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| Anneken Hendriks: She would not stop talking, so they filled her mouth with gunpowder. Anneken Hendriks was 53 years old, could neither read nor write, and had moved into a house in Amsterdam next door to the underbailiff of the city. She had left the Catholic church six years earlier and joined the Anabaptist Mennonites. She held meetings at her home. She had been baptised as an adult in the Anabaptist tradition. She had married her husband at night, in a private ceremony, in the manner of her faith rather than the church. Her neighbour reported her to the authorities. She was arrested and her formal sentence was recorded in full. The court listed her crimes. She had forsaken the holy church. She had adopted the cursed doctrine of the Mennonists. She had been baptised outside the Catholic faith. And she had married her husband at night, away from the church, in a private ceremony. That was in the sentence. That was listed as evidence against her. On October 27th, 1571, two weeks before her execution, she was tortured by rack and strappado. The purpose was to extract the names of other Anabaptists in Amsterdam. She gave no names. She was tortured until there was nothing left to do but stop, and she had given them nothing. On November 10th, 1571, she was taken from the city hall across Dam Square to the stake. She passed her neighbour on the way: the man who had reported her. She stopped and looked at him and told him that God would punish him if he continued in his Judas act. The Martyrs Mirror, the Mennonite martyrology that recorded her story, preserved that moment in the account of her death. She continued walking. Catholic confessors approached her and she turned them away. She was praying aloud, speaking to the crowd, addressing the people around her. She would not be silent and she would not be still. They packed gunpowder into her mouth. Then they tied her to a ladder and threw her into the flames. A contemporary engraving made by the Dutch artist Jan Luyken in 1685, now held in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, depicts the execution on Dam Square. The old city hall stands in the background. A crowd watches from the square. In the centre, a woman is bound to a ladder above the fire. Her name is recorded. Her story is recorded. The Martyrs Mirror made sure of it. Anneken Hendriks was one of thousands of Anabaptists executed across the Netherlands and the German states during the sixteenth century under the authority of the Spanish Habsburg administration. The specific charge of heresy had been used against Anabaptists since 1525. By the time Anneken died in Amsterdam in 1571, the machinery was well established, the sentences were formulaic, and the executions were routine. None of that made her routine. She could not read. She had never written a word. She held meetings in her home and married her husband at night and refused under torture to give a single name, and when they walked her across Dam Square to burn her she used every step of it to speak. They could only think of one way to stop her. |
| During the 16th century, when Catholics and Protestants were killing and persecuting each other across Europe in an epic contest for doctrinal supremacy, there was one thing they could agree on—that Anabaptists were heretics who should be put to death. The word “anabaptist” means “re-baptizer” or “one who baptizes over again.” The Anabaptists emerged as an offshoot of the Protestant Reformation and one of their fundamental beliefs was that only adults should be baptized—after making a confession of faith. They did not believe infant baptism to be valid, because an infant isn’t capable of making a decision of faith. Because Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists all practiced infant baptism, they derisively called those who chose to be baptized again as adults “re-baptizers”/anabaptists. The Anabaptists rejected the label but, nevertheless (as is so often the case in history) the derogatory term stuck and in time those to whom it was applied embraced it. Why did the religious establishment care if these people didn’t believe in infant baptism? Well, aside from the fact that any challenges to established orthodoxy were deemed dangerous, the Anabaptist claim that infant baptism was invalid was particularly inflammatory because it suggested that nearly all Christians (Protestant and Catholic alike) hadn’t been properly baptized at all, and therefore hadn’t acquired the eternal benefits of baptism. Perhaps more importantly, the belief was seen as a challenge to the authority of the state, which at the time was inextricably intertwined with the religion of the state. So, Anabaptists across Europe were persecuted with zeal. In most of Protestant Europe the penalty for practicing and advocating “re-baptism” was death by drowning or beheading. In Catholic Europe, the penalty was burning at the stake. Many thousands of Anabaptists met these gruesome deaths (ironically perhaps, as they were pacifists who believed the Sermon on the Mount was to be taken literally). During the 16th century there were more Anabaptists killed by fellow Christians than there were Christians martyred by Rome during the first three centuries of the faith. Hans Bret was a baker in Antwerp, in his early 20’s when he converted to Anabaptism and was baptized. Learning of his crime, authorities arrested him, charged him with having been “re-baptized” and sentenced him to death. After torturing Hans in an unsuccessful attempt to force him to recant his faith, he was burned at the stake. Before his execution the authorities put the young man’s tongue in a metal screw, then burned the end of his tongue with a hot iron so that it would swell and be impossible to remove from the screw. This precaution was to prevent Hans from being able to witness to his faith while being burned alive. Anneken Hendricks was 53 years old when she was arrested in Amsterdam. She was charged with having attended “meetings of the accursed Mennonites.” First she was tortured on the rack in an futile effort to compel her to provide names of her fellow Anabaptists. Then she was burned alive, her mouth stuffed with gunpowder to prevent her from speaking “heresy” while being killed. Felix Manz was a scholar living in Zurich when he adopted the Anabaptist faith. After publicly denying the validity of infant baptism and refusing to allow his children to be baptized, Manz was arrested and sentenced to death. His hands were tied together behind his knees, with a pole between them. Authorities placed him in a boat, rowed him out into Lake Zurich, and pushed him overboard. These are just three of many examples that could be cited. Executions of Anabaptists continued into the early 1600’s, and other forms of persecution continued long after that. Eventually and gradually, as religious toleration became the accepted norm, the persecutions would finally cease. |