These cages still hang from the Church of Saint Lambert in the German city of Munster. Empty now, for many many years they contained the decaying corpses of three religious leaders put to death in one of the many bloody conflicts of the Protestant Reformation era. In 1534-1535, Munster became an epicenter of the religious fanaticism and accompanying violence of the period, playing out to tragic ends.
For a whole year, the town’s inhabitants endured a siege that pitted their brand of Christianity against the state-supported Catholic bishop’s armies. The Christians inside the town were part of the Anabaptist movement, a denomination that eventually gave rise to the self-declaired pacifist Mennonite and Amish groups still around today. But these Munster Anabaptists were different. They believed in adult versus infant baptism (the main defining feature of all Anabaptist Christian sects), but they also thought that private property should be banned, that all women should be forced to marry, and that they should form a Christian state — one that eventually condoned violence to achieve its aims.
Things did not end well for them. On Easter Sunday of 1534, the Anabaptist leader Jan Matthys left the besieged city, convinced that God would save him. Instead, he was beheaded and his genitals were nailed to a city gate. Eventually, the Munster residents lost the siege, and three of the religious dissidents’ bodies were placed into the cages shown in the first photo here. The second image is St. Lambert’s Church.
Source(s): Paul Ham, _New Jerusalem: the Shirt Life and Terrible Death of Christiandom’s Mist Defiant Sect_ (Random House Australia, 2018); wikipedia.
