Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - The Münster Rebellion: Part 2

Episode Date: June 23, 2024

The horrors continue! part 2/3 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 Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me behind the walls of Munster for some reason is Nate. What's up buddy? Hey, what's up? I'm doing well. It's a lovely day to talk about 16th century European history and weird mendicant itinerant anarchist preachers who rabble rouse hordes of people to just burn shit down and destroy the Catholic church and it all ends well. It ends great and that's why we live in egalitarian utopia of Western Europe. Yeah, I love living in the Anabaptist theocracy of the Netherlands. Yeah, exactly. Everything has gone great. There is no here at Wilderness. Everyone's meal is wet as hell. There is no here at Wilder's. Everyone's meal is wet as hell.

Everybody's wearing lambskin racks. Yeah, exactly. We just got all... We've got an advanced gravy research institute. It's going really well. It's sad that someone took away the hard work of the advanced gravy institute from like Kentucky. Yeah. I mean, just so people don't think that this is just shoehorned in out of nowhere. I don't know if it was here at Wilders, it was another Dutch nationalist, like far-right politician, but this would have been years ago. Basically, he shared something in Dutch about like, you know, it's a Dutch cuisine, the best in the world. And what he posted was like, what looked like if you squinted was a Thanksgiving plate from America, but just wet.

Everything was moist. And if it wasn't covered in gravy, it was just wet enough to basically be gravy on its own. And this is not to cast aspersions on Dutch cuisine. I've had Dutch foods. Great. I like being in the Netherlands. Also Indonesian food in the Netherlands is insane for reasons the Dutch don't want you to remember. Incredible. However, the wet meal as a like, call it low country slash trending into Northern Europe thing, like it's just real. It exists. So when we talk about wet meals and gravy, that's what what we mean I know America has it too as an unwise man once said if I have an in serious problem yeah I try to give somebody a wet a non wet meal and they say yeah Vita fuck you doing now when we left you last time in

case you didn't read the title ofabaptists were flooding into Munster following the words of their leader John Mathias while Bernard Rothman attempted to turn the city into the prophesized New Jerusalem. Despite Anabaptists and their beliefs being literally outlawed everywhere by the Holy Roman Empire under the pain of beheading or being set on fire. Nobody really tried to jump on these guys as they made their way towards monster. I want to call them pilgrims or refugees. I don't really know what title to give them. Now, maybe they're closer to people that follow like the Grateful Dead around minus the sex and the drugs. Well, minus the drugs. The

second part is coming so yeah well early modern deadheads we've invented early modern jam bands the anabaptist deadheads versus the huguenot umphries magui look jam bands are a thing in the midwest or they were when we were young so many of our friends had macrame necklaces and tie-dye ceramic weed pipes and followed bands I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that.

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that.

I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to do that. I'm not, if you're into the dead, you like it. If you don't, you don't, that's life. My stepdad put it very well.

He was not a dead head, but he went to, it's like, I feel like to be considered a dead head, you have to travel with them. You have to follow the band around. Yeah, I think so. And he went to a show in Michigan. So he didn't travel to see them. So he's like, nah, man, they're grateful. Dead fuck it suck.

But the shows were awesome. Cause everybody was high and naked. I was like, well, I guess if you're a guy back then, that sounds pretty great. What's funny is that like the degradation through the generations is such that in the Midwest, instead of the kind of tendency that would provoke people to follow the dead, instead had people just go to, I go to all three nights of the Dave Matthews band every year when they tour Indiana, you know, return to a better era where you watched a shit band like the dead, but you, like you said, took non-stop as opposed to for those who were there

All three nights and I feel like we're just describing the jugalow festival for our generation the gathering the jugalow Festival for richer zip codes of Midwestern suburbs. Okay, so what we have discovered is the Dutch Swiss and German version of the They're not following the tour they're going to one place this is more of the gathering. They're not going to one place. They're not following the tour. They're going to one place. This is more like the gathering. They're going to that weird cornfield in Indiana where they do the gathering. Yeah, and you just ask any of these Anabaptist followers like what's so great? Why do you come? He's like, because you can just do whatever the fuck you want, man.

Just hang out and do whatever you want, man. Just be free. And it's like cool. It seems to be that you guys are just doing a lot of drugs and drinking and there's a lot of off-brand sugary drinks They don't really have sugar. I mean they kind of did but you know, that's Faygo in the 1500s That's just beetroot juice. So Jan von der Slue how like how did you get into anabaptism? Man, I had the great Malenko really brought me exactly like the Anabaptist tattoo is a silhouette of a guy with dreads holding a cleaver. Mysteriously known as the hatchet man. It's not a hatchet. It's not a fucking hatchet.

No, it's actually the piece of the one true cross. Either way in the regions that they left, nobody asked many questions. People were just happy to see them go and be somebody else's problem, especially in Amsterdam, which had grown tired of them because they had this tendency to run around naked in the streets screaming at people, which is nowadays the territory of a cryptid I call Brits on holiday. Yeah. I was going to say now it's just called stag news. Yeah. Yeah. I mean like it's a problem in Amsterdam.

They put out ads telling people to not go to Amsterdam. I mean, like, it's a problem in Amsterdam. They put out ads telling people to not go to Amsterdam. Meanwhile in Munster, things were rapidly escalating as Bernard Rothman and his followers became more and more extreme. Churches were constantly attacked and icons were destroyed. Priests and nuns were chased out of town and most of the city's non-believers got the fuck out of there as Rothman began to preach that the deliverance was coming on Easter of 1534, which had been informed to him by Matthias, the messenger of God. This is only reinforced when two of Matthias' preachers, who he considered two of his twelve

apostles, showed up in town. One was Bartholomew Bookbinder and William Kuiper. They quickly got close in with Rothman and began to baptize all of Rothman's followers who had yet to take the official Anabaptist plunge, Rothman included. Thousands of laypeople quickly followed their leader. Soon they were the majority of the city's population, or I should say, the remaining population, and men began to call one another brother and greet one another with a kiss on the mouth. This might seem like slightly shoehorned in out of nowhere, but just because of you mentioning the last name bookbinder, every time I find internecine European squabbles and like rivalries,

I laugh. I find this general topic of like this rivalry, you know, like the ancient hatred between I don't know, like Leiden and Den Haag or Flanders and Molonia. Things along those lines, I find them, and often sometimes they stem from religious conflicts and they're fucked up. But sometimes they're also very funny, especially when they carry forward into the modern day. And this just reminded me of something that basically the Swiss French refer to the Swiss Germans as Les Bourbines, which is like a kind of bastardization of Buchbinder. Basically, like, I don't know if because they're like, oh, all your last name is Bookbinder or like you're all bookbinders, like fastidious, insane, super,

super fussy people. And the Swiss Germans refer to the Swiss French, well, the Swiss French area as Velschenland, basically calling them the Welsh. It's the ultimate burn is calling someone Welsh. I think by that what they mean in general is more like their Kelts a lot of the Anabaptists were Swiss and this is still the era where like your last name was your profession A lot of the times yeah, someone made this joke recently that like in their phone They couldn't remember the guy's last name, but he just did his job

So it's like John Plummer is what I put underneath it because I need need to remember it and so it's like I've just invented the Western last-name system And not only just the Western last-name system for instance my last name Sabian literally just means the butcher. It was his butcher, wasn't it? Yeah, yeah Wasn't there a thing also that like in the low countries when this was happening under like Napoleonic tax codes They kind of resisted it. So there were people in Flanders and in the Netherlands who were like, okay fine But my my last name is like Vander ass born naked or something like that. Knocked Gaboran and stuff like that. Yeah. I mean, that wouldn't,

that wouldn't surprise me. Born the fuck does that mean? Knocked at a CKT in German is naked. Oh, okay. Cause Gaboran in Dutch means, uh, born born. Beings born naked. Basically it's like, I guess it's meant to be a joke. Yeah. Okay. Two non native speakers speakers arguing over two separate languages. I said it knocked by mistake like it was night. You were correct.

