32. F. Engels. The Peasant War in Germany
Signed: Frederick Engels The German people, too, have their revolutionary tradition. There was a time when Germany produced characters that could match the best men in the revolutions of other countries, when the German people displayed an endurance and vigour which would in a more centralised nation have yielded the most magnificent results, and when the German peasants and plebeians were full of ideas and plans that often make their descendants shudder.
In face of the slackening that has now ensued almost everywhere after two years of struggle, it is high time to remind the German people of the clumsy yet powerful and tenacious figures of the Great Peasant War. Three centuries have passed and many a thing has changed; still the Peasant War is not so impossibly far removed from our present struggle, and the opponents who have to be fought are still essentially the same. We shall see the classes and fractions of classes which everywhere betrayed 1848 and 1849 in the role of traitors, though on a lower level of development, already in 1525. In any case, it is no credit to the modern insurrection that the robust vandalism of the Peasant War was seen only here and there in the movement of the past few years — at Odenwald, in the Black Forest, and in Silesia.
1
i
To begin with, let us briefly review the situation in Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century.
German industry had made considerable progress in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The local village industry of the feudal type was superseded by the guild system of industry in the towns, which produced for wider circles, and even for remoter markets. The weaving of coarse woollen fabrics and linens had become a permanent and widespread branch of industry, and even finer woollen and linen fabrics and silks were manufactured in Augsburg. Along with the art of weaving especial growth was witnessed in industries which were nurtured by the ecclesiastic and secular luxury of the late medieval epoch and verged on the fine arts: those of the gold- and silver-smith, the sculptor and engraver, etcher and wood-carver, armourer,(1) engraver of medals, wood-turner, etc. A succession of more or less important discoveries, the most prominent of which were the invention of gunpowder* and printing, had contributed substantially to the development of the crafts. Commerce kept pace with industry. By its century-long monopoly of sea navigation the Hanseatic League[295] ensured the elevation of all Northern Germany from medieval barbarism. Even though since the end of the fifteenth century the League had quickly begun to succumb to the competition of the English and Dutch, the great trade route from India to the north still lay through Germany, Vasco da Gama's discoveries notwithstanding, and Augsburg still remained the great market of Italian silks, Indian spices, and all Levantine products. The towns of Upper Germany, particularly Augsburg and Nuremberg, were centres of an opulence and luxury quite remarkable for that time. The production of raw materials had also considerably increased. The German miners of the fifteenth century were the most skilful in the world and the flowering of the towns had also elevated agriculture from its early medieval crudity. Not only had large stretches of land been put to the plough, but dye crops and other imported plants were introduced, whose careful cultivation had favourable influence on farming in general.
Still, the progress of Germany's national production had not kept pace with the progress in other countries. Agriculture lagged far behind that of England and the Netherlands, and industry far behind that of Italy, Flanders and England, while the English, and especially the Dutch, had already begun ousting the Germans from the sea trade. The population was still very sparse. Civilisation existed only here and there, concentrated round the several centres of industry and commerce; but the interests of even these centres were highly divergent, with hardly any point of contact. The trade relations and export markets of the South differed totally from those of the North; the East and the West stood outside almost all traffic. Not a single city was in a position to be the industrial and commercial centre of the whole country, such, for instance, as London had already become for England. All internal communications were almost exclusively confined to coastal and river navigation and to the few large trade routes from Augsburg and Nuremberg via Cologne to the Netherlands, and via Erfurt to the North. Away from the rivers and trade routes there was a number of smaller towns which lay outside the major traffic and continued to vegetate undisturbed in the conditions of the late Middle Ages, needing only few foreign goods and providing few products for export. Of the rural population only the nobility came in contact with wider circles and with new needs; in their relations, the peasant masses never went beyond their immediate locality and its hori-zons.
While in England and France the rise of commerce and industry had the effect of intertwining the interests of the entire country and thereby brought about political centralisation, Germany had not got any further than grouping interests by provinces, around merely local centres, which led to political division, a division that was soon made all the more final by Germany's exclusion from world commerce. In step with the disintegration of the purely feudal Empire, the bonds of imperial unity became completely dissolved, the major vassals of the Empire became almost independent sovereigns, and the cities of the Empire, on the one hand, and the knights of the Empire, on the other, began entering into alliances either against each other or against the princes or the Emperor. Uncertain of its own position, the imperial government vacillated between the various elements comprising the Empire, and thereby lost more and more authority; in spite of all its intrigues and violence, the attempt at centralisation in the manner of Louis XI was only just able to hold together the Austrian hereditary lands. Who finally won and were bound to win in this confusion, in these countless and interrelated conflicts, were the bearers of centralisation amidst the disunity, the bearers of local and provincial centralisation — the princes, at whose side the Emperor himself became more and more of a prince like the others.
In these circumstances, the position of the classes inherited from the Middle Ages had changed considerably, and new classes had emerged beside the old.
The princes came from the high nobility. They were already almost independent of the Emperor and possessed most of the sovereign rights. They made war and peace on their own, maintained standing armies, convened Diets, and levied taxes. They had brought a large part of the lesser nobility and most of the towns under their sway, and resorted continuously to all possible means of incorporating in their dominion all the remaining imperial towns and baronial estates. They were centralisers in respect to these towns and estates, while acting as a decentralising force in respect to the imperial power. Internally, their government was already highly autocratic. They convened the estates only when they could not do without them. They imposed taxes and borrowed money whenever it suited them; the right of the estates to ratify taxes was seldom recognised and still more seldom practised. And even when practised, the prince usually had the majority by virtue of the knights and prelates, the two tax-exempted estates that participated in the benefits enjoyed from taxes. The princes' need for money grew with their taste for luxury, the expansion of their courts, the standing armies, and the mounting costs of government. The taxes became ever more oppressive. The towns were mostly protected from them by their privileges, and the full impact of the tax burden fell upon the peasants, the subjects of the princes, as well as upon the serfs, bondsmen and tithe-paying peasants [ZinsbauernY of their vassal knights. Where direct taxation proved insufficient, indirect taxes were introduced. The most refined devices of the art of finance were called into play to fill the anaemic treasury. When nothing availed, when there was nothing to pawn and no free imperial city was willing to grant any more credit, the princes resorted to currency operations of the basest kind, coined depreciated money, and set high or low compulsory exchange rates at the convenience of their treasuries. Furthermore, trade in urban and other privileges, later forcibly withdrawn only to be resold at a high price, and the use of every attempt at opposition as an excuse for all kinds of extortion and robbery, etc., etc., were common and lucrative sources of income for the princes of the day. Justice, too, was a perpetual and not unimportant merchandise. In brief, the subjects of that time, who, in addition, had to satisfy the private avarice of the princely bailiffs and officials, had a full taste of all the blessings of the "paternal" system of government.
The middle nobility of the medieval feudal hierarchy had almost entirely disappeared; it had either risen to acquire the independence of petty princes, or sunk into the ranks of the lesser nobility. The lesser nobility, or knighthood, was fast moving towards extinction. Much of it was already totally impoverished and lived in the service of the princes, holding military or civil offices; another part of it was in the vassalage and under the sway of the princes; and a small part was directly subject to the Emperor.The development of military science, the growing importance of the infantry, and the improvement of fire-arms dwarfed the knighthood's military merits as heavy cavalry, and also put an end to the invincibility of its castles. Like the Nuremberg artisans, the knights were made redundant by the progress of industry. The knights' need for money considerably hastened their ruin. The luxury of their palaces, rivalry in the magnificence of tournaments and feasts, the price of armaments and horses — all increased with the development of society,(2) while the sources of income of the knights and barons increased but little, if at all. As time went on, feuds with their attendant plunder arid extortion, highway robbery and similar noble occupations became too dangerous. The payments and services of their subjects yielded the knights hardly more than before. To satisfy their growing requirements, the gracious knights had to resort to the same means as the princes. The peasantry was plundered by the nobility with a dexterity that increased every year. The serfs were sucked dry, and the bondsmen were burdened with ever new payments and services on a great variety of pretexts and on all possible occasions. Statute labour, tributes, rents, land-sale taxes, death taxes, protection moneys,[296] etc., were raised at will, in spite of all the old agreements. Justice was denied or sold for money, and when the knight could not get at the peasant's money in any other way, he threw him into the tower without further ado and forced him to pay a ransom.
The relations between the lesser nobility and the other estates were also anything but friendly. The knights bound by vassalage to the princes strove to become vassals of the Empire, the imperial knights strove to retain their independence; this led to incessant conflicts with the princes. The knight regarded the arrogant clergy of those days as an entirely superfluous estate, and envied them their large possessions and the wealth held secure by their celibacy and the church statutes. He was continually at loggerheads with the towns, he was always in debt to them, he made his living by plundering their territory, robbing their merchants, and by holding for ransom prisoners captured in the feuds. And the knights' struggle with all these estates became the more violent the more the money question became to them as well a question of life.
The clergy, that bearer of the medieval feudal ideology, felt the influence of historic change just as acutely. Book-printing and the claims of growing commerce robbed it of its monopoly not only in reading and writing, but also in higher education. The division of labour also made inroads into the intellectual realm. The newly rising juridical estate drove the clergy from a number of the most influential offices. The clergy was also on its way to becoming largely superfluous, and demonstrated this by its ever greater laziness and ignorance. But the more superfluous it became, the more it grew in numbers, due to the enormous riches that it still continuously augmented by all possible means.
There were two entirely distinct classes among the clergy. The clerical feudal hierarchy formed the aristocratic class: the bishops and archbishops, abbots, priors, and other prelates. These high church dignitaries were either imperial princes or reigned as feudal lords under the sovereignty of other princes over extensive lands with numerous serfs and bondsmen. They exploited their dependants as ruthlessly as the knights and princes, and went at it even more wantonly. In addition to brute force they applied all the subterfuges of religion; in addition to the fear of the rack they applied the fear of ex-communication and denial of absolution; they made use of all the intrigues of the confessional to wring the last penny from their subjects or to augment the portion of the church. Forgery of documents was for these worthies a common and favourite means of swindling. But although they received tithes from their subjects in addition to the usual feudal services and quitrents, these incomes were not enough for them. They fabricated miracle-working sacred images and relics, set up sanctifying prayer-houses, and traded in indulgences in order to squeeze more money out of the people, and for quite some time with eminent success.
It was these prelates and their numerous gendarmerie of monks, which grew constantly with the spread of political and religious witch-hunts, on whom the priest-hatred not only of the people, but also of the nobility, was concentrated. Being directly subject to the Emperor,(3) they were a nuisance for the princes. The life of luxurious pleasure led by the corpulent bishops and abbots, and their army of monks excited the envy of the nobility, and the more flagrantly it contradicted their preaching, the more it inflamed the people, who had to bear its cost.
The plebeian part of the clergy consisted of rural and urban preachers. These stood outside the feudal church hierarchy and had no part in its riches. Their work was less controlled, and, important though it was for the church, it was for the moment far less indispensable than the police services of the barracked monks. They were, therefore, the worse paid by far, and their prebends were mostly very meagre. Of burgher or plebeian origin, they were close enough to the life of the masses to retain their burgher and plebeian sympathies in spite of their clerical status. For them participation in the movements of the time was the rule, whereas for monks it was an exception. They provided the movement with theorists and ideologists, and many of them, representatives of the plebeians and peasants, died on the scaffold as a result. The people's hatred of the clergy turned against them only in isolated cases.
