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Peasants' War
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Peasants' War, 1524–26, rising of the German peasants and the poorer classes of the towns, particularly in Franconia, Swabia, and Thuringia. It was the climax of a series of local revolts that dated from the 15th cent. Although most of the peasants' demands were economic or political rather than religious, the Reformation sparked the explosion. When the peasants heard the church attacked by Martin Luther and other reformers and listened to traveling preachers expound such doctrines as the priesthood of all believers, they concluded that their cause had divine support and that their grievances would be redressed. At Stühlingen, near the Swiss border, a revolt broke out in 1524. The peasants of Swabia and Franconia organized armies, and within a year the war spread over W and S Germany. Aid was given by some discontented nobles, such as Florian Geyer, Götz von Berlichingen, and Ulrich I, dispossessed duke of Württemberg, as well as by large numbers of townsmen. A program called the Twelve Articles of the Peasantry listed among the demands liberty to choose their own pastors, relief from the lesser tithes, abolition of serfdom, the right to fish and hunt, restoration of inclosed common lands, abolition of death duties, impartiality of the courts, and restriction of the demands of landlords to their just feudal dues. These articles were modified variously to suit local conditions. Some atrocities by the peasants (e.g., the massacre of Weinsberg) marked the war, but those committed by their enemies were worse. The revolt received the blessing of the Swiss reformer Huldreich Zwingli and in Thuringia was led by the radical Anabaptist leader Thomas Münzer. Martin Luther, however, condemned the revolt, thus contributing to its eventual defeat. Lacking unity and firm leadership, the peasant forces were crushed (1525) largely by the army of the Swabian League. It is estimated that 100,000 peasants were killed. In Austria, where the revolt continued until 1526, the peasants won some concessions, but in most areas they suffered continued or increased restrictions and had to pay tribute. The peasants' defeat dissuaded further attempts by the peasantry to improve their social and political position.
| History 1450-1789: German Peasants' War |
The German Peasants' War was among the most significant rebellions in modern European history. The political movements arising from the rebellion fit none of the stereotypes of Europe's peasant revolts. In 1524–1525 peasant armies briefly shattered the rule of countless lords, small princes, and urban governments in the southern and central parts of the Holy Roman Empire, creating the potential for revolutionary changes had the rebels' political programs been fully realized. The name of the rebellion is a misnomer as it was neither a strictly German affair nor a war involving only the peasants. The rebellion sprawled across southern and central Germany, parts of modern France, Switzerland, Austria, and northern Italy. The name that chroniclers and writers settled on after the rebellion also masked its strong urban and religious character. The rebellion's ties to the Reformation and urban reform were therefore played down. Efforts to rename the revolt as "an early bourgeois revolution" or "the Revolution of 1525" have, however, been unsuccessful. While the rebel bands ultimately failed to realize their audacious political programs, the rebellion still bears comparison with the other great political upheavals of European history, such as the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the Revolutions of 1848, and the Russian Revolution of 1917.
Narrative of Events
The Peasants' War is best understood not as a single revolt but as a set of five closely related regional revolts. The center of the rebellion lay in Upper Swabia in southern Germany. In the summer of 1524 peasant protests against the seigneurial burdens of the counts of Stühlingen and Lupfen spread quickly to nearby villages and lordships. By early March 1525 the rebellion, expanding with stunning speed, had engulfed the Klettgau, the Hegau, the Black Forest, and eventually much of the land between Lake Constance and the Danube River. Ties to evangelical preachers from Zurich were established. Even small towns went over to the rebels. By April, five well-organized bands, totaling 40,000 peasant soldiers, controlled much of Upper Swabia.
From there the rebellion spread north into Franconia and Thuringia, then into the rich lands along the Upper Rhine and the Palatinate. By late April and early May three well-led peasant armies dominated Franconia and won the most significant victories of the rebellion, including seizing the imperial city of Heilbronn, calling a Peasant Parliament, forcing the capitulation of the archbishopric of Mainz (the seat of the chancellor of the Holy Roman Empire), and temporarily capturing Würzburg from its bishop. The risings in Thuringia were more diffuse due to political fragmentation, weak organization, and narrow goals. The participation of many small towns also complicated the politics of rebellion. The Thuringian rebellion was noteworthy for the ideological leadership of the firebrand preacher Thomas Müntzer. In Alsace the rebellion was characterized by the strong role of religion in organizing rebel bands and the links made between the preaching of the Word of God and the rebel programs.
