The Reformation

by Will Durant

  First, It is our humble petition and request, as also the will and intention of all of us, that in the future we should have authority and power so that a whole community should choose and appoint a pastor, and also have the right to depose him. ...

  Second, Since the tithe is appointed in the Old Testament and fulfilled in the New, we will .... pay the just tithe of grain, but in a proper way.... . We will that for the future this be gathered and received by our church provost, whom the community appoints; that out of it there shall be given to the pastor... a modest, sufficient maintenance for him and his... that the remainder shall be distributed to the poor and needy who are in the same village.... . The small tithe we will not give at all, for God created cattle for the free use of men.....

  Third, It has been the custom hitherto for men to hold us as their own property, and this is pitiable, seeing that Christ has redeemed and bought us all with the precious shedding of His blood, the lowly as well as the great .... Therefore it agrees with Scripture that we be free, and will be so.... . To our chosen and appointed rulers (appointed for us by God) we are willingly obedient in all proper a d Christian matters, and have no doubt that, as true and real Christians, they will gladly release us from serfdom, or show us in the Gospel that we are serfs....

  Sixth, We have a heavy grievance because of the services which are increased from day to day....

  Eighth, We are greatly aggrieved, as many of us have holdings that will not support the rents we pay, and the peasants suffer loss and ruin. Let the lords have honorable men inspect said holdings, and fix fair rent... for every laborer is worthy of his hire.....

  Tenth, We are aggrieved because some have appropriated to themselves meadows out of the common fields, which once belonged to the community.....

  Eleventh, We would have the death dues entirely abolished. We will not suffer it, nor allow widows and orphans to be so shamefully robbed....

  Twelfth, If one or more of the articles here set forth .... can be shown to us by the Word of God to be improper, we will recede from it if this is explained to us with arguments from Scripture.18

  The peasant leaders, encouraged by Luther’s semi-revolutionary pronouncements, sent him a copy of the Articles, and asked for his support. He replied with a pamphlet printed in April 1525: Ermahung zum Frieden (Admonition to Peace). He applauded the peasants’ offer to submit to correction by Scripture. He noted the charges, now rising, that his speeches and writings had stirred revolt; he denied his responsibility, and referred to his inculcation of civil obedience. But he did not withdraw his criticism of the master class:

  We have no one on earth to thank for this mischievous rebellion except you, princes and lords, and especially you blind bishops and mad priests and monks, whose hearts are hardened against the Holy Gospel, though you know that it is true and that you cannot refute it. Besides, in your temporal government, you do nothing but flay and rob your subjects, in order that you may lead a life of splendor and pride, until the poor common people can bear it no longer.... Well, then, since you are the cause of this wrath of God, it will undoubtedly come upon you, if you do not mend your ways in time.... The peasants are mustering, and this must result in the ruin, destruction, and desolation of Germany by cruel murder and bloodshed, unless God shall be moved by our repentance to prevent it.19

  He counseled the princes and lords to recognize the justice of many of the Articles, and urged a policy of kindly consideration. To the peasants he addressed a frank admission of their wrongs, but pleaded with them to refrain from violence and revenge; a resort to violence, he predicted, would leave the peasants worse off than before. He foresaw that a violent revolt would bring discredit upon the movement for religious reform, and that he would be blamed for everything. He objected to the appropriation of tithes by each congregation. The authorities should be obeyed, and had a right to tax the people to pay the expenses of government. The “freedom of the Christian man” was to be understood as a spiritual liberty, consistent with serfdom, even with slavery.

  Did not Abraham and other patriarchs and prophets use slaves? Read what St. Paul teaches about servants, who at that time were all slaves. Therefore your third article is dead against the Gospel.... . This article would make all men equal... and that is impossible. For a worldly kingdom cannot stand unless there is in it an inequality of persons, so that some are free, some imprisoned, some lords, some subjects.20

  His final advice, had it been followed, would have spared Germany much bloodshed and devastation:

  Choose among the nobles certain counts and lords, and from the cities certain councilmen, and have these matters dealt with and settled in a friendly way. You lords, let down your stubbornness... and give up a little of your tyranny and oppression, so that poor people get air and room to live. The peasants for their part should let themselves be instructed, and give over and let go some of the Articles that grasp too far and too high.21

