When at Amsterdam [Sidenote: 1534] the sectaries rose and very nearly mastered the city, death by fire was decreed for the men, by water for the women.

From Antwerp they were banished by a general edict especially aimed at them supplemented by massacres in the northern provinces.

[Sidenote: June 24, 1535] After the crisis at Muenster, though the Anabaptists continued to be a bugbear to the ruling classes, their propaganda lost its dangerously revolutionary character.

Menno Simons of Friesland, after his conversion in 1536, became the leader of the movement and succeeded in gathering the smitten people into a large and harmless body.

The Anabaptists furnished, however, more martyrs than did any other sect.
Lutheranism also continued to spread.