Question on the Reformation. Need some blanks filled on regarding a radical sect that came up during the reformation.
I remember hearing about a sect that grew out of the reformation (most likely anabaptists) who took to some pretty radical ideas such as collectivisation and what we would call free love, liberal interpretation of marriage (if it was thought of at all) and developed the doctrine of Sin is good because what is important about the Christian experience is that forgiveness, so go sin so you can be forgiven again.
I know the anabaptists were persecuted by both Catholic and Protestants and I think/assume these guys were too. I vaguely remember hearing that the town that this heresy developed in was simply destroyed or at least everyone in it was killed because of the danger of the heresy.
Can anyone point me in the right direction or clarify any of this? Or am I thinking of something that never happened.
It's sounds to me like you may be talking about the Anabaptist Kingdom in Münster.
In 1534, Jan Matthys, who was a baker from Haarlem (in Holland), and a follower of the Anabaptist preacher Melchior Hoffmann, had a vision that led him to believe that Münster would be the site of the new Jerusalem. Dutch Anabaptists flooded the city, which today is just across the Dutch Border in Germany. Initially, they appear to have been welcomed. They claimed that 1000 adults were re-baptized immediately after their arrival in the city.
Their initial enthusiastic support allowed them to gain control of the city with relative ease. The Bishop, who was also the political ruler of the city and the area, was expelled. Matthys, along with John of Leiden (aka Jan van Leiden) set up a government where all goods were held in common. John took seventeen wives. They were mostly the former wives of the most important people in the town. Some of these women were in their sixties or older. Testimony after-the-fact from these women indicates that this was not a consensual agreement.
This "kingdom" lasted for about a year. Meanwhile, the expelled bishop had besieged the city and the people inside were starving. In June of 1535, the bishop broke through the city's defenses and arrested the ringleaders. John and others (Matthys had died in battle soon after the siege began) were executed in 1536 and their bodies were displayed in cages on the steeple of the market church in the center of town.
These cages are actually famous. When the city re-built the market church's steeple in the 19th century, they re-hung the cages on the new steeple. The original cages were damaged during the second world war, and reproductions hang there today. The Dutch consulate is two doors down from this Church.
This is the only incident in which Anabaptists had political control of an area, and it was used as a justification for the open prosecution of Anabaptists across central Europe.
Futher Reading:
Anthony Arthur The Tailor King (St. Martin's, 1999)
If you can read German, there are a lot of primary source documents in the back of Johann Christian Fässer Geschichte der Wiedertäufer zu Münster. (Brunn, 1860). It's on Google books. You can find the testimony of some of John's Wives in there.