This seventeenth-century song tells the story of the Swiss Anabaptist preacher Hans Haslibacher (1500-1571), who was martyred for his faith. Haslibacher became a popular Anabaptist preacher in the 1530s and was repeatedly arrested and banished from his canton. He eventually returned to his community and was sentenced to death and executed in 1571, one of about thirty Anabaptists who were executed for their faith in the canton of Bern. The song describing his martyrdom was written by an anonymous author and was added to an expanded early seventeenth-century edition of the collection of Anabaptist hymns, Ausbund. Its first edition had been published in 1564.