And Vander Aarhus I think makes pretty clear sense to anyone listening what that's supposed to mean. Born out of an ass. Now, after all the men started kissing each other on the mouths, the city councilors attempted to rein in the madness outside. They had their meetings interrupted by crowds of women who chucked fistfuls of cow shit at them while calling them devourers of God until they had to scurry away from the meetings. Save us from 16th century Coachella Martin Luther.

I mean with all this shit throwing I feel like this is like was it 1999 Woodstock? Yeah, yeah I was gonna say. The only thing missing is an Anabaptist Lintbiscuit. Anabaptist Fred Durst telling people to set shit on fire. Break stuff but it's just the Catholic Church. As with any somewhat revolutionary type takeover power, paranoia rapidly began to set in. The Lutherans, the Prots, the goddamn Papists, they're all coming for us, right? And to be fair, the bishop was still trying to find a way to muscle his way in and stop the Anabaptists from taking over, but he still lacked any real force other than making threats, though

he was working on the other kind of force. He was finally getting help from the nobility to front him cash so he could purchase a small mercenary army. And that was slowly forming outside the city. When the Anabaptists heard, they took up arms themselves, but that didn't stop the mercenaries under the employ of the bishop from sneaking into the city and kidnapping several Anabaptist leaders. But before things could blow up into an outright civil war, they both kind of backed down. The mercenaries, who were mostly Lutheran, cut a deal with the city's government for, you know, a decent paycheck to release the prisoners and leave the city, all without consulting their employer, the bishop. And again, this made him look bad. You know, he purchased these mercenaries, he can't really control them, and he resorted to

sending letters to any noble who might listen to him, but the Anabaptists were in rebellion and they needed to be put down. Though he did have enough men to stop the flood of Anabaptists from Germany and the Netherlands, which is continuing this whole time from making it into town. He caught them on the streets, on the roads, the countryside, and burned the women alive and drowned them in nearby rivers and lakes. Yeah. I was going to make a joke about the mercenaries for freelancing. It's like if Fleur just started setting UCMJ law, but like now you're talking about mass burnings and drownings and the sounds gotten onto a heavier note, sadly.

I mean, mercenaries do nothing but freelance, right? Like you only rent their time. Once you point them in the general direction, they're gonna do whatever it is that ends with them getting the most amount of money. And you know, they're not, as we'll get into, they're not at the point now where they're getting to rob Munster blind.

So they're like, we'll take a ransom. You know, it's funny that you mentioned that so many of the Anabaptists were Swiss because also so many European mercenaries in this era were Swiss too. That was like one of the prime sources, because Switzerland was famously a very, very poor country for like basically to the 1950s. So a huge source of income was that like,

you know, just internal turmoil in Europe. And so it is entirely possible that like- That's why they got known for being very good mercenaries and soldiers. Same with Germans actually. And a lot of the German mercenaries were Lutheran. Well, basically it is entirely possible that in Munster, you know, dudes who used to face off in like blowing the horn louder, loud as possible competitions in some various, you know, in some isolated valleys of the German speaking part of Switzerland were then

on opposing sides. It was like the TV melodrama North versus South, but Swiss version for the battle, the siege of Munster. That literally did happen in an episode we did not too long ago about the 1500 sack of Rome where you had Swiss people defending Rome and then you had Swiss mercenaries burning Rome to the ground and Germans and German. This was when you know what, when it's all done, we'll get together over a nice Rushdie and we'll just be like, you know what?

We still hate Croatians. Now Rothman saw the entire incident as an obvious victory and further proof that God was on his side. Then Matthias finally arrived in the city and almost instantly Rothman bent the knee to him and Matthias began worming his way into the city government, managing to arrange new snap elections because the ongoing emergency and then winning an all Anabaptists, but more importantly, all Melchiorite council. And they would be loyal to him and only to him. Within a month of arriving in February of 1534, Matthias had

couped Rothman's previously already couped city government. Now in complete and total control the Anabaptists got, let's say, they got weird with it. Nothing so far would suggest that given a lack of downward pressure or constraint that they would get weird with it. Nothing at all. It's one of those problems, right? When any insurgent revolutionary or any group gets power and they're allowed to do effectively whatever they want while instability and paranoia sweeping through the ranks. It never ends with people not being murdered.

Yeah, because it's annoying on the part of the French Revolution because on one part you're like, okay, all these beheadings on the part they're like, fuck the Christian calendar. We have a new calendar is based on plants and animals. Every day has got its own goddamn plant day. You're going to you're going to have. Yes. There are some things you're like, okay, this is actually kind of cool. Roast beer attempting to start his own religion. It's all good stuff.

Just chopping people's heads off in the five figure counts, bit of a problem. I mean, even if they were pricks. It's just one of those things where you always get stuff swept up by the wayside. It's like, I'm never really in a position where I'm like, you know what? I think the mass graves were a good idea. It's like, I'd love to be the guy I'm like, hi. I campaigned for a moratorium on the death penalty and banned the death penalty in America,

but also it was really, really good that they fucking beheaded 100,000 people in France. It's like, I wanna be ideologically consistent here. Well, if it makes you feel any better, the mass graves are coming. Oh, I'm sure they are. I mean, they always are, that's the thing. I made a joke once about the worst sequel in the world

you could possibly imagine to the sixth sense would be the boy from the sixth sense goes to Europe and there's just like three trillion Stories of fucking death and destruction all those ghosts in Europe just like yo solve my problem, please Like all the way back to like six sense visits typing and immediately kills himself Yeah, the boy from the Sixth Sense is there and it's like, it goes all the way back to like the beaker cultures, was like, please help me this fucked up shit happened. Anything and everything inside Monster became a vision, a sign, or a miracle. When the sun glinted off a weathervane to the point it looked kind of golden, it became

sign that the vast wealth was coming to the people. Lightning strikes were seen as God applauding their actions. People began to see knights in the distance, dancing through the darkness as God's protection of monster. And of course, because this is still the 1500s and Europeans were talking about, they looked up into the sky and saw the moon and they swore they saw a dark face staring down with them from the moon, which meant the Turks were always watching them. You know, I was about to say that I kind of want to sample 16th century low

countries MDMA, but now I'm feeling like maybe I don't. It's all ergot poisoning all the way down. I was going to say, say yeah, this is this is just mold in the water in the in the wine skins This is you know fuck it like Trichinosis long-term effects this is lead poisoning because like they just administer lead when you have a cough or something But also there's a part of it's like yeah, that sounds cool I too love smoking weed with a hangover when it's like the light's so beautiful It's a sign from God but then when you're like, oh you see a Turkish face in the moon a hangover when it's like, oh, the light's so beautiful. It's a sign from God. But then when you're like, oh, you see a Turkish face in the moon and it hates you, it's like,

