astrologers warned of calamity in southern Germany: floods and failed harvests The clergy would ‘drink the cup of bitterness’ But peasant disquiet was sufficiently visible to make planetary auguries redundant When the serfs of Stühlingen rose up at midsummer the catalyst was mundane: the countess of Lupfen had made them collect snail shells to use as thread bobbins at court Rebellion spontaneously combusted on nearby estates The nobility at Stühlingen received 62 complaints relating to abuses of their obligations and privileges amounted to ‘an indictment of an entire system’ The rebellion spread through the Black Forest to Upper Swabia along the Rhine to Alsace and into Franconia As Roper demonstrates in her absorbing account of the Peasants’ War this outburst was more than a historical curiosity The rebellion was an expression of a novel political sensibility and has informed every major European insurrection since; it can’t be understood without considering the rebels’ inner lives as well as their material circumstances Only three years had passed since Charles V castigated Martin Luther at Worms for his 95 theses and other foundational texts of the Reformation Although Luther shrank back to a more conservative position his doctrine of the priesthood of all believers inspired radical clerics such as Thomas Müntzer to speak out against clerical abuses In Luther’s university town of Wittenberg the polemical Andreas Karlstadt advocated change far beyond anything Luther had intended An elevated sense of communal peasant responsibility together with criticism of Church property rights can also be traced to Lutheran ideas mixed concepts of devotional liberty and economic liberty in a new and incendiary way There had been revolts in the German territories against taxes and tithes in the late 15th century as there had been in England and France a century earlier These generated ardent rhetoric about access to land and resources inflected by grumbling anti-clericalism and backed by scriptural justification and mystical visions the so-called Bundschuh rebels – their emblem was a peasant’s shoe – learned about the efficacy of brotherly association swearing oaths of loyalty and friendship which would influence the future uprising But what made the war of 1524-25 so much more serious was the way that Lutheran ‘freedom’ undermined ecclesiastical authority and broadened disparate complaints in different regions into censure of the nature of lordship itself specifically that it had become ‘un-Christian’ Luther had proposed that peasants were their own Christian lords with a duty of service to all other believers thus redirecting the flow of obligation by ninety degrees This wasn’t entirely outrageous: townsmen and even some lords sympathised given that social discord threatened all order and prosperity Serfdom was permitted by civil law but was at odds with the consensual social relations that had evolved from ancient usage animalistic mob.’ Economic conditions and seigneurial rights varied across jurisdictions where some peasants were more affluent and powerful than others but more important was the economic upswing that followed the Black Death in the mid-14th century Peasant assertiveness was born not of desperation but new-found political confidence: being better off made serfdom even less acceptable The homogenisation of feeling that fuelled the Peasants’ War was made possible by cheap print which was also the cornerstone of the Reformation peasant bands in Upper Swabia adopted the Twelve Articles a set of demands that covered such matters as appointing preachers and the unconscionable proliferation of laws and dictates by landlords The document was a synthesis of complaints which had been around for some time but couched in seductive prose and printed in 25,000 copies like Luther’s bill post at Wittenberg could be fixed to a church door by anyone with a hammer the medium mattered almost as much as the message ‘You could pick them up and hold them in your hand,’ Roper writes ‘point to each demand and the biblical passages that proved their godliness.’ As with Protestant propaganda the copies of this unlikely bill of rights were emblazoned with woodcuts showing peasants gathered in amity Scores of marchers became an army of hundreds its momentum born of necessity as well as zeal: without supply lines the peasants had to keep moving to feed themselves and using the language of Christian love and the light of the gospel these letters were nonetheless veiled threats: are you with us but the sight of a vast mob at the walls exerted its own persuasive force the records could always be adjusted to suggest that the authorities had surrendered only reluctantly The nearest comparator the rebels would have had to the marches of the Peasants’ War was pilgrimage to a monastery to revere a holy relic The difference in 1524 was that along with the marchers’ giddy sense of liberation went the urge to sack and loot and destroy for the hell of it The peasants found themselves drunk on lawlessness The religious houses and baronial castles they stormed were fabulously opulent At Eberbach in the Rheingau they came across a barrel containing a hundred tuns – 100,000 litres – of wine and managed to drink two-thirds of it (so the story goes) they enjoyed savouries and sweetmeats grabbed from well-stocked kitchens ‘We’re eating goose!’ was the battle cry in Alsace the abbot of Weissenau in Swabia commissioned a pictorial narrative of peasants boozing a rebel leader makes himself comfortable in the abbot’s seat like a self-appointed lord of misrule while the monks flee to Ravensburg with whatever they can carry ‘It must have been sensational to enter these enclosed communities,’ Roper suggests jewelled chalices and massive stores of food.’ Swabian peasants broke into Burg Liebenthann They stole the abbot’s bed (having first removed the sleeping abbot) then razed his home to the ground After the town council at Heilbronn sacrificed its monasteries to save its skin peasants discovered nine sacks of gold in the bell tower of the Teutonic Order Other nickable wealth was tied up in livestock The counts of Ebeleben in Thuringia itemised their losses: 482 sheep 300 hens as well as a quantity of feather pillows on which peasant heads rested that night Rebels relaxing in an alehouse in Frankenhain arranged the removal of grain and other foodstuffs from the local castle Such stories multiplied across the territories A third of all monastic institutions were attacked; in Thuringia and Saxony Nuns and priests were ridiculed and assaulted In the region of Würzburg and Bamberg more than fifty monasteries and nearly three hundred castles were destroyed because they ‘wrote lordship into the landscape’ who insisted that the insurgents had mistaken his idea of spiritual liberty for political liberty A peasant’s understanding of the gospel was embedded in an instinctive sense of fairness and harmony with nature Just as Christ intended for all men to share in his sacrifice so all men should share in the bounties of God’s creation – and not be meanly denied by monks This thinking was streaked with nostalgia; like so many protests of early modern ‘rioters’ the privileges listed in the Twelve Articles were largely conservative an appeal to social superiors to keep their side of the bargain These were not proto-republican rights for the individual: they were collective customs part of a prelapsarian vision in which people were free to enjoy the fruits of the fields and forests But in the spring of 1525 the peasants made war on their masters forcing them into humiliating – and unforgivable – postures of dependency Swathes of territory came under the control of ragtag regiments Yet keeping hold of its gains was a problem for an army in perpetual motion by April the tide in some regions was turning drowned or taken prisoner by the mounted knights of the Swabian League the survivors hiding in trees or frantically banging on the town gates and the well-trained warriors’ insistence that the peasants had fought ‘manfully’ was a feint to make yokels who ran away seem more like worthy adversaries The peasants didn’t even pretend to be chivalrous 24 captured knights were made to run the gauntlet – a corridor of lethally stabbing lances This and other atrocities ended the carnivalesque mood and altered the course of the war Humorous inversions were funny or salutary only when (as with the appointment of boy bishops) they could be safely reversed it was hard for peasants to preach Christian brotherhood with so much blood on their hands The scale of their reverses may even have suggested a loss of heavenly favour fifteen hundred peasants were driven into a ditch to die ten times that many failed to take the castle at Würzburg even under the charismatic leadership of Florian Geyer a pious knight with a prosthetic iron hand both of whom had thrown in their lot with the peasants in the Tyrolean Alps and the collieries of Saxony though by now the brutalising effects of civil war were plain to see four thousand peasants were killed at Böblingen in Württemberg a massacre of noble and clerical prisoners – ‘divine justice’ who led the Thuringian peasants responsible – was followed by a crushing defeat at Frankenhausen and the deaths of thousands of men whose blood ran along a gulley after a fiery exchange of scriptural justifications with Philip of Hesse By June the peasants had all but lost in Franconia Then the Swabian League scattered five thousand rebels near Würzburg ending the war and commencing an orgy of mopping-up and retribution that chroniclers blenched to describe Ritualised executions righted the social order the condemned were arranged in circles to mimic and mock their huddled conspiracies Sixty-two citizens of Kitzingen were blinded by the Margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach so that those who had not seen him as their lord ‘should see him no more’ Mindful not to destroy their own workforce the lords mostly settled for fines and the reswearing of feudal oaths renouncing fraternity with a raised index finger of obedience Much of the trauma of the war went unrecorded Albrecht Dürer had a disturbing dream in which lumpy columns of rain descended near Nuremberg; Roper believes it must have been connected