  The peasant leaders, however, felt that it was now too late to retrace their steps; in any conciliation they would sooner or later be punished. They mourned Luther as a traitor, and went on with the revolt. Some of them took quite literally the dream of equality: the nobles were to dismantle their castles, and live like peasants and burghers; they were no longer to ride on horseback, for that raised them above their fellow men. Pastors were to be informed that they were henceforth servants, not masters, of their congregations, and would be expelled if they did not adhere strictly and only to the Scriptures.22 Corresponding demands came from the workmen of the towns. They denounced the monopoly of city offices by the rich, the embezzlement of public funds by corrupt officials, the perpetually rising prices while wages stood almost still. “It would be better for the salvation of the soul,” said one radical, “if the lord prelates were not so rich and luxurious, and if their possessions were divided among the poor.” 23 Wendel Hipler and Friedrich Weigant proposed that all Church property should be confiscated to secular needs; that all transport tolls and tariff duties should be removed; that there should be throughout the Empire one coinage and one system of weights and measures.24

  The movement had a colorful assortment of leaders: the innkeepers George Metzler and Metern Feuerbacher, the jolly roisterer Jäcklein Rohrbach, some ex-soldiers and priests, and two knights from Sickingen’s defeated band—Florian Geyer and Götz von Berlichingen “of the Iron Hand”; Hauptmann and Goethe would later choose these two as heroes for vivid plays. Each leader was sovereign over his own group, and rarely concerted his action with the others. Nevertheless, in the spring of 1525, the revolt flared up in a dozen scattered localities about the same time. At Heilbronn, Rothenburg, and Würzburg a commune of labor representatives captured the municipal administration. At Frankfurt-am-Main the victorious commune announced that it would thereafter be council, burgomaster, pope, and emperor all in one. At Rothenburg the priests were driven from the cathedral, religious images were demolished, a chapel was smashed to the ground (March 27, 1525), and clerical wine cellars were emptied with triumphant gaiety.25 Towns subject to feudal lords renounced their fealty; episcopal towns called for an end to clerical privileges, and agitated for the secularization of ecclesiastical property. Nearly the whole duchy of Franconia joined the revolt. Many lords and bishops, unprepared to resist, swore to accept the reforms demanded of them; so the bishops of Speyer and Bamberg, and the abbots of Kempten and Herzfeld. Count William of Henneberg freed his serfs. Counts George and Albrecht of Hohenlohe were summoned before peasant leaders and were initiated into the new order: “Brother George and brother Albrecht, come hither and swear to the peasants to be as brothers to them, for you are now no longer lords but peasants .” 26 Most of the towns received the rural rebels with a hearty welcome. Many of the lower clergy, hostile to the hierarchy, supported the revolt.

  The first serious encounter took place at Leipheim on the Danube near Ulm (April 4, 1525). Under an energetic priest, Jakob Wehe, 3,000 peasants captured the town, drank all discoverable wine, pillaged
the church, smashed the organ, made themselves leggings from sacerdotal vestments, and paid mock homage to one of their number seated on the altar and robed as a priest.27 An army of mercenaries hired by the Swabian League and led by an able general, Georg von Truchsess, laid siege to Leipheim, and frightened the undisciplined peasants into surrender. Wehe and four other leaders were beheaded, the rest were spared, but the League’s troops burned many peasant cottages.

  On Good Friday, April 15, 1525, three rebel contingents under Metzler, Geyer, and Rohrbach laid siege to the town of Weinsberg (near Heilbronn), whose ruling Count Ludwig von Helfenstein was especially hated for his severities. A delegation of peasants approached the walls and asked for a parley; the Count and his knights made a sudden sortie and massacred the delegation. On Easter Sunday the attackers, helped by some citizens of the town, broke through the walls, and cut down the forty men-at-arms who cared to resist. The Count, his wife (a daughter of the late Emperor Maximilian), and sixteen knights were taken prisoner. Rohrbach, without consulting Metzler or Geyer, ordered the seventeen men to run the gantlet between rows of peasants armed with pikes. The Count offered all his fortune in ransom; it was refused as a temporizing expedient. The Countess, prostrate and delirious, begged for her husband’s life; Rohrbach bade two men hold her up so that she could witness the orgy of revenge. As the Count walked to his death amid a volley of daggers and pikes, the peasants recalled to him his own brutalities. “You thrust my brother into a dungeon,” one cried, “because he did not bare his head as you passed by.” “You harnessed us like oxen to the yoke,” shouted others; “you caused the hands of my father to be cut off because he killed a hare on his own field.... Your horses, dogs, and huntsmen have trodden down my crops.... You have wrung the last penny out of us.” During the next half-hour the sixteen knights were similarly laid to rest. The Countess was allowed to retire to a convent.28