As these rebellions ended, disturbances broke out in the Alpine lands of Tyrol and the archbishopric of Salzburg. Rebels successfully brought their demands to the attention of the territories' diets or estates. In the meantime the army of the Swabian League under Georg Truchsess von Waldburg negotiated a peaceful end to the rebellion in Upper Swabia at Weingarten and then swung north to confront rebel armies in Württemberg and Franconia. The devastating defeats of peasant armies on 15 May at Frankenhausen and then 2 June at Königshofen crushed the rebellion for good. Punitive reprisals by lords and princes lasted into 1526 and 1527.
Origins
Social and economic reasons alone fail to explain the rebellions. The roots were political, legal, and even religious in nature. Among the socioeconomic grievances, complaints against the burdens of lordship played a prominent part. Villagers complained of high rents, dues, labor services, tithes, fees, access to common resources, and serfdom. Some scholars characterize these grievances as a response to an "agrarian crisis" of the late Middle Ages. In Upper Swabia, for example, peasants resisted the lords' uses of serfdom to reduce mobility and control peasant marriages and labor. Population growth may also have exacerbated the competition for land and other resources in some regions. These conditions made small-scale revolts common before 1520. When local harvests failed in the early 1520s and lords dealt ineptly with peasants, the possibility of wider protests grew.
Political and religious tensions explain why the local protests of 1524 expanded quickly in scale and organization. The small revolts of the fifteenth century had broken out over the exercise of three different types of political powers. Clashes over lordship itself represented the most serious source of conflict. Lords viewed their rights and privileges as legitimate and just and expected loyal subordination from their subjects. Villagers, on the other hand, tended to view lordship as a reciprocal relationship in which loyalty was offered in exchange for protection and justice. Tensions also ran high over taxes and other burdens as states began to develop. When powerful lords, princes, and prince-abbots consolidated their lands and jurisdictions into more compact territories in southwest Germany, a region of notoriously fragmented lands, the foundations of early modern states—and resistance to them—were laid. The development of courts and the imposition of Roman law also sparked conflicts.
Long-simmering conflicts involving small towns added to the potential for rebellion. Tensions between townsfolk and local government oligarchs formed one source of tension. Towns were also frequently at odds with overlords, local bishops, and the clergy over religious issues, legal privileges, and taxes. When the uprising spread in 1524 and 1525, these local conflicts easily spilled over into rebellion.
Anticlericalism also fueled the rebellion, especially when it mixed with the evangelical programs of the early Reformation. Many bishops, abbots, and abbesses combined formal political powers and lordship over the land in the core areas of the rebellion and provoked protests against ecclesiastical taxes before 1525. When these protests were added to demands to reform the clergy and the evangelical zeal for the Gospel after 1520, anticlericalism gained momentum.
Political Organization and Goals
In response to these challenges from feudal lords, rebel bands developed their own political organization, notably through communal assemblies. Village communes had long organized many vital local affairs: crop rotation, the division of labor, and access to common fields. While communes tended to treat their members as equals, creating powerful bonds of solidarity, these institutions were not democratic institutions. Women and those who did not hold property were excluded. Communal assemblies and village notables had experience imposing discipline on their neighbors, however, through customary law, courts of discipline, the parish church, and the local militia. In the century before the rebellion, communal institutions had become even stronger in the heartlands of the Peasants' War. Through them villages developed seasoned leaders, skill and experience in negotiations, and the means to organize marches and protests against lords. As the scale of rebellion grew, the commune provided the basis for larger political organizations: rallies, bands, and even federations. When seasoned by veteran soldiers from the militias or mercenary armies, these peasant organizations could be formidable indeed.
