethren, who, like himself, believed that only adults and all these other things, like they believed in 99% the same thing that he did. However, the Brethren had one thing that Hoffman didn't, the concept of adult baptism. Hoffman still believed in normal ideas of baptism. He wasn't fully on board with like only baptizing adults. The Brethren introduced him to that belief, but they also agreed with rejecting the state. The only idea being, you know, you have this connection with God through the Bible that

you make yourself, and the only thing that clergy should do is kind of facilitate talks, right? The group is largely made up of the poor and what it amounted to be kind of like a middle class, but they were all on board with Hoffman's idea of holding property in common. So the Brethren introduced him to the concept of adult baptism and he had introduced the Brethren to the idea of Christian communism effectively. And no one in Strasburg was ever frustrated with the concept of a nation state ever again. Never happened. And the Brethren, this is where the name Anabaptists come from. The Brethren's nickname were the Re-Baptizers or Anabaptists, and that is where the name

comes from. I feel like nowadays if you encounter a group called the straws board brethren your eyes are gonna get like the hardest Hardest Euro dance you've ever heard in your life or it's just gonna be skinheads or the same those two could both be the same Yeah, yeah. Now. This is the first time Hoffman was welcomed anywhere with open arms So that probably helped too and it was here that Hoffman anywhere with open arms. So that probably helped too. And it was here that Hoffman absorbed this concept of adult baptism, shedding off the last shreds of mainline Lutheranism. And he petitioned the government of Strasbourg that the Anabaptists should have their own church. Like, cause that's how churches got made then. You couldn't, I don't know, grassroots

fund a church. You had to get funding and approval from the government. You couldn't just open a strip mall storefront church. There used to be like a bowling alley. The way you can in God's perfect utopia, the American Midwest. Now I should point out here that just because Strasbourg and other places were considered kind of tolerant for the day, Anabaptists were considered heretics across Christendom and more likely than not outright banned the practices and the construction of the churches. However how this was enforced

varied wildly. In some places it meant being literally burned at the stake or beheaded and in others it was oh fuck off and leave us alone but we won't kill you. Still in others they were allowed to exist. They were just ignored. They're not giving any official capacity. They. They were just ignored. They're not given any official capacity. They were not considered a religion. They're just like, oh, let's let these fucking weird adult baptism guys hang out on their own. We don't care.

And that's where Strasburg fell, though they had their limits. And when, of course, Hoffman decided to start personally insulting the emperor, he was banished yet again. And he was set off on his world-spanning journey with his beliefs now completely set in stone as an Anabaptist. He ended up in Emden in East Frisia where he began mass adult baptisms in 1530 and within no time at all he's the leader of the Dutch-speaking Anabaptists or what they called their belief Melchiorism after him. His popularity and his message also meant he rapidly became a political threat

more than anything else. And this is not helped by the fact of just Hoffman himself. He began to see himself as the new Elijah, a prophet that would defend his people from the Canaanite ball and the literal fires from the heaven. And by that, I mean the Protestant, Lutheran, and Catholic churches. So everyone is mammon. Everyone is a Canaanite. Everyone's a Philistine. Everyone is the enemies in the Bible. Problem is they have standing armies and mercenaries and guys with funny hats and halberds. Yeah, who are very comfortable doing horrific things to you because a guy in

robes told them to do so. Yeah, it's like, hey, we can give you an extra serving of porridge if you take this long pointy thing and stab this dude. And it's like, yeah, cool, whatever. It's Monday. I'm hungry. You want me to burn him too? No, no, no, no, I'll be fine. Yeah, whatever. Yeah. You want me to tie him on a wagon wheel and stretch him or some shit? We're not paying you overtime for this.

The torturers are not unionized. Man, I swear to God. These fucking union rates. They don't even give us union rates anymore. You know what? Some scab shit. I gotta get on the real torturers guild. Man, it's a long day at the office. You just hear people screaming in the background as you're tearing the flesh off their bones. Like, did you hear we're not even getting our 5% raise this year as it says in our CBA? Oh God, I'm so sorry! That sounds terrible! I know, right? Yeah, I was gonna try to think of a modern analog and it's just like, prison guards. I was gonna say, that's me when I finally get my hands on Royal Mail. Now from here, he finally has so many followers, his ideology is so set in stone, he begins

to separate himself from the real world and surrounds himself with his own people. One of them had a prophecy that he would be arrested for his religious and political messaging. Damn, a hard thing to predict. But the prophecy is like this would happen if you go back to Strasbourg so you should never go. And he was like, no, I will go to Strasbourg. I welcome the arrest because it's clearly God's will and the love of Christ will protect me from any outcome.

