Q by Luther Blissett (poetry books to read txt) 📕

the end of the kingdom of Zion in the city of M�nster. The attention of every state is focused upon the outcome of the siege, and Your Lordship will be particularly attentive to events that concern him. I therefore appeal to Your concern, and to the natural curiosity of a highly cultured and educated man, so that my letter my have a purpose, illustrating some particulars that have struck me as significant over the past few months of silence, never forgetting that Your Lordship has always shown great appreciation of first-hand information, in the full awareness that the most alarming occurrences are the most likely to be enriched by non-existent details, false interpretations and wild inventions.

But perhaps I might begin the story with an almost intimate reflection, which may help Your Lordship to read my exposition, and that is that never, in the thirty-six years granted me by God, have I endured months so tiring to the body, so exhausting to the mind, so unsettling to the spirit, as those endured by a sane man who must become a madman among madmen. Such a man, however rigorously he may survey the provinces of his mind, will often nurture the atrocious suspicion that he has irremediably lost his own nature, in spontaneously assuming the attitudes of the mob and forging friendships with lunatics until he ends up understanding them better than he does those of sound mind. So his return to normal life will be neither easy nor immediate.

During the crucial months of the fall of M�nster I have seen the food supplies becoming ever more meagre, as the faces of the city’s inhabitants grew increasingly gaunt. In a single week I have seen all the rats disappear from the streets of the city, and I have begun to suspect that it is not out of madness, but out of clear-sighted calculation that Jan Bockelson has begun to execute an ever greater number of so-called ‘disobedients’: fewer mouths to feed and more meat to eat.

I may say that, had the Anabaptist front been truly solid, my task would have been much less burdensome. I would easily have identified the people barricaded behind the walls with the forces of Satan and the mercenaries camped outside with the troops of the Lord. As things transpired, however, it became increasingly difficult not to consider the King of Zion and his court as the sole true enemies, and the rest of those under siege a blameless flock. Bockelson’s great madness made the Anabaptist madness of all the others all the less horrible.

So, on more than one occasion, when I heard him promise his people that the cobblestones would be transformed for them into bread and pheasant legs, I felt an inextinguishable desire to kill him, to erase him from the face of the earth, to release those poor people from that yoke, which was borne only because of the presence of a greater danger outside the walls.

Nonetheless, Your Lordship’s correspondent has been responsible, in person, for the division created within the city. Since the arrival of Jan Matthys I have begun to win the friendship of the chief preacher of the community, Bernhard Rothmann, a highly cultured man with a fine mind, whom I mentioned in my last letter more than a year ago now. When I saw the way in which he was brushed aside by the new prophet Matthys, I immediately realised that his wisdom could be useful to my plans. I could use the dissatisfaction of the failed leader, the man of the Bible excluded by rogues and panders. But Rothmann fell gravely ill, and with his health his will to fight gradually faded as well. In the end he settled for the role of theologian at the court of Jan of Leyden. And yet no reasonable person, however feeble and exhausted, could bear the spectacle of the Kingdom of Zion for long.

I don’t know how I hit upon the idea of polygamy, it was probably inspired by the legend that the Anabaptists practised community of wives as well as goods. I spent a long time talking to Bernhard Rothmann about the practices of the patriarchs of the Holy Scriptures where marriage was concerned, with the result that the preacher advised Bockelson to take up this custom, one so odious as to make the people hostile to him. From that point onwards everything was submerged in a tide of blood, and Rothmann finally took fourteen wives. But the spirit of the besieged city, which had until that moment solidly resisted the attacks of Bishop von Waldeck, would never again know unity.

So no traitor would have been required had the besieging forces been better organised and less afraid of failure. And yet the siege seemed destined never to come to an end. It is true that the New Zion was by now on the point of collapse through hunger, and it is also true that the tight grip that the bishop’s troops managed to put upon the city began, after a year, to be properly effective, but in the long term a mercenary army usually breaks down and loses its vigour the longer its pay is delayed.

I reached the Episcopal camp at dawn on 24th May, with the hackbuts of the mercenaries aimed at my head, and the shouts of the city sentries telling me to turn back. I overcame the diffidence of Captain Wirich von Dhaun by constructing clay models of the fortifications of M�nster, and describing in detail the gaps in sentry duty. I had to confirm the precision of what I was saying by climbing at dead of night into the bastions of the city, and slipping unharmed out of one of the gates.�

A month later the Episcopal troops entered M�nster. Of the battle that took place within the walls I have no details to give, because I did not have the opportunity to be present. What happened next, on the other hand, is something that no human eye would ever wish to see, and no mouth will ever be able to describe. The searches, the first few killings, the massacres are still taking place. Everyone is being run through on the spot. Only Jan Bockelson and his two most trusted men, Krechting and Knipperdolling, were captured to be interrogated. In that fateful hour the king of the Anabaptists was not seen fighting in the square along with the strenuous defenders of the city, but was discovered in the throne room, hiding under a table, begging them to spare a little tailor and a miserable pander. As for Bernhard Rothmann, his fate is a matter for conjectures of the most various kinds: he was not taken prisoner, and his corpse is nowhere to be found, but some people say they saw a Hungarian planting a sword between his shoulder-blades and then, having recognised him as one of the men the bishop had ordered to be taken alive, concealing the corpse.

Bodies lie in all the alleyways, and the city is plagued by an unbearable stench. In the central square a pile of white bodies mounts, stripped naked and heaped up one on top of the other.

The arrival of Bishop von Waldeck did not contribute a great deal more to the health of M�nster. The streets of the city are still empty, even at midday, and the grocery stalls have not yet reappeared beneath the pinnacles of the Rathaus. A long time will pass before life returns to the city of M�nster, although work on the reconstruction of the Cathedral has already begun. I am still am trying to regain the strength and resolution that I lost in that carnival of death, but this city’s danse macabre catches all of us in its whirl, like a pestiferous contagion, as though the smell of the corpses were turning even the living into corpses.

And that’s how it will be for the Anabaptists between here and the Low Countries, now that the beacon of their hope has been extinguished. Many supporters of M�nster sent by Bockelson to stir up the people of Holland are still travelling about� those regions, but their days are numbered, and ever fewer will be the fools willing to listen to them. That is why I think that the fate of this execrable heresy is sealed, and the danger has been averted.

For the same reason I think I have accomplished the task assigned to me by Your Lordship, a task to which I have sacrificed all the strength of my body and my mind, having been put most profoundly to the test by the horrendous tragedy in which I have been both spectator and minor participant. So it will not be difficult for my lord to understand why I ask to be removed from the nauseating and deadly stench of these lands, and to continue to serve him, if my services can ever be of use to him again in other places and circumstances.

I take my leave of Your Lordship’s benevolence, and humbly kiss Your hands

Dated M�nster, the 30th day of June, 1535

Your Lordship’s faithful servant

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