The most impressive aspect of the rebellion was the way in which some well-led bands began to act like sovereign political organizations. This occurred when oaths of loyalty were imposed, ordinances issued, and constitutions drafted. Recognition came, often coerced, from local nobles and other political authorities. The most notable of these organizations was the Christian Union of Upper Swabia. In some areas, such as Tyrol and Salzburg, peasants worked through territorial diets or estates. When Archduke Ferdinand summoned the Tyrolean Estates in the summer of 1525, two hundred peasant delegates came. The whole proceeding was observed by representatives from Italian and German principalities. Rebels also forged alliances with small towns. Some towns, such as Memmingen in Upper Swabia, simply went over completely to the rebels. Most towns made alliances of convenience while pursuing goals quite different from those of their allies from the countryside. These were brittle alliances. In other cases peasants subjugated a town or city, as when the army of the Odenwald-Neckar Valley seized Heilbronn and made it the capital of the rebellion in Franconia. The challenge to the lords lay in the fact that the peasant armies undermined established loyalties, creating solidarity where it had not existed before and making large political associations and even revolutionary political programs possible. To some the possibility was not far-fetched that the lands between Lake Constance and the Danube might simply "turn Swiss," successfully throw off their noble overlords, and assume federal forms of government modeled on the Swiss Confederation to the south.
No other peasant rebellion in Europe advanced political programs as original as those of the Peasants' War. The best known of these programs was the Twelve Articles of the Peasantry. As the program of the Upper Swabian rebellion, the Twelve Articles envisioned a radical restructuring of society that would acquire its legitimacy through the Gospel. Once considered a utopian program, the Twelve Articles are now seen to be a concise distillation of peasant grievances from across much of Upper Swabia. They were also widely adopted by rebel bands in the Black Forest, Franconia, Thuringia, the Upper Rhine, and Alsace. Other notable political programs included Friedrich Weigandt's "Draft of an Imperial Reformation," Thomas Müntzer's "Eternal League of God," Michael Gaismair's draft constitution for Tyrol, and, later, Hans Hergot's utopian treatise on the transformation of Christian society. Scholars differ in their assessment of these programs. Some see them as conservative documents. Others stress their revolutionary potential.
The connections of the rebellion with the early German Reformation are now indisputable. For a long time scholars played down the association, stressing the socioeconomic nature of many grievances and the coincidental timing of the revolt with the early evangelical movements. How to assess the role of religion in the rebellion is difficult, however. Some scholars see in the revolt an explosive extension of the evangelical movements into the countryside and look upon 1524–1525 as a turning point in the Reformation as a whole. Certainly evangelical preachers preached to rebel armies and some helped draft lists of grievances. Other preachers provided ideological justification for the revolt in divine law and the Gospel. In Franconia preachers even formed up their own company of soldiers. Rebels who looked to Martin Luther, however, were disappointed. Luther condemned the rebels and, while blaming greedy and oppressive lords for the rebellion, appealed to the authorities to crush the rebellion without pity. In southern Germany, however, Huldrych Zwingli's theology inspired in part several political programs, including the Twelve Articles. There were also a few preachers who, like Thomas Müntzer, aroused millenarian hopes for the rebellion.
Aftermath and Consequences
One should not assume that the violent repression of the rebellion meant that it ended without consequences. In the short term the reprisals were harsh. Chronicle accounts emphasize how bloody and violent the reprisals were. Somewhere between several tens of thousands and 100,000 peasants lost their lives in the rebellion's aftermath. The authorities especially targeted leaders for trial and execution. Fines and other punishments were common. Not everywhere was the aftermath violent. The Upper Swabian rebellion ended through peaceful negotiations.
More difficult to assess, however, are the long-term effects on lord-peasant relationships in the Holy Roman Empire. Many lords and princes seem to have exercised more caution in their dealings with the peasantry after 1525 so that disputes might not escalate dangerously. In southern Germany serfdom weakened and ceased to expand. At the Imperial Diet of Speyer in 1526, the committee reviewing grievances of the common man recommended a return to customary levels of exaction and just treatment of peasants. A solid case can also be made that fears of another rebellion contributed to the tendency to channel disputes into the courts and commissions of arbitration, thereby giving the empire ways of defusing rural conflict through legal institutions. Popular support for the Reformation also waned in the aftermath of the rebellion as public authorities guided the evangelical movements into a "magisterial Reformation." In this way religion lost much of its capacity to legitimize radical political protest in the empire.