What the Emperor was to the princes and nobility, the Pope was to the higher and lower clergy. Where the Emperor received the "general pfennig"[297] or the imperial taxes, the Pope received the universal church taxes, out of which he paid for the luxury of the Roman court. And in no country were these church taxes collected more conscientiously and exactingly than in Germany — thanks to the power and number of the clergy. Particularly the annates,[298]
collected on the bestowal of bishoprics. The growing needs led to the invention of new means of raising revenues, such as trade in relics and indulgences, jubilee collections, etc. Large sums of money flowed yearly from Germany to Rome in this way, and the consequent increased oppression not only heightened the hatred for the clergy, but also roused the national sentiments, particularly of the nobility, the then most nationalistic estate.
In the medieval towns three distinct groups developed from the original citizenry with the growth of commerce and the handicrafts.
The urban society was headed by the patriciate, the so-called honourables. They were the richest families. They alone sat in the town council, and held all town offices. Hence, they not only administered but also consumed all the town revenues. Strong by virtue of their wealth and time-honoured aristocratic status recognised by Emperor and Empire, they exploited the town community and the peasants belonging to the town in every possible way. They practised usury in grain and money, seized monopolies of all kinds, gradually deprived the community of all rights to communal use of town forests and meadows and used them exclusively for their own private benefit, exacted arbitrary road-, bridge- and gate-tolls and other imposts, and trafficked in trade, guild, and burgher privileges, and in justice. They treated the peasants of the town precincts with no more consideration than did the nobility and clergy. On the contrary, town bailiffs and village officials, patricians all, added a certain bureaucratic punctiliousness to aristocratic rigidity and avarice in collecting imposts. The town revenues thus collected were administered in a most arbitrary fashion; the accounts in the town books, a mere formality, were neglected and confused in the extreme; embezzlement and deficit were the order of the day. How easy it was at that time for a comparatively small, privileged caste bound by family ties and common interests, to enrich itself enormously out of the town revenues, is easily seen from the many embezzlements and swindles[3] which 1848 brought to light in so many town administrations.
The patricians took pains everywhere to let the rights of the town community fall into disuse, particularly in matters of finance. Only later, when their machinations transcended all bounds, the communities came into motion again to at least gain control over the town administration. In most towns they actually regained their rights, but due to the eternal squabbles between the guilds, the tenacity of the patricians, and the protection the latter enjoyed from the Empire and the governments of the allied towns, the patrician council members soon in effect regained their former undivided dominance, be it by cunning or force. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the communities in all the towns were again in the opposition.
The town opposition to the patricians broke up into two factions which took quite distinct stands in the Peasant War.
The burgher opposition, forerunners of our present-day liberals, included the richer and middle burghers, and, depending on local conditions, a more or less appreciable section of the petty burghers. Their demands did not overstep purely constitutional limits. They wanted control over the town administration and a share in legislative power, to be exercised either by an assembly of the community itself or by its representatives (big council, community committee); further restriction of the patrician nepotism and the oligarchy of a few families which was coming to the fore ever more distinctly within the patriciate itself. At best, they also demanded several council seats for burghers from their own midst. This party, joined here and there by the dissatisfied and impoverished part of the patriciate, had a large majority in all the ordinary community assemblies and in the guilds. The adherents of the council and the more radical part of the opposition together formed only a small minority among the real burghers.
We shall see how this "moderate", "law-abiding", "well-to-do" and "intelligent" opposition played exactly the same role, with exactly the same effect, in the movement of the sixteenth century, as its successor, the constitutional party, played in the movement of 1848 and 1849.[2]"
Beyond that, the burgher opposition declaimed zealously against the clergy, whose idle luxury and loose morals roused its bitter scorn. It urged measures against the scandalous life of those worthy men. It demanded the abolition of the clergy's special jurisdiction and tax exemption, and particularly a reduction in the number of monks.
The plebeian opposition consisted of ruined burghers and the mass of townsmen without civic rights — journeymen, day labourers, and the numerous precursors of the lumpenproletariat, who existed even in the lowest stages of urban development. The lumpenproletariat is, generally speaking, a phenomenon that occurs in a more or less developed form in all the so far known phases of society. The number of people without a definite occupation and permanent domicile increased greatly at that time due to the decay of feudalism in a society in which every occupation, every sphere of life, was still fenced in by countless privileges. In all the developed countries vagabonds had never been so numerous as in the first half of the sixteenth century. In war time some of these tramps joined the armies, others begged their way across the countryside, and still others eked out a meagre living in the towns as day labourers or from whatever other occupation that was not under guild jurisdiction. All three groups played a part in the Peasant War — the first in the armies of princes which overpowered the peasants, the second in the peasant conspiracies and in peasant gangs where its demoralising influence was felt at all times, and the third in the clashes of the urban parties. It will be recalled, however, that a great many, namely those living in the towns, still had a substantial share of sound peasant nature and had not as yet been possessed by the venality and depravity of the present "civilised" lumpenproletariat.
As we see, the plebeian opposition in the towns of that day was a very mixed lot. It brought together the depraved parts of the old feudal and guild society with the undeveloped, budding proletarian elements of the germinating modern bourgeois society. There were impoverished guild burghers, on the one hand, who still clung to the existing burgher system by virtue of their privileges, and the dispossessed peasants and discharged vassals as yet unable to become proletarians, on the other. Between these two groups were the journeymen, who still stood outside official society and whose condition was as close to that of the proletariat as this could be with the contemporary state of industry and the guild privileges; but due to these privileges they were, at the same time, almost all prospective burgher artisans. The party affiliation of this conglomeration was therefore highly uncertain, and varied from locality to locality. Before the Peasant War the plebeian opposition took part in the political struggles not as a party, but as a noisy marauding tagtail of the burgher opposition, a mob that could be bought and sold for a few barrels of wine. The peasant revolts turned it into a party, and even then it remained almost everywhere dependent on the peasants in its demands and actions — a striking proof of how much the town of that time still depended on the countryside. In their independent actions, the plebeians demanded extension of the monopoly in urban handicrafts to the countryside, and had no wish to see a curtailment of town revenues come about through the abolition of feudal burdens within the town precincts, etc.; in brief, they were reactionary in their independent actions, and delivered themselves up to their own petty-bourgeois elements — a typical prelude to the tragicomedy staged in the past three years by the modern petty bourgeoisie under the trade mark of democracy.
Only in Thuringia under the direct influence of Münzer, and in a few other localities under that of his pupils, was the plebeian faction of the towns carried away by the general storm to such an extent that the embryonic proletarian element in it gained the upper hand for a time over all the other factions[2] of the movement. This episode grouped round the magnificent figure of Thomas Münzer, was the culmination point and also the briefest episode, of the Peasant War. It stands to reason that the plebeian factions were the quickest to collapse, that they had a predominantly fantastic outlook, and that the expression of their demands was necessarily extremely uncertain; in the existing conditions they found the least firm ground to stand on.
Beneath all these classes, save the last one, was the exploited bulk of the nation, the peasants. It was on the peasant that the whole arrangement of social strata reposed: princes, officials, nobles, clergymen, patricians and burghers. No matter whose subject the peasant was — a prince's, an imperial baron's, a bishop's, a monastery's or a town's — he was treated by all as a thing, a beast of burden, and worse. If a serf, he was entirely at the mercy of his master. If a bondsman, the legal levies stipulated in the agreement were enough to crush him; yet they were daily increased. He had to work on his lord's estate most of his time; out of what he earned in his few free hours he had to pay tithes, tributes, the quitrent, princely levies [Bede], road (war) tolls, and local and imperial taxes. He could neither marry nor die without paying something to the lord. Besides his statute labour he had to gather litter, pick strawberries and bilberries, collect snail-shells, drive the game in the hunt, and chop wood, etc., for his gracious lord. The right to fish and hunt belonged to the master; the peasant had to look on quietly as his crop was destroyed by wild game. The common pastures and woods of the peasants were almost everywhere forcibly appropriated by the lords. The lord did as he pleased with the peasant's own person, his wife and daughters, just as he did with the peasant's property. He had the right of the first night. He threw the peasant into the tower when he wished, and the rack awaited the peasant there just as surely as the investigating attorney awaits the arrested in our day. He killed the peasant or had him beheaded when he pleased. There was none out of the edifying chapters of the Carolina500 dealing with "ear clipping", "nose cutting", "eye gouging", "chopping of fingers and hands", "beheading", "breaking on the wheel", "burning", "hot irons", "quartering", etc., that the gracious lord and patron would not apply at will. Who would defend the peasant? It was the barons, clergymen, patricians or jurists who sat in the courts, and they knew
The 1850 edition has Faktoren (agents) instead of Fraktionen (factions).— Ed.
perfectly well what they were being paid for. After all, every official estate of the Empire lived by sucking the peasants dry.
Though gnashing their teeth under the terrible burden, the peasants were still difficult to rouse to revolt. They were scattered over large areas, and this made collusion between them extremely difficult. The old habit of submission inherited by generation from generation, lack of practice in the use of arms in many regions, and the varying degree of exploitation depending on the personality of the lord, all combined to keep the peasant quiet. For this reason we find so many local peasant insurrections in the Middle Ages but, prior to the Peasant War, not a single general national peasant revolt, at least in Germany. Moreover, the peasants were unable to make revolution on their own as long as they were confronted by the united and organised power of the princes, the nobility and the towns. Their only chance of winning lay in an alliance with other estates. But how could they join with other estates if they were exploited to the same degree by all of them?
As we see, in the early sixteenth century the various estates of the Empire — princes, nobles, prelates, patricians, burghers, plebeians and peasants — formed an extremely confusing mass with their varied and highly conflicting needs. The estates stood in each other's way, and each was continually in overt or covert conflict with all the others. The division of the nation into two large camps, as seen in France at the outbreak of the first Revolution and as witnessed today on a higher level of development in the most advanced countries, was thus a rank impossibility. Anything like it could only come about if the lowest stratum of the nation, the one exploited by all the other estates, the peasants and plebeians, would rise up. The entangle-ment of interests, views and aspirations of that time will be easily understood from the confusion brought about in the last two years by the present far less complicated structure of the German nation, consisting of the feudal nobility, the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the peasants and the proletariat.
II
il
The grouping of the then numerous and different estates into bigger entities was made virtually impossible by decentralisation, local and provincial independence, the industrial and commercial isolation of the provinces from each other, and poor communications. It came about only with the general spread of revolutionary political and religious ideas during the Reformation. The various estates that either embraced or opposed those ideas, concentrated the nation — only very laboriously, to be sure, and only approximately — into three large camps: the Catholic or reactionary, the Lutheran bourgeois reformist, and the revolutionary. If we discover little logic in this great division of the nation, and if we find partly the same elements in the first two camps, this is explained by the dissolution of most of the official estates handed down from the Middle Ages, and by the decentralisation which, for the moment, imparted to these estates in different localities opposing tendencies. In recent years we have so often encountered similar facts in Germany that this apparent jumble of estates and classes in the much more complicated environment of the sixteenth century cannot surprise us.
