Batavia's Graveyard - Mike Dash [177]
Anabaptist millenarianism and the siege of Münster Krahn, Dutch Anabaptism, pp. 114–5, 120–4, 130, 135–50; Stayer, op. cit., pp. 191–3, 227–80; Cohn, op. cit., pp. 259–61.
Anabaptist revolutionaries in Amsterdam and Friesland Krahn, op. cit., pp. 148, 154; Israel, op. cit. pp. 92–6, 655–6.
The emergence of the Mennonites Israel, op. cit., pp. 85–90.
The Batenburgers and their successors Jan van Batenburg was born around 1495, and became mayor of a town in Overijssel. During the early 1530s, he converted to Anabaptism and found himself the leader of a large number of his coreligionists in Friesland and Groningen. He had Münsterite sympathies, but in 1535 one group of his followers urged him to announce himself as “a new David” and before long he had established a new and wholly independent sect, which quickly became the most extreme of all the early Anabaptist movements.
The Batenburgers believed that every man and everything on earth was owned, in a literal sense, by God. They also believed that they were God’s chosen children. It followed, in their theology, that everything on earth was theirs to do with what they pleased; indeed, killing “infidel,” by which they meant any man who was not a member of their sect, was pleasing to their God. Those who joined the sect after 1535—when the Münsterite leadership had declared the door to salvation to be closed—could never be baptized, they thought, but these men and women would nevertheless survive the coming apocalypse and be reborn in the coming Kingdom of God as servants of the Anabaptist elite. The Batenburgers also shared the views of the radical Münsterites on polygamy and property; all women, and all goods, were held in common. A few Batenburger marriages did occur, and Van Batenburg himself retained the right to present a deserving member of his sect with a “wife” from the group’s general stock of women. However, such unions could be ended just as readily, and on occasion the prophet did order an unwilling wife to return to servicing the remainder of the Batenburger men.
Van Batenburg seems to have commanded the loyalty of at least several hundred men. Members of his sect were required to swear oaths of absolute secrecy, however, and had to endure a painful initiation designed to ensure they would be able to resist torture if they were ever captured, so the true extent of his following never emerged. The Batenburgers did not gather openly in public and had their leader’s dispensation to pose as ordinary Lutherans or Catholics, going to church and living apparently normal lives in the lands along the borders of the Holy Roman Empire and The Netherlands for several years after the fall of Münster. They recognized one another by secret symbols displayed on their houses or their clothing, and by certain ways of styling their hair. It was only after Van Batenburg himself was captured and burned at the stake that they came together at last, infesting the Imperial marches for at least another decade under the leadership of a Leyden weaver called Cornelis Appelman. By now the group had been reduced to a core of no more than 200 men, most of whom were joined by bonds of family or marriage.
Appelman remained active until his own capture in 1545. He was if anything more extreme than Van Batenburg, giving himself the title of “The Judge” and killing any of his followers who refused to join his criminal activities, or proved themselves lax in killing, robbing or committing arson. Like Van Batenburg, he preached and practiced polygamy, with the additional refinement that the women of his sect could leave their husbands at any time should they decide to marry a man further up the Batenburger