Views of the Peasants' War have naturally reflected political attitudes in modern Germany. In the nineteenth century Leopold von Ranke dismissed the rebellion as an event unworthy of serious analysis. Conservatives to this day play down the rebellion's political significance. By contrast Friedrich Engels saw it as a pivotal turning point in German history and laid down a socialist view of the event. Not surprisingly East and West German historians in the 1960s and 1970s clashed over the meaning of the Peasants' War. Marxists saw in it an "early bourgeois revolution" while some liberal West German historians viewed it as a "system conflict" or a revolution and high-water mark of a populist communal tradition. Given the importance of the war, it is likely to remain a controversial subject for historians.
Bibliography
Baumann, Franz Ludwig. Akten zur Geschichte des deutschen Bauernkrieges aus Oberschwaben. Freiburg im Breisgau, 1877.
Blickle, Peter. Communal Reformation: The Quest for Salvation in Sixteenth Century Germany. Translated by Thomas Dunlap. Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1992.
——. Die Revolution von 1525. 3rd ed. Munich, 1993.
Buszello, Horst. Der deutsche Bauernkrieg von 1525 als politische Bewegung. Mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der anonymen Flugschrift "An die Versamlung gemayner Pawerschafft." Berlin, 1969.
Franz, Gunther. Der deutsche Bauernkrieg. 12th ed. Darmstadt, 1984.
Robisheaux, Thomas. Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Germany. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 1989.
Schulze, Winfried. Bäuerlicher Widerstand und feudale Herrschaft in der frühen Neuzeit. Stuttgart–Bad Cannstatt, 1980.
Scott, Tom. Freiburg and the Breisgau: Town-Country Relations in the Age of Reformation and Peasants' War. Oxford and New York, 1986.
Scott, Tom, and Bob Scribner, trans. and eds. The German Peasants' War: A History in Documents. Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1991.
Scribner, Bob, and Gerhard Benecke, eds. The German Peasant War: New Viewpoints. London and Boston, 1979.
Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, ed. Der deutsche Bauernkrieg 1524–1526. Göttingen, 1975.
—THOMAS ROBISHEAUX
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The Peasants' War (Deutscher Bauernkrieg in German, literally the German Peasants' War) was a popular revolt that took place in Europe during 1524-1525. It consisted, like the preceding Bundschuh movement and the Hussite Wars, of a series of both economic and religious revolts in which peasants, townsfolk and nobles all participated.
At its height in the spring and summer of 1525, the conflict, which occurred mostly in the southern, western and central areas of modern Germany plus areas in neighbouring Alsace and modern Switzerland and Austria, involved an estimated 300,000 peasant rebels: contemporary estimates put the dead at 100,000. It was Europe's largest and most widespread popular uprising prior to the French Revolution of 1789.
Contents |
Social classes in the 16th-century Holy Roman Empire
Princes
Sixteenth century Germany was part of the Holy Roman Empire, a decentralized entity in which the Holy Roman Emperor himself had little authority outside of his own dynastic lands, which covered only a small fraction of the whole. There were hundreds of largely independent secular and ecclesiastical territories in the empire, most of which were ruled by a noble dynasty (though several dozen were city states). Many were autocratic rulers who barely recognized any other authority within their territories. Princes had the right to levy taxes and borrow money as they saw fit. The growing costs of administration and military upkeep impelled the princes to keep raising their subjects' cost of living. The lesser nobility and the clergy paid no taxes and often supported their local prince. Many towns had privileges that exempted them from paying taxes, and so the bulk of the burden of taxation fell on the peasants. Princes often attempted to force their freer peasants into serfdom through increasing taxes and the introduction of Roman Civil law. Roman Civil law was advantageous to those princes who sought to consolidate their power, because it brought all land into their personal ownership and eliminated the feudal concept of the land as a trust between lord and peasant that conferred rights as well as obligations on the latter. By maintaining the remnants of the ancient law which legitimized their own rule, they not only elevated their wealth and position in the empire through the confiscation of all property and revenues, but also their dominion over their peasant subjects. Under this ancient law, the peasants had little recourse beyond passive resistance. Even so, the prince now had absolute control over all his serfs and their possessions. Until Thomas Müntzer and similar radicals began to reject the legitimizing factors of ancient law and invoked the concept of "Godly Law" as a vehicle for rousing the people, uprisings generally remained isolated, unsupported and easily put down.