In spite of the latest experiences, German ideology still sees nothing except violent theological bickering in the struggles that brought the Middle Ages to an end. Should the people of that time, say our home-bred historians and political sages, have only come to an understanding concerning divine matters, there would have been no reason whatever for quarrelling over the earthly affairs. These ideologists are so gullible that they accept unquestioningly all the illusions that an epoch makes about itself or that ideologists of an epoch make about that epoch. People of that kind see in, say, the Revolution of 1789 nothing but a somewhat heated debate over the advantages a constitutional monarchy has over absolutism, in the July Revolution(1) a practical controversy over the untenability of justice "by the grace of God", and in the February Revolution(2) an attempt at solving the problem: "republic or monarchy?", etc. To this day our ideologists have hardly any idea of the class struggles fought out in these upheavals, of which the political slogan on the banner is every time a bare expression, although the tidings about them are carried discernibly enough not only from abroad, but also by the rumble and grumble of many thousands of native proletarians.
Even the so-called religious wars of the sixteenth century mainly concerned very positive material class interests; those wars were class wars, too, just as the later internal collisions in England and France. Although the class struggles of those days were clothed in religious shibboleths, and though the interests, requirements, and demands of the various classes were concealed behind a religious screen, this changed nothing at all and is easily explained by the conditions of the times.
The Middle Ages had developed altogether from the raw. They wiped the old civilisation, the old philosophy, politics and jurisprudence off the slate, to begin anew in everything. The only thing they kept from the shattered old world was Christianity and a number of half-ruined towns divested of all civilisation. As a consequence, just as in every primitive stage of development, the clergy obtained a monopoly in intellectual education and education itself became essentially theological. In the hands of the clergy politics and jurisprudence, much like all other sciences, remained mere branches of theology, and were treated in accordance with the principles prevailing in the latter. Church dogmas were also political axioms, and Bible quotations had the validity of law in any court. Even when a special estate of jurists had begun to take shape, jurisprudence long remained under the patronage of theology. This supremacy of theology in the entire realm of intellectual activity was at the same time an inevitable consequence of the fact that the church was the all-embracing synthesis and the most general sanction of the existing feudal order.
It is clear that under the circumstances all the generally voiced attacks against feudalism, above all the attacks against the church, and all revolutionary social and political doctrines were necessarily also mostly theological heresies. The existing social relations had to be stripped of their halo of sanctity before they could be attacked.
The revolutionary opposition to feudalism was alive throughout the Middle Ages. It took the shape of mysticism,[301] open heresy, or armed insurrection, depending on the conditions of the time. It is well known how much sixteenth-century reformers depended on mysticism. Münzer himself was indebted to it. The heresies gave expression partly to the patriarchal Alpine shepherds' reaction to the feudalism advancing upon them (Waldenses[302]), partly to the, opposition of the towns that had outgrown feudalism (the Albigenses,[303] Arnold of Brescia, etc.), and partly to direct peasant insurrections (John Ball and, among others, the Hungarian teacher in Picardy[304]). We can here leave aside the patriarchal heresy of the Waldenses and the Swiss insurrection, which was in form and content a reactionary, purely local attempt at stemming the tide of history. In the two remaining forms of medieval heresy we find already in the twelfth century the precursors of the great antithesis between the burgher and peasant-plebeian oppositions, which caused the defeat of the Peasant War. This antithesis is seen throughout the later Middle Ages.
The town heresies — and those are the actual official heresies of the Middle Ages — were directed primarily against the clergy, whose wealth and political station they attacked. Just as the present-day bourgeoisie demands a gouvernement à bon marché (cheap government), the medieval burghers chiefly demanded an église à bon marché (cheap church). Reactionary in form like any heresy that sees only degeneration in the further development of church and dogma, the burgher heresy demanded the revival of the simple early Christian Church constitution and abolition of exclusive priesthood. This cheap arrangement would eliminate monks, prelates, and the court in Rome; in short, all the expensive element of the church. The towns, which were republics themselves, albeit under the protection of monarchs, were the first to enunciate in general terms through their attacks upon the Papacy that a republic was the normal form of bourgeois rule. Their hostility to some of the dogmas and church laws is explained partly by the foregoing, and partly by their living conditions. Their bitter opposition to celibacy, for instance, has never been better explained than by Boccaccio. Arnold of Brescia in Italy and Germany, the Albigenses in Southern France, John Wycliffe in England, Hus and the Calixtines[305] in Bohemia, were the principal exponents of this trend. The towns were then already a recognised estate sufficiently capable of fighting secular feudalism with its privileges by force of arms or in the assemblies of the estates.
This explains quite simply why here the opposition to feudalism amounted only to opposition to ecclesiastical feudalism.
We also find in Southern France and in England and Bohemia that most of the lesser nobility joined the towns in their struggle against the clergy and in their heresies — which is explained by the dependence of the lesser nobility on the towns, and by their common interests as opposed to the princes and prelates. We shall encounter the same thing in the Peasant War.
The heresy that lent direct expression to peasant and plebeian needs and was almost invariably associated with an insurrection was of a totally different nature. Though it shared all the demands of the burgher heresy in relation to the clergy, the Papacy and the revival of the early Christian Church constitution, it went infinitely further. It demanded the restoration of early Christian equality among members of the community and recognition of this equality also as a prescript for the burgher world. It invoked the "equality of the children of God" to infer civil equality, and partly even equality of property. Equality of nobleman to peasant, of patrician and privileged burgher to the plebeian, abolition of statute labour, quitrents, taxes, privileges, and at least the most crying differences in property — those were the demands advanced with more or less determination as naturally consistent with the early Christian doctrine. At the time when feudalism was at its zenith there was little to choose between this peasant-plebeian heresy of the Albigenses, for example, and the burgher heresy, but in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries it developed into a clearly distinctive party opinion and usually occupied an independent place alongside the heresy of the burghers. This was so in the case of John Ball, preacher of Wat Tyler's rebellion in England, and the Wycliffe movement, and of the Taborites[306] and the Calixtines in Bohemia. In the case of the Taborites there was even already a republican tendency under the theocratic cloak, a view further developed by the plebeians in Germany in the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.
The fanaticism of mystically-minded sects, the Flagellants and Lollards,[307] etc., which continued the revolutionary tradition in times of suppression, was contiguous with this form of heresy.
At that time the plebeians were the only class that stood outside the existing official society. They had no access to either the feudal or the burgher association. They had neither privileges nor property; they did not even have the kind of heavily-taxed property possessed by the peasant or petty burgher. They were propertyless and rightless in every respect; their living conditions never even brought them into direct contact with the existing institutions, which ignored them completely. They were a living symptom of the decay of the feudal and guild-burgher society, and at the same time the first precursors of the modern bourgeois society.
This explains why even then the plebeian faction could not confine itself to fighting only feudalism and the privileged burghers; why, in fantasy at least, it reached beyond the then scarcely dawning modern bourgeois society; why, an absolutely propertyless faction, it questioned the institutions, views and conceptions common to all societies based on class antagonisms. In this respect, the chiliastic dream-visions[308] of early Christianity offered a very convenient starting point. On the other hand, this sally beyond the present and even the future could be nothing but violent and fantastic, and was bound to slide back at its first practical application to within the narrow limits set by the contemporary situation. The attack on private property and the demand for community of property was bound to dissolve into a primitive organisation of charity; vague Christian equality could at best dissolve into civic "equality before the law"; elimination of all authority would finally end in the establishment of republican governments elected by the people. The anticipation of communism in fantasy became in reality an anticipation of modern bourgeois conditions.
This violent anticipation of coming historical developments, easily explained by the living conditions of the plebeians, is first seen in Germany, with Thomas Münzer and his party. True, the Taborites had a kind of chiliastic community of property, but that was a purely military measure. Only in the teachings of Münzer did these communist notions express the aspirations of a real section of society. He was the first to formulate them with a certain definiteness, and only after him do we find them in every great popular upheaval, until they gradually merge with the modern proletarian movement; just as the struggles of free peasants in the Middle Ages against the increasing feudal domination merged with the struggles of serfs and bondsmen for the complete abolition of the feudal system.
The first of the three large camps, the conservative. Catholic, embraced all the elements interested in maintaining the existing conditions, i.e. the imperial authorities, the ecclesiastical and a section of the lay princes, the richer nobility, the prelates and the city patricians,while the camp of Lutheran reform, moderate in the burgher manner, attracted all the propertied elements of the opposition, the mass of the lesser nobility, the burghers, and even some of the lay princes who hoped to enrich themselves through confiscation of church estates and wanted to seize the opportunity of gaining greater independence from the Empire. As for the peasants and plebeians, they formed a revolutionary party whose demands and doctrines were most forcefully set out by Münzer.
Luther and Münzer each fully represented his party by his doctrine, as well as by his character and behaviour.
Between 1517 and 1525 Luther changed just as much as the present-day German constitutionalists did between 1846 and 1849, and as every bourgeois party does when, placed for a time at the head of the movement, it is overwhelmed by the plebeian or proletarian party standing behind it.
When in 1517 Luther first opposed the dogmas and statutes of the Catholic Church his opposition was by no means of a definite character. Though it did not overstep the demands of the earlier burgher heresy, it did not and could not rule out any trend which went further. At that early stage it was necessary that all the opposition elements should be united, the most resolute revolutionary energy should be displayed, and the sum of the existing heresies against the Catholic orthodoxy should be represented. In exactly the same way our liberal bourgeoisie of 1847 was still revolutionary, called itself socialist and communist, and clamoured for the emancipation of the working class. Luther's sturdy peasant nature asserted itself in the stormiest fashion in that first period of his activity.
"If the raging madness" (of the Roman churchmen) "were to continue, 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 put an end to this game once and for all, with arms, not with words.(3) Since we punish thieves with the sword, murderers with the halter, and heretics with fire, why do we not turn on all those evil teachers of perdition, those popes, cardinals and bishops, and the entire swarm of the Roman Sodom with arms in hand, and wash our hands in their blood?"(4)
But this initial revolutionary zeal was short-lived. Luther's lightning struck home. The entire German people was set in motion. On the one hand, peasants and plebeians saw the signal to revolt in his appeals against the clergy, and in his sermon of Christian freedom; on the other, he was joined by the moderate burghers and a large section of the lesser nobility. Even princes were drawn into the maelstrom. The former believed the day had come to settle scores with all their oppressors, the latter only wished to break the power of the clergy, the dependence upon Rome, to abolish the Catholic hierarchy and to enrich themselves on the confiscation of church property. The parties stood aloof from each other, and each had its spokesmen. Luther had to choose between them. He, the protégé of the Elector of Saxony,[3] the revered professor of Wittenberg who had become powerful and famous overnight, the great man with his coterie of servile creatures and flatterers, did not hesitate for a single moment. He dropped the popular elements of the movement and took the side of the burghers, the nobility, and the princes. His appeals for a war of extermination[15] against Rome resounded no more. Luther now preached peaceful progress and passive resistance (cf., for example, An den Adel teutscher Nation, 1520, etc.). Invited by Hütten to visit him and Sickingen in the castle of Ebern, where the nobility conspired against the clergy and the princes, Luther replied:
"I do not wish the Gospel defended by force and bloodshed. The World was conquered by the Word, the Church is maintained by the Word, the Word will also put the Church back into its own, and Antichrist, who gained his own without violence, will fall without violence."(5)
From this reversal or, to be more exact, from this more definite explication of Luther's policy sprang that bartering and haggling over institutions and dogmas to be retained or reformed, that disgusting diplomatising, conciliating, intriguing and compromising, which resulted in the Confession of Augsburg, the finally impor-tuned articles of a reformed burgher church.[309] It was quite the same kind of petty bargaining as was recently repeated in political form ad nauseam at the German national assemblies, agreement assemblies, chambers of revision, and Erfurt parliament.[310] The philistine nature of the official Reformation was most distinctly on display at these negotiations.
