German Peasants' War

The German Peasants’ War, sometimes called the Great Peasants’ Revolt, was a large-scale uprising in German-speaking parts of Central Europe that lasted from 1524 to 1525. It was the biggest and most widespread popular rebellion in Europe before the French Revolution of 1789. The revolt ultimately failed because the aristocracy fought back fiercely. They killed as many as 100,000 of the roughly 300,000 poorly armed peasants and farmers.

Those who survived were fined, and the rebels achieved very little of what they had wanted. Like the earlier Bundschuh movement and the Hussite Wars, this war was made up of a mix of economic and religious revolts involving peasants and farmers, sometimes backed by radical clergy such as Thomas Müntzer. The heaviest fighting took place around the middle of 1525. The conflict began with separate uprisings in what is now southwestern Germany and Alsace, then spread to central and eastern Germany, as well as parts of present-day Austria.

After the revolt in Germany was put down, it briefly flared up again in a few cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy. The peasants faced huge obstacles. Their movement was democratic, which meant they had no clear command structure.

They also lacked artillery and cavalry, and very few of them had any military experience. Their opponents, on the other hand, had experienced military leaders, well-equipped and disciplined armies, and plenty of money. The uprising used some ideas and language from the emerging Protestant Reformation, as the peasants hoped to gain influence and freedom. Some Radical Reformers, especially Thomas Müntzer, encouraged and supported the revolt.

Luther and Müntzer

But Martin Luther and other Magisterial Reformers condemned it and took the side of the aristocrats. In his pamphlet Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, Luther called the violence the devil’s work and urged the nobles to crush the rebels like mad dogs. Huldrych Zwingli supported the movement, but Luther’s condemnation helped bring about its defeat. About twenty veterans of the war later became leading figures in the Anabaptist movement, though historian James Stayer notes that no large number of known Anabaptists can be identified by name as having taken part in the 1525 uprising.

Background

In the 1500s, many parts of Europe were loosely connected within the Holy Roman Empire, a decentralized entity where the emperor himself had little power outside his own family lands, which were only a small part of the whole. At the time of the Peasants’ War, Charles V, King of Spain, was the Holy Roman Emperor (elected in June 1519). Aristocratic dynasties ruled hundreds of mostly independent territories—both secular and religious—within the empire, and several dozen others operated as semi-independent city-states. These princes were taxed by the Roman Catholic Church.

Roman civil law

They stood to gain financially if they broke away from Rome and set up a German church under their own control, which would not tax them the same way. Many German princes did break with Rome, using the nationalist slogan “German money for a German church.” Princes often tried to force their freer peasants into serfdom by raising taxes and introducing Roman civil law. This law helped princes consolidate power because it gave them personal ownership of all land and got rid of the feudal idea that land was a trust between lord and peasant, which gave the peasant both rights and duties. By keeping the remnants of older laws that supported their own rule, the princes not only increased their wealth and status in the empire by taking all property and revenues, but also strengthened their control over their peasant subjects.

During the Knights’ War of 1522–1523, the lesser landholders of the Rhineland in western Germany rose up. Their rhetoric was religious, and several leaders used Luther’s ideas about breaking with Rome and creating a new German church. But the Knights’ War was not really about religion. It was conservative and aimed at preserving the feudal order.

The knights rebelled against the new money-based economy, which was pushing them out of existence. Martin Luther, the main leader of the Reformation in Germany, initially took a middle position in the Peasants’ War. He criticized both the injustices the peasants suffered and the rashness of their rebellion.

He also tended to support the centralization and urbanization of the economy. This stance alienated the lesser nobles but strengthened his support among the burghers. Luther argued that work was the chief duty on earth: peasants were meant to farm, and rulers were meant to keep the peace. He could not support the Peasants’ War because it broke the peace—an evil he considered worse than the evils the peasants were fighting against.

At the height of the rebellion in 1525, his position shifted completely to backing the secular princes and their Roman Catholic allies. In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants (May 1525), Luther urged the nobility to swiftly and violently eliminate the rebelling peasants, writing that they “must be sliced, choked, stabbed, secretly and publicly, by those who can, like one must kill a rabid dog.” After the war ended, he was criticized for these writings supporting the nobles’ violent actions. He responded with an open letter to Caspar Muller, defending his position. Still, he also said that the nobles had been too harsh in putting down the rebellion, even though he had earlier called for severe violence.