This was a very bad idea. I was going to say the same message was played verbatim to Napoleon the third. And he said about the same thing. I have visions of wide open Aaron De Smontz. I had this, this idea that I should leave from the front. There's this place called sedan and it'll be remembered because I'm a bad ass. It'll go great. Everybody will remember it. Every time they get in a mid-sized car.

Hilariously, that's not what they call them in Europe. They call them saloons here. And in France, they call what we would call a sedan a Berlin, which I don't know if because they owned them in some other conflict like Berlin. Like they just like we call it. I have no idea. But the saloon thing, like it doesn't translate the way you'd think it would. It would be weirder if they did call them sedans in France to be fair. Yeah. Yeah. That would be like, do you check out

this new model of waterloo I have? Yeah, exactly. That would be like if the official term in the airline industry for like an overbooking was just called the Pearl Harbor. Man, we get a real MH 60 or 17 situation going on over here. It's too many. Yeah. Yeah. Woo boy. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I really hate it when that happens. I really hate it when my ghost plane flies to Antarctica and we all die. He was immediately brought up on charges of heresy and sedition when we returned to Strasburg, somewhat hilariously, even a Lutheran synod, which is like the prosecutorial power of the area had no evidence of any of these charges and they had to be dropped.

But the lead church authority pointed out that, yo, Anabaptism is illegal and he should be held on those charges anyway. This prolonged his stay in prison and Hoffman spent his time leading sermons from the window of his prison cell to mass crowds of the hundreds below. All while not wearing pants, because this is true, he had such a horrible case of dysentery. He was just shitting himself constantly So you had to keep his like rags hiked up to keep the free flow of shit spattering under the floor Unopposed so he could say God's word from the window Haters and looters don't want you to know the true word of God like these people are just posters like I realize okay

It's kind of retconning it but still, just the dedication to the craft, dedication to the art, commitment to the bit, if you will, it's just so, so endless. And the city decided we can't kill him. He'd be a martyr. So instead, they would just keep him in prison. They believed that they just hid him from view, threw him in a featureless dungeon with no window to speak to anybody. Eventually, his faithful would just leave him.

So that's what they did. They kept him indefinitely unsentenced for any crime in a windowless dungeon. However, there was a flaw in their plan. He was still allowed to get visitors, and those visitors were still able to smuggle out his writings. And then they were delivered by his friends in sermons as his stand-in. His messaging was getting more apocalyptic as you can imagine he's sitting in a windowless dungeon, but also because the world outside of his prison cell was not good. There was a mass famine that left people starving and dying in the streets. There's a mass syphilis outbreak that people saw as God's punishment for lust and Luther himself saw the mass death from fuck disease as a sign of the end times. Not to make jokes about it, but I am. The outbreak was fucking insane and nobody

knew what to do. Safe sex did not exist yet. There is no treatment for it. There was nothing. Infected people, regardless of their class, their wealth, or anything, millions died of cock rot. Also, syphilis can be, if I remember correctly, syphilis can be transmitted during childbirth as well. Yeah, it can be transmitted through sex, childbirth, blood, saliva, you name it. And it is more than, you know, it's more than just cock rot. Like it makes you lose your mind. It's dementia, facial deformities, like open source, things like that.

It's really horrible. It's not good. No. Like, millions of people are dying from this. Outside of hunger and disease, the Holy Roman Empire itself was rapidly coming apart with wars and secession crises, all while normal people were smashed under an ever-increasing tax rate in order to pay for their constant wars. And only a few years before, Turkish invaders reached the gates of Vienna and a lot of people would

remember the fall of Constantinople before then. Things look bad and Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, began to lose his direct control over the lands that he was supposed to be in charge of, especially the German and Dutch speaking areas, as power slowly devolved back to city councils. He effectively lost the ability to control the municipalities, unless they allowed him to control them, which explains why his and other edicts regarding the Anabaptists were hardly followed. But that isn't to say that conditions of the world drove mass populations of Europe into the arms of people like Hoffman. This kind of fundamentalist strain, a kind of extremism, only really ever appeals regardless

of the religion or political messages carried with it. And, you know, we're talking about the poor, the destitute, the vulnerable and vulnerable could mean a lot of things. In this context it drives people to anything that might alleviate their suffering or whatever their vulnerability or their destitution may be. Sure thousands join them but there are still only a vast minority of people within the European Christian scene, let's call it that. But that didn't stop every other Christian denomination from unifying together to hate them almost as much as they hated Muslims, which was a lot. Soon virtually no matter where they went, they were met with genocide-like violence. However, this

