The Tailor-King

"The Anabaptists now have the reputation of being the most pacifist people you could possibly meet. The Amish, a Mennonite group, are the most obvious representatives that most Americans know. They came into existence as a direct reaction against the unbelievable events that they were involved in during the 16th century. At core, Anabaptism was then a millenarian cult. One of their prime beliefs was the imminence of the second coming, which could only be achieved by building a new Jerusalem for Christ to return to. The central purpose of this religion in its early stage was to bring about the various prophecies in the Book of Revelations. So they looked for a town that they could take over and rebuild as a new Jerusalem, and Münster – which is in northern Germany, near the border with the Netherlands – was the one they managed to get hold of. At first they infiltrated it peacefully, taking over elements of the town council. Eventually they issued a call to all their co-religionists to gather there, expelled everybody else and fortified themselves against the inevitable counter-strike. This was led by the Bishop of Münster, who was rather unhappy about being expelled from his bishopric and assembled a large army of Catholics outside. There was a year-long siege. Inside the town, things started to get really quite weird, very rapidly. The Tailor-King is about what happened inside the town. The man named in the book, Jan van Leiden, came from a very humble background as a tailor’s apprentice, and ended up as the leader of these several thousand Anabaptists. It was essentially a prototype communist community there. Everything was to be held in common, all their goods and chattels were to be shared. But, of course, as is quite often the case with these types of leaders, they generally benefit themselves quite substantially. For example, one of the things Jan ordained was that there should be polygamy. He ended up with 16 wives, and the whole thing ended up rather horribly, with a massive assault on the walls. Almost all of the inhabitants, including women and children, were cut down and slaughtered, but Jan and two of his chief lieutenants were captured, tried, and torn apart with red-hot pincers. Yes. The sword side of Anabaptism – as some people call it – disappeared during the 16th century because of these incredible events that took place, and not just in Münster. There were several other similar incidents in the Netherlands, though not on such a large scale. The Anabaptists were heavily persecuted as a result, and treated as heretics. Even among the other Protestants of the Reformation, they were looked on with a great deal of suspicion, because they were bringing unwelcome attention down on the new religions and making it seem as if they were all fanatics. So they were nearly wiped out, and the only way of surviving was to remove the cancer that was part of their beliefs and switch to a profound form of pacifism. Menno Simons was the man who led them down that route, and that’s why they’re still called Mennonites today. So the old beliefs were pretty much extinguished, although, as I say in Batavia’s Graveyard , some of them survived into the early 1700s, and it’s certainly not impossible that Jeronimus Corneliszoon, the villain of Batavia’s Graveyard , had heard some of them, because some of the things he introduced on this little island off the coast of Australia [where the Batavia was shipwrecked] bore quite a striking resemblance… Out of the 340 people who had been on the Batavia , about 280 survived the wreck. About 20 or 30 of them were women. Corneliszoon had been planning a mutiny on the ship and with his gang of cutthroats at his back he essentially took control of all the weapons. They end up on this little island which was the size of three football pitches put together, and there was no way off because nobody in those days could swim. So these 20-odd mutineers had all the weapons, and they set up a community to suit themselves. They started by killing all the people who were most likely to threaten them, then they started killing the people who they thought were eating all the food supplies, and then they started killing the people who were left, just for fun. In the course of doing that, they did set up this community where all women were held in common. They were corralled into a central tent, and anyone could have one for the night. Some of the communal beliefs that Corneliszoon was propounding might well have some sort of echoes of those early Anabaptist days. He was himself Mennonite. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter"