Lions Led By Donkeys Podcast - Episode 318 - The Münster Rebellion: Part 3

Episode Date: June 30, 2024

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Hey everybody, welcome back to the Lions Led by Donkeys podcast. I'm Joe and with me here still, behind the walls of Munster, is Nate. What's up buddy? Hey, I'm doing great. You know what? I will give you a brief summary. I have the normal parent experience of plans have been canceled because child can't stop puking and shitting, so I'm getting one little taste of the dysentery, cholera, whatever situation within the walls of Munster. One little sample. A soup saun, if you will. And it sucks. It's the worst soup ever. Yeah, yeah.

I'm glad that your daughter believes in method acting in the Munster Rebellion. She really does, yeah. And I think she has the emotional intelligence of John of Leiden too, in the sense that, I mean, she's not expected to have more than that. She's a baby, but in the sense that she has to be the center of attention. And if I walk out of her line of sight, she screams. She doesn't scream that I should repent or marry off other children. She's still young though. She could always get, always get worse. Be suspicious if you go in her room and she's lying in her crib in the shape of a cross like oh no Oh, she's figured it out. You know it's like I said the motivational the sort of like

Positivity public service announcement they made for queer kids in the 2010s about it gets better. It's like no sometimes it gets worse Just FYI it can get better, and we hope it does sometimes it gets worse though, and you know what I have a feeling It's about to on this episode Oh, yeah. Well, it's not only about to get worse it's also about to come to an end because we're at our conclusion and When we left you last time the strange cult fortress of Munster devolved into an eyes wide shut party after Holding off a drunken mercenary assault at the behest of the Bishop of Munster after holding off a drunken mercenary assault at the behest of the Bishop of Munster. Stories of what was going on inside Munster then began to spread far and wide, all while

the Bishop began remassing his forces outside the city, with more and more money flowing toward him from noble backers, all intent on snuffing out the armed Anabaptists, lest their heresies spread throughout the realm. It all starts to sound like a fantasy novel, but it's real. Munster was not only surrounded by high walls but also had a deep moat. So the bishop was trying to figure out how to drain the moat by blocking nearby rivers with a small army of levied peasant laborers. This would have been a good plan. However, in the meantime, the Anabaptists have actually become pretty proficient at using their guns so as the peasants went to work they kept getting sniped by Anabaptist musketeers on the city walls. Well I mean weren't they doing like a you know

closing down the range at spendex style training previously of just fucking non-stop shooting with no idea like you think at a certain point some of them would figure out how they work. You know you've heard of the 10,000 hours thing of learning a new skill what about 10,000 bullets you know they had an endless amount of ammo seemingly so they had plenty of time to practice like look we don't have any trainers but eventually we'll get it I believe in us God believes in Christ Jesus will guide our musket balls well Well, you know what? Apparently, if you're you're a peasant named like, you know, John DeShitt, and you're out there

trying to drain moats at the behest of the bishop and you're constantly getting, you know, round musket balls peppering you in the butt. Like it's going to keep getting worse as people keep getting more and more proficient with their warrior tasks and drills. You're sitting there attempting to damn this fucking river like, View the fuck of Bishop of Munster. Yo, how the fuck, how the fuck is he shooting me in the ass? I don't know how to say it.

Shoot my ass might actually be, I know is a different way of saying it in Dutch, Jesus Christ. We were entranced by the video of these teen girls at a protest in, I want to say, 2019, interviewed by the Dutch language version of Vice. And I guess the insane right-wing columnist, Veerd Doek, had said something about, basically like, me too, or women's rights kind of marched, and that he'd probably said something to the effect of like, if you want women's rights, you have to be an Islam. And one of these girls just said in response, and this clip was just clipped, saw, you know, no context.

Yeah, Vida fuck is veerduk. It's just in my head constantly just on repeat. It's a great piece of media. Dutch might be a cursed language, but sometimes it's a blessed language. And that's, that's an example. So I just imagine him saying, Vida fuck is bishop of Munster Anyway, so Also, Joe told me that one of his neighbors was yelling at a DHL guy who had rung all the bells in the building and he

Was using the formal form of the second person in Dutch literally he was saying what the fuck is you doing? That's literally correct in touch Great I've never heard such an angry conversation at like 9am, which was only funny because I was already awake. If I was asleep I'd be very upset. I'm screaming Dutch outside my walls. So anyway, that's probably what's going on. This guy has no context of DHL or Veerduk or vice.nl or whatever, if that even existed, but he is having to dig ditches and drain swamps and get grazed and sometimes not not grazed by musket balls from Munsters, God Code, cheat, having ass, snipe, like sharpshooters. Dutch Vice is going to send a guy who looks like he could be in Weezer to embed with like

the Anabaptist Rebellion monster. Yeah, yeah, yeah, he's gonna go and he's gonna get the most incredible access you could ever have as a journalist and he's gonna ask questions like, Yo, you guys smoke weed? Pushing up his giant glasses that look frighteningly like the ones I'm wearing right now. So it seems that they're all married. I'm gonna go into one of their bedrooms and see what all this is about. Yeah, it's actually like really really good reporting and

Then somewhat hampered by the fact that the Twitter handle that it's published is associated with the account being shared on Twitter on social Media is baby ball 69 Rest in piss vice news Oh, rest in piss, Vice News. This time the bishop wouldn't be alone. Rather than just a collection of drunken mercenaries, actual battle-hardened knights and princes came to his aid to help him, to plan this whole thing. Not all were there to fight though, some were there to monitor the bishop. Namely, how the fuck are you spending all of this money and still not defeating a city

of sex-crazed peasants? Others came so they could witness the Anabaptist defeat and swoop in and steal some glory and credit However, there was also a pervasive rumor that for some reason Munster was full of like this collection of jewels and gold which is absolutely not true But it spread really really far and everybody's like i'm gonna get involved in robbing this shit when all this is over and this will become a problem later that we'll get to. In August of 1534 the bishop held a meeting of the princes and has decided if they gave the city an olive branch of peace you know like a hint of mercy it would give

a lot of people who wanted to quit the rebellion and get the fuck out of there and opening to leave, thus draining power away from John of Leiden. They believe that obviously the only thing keeping this rebellion in a forward momentum was John of Leiden's madness and he was keeping them trapped inside the walls. His destruction of Christianity warping their poor little minds and they simply just didn't know any better. The bishop believed if a representative of his was allowed to go in and talk to regular people they would see the light. Right? Now John of Lyon kind of understood this as well which is why when they agreed upon a temporary truce and the bishop sent an envoy into the city the envoy was not allowed to talk to regular people and instead only talked to John and his council of elders, which kind of put a damper on the bishop's plans.

Either way, the envoy promised a full pardon for everyone if they just opened the gates, repented, cast off their beliefs, and returned to the church. Obviously, John immediately refused, because to him, it was the bishop and everyone outside the walls that needed to throw down their weapons, repent, and beg God for forgiveness. Now, the bishop knew that this was not going to work whenever he got trapped into talking with John. So, he decided he would have to find a new way to talk to the regular people, and he'd have to get creative. He resorted to firing arrows into the city, each arrow wrapped with his message and his offer of peace to the people. And John saw this pretty quickly, and he announced that if anybody touched the

arrows, they'd immediately be condemned to hell and then be executed for heresy. So people left the fucking arrows alone and the Bishop's plan didn't work. So he was left with one option to once again, attack the city. So basically I'm just thinking off the top of my head, I was like, there's going to be some some 16th century airdrop pamphleteering happening. Ye bishops, psyops. We've sent over our message of peace. We recognize many people can't read so we've actually also illustrated it. It kind of looks like hentai but it explains things. The bishop's sitting in a meeting with all the princes.

And John of Lydas says no otaku, no weebs are allowed to live in the kingdom of heaven or in my kingdom. The bishop sitting down with the princes and one of the prince insists he's a very good artist and he's just drawing the most explicit hentai on earth. And the bishop is here, do you think this will work? He's like, yes, the people, they crave it. They need it. It's just two plain vanilla in the mud orgy scene from the Matrix 2

that's going on in there. It's too chaste. We gotta get weird with it. Your honorable Bishop, you see, they've lost their minds in the mud of Zion. Exactly. We have to show them that we are also not prudes. And that is why this octopus is very romantic It's good to say one of our merchants was recently in the Far East Kingdom of Japan and found this illustration called the dream of the fisherman's wife It's the guy from the Shogun TV show comes back. I have an idea for art

Someone give me a piece of wood and some pig fat I need to get lubed up for this one oh god yeah so just so people because people might be confused and I definitely don't recommend googling the dream of the fisherman's wife by Hokusai because uh somehow this is not the first time that we've talked about this on the show but just in case you've forgotten or you're a new listener you aren't aware that you are most certainly aware of the great wave off Kanagawa, the ukiyo-i woodcut by Hokusai is you know one of the classic examples of that style of color wood black print in Japanese art. He also did an illustration of what can only be described as

a lady getting eaten out by an octopus. You had to get weird with it, you know? Every artist has an era. Oh my f*** yeah, yeah, I mean yeah. Hentai, hocus-size version. I mean, can you imagine? You have to be committed to the bit where you're like, I am going to draw the illicit gay sex tryst between two courtyards and I have to very, very delicately carve the wood and then hand paint onto the wood to print onto paper.