  In nearly every section of Germany peasant bands were running riot. Monasteries were sacked, or were compelled to pay high ransoms. “Nowhere,” says a letter of April 7, 1525, “do the insurgents make a secret of,.. their intention to kill all clerics who will not break with the Church, to destroy all cloisters and episcopal palaces, and to root the Catholic religion utterly out of the land.” 29 This is probably an exaggeration, but we may note that in Bavaria, Austria, and Tirol, where Protestantism had apparently been suppressed, the rebels captured many towns, and compelled Archduke Ferdinand to agree that all preaching should henceforth be according to Scripture—a characteristic Protestant demand. At Mainz Archbishop Albrecht fled before the storm, but his deputy saved the see by signing the Twelve Articles and paying a ransom of 15,000 guilders. On April 11 the townsfolk of Bamberg renounced the bishop’s feudal sovereignty, pillaged and burned his castle, and plundered the houses of the orthodox. In Alsace the revolt spread so rapidly that by April’s end every Catholic or rich landlord in the province was in terror of his life. On April 28 an army of 20,000 peasants attacked Zabern, seat of the bishop of Strasbourg, and despoiled his monastery; on May 13 they took the town, forced every fourth man to join them, renounced all payment of tithes, and demanded that thereafter all officials except the emperor should be elected by popular suffrage, and be subject to recall.30 At Brixen in Tirol a former episcopal secretary, Michael Gasmaier, organized a revolt that attacked all orthodox clergymen, sacked the local monastery (May 12), and remained rampant and unsubdued for a year. In all the valleys of the Inn and Etsch rivers, says an unsympathetic chronicler of the time, “there was such a concourse, cry, and tumult that hardly might a good man walk in the streets. Robbing and plundering... became so common that even pious men were tempted thereto.” 31 At Freiburgim-Breisgau the peasants looted castles and monasteries, and forced the city to join the “Evangelical Brotherhood” (May 24). In that same month a peasant band drove the bishop of Würzburg out of his palace, and feasted on his stores. In June the powerful and warlike Archbishop Matthias Lang was chased from his palace in Salzburg into his castle fortress overlooking the city. In Neustadt in the Palatinate Elector Ludwig, surrounded by 8,000 armed peasants, invited their leaders to dinner, and cheerfully complied with their demands. “There,” said a contemporary, “one saw villeins and their lord sit together, eat and drink together. He had, as it seemed, one heart to them, and they to him.” 32

  Amid this torrent of events Luther issued from the press of Wittenberg, toward the middle of May 1525, a pamphlet “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants.” Its vehemence startled prince and peasant, I prelate and humanist, alike. Shocked by the excesses of the infuriated rebels, 1 dreading a possible overturn of all law and government in Germany, and stung by charges that his own teachings had loosed the flood, he now ranged himself unreservedly on the side of the imperiled lords,

  In the former book I did not venture to judge the peasants, since they had offered to be set right and be instructed.... . But before I look around they, forgetting their offer, betake themselves to violence, and rob and rage and act like mad dogs.... It is the Devil’s work they are at, and in particular it is the work of the archdevil [Münzer] who rules at Mülhausen.... I must begin by setting their sins before them.... Then I must instruct the rulers how they are to conduct themselves in these circumstances.....

  Any man against whom sedition can be proved is outside the law of God and the Empire, so that the first who can slay him is doing right and well.... For rebellion brings with it a land full of murder and bloodshed, makes widows and orphans, and turns everything upside down.... Therefore let everyone who can, smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is just when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him he will strike you, and a whole land with you.....

  He rejected the supposed Scriptural warrant for communism:

  The Gospel does not make goods common, except in the case of those who do of their own free will what the Apostles and disciples did in Acts iv. They did not demand, as do our insane peasants in their raging, that the goods of others—of a Pilate or a Herod—should be common, but only their own goods. Our peasants, however, would have other men’s goods common, and keep their own goods for themselves. Fine Christians these! I think there is not a devil left in hell; they have all gone into the peasants.

