Cages of the executed leaders of the Münster Rebellion on the tower of St Lambert’s Church

For almost 500 years now, three iron cages, each weighing two hundred kilograms, have hung from the bell tower of St Lambert's Church in Germany. In them the bodies of the executed leaders of the Münster Rebellion of 1534-1535 were put on public display.

The Anabaptist uprising, headed by a Haarlem baker, Jan Matthys, turned into a veritable bloody revolution, whose adherents managed to hold power in the city for almost a year. A Catholic-Protestant coalition besieged the city for a long time, and when it finally broke the resistance, the leaders of the uprising were put to death in the cruellest fashion. Not at once, of course: first they were starved, then tortured at length, and after the execution their bodies were hung by the hair in cages on the walls of the city church of St Lambert.

Since then the church has been restored, rebuilt and even destroyed, but each time the cages have been returned to its walls.

For almost half a millennium, the cages of the three executed leaders of the Münster uprising (1536) have dangled from the bell tower of St Lambert's Church in Germany.