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The Reformation
Moravia
The early leader of the Anabaptists in Moravia was Georg Hübmaier. This area still remembered and revered John Hus and Jerome of Prague, and were receptive to anti-Catholic ideas.
Hübmaier, fresh from the Tyrol, founded a center at Nikolaberg, where he was joined by Hans Hut. Hübmaier was more conservative, but Hut was a millenarian fanatic and an enthusiastic preacher. The barons of Lichtenstein, sympathetic to Hübmaier, arrested Hut in 1527, but Hübmaier was himself captured by imperial authorities not long after. On 10 March 1528, Hübmaier was burned at Vienna. Three days later, his wife was cast into the Danube River with a stone around her neck.
The center of anabaptism now shifted to Austerlitz and the leadership of Jakob Huter, also fleeing from the Tyrol. Huter enjoyed great success, founding as many as eighty-six Brüderhofe (villages of brethren) that ranged in population from 200 to 2000. Huter was captured in 1536, taken to Innsbruck, and there burned.
The great persecution in Moravia was 1547 to 1564. Many were killed and nearly all were exiled from one place to another, multiple times. A whole generation was spent being harassed from Moravia to Hungary and back again. The Hutterites stayed in touch with brothers and sympathizers in Poland, northern Italy, and southeast Europe.
The persecutions gradually came to an end in the middle 1560s. The Hutterites survived and continued to live in Moravia. Some even emigrated to the New World in later centuries.