Historical loonies

I've just finished a fantastic book about millenarianism, The Pursuit of the Millenium by Norman Cohn. There were some excellent mad sects in the High Middle Ages who tried, in various creative ways, to usher in the kingdom of a thousand years which would precede the end of the world. I particularly liked one young man called Eon, Eudes in French, who claimed that the "eundem" in "per eundem Dominum nostrum Iesum Christum" referred to him, and that therefore all Latin prayers ended "through Eon Jesus Christ our Lord". Later he decided that he was also the "eum" in "per eum qui venturus est iudicare vivos et mortuos et seculum per ignem", and that Eon was the one who would come to judge the living and the dead and the world by fire. He died in the custody of the archbishop of Rouen, but not before gathering many disciples, several of whom ended at the stake, and generally causing chaos.

The topos of the ruler who didn't really die but is actually living as a wandering hermit and will come again is a familiar one; there were legends that Harold II survived Hastings, for example, and the idea that Edward II wasn't killed with that memorably gruesome poker but survived for decades as a wandering holy man is still current today. I was pleased to learn that not only were there several convincing imposters who claimed to be Frederick II, the stupor mundi, but that one of them, who mustered surprising international support but eventually betrayed himself and was burnt at the stake, even had his own imposter who claimed to be him raised from dead after three days -- a sort of pseudo-pseudo-Frederick. They killed that one too.

But the anabaptists rule when it comes to eschatalogical lunacy. The story of the kingdom of Münster is a sort of nightmare of odd but not completely unreasonable ideas slipping away into outright insane terror. Through a series of mad lurches they ended up ruled by a king called Jan Bockelszoon, whose first act as leader Cohn describes thus:
"Early in May he ran naked through the town in a frenzy and then fell into a silent ecstasy which lasted three days".
He instituted polygamy, from Old Testament examples, and made it illegal for women of marriageable age not to be married to another anabaptist. (Bockelszoon had fifteen wives at one point.) Women were executed for refusing to comply with this, and also for arguing with their new co-wives. He renamed the days of the week, and became a sort of Caligula, demanding strange shows of loyalty from his subjects, who were starving from a complete siege of the city by the ejected bishop. Eventually someone managed to let the bishop's army in, and a massacre followed. Bockelszoon and two others were tortured to death with red hot pincers, and their bodies hung in cages from a church tower in the city centre. The cages are still there, apparently, but the bodies were taken down after about fifty years. The whole episode was included by Luther Blisset in his book Q, which is quite readable; the author(s) claimed to have taken the name of Luther Blisset, a 70s footballer, as a pseudonym to conceal their identity as four Italian professors of semiotics, though the image of four Italian professors of semiotics choosing to get together to co-write an English novel about the North European reformation strikes me as the less likely of the two options. Still it's on Wikipedia so it's either true or someone's been reading too much Borges.