Batenburgers: violence and the nonresistant witness

The Batenburgers followed Jan van Batenburg, whose movement gathered adherents after Münster’s fall in 1535. GAMEO’s historical entry describes a group that permitted attacks and church plundering in expectation of divine judgment. Batenburg was captured in 1537 and executed in 1538; some adherents remained active after his death, and a later leader, Appelman, was executed in 1544.

The supplied Martyrs’ Mirror does not provide a Batenburg biography. It does preserve Jacob de Keersgieter’s 1569 answer to accusations about Münster and religious violence: he denies that such people were his brethren and rejects the attempt to establish Christ’s kingdom by force. The passage records the burden those accusations placed upon nonresistant believers; it does not identify every group involved by name.

The chart’s separate Batenburgers line therefore belongs to the surrounding history of competing claims and persecution. It should not become an inferred line of descent into the later Mennonite fellowships that confessed a peaceable following of Christ.