And I gotta make sure that the fucking DVDA scene is looking as sharp as possible because if it's not painted correctly, it's not going to transfer to paper. It's like, you have to really believe in what you're doing. Like John of Leiden, for that matter. You have to believe what you're doing. You have to say, that might be the hottest hentai you've ever seen, but if you touch it, you'll go to hell and I'll kill you. Yeah, imagine he's unrolling the parchment or whatever,

unfurling the German fucking hentai, and he's just like, do we have a fishmonger? I have an idea. Someone go get my 30 wives I have a story really quickly I know we have to move on but when I was a little kid my mom Decided that the best way to cure me of my desire to Listen to heavy metal because I was just for some reason decided I liked heavy metal when I was six and I had no idea What heavy metal was in the sense that I was like I will listen to heavy metal like Bon Jovi and poison It's like you write that okay It was 1990 right my

mom bought me a German heavy metal magazine like a metalhead magazine at the grocery store where they did she accidentally buy you the heavy metal comic no no that would have been really funny but we were living in Germany remember and so she got me some German magazine and it was for hair metal fans or whatever and it'll probably like Motley Crue and shit on the cover and it had like a poster inside of like Queens Reich or something like that just terrible shit but there was also a very strange funny satirical German cartoon about the guy who while he's at work his dog is eating his wife out and he and then he comes home and

sees it and shoots the dog because he's like no it's my job and then starts eating his wife out I thought this was very funny. I told my mom the story about, yeah, this is cartoon in this magazine. You bought me needless to say, she did not find it funny at all. Well, how would you react if your child brought you this comic? No, but how would you react if your child didn't bring you the comic and you understood the context immediately? He very happily told you he's six told you the story. Hey, isn't this funny? There's this funny cartoon about the dog that is eating out lately

I just returned to my phone and called child protective services on myself Yeah, but those days you to do with a rotary phone. You know, it was a much more deliberate process. Oh My god. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah So anyway that that when thinking about you said German hentai and I was like, what would German hentai look like? And then in my mind I'm like, Oh, the cartoon about Balthazar the dog. Listen, if you're out there, we've got a lot of European fans. I can't remember the name of the magazine. I don't really want to see it again, but maybe there's some cultural reference here that I don't recall.

All I remember was the dog was named Balthazar and yeah, and there was a lot of cunnilingus involved as the punchline of the joke. We're looking for a 1990 version of the very well-known German comic cucked by Balthazar. I mean, someone out there's gonna be a Dutch guy who's just like a... Fear the fuck is Balthazar. Adult anime, like, you know know cuz comic strips and comic book stuff like it's not necessarily seen as like a juvenile army in Europe certainly not in I know in France and in other countries is like it's not taken as like

a weird thing the way it is in America was for a long time and so there might be a guy like oh yes that's a that's a that's the Baltic-Arshantic volume seven issue 15. He's actually Clifford's cousin. Everybody knows this. Yeah Yeah, exactly I love you. The Clifford is the prudish American version in the year. He's really horny as well as being huge Clifford the the big red huge kink freak. Yeah, I was gonna say I Big Red Huge Kink Freak. Yeah, I was gonna say... I don't want to make that joke. Groot de Clifford is the unknown Dutch part of the Clifford the Big Red Dog family.

I don't want to talk about it because there's a joke that everyone probably can see coming a mile away involving the color red and I'm just gonna leave it alone. Just gonna leave it alone. This is a history podcast, folks. It's a history podcast. It's a history podcast. I hope all my professors are very proud of me I was up to 2 30 in the morning with a cranky baby and and so I'm um You know what my brains all over the place got Balthazar on the brain

Yeah, yeah, I got Balthazar on the brain that is the origin of Balthazar's speedboost We've made the joke on the trash feature podcast on a kind of comedy riff podcast, that like the joke should be that it's really inconvenient for you if someone who has the same name as you gets convicted of like sex crimes against kids or something like that. And so the punishment on top of the other punishments should be that person has to change their name to something ridiculous so they can never be confused with you or anyone else ever again. So it's like we've decided your name is just going to be, it's like, well, you've been

convicted of this so you're gonna serve 12 months in prison and now your name is Balthazar Speedboat. And Balthazar, that then I told the story and that became the joke about the oh yeah it was a Nazi dog being very Nazi like anyway. It all comes back to Balthazar. It all comes back to Balthazar. I'm sure there was a guy named Balthazar in Monster. There was actually. There's a bunch of them, Balthazars and Melchiorz and fucking... That's it. This is just a full on steampunk fantasy. It's a weight bearing

Balthazar. The bishop had learned something from his last attack on the city, namely that rather than just smashing the city with the salvo of unnamed cannon fire, it needed to be directed in a single point to do the most damage. So he did, and crushed the reinforced gates of the city within three days of fire. Though again, the walls of the city, the main barrier, remained standing. This led to an argument between the gathering of princes, mercenaries, and knights. How do we attack the city? One camp had an obvious answer.

We go through the gates. The other camp pointed out that that'd be way too dangerous, so we'd all be funneling in through a few points. So we need to attack both the walls and the gates at the same time. And that makes sense. However, this argument went on for so long that the well regimented and at this point trained militia within the city rapidly went to work repairing and reinforcing the damaged gates and then manning the defenses in order to prepare for the attack because the bombardment had lifted they're like okay they're gonna come now this isn't like they don't have enough ammo nor technology and guns back then to just bombard the

city around the clock right so as soon as the cannons lift they're like okay they're going to attack now also it's like they've been bombarding the gates it's like shock they're actually gonna attack a completely undamaged segment of wall just hit it with their fists really hard show how mad they are like they're probably gonna attack the gate I'll show them yeah exactly fuck you tapping your fists against the wall fuck these walls in particular you assholes people of Munster like you just standing over there with their cauldrons of soup,

they're about to dump on you Swiss style. I mean, like, are they actually attacking or are they just having a bad day? My lord, John of Leiden, they're coming. Leiden rises from his throne. He's like, get me Belfazar. Yeah. Everyone in the city had a job

directly related to the defense, whether it was combat or supporting those that would be engaged in it. The only people that were exempt were the infants and the elderly, really anyone too weak to carry anything from food or water to ammo up to the walls. The women, for example, despite not having direct combat roles, spent their time under bombardment making pot after pot of boiling pitch to pour over the walls onto the heads of the attackers, as well as coating bundles of flax in oil to be set on fire and dumped on top of enemy soldiers. The forbidden soup, if you will. So, pitches, if I'm not mistaken, is pine resin, I think, boiled or some kind of

tree resin boiled down like sap, boiled to like a really, really tar, basically, consistency. Yeah, pretty much. And so it's like molasses or caramel in the sense that like, it can get a lot hotter than water, it can get hotter than, maybe it'll get hotter than oil, but it can get really fucking hot and stay hot. So if you get it boiling, its boiling point's gonna be higher, and you drop it on someone. It's just sort of like, oh, it's like a magic eraser for flesh. They also have like lime as well, you know, you get to line those wounds. I was going to say, so it's not good. No. So basically what you're saying is they've basically created like an on time delivery for a mass grave

right outside of their walls. It's like we will first we boil away the flesh and then we burn the remains with oily flax and then we dump lime on you. So it's just like, you know, it might as well be Amazon delivery. We have made the world's worst shrewd waffle outside the city walls. Yeah, I was going to say, call it, uh, yeah, you know, anabaptist baklava, but that would be referencing the perfidious Turk and his demonic food. Yeah, I was gonna say call it, yeah, you know, Anabaptist Baklava, but that would be referencing the perfidious Turk and his demonic food. Yeah, the celestial moon Turk. They probably wouldn't like it very much.

