§ 26. PERSECUTION OF THE ANABAPTISTS. 83
Six executions in all took place in Zurich between 1527 and 1532. Manz was the first victim. He was bound, carried to a boat, and thrown into the river Limmat near the lake, Jan. 5, 1527. He praised God that he was about to die for the truth, and prayed with a loud voice, " Into thy hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit ! " BuUinger describes his heroic death. Grebel had escaped the same fate by previous death in 1526. The last executions took place March 23, 1532, when Heinrich Karpfis and Hans Herzog were drowned. The foreigners were punished by exile, and met death in Roman Catholic countries. Blaurock was scourged, expelled, and burnt, 1529, at Clausen in the Tyrol. Hiitzer, who fell into carnal sins, was beheaded for adultery and bigamy at Constance, Feb. 24, 1529. John Zwick, a Zwinglian, says that " a nobler and more manful death was never seen in Constance." Thomas Blaurer bears a similar testimony.^ Hiibmaier, who had fled from Waldshut to Zurich, December, 1525, was tried before the magistracy, recanted, and was sent out of the country to recant his recantation.2 He labored successfully in Moravia, and was burnt at the stake in Vienna, March 10, 1528. Three days afterwards his faithful wife, Avhom he had married in Waldshut, was drowned in the Danube.
Other Swiss cantons took the same measures against the Anabaptists as Zurich. In Zug, Lorenz Fiirst was drowned^ Aug. 17, 1529. In Appenzell, Uliman and others were beheaded, and some women droAvned. At Basle, Qilcolampadius held several disputations with the Anabaptists, but without effect ; whereupon the Council banished them, with the threat that they should be drowned if they returned
judkis partem tandem usm-pavit). This is, of course, unsatisfactory. Banishment in this case, as in that of Servetus, would have been severe enough.
1 Burrage defends Hiitzer against the charges of immorality (p. 200 sqq.) ; but Keim and Cornelius (II. 59) sustain them.
2 Baur, II. 173 sq. Zwingli's letter to Capito, Jan. 1, 1526, published by Rud. Stahelin, Briefe aus der Reformationszeit (Basel, 1887), p. 20.
84 THE SWISS REFORMATION.
(Nov. 13, 1530). The Council of Berne adopted the same course.
In Germany and in Austria the Anabaptists fared still worse. The Diet of Speier, in April, 1529, decreed that "every Anabaptist and rebaptized person of either sex be put to death by sword, or fire, or otherwise." The decree was severely carried out, except in Strassburg and the domain of Philip of Hesse, where the heretics were treated more leniently. The most blood was shed in Roman Catholic countries. In Gorz the house in which the Anabaptists were assembled for worship was set on fire. " In Tyrol and Gorz," says Cornelius,^ " the number of executions in the year 1531 reached already one thousand; in Ensisheim, six hundred. At Linz seventy-three were killed in six weeks. Duke William of Bavaria, surpassing all others, issued the fearful decree to behead those who recanted, to burn those who refused to recant. . . . Throughout the greater part of Upper Germany the persecution raged like a wild chase. . . . The blood of these poor people flowed like water so that they cried to the Lord for help. . . . But hundreds of them of all ages and both sexes suffered the pangs of torture without a murmur, despised to buy their lives by recantation, and went to the place of execution joyfully and singing psalms."
The blood of martyrs is never shed in vain. The Anabaptist movement was defeated, but not destroyed ; it revived among the Mennonites, the Baj^tists in England and America, and more recently in isolated congregations on the Continent. The questions of the subjects and mode of baptism still divide Baptist and Pedobaptist churches, but the doctrine of the salvation of unbaptized infants is no longer condemned as a heresy ; and the principle of religious liberty and separation of Church and State, for which the Swiss and German Anabaptists suffered and died, is making steady progress.
1 /. c. II. 57 sq.