You ever smoked that loud so hard space gets racist? Like this is genuine. This is genuine, like a middle ages, Philip K Dick story. This created something of an arms race of religious zealotry amongst the people of the city. When one person had a vision, someone else had claimed they had a different, even more important, fantastical one. Oh yeah, you saw a Turk in space? I saw two. This is... okay, so basically they're inventing left policy forums. I say as someone who goes to them, I'm saying as someone who is ideologically aligned with it,

there's just some tendencies we have to be allowed to acknowledge and some of them is well. Oh, don't worry. The infighting is coming. And my personal favorite portion of this is they got into a competition, you know, not really a competition, but really it was of who could simply lay down in the street in the shape of the cross for the longest? As a way to prove their devotion just laying on the ground they they did anabaptist planking Yeah, we asked Juergen to lie down on the ground and he did it absolute mad lad legend Here it's been laying on the floor for seven fucking hours Look how pious he is

Someone go roll him before he gets dirt sores. Let me ask you, cause I don't want to get too off topic, Joe, but do you think like in terms of this, just sort of being a kind of like ecstatic hysteria based on a religious call for what it is kind of like cult like, or just full on cult beliefs? Or do you think that there's some other explanation because some of this behavior just seems like there's comments made in the past,

for example, like, Oh, the Paris commune should have done X, Y, and Z thing to harden their defenses. Like they didn't do it hard enough. If they hadn't, if they hadn't squabbled so much, maybe they wouldn't have been crushed. But in this case it's like, guys, you do realize that all forces of Christendom in Europe are going to want to crush you. And it's like, and you're, you're planking. Do you think that this is ideological?

Do you think this is genuinely like because of the famine and other problems, like they're just fucked up on some kind of like weird fungus that grows on turnips? Like I just want to know your professional opinion. I feel like it's a combination of a lot of things. I do believe that there is that hysterical eccentricism that comes with cult belief being whipped up in this new, I mean, because it really is a new belief that now they're in a city that is theirs effectively, right? And they have a guy who's telling them like, God is giving this to us in an era where people believe that's how everything worked, you know? Um,

and I mean, I'm not saying that as like an insult against people who do believe that is how the world works, but this is how the entire world worked. No matter what your religion was at the time, things were delivered to you by God. If they didn't, it was a punishment. If they did, it was a reward. So they had a self-fulfilling feedback loop of we've secured Munster. We're finally safe from persecution. And we obviously have to thank Matthias, Nipperdolling.

We have all of these things. We have Melchior to thank for this. They told us that this would happen. And as it's happening, their beliefs are getting more radical as they're getting more secure and they're being fed. They're not being murdered in the streets. So like these things are working on top of also believing by doing those things. God will protect them from the heretics they see in the, in the Catholic church

and Lutheranism and Protestantism and from everything and also space Turks like all of these things will protect us. I don't think that they were lying. Okay some people were absolutely lying about their visions and we'll get to those people because they are of course the leaders but for the common person to be caught up in the middle of all of this I mean mean, we're going to get to the oppression and the violence that keeps people in line. But at this point, they see this as the solution to all of their problems, right? Like it's working. Yeah. I was thinking about this. It just feels as though there's this kind of like closed circuit totality of belief at the time.

And so you could see how the thought, expressing the thoughts, expressing the opinions that attend to Anabaptism seemed so revolutionary, so radically different. And then to have a thing go well, you could see how this would be taken in this society that interpreted everything as God's will and action, that this would seem like a kind of form of confirmation, of validation, if you will. And so of course there would be this kind of ecstatic response. And then it sounds like you get a lot of the kind of social group dynamic responses here. And then to continue our joke from previously. So we're now experiencing the wonders of 16th

century low countries Woodstock. I presume 16th century low countries Altamont will also go very well. Yeah, we're gonna get to the Anabaptist version of the Hells Angels stabbing. I was gonna say the hells, the Swiss Guard are the hells angels of 16th century Altamont. It's like you get like the average person

who just wants what they see as the world ending around them from plague to famine to disease, you know, whatever they want comfort. They want protection. They want things to be taken care of. And that is 100% harness by people like Matthias Rothman and soon John of Lydon to turn this in the worst fucking way, like any insurgent revolution or even cult belief.

In essence, the vast mass body of people aren't the problem. It's how they're directed. Because this is going to get really bad. Because Matthias and Rothman decided they were being too lenient on non-believers, and they ordered all non-Anabaptists out of the city or face the death penalty. So as you can tell, they've swung back around to effectively become everything they've already hated. However, Bernard Nipperdolling managed to talk him down from actually carrying out a mass slaughter of innocents.

So Matthias resorted to forcing people out of their homes at Swordpoint and baptizing them in the street, whether they wanted to be or not. And some people still physically refused and fought them forcing people out of their homes at Swordpoint and baptizing them in the street, whether they wanted to be or not. And some people still physically refused and fought them. And their punishment was immediate banishment and taking nothing with them. I feel like once again, the kind of epistemology of the 16th century Christian worldview comes

into conflict here because I guess to us, it's hard to imagine how you would interpret that in like in a modern context of like no fuck no you can't hit me with that holy water it means something and like it's like a guy at the subway handing you out handing Jehovah's Witnesses pamphlets but you have to fight to the death over whether or not you'll take the pamphlet exactly yeah this is literal life and death eternal salvation eternal salvation yeah and I don't want to make too much light of it but it's just one of those things where a person is willing to take immediate banishment with no possessions, like literally go be

homeless on the road now, leave the city forever, because the significance of letting them hit you with the holy water is that dire to them. And it's also important to remember, like these people got this extreme not on their own, right? This is a response of violent persecution. They attempted to live within the bounds of what was considered okay for a little while and even while they were doing that, which again you could say for most revolutionary groups, they attempted to work within the system. The system

violently repressed them, which caused them to get much more extreme and then you get mass graves. Yes. Generally. This will never happen again. Thankfully, this does not happen at any other point throughout history or even today. Now, alone in this city with only men and women of the faith, high off their victories, some people begin to notice something particularly dire.

We're all locked in this city, which is easily defensible because of its high, strong walls, but everybody around us wants us dead. And oh yeah, the bishop's mercenary army is right outside the walls and I think I see them building earthworks. We have no way out. So Matthias and Rothman rush to reassure people, don't worry, God is on our side. And Matthias said that dissenters had been infected by, quote, that horror reason. Uh, that's always a thing that you want someone to say.

It's not when it comes to practical defenses and whatnot. I think it's going to go well. I mean, you know, I would say that Turks and quite frankly, the precursors to the Ottoman Empire, the Ayyubids were really good at sapping defenses and destroying walls, so maybe they should ask the moon Turk to help them? Yeah, the great moon Turk in the sky. Now, they weren't just going to sit back and, you know, hope God would deliver them. John of Leiden began forming something that would resemble a self-defense force within the city, though he only had about 2,000 men at his disposal, none of whom were soldiers, himself included,

but they did have a massive collection of weapons. The giant walled city came equipped with 86 cannons, though nobody was really sure how to use them. And there was at least 500 muskets floating around, though again, nobody was really sure how to use those either. So John of Leiden sent them to Tass to learn how to use their weapons. Just figure it out So John of Leiden said just hammer it out until something works much like future John Leiden would with The worst musicians on the planet when forming the sex pistols god. I will not let go of this joke

I will not let go of this joke John of Leiden does better when he forms an abaptist public image limited What is interesting is they have all these weapons. They have no shortage of ammunition or powder. So ye olde Sex Pistols guy is just like fire the guns until the distance until you figure out how to reload them quickly and kind of how to aim. I mean not too different from the way that we would teach third country national troops when we were deployed. I mean the difference is like someone leading the trading knew what they were doing.