I'd forgotten about like there's a Turk in the moon sounds like fucking lyrics in a song that Syd Barrett would be playing guitar on and so it was just like, you know, whatever. European history is amazing sometimes. It's just genuinely I love every detail of this. And then right as it began to rain, the bishop launched his attack storming through the sections of the damaged outer wall of the city. While still others had to cross the moat that was because they never successfully blocked the moat off and drained it on homemade rafts. Now, once they made it in front of the inner wall, which is where the Anabaptists decided

they would defend because the outer wall is like, nah, fuck it, we don't need it, they began to rain hell down onto the attackers. Rocks, spears, burning pitch, lime, gunfire, you name it, went directly down onto their heads. And when knights managed to scale sections of the wall, the gunners then, on cue, pulled back and then militia armed with axes and swords ran over to hack them to pieces before they could get a foothold on the wall. It's always amazing these moments in history because you have, you know, like a fusillade

of musketeers firing rifles, firing projectile weapons, powered with gunpowder. And they're like, okay, reload and clear out this fucking flank so that like the clan of the cave bear can come out with sharp rocks and just fucking hack people. Like you get both at the same time. The order of the hand is just descending. It brings up the argument which one would you rather be? Would you rather be using a musket circa the 1500s which is you know a ticking time bomb in your hand?

Mm-hmm. Or be the guy that has to close ranks with an armored knight armed with a hatchet? Either way it seems not preferable. Yeah I'm on sick call I can't make it to wall defense duty today. Yeah. Sprayed my fucking ankle at militia PT. I guess it's just kind of like, you see these moments in time. World War I is a good example of it, where you have so much progress of modern industrialization has taken place

since the last major European war, which is the Franco-Prussian war. But then it's like, OK, we've gotten to the front by railroad and now how about we hit each other how would we run into each other really hard with horses also we've invented barbed wire there are these mismatches try your swords gentlemen as you get off the train yeah exactly it's like I think we're gonna be successful engaging with bayonets and they were using breech loading rifles, but it was still annoying.

But yeah, bayonet charges against, you know, fixed machine gun positions, barbed wire, gas, et cetera. You know, we've invented a tank, but it sucks. It's basically an RC car. It's an RC car that fills itself with poison gas as it drives. Yeah, exactly. It's like, what is it? Was it C-23, I think?

The Sherpa? There was a an aircraft that we used to jump out of in Alaska It's a short takeoff and landing aircraft that looks like it was made It was made by a manufacturer in Northern Ireland and it looks like a guy Bought a build your own plane project kit and sold it to the army and it's like whenever I see those things I'm like, yeah That's this is like being in a World War one tank. Where it's like, when it kind of accomplishes, like it doesn't necessarily... Nine times out of ten it does get stuck in barbed wire, but maybe once it'll work, but also you will die.

I will say, handshaking hand across all of history as a tanker of giant piece of technological Marvel for its time, defeated by small mud puddle. Yeah, yeah, yeahdle yeah yeah exactly just thinking about this along the lines is like yep you know 79 tons the world's heaviest modern battle tank or main battle tank unmatched across the world defeated by every road bridge culvert and or fording site in human history which cannot handle this weight and just collapses it's like we love the Abrams it's called I personally love the Abrams as I've pointed out multiple times on this show I have something of a soft spot for giant

huge anachronisms of history like battleships 75 ton main battle tanks mm-hmm a guy in armor scaling a wall to fight a dude with the musket like I'm on the side of the man who's on the wrong side of history. Cause it's cool, man. It fucking rules. To me, it's just one of those things where I wasn't a tanker. And so when it dawned on me how much of an encumbrance this was, it was just genuinely funny. It's like the Gulf war must've been the sickest thing ever for all of the

investors in the companies that make the Abrams. Cause there's this like, just flat the whole way and you can tanks get to fight tanks like, yes, Abrams is the's this like just flat the whole way and tanks get to fight tanks like yes Abrams the best tank on earth they forget that like everywhere else the US might go to war in the world has roads and bridges and stream crossing slight changes in elevation yeah it wasn't really made for those is made to fight the communist hordes as they storm across the fold a gap and then yeah yeah fast forward several decades and it's patrolling the streets of Baghdad. The tank is as confused as you are as how it ended up there.

Yeah, exactly. I like the idea that the tank is sentient in its own right and it also hates its job just like all four of its crew, correct? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Abrams like I was supposed to fight T-72s and now I just sit at a traffic control point full of dudes jerking off all the time. This fucking sucks. This is basically- I am full of cum.king off all the time. This fucking sucks. This is basically full of cum.

The army version of the Brave Little Toaster. Like this is the scene in the Brave Little Toaster where they go to the junkyard and the cars are all singing about like what they were intended to do and how like now they're in the junkyard and the chorus is worthless. And it's just like the Abrams tank is singing about like, yeah, I was I was meant to fight off the, the you know the guards divisions and instead like Someone's managed to draw the most anatomically confused tits and pussies on the wall and sharpie I don't even know what this is supposed to be it looks like a fucking ekg readout

But a guy's jacking off to it, so I'm gonna go get my wood cut that I got off of eBay I need to compare these Or like the Bradley that it's like yeah, you can fit an entire squad They can't wear armor if they do if they do wear armor They have to be like they basically have to be in like cowgirl to reverse cowgirl position on top of each other And that's enough of how I got promoted. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah We do have to get through a thing that's about an era before modern combustion before combustion combustion engines, before rifling, it's smoothbores, you know, before smoothbore, fuselet, arquebuses. We did not have big corkatures known as main gun rounds to be loaded into the breach. You

know, we just had, we were, we were breech loading, uh, the gun that had what basically looked like, like a candlestick holder, a pan full of gunpowder that you hoped would explode and send around downrange, but might just explode and scar you for life, blind you, etc. Where the guy who built your musket or cannon did not go to school, but rather learned from his dad. Now, before long, the knights and the mercenaries, burning alive from lime and pitch and flax bundles, were running around melting like human candles.

So they threw themselves into the moat, trying to put the fires out, which did work. However, they were wearing heavy armor. They were quickly pulled down and drowned by the weight of their, you know, plate armor and swords and whatnot. By the time the sun went down, the bishopishops men broke and began to run for their lives. The water in the moat had become clogged with human bodies and flowed red with their blood. And now I'm gonna say the thing that everyone's wondering, is that good? Depends.

If you're an Anabaptist, it's a sign from God that you're on the right side there. If you're a knight, you have to work a little bit extra hard for it, I guess. Yeah. None of these guys died Well, like if you were lucky is scaling the walls like oh boy there I go fucking doing mercenary crimes again in the 1500s Hope I get my golden jewels and then some starved dude named like Yon blasts your fucking head into confetti with a musket best case scenario But most of the time their heads are getting like crushed in with rocks or they're being melted with pitch and lime and

then drowning in a fucking disgusting moat like it's not good I'm reminded of a night of a 90s onion headline and look it's not good in the sense that it's it's a cruel joke but it's a joke that definitely seems to apply to the demographic we're describing here in terms of 16th century mercenaries. The headline in The Onion was, Sudanese 14 year old experiences midlife crisis. Jesus. Yeah, it sounds about like an Onion headline. They never really pull punches. No, no. And they- I believe comedy always requires the punch up.

The onion believes it's punching in all directions all the time. Yeah, yeah, the onion had their sort of Atlas of the world, and their entry for the Democratic Republic of Congo was like a zoo you get killed at. Christ. They... I think they meant it in the sense of all the biodiversity of the rainforests, but I realize now when you say it that way, people just, we've been around,

we've been in Europe and the Midwest so long that the first thing we think of when we think of a country in Africa and zoo is like a racist uncle, whether it's a racist uncle named like John Smirt or a racist uncle named like, you know, Jan Smirt American. Uh, he runs a hardware store called Smurt's

I'm killing Joe with this shit because he knows how fucking accurate it is Adolf Menard was the name of the guy who runs Menards the Hardware store in Indiana. They had a song that went say big money at Menards. Don't ask about my first name The idea of a guy's like yeah, yeah I'm gonna have like I want my child to have a normal life in America That's why I'm naming them Adolf Menard Yeah, like sorry, it's a derail, but that's all I do all day long story short What I was bringing this up was to say was 15 year old experiencing midlife crisis is basically what this is It's like these guys like if you're lucky you make it to 30 not because of and it's like these guys, like if you're lucky, you make it to 30, not because of, and it's not just one thing. It just feels like your entire life is, you're like, Cirque

de Soleil hula hooping through Venn diagram circles of stuff that kills you. Yeah. They're like, Oh, I survived the battle at the walls. Thank God marching down musket over their shoulder. Like I will live to see UGH UGH UGH Like blood shoots out their mouth and asshole at the same time like I forgot about the cholera FUCK Oh yeah we survived this battle I barely avoided getting hit by the pitch and the flax and the lime All of the ingredients of the devil's baklava now to celebrate with this delicious flask of water

And then it's like FUCK I'm sick it's like fuck, I'm sick it's like, well don't worry, we've got a doctor here he's gonna jam mercury into your butthole cause that's gonna cure it the problem is you got too much ghosts in your blood son yeah exactly

you can't win you fucking can't win and like worst case scenario oh no, my crippling syphilis you listen to a mendicant preacher telling you that you can have exactly one crumb of egalitarianism as a treat, and then the entire Catholic Church comes down and is like, we need to take this guy's intestines out one bit at a time. You just can't win, man.

