Melk (Niederösterreich, Austria)

Melk or Mölk is a town (1957 pop. 3,175, 2001 pop. 5,222) in the federal state of Lower Austria, in Austria. It is situated in the upper entry to the Wachau, with a famous old Benedictine abbey. According to the Passau court records in the archives at Munich, Hans Hut introduced the Anabaptist movement here, when he stopped briefly in the spring of 1527 on his return from Vienna. When he went on to Styria, he took with him two highly respected citizens whom he had won, Eibmann and Simon Fleischhacker. In 1528 Jörg Krautschlögel, a leader in Melk who had recently been in Krems, was in Melk. A Passau court record describes him as "a fat person, a small beard, and was toll-taker on the bridge at Vienna, a leader of the deceiving sect of the Anabaptists, lived especially in Melk and wherever he could mix in, in order to spread the heresies." The authorities of Lower Austria, urged on by Ferdinand, took energetic action in Melk, reporting to the king on 4 March 1528 that in Melk several Anabaptists had been questioned. These were imprisoned and Wolfgang Künigl was appointed to prosecute them. The outcome of the trial was that Krautschlögel and two other Anabaptists were beheaded in October and their bodies burned. These are the three victims mentioned but not named in the martyr list. People traveling from Tyrol to Moravia used to end the river trip at Krems or Stein rather than at Melk.

Bibliography

Beck, Josef. Die Geschichts-Bücher der Wiedertäufer in Oesterreich-Ungarn. Vienna, 1883; reprinted Nieuwkoop: De Graaf, 1967.

Hege, Christian and Christian Neff. Mennonitisches Lexikon, 4 vols. Frankfurt & Weierhof: Hege; Karlsruhe: Schneider, 1913-1967: v. III, 71.

Loserth, J. "Wiedertaufe in Niederosterreich." Blätter des Vereins für Landeskunde von Niederosterreich 33 (1899).

Nicoladoni, A. Johannes Bünderlin von Linz und die oberösterreichischen Täufergemeinden in den Jahren 1525-1531. Berlin, 1893.

Wolkan, Rudolf. Geschicht-Buch der Hutterischen Brüder. Macleod, AB, and Vienna, 1923.

Zieglschmid, A. J. F. Die älteste Chronik der Hutterischen Brüder: Ein Sprachdenkmal aus frühneuhochdeutscher Zeit. Ithaca: Cayuga Press, 1943.

Author(s)	Paul Dedic
Date Published	1957

Cite This Article

MLA style

Dedic, Paul. "Melk (Niederösterreich, Austria)." Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1957. Web. 22 Nov 2024. https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Melk_(Nieder%C3%B6sterreich,_Austria)&oldid=145863.

APA style

Dedic, Paul. (1957). Melk (Niederösterreich, Austria). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved 22 November 2024, from https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Melk_(Nieder%C3%B6sterreich,_Austria)&oldid=145863.

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Adapted by permission of Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia, from Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 3, p. 566. All rights reserved.

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