Yeah. Whereas everybody it's the blind leading the blind to use like an overused term. Also like old timey muskets in that era, if I remember correctly. They were not good. I mean, they were, they were smooth bore. If I remember correctly, they were all breech loading. And then you basically had like a saucer of powder at the kind of like where the. Yeah. A pan. Yeah. And then you basically had like a saucer of powder at the kind of like where the pan

Yeah, and literally lit by a fuse because I don't believe caps had been invented yet No, they I don't think they had been you effectively had like yeah, it was somewhere between lighting a candle and lighting a cherry bomb to Spark the explosion that would then fire it and hopefully deliver a projectile spark the explosion that would then fire it and hopefully deliver a projectile somewhere in the direction of where you aimed. If a cherry bomb exploded in your face it probably wouldn't kill you though. Yeah it would just burn you really it would basically on a long enough timeline it would deliver a thick coating of soot for a reason that is not celebrated in the Netherlands. More of the Wiley

Coyote face full of soot than the Gert Wilders kind of face full of soot. Yeah yeah more of the Acme dynamite response versus the Zivarta peach, you know, Zinterklaas, whatever. Now the leadership was comforted by a massive food stock and a constant supply of fresh water though. They were convinced that even if the Bishop did try to besiege them and actually assault the walls, it would be a useless effort. After all Easter was coming and with it God's deliverance and they would only

need to hang on for a fewance and they would only need to hang on for a few weeks and they'd all be saved by the divine because remember they believe that they are going to be saved on Easter that their kingdom is gonna be delivered to them the evil will be wiped out and the world will be an Anabaptist theocracy even with all this going on Matthias couldn't just wait for the supposed end times you see he was worried about the souls of the people in the city because according to him, they were still living under man's law, not God's law.

And he needed to fix that. And the first thing he did was pull all of their property together into the common, everything, food, clothing, everything you owned should be given to the church, which is the common he was talking about, and it should be redistributed based on a per need basis. To go further, money was no longer needed to pay for work. Usury or the loaning of money in any and all commercial exchange was banned.

And obviously, since he's already banned all those things, he might as well ban money while he's at it. So everything would simply be given to you by the common. If you worked for someone else, it was just out of your love for your fellow man. And this was all to be enforced by seven deacons appointed by Matthias who'd go door to door looking for violators. Anyone who refused to hand over their property faced at best exile and at worst the death sentence.

But as you can imagine, some people were more equal than others. The city's leaders surrendered nothing to the common. They had the best jobs and they had the only access, free access, to all the other property that had been surrendered to them and constantly stole it for themselves. Then Matthias banned books other than the Bible, because why else would you need any other book? Not just religious books, though. They had burned most of those. But literature, poetry, school books, literacy books, anything other than the Bible had to go, otherwise known as the Texas school system sometime in the next 20 years.

Yeah, yeah. This is going from weird evangelical proto-communism to a different kind of evangelical, different kind of proto-something. And it's just, it's going all over the place to the point where it's like, you can't really map it to a term, you know, that we can comprehend from 19th or 20th century politics, I mean, into the 21st century. But you know what I mean? Like, so much of our worldview nowadays is taken from historical moments and movements and events of the recent 150 years really, of the modern era. And with this, it's just a mishmash. It's like the world's worst jambalaya

of... I mean, they would probably execute you for making jambalaya because it somehow violated biblical dietary laws. We've decided to read the Old Testament super hard and actually enforce cashew, but not in a Jewish way. Flavor is outlawed. This is strictly not flavor country. They burned the heretic Tony Chattery at the stake. Guy Fieri was exiled. Tony Chattery at the stake. Guy Fieri was exile.

It's one of those, but you can kind of see what I mean. The people are true believers. Whereas Matthias and the leadership are constantly becoming more and more extreme and all of their extreme methods or methods of control. Yeah, absolutely. All property in the common. No books, despite the fact that like, Anabaptism at its core was for people to make these decisions themselves between them and God, right? Like from last episode that is what Matthias was supposed to believe but as he gets complete control

Every new law which is framed in biblical terms is only for a method of control Whereas before the whole concept of anabaptism was to weaken the church to the point that it had no control over its believers. It was going backwards. Of course, this brought fractures into the city. Much like his order on everything becoming communal, Matthias had an easy answer for all of this. He was a tyrant at this point, I think we can all agree, right? But he also knew his strength did not come from force of arms, not yet, but from his believers. And the best way to punish someone was to turn that apocalyptic fever of the city's population against them.

Defying his orders was defying the will of God. And by doing so, they are damning not only themselves, but those around them to hell when the time came. The pressure from the people, terrified of Matthias' fire and brimstone preaching, caused pretty much everybody to fall in line when they're publicly shamed. He put all these methods of control over the people, then used the people's constant fear of the end times to force those back into line, right? Yeah. I mean, so effectively I am interpreting that everything is happening is basically, you know

the Bible the book of Revelation all these and You by transgressing my law which is based in scripture are violating the will of God and you've now faced eternal damnation for this and If you've come so far in believing the Word of God and all of this that has weight That is a serious threat to you and notice the ships Remember like the very concept of Anabaptism when we started this last episode was supposed to be a conscious decision,

a choice that individuals made to have this individual relationship with their own religion and therefore their own salvation in God. Now, it's a communal issue. Now, if you aren't a believer and you don't follow the rules of God and by the rules of God I mean my rules you damn everyone around you it's like a cluster bomb effect for damnation

Chucking damnation hand grenades. You're detonating the damnation claymore. It's full of 200 steel ball bearings of damnation of 200 steel ball bearings of damnation. 200 steel ball bearings of gods wrath. Exactly, that's probably something somebody said in ranger school once but these guys actually believed it. Yeah. A claymore to them was a bitchin' huge sword. And I imagine that's gonna come up.

Uh yeah, oh yeah. As I told you last episode, hold on to that thought about the buster sword. I'm dreaming of the buster sword. I'm dreaming of the 16th century buster sword in the slots for rare Dutch materia. I'm trying to get the junctions just right. However, violating his rules is one thing. Matthias is willing to bend people back into the group before destroying them if he could. It wasn't just like, ah, you fucked up, I kill you.

He would turn the crowd against him and then put them into place. However, the one thing he punished immediately and violently was questioning his status as a prophet. And this is where I have the best burn of this entire series. I'm excited. A baker publicly insulted Matthias, calling him a quote, a shit prophet not worth a fart. I feel as though the weird scatological jokes are very, very indicative of the region and the time. I find this to be the case with a lot of things that I encounter historically just in passing when it comes to kind of like any part of Europe that could have been painted in like a Dutch master's painting or in like Flemish paintings like there's just a lot of piss

fart and shit jokes don't know why. I love the idea of Vermeer just like painting like the inside of like a deployment portagion and also like there's some validity to this everybody back then was shitting like to death For the most because remember all the plagues and everything else here. I was like bro It's that old stupid joke that we all have like true bravery as a man with diarrhea chancing a fart Yeah, well also like and this Baker tells him like you're not even worth the chance. I might shit myself. It's not worth I also think about it too with just the extent to which like it was latrine like pit latrines and Chamber pots and dumping sewage wherever you know, like it was kind of inescapable shit was a public affair

Yeah, well and then quite frankly that was the case in a lot of even what's now the sort of advanced economies of the world until you Know within our grandparents' lifetimes. So it's not that far off. We know of the low countries as land of fast trains and wet food and so on and so forth. Like the heart base and Euro dance and the Vengo boys and things like that. It's just weird to imagine, but yeah, it is. Gabba rap would have blown these guys' minds. I'm just imagining John of Leiden experiencing Haber. imagine, but yeah, it is. Gabba rap would have blown these guys minds. I'm just imagining John of Leiden experiencing hobber.