There were good reasons for Luther, henceforth the recognised representative of the burgher reform, to preach lawful progress. The bulk of the towns espoused the cause of moderate reform, the lesser nobility became more and more devoted to it, and a section of the princes joined in, while another section vacillated. Success was as good as won, at least in a large part of Germany. The remaining regions could not in the long run withstand the pressure of moderate opposition in the event of continued peaceful development. On the other hand, any violent upheaval was bound to bring the moderate party into conflict with the extremist plebeian and peasant party, to alienate the princes, the nobility, and many towns from the movement, leaving the alternative of either the burgher party being overshadowed by the peasants and plebeians or all the parties to the movement being crushed by a Catholic restoration. We have seen examples enough of late of how, after gaining the slightest victory, bourgeois parties sought to steer a lawful course between the Scylla of revolution and the Charybdis of restoration.
Since in the social and political conditions of that time the results of every change were bound to benefit the princes and inevitably increased their power, it came about that the burgher reform fell the more completely under the control of the reformed princes, the more sharply it broke away from the plebeian and peasant elements. Luther himself became more and more their vassal, and the people knew perfectly well what they were doing when they accused him of having become just another flunkey of the princes, and when they stoned him in Orlamünde.
When the Peasant War broke out, and this in regions where the nobility and the princes were mostly Catholic, Luther tried to strike a mediatory pose. He resolutely attacked the authorities. He said it was their oppression that was to blame for the rebellion, that it was not the peasants but God himself who had risen against them. Yet, on the other hand, he said, the revolt was ungodly and contrary to the Gospel. In the end he advised both parties to yield and reach an amicable understanding.(6)
But in spite of these well-meaning mediatory offers, the revolt spread swiftly and even involved Protestant regions dominated by Lutheran princes, lords and towns, rapidly outgrowing the "circumspect" burgher reform. The most determined faction of the insurgents under Münzer made its headquarters in Luther's immediate proximity in Thuringia. A few more successes and the whole of Germany would be in flames, Luther surrounded and perhaps piked as a traitor, and the burgher reform swept away by the tide of a peasant-plebeian revolution. This was no time for circumspection. All the old animosities were forgotten in the face of the revolution. Compared with the hordes of peasants, the servants of the Roman Sodom were innocent lambs, sweet-tempered children of God. Burgher and prince, noble and clergyman, Luther and the Pope, all joined hands "against the murderous and plundering peasant hordes".[3]
"They must be knocked to pieces, strangled and stabbed, covertly and overtly, by everyone who can, just as one must kill a mad dog\" Luther cried. "Therefore, dear sirs, help here, save there, stab, knock, strangle them everyone who can, and should you lose your life, bless you, no better death can you ever attain." There should be no false mercy for the peasant. Whoever hath pity on those whom God pities not, whom He wishes punished and destroyed, belongs among the rebels himself. Later the peasants themselves would learn to thank God when they had to give up one cow in order to enjoy the other in peace, and the princes would learn through the upheaval the spirit of the mob that must be ruled by force only. "The wise man says: cibus, onus
et virga asino.(7) The peasants must have nothing but chaff. They do not hearken to the Word, and are foolish, so they must hearken to the rod and the gun, and that serves them right. We must pray for them that they obey. Where they do not there should be little mercy. Let the guns roar among them, or else they will do it a thousand times worse."
Our late socialist and philanthropic bourgeoisie said the same things when the proletariat claimed its share of the fruits of victory-after the March events.
Luther had put a powerful tool into the hands of the plebeian movement by translating the Bible. Through the Bible he contrasted the feudalised Christianity of his day with the moderate Christianity of the first centuries, and the decaying feudal society with a picture of a society that knew nothing of the ramified and artificial feudal hierarchy. The peasants had made extensive use of this instrument against the princes, the nobility, and the clergy. Now Luther turned it against the peasants, extracting from the Bible such a veritable hymn to the God-ordained authorities as no bootlicker of absolute monarchy had ever been able to match. Princedom by the grace of God, resigned obedience, even serfdom, were sanctioned with the aid of the Bible. Not the peasant revolt alone, but Luther's own mutiny against religious and lay authority were thereby disavowed; not only the popular movement, but the burgher movement as well, were betrayed to the princes.
Need we name the bourgeois who recently provided examples of the same disavowal of their own past?
Let us now compare the plebeian revolutionary, Münzer, with Luther, the burgher reformer.
Thomas Münzer was born in Stolberg, in the Harz, somewhere around 1498.3U His father is said to have died on the scaffold, a victim of the obduracy of the Count of Stolberg. In his fifteenth year Münzer organised a secret union at the Halle school against the Archbishop of Magdeburg[3] and the Roman Church in general. His learning in the theology of his time brought him an early doctor's degree and the position of chaplain in a Halle nunnery. Here he treated the church dogmas and rites with the greatest contempt. At mass he omitted the words of the transubstantiation and, as Luther said, devoured the almighty gods unconsecrated.b The medieval mystics, and particularly the chiliastic works of Joachim the Cala-brese, were the main subject of his studies. The millennium and the Day of Judgment of the degenerated church and corrupted world propounded and described by that mystic seemed to Münzer imminently close, what with the Reformation and the general unrest of his time. He preached in his neighbourhood with great success. In 1520 he went to Zwickau as the first evangelist preacher. There he found one of those fanatical chiliastic sects that continued their existence on the quiet in many localities, whose momentary humility and detachment concealed the increasingly rampant opposition to the prevailing conditions of the lowest strata of society, and who were now, with the unrest growing, coming into the light of day ever more boldly and persistently. It was the sect of the Anabaptists[312] headed by Niklas Storch. They preached the approach of the Day of Judgment and of the millennium; they had "visions, transports, and the spirit of prophecy" and soon came into conflict with the Council of Zwickau. Münzer defended them, though he never joined them unconditionally and would much rather have brought them under his own influence. The Council took drastic measures against them; they had to leave the town, and Münzer with them. This was at the close of 1521.
He went to Prague and sought to gain a foothold there by joining the remnants of the Hussite movement. But all that he accomplished with his proclamationc was that he had to flee from Bohemia as well.
In 1522 he became preacher at Allstedt in Thuringia. The first thing he did here was to reform the cult. Even before Luther dared to go so far, he entirely abolished the Latin language and ordered the entire Bible, and not only the prescribed Sunday Gospels and epistles, to be read to the people. At the same time, he organised propaganda in his locality. People flocked to him from all directions, and Allstedt soon became the centre of the popular anti-priest movement of all Thuringia.
Münzer was as yet more theologian than anything else. He still directed his attacks almost exclusively against the priests. He did not, however, preach quiet debate and peaceful progress as Luther did at that time, but continued Luther's earlier violent sermons, calling upon the princes of Saxony and the people to rise in arms against the Roman priests.
"Does not Christ say, 'I came not to send peace, but a sword'? What must you" (the princes of Saxony) "do with that sword? Only one thing if you wish to be the servants of God, and that is to drive out and destroy the evil ones who stand in the way of the Gospel. Christ ordered very earnestly (Luke 19:27): 'bring hither mine enemies and slay them before me'.... Do not shallowly pretend that the power of God will do it without the aid of your sword, for then it would rust in its sheath. Those who stand in the way of God's revelation must be destroyed mercilessly, as Ezekiel, Cyrus, Josiah, Daniel and Elijah destroyed the priests of Baal, else the Christian Church will never come back to its source. We must uproot the weeds in God's vineyard at harvest time. God said in the Fifth Book of Moses, 7, 'thou shalt not show mercy unto the idolaters, but ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images and burn them with fire that I shall not be wroth at you'."a
But these appeals to the princes were of no avail, while revolutionary sentiments among the people grew day by day. Münzer, whose ideas became ever sharper and ever more bold, now resolutely broke away from the burgher Reformation, and henceforth also became an out-and-out political agitator.
His philosophico-theological doctrine attacked all the main points not only of Catholicism, but of Christianity generally. In the form of Christianity he preached a kind of pantheism, which curiously resembled modern speculative contemplation[313] and at times even approached atheism. He repudiated the Bible both as the only and as the infallible revelation. The real and living revelation, he said, was reason, a revelation that has existed at all times and still exists among all peoples. To hold up the Bible against reason, he maintained, was to kill the spirit with the letter, for the Holy Spirit of which the Bible speaks is not something that exists outside us — the Holy Spirit is our reason. Faith is nothing but reason come alive in man, and pagans could therefore also have faith. Through this faith, through reason come to life, man became godlike and blessed. Heaven is, therefore, nothing of another world and is to be sought in this life. It is the mission of believers to establish this Heaven, the kingdom of God, here on earth. Just as there is no Heaven in the beyond, there is also no Hell and no damnation. Similarly, there is no devil but man's evil lusts and greed. Christ was a man as we are, a prophet and a teacher, and his supper is a plain meal of commemoration wherein bread and wine are consumed without any mystic garnish.
Münzer preached these doctrines mostly concealed in the same Christian phraseology behind which the present-day philosophy has had to hide for some time. But the arch-heretical fundamental idea is easily discerned in all his writings, and he obviously took the biblical cloak much less in earnest than many a disciple of Hegel does in modern times. Yet three hundred years separate Münzer from modern philosophy.
Münzer's political doctrine was very closely aligned to these revolutionary religious conceptions, and overstepped the directly prevailing social and political conditions in much the same way as his theology overstepped the conceptions current in his time. As Münzer's religious philosophy approached atheism, so his political programme approached communism, and even on the eve of the February Revolution more than one present-day communist sect lacked as comprehensive a theoretical arsenal as was "Münzer's" in the sixteenth century. This programme, which was less a compilation of the demands of the plebeians of that day than a brilliant anticipation of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletarian element that had scarcely begun to develop among the plebeians — this programme demanded the immediate establishment of the kingdom of God on Earth, of the prophesied millennium, by restoring the church to its original status and abolishing all the institutions that conflicted with the purportedly early Christian but in fact very novel church. By the kingdom of God Münzer meant a society with no class differences, no private property and no state authority independent of, and foreign to, the members of society. All the existing authorities, insofar as they refused to submit and join the revolution, were to be overthrown, all work and all property shared in common, and complete equality introduced. A union was to be established to realise all this, and not only throughout Germany, but throughout Christendom. Princes and lords would be invited to join, but should they refuse the union was to take up arms and overthrow or kill them at the first opportunity.