only drove Anabaptist preachers and their believers to become even more apocalyptic as the persecution against them rose. With good reason, you can't blame them. There's mass beheadings and burnings of the faithful. Their core message never really changed. Become baptized as an adult. Ask for forgiveness and salvation from the coming end times in your prayers to God and you'll have it. This alone was enough to continue to convince more people into converting and undergoing adult baptism even if the converts knew the kind of threats that they would face. Because it's not like not being an Anabaptist made your life any better. Yeah I mean. Right? Like

everybody's destitute, poor, and dying of fucking syphilis. And obviously following the sort of doctrinaire guidance isn't doing anything for these people. And so, you know, that this is something that posits a different approach to your spiritual life, but also clearly to the way you exist in society. And that is going to have more purchase when society is not exactly working out for people. Yeah. And Melchior Hoffman's followers would point like, obviously the world is ending. This is your only salvation. This salvation hasn't worked, but try us out.

God's mad at us right now. God's really mad at us right now. I mean, look at your dick. All right. Do you think a God who loved you would do this? Like we got to fix this problem. Your shit is busted. Yeah. Yeah. This just rotten everywhere. This practice continued. However, they had to meet underground in secret. They had secret handshakes, clothes, and meetings that would identify oneself as being Anabaptist to other Anabaptists.

And this kind of secrecy vibe alone was also enough to attract new converts. The secret was the allure. Though this all happened in what you can consider factions, it was all very regional. By 1533, the different groups began to travel and seek out their comrades from the Netherlands to Germany to Switzerland. Specifically in Strasbourg, the growing power of the Anabaptists, who were again called Melchiorites, finally led to them being banned by the city council, and they were ordered to recant their beliefs, follow the law, and of course immediately baptize their children.

This edict uprooted the last real tolerant bastion that the Anabaptists had, and now their force looked for a new safe haven. And this also happened to coincide with a break between Hoffman, who was still in prison, and the belief he had helped create. While in prison, the persecution of the Anabaptists had been ramping up. And while Hoffman was safe, effectively in eternal exile, he wasn't going to be killed, he couldn't be free, but he wasn't going to be set on fire. He heard about what was going on outside the prison walls. So Hoffman penned a vision that he had, wrote it down and handed it to his constant visitor to bring out to his faithful. There'd be a kingdom of heaven, of godly men,

established over the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by Anabaptists, and together they would drive out the Catholic Church, Islam, corruption, and all of that, with the sword of heaven. However, he also simultaneously discarded any idea of violence against other faiths, even violence to attain his own prophesied kingdom. Instead, he told people, be like Jesus, turn the other cheek, harm no one, and their kingdom would simply be gifted to them. Now this sent shockwaves to the Anabaptist community. For starters, they thought, how could they achieve any of these goals without violence

when there's so much violence being visited on us? It was also clear to his believers that he was never going to be released from prison and they would need a new leader to guide them in these trying times. The obvious choice was a guy named Cornelius Polderman. He had the ear of Hoffman and Hoffman trusted him. He was the guy smuggling everything out of prison all this time. Polderman was also calm, peaceful. He agreed with Hoffman there should be no violence.

Polderman had all but been handpicked to be Hoffman's successor. The other guy was John Matthias, who was described as a quote, swarthy bear of a man in both hair and size. He had been a baker by trade, but also a drunk with an anger problem who married a 14 year old when he was in his 40s.

Can you imagine being an insanely hairy baker in those days? Like every loaf of bread you bake is just going to be just disgusting, just shedding, just like all over it. Wearing a full body hairnet. Just all every loaf of bread looks like it's been dragged under the kitchen table. Oh. Matthias had been a follower of Hoffman for years but fundamentally disagreed with the concept of nonviolence. He thought they should meet any kind of violence with violence in kind.

He also happened to believe in a holy war in order to create Hoffman's envisioned Anabaptist kingdom. He quickly took over the Melchiorite movement by simply bullying Polderman into submission. Because Polderman was very very nice. So Matthias just kind of beat him into submission. I love it when bullying works I assume everything's gonna work out great. I mean that's why everybody knows Munster today is like the kingdom of heaven right? That's what Munster is known for. Anarchist utopia? Yeah. As Matthias took over the movement he began to

believe that he was possessed by the Holy Spirit of the Prophet Enoch which when you're in a movement and someone believes that you're being taken over by a Holy Prophet, that's always a good sign, right? That can't possibly go wrong. I mean, all I can say is, it does seem as though this man might get some spiritual guidance from God directly saying, that grass looks delicious. These weeds have medicinal value. Hoffman did not approve of his rise to power and Matthias didn't even care or try to win Hoffman over in any way. For example,

