Batenburgers

The Batenburgers were members of a radical Anabaptist sect led by Jan van Batenburg, that flourished briefly in the 1530s in the Netherlands, the aftermath of the Münster Rebellion. They were called Zwaardgeesten (sword-minded) by the nonviolent mainstream Anabaptists.

Jan van Batenburg was born around 1495, the illegitimate son of nobleman Dirk van Batenburg from Gelderland, and became mayor of a town in the Oversticht, present-day Dutch province of Overijssel. The Oversticht was occupied by the duke of Gelderland and was conquered by the Habsburgers. At some point in time — it is unknown when or why — he fell out with the local Habsburg-Burgundian authorities, was exiled, and lost his property. Van Batenburg thenceforth regarded the Holy Roman Emperor as his mortal enemy.

During the early 1530s, Van Batenburg converted to Anabaptism and found himself the leader of a large number of his co-religionists in Friesland and Groningen. His sympathies originally lay with the revolutionary Anabaptists who held Münster during the Münster Rebellion, but between Easter and Pentecost 1535, the Batenburgers from Groningen urged him to declare himself as 'a new David'. Before long Van Batenburg had established a new and completely independent sect, which quickly became the most extreme of all the early Anabaptist movements.

In August 1536, the leaders of the various Anabaptist groups met in Bocholt in a final attempt to maintain the unity of Anabaptism. At this meeting the major areas of dispute between the sects were polygamous marriage and the use of force against non-believers. David Joris tried to compromise by declaring the time had not yet come to fight against the authorities, and that it would be unwise to kill any 'infidel' (non-Anabaptists), lest the Anabaptists themselves be seen as common thieves and killers. Accounts of the outcome of the meeting differ; however, Joris and his followers subsequently split from the other Anabaptist groupings.

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