16th century sucks. It just sucks. It's bad. Even funnier than the idea the idea of like a peasant Zealot army beating back all of these nights as they're running away. They start heckling them. They start cheering Oh, you're leaving already. Please come back. That's now that that that seems in character Inside the city another victory only reinforced what everybody believed They were truly God's chosen people, and Munster, New Jerusalem as they were calling it, was the city of God. Not like the terrifying

movie but you know like the biblical sense. But because of this, John and his elders saw no need to launch any counter-attack or even think about breaking out of the siege. Why would they? After all, practically, well I mean they couldn't to be like in in the realm of reality they were stuck. But in the security of their victory the siege which was still very much ongoing and the bishop's been still vastly outnumbering them this is all nothing to worry about. God would protect them. He would deliver us just like he had done multiple times then. John also told anyone within the city that had any doubts not to worry. An army of our brethren was marching up for the city. Anabaptists from the Netherlands, from Germany,

and from Switzerland were all coming to their aid, coming to the banner of heaven. He'd seen it in a vision after all, so you know that you know it's totally legit, but in reality those just didn't exist. He had made it up Completely, and we don't know if it's out of true belief in these visions I have a hint that it probably wasn't the case that we'll get to in a bit But more of like consoling his population that we're still good. Everything is fine No need to start panicking and they just need to prepare for the next attack Just like they had done for all the others But the bishop wasn't planning on another attack. The siege so far had actually hardly been

complete. People and supplies still routinely made it in and out of the city. Call it hubris or bad planning or whatever but the bishop didn't see the need for fully locking down the city. They thought that they would be defeated by an obviously superior force of arms. But now that obviously was not happening, he ordered the city to be put under complete and total lockdown. Trenches and other earthworks were to be dug around the city and nobody was allowed in or out.

Anyone who left the city was to be killed immediately. Now they would simply wait. The bishop's weapon, his ultimate and final weapon, would be starvation. Yeah, sounds about right. And you might be wondering what John of Leiden was planning as his own people watched the earthworks slowly crawl around their city. Well, he faked being mute. He lied down on the ground in the shape of a cross for hours.

He spoke in tongues He ran around the city like a madman stripped of all of his clothes and then repeated the cycle went on for days He put out an album with sandpaper on the inside of the sleeve So it scratched the record every time you take it in and out, you know he put some strange compilations out with a Electronic music act called left field with a song called open up which also applies to the gates of Munster. Oh wait, different John Lydon. Are you citing like another band that three people have ever heard? No, I'm talking about John Lydon or formerly known as Johnny Rotten, the guy Public Image Limited. They put out an album in the early 80s that were literally the sleeve

was like a film can and it had sandpaper so it would scratch the record. His name is John Lydon so every time you say John of Lydon all I can think of is him. I wasn't aware that he actually did music on his own. Sex Pistols put out one album that everyone got mad at and then- That one I'm aware of. toured disastrously and then you know before the second album could come out their bassist killed his girlfriend and overdosed on heroin and the band kind of fell apart. Damn I didn't know it was related to Sid Vicious. That's crazy. That is Sid Vicious. Sorry.

I'd forgotten his name and I kept saying Sid Barrett, the guy from pink Floyd who took so much acid that he went to a different dimension. Uh, I knew it was Sid something, but my brain isn't working right now, but no, it is. It's Sid Vicious. That was, that was. Everybody knows that the actual basis of the Sex Pist was Sydney Crosby little known fact yeah I'm just laughing too because there's got to be like a Sydney or some kind of name related to that that could be another figure in this we've got John of Leiden we've got Melchior in Balthazar to no end so we've got to find got to find a Sydney I don't know many Sydney's

I mean the the main character from the Scream films, that's all I got. Yeah, there's not really that name. I mean, obviously that name was in English, but I don't know about Dutch or low country languages, really, because I don't know what the equivalent would be. So my joke doesn't work. Fuck, I've screwed myself.

I've derailed for no reason. But more than three people would recognize Public Image Limited, I will say that. So I can defend myself on those grounds alone Whenever you start talking about music on this podcast I feel like you just have flipped into speaking like Swiss German because I don't understand any of it and I Do believe at this point you or Tom could just make up a band and I'd like oh cool Because I would have no idea like man Have you heard of this great like Gert and the Travelers?

Like they were huge. That is how I feel when Tom and Hussain talk about like British TikTok influencers. Like you could just make it all up and just be pulling my leg and I would not know. Yeah. We're simultaneously too young and too old for the music and the social media tides of the modern age.

But we do have history. We do have the Bolly of Man and the social media tides of the modern age. But we do have history. We do have the Bolly of Man and the bishop who finally got so mad at people brutalizing his extremely not good at their jobs mercenaries that he said, maybe I should close the gates to the city that has infinity ammo. I'm coming up with a battle tactic. It's called the diet maxing Now After a few days of this John of Leiden stopped He told everyone I need to speak and he ordered everybody to gather around you see he explained to them

He was not crazy He had been receiving visions from God the entire time and God had told him that a man within the city had been given a prophecy and that he needed to be given space to speak. Then like a showman, the crown parted and a wooden-legged old man hobbled forward to give the gathered people a prepared speech that was almost certainly given to him by either John of Leiden or Nippur-Doling. Either way, the old man told the gathering of people that God had spoken to him and said that John of Leiden was heaven's chosen king of all mankind in the heir to

the throne of David. John was then gifted a sword called what else but the Sword of Justice, some gold rings to wear, and a crown, all of which he had ordered to be prepared for him a few days prior for the show. And he officially declared himself, through the old man's prepared holy message, that he insisted that he had gotten from God as the King of New Zion. I feel like if I were an Anabaptist I'd be like, this is not looking good. Messianic leaders only do this when they're very sick. Your Dutch Anabaptists only declare themselves the King of New Zion when they're very stressed. This was not altogether popular, though the pressure of the crowd and of course the fear

of immediate execution kept the dissenters silent. And soon the dogma of the Anabaptist worship within the city centered around John of Leiden himself because he was no longer a man, he was a celestial king, a trend on this show that never ends well when someone declares themselves a celestial king, and he would hold the throne until Jesus returned to earth. The elders quickly put pen to paper to cite biblical passages that would reinforce John's rise and banned passages that would act as evidence against it, as any true believer does.

They also declared that God's chosen kingig could deliver miracles like healing the sick and Specifically healing the blind by spitting directly into their eyes. I Mean you never know like maybe giving you pink eye. Hallelujah. Two strains of syphilis can cancel each other out Yeah, it's like it's like Dragon Ball Z when the energy hits one of those bounce right off But syphilis Just sending a syphilis. Just sending a syphilis hadouken? Akira Toriyama did not conceive of the syphilis kamehameha wave.

Oh man. You're referencing Dragon Ball and I'm referencing Street Fighter but they're all the same. It conjures up a dude who just is so into whatever he's doing that he can shoot energy waves out of his hands. I don't know I'm just thinking like when you talk about that when someone starts speaking this language and declaring themselves this sort of vaunted status of you know God's chosen king on earth, I'm just all I can think of now after the big reveal of the previous time this talk that we talked about this is you know what let's just start folding the napkins and setting out the plates for the big banquet of grass.

Okay hold that thought. Ah I will say John of Lyon never starts telling his people they need to start eating mana, whatever the fuck that is, but it does get quite grim here in a second. Because while Munster became a full theocratic kingdom and John and his inner circle put a lot of work switching the aesthetics to meet that change. He went everywhere with a full guard all decked out in homemade royal regalia, and he announced everywhere he went with a symphony of trumpets, you know, like a true Ska King. I feel like they're not really beating the blasphemy allegations here. Really circling back around to just recreate the papacy. But it's like, hey, I've got the Sword of Justice in these rings and shit. We've cut up, we've basically done like a blackmail letter cutting out different passages of the Bible

to make it into scripture that supports it. I'm allowed to fuck nine-year-olds, you're not allowed to read or you die. Like, you're not really beating the allegations that you're just a big heretic. Yeah, yeah. I mean, when someone accuses you of something, you really gotta lean in, you know? You gotta be rabbit them, you know? You gotta own it. Own the heresy. When someone accuses you of something, you really gotta lean in, you know? You gotta be-rabbit them, you know? You gotta own it. Own the heresy. When someone accuses you of heresy, you gotta do what Eminem did in 8 Mile and be-rabbit the whole thing and just say like, yeah, this is why I'm a heretic, what else you got to

say? Oh dear god, cannons! Yeah, exactly. Fucking Bishop went to Cranbrook, that's a private school. You know, it's just so funny that no matter how far we go and what we do in life and all Exactly. Fucking bishop went to Cranbrook. That's a private school. You know, it's just so funny that no matter how far we go, what we do in life and all the places it takes us, we will forever be locked into, we were dirtbag kids in the Midwest in the early 2000s. Yeah. I don't want to deny like I'm not like ashamed of it,

but it's just very funny sometimes that like, you know, you're probably the only person I'm not like ashamed of it, but it's just very funny sometimes that like, you know, you're probably the only person that I've worked with who really kind of gets where I'm coming from in a rare moment of earnestness because like our backgrounds are not that dissimilar and like we've both gotten into this weird status of where we are on podcasting after being the military and coming from the Midwest and just being like, you know, being prepared to basically live out of a fucking storage unit for the rest of your life. And so it's just so strange, but it's just like the... You reacting in a way, it's almost touching.

