It was only eleven days later that Hans Behem had told his followers in Germany to return armed, leaving at home their women and children. That year, July 13, on a Saturday, was the Feast of St Margaret. A martyr, probably living in the early fourth century, persecuted under Diocletian, she became honored in the eastern church by the ninth century, when her relics were moved from the east to Italy. She was protector of pregnant women, and often invoked against disease and death and during childbirth. She had also flourished as well, in the 12th century, among crusaders. Again her relics were transferred, this time to Venice in 1213. During the late middle ages, Wunderli tells us Margaret came to a greater popularity in Germany as one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, all martyrs, who were invoked against disease and death. [pp. 115-16]
One popular story in those times was that Margaret of Antioch was one of the Saints that Joan of Arc had said was with her always, whispering, coaxing at the end, to accept the fire of the stake and eventual martyrdom. The story of Margaret's life was one that, many of the peasants could recognize. A daughter of a pagan priest, becomes a shepherdess and then a Christian. She converts many pagans to Christianity. She becomes noticed by the local governor and he attempts to bring her in and seduce or marry her. She refuses due to her faith. He takes her anyway, and tortures and tests her. Even feeding her to a dragon. She was commonly depicted in the middle ages as slaying or bursting out of a dragon. In the end, she and her converts are beheaded during the mass executions under Diocletian. She was the one, after many converts, was tested, swallowed up by government and then killed, but remembered forever and ever. In those days, Joan of Arc was a real person, within living memory. Margaret may have loomed large in the faithful Christian peasant mind within Germany. Her feast day was eventually suppressed by the Holy See in 1969.
The crowds in and around Niklashausen had kept coming. They marched with candles, waved their banners and sang their blasphemous songs, wanting to see or touch him, relay any words he may have spoken. The crush of people must have been intense. With thirty or forty thousand, maybe they were six or eight times as many people as lived in the largest nearby city, Wurzburg. But then, the night before the feast day, Friday night, under cover of darkness, thirty-four men rode under orders from the Bishop of Wurzburg, to the farmhouse where they knew Hans Behem hid from the massive throngs of people, just outside Niklashausen. They knew where he was, but the crowds did not. Quietly the knights went in, captured the Drummer, secured him tightly, threw him on a horse and took him back to Wurzburg. No one was hurt, only a horse. [p. 117]
The next day, as the news spread, the crowds at once were enraged. Then, one by one, they stood up to speak, urging this action or that. All day they debated what to do and they decided at length, who would lead them next. As Wunderli reminds us, they were coming out of that enlightened state, that inspired state of divine excitation and returning to hierarchal models and means of organization, and purpose. The decision then, to march on the Bishop and Wurzburg, in order to free the Drummer, became the next goal. By the end of the day they chose a group of knights to lead them. One named Conrad von Thunfeld and his son became captains and the hordes turned toward Wurzburg. [p. 119]
They marched off into the night, carrying candles, waving their banners, singing their blasphemous songs. Maybe as many as ten or twelve thousand of them. A letter penned that Saturday, and sent to town council officials in Nurmburg, from one of the Bishop of Wurzburg's men, a doctor Kilian von Bibra said that no, they had not received permission to march, or preach or sing these awful songs. There had been strict proclamations for the people not to do these things. And yet, now they were on the move, coming to the city. The Drummer had been captured, but before, they had merely carried banners, and now, they were armed. The hermit he thought was from Bohemia and had lived in a cave near Niklashausen was also arrested, he said. The heretical sayings that the Drummer was preaching, had been collected and were being analyzed by a professor from Hiedelberg. Wunderli assumes this was to reassure the town council members that a legal case was being drawn up against the captured preacher. [p.118]
Here, the contemporary record of the Drummer of Niklashausen, dries up. From now on, the stories that relate these day to day events, come to us written years later and entirely through the moralizing language and biases of preachers and the faithful members of later times.
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all quotes from Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen by Richard Wunderli, Indiana University Press, Bloomington and Indianapolis, 1992.
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