Five hundred years ago, one of the greatest social movements in European history swept the Holy Roman Empire in what is now Germany. In thousands of villages, people’s private mumblings at heavy taxation, poverty and the onerous labour placed on them by their feudal lords became protest meetings. Groups of peasants walked from village to village, using the opportunities offered by fairs and markets to spread their anger and their organisation. In February 1525, in Upper Swabia, if anyone in authority asked what they were doing, the peasants replied that they were ‘fetching Shrovetide cakes from one another’.
Under the very noses of their lords and masters, the peasants built a mass movement. Meetings turned into ‘bands’ of armed rebels who elected leaders, marched through the countryside, gathering great armies tens of thousands strong. These stormed manor houses, castles, villages and towns. This rebellion, the largest on European soil until the French Revolution, is known as the German Peasant War.
A world turned upside down
It was a radical mass movement from below. Within it were revolutionary visions of a new world without oppression and exploitation. First and foremost, the rising was an expression of mass discontent at poverty, hunger and the regular deprivations of war. But it also reflected the growing contradictions of feudal society – the emergence of the first signs of the capitalist economy and its expression in the religious ferment of the German Reformation. These tensions drove rebellion from below.
In 1525 the lords, whose brutal and exploitative rule had held the peasantry in subjugation for hundreds of years, were terrified. From the rebels however, there was surprisingly little violence. But one set of killings, in Weinsberg in spring 1525, filled the lords with dread, but not just for their own health. The nobility were also terrified of a ‘world turned upside down’. In May, a local clerk wrote urgently to his master from the centre of the revolt in Upper Swabia:
‘In the land of Württemberg the peasants are very strongly united and they first took Weinsberg where there were many nobles…It is rumoured that they will march to Balingen. Lord Georg Truchsess will meet them there; God give him good fortune that it may go well, for if the league’s army is once defeated, the whole land will fall and the peasants will be the lords. May God prevent it!’
The revolution had to be stopped and that meant drowning it in blood. Armies led by the likes of Georg Truchsess stalked southern Germany, smashing peasant armies and liberating rebellious towns and cities. The rebels, or indeed anyone and anything associated with them, were destroyed. At the ‘battle’ of Frankenhausen in May 1525 thousands of rebels were massacred, chased through the streets, and murdered in cold blood. The ‘war’ became mass murder as peasants were cut down and leaders executed. So great was the killing, that one nobleman wrote to his brother cautioning against too much excess: ‘if all the peasants are killed where shall we get other peasants to make provision for us?’
The demands of the peasants
The rising was, according to Friedrich Engels, far more than another local peasant rebellion, and not because of its scale. Engels saw it as the first attempt at a bourgeois revolution in Germany. Its failure, he argued, held back the development of German society for centuries, reinforced the rule of the feudal princes and forced the peasants into renewed serfdom and oppression.
But Engels also saw in the War an expression of radical democracy, a yearning for a more equitable and just society and a hope for a better world. Each of the rebel groups produced articles – lists of demands for change – that they presented to the authorities. Most famously a meeting of rebel delegates in Memmingen, Bavaria produced Twelve Articles, which went on to be adopted and expanded everywhere else. The Twelve Articles are a powerful expression of radical peasant aspirations. From the protection of common lands, the safe-guarding of rights to hunt and fish, to an end to serfdom, the Articles articulated a vision of a world which blunted the power of the lords and introduced new, democratic rights to the village community.
Crucially the peasants framed their demands in terms of ‘Godly Law’. The bible should be the foundation for society’s laws and thus, they said, it must be accessible to all, not mediated through the nobility. Local priests should be elected to serve the community – not the system.
Reformation and revolution
Ever since 1517, when Martin Luther had initiated the Reformation, German society had been in turmoil as people fought to interpret and revaluate their religion against a corrupt and greedy Church. The Reformation provided an ideological framework that lubricated the rebellion – justifying the rising and inspiring hope. Luther was so shocked by the rising, and by its identification with his reforms, that he called on the nobility to ‘stab, smite, slay’ the rebellious peasantry. The lords needed no urging, but Luther made it clear which side he was on.
Despite the radical democratic aspirations of the rebels, and the revolutionary dreams of leaders like Thomas Müntzer in Thuringia and Michael Gaismair in Tyrol, the revolutionary movement could not break through and defeat feudalism. The next century would see the gradual development of new economic forms – an emerging capitalist economy and the development of the working class. These forces would eventually see German feudalism defeated.
Today it might seem like the struggles of the peasantry are distant and irrelevant. But in their fight against oppressive rule and exploitative labour, we can see the echoes of the hopes and dreams of our own generation. The words of Thomas Müntzer can speak to us, as much as they did to sixteenth century peasants:
‘It is the lords themselves who make the poor man their enemy. If they refuse to do away with the causes of insurrection how can trouble be avoided in the long run? If saying that makes me an inciter to insurrection, so be it!’
