owned, in a literal sense, by God. They also believed that they were God's chosen children. It followed, in their theology, that everything on earth was theirs to do with as they pleased. There was nothing wrong in making a living by robbing 'infidels', by which they meant any man who was not a member of their sect; indeed killing infidels was pleasing to their God. Those who joined the sect after 1535 — when the Münsterite leadership had declared the door to salvation to be closed—could never be baptised, they thought, but these men and women would nevertheless survive the coming apocalypse and be reborn in the coming Kingdom of God as servants of the Anabaptist elite. The Batenburgers also shared the views of the radical Münsterites on polygamy and property; all women, and all goods, were held in common. A few Batenburger marriages did occur, and Van Batenburg himself retained the right to present a deserving member of his sect with a 'wife' from the group's general stock of women. But such unions could be ended just as readily, and on occasion the prophet did order an unwilling wife to return to servicing the remainder of the Batenburger men. Leadership Jan Van Batenburg seems to have commanded the loyalty of at least several hundred men. Members of his sect were required to swear oaths of absolute secrecy, however, and had to endure a painful initiation designed to ensure they would be able to resist torture if they were ever captured, so the true extent of his following never emerged. The Batenburgers did not gather openly in public, and had their leader's dispensation to pose as ordinary Lutherans or Catholics, going to church and living apparently normal lives in the lands along the borders of the Holy Roman Empire and the Netherlands for several years after the fall of Münster. They recognised one another by secret symbols displayed on their houses or their clothing, and by certain ways of styling their hair. It was only after Van Batenburg himself was captured and burned at the stake, at Vilvoorde, Brabant, in 1538, that they came together at last, transforming themselves into a robber-band and infesting the Imperial marches for at least another decade under the leadership of a Leyden weaver called Cornelis Appelman. By this point the group had been reduced to a core of no more than 200 men,