Anyway that's not the point. The point was that the programme was about the Anabaptists and the Munster siege. The Anabaptists were radical Lutherans who took the 'simplification' that Luther brought to Christianity to extreme lengths. Some of them burnt all books except the bible for example. At one point a group of them decided that Munster was to be the location of the New Jerusalem and that the world was going to end on Easter Day 1543. They set themselves up in Muster and imposed an Anabaptist regime killing people who opposed them and creating a proto-fascist city state. Luther and the prevailing rules around didn't take kindly to this and besieged the city for 18 moths. During the siege a number of crazy things happened, not least the leader of the Anabaptists after a 'vision' charged the besieging army with twelve others with absolute assurance that god would bring them victory and that the end of days would arrive with that victory. He and the twelve riders were of course chopped to pieces.
Finally the siege was broken. The besieging army killed thousands of the inhabitants of the city and the leaders were put into the cages you see below and tortured horribly to death.
All of this was in preparation for the return of Christ to the earth for fuck's fucking sake.
Links below. And if you want to hear it In Our time is at: http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b0 ... f_Munster/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anabaptist ... _Rebellion