Like, reacting to that or reacting to the comment about the Smurtz hardware. Like, because you just... I don't know, you get it? That thing just makes me laugh, man. It's just very, very funny. Like, I always forget sometimes, like, no, this is some deeply, deeply Midwestern stuff here. And I guess at the end of the day, we're talking about the origins of why the Midwest is so weird which is wars of religion in Europe Somehow this will circle back to the Midwest and you're not gonna guess how Oh fucking great Alright

John of Lyon had a throne room built he adorned it with the color purple though I should point out here that they couldn't get any new clothes into the city So the King's tailors had to go through the common collection of clothing that they had gathered from the people of Montserrat and just pick out things that looked nice and then stitch them together to make them look royal. I don't think I'd want to live in the kingdom of heaven where basically like God's will is that the king's guards have to steal my sneakers walk down the street you know on my way to bucking- What if Napoleon dressed out of goodwill?

Yeah but like to dump boiling oil onto attackers and then I get waylaid by the king's guards. You're like, what shoes are those? What size are those shoes? Oh, my size. Like just getting robbed for my shoes, getting stripped naked because my clothes were too fly, you know, my fit hits too hard and the king's jealous, you know, he knows how good I'm smoking, and it's just, it's just not fair, man. I would like to fight my fuckmonster. I don't like this anymore. Nippledolling strides forward, unsheathes the buster sword of high heaven.

Your drip is too hard, you've been sentenced to death. They're gonna kill you, bird-nippledolling. Your bitch too bad. Your swag swag too hard your fit too tight Yeah, just it's you'd also hold legal court in his new throne room and he passed down punishments for violating the strict rules but specifically about fucking and Marriage just seemed to be the only two things that he was really concerned with there was no trial there wasn't a jury and You know those kind of existed beforehand with the council of elders was really concerned with. There was no trial, there wasn't a jury, and you know those kind of existed beforehand with the Council of Elders, but now John would

just pronounce the punishment, which pretty much always meant death if you were a woman, and most the time if you were a man. And then Nipper Doling would walk forward and kill you on the spot. Was there some big change to the general ethical considerations of fucking that they previously talked about. Oh, don't worry about that. He's about to change those again. I love flipping the sex script on people. That sounds really bad. It seemed to be the only laws he cared about. He renamed parts of the city, at random, mostly

after himself. He decided that only he had the right to name every single newborn male in the city, which he largely named just John. He instituted strict rationing for everyone from food to clothes, and since everything was already held in common, that was already made easy for him. Regular people already had their diets dwindling, they were cut even further. He also had their clothes rationed to only allow two shirts and two pairs of pants apiece, no shoes. John and his inner circle held massive banquets, fit for royalty every night, kept the best clothing for themselves while everyone else survived mostly on adulterated bread.

And much like the lyrics of the 1999 Beck song, Sex Laws, it sounds like you're saying he's about to defy the logic of all sex laws. But what if I told you he couldn't defy the logic of all sex laws if he could simply much like Beck's own Church of Scientology Create their own sex laws Yep, they sure do sure fucking do but nipper doling had been pushed too far Seeing the guy that he had become an executioner for declare himself king and start claiming He could heal the blind finally pushed him over the edge or it could have just been good old-fashioned jealousy because Nipperdolling had

helped create this monster. I mean he let the guy fuck his daughter for power and then he kind of felt like he wasn't getting enough in return so Nipperdolling walked over plopped down on John's throne and refused to stand back up, and then began to scream that John would be nothing without him. And John actually knew this was true, and killing him would look really, really bad. So he simply announced, poor Nipperdolling has gone insane. But he has the Buster Sword. He does have the Buster Sword.

You kinda don't want to make an enemy of that guy. Yeah, it's true, but remember John has the Sword of of justice so it's hard to tell which one's more powerful It's like an Air Force promotion ceremony now Nipper doling was terrified because everyone in the court quickly agreed with the king that he had in fact gone cuckoo bananas So he was realizing that oh god my, my plan is not working, my descent is failing. So he launches himself from the throne, throws himself on his hands and knees and begs John for forgiveness, which John immediately gives and then goes back to work like nothing happened. He's like, see, you've learned your fucking place. Don't try anything.

Nobody has your back. This feels like the second act of like a biopic about a band that did too much cocaine. What if Motley Crue was in the 1500s? Yeah yeah. I remember reading The Dirt when I was in middle school for some reason because I was reading at a much higher level and they wanted to challenge me. They gave me The Dirt which I didn't know fuck all about Motley Crue or whatever but I do remember one of the opening chapters is about them cheating on their girlfriends and then fucking a Microwaved burrito

From a local gas station to cover up the smell of pussy on their dick And that's when I realized like my teacher probably shouldn't have gave me this Shout out to mr. Raines love you, bro. I Went to a talk by the British rock and roll photographer, Mick Rock in Brooklyn, and he had all these photos of his career and there was a bunch of stuff with Motley Crue and all he could talk about was like, yeah, we did this photo shoot in a hotel room and there was just like a gigantic platter full of cocaine. That does explain a lot.

Cocaine and heroin. Them with makeup and wigs, like taking a bath together was the idea of the photo shoot and stuff like that. And I was like, yeah, that seems like a cocaine idea. Yeah. So, you know what I mean? Because I know 80s hair metal, because I understand to some extent human relationships, I can envision what this is like when all constraints are taken away because you are in a sort of apocalyptic phase of what you might call this, I suppose, early modern Christianity-ish thereabouts. I don't know, doctrinally,

would you call it? So basically, I get it. This is like Tommy Lee and the various other members of Motley Crue whose names are escaping me because I'm old and tired fighting in a hotel room because someone fucked the burrito first. That's gonna be in my head forever man. Bro you really damaged the burrito too much. Nobody wants the burrito after Tommy Lee's done with it. Yeah, cause it's basically become like a fucking kebab that the meat fell out of. That is extremely funny. They're like, man this kid is a really precocious reader, let's give him a book that's gonna challenge him. they did that to me with maybe we fucking dune when I was 11 And I hated it, and I fucking hate doing fuck dune forever

But like I didn't get to read a book about dude fucking a burrito Really in the opening chapter as well like I cracked it in class I'm sitting in the back of class reading it because I was already done with my English homework, and then I close it I'm just like should should I ask him? Because I didn't understand, right? I was like maybe 14. Yeah. Like why did they have to fuck a burrito?

So like I went over and asked him like, Mr. Rains, this doesn't make any sense. And he's like, you'll get it when you're older. Meanwhile about the same age, my friend and I watched Summer of Sam because we thought it would just be a fun movie. We were like 13 or 14 and it's got some dialogue that made a similar impression on us. Stuff like that when you're that age, you understand it, but not really, but like it can just straight up sear into your brain. Yeah. I mean, I have not read The Dirt. I'm almost 36. I have not touched that book ever

since and that is the one part that will never leave me Because like even when I didn't understand it, I knew it was hilarious All I can say is I am prepared for whatever is gonna happen between John of Leiden and burnt nipper-doling I'm prepared for whatever. Well, the thing is with nipper-doling is not really a coup I'm not really sure what he was going for, but when John effectively made him literally prostrate himself in front of the crowd, he knew he had no more challenges. Nothing could slow him down and the brakes fully went off the shit. And of course that meant he was gonna turn right back to fucking. Now remember you can have as many wives as you wanted, but he had passed the law that

you can't marry someone who's already married, like you have to let them marry who they want. Like that was the most progressive as he got, right? And also like sometimes occasionally no means no, which is about as far as he went towards giving a shit about women. Yes. But that was running into a problem. He already had like 16 wives or something, and at this point, so many other women in the city

got married and he couldn't go around fucking them anymore. It would be contrary to dogma, right? It'd be adultery. Well, he figured out a way around that. I'm the celestial king. I have prima nocta. Not just when they got married either. Any wife, whenever he wanted, they could not

