Radical Reformation Leaders
he first thing to notice about the leaders of this movement is how quickly they were
gone. The first rebaptism took place in January 1525. Within five years Grebel was dead
of plague, Manz drowned, Sattler burned, Hubmaier burned, Hut and Denck dead, and
Blaurock burned. When Menno Simons joined the movement in 1536, nearly every man who had
begun it was already in the ground.
That fact shapes everything else. A movement that loses its whole first generation inside a decade cannot correct itself the way a settled church can. Teaching could not be weighed slowly, error could not be answered at leisure, and men of very different spirits—quiet pastors, learned doctors, visionaries, and armed prophets—all claimed the same name at once, with almost no one left alive who had the standing to say otherwise.
The sketches below are arranged roughly in order of appearance. For the families of Anabaptism these men led, see Types of Anabaptists.
The Zurich Founders
Conrad Grebel (c. 1498–1526). A Zurich patrician, son of a member of the council, educated at Basel, Vienna, and Paris without taking a degree. He joined the circle that met around Zwingli in 1521 to read the Greek New Testament, and became the most forceful of those who thought Zwingli was stopping short. On January 21, 1525, in Felix Manz’s house, he baptized George Blaurock on his confession of faith. He preached in Schaffhausen and St. Gall, was imprisoned in the Zurich tower, escaped in the spring of 1526, and died of the plague later that year at about twenty-eight. He is often called the father of Anabaptism.1
Felix Manz (c. 1498–1527). The natural son of a canon of the Grossmünster, and the best Hebraist of the group. He hosted the first rebaptisms and wrote a defense of the movement for the council that had condemned it. On January 5, 1527, under the Zurich mandate of the previous March, he was taken by boat onto the Limmat, bound hand to knee with a pole thrust between, and pushed into the water—the first Anabaptist put to death by Protestant authority. He left an eighteen-stanza hymn behind him.
George Blaurock (c. 1491–1529). A former priest from Bonaduz in the Grisons, called Blue Coat for what he wore; the loudest and most fearless preacher of the three. He was the first to be baptized on confession, and he baptized the rest of the company that night. Beaten and expelled from Zurich on the day Manz was drowned, he evangelized Bern, Biel, the Grisons, and Appenzell, then the Tyrol, where he gathered congregations rapidly. He was arrested in August 1529 and burned on September 6, 1529.2
Michael and Margaretha Sattler
Michael Sattler (c. 1490–1527) had been prior of the Benedictine monastery of St. Peter in the Black Forest. He left the cloister, married Margaretha, and joined the Brethren, bringing with him a monastic seriousness about discipline and a real theological education. He is generally taken to be the principal author of the Schleitheim Confession of February 1527, the document that gave a scattered movement a common shape.
He was arrested near Horb, tried at Rottenburg, and sentenced to have his tongue cut, his body torn with hot tongs, and then to be burned, which was carried out on May 20, 1527. Margaretha refused every offer of release and was drowned days afterward.3 Schleitheim’s fifth article had already made provision for a shepherd who should be led to the Lord through the cross.
Balthasar Hubmaier
Balthasar Hubmaier (c. 1480–1528) was the one genuine doctor of theology the movement produced, a student of Johann Eck, cathedral preacher at Regensburg, and afterward pastor at Waldshut. He is the most theologically substantial of these men and the most complicated.
In 1524 he published On Heretics and Those Who Burn Them, among the earliest Reformation-era pleas for liberty of conscience, arguing that Christ did not come to butcher and burn. He was baptized in 1525 and baptized hundreds at Waldshut. Arrested at Zurich, he was stretched on the rack and recanted, and afterward had to recover his ground in public. At Nikolsburg in Moravia he wrote prolifically, including his catechism of 1526 and, in 1527, On the Sword—which defends the magistracy and the Christian’s right to hold office against the position Schleitheim had taken. He was arrested by Ferdinand’s officers, tortured, and burned at Vienna on March 10, 1528. His wife Elsbeth was drowned in the Danube with a stone about her neck three days later.4
Two things must be said with him. He shows that the movement was not uniformly separatist—an Anabaptist could and did argue for the magistrate from Scripture. And his record is not spotless: his years at Regensburg are tied to the expulsion of that city’s Jews in 1519 and to the pilgrimage shrine raised afterward. Honest use of Hubmaier names both.
Hans Hut and Hans Denck
Hans Hut (d. 1527), a bookseller, had been marked by Thomas Müntzer and carried an apocalyptic Anabaptism through Franconia and Austria, baptizing in great numbers and expecting the end within a few years. Hans Denck (c. 1500–1527), a gifted scholar and Nuremberg schoolmaster, moved in the opposite direction, toward an inward and mystical religion that subordinated the outward Word and ordinances to the inner light.
Both were at the Augsburg gathering of August 1527, afterward called the Martyrs’ Synod because so few of those present survived the next year. Hut died in prison at Augsburg before the year was out; Denck died of plague at Basel in November 1527. Denck in particular is the seed of the spiritualist strand that later produced far worse fruit.
Pilgram Marpeck
Pilgram Marpeck (c. 1495–1556) is the most attractive figure on this page and the least known. A mining engineer by trade, he was employed by the city of Strasbourg and later by Augsburg to manage timber and waterworks, which gave him a standing and a usefulness that kept him alive when others were burned.
