German Peasants War

10 Key excerpts on "German Peasants War"

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  The Causes of War

  Volume III: 1400 CE to 1650 CE

  • Alexander Gillespie(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Hart Publishing

    (Publisher)

  41 The Peasants’ War 71 42 See page 50. 43 Hans Boheim, as noted in MacKinnon, J (1906) A History of Modern Liberty , Vol I (London, Longmans) 172; Greengrass, M (2015) Christendom Destroyed: Europe 1517–1648 (NYC, Penguin) 82–85. 44 Scott, T (2002) ‘The German Peasants War and the Crisis of Feudalism’, Journal of Early Modern History 6 (3), 265–95; Laube, A (1987) ‘Social Arguments in Early Reformation Pamphlets and Their Sig-nificance for the German Peasants’ War’, Social History 12 (3), 361–78. Also MacKinnon, J (1906) A History of Modern Liberty , Vol I (Longmans, London) 169; ibid, Vol II, 98–100. 45 ‘The Territorial Constitution for the Tirol’, as in Scott, T (ed and trans) (1991), The German Peasants War’ (NYC, Humanity Books) 265–67, the Treaty of Miltenberg at 281–82, and the Treaty of Ortenau at 284–88; Baylor, G (ed and trans) (1991) The Radical Reformation (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press) 95–129. 6. T HE P EASANTS ’ W AR Before Luther’s work could proceed much further, rebellions by peasants broke out in Germany. These were much more extensive than those in Castile a few years earlier. 42 In Germany, not only there were more pronounced economic and political inequalities but religious discontent was also bubbling. Large numbers of common people were serfs ( servii ), which meant that although they were not slaves, their persons were unfree, being tied to the land. These people and the communities they came from had few recognised rights to representation, petition or legal redress when they were abused. Their discontent, manifested as armed violence, would reappear on an ad hoc basis throughout the sixteenth century in Northern and Eastern Europe. It appears to have begun in the fifteenth century in Swabia and the Upper Rhine in 1449 and 1459, and then broke out again in 1462 and 1478 in the Tyrol and Carinthia.

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  Religion, Politics and Social Protest

  Three Studies on Early Modern Germany

  • Peter Blickle, Hans-Christoph Rublack, Winfried Schulze, Kaspar von Greyerz(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  96 We are confronted once again with the ambiguous effects produced by peasant rebellions. They provoked a tightening of repression and control and, at the same time, led to political, social and economic reforms.

  Peasant resistance in early modern Europe, therefore had significant consequences, although these differed in nature and extent from country to country; it regulated the exercise of noble and state power, led to its rationalisation and eventually weakened it. Peasant resistance must be seen as contributing to the European tradition which established the necessity of legitimising governmental control.97 Feudal order as understood today always provided a starting-point for resistance against tyranny and the unjust behaviour of rulers. But resistance was not confined to the nobility and early parliamentary assemblies, or more generally, to the sphere of dominium politicum et regale. 98 Resistance also served the ‘common people’, whose historical importance emerges more clearly in this wider context than in the isolated analysis of a few great peasant wars which were quickly suppressed.

  Notes: Chapter 3

  This is an extended version of a paper presented to the seminar of the German Historical Institute London in June 1980. I would like to thank Professor Wolfgang J. Mommsen and the British colleagues who were present for a long and very helpful discussion. The translation was prepared by Miss Jane Williams of the Institute. The paper is a first result of a research project supported by the Stiftung Volkswagenwerk which concentrates on certain aspects of European agrarian conflicts from the fourteenth to the eighteenth centuries. The project is being carried out by Professor Peter Blickle (University of Bern) and myself. For other publications which have grown out of this project see notes 3, 5 and 48.

  1.   1   H. Kamen, The Iron Century: Social Change in Europe 1550-1660 (London, 1971), pp. 365 ff.
  2.   2   Y.-M. Bercé,

     Croquants et Nu-Pieds: les soulèvements paysans en France du XVIe au XIXe

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  War and Peace in the Religious Conflicts of the Long Sixteenth Century

  • Gianmarco Braghi, Davide Dainese, Gianmarco Braghi, Davide Dainese, Herman J. Selderhuis(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

    (Publisher)