Now, of course, the baker was taken outside and executed without a trial in public to a crowd of hooting believers. Then came Good Friday, the day before Easter, the day of the apocalypse. The city had a massive banquet, and everything seemed rather cheerful for the pre-end of times meal. Then Matthias got up, shook everybody's hand, and left the dinner. You see, Matthias had a vision sent to him from God that he personally needed to ride

out and defeat the bishop's mercenary army, which was completely locked in on their siege at this point. Though on his way towards his horse, around 20 men saw he was leaving, Matthias told him what he was going to do, and then they followed him. Matthias strapped on his armor, grabbed his sword, along with his 20 odd dudes, charged directly towards the bishop's siege line, which had around 8,000 men arrayed across it. Obviously this does not end with Matthias winning. He's speared off of his horse and killed.

His dick and balls are chopped off and nailed to a nearby church door. Always with the dick and balls, it's just a thing. Always with the dick and balls. Fart jokes, poop jokes, piss jokes, dick and balls. It's just a very earthy and scatological society, you know what I mean? And when the trads are like, we must return,

they don't realize what they're actually talking about. It's just like a place where, you know, it's just got a lot of phallic fixation. I don't know why. Also, you have to, they have to kiss their fellow trads on the mouth. Also a society where you could walk by a door and a dick and balls is nailed to it.

You're like, ah, it's Wednesday. Exactly. Martin Luther actually was committing heresy by nailing the theses to the door because he was supposed to nail some kind of a dick and ball arrangement. And they're like, paper? What kind of indecency is this?

Paper comes from trees. I can't possibly cover all of my points by writing it under dick and balls. Does anybody have a bigger set of dick and balls? What you need to do is draw a floor-to-ceiling dick and balls like that portage on you're describing. If Martin Luther had had access to a Sharpie and a portage on in Iraq or in Kuwait, his 95 theses would have been a lot more concise because he would have communicated all of it the way that American soldiers communicate, which is to highlight, circle all of the previous

messages in graffiti, make a homophobic slur about it and draw a floor to ceiling dig. I will say that the best porta potty art, and I'll say porta potty message that I ever saw was sat down in front of me on the door, simply said, look left. I looked left. Then it said, look right. I looked right. I said, look behind you. And I looked behind me and it just said, you you're stupid The one that surprised me the most was uh, I was in a port of John in Korea in Winter gunnery freezing my dick and balls off as one does fully prepared to have them nailed to a wall by a 16th century Nice and warm mercenary. Yeah, exactly. And I saw written on the wall the lines sir Richard Pumplow the story of of a demented bread buffer,

which is a quote from the Frank Zappa song, Broken Hearts Are For Assholes, off the 1979 album Shake Your Booty, which has probably his most homophobic and misogynist lyrics ever. And Frank Zappa, that's an accomplishment if you know anything about Frank Zappa. But I was like, no context as to why a random soldier has just written a complete snippet

out of nowhere Frank Zappa lyrics about him. Martin Luther could simply not conceptualize the deep thoughts of Porta Potta artis. The song that he's, the line he's referencing has a refrain that goes, I'm going to ram it, ram it, ram it, remit up your poop chute. Cornhole! Like, I'm dead serious. Like Frank Zappa, there's a reason why the people who love him and would fight to the death for him

live in countries where they don't speak English. But like, it's just, it was just so surreal. It was like, am I having a dissociative episode? But no, you know, I guess the internet exists, but also it was just weird to me that that would be the line. So maybe a personal aside experience here I have seen the Mona Lisa the Sistine Chapel, you know The divine spark of dick and ball portraits because that's just a thing soldiers love doing throughout history

If soldiers have been there dick art follows dick art follows and periodically they break the taboo and try to draw female genitalia And it's always like anatomically confused It's just sort of like it's pretty on brand for a teenage kid and try to draw female genitalia and it's always like anatomically confused. It's just sort of like, it's pretty on brand for a teenage kid to try to draw, you know, they don't really understand what they're doing. Also why all the dicks are gigantic. It's like, come on, Steve, you know, yours doesn't look like that. Yeah. You would feel awkward if you were doing accurate representations and sort of like, why has someone drawn baby dicks all over this toilet? It's cold. It's really cold. I swear it has an effect. Now as the next day dawned in Munster, people waited for the end times, but they didn't

come. Then they learned about the death of Matthias because mercenaries appeared at the walls carrying his head around at the end of a spear. But have no fear. John of Leiden told them much like Jesus, Matthias will rise again in three days. However, it became pretty clear to everybody when three days passed. That motherfucker's still dead. Now they have no leader, and there's no deliverance on Easter. Then John of Leiden stepped into the light. He had always been effectively Matthias' second in command, and the other leaders of the movement knew he had the belief, but most importantly, the charisma needed to hold everything together

after Matthias Witten got decaught. One of John's biggest champions was nipper doling, who knew full well that arguably, unlike Matthias, John of Leiden was not a true believer, but rather a man who liked two things, having power and fucking. I just thought it's interesting because you've got Matthias as Jesus, John of Leiden as John the Baptist, and then you start ticking down all the names of the various apostles, thought it's interesting because you've got Matthias is Jesus, John of Leiden is John the Baptist, and then you start ticking down all the names of the various Apostles and it's like, or rather the various disciples, and it's like imagining a Last Supper where there's way more beer and turnip based meals than there were in any representation of the biblical story. It's getting more and more surreal. It's gonna get weirder. But also John of Leiden

in my interpretation is also 16th century Johnny Rotten, which implies that Matthias is, I don't know, 16th century Malcolm McLaren, and there's gonna, that means there's a 16th century Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen. Like, it's gonna get worse and worse. The music's terrible. Everyone's teeth are fucked up. Like, yeah. I mean, their teeth probably are fucked up at least. And I bet you they probably had a problem with good music. Correct me if I'm wrong, like maybe you haven't gotten into details on this, but a lot of this stuff,

when you get into the real hardcore kind of originalist interpretations of these things, like they wind up saying that that stuff is all, if not idolatry, then like basically it's idleness. I mean, that's kind of the Puritan version of it. And the only kind of music allowed is basically singing hymns. Pretty much.