to disturbances in his world which depicted a peasant with a knife in his back a fountain showing a peasant rolling around drunk was built in Mainz a sardonic reference to those who had helped themselves to the 100,000-litre barrel of wine at Eberbach A story circulated that it had been blessed by the devil lampooning the spiritual egalitarianism to which the peasants had laid claim were flipped to serve the resurgent status quo and establish a lasting public memory of the wickedness of rebellion Interpretations of the Peasants’ War in later centuries have been no less tendentious It was the greatest mass revolt in Europe before the French Revolution; some 100,000 people died Roper’s book is the first major re-evaluation for forty years A divided Germany led to different interpretations of the war The West celebrated the Twelve Articles as a blueprint of social democracy and cheered on communitarianism (but forgot to mention women); the East studied the rebellion in the spirit of Marxism and lionised Müntzer as a progenitor of revolutionary socialism The Czech text of Müntzer’s Prague Manifesto of 1521 was given to Stalin as a birthday present naming Waffen-SS divisions after Geyer and Berlichingen Diarmaid MacCulloch wrote about Martin Luther: Renegade and Prophet in the LRB of 11 August 2016 More by this contributorMalcolm Gaskill07 November 2024 Newsletter Preferences This site requires the use of Javascript to provide the best possible experience Please change your browser settings to allow Javascript content to run Distribute Your News Directly to Readers and Internet Search Widespread Integration into Global News Publications Industry Specific to Reporters and Trade Publications Delivered Over News Wires Geographic & Topic Specific The MINI Cooper Convertible is the perfect companion for open-air driving adventures which opens in just 18 seconds even at speeds of up to 30 km/h enables a summery open-air feeling while driving � Mattia Binotto becomes Head of Audi F1 Project and will be responsible for overall development while Jonathan Wheatley will lead the race operations as Team Principal � Development of race car (chassis) and power unit for F1 debut in 2026 under central management � Christian Foyer becomes COO at Audi Formula Racing GmbH Audi is aligning its Formula 1 project … 2025 Live on NBC Acura at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca � Acura Motorsports and Honda Racing Corporation USA have a long successful history at WeatherTech Raceway Laguna Seca recording 19 victories�more than at any other racing circuit�in Camel Lights Toyota Mobility Foundation (TMF) in collaboration with MaRS 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Lit Fest Lead-based paints were banned for residential use in Puerto Rico and across the rest of the United States in 1978 many homes built before then still have some lead-based paint in them Most people don�t recognize that they come in proximity to products and materials that may contain mercury on a regular basis and that it only takes a small amount to pose a serious health risk Commercial banks in Africa and Latin America trail Asian counterparts in addressing critical environmental and social risks � particularly climate change and nature loss � but can lead green growth and transition according to new WWF Sustainable Banking Assessment (SUSBA) reports a senior citizen was killed with a knife in Freiburg (Germany) Eight days after a 77-year-old man was killed during a burglary in Fribourg police and the public prosecutor's office have announced the arrest of a suspect the investigators announced on Monday in the city in Baden-Württemberg the 77-year-old was found dead by a relative in his house in the Wiehre district jewelry and electronic devices are said to have been stolen from the house A special commission began its work and evidence was collected on the deceased's property as well as on adjacent woodland and meadows The investigation and the evaluation of the traces led to an urgent suspicion against the 21-year-old there had been indications of a suspicious man in the church square of the small town of Stühlingen on the border with Switzerland He had rummaged through a rucksack in a bush the officers found objects in the bushes that came from the house of the man who was killed Video footage from private security cameras near the crime scene was also analyzed They show the man who was observed in Stühlingen A rucksack found at the crime scene contained personal documents belonging to him is said to have been in Germany since May and to have been involved in property crimes in the past The Freiburg public prosecutor's office applied to the local court for a national and European arrest warrant He was arrested during the international manhunt in Bern Tausende Zuschauer bejubelten die Para-Skilangläufer zur Premiere bei der Nordischen Ski-WM in Trondheim Neben Begeisterung und Medaillen gibt es auch Kritik und Zukunftsängste Und dann war die Stimmung die ganze Zeit wie im Fußballstadion Das waren tausend mal mehr Zuschauer als sonst bei uns Wir wollen den Para-Skilanglauf auf ein anderes Level bringen