Early 16th century
Wanted to form a holy community separate from
the rest of society. Anabaptists organized in response to the Protestant
Reformation, which was set in motion by the German friar Martin Luther in 1517
and quickly became a sweeping movement to uproot church abuses and restore
early Christian teachings. Set up secretly by laypeople, Anabaptists believed
that only adults had the free will to truly understand and accept baptism and
therefore had to be rebaptized. Rebaptism symbolized the Anabaptists’
determination to withdraw from a social order corrupted, as they saw it, by
power and evil. They therefore rejected the authority of courts and magistrates
and refused to bear arms or swear oaths of allegiance. When persuasion failed
to convince them, Zwingli (a Zurich reformer), urged Zurich magistrates to
impose the death sentence. Anabaptism quickly spread from Zurich to many cities
in southern Germany, despite the Holy Roman Empire’s general condemnation of
the movement in 1529. In 1534, one incendiary Anabaptist group, believing that
the end of the world was imminent, seized control of the northwestern German
town of Munster. Proclaiming themselves a community of saints, they abolished
private property and dissolved traditional marriages, allowing men to have
multiple wives. In 1535, they fell to a combined Protestant and Catholic army.
Many died in battle or were executed. The remnants of the Anabaptist movement
survived under the determined pacifist leadership of the Dutch reformer Menno
Simons, whose followers were eventually named Mennonites.