He led the South German congregations for a generation and spent his strength on two fronts. Against the spiritualists—Schwenckfeld above all—he defended the outward Word and the visible ordinances as God’s appointed means. Against the rigorists among the Swiss Brethren he argued that the ban was being used legalistically and that hasty judgment of a brother’s failings is itself a sin. He died in his bed at Augsburg in 1556.5
Melchior Hoffman
Melchior Hoffman (c. 1495–c. 1543) was a Swabian furrier turned lay preacher who carried a visionary Lutheranism through Livonia and the Baltic before becoming an Anabaptist at Strasbourg in 1530. He is the hinge on which the northern movement turned, and he turned it the wrong way.
He taught that Christ took no flesh from Mary but brought a heavenly body through her, and he read the prophets as a calendar, announcing that the end would come at Strasbourg in 1533 and presenting himself for imprisonment to hasten it. The prophecy failed; he remained in prison there until his death about ten years later. His followers, the Melchiorites, supplied both the men who seized Münster and the men Menno Simons afterward had to gather up.6
The Münster Prophets
Jan Matthys (d. 1534), a baker of Haarlem, claimed Hoffman’s mantle, discarded his nonresistance, and named Münster the New Jerusalem. He drove out those who would not be rebaptized, abolished private property, and burned the books of the city except the Bible. On Easter Sunday, 1534, he rode out against the besieging army with a handful of men, expecting deliverance, and was killed at once.
Jan van Leiden (c. 1509–1536), a tailor, succeeded him, had himself crowned king in the line of David, legalized plural marriage and reportedly took sixteen wives, and ruled a starving city under siege until it fell on June 24, 1535. He was tortured and executed with Bernhard Knipperdolling and Bernhard Krechting on January 22, 1536, and their bodies were hung in iron cages from the tower of St. Lambert’s.
Bernhard Rothmann (d. 1535?) was the city’s own evangelical preacher, an educated man who accepted rebaptism and then wrote the tracts that justified everything that followed. He is the more sobering figure of the three, because he was not an outsider or an illiterate. His body was never identified.
Fuller treatment of these events is on the Anabaptists page.
Jacob Hutter and Peter Riedemann
Jacob Hutter (c. 1500–1536), a Tyrolean hatmaker, took charge of the refugee Anabaptist communities in Moravia in 1533 and gave them the discipline and the common purse that have held his people together ever since. His organizing ability was extraordinary and his tenure was short: he was seized, taken to Innsbruck, and burned in February 1536.
Peter Riedemann (1506–1556) wrote the Hutterite confession of faith largely in prison, and it remains the doctrinal standard of the Hutterian Brethren to this day. Of all the communal experiments of the century, this is the one that survived, and it survived because it was catechized.
Menno Simons and the Philips Brothers
Menno Simons (c. 1496–1561), a parish priest at Witmarsum in Friesland, had doubted transubstantiation and infant baptism for years before the slaughter of a band of Münsterite sympathizers near Bolsward in 1535—his own brother among them—drove him to act. He renounced Rome in January 1536 and spent twenty-five years, with a price on his head, gathering scattered and disillusioned believers into peaceable congregations from Amsterdam to Danzig. He died in his bed in Holstein in 1561.
He is the reason a movement that might have ended at Münster has a later history, and he wrote 1 Corinthians 3:11 on the title page of nearly everything he published. He also held Hoffman’s doctrine of the heavenly flesh of Christ and defended it, which is why the Belgic Confession names the Anabaptists on that point. Both belong in any honest sketch of him.
Obbe Philips (c. 1500–1568) ordained Menno, then grew disgusted with the whole business of prophets and ordinations, withdrew, and wrote a bleak confession of his disillusionment. His brother Dirk Philips (1504–1568) stayed, became the movement’s ablest theologian after Menno, and pressed for a strict application of the ban that would divide the Dutch congregations for generations.
David Joris
David Joris (c. 1501–1556), a Delft glass painter, was for a time the most prominent Anabaptist leader in the Netherlands. He moved steadily toward a spiritualism in which the inward reality mattered and the outward form—including outward obedience—did not, and claimed a revelation that made him the third David. In 1544 he settled at Basel under the name Johann von Brugge, lived as a respectable citizen, and died there undetected in 1556. Three years later the deception was discovered and his body was exhumed and burned.
Wrongly Bracketed With Them
Three names appear in older accounts of the Anabaptists who do not belong there, and the distinction is worth keeping.
Thomas Müntzer (c. 1489–1525) preached the sword against the ungodly, led men into the Peasants’ War, and was executed after the rout at Frankenhausen in 1525. He never practiced rebaptism and was dead before the movement spread. His influence on Hut was real; the identification of him as an Anabaptist is a polemical convenience.
Caspar Schwenckfeld (1489–1561), a Silesian nobleman, suspended the outward observance of the Supper altogether and rejected water baptism as well. He is a spiritualist, not an Anabaptist, and Marpeck spent years answering him.
Michael Servetus (1511–1553) denied the Trinity, which is the reason he is remembered and the reason he was burned at Geneva. He shared the radical rejection of infant baptism, but the men on this page would have repudiated his theology as firmly as Calvin did.
A Note on the Martyrologies
Much of what is known about these men comes from Anabaptist martyr collections, above all the Martyrs Mirror compiled by Thieleman van Braght in 1660. It preserves court records, letters, and confessions that exist nowhere else, and it is indispensable. It is also a work of devotion written a century after the events, with an argument to make about the succession of the true church, and it should be used with the same care a Protestant reader brings to Foxe.7
