Idolatry

At the first beat of a drum, the noise in the tavern died away. There was silence as the musicians began playing a lilting air. The crowd recognised it at once; they were all shepherd-folk and had whistled or hummed it to their sheep on the hillsides. Soon they were joining in, beating time on the tables with their mugs. They recognised the musician, too. He was a shepherd who came down from the hills each evening to play for a few pence in the tavern of the village of Niklashausen. His name was Hans Bohm. Soon he was to be called the saviour of mankind and the herald of the end of the world. It was in 1474. Europe had been ravaged by wars, dynastic and religious, and the people were exhausted. They often sought release in fantasies. A recurrent belief was that so much war and devastation must have a purpose: must herald the Millenium, the destruction of the old, corrupt world and the creation of a new. In remote cells, men pored over parchments to discover when the event might happen. Two Bohemians argued that 1467 would be the year; but when it passed without incident, no one’s faith was in any way diminished – it was simply assumed that they had got their sums wrong. In the states of Germany, the feeling that the end of the world was approaching was especially strong. The people there had been heavily taxed to pay for their emperor’s armies and the armies themselves had carried off what the tax-gatherers had left. In no state was the atmosphere more apprehensive than in Wurzburg, which was governed by a powerful Prince-Bishop. And it was to his castle that rumours came of strange events in the village of Niklashausen. People spoke of a young shepherd who played the drum, who had declared that the world was to be destroyed and – here the Prince-Bishop choked in fury – who was laying the blame for it all on princes and bishops. Hans Bohm had assumed his role as prophet quite suddenly. One night in the tavern he had beaten his drum for silence. Then he had declared to the flushed audience in the taproom that he had had a vision. The Virgin Mary had appeared to him and had told him to stop entertaining the people and to save them instead. She had declared that the world as they knew it would be destroyed and that her statue in the village church was to be a rallying-point for all who wished to be saved; and she had ordered Hans to proclaim the news. Having delivered his message, Hans added a theatrical touch by burning his pipe and drum – a wasted gesture since after a message of that sort, no one felt like more music, anyway. At any other time, Hans might have been dismissed as a crank. But this was war-weary Europe and his message was just what people had been expecting. He was, in any case, a very eloquent preacher. On Sundays and holy days, crowds surged into the village streets to hear him. He began by preaching repentance, urging them to burn their gaudy clothes and elegantly-pointed shoes. Then he went further: he claimed he had worked miracles. Thanks to his personal intercession, he told farmers, God had refrained from sending a frost to kill off their corn and vines. The farmers were duly impressed; if the lad really was a prophet, they told each other, he clearly had his priorities right and with a bit of luck – and prayer, of course – they might even have a decent summer. Then Hans attacked the clergy. They were, he said, proud, lazy and greedy and the root of the evil that had contaminated the earth and made its destruction necessary. And in case anyone thought that the nobles were getting off lightly, he urged his listeners not to pay rents and taxes to them: “The time will come,” he declared, “when they, too, will work for their daily bread.” Attacked like this on both fronts, it was small wonder the Prince-Bishop was beside himself with rage. Soon, from the Alps and the Rhineland, bands of pilgrims were trudging along the roads to Niklashausen, anxious to be saved. Craftsmen downed tools and left their workshops; butchers and bakers shut their shops and set off also; and peasants in the fields left the seed unsown as they bundled up their few possessions and took to the road. As they walked they carried banners and sang their own songs. “To God in Heaven we complain,” ran one of the more moderate verses, “That the priests cannot be slain.” The less restrained choruses sent the clergy scurrying into their churches where they alternately quaked and prayed until the columns of pilgrims had passed. Meanwhile Hans was treated like a modern pop star. Wherever he went, men and women fell on their knees before him, begging to be saved. They scarcely allowed him to eat or sleep and on several occasions almost crushed him to death. They ripped off his clothes and tore them to fragments to be kept as relics as precious, they said, “as the hay from the manger in Bethlehem.” During April 1474, seventy thousand pilgrims were gathered at Niklashausen. A vast camp surrounded the village with traders, craftsmen and souvenir-sellers to cater to the pilgrims’ needs. The Prince-Bishop could stand it no longer. The gates of Wurzburg were closed to pilgrims and the citizen-militia was put on the alert. Eventually the State Diet, or Parliament, decided that Hans must be arrested. One night in July, a troop of the Prince-Bishop’s cavalry galloped through the pilgrim camp trampling the tents and stalls and making straight for the house of the “Holy Youth.” The soldiers seized him and carried him off to Wurzburg Castle. After the initial shock, the pilgrims rallied. One of them, a local peasant, claimed that he, too, had had visions and that if they marched on Wurzburg, the walls of the city would crumble before them like those of Jericho. Unarmed, except for the great candles they carried, the pilgrims marched to the city and surrounded it. They waited for the walls to fall, for their saviour to emerge and for the world to end. They were disappointed on all three counts. The walls did not crumble. The Prince-Bishop, who did not want a riot on his hands, sent a messenger to point out this fact to the pilgrims but he was driven off by a hail of stones. Then the crowd grew angry and threatened to take the castle by storm. The Prince-Bishop ordered his master-gunner to fire a few cannon-balls over the pilgrims’ heads. The master-gunner obliged and, being good at his trade, successfully avoided hitting anybody. The crowd, however, took this as a sign that Hans and the Virgin were protecting them from harm and attacked. The Prince-Bishop delayed no longer and sent out his cavalry. Forty pilgrims were killed. The rest fled. A few days later Hans was burned at the stake for heresy. So perished the Drummer of Niklashausen and his prophecies. His ashes were thrown into the river lest any of his followers should treasure them as relics. Nevertheless, some pilgrims crept back at night to scrape away earth from the foot of the stake and preserved that instead.