  © 2023 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht | Brill Deutschland GmbH ISBN Print: 9783525573259 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647573250 The German Peasants’ War (1524–5) 131 Beyond political and academic discussions, the collective memory seemed to focus for centuries on the spirit of resistance, especially in areas of Southwest Germany affected by the Peasants’ War. This translated in various ways into present- day life. When in late 1970, for example, the company Daimler Benz announced plans to construct an extensive test track in Swabia, the local opposition to the project formed a Bundschuh alliance, quite literally under a banner depicting the Bundschuh together with a plough. The historical reference became even more obvious when this Bundschuh of Schwabhausen issued its own Twelve Articles of Schwabhausen. Unlike the real Bundschuh conspiracy over 450 years earlier, the po- litical alliance, consisting of youth organisations, agrarians and environmentalists, confined itself to legal means and emerged victorious. In 1987, the constitutional court in Karlsruhe ruled in their favour. 67 During that time, civic commitment in many places, including in West Germany, led to smaller and larger museums commemorating the uprising. 68 Since Germany’s reunification in 1990, public discussion tends to categorise the Peasants’ War as an uprising for human rights and democracy, bearing Protestant Christian values. Accordingly, in a speech held on 10 March 2000, in Memmingen, the German federal president, Johannes Rau, concluded: “The Twelve Articles are in their core an expression of the universality of human rights. With this conviction, they were centuries ahead of their time!” The first article of the German constitution as formulated after World War II, “The dignity of humanity is inviolable”, remains a distant echo of the peasants’ articles of 1525, according to President Rau.

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  The Abbot and his Peasants

  Territorial Formation in Salem from the Later Middle Ages to the Thirty Years War

  • Katherine Brun(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter Oldenbourg

    (Publisher)

  Idem, Social Origins, pp. 36-37. 24 Horst BUSZELLO, The Common Man's View of the State in the German Peasant War, in: The German Peasant War 1525: New Viewpoints, ed. Bob Scribner and Gerhard Benecke, Lon-don 1979, p. 110; Hans-Martin MAURER, Der Bauernkrieg als Massenerhebung: Dynamik einer revolutionären Bewegung, in: Bausteine zur geschichtlichen Landeskunde von Baden-Würt-temberg, ed. Günther Haselier et al., Stuttgart 1979, p. 272. 25 FRANZ, Bauernkrieg. Community, Lordsbip, and the German Peasants' War 87 Salem's subjects participated in the German Peasants' War with great enthusiasm and in massive numbers. An estimated 10,000 armed rebels assembled in Bermatingen alone, more than twice the total population Under the Hills. Salem's rebel subjects who rallied in Bermatingen also belonged to the Christian Union of Upper Swabia, the federation of three major armies that produced the famous Twelve Articles. 26 In a period of otherwise scarce documentation, the Linzgau peasants' involvement in the German Peasants' War illuminates certain aspects of social and political life and is-sues of grievance that are hidden from view in ordinary times. 27 This chapter suggests that the German Peasants' War was not a watershed moment in Salem's lands, yet it was a remarkable event. It was fundamentally related to political developments and to socioeconomic conditions both before and after 1525—thus it was not, as Ranke saw it, the greatest natural event in the history of the German State. 28 Just as the Ger-man Peasants' War bridges the chronological gap between the Sidelrichter dispute of 1473 and the comparatively well-documented decades around 1600, this chapter and in particular its interpretations of 1525 provides a link between Chapter 2 and the later chapters of this study. The following discussion begins by considering three themes, each of which pro-vides essential context for the German Peasants' War in the southern Linzgau.

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  Martin Luther

  Catholic Dissident

  • Peter Stanford(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Hodder Faith

    (Publisher)

  Some 25,000 copies of the ‘Twelve Articles’ were printed and circulated around Germany. By the time they appeared, the Peasants’ War was underway, from Alsace in the west to Meissen in the east, though the majority of the conflict occurred in the south and west. There was little by way of organised leadership among the rebels, little co-ordination, and a variety of motivations for taking up arms. Some were local, some economic, some social, some religious. Some of those who rebelled were traditional Catholics, some were ‘new’ Lutherans, some from other reform-minded offshoots. Zwingli offered his support to the rising from the Swiss cantons he now controlled. And, despite it being known to history as the Peasants’ War, this was by no means a straightforward class conflict.

  The immediate spark for the conflagration is as hard to identify as anything else about this rising. Some point to a ‘Knights’ Revolt’ in 1522 and 1523 in the Rhineland in the west, where groups of lesser nobility vented their dislike at losing out in the pecking order to the new merchant/burgher class in the towns. They complained that their ancestral lands were lost, their military role usurped, and that the money economy in towns replacing the existing feudal system was ruining them. This revolt was in many senses an essentially conservative and backward-looking uprising, but it may have fanned the flames of wider peasant unrest.

  Another potential starting point was the demand by a Countess Helena Lupfen in the autumn of 1524, made on her ancestral lands in Stühlingen in the Black Forest region, that ‘her’ peasants collect snail shells. She was evidently fond of winding thread around such shells and wanted a new supply. For the peasants, however, exhausted by successive failures of the harvest, the countess’s imperious and frivolous order was the last straw. They rose up in fury and their defiance quickly spread throughout southwest Germany, merging with other simmering local issues. At Kempten in Swabia, for example, fighting broke out over a dispute concerning its status as an imperial free town and the role of the local monastery.