resist because that would be resisting God's will. Reference my previous comments in episode two about that seemingly delivered in passing observation in Emily St. John Mandel's Station 11 about cult leaders and pregnant 11 year olds for some reason. Like, it's just this. It's just weird sexual pathology, man. Yeah. And seemingly the only people in the city that were okay with this Was John of Illidan's wives cuz like oh, thank God. He's finally gonna leave us alone I left this part out of the script, but he had a very detailed Schedule written down and put on his door like a duty roster like which wife He was going to fuck and win and at what time, and they had to follow it to a tee,

otherwise they would be thrown in prison. Like this guy was nuts. Just simply not beating the heresy allegations ever, like this is one of the things where there needed to be a reformation for them to basically create the theological argument that you can jack off. This is what happens when no fap gets out of control. John of Leiden figuring out what jerking off is like the scene from The Dictator when Sacha Baron Cohen's character is told how to masturbate. He doesn't know. He doesn't know. He's got his detailed regimented fuck schedule. You know? Though as 1534 came to a close and the cold of winter was closing in,

the city's food supply began to noticeably run short. And it did not matter what John did to distract people from what was happening. The siege was simply becoming too obvious in everybody's lives. John held massive banquets and arranged public entertainment over Christmas for the city, but that only drained their supplies quicker. Before long, the communal kitchen tables were gone and the rations became less and less, so the city's new nobility could continue to eat as they always had. Mind you all this is happening while they could see the fires

burning from the camps of the bishop's men who completely surrounded the city. According to a spy in the bishop's employ who managed to sneak into the city posing as an anabaptist from holland and then snuck back out saying he was gonna go get reinforcements. He told the bishop that they only had food left in their stores for about a month, and that's at their current level, meaning starvation rations. Though it was clear that the pressure of the supply situation was weighing on John, he locked himself away in his quarters and rapidly fired out edicts, revising old laws and revising them again. About the only law here that he passed, almost certainly had to do with him, was you need to tell your sexual partners if you have syphilis. I'm

assuming because he had caught syphilis at this point. It's kind of a thing that happens in the pre-condom era, in the pre-safe sex era, in the pre-consent era. Which he called the French disease. Yes, we talked about that earlier, that it's always the other people's disease. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He scribbled down orders about how people prayed and then quickly changed them So people actually no longer knew how to pray correctly to ask God for forgiveness Which is again a central tent of anabaptism that has long since been forgotten Outside of the walls of his throne room his authority began to wane as famine embraced the city and none of his promises about Reinforcements ended up being true.

Communal kitchens became dangerous as people scavenged for any food they could find while the king's deacons continued to go door to door trying to find anyone with food that was not allotted to them from the rationing system, which is pretty much any food at this point because the rationing system had collapsed. And if they were found with non rationed food, it was confiscated and delivered to the king, and more often than not that person was executed. John was smart enough to know that he was losing people. He's losing their loyalty. They were questioning what he was doing. The gulf between him and them, a society originally created as a rebellion against the decadence and inequity of the

church, was turning into exactly that. So he had to give the people something to grab on to. He held an election of sorts. He told people that they could pick 12 men who would then be titled as a Duke and be in command of a city gate in charge of its defense, but the people would be allowed to pick them. It was an election, but they were only allowed to pick people that he liked and he knew was loyal to them. They also just picked names out of a hat, and with that a new social rank was constructed. Now, he gave the people the choice of dukes whom the king considered the best, elevating them, giving them a title, special privileges, more food, and he actually used this fake choice of

the people to further secure his own rule and make the people's situation worse. So through the grueling winter months, as the famine got worse and worse, John was secure and able to stay in power. But things did not get better once the winter ended. Now instead of people freezing and starving, they were just starving. People were beginning to die. Newborns were clearly malnourished, though most of them are still named John.

Just imagining becomes very repetitive being the gravestone maker in Munster constantly having to carve John into a headstone. It's gotta get a template going. They probably didn't have headstones. Yeah, it's probably just scribbled on. It's more of a mass grave situation in the city. Yeah, it's kind of looking like that, isn't it? Yeah, because if you have a tree, you don't really want to use it to make a like even a wooden grave or a cross. You kind of need it to burn for fuel and make pitch to dump on the, you know, the various Swiss and Flemish and German guys with funny hats with feathers who are out there trying to attack your ball and punish you.

You know, this is where we we kind of divide on the show because I still support dumping boiling pitch on the Flemish Well, you do live in holland They commit a sin that effectively makes them heretics and quite frankly close to the antichrist in dutch culture, which is they tip If you go to amsterdam, you'll see a lot of places asking for tips because they know most the people they're serving are not dutch Really it's less tipping and it's more that, in my experience in Flemish culture, they are less likely to send you a text message asking you to repay them for 15 euro cents for an espresso pod. That did just happen to me last week. Yeah, yeah. I got sent a Tiki. I was just like, the fuck is this? Yep. Now rations had dwindled down to some adulterated bread crusts, rotten potatoes, and some very questionable soup at best. They had

already eaten everything inside the city that moved and was non-human. Mules, horses, dogs, cats, insects, rats, everything was gone. People resorted to digging into the toilets, pulling out shit, drying it in the sun in the shape of a loaf of bread, and then trying to eat it. We're fucking crying out loud. Yeah. This is not the worst it'll get, I promise. When people tried to grow their own gardens, the king's deacons quickly moved in and took everything. But now it was Easter, 1535. The day that John told them would be their salvation, so he walked out into the public square, well fed and dressed as best as he could possibly be, to talk to the

starving masses. He told them there was good news. God had delivered to him a message. Their salvation had begun. Their internal salvation. They were now all completely free of sin. Their current situation, well you'll all stop starving to death eventually, which is technically true. That is how that works. You will eventually stop starving death. You will just die. Good to have a little ritual purification before the next thing that's gonna happen. I presume it's gonna be good. Typically it does go well and positive when someone's like, hey guess what We've all been cleansed of sin in advance of the great final battle conflagration.

Imagine how much of a letdown that is like, oh, thank God. Jesus is gonna return to Earth. Everything will be saved. And John's like, actually, this is more of like a confessional type forgiveness. Yeah, also, I bought everybody the same pair of generic Nikes. We're gonna put them on. Yeah, I got you this shirt that says the kingdom of Munster away team fucking Christ I mean I will say that can you imagine if you had like a Hale-Bopp style comet visible right around this time? The wild shit they would have come up with I mean they already did this this is a thing back then Yeah, they did this comet less imagine if they had to go to a spaceship trailing the tail of Hale Bopp.

That'd be some shit. They would have invented Nikes just to be able to wear them during mass suicide. Well, you gotta be dripped out for Celestial Jesus, you know? He doesn't like anybody that dress like shit. Yeah, Celestial Jesus is like, you know what? I do realize that you've bought like the bottom tier lowest rung Nikes. Literally like the ones that they've bought like the bottom tier lowest rung Nikes literally like the ones that they buy for like hey we're taking you know this pickup football team from Myanmar to go and play in a competition somewhere and it's

one of these things where as long as it's consistent everyone's in uniform you know what we like it yeah dress right dress for drinking poison and going to hillbob heaven is face checking you like oh those new balances, bro. Nope Back to the fucking line One time I walked into a store in New York and I was wearing Air Force one high tops It was like those high top kicks and I was like, yeah, man. He's like crap I was like you're just dissing my shoes like crap and I was just like man just getting fucking sneaker check I was on mid-tour from Afghanistan, too

I was like man. I don't get to wear sneakers very often You know what and I walk into the store trying to spend money in the store and y'all are hating on my shoes Fucking what I can't catch a break and then I got called a Jonas brother outside of a club I do think nipper doling was probably doing that at this point walking around sneaker checking fools with his buster sword It's amazing what you got there lambskin? Nuh uh. Nuh uh.

Crap. Get the fuck out of here before I chase you down with my fucking sword. You're not gonna like my god damn sneaker based limit break you bitch. When you said lambskin I laughed because I thought you were talking about checking them like they were trying to do improvised 16th century condoms. God. Now people celebrated the best they could at his message but it did mean the last of their hope was fully dead. Their spirits were saved but they

were still starving. They were dying and the city was full of corpses of those who were dropping dead and that's when they began eating one another. Ah now they didn't start killing people to eat them, but there's dead bodies everywhere. People began to strip the flesh off the dead and rumors swirled about people mad with hunger, hunting children in packs through the streets. To stave off this new wave of human predation, the king ordered the dead to be chucked into a mass grave and then covered with sewage to convince people know, convince people to leave them alone. So they got croutons in the soup is what you're saying.

Yeah exactly. I think he wasn't told about the shit bread so that's not going to slow anybody down. As soon as the sun went down people dug into the mass graves. Feasting, feasting, yeah. Terrified that their new Zion had turned into a city of roving cannibals, the city's self-proclaimed nobility locked themselves away and reinforced their homes under constant guard. I feel as though you might be like, hey, you know what, things are not really going well with our new experiment in God's kingdom on earth.