Münzer set to work at once to organise the union. His sermons became still more militant and revolutionary. He thundered forth against the princes, the nobility and the patricians with a passion that equalled the fervour of his attacks upon the clergy. He depicted the prevailing oppression in burning colours and countered it with his dream-vision of the millennium of social republican equality. Also, he published one revolutionary pamphlet after another, and sent emissaries in all directions, while personally organising the union in Allstedt and its vicinity.
The first fruit of this propaganda was the destruction of St. Mary's Chapel in Mellerbach near Allstedt, according to the command of the Bible (Deut. 7 [5], 6): "Ye shall destroy their altars, and break down their images ... and burn their graven images with fire for thou art an holy people." The princes of Saxony came in person to Allstedt to quell the unrest and bid Münzer come to the castle. There he delivered a sermon the like of which they had not heard from Luther, whom Münzer described as "that easy-living flesh of Wittenberg".3 Münzer maintained that ungodly rulers, especially priests and monks who treated the Gospel as heresy, should be killed, and referred to the New Testament for confirmation. The ungodly had no right to live save by the mercy of the elect. Should the princes not exterminate the ungodly, God would take their sword from them, because the entire community had the power of the sword. The princes and lords are the prime movers of usury, thievery and robbery; they take all creatures into their private possession — the fish in the water, the birds in the air, and the plants in the soil. And then they preach to the poor the commandment, "Thou shalt not steal," while they themselves take everything they find, and rob and oppress the peasant and the artisan. If, however, one of the latter commits the slightest transgression, he has to hang, and Dr. Lügner says to all this: Amen.
"The masters themselves are to blame that the poor man becomes their enemy. If they do not remove the causes of the upheaval, how can things go well in the long run? Oh, dear sirs, how the Lord will smite these old pots with an iron rod! But for saying so, I am regarded a rebel. So be it!" (Cf. Zimmermann's Bauernkrieg, Th. 2, S. 75.)
Münzer had the sermon printed. Duke Johann of Saxony punished his Allstedt printer with banishment, and ordered all Miinzer's writings to be censored from then on by the ducal government in Weimar. But Münzer paid no heed to this order. He hastened to publish a highly inciting paper[3] in the imperial city of Mühlhausen, wherein he called on the people
"to widen the hole so that all the world may see and understand who our great personages are that have blasphemously turned our Lord into a painted manikin".
It ended with the following words:
"All the world must suffer a big jolt. There will be such a game that the ungodly will be thrown off their seats, and the downtrodden will rise."
Thomas Münzer, "the man with the hammer", wrote the following motto on the title page:
"Beware, I have put my words into thy mouth b that thou mayest uproot, destroy, scatter and overthrow, and that thou mayest build and plant. A wall of iron against the kings, princes, priests, and against the people hath been erected. Let them fight, for victory will wondrously lead to the perdition of the strong and godless tyrants."
Münzer's breach with Luther and his party had taken place long before. Luther had had to accept some of the church reforms which Münzer had introduced without consulting him. He watched Münzer's activities with a moderate reformer's nettled mistrust of a more energetic, ambitious party. Already in the spring of 1524, in a letter to Melanchthon, that model of a zealous stick-in-the-mud philistine, Münzer wrote that he and Luther, did not understand the movement at all. He said they sought to choke it by the letter of the Bible, and that their doctrine was worm-eaten.
"Dear brethren," he wrote, "cease your waiting and hesitation. It is time, for summer is at the door. Keep not friendship with the ungodly who hinder the Word from working its full force. Flatter not your princes, or you will perish with them. Ye tender scholars, be not wroth, for I can do nothing else."0
Luther had more than once challenged Münzer to an open debate. The latter, however, always ready to take up the battle before the people, had not the least desire to let himself in for a theological
Aussgetrückte emplössung des falschen Glaubens der ungetrewen weit... Jere. am. 23. Cap. Thomas Müntzer mit dem Hammer. Mülhausen, MDXXIIII. (W. Zimmermann, op. cit., Th. 2, S. 77-78.)—Ed.
squabble before the partisan public of Wittenberg University. He did not wish "to bring the testimony of the Spirit exclusively before the high school of learning".[3] If Luther were sincere, he should use his influence to stop the chicaneries against his, Münzer's, printer, and lift the censorship so that their controversy might be freely fought in the press.
But now, when Münzer's above-mentioned revolutionary brochure appeared, Luther denounced him publicly. In his published Brieff an die Fürsten zu Sachsen von dem auffrurischen geyst he declared Münzer to be an instrument of Satan and called upon the princes to intervene and drive the instigators of the turmoil out of the country, since they did not confine themselves to preaching their evil doctrine but also incited to insurrection, to violent action against the authorities.
On August 1, Münzer was compelled to appear before the princes in the castle of Weimar on the charge of incitement to mutiny. Highly compromising facts had been obtained against him; they were on the scent of his secret union; his hand was detected in the societies of the miners and the peasants. He was threatened with banishment. No sooner had he returned to Allstedt than he learned that Duke George of Saxony demanded his extradition .Union letters in his handwriting had been-intercepted, wherein he called George's subjects to armed resistance against the enemies of «.he Gospel. Had he not left the town, the Council would have extradited him.
In the meantime, the growing unrest among the peasants and plebeians had made it incomparably easier for Münzer to carry on his propaganda. In the Anabaptists he found invaluable agents for this purpose. This sect, which had no definite and positive dogmas, held together only by its common opposition to all ruling classes and by the common symbol of the second baptism, ascetic in its mode of living, untiring, fanatical and intrepid in carrying on propaganda, had grouped itself more and more closely around Münzer. Made homeless by persecutions, its members wandered all over Germany and carried word everywhere of the new teaching, in which Münzer had made their own demands and wishes clear to them. Countless Anabaptists were put on the rack, burned at the stake or otherwise executed, but the courage and endurance of these emissaries was unshakable, and the success of their activities amid the people's rapidly growing unrest was enormous. Thus, after his flight from Thuringia, Münzer found the ground prepared wherever he went.
Near Nuremberg, where Münzer went first,[314] a peasant revolt had been nipped in the bud hardly a month before. Münzer conducted his propaganda surreptitiously; soon people appeared who defended his most audacious theological ideas on the non-obligatory nature of the Bible and the meaninglessness of sacraments, who declared Christ a mere human and the power of the lay authorities ungodly. "There is Satan stalking, the Spirit of Allstedt!" Luther exclaimed.[3] In Nuremberg Münzer printed his reply to Luther.b He accused him of flattering the princes and supporting the reactionary party by his insipid moderation. But the people would free themselves all the same, he wrote, and it would go with Dr. Luther as with a captive fox.—The Council ordered the paper confiscated, and Münzer had to leave Nuremberg.
Now he went across Swabia to Alsace, then to Switzerland, and then back to the Upper Black Forest, where an insurrection had broken out several months before, largely precipitated by his Anabaptist emissaries. This propaganda tour of Münzer's had doubtless substantially contributed to the establishment of the people's party, to the clear definition of its demands and to the final general outbreak of the insurrection in April 1525. It was through this tour that the dual effect of Münzer's activities became particularly apparent — on the one hand, on the people, whom he addressed in the only language they could then comprehend, that of religious prophecy; and, on the other hand, on the initiated to whom he could disclose his ultimate aims. Even before his journey he had assembled in Thuringia a circle of resolute men from among the people and the lesser clergy, whom he had put at the head of the secret society. Now he became the soul of the entire revolutionary movement in Southwestern Germany, organised ties from Saxony and Thuringia through Franconia and Swabia up to Alsace and the Swiss border, and counted such South German agitators as Hubmaier of Waldshut, Konrad Grebel of Zurich, Franz Rabmann of Griessen, Schappeler of Memmingen, Jakob Wehe of Leipheim, and Dr. Mantel in Stuttgart, who were mostly revolutionary priests, among his disciples and the heads of the union. He himself stayed mostly in Griessen on the Schaffhausen border, journeying from there across the Hegau, Klettgau, etc. The bloody reprisals by the alarmed princes and lords everywhere against this new plebeian heresy contributed not a litde to fanning the spirit of rebellion and consolidating the ranks of the union. In this way Münzer conducted his agitation for about five months in Upper Germany and returned to Thuringia when the culmination of the conspiracy was near at hand, because he wished to lead the movement himself. There we shall find him later.
We shall see how truly the character and behaviour of the two party leaders reflected the attitude of their respective parties, how Luther's indecision and fear of the movement, which was assuming serious proportions, and his cowardly servility to the princes fully corresponded to the hesitant and ambiguous policy of the burghers, and how Münzer's revolutionary energy and resolution was reproduced among the most advanced section of the plebeians and peasants. The only difference was that while Luther confined himself to expressing the ideas and wishes of the majority of his class and thereby won very cheap popularity among it, Münzer, on the contrary, went far beyond the immediate ideas and demands of the plebeians and peasants, and organised a party of the élite of the then existing revolutionary elements, which, inasmuch as it shared his ideas and energy, always remained only a small minority of the insurgent masses.
III -..
m
The first signs of a budding revolutionary spirit appeared among the German peasants about fifty years after the suppression of the Hussite movement.*
In 1476 the first peasant conspiracy occurred in the bishopric of Würzburg, a land impoverished by the Hussite wars, "by bad government, manifold taxes, payments, feuds, enmity, war, fire, murder, prison and the like",[3] and continually and shamelessly plundered by bishops, priests and the nobility. A young shepherd and musician, Hans Böheim of Niklashausen, also called the Drum-Beater and Hans the Piper, suddenly appeared as a prophet in the Tauber valley. He declared that he had had a vision of the Virgin Mary, that she had commanded him to burn his drum, to stop serving the dance and sinful sensuality, and to exhort the people to penance. Everyone should purge himself of sin and the vain lusts of the world, forsake all ornaments and finery, and make a pilgrimage to the Madonna of Niklashausen to obtain forgiveness.
Already here, with the first precursor of the movement, we find the asceticism typical of all medieval uprisings tinged with religion and, in modern times, of the early stages of every proletarian movement. This ascetic austerity of morals, this demand to forsake all joys of life and all entertainments, opposes the ruling classes with the principle of Spartan equality, on the one hand, and is, on the other, a necessary stage of transition without which the lowest stratum of society can never set itself in motion. In order to develop its revolutionary energy, to become conscious of its own hostile attitude towards all other elements of society, to concentrate itself as a class, it must begin by stripping itself of everything that could reconcile it with the existing social system; it must renounce the few pleasures that make its wretched existence in the least tolerable for the moment, and of which even the severest oppression could not deprive it. This plebeian and proletarian asceticism differs both in its wild fanatical form and in its essence from the bourgeois asceticism of the Lutheran burgher morality and of the English Puritans (as distinct from the Independents[315] and the more radical sects), whose entire secret amounts to bourgeois thrift. It stands to reason, however, that this plebeian-proletarian asceticism gradually sheds its revolutionary nature when the development of modern productive forces infinitely multiplies the luxuries, thus rendering Spartan equality superfluous, and when the position of the proletariat in society, and thereby the proletariat itself, become more revolutionary. This asceticism disappears gradually from among the masses, and in the sects, which relied upon it, it degenerates either directly into bourgeois parsimony or into a high-sounding virtuousness which, in practice, degenerates to a philistine or guild-artisan meanness. Besides, renunciation of pleasures need hardly be preached to the proletariat for the simple reason that it has almost nothing more to renounce.
