Nicholas Storch

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Nikolaus Storch (* before 1500 in Zwickau ; † after 1536; first name also Nicolaus ) was a cloth weaver and lay preacher from the Saxon town of Zwickau.

Life

Storch was one of the simple craftsmen who introduced independent church and social reforms there in the age of the Reformation . He had visions and saw himself as a prophet of God with the mission to fight the corrupt Catholic Church. He led a small group of like-minded people who came to be known as the Zwickau prophets . The Zwickau prophets gained enormous popularity with their visionary sermons and split the citizens of Zwickau. They advocated common property, poor relief and expropriation of the monasteries , if necessary also resistance to princely measures of violence.

Storch rejected infant baptism and approached the teachings of the Anabaptists . He also strongly influenced Thomas Müntzer , who stayed in Zwickau in 1521 and supported Storch in his struggle for reforms against the Catholic priest Egranus. The local Cistercian monastery was closed on March 16, 1522 at his urging.

Thereupon Nikolaus Hausmann , Zwickau's reformer and preacher at the Zwickau Church of St. Mary , called his friend Martin Luther for help; From the end of April he preached publicly from the town hall to a gathering of 14,000 citizens from the city and the surrounding area and achieved a change of opinion in favor of more moderate reforms. The Zwickau prophets had to leave the city.

Storch traveled to Wittenberg with Müntzer and made a big impression on Philipp Melanchthon ; but after Melanchthon asked Luther for help through the elector, Luther personally intervened here too. So Storch, Müntzer and Karlstadt had to leave the city again. They became traveling preachers. The fact that Storch died in a hospital in Munich after the peasant revolt in Saxony (May 25, 1525, Battle of Frankenhausen ) was put down is incorrect. It appears for the last time in the Zwickau council minutes in 1536.

literature

  • Siegfried Hoyer: The Zwickau Storchians. Anabaptist forerunners? In: Jahrbuch für Regionalgeschichte 13, 1986, pp. 60–78.
  • Paul Wappler: Thomas Münzer in Zwickau and the "Zwickau Prophets". Zwickau 1908.
  • Richard Bachmann: Niclas Storch, the beginner of the Zwickau Anabaptists . Zwickau 1880.
  • Paul Tschackert :  Storch, Nicolaus . In: Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie (ADB). Volume 36, Duncker & Humblot, Leipzig 1893, pp. 442-445.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ "Thomas Müntzer - Der Satan von Allstedt", MDR TV film from October 31, 2010
personal data
SURNAME Stork, Nicholas
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Cloth weaver and lay preacher from Zwickau in Saxony
DATE OF BIRTH before 1500
PLACE OF BIRTH Zwickau
DATE OF DEATH after 1536