It's from a all they had. Yeah. At this point, everything had been outlawed for the most part, and John of Lyon is gonna clamp that down even harder. Oh. Now, he had a wife he had left behind in the hay when he moved to Monster and spent his free time

tearing his way through the city's female population, including Nipper Doling's own daughter. Now, this would have been a sin punishable by death under their own rules since it's adultery and everybody knew that John of Lyon was married. But since Matthias loved him and he had that shine of a future leader, everybody just kind of let it slide. However, now as leader, or more let's say securing his position as leader, that would

have to change. He quickly went over the people by saying he had seen a vision that foretold Matthias's death and Matthias ignored it, meaning how could he possibly have been the prophet when God was speaking to him and Matthias refused to listen? Oh, and furthermore, I should marry Matthias' hot widow. So now we have plural marriage, which is not a law yet. So you said that he had relations with Matthias's daughter and now he's also going to... The nipper Doling's daughter.

No, nipper Doling's daughter and he's going to marry... He will also eventually marry. So what you're basically saying is in the crucible moment of history at the dawning of the horror of the aftermath of 16th century Altamont, we've decided to embrace the will of God and combat heresy by developing advanced polyamory. Kind of. We're going to do Christian polyamory, originalist, evangelical polyamory.

But I guess it's going to sound more like- Polygamy is coming. Polygamy, right. Because when you think about polygamy in the religious sense, when you talk about hardline Christian communities that practice this kind of stuff in the United States and elsewhere in the world. But to me, I'm I'm like no it's funnier to say that he's gonna develop the Anabaptist polycule he's going to

Well kind of it's coming so how things are working at the time is there's people married there's a lot of people in the city that were not married and as one of our sources put it it was pretty well known that everybody's was like cheating on one another and it was fine with it everybody had side pieces, effectively, whether they be single or married. However, him wanting to marry Matthias' widow kind of puts that spark in polygamy, which never previously existed. And the people desperate for hope and direction decided collectively to ignore the fact that everybody knew John of Lyon was already married and was fucking everybody in the town and welcomed him as the new prophet.

And John not only married Matthias as widow, but he quickly went to work denouncing everything to do with him. I don't know if this is a good joke to make, but all I'm thinking of is this is now a self-published romance novel called When the Side Prophet Catches Feelings. And the widow is not a huge fan of John of Leiden, I guess, but she's a woman living in the 1500s. It's not like she has any right to say no, you know, human rights for women have not been invented yet.

Yeah, this is a side note and I'll make it really briefly, but I was just reading out of curiosity, some stuff about the Byzantine Empire and some of the things that women were allowed to do legally and socially. And one of the points they made was that like, pretty much the entirety of what we call the West of Christendom, the rights that women had in the Byzantine Empire were not restored to anything close to where they were at the time until like the late 19th century and early 20th century. Human beings are fascinating. Yeah and we can go backward. We love going backward. Nothing makes us

happier than going backward. And so no need to look at the current headlines, you know. John went to, hard work denouncing the tires, but more specifically the end times date. It was now Easter 1535, a year away, which he said, but tires would have known if he had truly been speaking to God. He also centralized power around himself by destroying the old city council and appointing a council of elders. Unelected, who would now act as the city's government, everyone he appointed rolled inner

circle people of Metaius, solidifying their loyalty to John of Leiden. Though the seats of the real power John saved for those who put him there, Nipperdolling was made chief executioner and enforcer, answerable only to him. And he was also gifted a gigantic sword to carry out his, uh, his job. He got his buster sword. He got the buster sword. Together, these offices were given supreme authority to dispense the will of God to the people, and more importantly, on the people of Munster.

Now, this is a handy thing to have, as John of Leiden was officially making Munster a Christian and Anabaptist theocracy via a new constitution and a new set of laws which like Matthias he would violate all of them but anybody else who violated them would face the death penalty. I'm also just imagining now that he's the executioner burnt nipper doling having the buster sword it's like he also has his limit break hot daughter I'm sorry John was a pragmatist when it came to the small detail of the ongoing siege he knew there was only a matter of time before shit got real in his little city would need to be prepared for it they're outnumbered but they had their defenses so he strictly broke the city's militia

into companies and trade each one of them to defend the gate of the city He destroyed anything Catholic or Protestant and use it to shore up the defenses as well as melt any Metal into swords spears and shot for the city cannons when men weren't praying they were training They would occasionally launch letters tied to rocks towards the bishop lines Warning them that attacking the city was the same thing as attacking God himself towards the bishop lines, warning them that attacking the city was the same thing as attacking God himself. So like imagine you're manning the pickets for a siege and get fucking brained by a piece of propaganda tied to a rock.

It's gonna be demoralizing. It's like they drop a leaflet on your position in World War II, but you get a paper cut and then it gets infected and you die. The propaganda was just like, I don't know, a really weird anime drawing of Winston Churchill being gay or something like that. It's like that one we talked about during the Battle of Brisbane where it's Japanese propaganda saying Americans are fucking your girlfriend back home. Jodie has landed on the shores of Australia. None of your girls are safe.

Or guys for that matter, you know what, Jodie is equal opportunity in that regard. John also ordered his men to conduct raids against the bishop's forces. He thought that they had trained so much at this point they must be ready for it, and well they weren't. Guard. John also ordered his men to conduct raids against the bishop's forces. He thought that they had trained so much at this point they must be ready for it, and well they weren't. Remember, they were training, but they were making it up as they went, so they were in essence just winging it. The bishop had hired hardened mercenaries, so when the militiamen, high to the gills

and the power of God, rushed their lines, they were crushed. And despite the fact that John really did not have any men to spare for these raids, he kept ordering them anyway. By May, the bishop had moved his cannons in range of the city and began bombarding its walls of 20 cannonballs per day, which is, to be fair, a lot for the 1500s. The idea was that the bishop would hammer the city until the end of the month and then launch an all-out attack with his mercenaries. However, his plan went sideways due to the mercenaries themselves. They may have been battle-hard and professional killers, but they were still the kind of guys who, you know, become mercenaries. They had no discipline

to speak of, no matter how much the bishop threatened them and routinely spent his time yelling at them and telling them to be pious and whatever, but they spent most of the time just getting trashed on beer and passing out in the open. So uh-huh. When the bishop ordered them to attack on the morning of the 24th, they got ready by spending the entire day beforehand getting drunk. When one company of mercenaries woke up from the near-constant state of blackout drunkenness, they saw that the sun was setting.

Unsure of the actual time, they thought the sun was rising, which was the signal for the attack. So they charged the walls, confusing the rest of the mercenaries who thought they had lost track of time themselves and then they hurried to keep up. The attack was so disjointed, it gave Munster's defenders

more than enough time to prepare. They rained cannon fire, arrows, and musket balls down on the mercenaries as they charged, piecemeal, hungover, and also somehow still drunk. When they got close, women dumped lime and pitch onto them, setting them on fire with burning hay as they chucked it over the walls. The defenders were kept constantly supplied by a small army of logistical soldiers, and I use the term soldiers very loosely here, because they were mostly just the children

of the city, deemed too young to fight, that were faring supplies back over to the walls. Still the mercenaries blew a hole in the walls of gunpowder charges only to be fought off and the holes rapidly repaired by waiting teams armed with an endless supply of building materials torn out from destroyed churches. This went on for the whole next day and into the night before the bishop finally called his men off leaving behind a field of corpses. So here's the problem. It worked.

