Heinrich Krechting

Heinrich Krechting (* 1501 in Schöppingen ; † June 28, 1580 in Dykhausen (then East Friesland ), today part of the municipality of Sande in the district of Friesland ) was a radical leader of the Anabaptist movement .

Life

Heinrich Krechting was the son of the town clerk and organist Engelbert Krechting. He attended Latin school and in 1526 married Elsle Oedefelt, daughter of a Schöppinger cloth merchant. He had four children with her. In 1531 he became mayor in Schöppingen. A year later he became judge and gographer (presiding judge) of the largest Münster gogericht .

Jan van Leiden visited him in autumn 1533 , who may have baptized him in January 1534. When he was supposed to arrest Johann von der Wieck in early 1534 , he called the bishop up and fled with a large crowd of fellow citizens to Munster, where his brother Bernd was already a preacher of the Anabaptists. Heinrich and Bernd supported van Leiden, who appointed Heinrich as his secretary and later as "Chancellor of the Kingdom", making him his personal deputy. Heinrich Krechting was responsible for order during the siege.

When Münster fell on June 25, 1535 after 16 months of siege by treason, Krechting holed up with a few hundred survivors on the Prinzipalmarkt in a wagon castle. Since they fiercely defended themselves, the episcopal troops offered the besieged withdrawal and safe conduct if they laid down their arms. With an episcopal pass and 10 gold guilders as food for the journey, Krechting was allowed to withdraw from the city with 24 of his fellow combatants.

Krechting first fled to Lingen and tried, with the tolerance of Count Anton von Oldenburg , to collect the Anabaptists again. After Johann Batenburg's execution in February 1538, he was the leader of the radical Anabaptists. His efforts to elect a new king and to retake Münster during the Oldenburg feud in 1538 failed because of the weakness of his movement.

When Anton I expelled the Anabaptists from the county of Oldenburg in 1538, Krechting was able to stay and found accommodation in Gödens . Nothing is known about his activity as an Anabaptist from this period. In 1580 he died a respected man. His grave is located in the Evangelical Reformed St. Jakobus Church in Dykhausen .

His grandson Heinrich Krefting and his great-grandson Hermann Wachmann were mayors of Bremen .

literature

Jürgen Schmitter, The double exodus of Heinrich Krechting from Schöppingen in the Münsterland at the beginning of the Reformation. A fictional documentation . Münster 2017, ISBN 978-3-89688-582-1