Lesser Nobility
- Related article: Knights' Revolt
The evolving military technology of the late medieval period began to render the lesser nobility of knights obsolete. The introduction of military science and the growing importance of gunpowder and infantry lessened the importance of their role as heavy cavalry, as well as reducing the strategic importance of their castles. Their luxurious lifestyle drained what little income they had as prices kept rising. They exercised their ancient rights in order to wring what income they could from their territories. The knights became embittered as they grew progressively impoverished and fell increasingly under the jurisdiction of the princes. Thus these two classes were in constant conflict. The knights also considered the clergy to be an arrogant and superfluous estate, while envying the privileges and wealth that the church statutes secured. In addition, the knights, who were often in debt to the towns, were constantly in conflict with the town patricians.
Clergy
The clergy, or prelate class, was losing its place as the intellectual authority over all matters within the state. The progress of printing (especially of the Bible) and the expansion of commerce, as well as the spread of renaissance humanism raised literacy rates throughout the Empire. The Catholic monopoly on higher education was accordingly also reduced. Over time, Catholic institutions had slipped into corruption. Clerical ignorance and the abuses of simony and pluralism (holding several offices at once) were rampant. Some bishops, archbishops, abbots and priors were as ruthless in exploiting their subjects as the regional princes. In addition to the sale of indulgences, they set up prayer houses and directly taxed the people. Increased indignation over Church corruption had led the Roman Catholic monk Martin Luther to post his 95 Theses on the doors of the Castle Church in Wittenberg, Germany in 1517, as well as impelling other reformers to radically rethink Church doctrine and organization.
Patricians
As the guilds grew and urban populations rose, the town patricians faced increasing opposition. The patricians consisted of wealthy families that sat alone in the town councils and held all the administrative offices. Like the princes, they could seek to secure revenues from their peasants by any possible means. Arbitrary road, bridge and gate tolls could be instituted at will. They gradually revoked the common lands and made it illegal for a farmer to fish or log wood in what was once land held in common. Guild taxes were exacted. All revenues collected were not subject to formal administration, and civic accounts were neglected. Thus embezzlement and fraud were commonly practiced and the patrician class, bound by family ties, became ever richer and more exploitative.
Burghers
The town patricians were increasingly criticized by the growing burgher class, which consisted of well-to-do middle-class citizens who often held administrative guild positions or worked as merchants. To the burghers, their own growing wealth was reason enough to claim the right to control civic administration. They openly demanded a town assembly made up of both patricians and burghers, or at least a restriction of simony and the allocation of several seats to burghers. The burghers also opposed the clergy, who they felt had overstepped their bounds and failed to uphold their religious duties. They demanded an end to the clergy’s special privileges, such as their exemption from taxation, as well as a reduction in their number. The burgher “master artisan” now owned both the workshop and its tools, which he allowed his apprentices to use, and provided the materials that his workers needed to make their products. In exchange, they received payments whose size the burgher determined after taking into account how long their labour had taken, as well as the quality of their workmanship and the quantity of products produced. Journeymen lost the opportunity to rise in the ranks of the guild and were thereby deprived of their civic rights.
Plebeians
The plebeians comprised the new class of urban workers, journeymen and vagabonds. Ruined petty burghers also joined their ranks. Although technically potential burghers, the journeymen were barred from higher positions by the wealthy families that ran the guilds. Thus their “temporary” position devoid of civic rights tended to become permanent. The plebeians did not have property like ruined burghers or peasants. They were landless, rightless citizens, and a symptom of the decay of feudal society. It was in Thuringia that the revolution which centered around Müntzer would give the plebeian working class the greatest expression. They demanded complete social equality as they began to believe, with Müntzer's encouragement, that the evolution of their society should be driven by themselves from below, not from above. The authorities hastened to put down such explosive aspirations, which posed the greatest threat to their traditional authority.
