(Roughly) Daily

An excerpt from Lyndal Roper‘s Cundill Prize-Shortlisted Summer of Fire and Blood…

The German Peasants’ War was the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution. Like a vast contagion it spread from southwest Germany through Württemberg, Swabia, the Allgäu, Franconia, Thuringia, and Saxony to Alsace in what is now France, Austria, and Switzerland. Peasants massed in armed bands in one region, then another, and rebellion would break out even in areas far away. At its height it involved well over a hundred thousand people, perhaps many more, who joined with the rebels to bring about a new world of Christian brotherhood. And for several months, they won. Authority and rulership collapsed, and the familiar structures of the Holy Roman Empire were overturned, exposing the fragility of the existing social and religious hierarchies. People even began to dream of a new order.

But this moment did not last. In spring 1525, the ‘Aufruhr,’ or ‘turbulence,’ as contemporaries called it, had reached its height, rolling all before it. By May the tide had turned. The forces of the lords put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy thousand and a hundred thousand peasants. That summer of blood, maybe 1 per cent of the population of the area of the war was killed, an enormous loss of life in just over two months.

Despite its enormity, the Peasants’ War and its bloody defeat have been forgotten in recent years. People remember the era for Martin Luther and his Reformation, which split Western Christendom forever between Catholics and those who would eventually be known as Protestants. The Peasants’ War has come to be seen as a diversion, an interlude important mainly for what it tells us about Luther, for this was the moment when Luther came out in support of the princes and against the ‘mad dogs’, the rebelling peasants. From then on, the Reformation in Germany would be conservative. Mainstream reformers would go on to ally with rulers to advance the goals of the Reformation, and when the new church was set up after the war, it would have the backing of those in power.

The Reformation’s possibilities, as well as its limits, cannot be grasped without an understanding of the Peasants’ War as the giant trauma at its center. Equally, the ideas, dreams, and hopes unleashed by the Reformation shaped the Peasants’ War. And the war, in turn, cannot be understood if it has been severed from the heady atmosphere of religious excitement in which it took place.

To understand why such a massive movement mushroomed from such small, apparently isolated beginnings in a distant corner of the empire, we need to listen to what drove the peasants. It is no accident that just three years after Luther defied the emperor and the estates of the empire, the peasants of first one or two lords and abbots decided to down tools and gather in bands.

In 1520 Luther himself had written a short but powerful tract, one of the three great Reformation writings from that year setting out his theology, titled The Freedom of a Christian. The cover of the German edition was emblazoned with the incendiary word ‘freedom.’ It was all very well for Luther’s supporters to argue later that he had meant spiritual freedom, but the fact was that many peasants in the southwest, particularly those ruled by the Catholic monasteries, convents, and abbots Luther was attacking, were serfs, owned by their masters. For them, freedom meant ending serfdom too. Despite Luther’s later condemnation, the Peasants’ War is unthinkable without the ideas he unleashed.

By standing up to the emperor, Charles V, at Worms in 1521, Luther had provided an unforgettable example of resistance. A lone monk in a borrowed cassock before an audience of dignitaries arrayed in all their finery, he had confronted the mightiest power in the land and had said his piece, refusing to recant unless convinced by ‘Holy Scripture.’ Small wonder that the peasants drew on his ideas for their cause. Small wonder they assumed he would support them.

But he did not. [see below] By late March of 1525, the peasant revolt had become a mass movement whose demands found shape in the Twelve Articles [see here and more fully, here]. These were probably composed by Sebastian Lotzer, a townsman and furrier, on the basis of hundreds of complaints that different groups of peasants had been formulating for weeks beforehand. Influenced by Martin Luther; the preacher Christoph Schappeler, himself a follower of the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli; and a strain of radical evangelicalism, Lotzer helped transform a set of specific, apparently random grievances against particular lords into a wide-ranging theological vision that chimed with radical Reformation ideas.

Local spats could now feed into a mass movement that spread far beyond individual disputes between a peasant and a particularly nasty abbot or lord. Yet Lotzer did not invent this theology, nor was he the first to apply it to agricultural relations—that had already been done by the peasants themselves as they formulated their complaints. The Twelve Articles then became a document that the movement everywhere acknowledged, even when the rebels did not know exactly what the articles contained, and even though many areas revised them to suit local circumstances. Soon they were printed using the new technology made possible by the invention of movable type, and they spread all over Germany. You could pick them up and hold them in your hand, point to each demand and the biblical passages that proved their godliness.

The key thing about the Peasants’ War was that it was a mass movement. For too long, histories of the war have emphasized its leaders, men like Thomas Müntzer in Thuringia, adopted by Friedrich Engels and then by the East German regime as a revolutionary hero to rival the reactionary colossus Luther. There are indeed a series of outsize characters who populated the war: Götz von Berlichingen, the knight with the iron fist, who became a peasant leader after his mother-in-law failed to hand him his liege-lord’s summons to fight against them, or so he later claimed in his mendacious autobiography, written in his nineties. Or Florian Geyer, a noble who also led peasant armies and was finally knifed by an assassin. Or the Black Hofmännin, a peasant woman who claimed she urged on the peasant troops and rubbed the fat of the slaughtered nobles onto her shoes. Or the ‘Bauernjörg,’ Truchsess Georg von Waldburg, who led the lords’ army of the Swabian League and mercilessly torched rebel villages.

But this was a movement, not a drama of Great Men. The peasants’ side of the story has been forgotten because they did not write it down, either because they were illiterate or because they were slain or executed in the war. The winners—the lords and mainstream theologians who were the peasants’ enemies—instead wrote the history…

“How the German Peasants’ War Exposed 16th-Century Europe’s Fragile Foundations,” via @literaryhub.bsky.social.

Read Martin Luther’s (negative) reactions to the Peasants here.

* Montaigne

###

As we ponder the historicity of the history we “know,” we might spare a thought for a victim of a somewhat more successful rebellion, the wife of King Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, who is famously remembered for responding, on being told that many of her subjects had no bread, “let them eat cake”… except that she (virtually certainly) didn’t: the phrase can actually be traced back to Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s Confessions in 1765, when Antoinette was nine years old and had never been to France. The phrase was not attributed to Antoinette until decades after her death.

Still, she was was beheaded on this date in 1793 by the Revolutionary Tribunal of the Republican government established after the fall of the monarchy (and the execution of her husband) in the French Revolution.

Bonus: “Marie Antoinette, the original influencer” (?)

source