Jan van Leiden was a tailor and travelling actor from the Dutch town of Leiden, charismatic enough to declare himself the new King David of a New Jerusalem at Münster. Bernhard Knipperdolling was a Münster cloth merchant who became the city's mayor under Anabaptist rule. Bernhard Krechting was a former pastor who joined the movement and ran its political affairs. In 1534 and 1535, the three of them ran a city of perhaps ten thousand people that had abolished private property, expelled or rebaptized its Catholic and Lutheran inhabitants, and decreed polygamy on the model of the Old Testament patriarchs. The Prince-Bishop's forces besieged the city for sixteen months. By the time the walls were stormed in June 1535, hundreds had starved. In January 1536, the three leaders were tortured for an hour in the Prinzipalmarkt, killed with red-hot tongs and a dagger to the heart, and put in the cages to be seen from every approach to the city. They were human beings who died terribly. The cages were a warning written in their bodies.

The church the cages hang from is older than the rebellion it commemorates. A wooden church stood here around 1000, rebuilt in stone shortly before 1100, replaced by a vaulted Romanesque single-nave church in 1150 with a 21-metre west tower. In 1170 Münster was granted city rights, and parts of this parish were split off to create the parishes of St. Ludgeri, St. Aegidi, and probably St. Martini. In 1270 a Gothic three-nave hall church replaced the Romanesque one. The facade still contains a 1302 Jewish gravestone looted during the pogroms that followed the Black Death in 1350, set into the masonry as if it were ordinary building material. It is. It is also a reminder that this church's walls have absorbed cruelty for as long as they have stood.

The present late-Gothic building, the most significant example of Westphalian late Gothic architecture, was begun in 1375. It was financed by the city's merchants, who wanted a marketplace church to crown the Prinzipalmarkt. The choir was finished in 1422 and the octagonal south choir chapel in 1448. The nave went up in stages from 1450 onwards, including a southwest doorway carved with a relief of the tree of Jesse, the genealogy of Christ; the original carving is now in the Bode Museum in Berlin. The vaulting of choir and nave was only completed in 1525, almost exactly when the Anabaptists were beginning to gather across the Low Countries. By the time their leaders were hung from this tower in cages, the church around them was barely a decade old in its final form.

Since 1379, a watcher has blown a horn from the tower of St. Lambert's every half-hour between 9 pm and midnight, Wednesday through Monday. The job is called Türmer. The post has run continuously, with interruptions only for war and rebuilding, for nearly seven centuries. Since 2014 it has been held by Martje Saljé, who climbs the 298 steps to her booth in the tower most evenings and sends a single note out over the rooftops of the old town in each of the four cardinal directions. The horn is medieval crowd-control: it once told the city that the watchman was awake and that no fire had broken out. Tonight it tells the city the same thing, into a darkness that has electric streetlights and a small yellow bulb burning in each of the cages above her head.

By the end of the 19th century, the medieval tower was three times the height it had originally been built for, and its foundations could no longer support it. The Kulturkampf, the bitter struggle between Bismarck's Prussian state and the Catholic Church, blocked early preservation plans. In 1887 the old tower was demolished; in 1888 a new 90.5-metre neo-Gothic tower was begun, modelled on Freiburg Minster but influenced by the recently finished spires of Cologne Cathedral. Hertel, the diocesan architect, died in 1890 before his work reached half its height; his son Bernhard finished it in 1898. Statues of the Four Evangelists were added around the west door in 1911. The figure of John has the face of Friedrich Schiller; the figure of Luke has the face of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who visited Münster in 1792. World War II damaged one tower pillar and the eastern vaults; the bells were melted down for war material in 1942. Galen, the Bishop of Münster who preached against Nazi euthanasia, gave all three of his 1941 sermons from this pulpit; he had been parish priest here from 1929 to 1933. The damage was repaired by 1959. The cages, after a quiet restoration, were rehung in their original place above the city.