Peasants
The lowest stratum of society continued to be occupied by peasants, who were heavily taxed. In the early 16th century, no peasant could hunt, fish or chop wood freely, as the lords had recently taken these common lands for their own purposes. The lord had the right to use his peasant’s land as he wished; the peasant could do nothing but watch as his crops were destroyed by wild game and by nobles galloping across his fields in the course of their chivalric hunts. When a peasant wished to marry, he needed not only the lord's permission, but to pay a tax. When the peasant died, the lord was entitled to his best cattle, his best garments and his best tools. The justice system, operated by the clergy or wealthy burgher and patrician jurists, gave the peasant no redress. Generations of traditional servitude and the autonomous nature of the provinces limited peasant insurrections to local areas. The peasant’s only hope was the unification of aspirations across provincial lines. Müntzer was to recognize that the recently diluted class structures provided the lower stratum of society with a greater claim to legitimacy in their revolt, as well as more scope for political and socio-economic gains.
Minor Deaths
A nobleman, Count Ludwig Von Helfenstein-Wiesentheid, was killed by peasants on April 16, 1525 in the Massacre of Weinsberg during the Peasants' War.[1] The Count's wife Margareta (1480-1537) is alleged to have been the daughter of Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor and Margareta Von Edelsheim.
Rise of social conflict
The emergence of the newer classes and their respective interests began to soften the structure of authority of the old feudal system. Increased international trade and industry not only put the princes in conflict with the interests of the growing merchant capitalist class, but also broadened the base of lower-class interests (the peasants plus the new urban workers). The interposition of the burghers and the necessary plebeian class weakened feudal authority, as both these classes opposed the top of the hierarchy while also being in natural opposition to each other. The emergence of the plebeian class strengthened lower-class interests in several ways. Instead of the peasantry being the only oppressed and traditionally servile estate, the plebeians added a new dimension that shared similar class interests, but did so without a history of outright oppression.
Opposition to the privileges of the Catholic clergy was rising among several classes in the new late-medieval hierarchy, including the peasantry. Many burghers and nobles also despised the perceived laziness and looseness of clerical life. As members of the more privileged classes by virtue of entrepreneurship and tradition respectively, they felt that the clergy was reaping benefits (such as tax exemption and ecclesiastical tithes) to which they were not entitled. When the situation suited, even princes would abandon Catholicism in order to gain political and financial independence and increase their power within their territories.
After thousands of articles of complaints were compiled and presented by the lower classes in numerous towns and villages to no avail, the revolt broke out. The parties split into three distinct groups. The Catholic camp consisted of the clergy plus those patricians and princes who resisted any opposition to the Catholic-centred social order. The moderate reforming party consisted mainly of burghers and princes. The burghers saw an opportunity to gain power in the urban councils, as Luther’s proposed reformed church would be highly centralized within the towns, as well as condemning the nepotistic practices by which the patricians held a firm grip on the bureaucracy. Similarly, the princes stood to gain additional autonomy not only from the Catholic emperor Charles V, but from the demands of the Catholic Church in Rome. Plebeians, peasants and those sympathetic to their cause made up the third camp, which was led by preachers like Thomas Müntzer. This camp wished to break the shackles of late medieval society and forge a new one in the name of God.
Germany's peasants and plebeians compiled lists of articles outlining their complaints. The famous 12 Articles of the Black Forest were ultimately adopted as the definitive set of grievances. The articles' statement of social, political and economic grievances in the increasingly popular Protestant movement unified the population in the massive uprising that broke out first in Lower Swabia in 1524, then quickly spread to other parts of Germany.
Course of the war
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This section requires expansion. |
Ultimate failure of the rebellion
The peasant movement ultimately failed, with cities and nobles making separate peaces with the princely armies that restored the old order in a frequently still-harsher incarnation under the nominal overlordship of the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, represented in German affairs by his younger brother Ferdinand.
The religious dissident Martin Luther, already condemned as a heretic by the 1521 Edict of Worms and accused at the time of fomenting the strife, rejected the demands of the rebels and upheld the right of Germany's rulers to suppress the uprisings. Luther based his attitude on the peasant rebellion on St. Paul's doctrine of Divine Right of Kings in his epistle to the Romans 13:1-7, which says that all authorities are appointed by God, and should not be resisted. His former follower Thomas Müntzer, on the other hand, came to the fore as a radical agitator in Thuringia.