when Anabaptists were being horribly repressed, Hoffman banned baptizing adults for fear of the persecution it would bring upon his people. Matthias unilaterally unbanned it and began to baptize hundreds of people at once in the middle of Amsterdam. Matthias unilaterally unbanned it and began to baptize hundreds of people at once in the middle of Amsterdam. Matthias urged people to come for and be baptized or face the fires of hell when the book of Revelation unfolded in front of them, you know, via syphilis. Because according to both Hoffman and Matthias, that was only a few years away. Salvation was at hand and together, they could found the Holy Kingdom. Thousands of Dutch people flocked to him,

seeking out forgiveness and salvation that he was offering. It just so happened that the area of the Netherlands he was in at the time was suffering from horrific breakouts of cholera and typhus, along with, you know, famine, which really helped give people the push to try conversion. You know, the end seemed very fucking nigh. It's like, try this. I mean, chances are good that between the lack of food coming in and

the everything coming out, you're not going to be around much longer. The equation is not in your favor. No. Despite all of this, Matthias was simultaneously still looking for a safe haven for his people, while also sending out missionaries to the rest of the Anabaptist world through Germany and Switzerland telling people to prepare themselves for the coming holy war. You could see how he was not exactly the most popular outside of Anabaptist circles. Nobody wanted to throw open their gates to a guy who's talking about the vengeful sword of God and a holy kingdom and all that shit. One of the missionaries is a man named John Bockelsen of Leiden in the

Netherlands who is commonly and simply known as John of Leiden. He was Matthias's most trusted follower and he sent him on a mission to Munster. Munster had become something of a center of the Anabaptist world because it had about 1,400 followers of the faith within its city walls. And these followers were unlike others. Not only were they the poor and the common peasant, but men of influence and power like men who sat on the city council and leaders of the local guilds. This happened because of the hard work and political maneuvering of a man named Bernard Rothman. Previously, he and his flock had stormed the St. Lambert's Church and chased away the Catholic priests there, installing Rothman as the new rector. Because apparently you could just do that back then, though this was illegal.

Well, I mean, quite frankly, we'd know more about it if people understood that John of Leiden is commonly known in Dutch as John A. Rautijn. Rothman had so many powerful friends and followers amongst the guilds that the Bishop of Munster was worried that if he did anything about this, you know, church coup, it would bring violence. Which Rothman made sure everybody knew he was very comfortable with violence. So they let him kind of sit around unopposed as the forceful church rector. And now him and his faithful ran around the city attacking anything they saw as idolatry. Rather than confront Rothman, the bishop just retired and left the problem

to the next guy. By that point, Rothman was so entrenched with the city council that the next bishop couldn't get them to act and defrock him. This sent the new bishop into a rage at which point he promptly had a heart attack and dropped dead. It just pushed the problem to a different parish. The Catholic Church will never do this ever again. Then Franz von Walderdek was elected bishop. Walderdek saw the conflict with Rotherman in practical terms of class rather than faith because the Anabaptist belief system fundamentally threatened the ruling class, the nobility, which Balderdek

was obviously a part of. The ruling class of the city, Lutherans and Catholics, saw him, Balderdek, as their savior, but more importantly, saw him as the man that could stop Rothman from imposing Anabaptist-based communalism on them by force. Wow, we're getting class conflict too. Damn. I mean, that's most of it, to be fair.

Yeah, I mean, it's unfair to say. It's just more like there's a kind of a later kind of 19th century onward conception of class, but it's not as if that didn't apply beforehand. And as you said previously, like you wouldn't be a bishop if you weren't of the correct class to be, you know, of all the sort of elite production that goes into becoming a person of that stature back then. And now too, but back then especially. Yeah.

Rothman saw Valderdek as an old drunk womanizer who had no standing to tell them anything to do with faith. And to be fair, the first two parts of that were completely, completely true. This led to a political battle between the Rothman and the Bishop. The Bishop demanded that the city council restore the church's power and exile Rothman and his followers under pain of violence. Now, this was obviously supported by the Holy Roman Emperor, which Valdredek insisted that he was following. Meanwhile, Rothman used his connection to the guilds,

which was a man named Bernard Nipper-Doling, to whip up his fanatical support base to pressure the council to do no such thing. The councilors stalled, worried that no matter what they choose, it would lead to violence. And again, to be fair, they were completely right. The bishop talked about simply taking the city over by force, while Rothman talked about doing the same. Valdedik sent a small force that he had purchased, they're all mercenaries, to cut the city's roads and effectively starve them into submission while Rothman sent his own believers out of the city to raid other towns for food, which required the bishop to back down and open the roads back up.

