When Germany Waged War on Itself
In a forthcoming book, Lyndal Roper argues that the German Peasants’ War of 1524–25 was a missed opportunity to enshrine a Christian theology centred on equality and brotherhood.
A review of Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper, 544 pages, Basic Books (forthcoming 11 February 2025).
None of the European revolutions that convulsed Europe during the early modern period were tidy affairs. The English Revolution wasn’t just a violent political contest between Royalists and Roundheads, but also an intertwined religious and territorial struggle that drew in warring factions in Ireland and Scotland. The history of the French Revolution, likewise, can’t be neatly separated from the generations-long geopolitical struggle between France and Austria. Later on, the Revolutions of 1848—sometimes referred to as the “springtime of the peoples”—took such variegated forms throughout the continent as to defy any kind of general description, laying a path toward independence for some groups while leading to an enduring authoritarian crackdown against others.
But even by this historical standard, the German Peasants’ War of 1524–25 is difficult to summarise neatly—which perhaps explains why the 500th anniversary of its commencement passed (largely) unnoticed last month. This was a brief and inglorious conflict that left Germans with few heroes to be celebrated in song and stone. Most of the peasants who took part in the fighting likely didn’t see their struggle as a “war” at all, in fact, but rather had taken up arms in response to local grievances relating to lordly (and monastic) abuses of their traditional powers.
In her forthcoming book, Summer of Fire and Blood, Australian-born Oxford University professor Lyndal Roper does an admirable job of describing the war’s origins, protagonists, and major battles. But casual readers may find it tough going, as the complex narrative requires the author to bounce from region to region as she describes the unique circumstances that caused this or that village to join the rebellion. In one area, the casus belli was hatred of a powerful cleric who’d impregnated the mayor’s daughter. In another, hungry locals had been barred from catching fish in a well-stocked pond. In the southern German town of Stühlingen, the countess had enraged her serfs by ordering them to collect snail shells, which her friends at court liked to use as spindles for their sewing thread.
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Confronted with this catalogue of feudal humiliations and cruelties, a modern reader is left to wonder why Germany’s peasants hadn’t risen up earlier. But of course, this was a different age. What inflamed most ordinary farmers wasn’t so much the grossly inequitable nature of their society—a state of affairs that everyone then took for granted—but rather the gradual imposition of new tithes, taxes, labour duties, and rules that had no basis in traditional medieval customs.
Roper, an acclaimed scholar of early modern German history, emphasises that the timing of the Peasants’ War didn’t correspond with any devastating regional cataclysm such as famine or plague. On the contrary, it unfolded against a backdrop of increased trade and early capitalist economic innovation. But the fruits of these innovations all seemed to be going to merchants, money lenders, feudal landowners, and wealthy monks—none of whom had much interest in trickle-down economics.
This was Germany’s largest peasant revolt, but it wasn’t its first. In 1476, half a century earlier, a Franconian shepherd and street performer named Hans Böhm—known to history as The Drummer of Niklashausen—received an ecstatic vision that impelled him to burn his worldly possessions and preach a hyper-egalitarian Christian doctrine very much at odds with Catholic orthodoxy. Needless to say, the church establishment was unimpressed, especially when Böhm began urging followers to rise up and assassinate local priests. His ministry-slash-uprising attracted tens of thousands of peasants to Niklashausen, before terminating abruptly when Böhm was burned as a heretic.
In Böhm’s time, Christian scripture was the only tool that dissidents could use to justify a programme of social reform—which is exactly why priests and nobles were horrified at the idea that any random street busker should be permitted to read and interpret it without priestly guidance. By the time the German Peasants’ War began, however, the church’s monopoly on Biblical exegesis was beginning to crack. Just seven years earlier, Martin Luther had penned his 95 Theses, which not only sparked what we now know as the Protestant Reformation, but also set off a flurry of vigorous religious pamphleteering throughout central Europe. If core elements of Christian beliefs were now being thrown into question, some reasoned, why not re-imagine feudalism as well?
Germany’s peasants produced their own manifestos, the most famous of which became known as the Twelve Articles (Zwölf Artikel). While the document is sometimes venerated as a German take on Magna Carta, the authors were just as concerned with religious reform as they were with securing new political and economic rights. Or, more accurately, they saw the two projects as one and the same, since their understanding of freedom—freiheit—was rooted in divine authority.
Article 3, for instance, demanded the abolition of serfdom on the basis that Christ had redeemed all of humanity with his precious blood—shepherd and nobleman alike. The next article demanded access to enclosed lands so that peasants could hunt game, fowl, and fish, in fulfilment of God’s promise to give humans power over all the world’s beasts. Likewise, the peasants’ demand that inheritance taxes be abolished was based on the claim that impoverishing widows and orphans would be a shameful slight upon God’s will.
The document also foreshadows schism points that would mark the coming doctrinal battles between Protestants and Catholics—as with the demand that preachers teach the gospel “simply,” without high-church pomp and mystical priestly flourishes.
But Roper makes it clear that the order of battle in the Peasants’ War didn’t map neatly onto a Protestant-Catholic divide. Indeed, Luther himself was completely disgusted with the chaos and bloodshed associated with the mobs’ pillaging of castles and monasteries; and denounced them with a published text entitled, Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants. (The original title, Against the Rioting Peasants, was sexed up by publishers eager to sell more copies.)
