Christopher Mackay - False Prophets and Preachers: Henry Gresbeck’s Account of the Anabaptist Kingdom of Münster

Late one night in late May 1535, five men warily snuck out of the besieged city of Mnster. One man became separated from the group. He wandered in the dark, trying to avoid the enemy troops in the trenches, but eventually decided to give himself up and hope for the best. This man, Henry Gresbeck, was to play a major part in the recapture of the city from the Anabaptists. He would also write the only eyewitness account of what had gone on in the city for the preceding fifteen months. Gresbeck addressed his account to the prince-bishop, possibly to explain his role in the Anabaptist rebellion and his importance to the eventual capture of the city. Gresbecks original manuscript seems to have disappeared into the prince-bishops archive (eventually turning up in the archives in Cologne). His account had no effect on the sixteenth-century treatments of the events in Mnster; it was only rediscovered in the mid-nineteenth century. That account is here translated into English for the first time.

The best-known surviving source for the events in Mnster was written a generation later by the schoolmaster Herman von Kerssenbrock, who was a boy at the time of the Anabaptist regime and fled the city. He wrote his history in Latin a generation later (in the 1560s), partly using archival information but mostly by borrowing from earlier historians. Kerssenbrocks magisterial work eclipsed not only the influence of earlier historians, but also the knowledge of Gresbecks eyewitness account.

It was only with the 1853 publication of Gresbecks account in a collection of documents edited by C. A. Cornelius that his involvement in the {2} fall of the city came to be generally known. Cornelius based his edition of the Low German on two derivative manuscripts. One was a heavily edited copy of Gresbecks account from the ducal library in Darmstadt and the other a copy that was edited and converted into High German from a library in Meiningen. Cornelius was unable to consult another manuscript of Gresbeck that was located in Cologne. I have used a copy of the original manuscript that Gresbeck submitted to the prince-bishop to prepare a much better edition of the original text, and that text is the basis of the following translation. The Cologne manuscript appears to be the original manuscript Gresbeck had submitted to the prince-bishop. The translation presented in this volume is based on that early copy.

The narrative presented in Gresbecks retrospective account is not without its own difficulties, but not only does it give us the perspective of a common man on very unusual events, it is also the only account written by a man who actually witnessed these events with his own eyes. To judge by his account, Gresbeck was a keen observer of events around him, and he presents his story with verve and humor.

The Anabaptist regime in Mnster was brieffrom February 1534 to June 1535and the fact that the city was under siege resulted from one of the most remarkable events of the early Reformation in Germany. In the years before 1533, the city of Mnster was gripped with reforming fervor, which was adopted in part by the dignitaries of the local city council. The city was under the control, however, of the prince-bishop of Mnster, who held both religious and secular powers. The city council had extorted wide-ranging privileges that amounted to autonomy from the newly appointed Bishop Francis of Waldeck in 1533, but these would prove to be short-lived. The Reformers were intent on going much further in their religious innovations {3} than the Lutheran-inspired members of the city council were willing to go. One particularly noteworthy element in the Reformers beliefs was the rejection of infant baptism. They believed that baptism had to be voluntarily undertaken by responsible adults. Since at that time pretty much everybody would have received baptism as an infant, anyone who underwent a new baptism as an adult was a rebaptizer, or Anabaptist (