So we already kind of have a intercity civil war here going on. It's nuts because like we have to follow the plot line here and I can't just interrupt a scream name alert after every single person. Nipper doling, I know. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. This is just one big name alert the whole time. However, none of this mattered. Soon Rothman was sending his most faithful out to raid estates held by the nobility, kidnapping and ransoming them back for big paychecks. Now things inside the city had escalated to the point that people who wanted nothing to do with it were fleeing their homes.

Even Anabaptist believers who thought Rothman had gone way too far were getting the fuck out. The only Anabaptists left in Munster were the true believers, the Zealots. You know, like I said, you want to follow the plot and not distract, but also say, wow, this is basically they're doing low country's Robin Hood shit, or Robain Hoad.

Boo. Look, man, that's what I'm on this show for. Digressions, weird remembered things, strange stories, and name alert slash language jokes. Now, even the bishop was trying to avoid violence, mostly because he would have to ask for help in order to put the Anabaptist down and that would make him look bad, it'd make him look weak. So he struck a deal with the city council. Everyone chill out, you're free to worship as you see fit, but you can't

insult either side. It also gave the council the right to vote to appoint clergy in the city's parishes, which was the traditional mechanism of control that the bishop would use to retain power. Bishop didn't know this, but he effectively ceded complete and total control of the city over to Rothman, because a few months later, new city council elections were held, and Rothman's followers, all from the guilds, won in a landslide and quickly began to impose a Puritan religious code on the entire city in line with Rothman's beliefs.

Now I should point out here, Rothman was not a folly of Melchiorism at this point, or Matthias for that matter. Not officially, but they had 99% of the same beliefs. That is when John of Leiden, on a mission for Matthias, showed up to the city and began to introduce the concepts that were important to Matthias, namely adult baptism, which Rothman had yet to accept. He got everything else, but he's not baptizing adults yet. Three power chords start playing, he starts saying, I am an anabaptist. Sorry, sorry, I just had to do it. Soon Rothman was preaching against infant baptism as an insult to God himself, which infuriated many people, even amongst his staunch supporters on the council. Just as soon

as he completely reformed the government to his own means, Rothman had turned them right back against him as he continued to out-extreme their own belief system he had once taught them. Furthermore, like Matthias, Rothman said anyone unmarked by the sign of the cross in adult baptism not only would die, but should die. Just as Matthias and thousands of his followers were making their way towards Munster, their new Jerusalem, or as John of Leiden said, their promised land. And that is where we'll pick up next week on part two All right. I am excited

Sound fun and cool and you know egalitarian and then they're like, oh and by the way We're gonna do some full-on fucking Puritan extremist shit. I'm gonna say it's gonna get a lot worse a lot It always does. I mean, yeah, I will say the reason why I said to hold the buster sword comments because that will come up somehow. But that is the Munster Rebellion part one. Nate, thank you so much for joining me here. You produce and host multiple other podcasts. Plug those other podcasts.

Ah, yeah. So I am the co-host of a show called What a Hell of a Way to Die, which is a transitioning from being solely a military veteran podcast for non-right-wing Chud veterans or people who want to learn about the military hosted by me and Francis Horton. It's basically about why you shouldn't join the military. However, it's also transitioning into being a dad chat podcast because we're both dads. I have a kid now. And so we talk a lot about that too, and not military related stuff. I also am the co-host and producer of Trash And so we talk a lot about that too, and not military related stuff. I also am the cohost and producer of Trash Future,

a podcast about the tech industry and why it sucks. It's also about British politics, but mostly the tech industry. And I am the producer of Kill James Bond, a fantastic show, a feminist movie podcast hosted by three trans people who are hilarious. Their names are November Kelly, Abigail Thorne and Devin. It is a laugh riot.

It's a blast. I love it. And then obviously I am the co-host of this show too. So that's four podcasts on a constant basis I'm involved in. My life is podcasting. This is the only podcast that I host, but if you like what we do here and think it's worth your time and money, you can support us on Patreon. Just $5 gets you six plus years of bonus contents gets you every episode early gets you discord access It's the ebooks gets you audiobooks get you first dibs on merch and live show tickets and all sorts of other stuff So consider throwing us a dollar or leave us a review on where it is. You listen to podcasts It helps us immensely until next time wear rags walk barefoot. Don't trust Balenciaga, it's not the real thing.

Alright, do it yourself, get your feet that calloused. You'll eventually be in a rock band that turns people Christian. Like Creed. One, no one, the only way is one.