Late Summer, 1525

The free church movement gained the support of an important future leader when Michael Sattler left his monastery in the Black Forest in 1525 and began to influence discussions among Swiss and southern German Anabaptists. The remaining sources touching on Michael Sattler’s life do not allow historians to reconstruct a precise narrative about the timing and motives of his conversion to Anabaptism. But we know that he served in the Benedictine monastery of “St. Peter’s in the Black Forest” as prior—the deputy to the abbot—at some point between 1518 and 1525.¹

At the time when Sattler entered the monastery, likely between 1507 and 1510, St. Peter’s had aligned with a spiritual renewal movement among Benedictines known as the Bursfelde Union or Bursfelde Congregation—named for the Bursfelde Abbey in central Germany where the movement began in the mid-fifteenth century.² The abbot, Peter Gremelsbach III, nurtured the spiritual disciplines of the movement and showed interest in the contributions that humanists’ studies could make toward monastic renewal. It is possible that he encouraged Sattler, who would not likely have received an education in Latin or the biblical languages in his home town of Staufen as a boy, to live for a time in Freiburg and attend the university there. (This conjecture would explain how Sattler felt confident enough in his knowledge of Greek and Hebrew to offer to debate his interpretation of the Scriptures in the original languages during his later trial in 1527.)³ However, in 1512, Gremelsbach died, and a new abbot named Jodocus Kaiser was elected. Kaiser’s term was troubled with political unrest, and the preoccupation of his writings with jurisdictional and financial matters might indicate that he was not ardent about maintaining the spiritual disciplines of the Bursfelde movement that likely informed Sattler’s ideals about monastic life when he first trained as a Benedictine. In any case, Kaiser did not supply documents required to formally join the Bursfelde Union⁴ and Sattler seems to have become disappointed with the state of his monastery by the mid-1520s. At his trial for heresy in 1527, he would explain that it was monks’ unspiritual lifestyles that alienated him from the cloister and convinced him that he could better follow Christ in the context of the budding evangelical congregations.⁵

The most probable date for Sattler’s departure from his monastery is August 1525. By that point, Sattler would have witnessed the local margrave occupying the monastery with his troops in 1522 in order to satisfy peasants who had become upset with the heavy-handed requirements that Kaiser was placing upon them when they farmed the monastery’s lands. Kaiser fled the monastery for safety in Freiburg, and it is likely that Sattler was left in charge during the abbot’s absence. Apparently, the leadership of the St. Peter’s worked out a sufficiently positive relationship with its peasants after this conflict that they left the cloister unmolested three years later, during the spring of 1525, when peasants throughout the Black Forest region invaded and plundered many of the neighboring monasteries.⁶ Whether Sattler, coming from a rural background, empathized with the peasants and had a hand in forging a peaceful relationship with them must remain a matter of conjecture. But soon after the Peasants’ Revolt was suppressed, Sattler decided that his insulated life in the monastery was not the setting in which he was to follow Jesus.

Considering how close he had risen in leadership at the abbey, it was not a move without personal sacrifice. Shortly before being led to his death, an official mockingly asked him why he would exchange his life as a lord of his monastery for the scorn and condemnation he now faced. Sattler replied, “According to the flesh I would have been a lord, but it is better as it is.”⁷

About This Series

This post is part of a series entitled “The Reformation at 500: Timeline of the Free-Church Movement.” Click here for more information on this series.

Featured image courtesy of the Wick’sche Sammlung, ca. 1575, Zentralbibliothek Zurich, Ms. F 23, fol. 294.

1. As Hans-Otto Mühleisen has explained, in October 1525 the University of Freiburg erased “the most dangerous heretics’ names” from its register of students in order to assure Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand, who ruled the region where the university and St. Peter’s monastery lay, of its fidelity to the Catholic faith. Since Sattler appears in Zurich’s records as an imprisoned Anabaptist in November 1525, it is likely that he was known to have left St. Peter’s and the Freiburg area with the reputation of an evangelical or Anabaptist before October.  His name was thus likely to be one of those expunged from the university records at that time, making it impossible to know for certain whether Sattler studied there before or during his years as a monk. Since the abbot of St. Peter’s at the time had “close ties” to the university, Mühleisen also believes it likely that he had Sattler’s name erased from the monastery’s records as well. In any case, it would have been in the monastery’s interest to delete Sattler from its records after Sattler’s trial and execution for heresy in 1527. See Mühleisen, “Michael Sattler (ca. 1490-1527), Benediktiner — Humanist — Täufer,” in Edith Stein Jahrbuch 4 (1998), 225-242; id., “Vom Benediktiner zum Täufer: Michael Sattler; ein fast vergessenes Schicksal der oberrheinischen Kirchengeschichte zur Zeit der Reformation,” Freiburger Diözesan-Archiv 120 (2000): 142-156. ↩︎
2. On the Bursfelde Congregation, see James G. Clark, Monastic Orders, vol. 3: The Benedictines in the Middle Ages (Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer, 2011), 280-283. ↩︎
3. Mühleisen, “Vom Benediktiner zum Täufer,” 144. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 148-49. ↩︎
5. Micha Willunat, “Michael Sattler (1490-1527)—Mönch, Täuferführer und evangelischer Märtyrer,” Jahrbuch für badische Kirchen- und Religionsgeschichte 7 (2013): 14; Klaus Deppermann, “Michael Sattler – Radikaler Reformator, Pazifist, Märtyrer,” in Thomas Baumann and Klaus Deppermann, Protestantische Profile von Luther bis Francke. Sozialgeschichtliche Aspekte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1992), 49. ↩︎
6. Mühleisen, “Vom Benediktiner zum Täufer,” 148-49. ↩︎
7. Gustav Bossert, Jr., Harold S. Bender and C. Arnold Snyder, “Sattler, Michael (d. 1527),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online, at: https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Sattler,_Michael_(d._1527). ↩︎