Anabaptists
On December 27, 1521, three Zwickau prophets, both influenced by and influencing Thomas Müntzer, appeared in Wittenberg from Zwickau: Thomas Dreschel, Nicolas Storch and Mark Thomas Stübner. Luther's reform was not radical enough for them. Like the Roman Catholic Church, Luther practiced infant baptism, which the Anabaptists considered to be "neither scriptural nor primitive, nor fulfilling the chief conditions of admission into a visible brotherhood of saints, to wit, repentance, faith, spiritual illumination and free surrender of self to Christ."
The reformist theologian and associate of Luther, Philipp Melanchthon, who was powerless against the enthusiasts with whom his co-reformer Andreas Karlstadt sympathized, appealed to Luther, who was still hiding in the Wartburg. Luther was cautious in not condemning the new doctrine out of hand, but advised Melanchthon to treat its supporters gently and to test their spirits, in case they should be of God. There was confusion in Wittenberg, whose schools and university had sided with the "prophets" and were closed. From this arises the allegation that the Anabaptists were enemies of learning, which is contradicted by the fact that two of them, Haetzer and Denck, produced and printed the first German translation of the Hebrew prophets in 1527. The first leaders of the movement in Zürich—Conrad Grebel, Felix Manz, George Blaurock, Balthasar Hubmaier—were learned in Greek, Latin and Hebrew.
On March 6, 1522), Luther returned to Wittenberg, where he interviewed the prophets, scorned their "spirits", banished them from the city, and had their adherents ejected from Zwickau and Erfurt. Denied access to the churches, the latter preached and celebrated the sacrament in private houses. Having been driven from the cities, they swarmed across the countryside. Compelled to leave Zwickau, Müntzer visited Bohemia, lived for two years at Alltstedt in Thuringia, and in 1524 spent some time in Switzerland. During this period he proclaimed his revolutionary religious and political doctrines with increasing vehemence, and, so far as the lower orders were concerned, with growing success.
The Peasants' War began chiefly as a revolt against feudal oppression, but under the leadership of Müntzer it became a war against all constituted authorities in a forcible attempt to establish Müntzer's ideal of a Christian commonwealth based on absolute equality and the community of goods. The total defeat of the rebels at Frankenhausen (May 15, 1525), followed by the execution of Müntzer and several other leaders, proved to be a merely temporary check on the Anabaptist movement. Scattered throughout Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands were zealous propagandists whose teachings many were prepared to follow as soon as another leader emerged.
See also
References
- ^ Scott and Scribner, p158, Report of the Parson Johann Herolt
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Further reading
Primary sources
Secondary sources
- Ernest Belfort Bax (1899). The Peasants War in Germany, 1525-1526, from Internet Archive. HTML source.
- Friedrich Engels (1850). The Peasant War in Germany. HTML source
- Hillay Zmora (1997), State and Nobility in Early Modern Germany: The knightly feud in Franconia 1440-1567, Cambridge University Press, 1997 (hardback), 2002 (paperback), ISBN 0521561795
- Tom Scott and Robert W. Scribner (1991). The German Peasants' War: A History in Documents, Humanities Press International, New Jersey, ISBN 0-391-03681-5
External links
- Martin Luther's Violent, Inflammatory Rhetoric and its Relationship to the German Peasants' Revolt (1524-1525) by Dave Armstrong
- Der Bauernkrieg von 1525: The German Peasants’ Revolt by Christopher Handisides
"War of the Peasants (1524-25)". Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. 1913. http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Catholic_Encyclopedia_(1913)/War_of_the_Peasants_(1524-25).
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Mentioned in
- Florian Geyer (person)
- Truchsess von Waldburg (person)
- Ernst Lissauer (person)
- Götz von Berlichingen (German explorer)
- Georg von Frundsberg (German military leader)
- Memmingen (city, Germany)
- Tecla of England
- Tilman Riemenschneider (person)
- Heilbronn (city, Germany)
- Mühlhausen (city, Germany)
- Swabian League (organization, Germany – in politics, history)
- Florian Geyer (work)
- What was the Peasants' War? (history)
- Thomas Münzer (German theologian)
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