I was going to say it worked. Here's the problem. It's like everything that John of Leiden is doing is being a dickhead, but in this case, he managed to achieve something that exploited the situation and now it's delivered results. And it's like, you know, it's one of those I want, I'm rooting for both teams to lose in some capacity, but it is very funny that it's like, yeah, we, uh, we managed to do a faint, we, we did some Dutch sun zoo shit and this has led to completely hammered blind drunk mercenaries attacking at the wrong time because they forgot what side the sun rises on and have

now basically lost the tactical advantage. They've forgotten so fucked up, you forgot where the sun is? Once again, all I can say is 16th century Coachella. Now, desperate not to just rest on his laurels, John deployed his militia back out to immediately raid the mercenary camps, knowing they'd be tired from the assault. They even managed to capture more than a few of these mercenaries during their aid. They made them walk into a riverbed, dumped oil on them, and then burned them alive. I feel like if I had captured a bunch of mercenaries who were, I'd be like, hey guys, I'm either

gonna kill you or you're gonna fight on my side. Especially if they're sort of like the Robocops of the Western Europe. But paying people for services is now against the law in God's eyes in Munster. Well, I'll pay you in polyamory chits, you know, like a casino. You get like a plastic token, it's not actually money. It's just the manifestation of God's desire for you to be in a polycule. Exactly.

To be fair, I think a lot of mercenaries would be fun at that. Probably, I mean, they're like, oh wait, I don't have to pay for sex? Isn't that what being a soldier is all about? In some ways, the ideology is driving them towards some successes and also constraining them in ways that are gonna become catastrophic. Yeah. Now at this point, the bishop had a lot to answer for.

He had gotten money from the surrounding nobility to raise his mercenary force, who promptly went out there and showed their ass, losing to a bunch of barely trained peasants. And he couldn't lean back on the old nobility for even more money, so he had to go find new ones to reinforce his shrunken mercenary army. So using the power of his station as bishop, he demanded levies from the surrounding minor nobility and smallholder communities, not caring if they were able-bodied men or not. Soon around 10,000 men, hardly armed, not trained at all and having various numbers of arms, legs, and fingers, arrived at his camp for service. No word had gotten out about the glorious victory of the Munster rebels, and these conscripts, terrified of either dying or possibly being on the wrong side of a vengeful god, quickly

began to desert. Some of those, around 200, deserted to join Munster itself. Weirder still, after the failed assault on Munster, the bishop's own men, rather than desert, kind of joined the Anabaptists by means of prophetic vision. Because one man survived the assault, believing God had told him in a dream to burn the bishops camp. And try and fail. He was captured and not burned alive, but instead slowly roasted to get the good flavors, you know? You gotta look at it sometimes. There's a degree of sadism when these things get discussed that always like,

it's just very uncomfortable to examine in detail, but it's not just like, hey, we're gonna kill you. God says we gotta kill you. It's like, no, we're gonna do some shit that's gonna last full on a day. Like, we're gonna torture you. This is a marathon sprint. Yeah. This is like, no, you're not getting roasted alive in the sense of a flash and a bang. You're getting roasted alive in the sense of like, Carolina pulled pork.

Yeah. It's an all-day process, you're getting roasted alive in the sense of like Carolina pulled pork. Yeah. It's an all day process, you know, you gotta leave simmering overnight kind of thing. Yeah, I mean, how else are you gonna feed the mercenaries? Now, another attempt was a 15 year old Dutch girl who worked in the camp doing, well, you know, I don't need to say it. Yeah, Roger, understood.

She received a vision that she must kill the bishop to appease his many slights against God. So she hoaded herself in poison and attempted to kill the bishop via fucking, or at least at minimum, a vigorous hug to poison him with her own body. And she failed. She was put on the rack and confessed that she was an agent of the city of Munster. And Matthias gave her the entire plot to do, which would have been hard since he was dead, but whatever. Confessions were at the point, then she was beheaded. I'm gonna use my feminine charms to seduce this Catholic bishop. This has worked a lot in the past. I mean in fairness in those days it was different. It could go

either way back then. Yeah exactly. Now inside the city, John of Leiden, high off victory, returned to governing, which as a man was, you know, he was an armed cult leader, this only means one thing. Shit is about to get really weird in the most predictable way possible. Now remember, people already knew he was married, and he had gone on to marry Matthias' widow, and that brought up questions. Namely, hey, isn't that a sin? So John, now of the unimpeachable prophet of the Munster Rebellion, he decided to answer that question.

Namely, that question was how is he going to continue being the city coxman and get away with it in the eyes of the population? Well, John looked around, saw the city did have a massive amount of single unmarried women and came to the same conclusion that every cult leader before him would settle on, polygamy. The Council of Elders quickly came to see things his way because his idea would allow any man to have as many wives as they wanted. It was also easy to couch the idea in biblical precedence as many main characters of the

Bible have multiple wives. It was quickly passed into law and just to make sure everybody knew what was up, they also outlawed the pullout method. I assume they had police judging that, like the cream pie patrol going around the city. It outlawed the pullout method. I assume they had police judging that, like the cream pie patrol going around the city. It outlawed the pullout method. The spilling of seed, yeah. So this is really a dumb thing and we don't have a ton of time for it, but I'll say it really quickly. The idea behind the biblical, the sort of, I don't think it's parable is

the right term for it, of Onan, is not necessarily that jacking off is a sin, even though that's how it's interpreted, but rather that God said, no, marry your brother's widow and be fruitful and multiply and Onan didn't want to. So he was pulling out and because he was defying God's will by pulling out, he was smote. However, like Onanir and the German verb for that literally is like a way of saying masturbation. And it's like sort of implying that it's the same thing. It's like, no, no, no, no. It's not the jacking off part. It's God says, don pull out and then you busfuming. You're contravening the will of God.

And apparently they're gonna do the same thing. They can have an anti-onan force. It's like doing your analysis way worse. It's like it's a different kind of dick watcher. He's way too into it, you know. This is so strange. Of course there are dissenters however dissent was equal to questioning God remember so people kept their mouths shut lest

they'd be executed via nipper doling's massive anime sword and this turned the city into let's say something of a constant swirling orgy as men ran around trying to get as many wives as possible an official process that'd take only a few minutes. Not only did they just wanna fuck as many women as possible, but as John preached, those with the most amount of wives would be the best Christians. For many people, these marriages just legitimize their side piece relationship they already had,

but for others, there's a chance to marry up in society, even if that society was still supposed to be equal. Though the law still went further, requiring women of age to immediately marry unless there was a legitimate reason for them not to, and those reasons were to be evaluated by the Council of Elders and almost universally shot down. None of the previous social mechanisms that would have existed prior to this marriage, i.e. a woman's parents refusing a suitor, you know, whatever those may be, they didn't

work anymore. And people were trying to hide their daughters away, lest some weird old bastard with five other wives came calling to steal them like a kind of Pokemon-based human trafficking operation. A woman didn't even have to consent to be married. She could just be kidnapped and brought before the local officials. Okay, all right, this is getting darker

and weirder by the minute. It's not good! I have to ask also, do you know when they said when a girl became of age, what of age was defined as? Nine to 11. Fuck me. Yeah. Ah.

It's not good. No, it's really not good. Eventually, John of Leiden did put out some guidance for men inside the city that amount to, hey, if she doesn't want to marry you or she is already married, leave her alone, which is probably the only good thing he ever did, but not really a good thing because he caused a problem in the first place. So, the stories of what was going on behind the walls of Montserrat leaked out and eventually made all the way back to Melchior Hoffman,

who was still in prison. Seeing what his movement had turned into horrified him, and he soon found himself back on the side of Lutherans and Catholics that these fucking people have lost their goddamn minds. You try to lead them to the kingdom of God and then from your windowless dungeon you receive reports that they're recreating the Zion orgy scene from the Matrix 2 but like way more pathological and scary and coercive. No techno music just a whole bunch of Dutchmen blowing into jugs. Zero concept of age of consent. It age of consent, or consent in general. It's really, really bad. And you're like, I'm gonna make peace with that German guy who drinks too much and sees demons in his own poop.