  By the spring of 1525, the Peasants’ War was at its height. Perhaps the most notorious episode came on 17 April 1525. Count Ludwig von Helfenstein, a relative by marriage of Emperor Charles, and a group of up to seventy nobles were captured by a ‘peasants’ army’ under Jacklein Rohrbach near Weinsberg. They were made to run the gauntlet and massacred. Their relatives swore revenge.

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  The German Peasant War of 1525 – New Viewpoints

  • Bob Scribner, Gerhard Benecke, Bob Scribner, Gerhard Benecke(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  John C. Stalnaker

  3   Towards a Social Interpretation of the German Peasant War *

  The German Peasant War has long been a focal point of early modern German history. The revolutions and expectations of revolution in the later eighteenth and nineteenth centuries drew attention to the only mass insurrection of more than regional scope in earlier German history; the emancipation of the central European peasantry in the nineteenth century called to mind the violent, abortive attempt of their sixteenth-century forebears to better their condition. Since the early nineteenth century, a variety of concerns to which the Peasant War seemed pertinent have kept interest in it lively. The assumption that the 1520s were a formative period in German history, the belief that the Peasant War had important implications for evaluating the stature and influence of Luther, the recently growing concern with the history of the ‘common man’, the search for a typology of revolution, and the recognition of the frequency and importance of peasant-based revolutions in the Third World: all these have seldom been held by the same historian, but together they have kept the German Peasant War an important and controversial event (Buszello, 1969; Steinmetz, 1965; Waas, 1964; Schulze, 1973; Vahle, 1972).

   

  * This article also appeared in a German version, which contains more extensive footnotes: John C. Stalnaker, ‘Auf dem Weg zu einer sozialgeschicht-lichen Interpretation des Deutschen Bauernkriegs 1525-6’, Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg 1524-6 (ed. H. U. Wehler), Sonderheft 1, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, Göttingen, 1975, pp. 38-60.

  Author’s note

  This essay owes more than I am aware to the stimulus of Hans Rosenberg, whose lectures introduced me to the subject more than a decade ago, and whose ‘Deutsche Agrargeschichte in alter und neuer Sicht’ (1969) set my thoughts going on the topic of this essay. However, here as elsewhere, teachers are not responsible for the vagaries of their students.

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  The German Peasant War of 1525

  • Janos Bak(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  It is also the cause of the many difficulties Marxist historians face when discussing questions of analysis and assessment, which, due to intensive historical research, may suggest corrections of the ‘classical’ position. Additional problems present themselves when the theses of the Peasant War are compared with other relevant statements of Engels, which to a certain extent contradict them. These problems have recently been discussed among the historians of the German Democratic Republic with promising results. 2 Engels drew the outline of the Marxist interpretation of the Reformation in the Peasant War on the basis of a somewhat simplified socio-economic analysis of the period. Compared with the general overview of Marx, this restricted treatment presents a rather narrow and flat view of history. Yet, Marxist-Leninist historians characterize it as an ‘unsurpassed class-analysis’ [ Bensing, 1961: 193 ], and accept it as a foundation for the thesis that the main opposing groups and their religious-political ideas, their ‘ideologies’, were basically defined by economic and social conditions. Hence the Reformation is perceived as a mass movement primarily determined by socio-economic factors and not, as by most other German historians, a process of intellectual and religious conflict and renewal. However, only the Peasant War was called a revolution by Engels. The Peasant War has always been a very popular topic with engaged socialist historians, like August Bebel [ 1876 ], Karl Kautsky [ 1895 ] and Franz Mehring [ 1964 ], who all followed Engels without adding new insights. Soviet historians turned early to the study of the peasant movements in sixteenth century Germany and M. M. Smirin [ 1955 ] placed them in the centre of his research on the period. He too followed the lead of Engels, but also considered the basic statements of Lenin [ 1963 : vol. 15, 43, vol. 35, 93–94 ] relevant to the subject

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  From Wittenberg to the World

  Essays on the Reformation and its Legacy in Honor of Robert Kolb

  • Charles Arand, Erik H. Herrmann, Daniel L. Mattson, Charles Arand, Erik H. Herrmann, Daniel L. Mattson(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht

    (Publisher)