Yeah, I think we fucked up somewhere. Children are being hunted as food. People make bread out of shit. Basically, mass graves are treated as one big lasagna in the dark of night. Give me that shit ricotta on top, King John. Let's fucking go. Oh, God. Yeah, it's somewhere like one of the dukes are like, you ever think we took a wrong turn

somewhere? Just out of curiosity? Oh, God, here comes nipper doling. I mean, I'll praise King God, John. Nothing bad here. Could someone please pass that foot? I'm going to eat. Oh, yeah, it's's just it's not good.

Now this finally forced John to open the gates of the city allowing anyone who wanted to leave to leave Though they wouldn't be able to ever come back. Would that be a fucking problem? We'd be like, damn it. Exactly like oh, you mean I don't have to come back here? Thank God. God, what an encumbrance. A column of dying refugees flooded out the city directly towards the bishops lines. The bishop slaughtered the men and sent the women and children back toward the city where John refused

to let them back in. So there they sat in no man's land between the two lines surrounded by the dead and rotting corpses that had been left behind by the bishop after the previous battles and then they ate those two. Ah, it was clear to the bishop at this point, at the end of June, that the city was dying. His siege was working, and John and his half-dead kingdom were ready to fall. He ordered his men to prepare for battle, but was smart enough to ban any alcohol this time around. Using an Anabaptist named Griesbeck, who had switched sides and was working as his guide, the bishop sent a forward party out under the cover of darkness towards the place they had been told would be easily penetrated. This time instead of advancing under a hail of bullets, cannonballs, burning pitch, and rocks,

there's nothing. The bishop's army simply walked towards the city unopposed and only ran into any militiamen once they'd already gotten to the gates, but these militiamen were so weak from hunger that they hardly put up a fight. Within minutes they'd thrown up ladders and scaled walls. Hundreds of the bishop's men were inside the city, not even a single alarm had gone up through Munster. Even if there was, hardly anyone was strong enough to answer it at this point. Finally the one force that had in the city that had enough strength to fight, the King's

Guard of King John of Lydon, heard what was going on and the battle actually started, right outside the city's main cathedral where the rebels had stored all their gunpowder. At this point though, the bishop's men were in every back alley and down every street, going door to door, slaughtering anyone they found. Once the initial shock of the attack wore off, the rebels slowly got themselves together. Despite being starved and mostly dead on their feet, they did no monster like the back of their own hand. So the bishopsmen continued their attack through the streets and alleyways of the city, and they met constant ambushes being gunned down by militia barely strong enough to hold up the muskets that they were shooting them with.

This forward party was just supposed to get a foothold in the city and destroy their gunpowder stores, but now found themselves in a grinding house-to-house street-to-street fight. Then the Rebels man just seized the gate that they had taken, shutting it off behind them, trapping them inside the city, and cutting themselves off from the rest of the bishops men. However, despite being badly outnumbered and cut off, the forward party held off the rebel attempts to wipe them out for hours. And finally, the rest of the bishop's force, realizing that the forward attack had failed, marched into battle, taking several gates, which were hardly even defended, because most

of the people that were actually able to defend them had been pulled back into the city to contain the soldiers that had already broken through. This was the breaking point. The king, John of Leiden, fled his castle, taking refuge in one the fortified gatehouses, as did most of his inner circle. Small pockets of the Munster militia were all that was left, and they were organized the best way they could and found themselves in a series of last stands across the city as the bishopsmen poured in. One Anabaptist, a one-eyed man they had literally nicknamed the Cyclops, held the bridge single-handedly for hours

dual wielding axes before finally being shot down. This is just a troll. This is a fantasy figure. This is the thing that was made in pewter to be used in like a D&D table set. By the morning of June 25th the bishop declared that Munster had fallen to his men. They were not in the mood for mercy. Every adult male who survived the battle was immediately executed. Women and children were punished with banishment to England. Fate worse than death. Some were also sent to Holland, but most went to England.

In reality though, his knights and mercenaries had been on a looting and murdering spree from the second they had walked into the city, and there would not be many people left to exile by the end of it. They eventually captured John of Leiden and Nipperdolling. They were hiding in attics and gatehouses and stuff. They went without a fight. The bishop entered the city a few days later after his men had cleared all the corpses off of the street.

Then he came face to face with John of Lydon for the first time and asked sarcastically, you are a king. John, fully aware of his coming fate, answered, and you're a bishop? Ah. And you already know you're dead, you might as well try to go down talking shit. Just gonna say, trade barbs, do some riffin, you know what, commit to the bit. Yeah. Though not everything went well for the bishop, even victory. Remember I told you about the rumored pile of golden jewels that were supposed to be in the city? Yes, you did. Well, they were quickly realizing that they weren't there.

And the mercenaries and knights, hoping for a big ol' paycheck, were like, yo, where the fuck is our money? Where is El Dorado? Where is the city of eternal youth? I was promised it was here. Where German El Dorado? German El Dorado is like all expenses included resort in the Dominican Republic where no one complains about sex tourism. Look it's in fucking Punta Cana okay I know the Dominican Republic I've seen the German

tourists. It's suspicious. It's either Puerto Plata or Punta Cana. My best friends taught English in the DR for a year and I went and visited and you just start to notice it all right you know? We are going along on this episode. I won't give in too much detail, but the Germans have a term they call Bumsen Bomber, which literally means fuck bomber. That's the term they use for fuck bombers, direct flights. How is that not one of like the obscure hardcore bands that you and Tom talk about? Probably because it sounds so goofy because it's B-U-M-S-E-N.

So like Bumsen, it just sounds like, I don't know, Bumsen Bomber doesn't sound hardcore. It just sounds like a goofy ass word Fuck bomber basically because it's a direct flight from like Frankfurt to the Dominican Republic And it's all full of like German dentists over 50 like yeah Spiritually they were also at the Munster rebellion spiritually they were they were in the bishops and took the fuck yeah exactly spiritually they were they were in the bishops they took the fuck yeah exactly now eventually the bishop was able to calm all these mercenaries by paying them huge sums of money out of his own pocket so he could avert a rebellion of

his mercenaries immediately after they had just put down the last rebellion now John Nipper-Doling and a third man named Bernard Kretschling were packed off to the dungeons in the bishops castle N. Nipper Doling was taken to the Inquisition and without being tortured admitted immediately to heresy blaming John of Leiden for everything. He led me down the path of Satan. He brainwashed me all this other stuff. He admitted to executing 12 people though historians think that number is probably over a hundred. Kretschling also immediately chucked John under the bus, blamed him for everything, immediately said I'm a heretic, I renounce all of my beliefs. They all knew they were gonna

face the death penalty, but they were just probably trying to get out of being tortured. But they were tortured anyway because the pain is the point, you know? I was just thinking about the Hugh Dispenser the stuff in the was called them when they were mad then it was at the Knights Templar or one of those like warrior night societies and they're like the Pope has declared that secretly you're all gay and you have to be Punished and so it was always like two three days of being vivisected and so on and so forth And I imagine these guys knew centuries before this, you know It's probably in the 1100s

But these guys knew that that was sort of the thing, that was sort of done. Like you know the Bruegels, the triumph of death painting with the people fucking on the wagon wheels, you know, tortured to death, like that was just kind of like a thing that was real. So yeah. Yeah, I think they were really hoping by immediately, most importantly, admitting that they're a heretic and recanting their beliefs and even offering to be rebaptized in the church, they would just get a quiet death. Didn't work out for them, they immediately got put on the rack.