Though I should point out here, there were a few men who absolutely refused to do any of this. They were already married to their wives and they loved her and they thought taking another wife was not only a slight against God but you know cheating on their wife. Let's call these the Munster Rebellion wife guys. This led to an agreement that the women who didn't want to get married to some weird rapist would marry one of these guys and just kind of move into their home and have a happy family where the marriage would be legal and would protect them and there would be nothing else going on. However, it didn't take long for the Council of Elders to hear about this. There's only a few thousand people in the city. This is not like hundreds of thousands of people talking about here. So of course, now not marrying

multiple women and having sex with them all, which would need to be confirmed by a witness, is punishable by death. You want to guess the caveat to this? Death is only for the women. Man, the most predictable outcome I know. This is just getting so like, I want to riff and make jokes, but it's just so weird. This is what we call the space for nervous laughter. Yeah, exactly. Women, suddenly realizing after all this talk about equality under the Lord from John, had actually just made them sex slaves.

And they teamed up with the wife guys who refused to cheat on their wives or marry off their young daughters in rebellion within the larger rebellion. On June 30th, John and his inner circle were holding a meeting at the spire of St. Lambert's Church when 200 rebels rushed in and locked them in their chambers. This group of rebels was led by a locksmith named Henry Molenheck, who was almost certainly going to face execution by Nipper Dolings' anime sword because he'd been refusing to marry off his daughter, who had just turned 12 years old.

Molenheck and others saw this is the best way out of the situation if they lock the leadership in and Surrender the city to the bishop. Maybe he wouldn't kill us all right I mean doubtful but like you might at least solve the problem of the weird freaks in the child trafficking ring But right I can't imagine you're gonna get a lot of leniency. It is, after all, the Catholic Church in the 16th century. It's not good. Your chances suck either way. You've done some heresy, like you're kind of conceding. We've done some light to moderate to severe. Some light heresy amongst friends.

And his idea was, you know, surrender the city. But he needed to call the people into a town meeting to get them to go along with it. Otherwise, it would not work. Right. He needed to get everybody on his side to surrender the city. Convening a house meeting with the polychoral to surrender to the bishop. You think it's about chores and actually it's like,

no, we're gonna surrender to the Lutherans. Yeah, we're actually gonna. You know all this weird shit we did? What if we just surrendered to the Catholic church? You think they'd be okay with it? No, fuck. And you know, also sock, do your dishes. As you can imagine the townspeople were not super happy that Molenhec and the the Wife-Guy alliance had locked away their

leadership. They turned against him when he started talking about surrendering the town and Molenhec was also surprised to see that virtually all of the people who helped him lock John and the others in the tower turned against him as well with the crowd. Seeing his little rebellion was going tits up and you know wanting to find a way to at the end of it to still be alive they all turned against him. The town stripped all of them naked and beat them half to death with rocks. Eventually Nipper Dulling and John were freed from the tower and they ordered the Wife-Guy Alliance to be executed. In the end, 49 people were taken out back and hacked to death by Nipperdolling. His power, secure once again, John of Lyne would take 16 wives while the few holdouts

inside the city quickly married off their young, lest they themselves meet their maker at the end of the Dutch Buster Sword. And that is where we'll pick up next time on the conclusion, part three of the Monster Rebellion. You know, there was a line that came to mind if you have read the book or seen the TV series, but Emily St. John Mandel's book, Station Eleven, is excellent in my opinion. And there's some things that I like, some things I dislike, but I rate it close to the road in terms of good sort of post-apocalypse fiction. And I tried watching the series

and it was happening right during COVID and Cynthia and I tried to watch it and we're like, can't fucking handle it, sorry. Like it's too much. Too close to home. No, too much too close. And now we have a kid, so like it's even worse. But there was a line in passing

because these sort of one of the plot threads follows this troop of like Shakespearean performers, you know, do on like a wagon train that travels across the post plague apocalypse Midwest because one of the plot threads follows this troupe of Shakespearean performers, on a wagon train that travels across the post-plague apocalypse Midwest and performing. And one of the comments made in the close third narration is just when they pass through a community where you'd see things like pregnant 11-year-olds,

you just keep moving, this is not a place you wanna spend any amount of time. And I thought about the first thing. It's a good hint, yeah. Because it seems as though, I don't want to say this is some eternal thing, but it's just more like, this is so depraved, but like, it's not inherent to any one ideology or belief,

but it does seem as though like, this is some kind of bizarre thing that gets unlocked when this kind of like, total absolute control gets put in place. You know what I mean? And it's not explicitly just with children. It's just like the ability to victimize and to withdraw the need for any kind of consent under pain of death. Like effectively to normalize rape in a way that society, the ruling group now determines is not even worth mention. It doesn't even count as rape doesn't count as anything

It's normal business. It just seems to be a President depravity is I guess I have something of a controversial take or human depravity is the baseline of human experience until it's controlled And that control can go one of two ways where it can be punished or it can become institutional. Yeah, it's normalized Yeah institutionalized. There's no middle ground of it. There cannot be. And we have seen a lot of cults, a lot of revolutionary groups, especially left theocratic groups,

this became institutionalized. Or on the bright side, I will tell you, none of these people have a happy ending in part three. Ah, fuck me. Yeah, man, in a way I kind of regret making the joke about the, I mean I'm going to leave it in so I can be punished for my sins because I too believe in the... In Anabaptism. But I feel as though, like, on one hand, make the joke about Pneumatid and having the limit

break called hot daughter, but it's like, it doesn't seem as though anything involved with any of these relations were consensual in any way whatsoever. And not just in the sense of like, okay, women's rights were non-existent in the 16th century but like even for the time this was like so in violation of Cital norms and taboos like this is yeah. I mean, it sucks horrible. Yeah horrible. Horrible fucking people. That's part two Cool. I would say thanks for joining me Nate, but there's nothing to be thankful for here But you can use this area to plug your other shows I am the co-host of what a hell of to Die, a show about why you shouldn't join the

military, but also about dad stuff. Francis and I talk about both. I also am the cohost and producer of Trash Future, a podcast about the tech industry and why it's great and definitely has no huge systemic problems or isn't based around the idea of breaking or contravening labor laws. I also am the producer of Kill James Bond, a movie podcast, a feminist take on Bond films and now just movies in general hosted by an all trans cast. They are Abigail Thorne, November Kelly and Devin. Extremely funny, love that show, listen to it as well.

So those are four shows total when you include this one that I am involved in and yeah, and I'm just out here doing the podcast thing being a guy reacting to stuff trying to not to be crushed under the experience of learning about history's greatest crimes and monsters but Joe is gonna keep trying. Nate's react zone. This is the only show that I host but if you like what we do here considering what your time and money you can support us on Patreon where five dollars gets years and years and years of bonus content also gets you every episode early access to our discord ebooks audiobooks all sorts of

other stuff like first dibs on merch and live show tickets and until next time Oh God don't do anything in this episode. Just don't do it at all. Yeah, please don't.