Hans the Piper's call to penitence found a ready response; all the prophets of rebellion began with this call, and, indeed, only a violent exertion, a sudden renunciation of all this habitual mode of existence could set this disunited and widely scattered peasant species, raised in blind submission, into motion. The pilgrimages to Niklashausen began and rapidly increased, and the more massive the stream of pilgrims, the more openly the young rebel spoke out his plans. The Madonna of Niklashausen had told him, he preached, that henceforth there should be neither king nor prince, neither papal nor any other ecclesiastic or lay authority. Each should be a brother to the other and win his bread by the toil of his own hands, and none should have more than his neighbour. All tributes, rents, services, tolls, taxes and other payments and duties should be for ever abolished, and forest, water and pasture should everywhere be free.
The people received this new gospel with joy. The fame of the prophet, "the message of our Lady", spread far and wide; pilgrim throngs flocked to him from Odenwald, from the Main, Kocher and Jagst, even from Bavaria and Swabia, and from the Rhine. Miracles said to have been performed by the Piper were recounted; people fell to their knees before him, praying to him as to a saint, and then fought for tufts from his cap for relics or amulets. In vain did the priests speak against him, denouncing his visions as the devil's delusions and his miracles as diabolic swindles. The mass of the believers increased precipitously, a revolutionary sect began to take shape, the Sunday sermons of the rebel shepherd drew gatherings of 40,000 and more to Niklashausen.
Hans the Piper preached to the masses for a number of months, but he did not intend to confine himself to preaching. He had secret connections with the pastor of Niklashausen and with two knights, Kunz von Thunfeld and his son, who held to the new teaching and were to become the military leaders of the planned insurrection. Finally, on the Sunday before the day of St. Kilian, when his power appeared to be great enough, the shepherd gave the signal.
"And now go home," he closed his sermon, "and weigh in your mind what our holiest Lady has announced to you, and on the coming Saturday leave your wives and children and old men at home, and you, men, come back to Niklashausen on the day of St. Margaret, which is next Saturday, and bring your brothers and friends, as many as they may be. Do not come with pilgrim's staves, however, but with armour and arms, a candle in one hand, and a sword, pike or halberd in the other, and the Holy Virgin will then tell you what she wishes you to do." a
But before the peasants arrived in their numbers, the bishop'sb
horsemen seized the rebel prophet at night and brought him to the castle of Würzburg. On the appointed day almost 34,000 armed peasants appeared, but the news of the Piper's detention crushed them. Most of them went home, while the initiated kept about 16,000 together, with whom they marched to the castle under the leadership of Kunz von Thunfeld and his son Michael. The bishop persuaded them with promises to turn back, but no sooner had they begun to disperse than they were attacked by the bishop's horsemen and many of them taken captive. Two were decapitated, and Hans the Piper was burned at the stake. Kunz von Thunfeld escaped and was allowed to return only after ceding all his estates to the bishopric. The pilgrimages to Niklashausen continued for some time, but were finally also suppressed.
After this initial attempt, Germany remained quiet for some time. Only towards the close of the century were there any new peasant revolts and conspiracies.
From a free rendering of the sermon as given by W. Zimmermann (op. cit., Th. l, S. 121-22).— Ed.
We shall pass over the Dutch peasant revolt of 1491 and 1492, which was suppressed by Duke Albrecht of Saxony in the battle of Heemskerk, the simultaneous peasant revolt in the Abbey of Kempten in Upper Swabia, and the Frisian revolt under Sjoerd Aylva, about 1497,(1) which was also suppressed by Albrecht of Saxony. These revolts were partly too far from the scene of the Peasant War proper, and partly uprisings of hitherto free peasants against the attempt to force feudalism upon them. We pass on to the two great conspiracies which laid the ground for the Peasant War: the Bundschuh and the Poor Konrad.
The same famine that had precipitated the peasant revolt in the Netherlands, brought about a secret alliance of peasants and plebeians in Alsace in 1493; people of the purely burgher opposition took part in it, and it even enjoyed some sympathy among the lesser nobility. The seat of the alliance was in the region of Schlettstadt, Sulz, Dambach, Rosheim, Scherweiler, etc., etc. The conspirators demanded plunder and extermination of Jews, whose usury then, as now, fleeced the peasants of Alsace, proclamation of a jubilee year, whereby all debts would expire, repeal of duties, tolls and other imposts, abolition of the ecclesiastical and Rottweil (imperial) court, the right of the estates to ratify taxes, reduction of the priests' prebend to fifty or sixty guilders, abolition of the auricular confession, and self-elected courts for every community. When they were strong enough the conspirators planned to over-power the stronghold of Schlettstadt, to confiscate the treasuries of the monasteries and of the town, and from there to arouse the whole of Alsace. The banner of the Union, which was to be unfurled at the start of the uprising, depicted a peasant's clog with a long leather thong, the so-called Bundschuh, which served peasant conspiracies as an emblem and name in the following twenty years.
The conspirators were wont to hold their meetings at night on the lonesome Hunger Hill. Initiation into the Bundschuh involved the most mysterious of ceremonies and the severest threats of punishment for betrayal. But the affair got abroad about Easter Week of 1493, the time appointed for the attack on Schlettstadt. The authorities stepped in immediately. Many of the conspirators were arrested and tortured, some were quartered or decapitated, and others had their hands or fingers cut off and were driven out of the country. A great many fled to Switzerland.
The Bundschuh, however, was far from crushed by this first blow. On the contrary, it continued in secret and the numerous fugitives scattered all over Switzerland and South Germany became as many emissaries. Finding the same oppression and, consequently, the same inclination to revolt everywhere they went, they propagated the Bundschuh in the whole of the present-day Baden. The tenacity and stamina with which the peasants of Upper Germany conspired for about thirty years after 1493, with which they surmounted all the obstacles arising from their scattered way of life on the road to a larger, more centralised organisation, and with which they renewed their conspiracies over and over after countless dispersions, defeats, and executions of their leaders, until an opportunity came at last for a mass uprising — this tenacity is truly admirable.
In 1502 there were signs of a secret movement among the peasants of the bishopric of Speyer, which at that time also included the locality of Bruchsal. The Bundschuh had reorganised itself there with really considerable success. About 7,000 men belonged to the society, whose centre was in Untergrombach, between Bruchsal and Weingarten, and whose ramifications reached down the Rhine to the Main, and up to the Margraviate of Baden. Its articles said: neither rent nor tithe, neither tax nor toll are to be paid any longer to the princes, the nobility, or the clergy; serfdom is to be abolished; the monasteries and other church estates are to be confiscated and divided among the people, and no other ruler is to be recognised save the Emperor.
Here we find for the first time expressed by peasants the two demands — secularising church estates in favour of the people, and a united and indivisible German monarchy — which will henceforth be advocated regularly by the more advanced peasants and plebeians, until Thomas Münzer changes distribution of church estates to confiscation and conversion into community of property, and a united German Empire to a united and indivisible republic.
The revived Bundschuh, like the old, had its own secret meeting place, its oath of silence, its initiation ceremonies, and its union banner with the legend, "Nothing but God's Justice!" Its plan of action was similar to that of the Alsatian union. Bruchsal, most of whose inhabitants belonged to the Bundschuh, was to be captured and a Bundschuh army organised there and sent into the surrounding principalities as an itinerant meeting point.
The plan was betrayed by a clergyman who had learned of it from one of the conspirators in the confessional. The authorities instantly took countermeasures. How widespread the Bundschuh had become is evident from the terror that seized the various imperial estates in Alsace and the Swabian League.[316] Troops were concentrated, and mass arrests were made. Emperor Maximilian, "last of the knights", issued bloodthirsty punitive decrees against the unheard-of peasant undertaking. Throngs of peasants assembled here and there and offered armed resistance, but the isolated peasant troops could not hold out for long. Some of the conspirators were executed, others escaped, but secrecy was so well preserved that, in their own localities and in the possessions of the neighbouring lords, the majority, even the leaders, remained unharmed.
After this new defeat there followed a long period of apparent calm in the class struggle. But work went on underground. In the first years of the sixteenth century Poor Konrad appeared in Swabia, evidently with the support of the scattered members of the Bundschuh. In the Black Forest the Bundschuh continued in small isolated groups until, ten years later, an energetic peasant leader succeeded in gathering the various threads into a major conspiracy. Both conspiracies became public one after the other in the restless years of 1513-15, in which the Swiss, Hungarian and Slovenian peasants rose simultaneously in a series of major insurrections.
The man who revived the Upper Rhine Bundschuh was Joss Fritz of Untergrombach, a fugitive of the conspiracy of 1502, a former soldier, and in all respects an outstanding figure. After his flight he stayed in various localities between Lake Constance and the Black Forest, and finally settled in Lehen near Freiburg in Breisgau, where he even became a forester. Most interesting facts are contained in the court records about the manner in which he reorganised the Bundschuh from that vantage point and how ingeniously he recruited people of different kinds. The diplomatic talent and tireless perseverance of this model conspirator helped him enrol a great number of people of various classes into the Bundschuh —knights, priests, burghers, plebeians and peasants, and it appears almost certain that he even organised several more or less sharply divided grades of the conspiracy. All serviceable elements were utilised with the greatest circumspection and skill. Apart from the more initiated emissaries who traversed the country in various disguises, vagrants and beggars were employed for subordinate missions. Joss stood in direct contact with the beggar kings, and through them held the numerous vagabond population in the palm of his hand. The beggar kings played a considerable role in his conspiracy. They were very bizarre figures: one roamed the country with a girl whose seemingly wounded feet were his pretext for begging; he had more than eight insignia on his hat — the Fourteen Deliverers, St. Ottilie, Our Mother in Heaven, etc.—and, besides, wore a long red beard and carried a big knotty stick with a dagger and pike. Another, who begged in the name of St. Veiten, had spices and wormseeds for sale, and wore a long iron-coloured coat, a red barret with the insignia of the Infant of Trient attached to it, a sword at his side, and many knives and a dagger in his girdle. Others had bleeding wounds, which they deliberately did not allow to heal, and their attire was also picturesque. There were at least ten of them, and for the price of two thousand guilders they were simultaneously to set aflame Alsace, the Margraviate of Baden, and Breisgau, and to put themselves, with at least 2,000 of their kind, under the command of Georg Schneider, a former captain of the mercenaries, on the day of the Zabern parish fair in Rosen, in order to take possession of that town. A courier service from station to station was established by members of the Bundschuh, and Joss Fritz and his chief emissary, Stoffel of Freiburg, rode continually from place to place to hold nocturnal military reviews of the neophytes. The court records offer ample evidence of the spread of the Bundschuh in the Upper Rhine and Black Forest regions. They contain countless names and descriptions of members from the various localities of that region — most of them journeymen, then peasants and innkeepers, a few nobles, priests (like the one from Lehen), and breaçUess mercenaries. This composition of the Bundschuh is evidence of the more developed character of the society under Joss Fritz. The urban plebeian element was asserting itself more and more. The ramifica-tions of the conspiracy spread throughout Alsace, the present-day Baden, up to Württemberg and the Main. From time to time large gatherings were held on secluded mountains such as the Kniebis, etc., to discuss the affairs of the Union. The meetings of the chiefs, in which local members and delegates of remoter localities often participated, took place on the Hartmatte near Lehen, and it was there that the fourteen articles of the Bundschuh were adopted. The articles agreed upon were: no master besides the Emperor and (according to some) the Pope; abolition of the Rottweil imperial court and restriction of the church court to religious affairs; abolition of interest after it had been paid for so long that it equalled the capital; top interest rate of five per cent; freedom of hunting, fishing, pasture, and woodcutting; restriction of priests each to one prebend; confiscation of church estates and monastery treasures for the Bundschuh war chest; abolition of all inequitable taxes and tolls; eternal peace in all Christendom; determined action against all opponents of the Bundschuh; Bundschuh taxes; seizure of a strong town, such as Freiburg, to serve as Bundschuh headquarters; negotiations with the Emperor as soon as the Bundschuh troops are gathered, and with Switzerland in case the Emperor declines. It was evident that, on the one hand, the demands of the peasants and plebeians were becoming more definite and firm, and that, on the other, concessions had had equally to be made to the moderate and timid.