Ah, bad stuff. John himself did not bend. He admitted that everything everybody else said was true about his conduct within the city, but he was no heretic. He was God's chosen King in direct communication with the Almighty. The only thing he pushed back on was how the outside world saw his weird sex and marriage laws, and he, to make a very long explanation short, he pretty much just said, you misunderstand

us, it's just the way of our people. Yeah, it's our culture, leave us alone. Now this actually infuriated the bishop. He didn't want a confession from John. A confession was effectively pointless to him. They were all guilty before they were even captured. He wanted him to recant his beliefs because he believed if he got John recant it would kill Anabaptism. He wanted to admit that he was wrong and Anabaptism itself was pure heresy and he refused to do so. And when he was told he was going to be executed, he was offered a priest so he could confess his sins and he did but he only confessed that he regretted the violence that came with

the uprising and swore by his beliefs Which is interesting because he still did a confession and a Baptist didn't believe in. You would think that the hard Response would have been like yeah sure bring him he can confess to me. Yeah. Yeah, I'm kind of surprised It's not what John did I mean it was one last fuck you to the bishop to refuse to say that his beliefs wrong because functionally didn't matter You're gonna kill him not die horrible spare him anything you're gonna do the no 16th century Exacto knife to peel back your dick and balls torture like they're gonna do that. He knows that yeah

He had people tortured that way. He fully knows that's what's in store for him. Like yeah, so on January 22nd 1535 they all three men were led to the execution ground where they're all to be put to death via being torn apart by white Hot tongs for one hour and then after time collapses To be stabbed in the heart all in front of a gathering mass of hooting and cheering priests. Now, the three men were executed one at a time, with each forced to watch the hour-long process of the man before. Kretsching was the last to be killed. Afterwards, the corpses of the three men were thrown inside of iron cages, attached to the site of St. Lambert's Church in Munster, and hauled up into the air for all to see. Their bodies rotted to pieces, and their skeletons remained in the cages for 50 years. Though, in case you're ever in Munster, those cages are still

there. You can see them hanging from St. Labritz to this day. Yikes. Yeah. Now, Melchior Hoffman, the man who set all of this in motion, survived to hear about the destruction of the Munster Rebellion, but he would never leave prison. There he would die in 1543, but Anabaptists related violence would not end. The Holy Roman Emperor issued an order in 1535 that all practicing Anabaptists were in league with the Munster Rebels and were to be destroyed. Within five years, beheaded, burned at the stake, torn apart by white-hot tongs, Anabaptism had effectively been wiped out throughout Europe but it survived in a small segment thanks to a Dutch guy named Menno Simons and his ideas

survive even today but you probably know them better as Mennonites. Right back to the Midwest baby! In the end there was a stage coach with some horses and dudes in straw hats there the whole fucking time. Yep. So whenever if you say you live in any of the midwestern areas or I know there's some I believe in Texas you see a Mennonite you know where they come from now and that is the Monster Rebellion. Yeesh. Started so funny. Started so ridiculous. We were riffing, we were laughing. Jokes aplenty. Got so grim, so fast. It always does, but this in particular, man. Started from the bottom, now you're terrified. Well, Joe can see this, the listener can't. So because of timing I'm actually

cradling my eight-month-old daughter right now because she was not interested in napping in the other room and it's easier to get her to sleep this way so she's on the recording even though she's not making noise thankfully but yeah it's weird thinking about it. We made sure to put headphones on her so she could hear the whole thing and printing war crimes on her from birth. She's gonna be like wait they were the punishment for heresy was to be sent to live here why did you move here dad why was i born here i hate this place. Actually that brings us to our question from the legion if you'd like to ask us a question from the Legion you can support us on Patreon, you can ask us through Patreon DMs or on our Discord where we have an ongoing thread and you can add your question to it. And today's question

is, is there anything specific you prefer about your country of residence that you could not get at home? Yeah I assume in home country because like my home is not in the United States anymore. But yeah. But I could not get in my home country. Well, to be honest, I will say the United Kingdom is probably the most convenient and best country I've lived in for e-commerce in the sense that between it's a dense country, it's a small country, it's a big international hub to the airports. And I don't know why, probably the insane exploitative culture of delivery

services and or couriers, you just get stuff faster here than you do in America. And I'm constantly reminded of that when I'm home and I order something thinking it's like England and you'll be there in like 18 hours and it takes two weeks. Even though it's like one state over, uh, stuff is just, it's just, you should get stuff faster, like, it's like shocking, like, like better than my experiences in continental Europe, better than my experiences in Asia, better than my experience in America, obviously. I have never had something like, and it's not necessarily tiny distances, but you know, I remember ordering a specialty cooking thing for an outdoor wok burner from a restaurant supply store that sold via an eBay storefront.

Their restaurant was in Bradford. It's about 150 miles from here. It was like the distance between New York and Providence. I ordered it at like 2 p.m. and it was there at 9 a.m. the next day. But you cannot fucking... You would not get something that fast from Providence to New York City. No. Even if you paid for overnight, it would be the next day, the following day. I wouldn't be able to get anything that fast if I ordered something from Amsterdam. Cynthia has had it happen with some vendors here where she'll buy something and it's here like she'll

order it like 9 p.m the night before and it's here at like 8 a.m the next day like genuinely. That's crazy. Some of it is extraordinarily unethical and exploitative labor practices and that's a bad thing. Of course. But some of it's just like I don't know they they weirdly when when they're not completely shitting the bed on stuff they're actually quite good at that. And the logistical side of it, it's, it's shocking. Yeah. Like you wouldn't expect that, but they are, they are quite good at it. Mine is pretty cut and dry.

I've never lived anywhere with like infrastructure for anything other than cars really. So in specifically the Hague, I can't speak for any other city in the Netherlands because I've never lived in any other city, public transit is very very good and the bike lanes are fucking incredible. It's kind of the place for it. Yeah I'm absolutely in love with it. I've got myself an electric bike for when I'm you know going because sometimes there are places that are much easier to get to using a bicycle and public transportation and public transportation isn't necessarily super

expensive here but it's also not so cheap you can't like feel it if you use it a ton so use my bike you know it's great I love it bike lanes are very very good we have our own traffic lights intersections completely separated highways from the road and at least in the Hague it's not so congested and chaotic between cyclists and cars and trams like what I've experienced so far in Amsterdam. It's very, very easy to do. So like I don't know anywhere in the United States that I would ever be able to experience anything remotely close to that. And I, after experiencing it, I really don't know how I'd ever voluntarily leave it behind. Yeah, it's funny because I've seen photos of like new train stations in the Netherlands and it reminds me of how

nice stuff is in Switzerland, how nicely designed stuff is in Switzerland. But I will say the French speaking part of Switzerland does not have as good a cycle infrastructure. The German speaking parts got better, but nowhere near as good as in the Netherlands. And frankly, UK has better cycle infrastructure than anywhere I've been in America, or at least London does, but it's still, it's hit or miss. But I love riding my bike and I'm still recovering from the health stuff. I'm looking forward to be able to do that because it's the fastest way to get to the studio by far. And also it costs me almost nine pounds a day to take public

transit back and forth between the studio. So I would prefer to not spend that money. Yeah. I mean, I could jump on. We don't have a metro in The Hague. There's nothing underground. It's all overground trams and whatnot. Hypothetically, we do have a metro, but not in the traditional sense. But twice a week, I have to take the tram from one extreme of the line pretty much all the way to the other. And that will cost me like 10 euro. Yeah. Both ways.

So 20 euro total. Jesus. I mean, it's from one side of the city all the way to the other. And depending on the time, it's less expensive depending on when I have to go. Yeah. And it takes like 35 minutes, 40 minutes. I'm hitting the cap I think in the sense that I'm going from zone two to zone one to zone two again on the train and then I take a bus and so the combination of that hits the daily limit every day. But yeah, I lived further out in London and went further in and then further out again it would would cost way more. Like, transit's very expensive here. And I mean, if I just ride my bike, it takes me almost an equal amount of time and it's free.

So, you know, assuming it's not because like winters here can be kind of shitty. I don't really don't feel like riding my bicycle for 40 minutes in the howling wind and rain of the Dutch winter. But, you know, when the weather is good, I'm not touching public transit. I'm not doing it. I need to do it more. I've written year-round winter whatever snow rain horrible shit here I've just been sick, but yeah It's 30 minutes door-to-door on a bad day for riding my bike to work whereas It's for it's good for in 40 minutes door-to-door if I cut it super super super close with catching the train and

The bus and I get lucky with the bus more likely.'s like 50 to 60 minutes each way. Oh fuck that. Yeah, that would convince me to ride my bicycle It's not even that it's bad It's just that there's no real direct like it's a 15 minute walk to the train station from my house And then it's a 10 minute bus ride from the train station. I get off at to the studio. That's just yet But can you put your bike on the train? Not during rush hour and you're supposed to have folding bikes and frankly the train gets so crowded and Brits have not developed the new technology known as take your backpack off on crowded trains so I don't believe that I want to. I've seen people try and it's annoying. Okay, fair enough.

I, despite what you might believe from my presence on podcasts in the last three weeks of Monster Rebellion. You have multiple other projects that people can catch you on. What are those projects? Plug away. I am the producer of Trash Future, a podcast about the technology industry, or the tech industry rather you could call it, and why it's on its own terms just basically three labor law violations in a trench coat. I am the co-host and producer of What a Hell Way to Die, a podcast about

why you shouldn't join the military and also Dad Stuff, which is emphasizing the point of why I'm holding a baby right now while I'm podcasting. I am the co-host of this show, obviously, and the overall executive producer. And I am the producer of Kill James Bond, a movie podcast, a funny movie podcast, a very, very funny movie podcast. You should listen to it. And this is the only show that I host, but if you like what we do here and you think it could be worth your time and money, you can support us on Patreon.

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