  © 2018, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen ISBN Print: 9783525531266 — ISBN E-Book: 9783647531267 Scott Hendrix Martin Luther’s Bauernkrieg 1 The following summary of the Peasants’ War was written in 1525 on the title page of Martin Luther’s Admonition to Peace. In the year 1525 a horrible spilling of blood was caused by a widespread peasants’ war. Almost every region of Germany rebelled against the authorities with the result that about 200,000 peasants were woefully slain. It reached Alsace, Franconia, the Rhineland, the Black Forest, the Nördlingen crater, 2 Thuringia, Meissen, Swabia, and elsewhere. In the rebellious towns and countryside more than 300,000 people were killed by the sword and other weapons. O God, please forgive us and have mercy on us. 3 The number of casualties was much too high, but even for today the extent of the war was accurately portrayed—if we include under “elsewhere” the action in Austria and skirmishes outside the areas that are named. The number of dead is now estimated to be fewer than 100,000. 4 The author was well aware that the revolution of 1525, as Peter Blickle renamed it, was a war fought with deadly weapons and not a feud among farmers wielding hayforks. 5 1. The summary was probably inscribed on the front of Luther’s Admonition to Peace in order to protest Luther’s condemnation of rebelling peasants or to confirm that Luther was right to warn peasants and princes against using vio- 1 The original German text of this essay was delivered on June 3, 2013, at the Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster in a series of lectures sponsored by the Exzellenzcluster “Re- ligion und Politik.” I wish to thank Dr. Iris Flessenkämper and her colleagues for the invitation and Dr. Hauke Christiansen (Ratzeburg) for improving the original German. The essay has been translated and revised by the author. 2 The Ries, a large crater in south-central Germany about 50 miles north of Augsburg.

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  The Christian Origins of Social Revolt

  • William Dale Morris(Author)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  (The Peasant War in Germany , Engels, p. 42.)

  Luther and the Peasants

  Martin Luther, with his vague declaration of human liberty and German brotherhood, found adherents both among the peasantry and the middle class; though this uneasy unity quickly vanished when the peasants took violent measures to carry into effect what they held to be the implications of Luther’s teachings.

  The Edict of Worms (1521) had denounced Luther as an opponent of law and a breeder of sedition, and there had been some justification for this view since the early Luther had not hesitated to preach the revolutionary use of violence.

  “If the raging madness (of the Roman Church) were to continue,” he wrote, “it seems to me no better counsel and remedy could be found against it than that kings and princes apply force, arm themselves, attack those evil people who have poisoned the entire world, and once for all make an end to this game, with arms, not with words. If thieves are being punished with swords, murderers with ropes, and heretics with fire, why do we not seize, with arms in hands, all- those evil teachers of perdition, those popes, bishops, cardinals, and the entire crew of Roman Sodom? Why do we not wash our hands in their blood?”

  It was a different thing, however, when the peasants acted on this advice, and began burning castles. Luther denounced them in unbridled language.

  Dear Gentlemen, (he cried) hearken here, save there, stab, knock, strangle them at will, and if thou diest, thou art blessed; no better death canst thou ever attain.

  It is true that at first he attacked the governments as well, declaring that the revolts had been provoked by oppression; also he advised both parties to come to a peaceful understanding.

  I have told you, (he wrote) that you are both wrong and are fighting for the wrong. You nobles are not fighting against Christians, for Christians would not oppose you, but would suffer all. You are fighting against robbers and blasphemers of Christ’s name; those that die among them shall be eternally damned. But neither are the peasants fighting Christians, but tyrants, enemies of God, and persecutors of men, murderers of the Holy Ghost. Those of them that die shall also be eternally damned.

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  Lust for Liberty

  The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200–1425

  • Samuel K. Cohn Jr., Samuel Kline COHN(Authors)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Harvard University Press

    (Publisher)

  Nor did they list griev-ances over lost rights in common, as German peasants in 1524–1525 would later do, as with “a peasant war” in Normandy in 996, or when peasants resis-ted aristocratic encroachments on their economic independence from the eighth to the tenth century. 42 Nonetheless, the absence of such direct eco-nomic grievances should not lead us to follow Guy Fourquin and others who claim that because the peasants lacked such programs, no class struggle is evi-dent, and that the peasants were reactionary, desiring only to turn back the clock to some mythical golden age. The sources do not justify such conclu-sions. Instead they show peasants engaging in politics, forming assemblies and village alliances, electing their own leaders, and defending their rights by attacking their class superiors who had betrayed them. 43 Peasant Revolts 35 Peasant Revolts in France and Flanders Let us now turn to the bulk of the evidence given for peasant uprisings over the two centuries of this analysis across Italy, France, and Flanders. First, although Flanders produced the largest and longest-enduring peasant revolt in Western Europe of the Middle Ages (that of 1323–1328), the chroniclers report few other Flemish peasant uprisings for the rest of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. Peasants comprised the troops that Jacob van Artevelde sent into the field in the 1330s and those that his son Philippe mobilized from 1379 to 1383, but these wars emanated from the cities and expressed no explicit peasant grievances of either an economic or a political character. 44 Peasant uprisings were rare in France too. The Jacquerie was the exception. Only six others appear in the chronicles, and none of these was a peasant revolt in the strict sense (whether against landlords or the state). Geographi-cally, certainly the most extensive of the six were the shepherds’ and chil-dren’s crusades of 1250 and 1320.

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