“They cloak this terrible and horrible sin with the gospel,” thundered Luther, who always struck a far more reactionary tone when excoriating the unwashed than when railing against fellow theologians. “Thus they become the worst blasphemers of God and slanderers of his holy name.”
In the early sixteenth century, the hodgepodge of duchies and princely states that we now call Germany was part of the Holy Roman Empire, whose Emperor, Charles V, was then waging war against France. Many of the troops who’d ordinarily be garrisoning German castles had been deployed to northern Italy. And so in many confrontations, peasant armies found themselves arrayed against just a handful of knights who’d been left behind to mind the shop.
As history shows, however, even large mobs of untrained amateurs typically fare poorly when confronting disciplined bands of well-armed, professionally-trained soldiers.
At the climactic Battle of Frankenhausen, Philip I, Landgrave of Hesse, required just 2,800 cavalry and 4,000 foot soldiers to utterly massacre a large peasant force allied to the apocalyptic preacher Thomas Müntzer (a former acolyte of Luther who’d decided the University of Wittenberg theologian was too tame for his tastes). Up to 10,000 peasant combatants were slaughtered in that one engagement alone—compared to just four killed in action (reportedly) on the princely side. By the time the peasants were completely defeated in late 1525, their losses were at least 100,000.
While Roper’s command of the historical facts is authoritative, she sometimes lapses into gauzy overstatement when prosecuting her argument that the peasants’ “theological, social, and political vision could have taken history in a very different direction” had they prevailed. In particular, she hints that a peasant victory might have turned Europe toward a kinder, gentler understanding of “freedom”—one that contrasts with the arid neorepublican ideal of liberty channelled during the English Civil War. In her telling, the peasant leaders were proto-socialists (my term, not hers) whose writings were “saturated with the language of brotherhood”—as opposed to crass eigennutz, or greed.
The problem here is that all political movements depend on the conceit of “brotherhood” as a means to boost morale and attract allies. And it’s hardly surprising that German peasant leaders—whose most immediate political aim was typically to enlist the men of the next village in their campaign against some despotic local grandee—would follow in this tradition. Their vision of society was no less theocratic (not to mention antisemitic) than that of the aristocrats they fought against. And it would be several centuries before their society (or any in Europe, for that matter) attained the levels of wealth, literacy, and urbanisation required to support the type of radical, deeply rooted social reformation that Loper imagines.
When playing the game of what-if, moreover, it’s worth considering that grass-roots movements focused on “direct action” (to employ the modern activist euphemism) tend to get co-opted quickly by exactly the kind of ruthless fanatic who, in temperament if not social class, is just as much a scourge upon humanity as the worst of his enemies. Lenin should come to mind here—alongside Robespierre.
In Germany, the ranks of such sociopaths included the aforementioned Müntzer, an apocalypticist who pushed recruits to their doom at Frankenhausen with the warning that those “unwilling to suffer for the sake of God” would become “martyrs for the devil.” By mid-1525, Luther and his publisher were hardly the only Germans delighted to see Müntzer’s “murderous, thieving hordes” cut down amidst the rebellion’s last bloody days.
What would a peasant-run commune have looked like in the (unlikely) event that the rebels had managed to take power? A clue comes to us from the radicalised Anabaptist movement, several of whose early leaders had come under the sway of Müntzer and his vision of a classless utopian theocracy.
In 1534, a particularly charismatic Anabaptist named Jan Matthys seized control of Münster—a city in North Rhine-Westphalia that he then presided over as a “New Jerusalem.” Imagining himself a divine heir to Gideon, the Biblical military leader who triumphed over the Midianites, Matthys led a dozen of his most fanatic followers into a massacre against the city’s princely besiegers, following which his head was stuck on a pike and (less conventionally) his genitals were nailed to Münster’s fortification.
But the Anabaptists of Münster weren’t done. Leadership of the group passed to one John of Leiden, who—in the time-honoured tradition of many supposedly classless “brotherhoods”—promptly appointed himself the city’s absolute ruler. He also ordered citizens to embrace polygamy. John himself took 16 wives, one of whom, Elisabeth Wandscherer, was reportedly executed when she criticised John for bedding new brides even as the citizens of the besieged city were starving to death. By the time princely troops finally captured the city and put John to death, his movement had degenerated into little more than a violent doomsday sex cult.
One interesting (and decidedly more cheery) subplot to end on: With its movement in disgrace following the Münster fiasco, the Anabaptists fragmented between reformers and violent hardliners. Among those repudiating the Münster fanatics was a former Catholic priest named Menno Simons who advocated a creed that “clothes the naked; feeds the hungry; consoles the afflicted; shelters the miserable; aids and consoles all the oppressed; [and] returns good for evil.”
In her conclusion, Loper writes that “with the defeat of the peasants, the vision of a new society was also lost.” But in fact, as the peasants’ vision died, another was born amid the horrors they wrought. For Menno Simons’ movement survives to the present day, and now boasts about two million adherents—known to us as Mennonites. Their commitment to pacifism may represent a minority view among Christians. But given the bloodshed that central Europe endured during the German Peasants’ War and its aftermath, one must concede that they came by it honestly.