The blow was to be struck about autumn 1513. Only a Bundschuh banner was lacking, and Joss Fritz went to Heilbronn to have it paint-ed. Besides all sorts of emblems and pictures, it bore the peasant's clog emblem and the legend, "God Help Thy Divine Justice". While he was away a premature attempt was made to overwhelm Freiburg, which was discovered. Some indiscretions in the conduct of propaganda put the Council of Freiburg and the Margrave of Baden[3] on the right scent, and the betrayal by two conspirators completed the series of disclosures. The Margrave, the Council of Freiburg, and the imperial government at Ensisheim[317] instantly sent spies and soldiers; some Bundschuh members were arrested, tortured and executed. But again the majority escaped, Joss Fritz among them. This time the Swiss Government sternly persecuted the fugitives, and even executed many of them. However, it had just as little success as its neighbours in preventing the greater part of the fugitives from remaining continually in the vicinity of their former homes and even returning to them after some time. The Alsace Government in Ensisheim behaved more brutally than the others. It ordered very many to be decapitated, broken on the wheel, and quartered. Joss Fritz himself kept mainly to the Swiss bank of the Rhine, but often crossed to the Black Forest, without ever being apprehended.
Why this time the Swiss made common cause with the neighbouring governments against the Bundschuh is made apparent by the peasant revolt that broke out the following year, 1514, in Berne, Solothurn and Lucerne,(2) resulting in a purge of the aristocratic governments and the patriciate generally. The peasants also won certain privileges for themselves. The success of the local Swiss revolts was due to the simple fact that there was even less centralisation in Switzerland than in Germany. In 1525 the peasants managed to dispose of their local lords everywhere, but succumbed to the organised armies of the princes, and it was these latter that Switzerland did not have.
Simultaneously with the Bundschuh in Baden, and apparently in direct association with it, a second conspiracy was formed in Württemberg. Documents indicate that it had existed since 1503, but since the name Bundschuh became too dangerous after the setback of the Untergrombach conspirators, it adopted the name Poor Konrad. Its main seat was the valley of the Rems at the foot of the mountain of Hohenstaufen. Its existence had been no secret for a long time, at least to the people. The merciless oppression of Duke Ulrich's government coupled with several famine years, which contributed greatly to the outbreak of the movements of 1513 and 1514, had increased the number of conspirators. The newly imposed taxes on wine, meat and bread, and a capital tax of one pfennig yearly on every guilder, provoked the uprising. The town of Schorndorf, where the heads of the complot met in the house of a cutler named Kaspar Pregizer, was to be seized first. In the spring of 1514, the rebellion broke out. Three thousand — and according to some, five thousand — peasants gathered before the town, but were persuaded by the amicable promises of the Duke's officers to withdraw. Duke Ulrich, who had agreed to abolish the new taxes, arrived posthaste with eighty horsemen to find everything quiet in consequence of the promise. He promised to convene a Diet to examine all complaints. But the chiefs of the society knew very well that Ulrich sought only to keep the people quiet until he recruited and concentrated enough troops to be able to break his word and collect the taxes by force. From Kaspar Pregizer's house, "Poor Konrad's chancery", they issued a call for a society congress, and sent emissaries in all directions. The success of the first uprising in the Rems valley had everywhere stimulated the movement among the people. The appeals and the emissaries found a favourable response everywhere, and the congress held in Untertürkheim on May 28 was attended by a large number of representatives from all parts of Württemberg. It was decided to proceed at once with propaganda and to strike in the Rems valley at the first opportunity, in order to spread the uprising from that point in every direction. While Bantelhans of Dettingen, a former soldier, and Singerhans of Würtingen, an esteemed peasant, were bringing the Swabian Jura into the society, the uprising broke out on every side. Though Singerhans was attacked and seized, the towns of Backnang, Winnenden, and Markgröningen fell into the hands of the peasants who had joined forces with the plebeians, and the entire area from Weinsberg to Blaubeuren, and from there to the border of Baden, was in open revolt. Ulrich was compelled to yield. However, while calling the Diet for June 25, he wrote to the surrounding princes and free towns asking for aid against the uprising, which, he said, threatened all princes, authorities and nobles in the Empire, and which "bore an uncommon resemblance to the Bundschuh".
In the meantime, the Diet, i. e. the deputies of the towns, and many delegates of the peasants who also demanded seats in the Diet, came together as early as June 18 in Stuttgart. The prelates had not yet arrived. The knights had not even been invited. The city opposition of Stuttgart, as well as two threatening peasant throngs at Leonberg and in the Rems valley, supported the demands of the peasants. Their delegates were admitted, and it was decided to depose and punish the three hated councillors of the Duke — Lam-parter, Thumb and Lorcher — and appoint for the Duke a council of four knights, four burghers and four peasants, to grant him a fixed civil allowance, and to confiscate the monasteries and endowments in favour of the state treasury.
Duke Ulrich countered these revolutionary decisions with a coup d'état. On June 21 he rode with his knights and councillors to Tübingen, where he was followed by the prelates, ordered the burghers to come there as well, which they did, and there continued the Diet without the peasants. The burghers, confronted with military terror, betrayed their peasant allies. On July 8 the Tübingen agreement came about, saddling the country with almost a million of the Duke's debts, laying some restrictions on the Duke which he never observed, and disposing of the peasants with a few meagre general phrases and a very definite penal law against insurrection and association. Naturally, nothing was said any more about peasant representation in the Diet. The peasantry cried treason, but the Duke, who had acquired new credit after his debts were taken over by the estates, soon gathered troops, and his neighbours, particularly the Elector Palatine,(3) also sent him military aid. The Tübingen agreement was thus accepted all over the country towards the end of July, and a new oath was taken. Only in the Rems valley Poor Konrad offered resistance. The Duke, who again rode there in person, barely escaped with his life. A peasant camp was set up on the mountain of Kappel. But as the affair dragged on, most of the insurgents dispersed for lack of food, and the rest also went home after an ambiguous agreement with some of the Diet deputies. In the meantime, Ulrich, his army strengthened with companies willingly placed at his service by the towns, which, having attained their demands, turned fanatically against the peasants, attacked the Rems valley in spite of the agreement and plundered its towns and villages. Sixteen hundred peasants were taken prisoner, sixteen of them instantly decapitated, and most of the others made to pay heavy fines into Ulrich's treasury. Many remained in prison for a long time. Strict penal laws were enacted against a revival of the society, against all gatherings of peasants, and the nobility of Swabia formed a special league for the suppression of all attempts at insurrection.—The top leaders of Poor Konrad had meanwhile succeeded in escaping to Switzerland, whence after a few years they returned home, most of them singly.
At the time of the Württemberg movement, signs of new Bundschuh activity were observed in Breisgau and in the Margraviate of Baden. In June, an insurrection was attempted near Bühl, but it was quickly throttled by Margrave Philip, and its leader, Gugel-Bastian, was seized in Freiburg and beheaded.
In the spring of the same year, 1514, a general peasant war broke out in Hungary. A crusade against the Turks was preached, and freedom was promised as usual to the serfs and bondsmen who would join it. About 60,000 gathered under the command of Georg Dözsa, a Szekler,[318] who had distinguished himself in previous Turkish wars and attained nobility. The Hungarian knights and magnates, however, looked with disfavour upon the crusade, which threatened to deprive them of their property and bondsmen. They overtook isolated peasant groups, took back their serfs by forte and maltreated them. When this reached the ears of the army of crusad-ers the fury of the oppressed peasants broke loose. Two of the most enthusiastic advocates of the crusade, Laurentius and Barna-bas, fanned the hatred against the nobility in the army by their revolutionary speeches. Dozsa himself was as angered with the treacherous nobility as his troops. The army of crusaders became an army of revolution and Dôzsa put himself at the head of the new movement.
He camped with his peasants in the Râkos field near Pest. Clashes with men of the noblemen's party in the surrounding villages and the suburbs of Pest opened the hostilities. It soon came to skirmishes, and then to Sicilian Vespers[319] for all the noblemen who fell into the hands of the peasants, and to destruction by fire of all the castles in the vicinity. The court made its threats in vain. After the first acts of popular justice against the nobility had been accomplished under the walls of the capital, Dozsa proceeded with further operations. He divided his army into five columns. Two were sent to the mountains of Upper Hungary to rouse the populace and exterminate the nobility.. The third, under Ambros Szâleresi, a citizen of Pest, remained on the Râkos to watch the capital, while the fourth and fifth were led by Dôzsa and his brother Gregor against Szegedin.(4) In the meantime, the nobility gathered in Pest, and summoned to its aid Johann Zâpolya, the voivode of Transylvania. Joined by the burghers of Budapest, the nobility attacked and annihilated the army on the Râkos, after Szâleresi and the burgher elements in the peasant force had gone over to the enemy. A host of prisoners was executed in the most cruel fashion, and the rest sent home minus their noses and ears.
Dozsa failed at Szegedin and marched on Csanâd, which he captured on defeating an army of noblemen under Istvân Batory and Bishop Csâky. He took bloody revenge on the prisoners, among them the bishop and the royal Chancellor Teleki, for the Râkos atrocities. In Csanâd he proclaimed a republic, abolished the nobility, declared general equality and sovereignty of the people, and then marched against Temesvâr,[3] to which Bâtory had fled. But while he besieged this fortress for two months and was reinforced by a new army under Anton Hosszu, his two army columns in Upper Hungary were defeated by the nobility in several battles. Johann Zâpolya with his Transylvanian army advanced against him, attacked and dispersed the peasants. Dôzsa was taken prisoner and roasted alive on a red-hot throne. His flesh was eaten by his own people, this being the condition on which their lives were spared. The dispersed peasants, reassembled by Laurentius and Hosszû, were again defeated, and those who fell into enemy hands were either impaled or hanged. The peasants' corpses hung in thousands along the roads or on the edges of gutted villages. About 60,000, it is said, either fell in battle or were massacred. The nobility saw to it that at the next Diet serfdom was again recognised as the law of the land.
