Michael Sattler
Former monk to whom the Schleitheim articles of February 1527 are attributed. He was tried that May at the suit of the emperor’s governor and burned.
The seven articles agreed at Schleitheim on 24 February 1527 name no author; their drafting is attributed to Sattler (Schleitheim Confession articles and closing date, with the editors’ abstract).
The Martyrs Mirror reproduces an account of his trial in May 1527. The charges were that he had acted against the emperor’s mandate, denied that the body and blood of Christ are present in the sacrament, taught that infant baptism does not help to salvation, rejected extreme unction, despised the mother of God and the saints, forbidden oaths, kept the Lord’s Supper in a new way, left his order and married, and said that the Turks should not be resisted. Sattler answered the articles one by one; asked why he had not remained a lord in his convent, he said, “According to the flesh I was a lord; but it is better so.” He was sentenced to have his tongue cut out and his flesh torn with hot tongs and was burned, and his wife was drowned a few days later (Martyrs Mirror pp. 416–418). See the First Anabaptists.
In the timeline
- 21 January 1525, firm dateThe First Anabaptists
In January 1525 former followers of Zwingli at Zurich begin to baptise adults on confession of faith. The council answers with banishment and, from 1526, with death by drowning; Felix Manz is drowned in 1527. The Schleitheim articles of that year state what they believed.