Fritz Erbe: Anabaptist Conscience and Reformation Persecution

J. Neil Daniels

Nota Bene: A "Deep Dive" audio overview is available here: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WjwgAZPzURZ4YuBAHbkdsO0bZ5tZxuC7/view?usp=drivesdk

Beginnings in Thuringia

In the rolling hills of Thuringia, in the small village of Herda near Eisenach, lived a farmer whose name would never have been remembered apart from the stubbornness of his conscience. Fritz Erbe was not a theologian, nor a nobleman, nor even a wandering preacher. He was a peasant, and yet his story cuts to the heart of the Reformation’s contradictions: the simultaneous promise of freedom and the fierce impulse to control it. The year was 1531 when he was first arrested for undergoing baptism upon his own confession of faith—an act that placed him immediately among the outcasts branded “Anabaptists,” that is, those who dared to reject infant baptism and insisted on believer’s baptism instead.

The village of Herda lay in the Eisenach district, not far from Wartburg Castle, a fortress soon to play its own ironic role in Erbe’s fate. At first glance, Erbe’s life was unremarkable: a landowner with a sizeable farm, a family man. But in the volatile theological atmosphere of early sixteenth-century Germany, one did not need to lead armies or write books to attract attention. To defy the sacrament of infant baptism was to defy both the sacramental authority of the medieval Church and the social order guarded by the emerging Lutheran establishment.

The Sword of the Edict

To understand why Erbe’s refusal to baptize his newborn in 1533 was so explosive, one must recall the legal backdrop. At the Diet of Speyer in 1529, the imperial estates had passed a chilling decree:

“Every Anabaptist and rebaptized person of either sex, of whatever age, shall be executed by fire, sword, or the like, according to circumstances, without previous trial of the spiritual judges.”¹

This was not merely rhetoric. It was law, and it sanctioned death. Erbe’s persistence in Anabaptist conviction, therefore, was not a private eccentricity but a capital offense under imperial statute. John Frederick, Elector of Saxony, appealed to this very edict in demanding Erbe’s execution. For him, it was not a matter of personal conscience but of obedience to empire and Scripture alike.

Philip of Hesse’s Counterpoint

Standing against John Frederick was Philip of Hesse, who argued that to kill Erbe would be to trample the very nature of faith. Philip wrote memoranda insisting that faith was a divine gift and could not be compelled by violence.² He distinguished between sedition (which threatened the commonwealth) and heresy (which touched the soul). Erbe, he maintained, was guilty of the latter but not the former. Expulsion or banishment, not the sword, was the fitting remedy.

Philip’s refusal to shed blood marked him as an outlier among Protestant rulers. While Luther himself had, by the early 1530s, resigned himself to harsh measures against Anabaptists, Philip saw in them misguided sheep rather than wolves. One senses in Philip a proto-tolerationist instinct, however limited and inconsistent, that looked ahead to later arguments about liberty of conscience.

Melanchthon’s Hardness

If Philip offered mercy, Melanchthon offered steel. In 1536, he composed the Opinion on the Anabaptists, signed also by Luther, which concluded:

“Since Anabaptists cause tumult and uproar, and teach what is against the gospel, authorities are bound to resist their blasphemies with the sword.”³

This was no abstract position; it was pastoral policy. Melanchthon urged rulers to treat obstinate Anabaptists as rebels against God’s order. Such a document framed the climate in which men like Erbe were imprisoned, debated, and left to rot in dungeons. The rhetoric of “tumult” and “sedition” blurred the line between private faith and political threat.

Erbe, notably, was no revolutionary. He did not advocate social overthrow, nor did he lead insurrections like the radicals in Münster. He simply refused to baptize his infant. Yet in the climate of the 1530s, that act alone was taken as defiance against both heaven and earth.

The Long Imprisonment

The compromise reached was grim but not final: Erbe was sentenced to life imprisonment. His first confinement was in Eisenach’s city tower, sometimes called the “Stork Tower.” There, in the stillness of night, he managed to communicate with fellow Anabaptists—scraps of conversation, whispered prayers, even messages passed along in unlikely ways. For two years this tenuous contact sustained him, but the net was closing. In 1535, two of those who had visited him were caught within Saxon territory. Unlike Philip, the Saxon authorities had no qualms about the gallows. By 1537 or 1538, those men were dead.

The authorities grew uneasy at Erbe’s persistence and his connections. Around 1540 or 1541, he was transferred to Wartburg Castle. One cannot miss the bitter irony: the same fortress that had sheltered Martin Luther in 1521 now became the dungeon of a man persecuted in Luther’s name. His new cell was not a room but an underground vault, accessible only through a hole in the floor—aptly dubbed the “terror hole.”⁴ It was cold, dark, and damp. Prolonged exposure slowly ruined his health.

Here the historical imagination falters. How did Erbe mark the days? Did he pray the Psalms, as many prisoners did, their cadences rising from memory rather than parchment? Did he recall Luther’s translation of the Bible, knowing that the same walls had echoed with the scratching of Luther’s pen? We cannot know. The records tell us only that he endured.