  To Catholic rulers he offered his forgiveness if they smote the rebels without trial. To Protestant rulers he recommended prayer, contrition, and negotiation; but if the peasants remain obdurate,

  then swiftly grasp the sword. For a prince or lord must remember in this case that he is God’s minister and the servant of His wrath (Romans, xiii), to whom the sword is committed for use upon such fellows.... If he can punish and does not—even though the punishment consist in the taking of life and the shedding of blood—then he is guilty of all the murder and all the evil which these fellows commit.... The rulers, then, should go on unconcerned, and with a good conscience lay about them as long as their hearts still beat.... . If anyone think this too hard, let him remember that rebellion is intolerable, and that the destruction of the world is to be expected every hour.33

  It was Luther’s misfortune that this outburst reached its readers just about the time that the forces of the propertied classes were beginning to subdue the revolt; and the Reformer received undue credit for the terrorism of the suppression. It is unlikely that the endangered masters were influenced by the pamphlet; it was in their temper to handle the insurgents with a severity that would serve as a deterrent in unforgettable memory. For a time they had bemused the simple peasants with parleys and promises, and had thereby persuaded many of the bands to disperse; meanwhile the masters organized and armed their levies.

  At the height of the turmoil Elector Frederick died (May 5, 1525), himself calm and at peace, admitting that he and other princes had wronged the peasant, refusing to join in extreme measures of retaliation, and leaving to his successor, Duke John, urgent counsels of moderation. But the new E
lector felt that his brother’s policy had been unwisely lenient. He joined his forces with those of Duke Henry of Brunswick and Philip Landgrave of Hesse, and together they moved against Münzer’s encampment outside Mühlhausen. The opposed armies were matched only in number—each some 8,000 strong; but the ducal troops were mostly trained soldiers, while the peasants, despite Münzer’s home-made artillery, were indifferently armed, poorly disciplined, and disordered with natural fright Münzer relied on his eloquence to restore morale, and led the peasants in ayer and hymns. The first barrage of the princely cannon slaughtered hundreds, and the terrified rebels fled into the town of Frankenhausen (May 15, 1525). The victors followed, and massacred 5,000. Three hundred prisoners were condemned to death; their women pleaded mercy for them; it was granted, on condition that the women should beat out the brains of two priests who had encouraged the revolt; it was so done, while the triumphant dukes looked on.34 Münzer hid, was captured, was tortured into confessing the error of his ways, and was beheaded before the headquarters of the princes. Pfeiffer and his 1,200 soldiers defended Mühlhausen; they were overcome; Pfeiffer and other leaders were put to death, but the citizens were spared on paying a total ransom of 40,000 guilders ($1,000,000?).

  Meanwhile Truchsess took the town of Böblingen by negotiation, and from within its walls turned his guns upon a rebel camp outside (May 12). Those of the peasants who survived this cannonade were cut down by his cavalry; this ended the revolt in Württemberg. Turning next to Weinsberg, Truchsess burned it to the ground, and slowly roasted Jäcklein Rohrbach, who had directed the “Massacre of Weinsberg.” Truchsess marched on to rout peasant forces at Königshofen and Ingolstadt, recaptured Würzburg, and beheaded eighty-one chosen rebels as a memento for the rest (June 5). Florian Geyer escaped from Würzburg into obscurity, and remained a cherished legend. Götz von Berlichingen surrendered in apt time, lived to fight for Charles V against the Turks, and died in his own bed and castle at eightytwo (1562). Rothenberg was taken on June 20, Memmingen soon afterward. The revolt in Alsace was crushed by the slaughter of from 2,000 to 6,000 men at Lipstein and Zabern (May 17–18). By May 27 some 20,000 peasants had been killed in Alsace alone, in many cases after surrender; the air of the towns was fetid with the stench of the dead.35 Markgraf Casimir had some of his surrendering peasants beheaded, some hanged; in milder cases he chopped off hands or gouged out eyes.36 Saner princes finally intervened to reduce the barbarism of the retaliation, and at the end of August the Diet of Augsburg issued a rescript urging moderation in punishments and fines. “If all the rebels are killed,” one philosophic noble asked, “where shall we get peasants to provide for us?”37