Lutheran Disputations

Lutheran pastors were dispatched to debate him. Their mission was not merely theological but disciplinary: to reclaim him for the church, to break his obstinacy. But Erbe remained firm. Believer’s baptism was, in his eyes, the clear teaching of Scripture. Infant baptism was no sacrament, no saving rite, but an empty ceremony imposed by men. To recant was to betray Christ. His quiet but immovable resistance frustrated his captors, who saw in him not just a peasant but a symbol of defiance.

In one sense, his prison debates mirror Luther’s own stand at Worms in 1521: “My conscience is captive to the Word of God.” The difference, of course, is that Luther found protectors in German princes, while Erbe’s captors enforced the very same logic against him. The paradox of the Reformation is that conscience was honored when it matched confessional orthodoxy, and condemned when it strayed beyond it.

Death and Memory

In 1548, after some fifteen to seventeen years in confinement, Erbe died in his cell. His body, weakened by years of deprivation, finally gave out. He was buried beneath the walls of Wartburg Castle. Today a bronze plaque marks the South Tower, commemorating him as a martyr. Visitors often come to see the castle as a monument to Luther’s courage; few linger over the dungeon of Fritz Erbe. And yet his story complicates the heroic narrative of Protestant triumph.

The Larger Context of Anabaptist Persecution

Erbe was hardly alone. Throughout the Empire, Anabaptists were hounded, drowned, and burned. In Zurich, Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat River in 1527—“the third baptism,” his executioners called it, with cruel humor. In Münster, a failed apocalyptic experiment in 1534–35 brought disgrace upon the movement, giving authorities further excuse to root out even the peaceful brethren. In Moravia, communal experiments like those of Jakob Hutter’s followers flickered with hope, though they too faced fierce persecution.

Luther himself, though personally opposed to bloodshed in some contexts, made it clear that obstinate heretics deserved the sword. In his Letter to the Princes of Saxony (1530), he urged that Anabaptists be resisted:

“It is not only right but necessary that such blasphemous doctrines be rooted out by the sword, for they blaspheme God and destroy secular authority.”⁵

For Luther, the link between theological error and political rebellion was almost automatic. To undermine baptism was to undermine Christendom itself.

What Erbe’s case illustrates is the uncomfortable fact that Protestant reformers, for all their cries of conscience, could be as intolerant as their Catholic counterparts. The same Luther who thundered against the tyranny of Rome had little patience for those who, in his judgment, distorted the gospel. Anabaptists were not merely “heretics” but threats to the fragile social fabric of the Reformation states.

Faith, Freedom, and Irony

The irony of Erbe’s story is impossible to ignore. In the very fortress where Luther had found refuge, another man of conscience was entombed. The same principles—Scripture, conscience, faith—were invoked by both, yet with opposite outcomes. Luther’s defiance of Rome birthed a movement; Erbe’s defiance of Wittenberg led to the silence of a dungeon.

One is tempted to ask what Luther would have said had he visited Erbe’s cell. Would he have recognized in the peasant’s stubbornness something of his own? Or would he have scolded him as a fanatic, confusing zeal with disobedience? The historical record does not say, but the juxtaposition lingers.

Conclusion

Fritz Erbe’s life and death are not as well known as those of Luther, Zwingli, or Calvin, yet they embody the sharp edge of Reformation history. His story is a reminder that the sixteenth century was not only a time of liberation but also of exclusion. Anabaptists like Erbe paid dearly for convictions that many Christians today—whether Baptist, evangelical, or simply advocates of religious liberty—take for granted.

To read his story is to be reminded that conscience often carries a cost, sometimes a dungeon, sometimes a grave beneath the castle wall. And yet, in that very silence, Erbe left behind a testimony more eloquent than the words of his accusers: that faith, when rooted in conviction, can endure the darkness of the “terror hole” and emerge, centuries later, as a quiet but insistent voice.

Endnotes

Edict of Speyer (April 23, 1529), in Die Reichstagsakten unter Kaiser Karl V., vol. 2 (Gotha: Friedrich Andreas Perthes, 1894), 208–10. English trans. in George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University, 2000), 153.
Philip of Hesse, “Memorandum on the Treatment of Anabaptists” (1533), in Claus-Peter Clasen, Anabaptism: A Social History, 1525–1618 (Ithaca: Cornell University, 1972), 210–12.
Philip Melanchthon, Opinion on the Anabaptists (1536), in Corpus Reformatorum, vol. 3, ed. Karl Bretschneider (Halle: Schwetschke, 1834), 80–85. English excerpts in Michael Baylor, ed., The Radical Reformation (Cambridge: Cambridge University, 1991), 135–37.
Hans-Jürgen Goertz, The Anabaptists (London: Routledge, 1996), 112–14, gives a vivid description of Erbe’s Wartburg cell, noting the “terror hole” entry and the appalling cold.
Martin Luther, Letter to the Princes of Saxony concerning the Rebellious Spirit (1530), in Luther’s Works, vol. 40, ed. Conrad Bergendoff (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1958), 235–37.