The peasant revolt in the "Wendish mark", that is, Carinthia, Carniola and Styria, which broke out at about the same time, reposed on a Bundschuh-like conspiracy that had taken shape and precipitated a rising in this region — wrung dry by the nobility and imperial officials, ravaged by Turkish invasions, and plagued by famines — as far back as 1503. Already in 1513, the Slovenian and German peasants of this region once more raised the battle standard of the Stara Prawa (The Old Rights). If they allowed themselves to be placated that year, and if in 1514, when they gathered anew in larger masses, they were again persuaded to go home by Emperor Maximilian's explicit promise to restore the Old Rights, the war of revenge of the perpetually deceived people broke out with redoubled vigour in the spring of 1515. Just as in Hungary, castles and monasteries were destroyed everywhere, and the captured nobles were tried by peasant juries and decapitated. In Styria and Carinthia the Emperor's captain, Dietrichstein, soon succeeded in crushing the revolt. In Carniola it was only suppressed by a sudden onslaught on Rain (autumn of 1516) and the subsequent countless Austrian atrocities, which duplicated the infamies of the Hungarian nobility.
It is clear why, after this series of decisive defeats and the mass atrocities of the nobility, the German peasants long remained quiet. Yet conspiracies and local uprisings did not cease altogether. Already in 1516 most of the fugitives of the Bundschuh and the Poor Konrad returned to Swabia and the Upper Rhine, and in 1517 the Bundschuh was again in full action in the Black Forest. Joss Fritz himself, still hiding the old Bundschuh banner of 1513 on his chest, again travelled the length and breadth of the Black Forest and developed energetic activity. The conspiracy was revived. Just as four years before, gatherings were held on the Kniebis. However, the secret was discovered, the authorities learned of the matter, and took action. Many conspirators were captured and executed. The most active and intelligent were compelled to flee, among them Joss Fritz, who, though he again evaded capture, seems to have died soon thereafter in Switzerland, for he is not heard of again.
IV
At the time when the fourth Bundschuh conspiracy was suppressed in the Black Forest, Luther in Wittenberg gave the signal for the movement that was to draw all the estates into the vortex and shake the whole Empire. The theses of the Augustinian from Thuringia[320] had the effect of a match held to a powder keg. The multifold and conflicting aspirations of the knights and burghers, peasants and plebeians, princes craving for sovereignty, and the lesser clergy, the clandestine mystic sects and the scholarly, satirical and burlesque[321] literary opposition, found in Luther's theses a momentarily general and common expression, and fell in with them with astounding rapidity. Formed overnight, this alliance of all the dissident elements, however brief its duration, suddenly revealed the enormous power of the movement, and drove it forward very rapidly.
However, precisely this rapid growth of the movement was also very quickly bound to develop the seeds of discord that lay concealed in it. At least, it was bound to tear asunder the constituent parts of that agitated mass which, by their very place in life, were directly opposed to each other, and to return them to their normal, hostile state. This polarisation of the motley opposition at two centres of attraction was observed in the very first years of the Reformation. The nobility and the burghers grouped themselves unconditionally around Luther. Peasants and plebeians, as yet failing to see in Luther a direct enemy, formed as before a separate revolutionary party of the opposition. Yet the movement became much more general, more far-reaching, than it had been before Luther, which made sharp contradictions and an open conflict between the two parties inevitable. This direct antithesis soon became apparent. While Luther and Münzer attacked each other in the press and from the pulpit, the armies of princes, knights and towns that for the most part consisted of Lutherans or elements at least gravitating towards Lutherism, attacked the throngs of peasants and plebeians.
How strongly the interests and requirements of the various elements behind the Reformation diverged is seen from the attempt of the nobility to compel the princes and the clergy to meet their demands even before the Peasant War.
We have already examined the situation of the German nobility early in the sixteenth century. It was on the point of losing its independence to the ever more powerful lay and clerical princes. It saw at the same time that the decline of imperial power, the Empire breaking up into a number of sovereign principalities, was keeping pace with its own decline. It thought that its own collapse meant the collapse of the Germans as a nation. Furthermore, the nobility, and particularly that section of it which owed allegiance to the Empire, was the estate that by virtue of its military profession and its attitude towards the princes, directly represented the Empire and imperial rule. It was the most national of the estates, and the mightier the imperial power, the weaker and less numerous the princes and the stronger the unity of Germany, the more powerful became the nobility. This was the reason for the general discontent of the knighthood with Germany's pitiful political situation, with the weakness of the Empire in foreign affairs which increased as the imperial family added to the Empire one inherited province after another, with the intrigues of foreign powers inside Germany, and with the plots of German princes and foreign countries against imperial rule. The demands of the nobility, therefore, had fo be above all concentrated on the demand for an imperial reform whose victims were to be the princes and the higher clergy. Ulrich von Hütten, the theorist of the German nobility, took it upon himself to formulate the demand for reforms together with Franz von Sickingen, the nobility's military and diplomatic representative.
The imperial reform demanded on behalf of the nobility was conceived by Hütten in very clear and radical terms. Hütten demanded nothing short of eliminating all princes, secularising all church principalities and estates, and establishing a noblemen's democracy headed by a monarch, much like the late Polish republic in its best days. Hütten and Sickingen hoped to make the Empire united, free and powerful again through the rule of the nobility, a predominantly military class, elimination of princes, those bearers of disunity, annihilation of the power of the priests, and Germany's liberation from the dominance of Rome.
Founded on serfdom, this noblemen's democracy as fashioned in Poland and, in somewhat modified form, in the early centuries of the states conquered by the Germanic tribes, is one of the most primitive forms of society and quite normally matures into a highly developed feudal hierarchy, a considerably higher stage. Such a pure type of noblemen's democracy was therefore impossible in the sixteenth century.(1) It was impossible if only because of the. important and powerful German towns. On the other hand, an alliance of the lesser nobility and the towns that in England brought about the transformation of the monarchy of feudal estates into a bourgeois-constitutional monarchy, was also out of the question. In Germany the old nobility still survived, while in England it had been exterminated in the Wars of the Roses[322] down to twenty-eight families, and replaced by a new nobility of bourgeois extraction and with bourgeois tendencies; in Germany serfdom was still rampant and the nobility drew its income from feudal sources, while in England serfdom had been virtually abolished and the nobles had become ordinary bourgeois landowners with a bourgeois source of income — the rent. Finally, the centralisation of absolute monarchy which we saw in France and which continuously developed since Louis XI in the conflict between the nobility and the burghers was impossible in Germany if only because the conditions for national centralisation were totally absent or existed in a very rudimentary form.
Under the circumstances, the further Hütten went in putting his ideal into practice, the more concessions he was compelled to make, and the more indefinite became the outlines of his imperial reform. The nobility was not strong enough to carry out the reform on its own. This was evident from its increasing weakness as compared with the princes. Allies were needed, and these could only be found in the towns, among the peasants and the influential theorists of the Reformation movement. But the towns knew the nobility too well to trust it, and rejected every offer of alliance. The peasants rightly considered the nobility, which exploited and maltreated them, as their bitterest enemy, while the theorists of the Reformation held either with the burghers, the princes, or the peasants. What advantages, indeed, could the nobility promise the burghers and the peasants from an imperial reform that was mainly intended to aggrandise the nobility? Under the circumstances Hütten had no other choice but to say little or nothing in his propaganda about the future relations between the nobility, the towns and the peasants. He put all blame on the princes, the priests, and the dependence upon Rome, and showed the burghers that it was in their interests to remain at least neutral in the coming struggle between the nobility and the princes. He said nothing of abolishing serfdom or the services imposed upon the peasants by the nobility.
The attitude of the German nobility towards the peasants was at that time exactly the same as that of the Polish nobility towards its peasants in the insurrections of 1830-46.a As in the modern Polish uprisings,[323] the movement in Germany could be sustained only through an alliance of all the opposition parties, particularly the nobility and the peasants. Yet it was just this alliance that was impossible in both cases. The nobility deemed it unnecessary to give up its political privileges and its feudal rights vis-à-vis the peasants, while the revolutionary peasants would not be drawn by vague and general prospects into an alliance with the nobility, the estate which oppressed them the most. The nobility could no more win over the peasants in Germany in 1522 than it could in Poland in 1830. Only total abolition of serfdom, bondage and all the privileges of the nobility could have induced the rural population to side with the nobility. But like every privileged estate the nobility had not the slightest desire voluntarily to give up its privileges, its highly exclusive position, and most of its sources of income.
Thus, when the struggle finally broke out the nobles had to face the princes alone. And it came as no surprise that the princes, who had for two centuries been cutting the ground from under the nobility, gained another easy victory.
The courseb of the struggle is well known. In 1522 Hütten and Sickingen, who was already recognised as the political and military chief of the Middle-German nobility, organised in Landau a union of the Rhenish, Swabian and Franconian nobility for a term of six years, ostensibly for self-defence. Sickingen assembled an army, partly on his own, and partly with the neighbouring knights, organised recruitment and reinforcements in Franconia, along the Lower Rhine, in the Netherlands and Westphalia, and in September 1522 opened hostilities by declaring a feud against the Elector-Archbishop of Trier.c However, while he was stationed near Trier, his reinforcements were cut off by a swift intervention of the princes. The Landgrave of Hesse and the Elector Palatined came to Trier's
The 1850 and 1870 editions have Insurrektionen seit 1830 (insurrections since 1830) instead of Insurrektionen 1830-46 (insurrections of 1830-46).— Ed.
aid and Sickingen was compelled to retreat to his castle of Landstuhl. In spite of all Hutten's efforts and those of his other friends, the united nobility, intimidated by the concerted and swift moves of the princes, left Sickingen in the lurch. Sickingen was mortally wounded, surrendered Landstuhl, and died soon after. Hütten had to flee to Switzerland, where he died a few months later on the Isle of Ufnau in the Lake of Zurich.
This defeat and the death of the two leaders broke the power of the nobility as a body independent of the princes. From then on the nobility acted only in the service and under the leadership of the princes. The Peasant War, which broke out soon after, compelled the nobles to seek the direct or indirect protection of the princes. Also, it proved that the German nobility would rather continue exploiting the peasants under the dominance of the princes than overthrow the princes and priests in an open alliance with emancipated peasants.
V
Not a year passed since Luther's declaration of war against the Catholic hierarchy set in motion all the opposition elements in Germany without the peasants again and again bringing forward their demands. Between 1518 and 1523 one local peasant revolt followed another in the Black Forest and in Upper Swabia, and after the spring of 1524 revolts became systematic. In April 1524 the peasants of the Abbey of Marchthal refused to do statute labour and to pay tributes; in May the peasants of St. Blasien refused to make serf payments; in June the peasants of Steinheim, near Memmingen, announced that they would pay neither tithes nor other duties; in July and August the peasants of Thurgau revolted and were quelled partly by the mediation of Zurich and partly by the brutality of the Confederacy, which executed many of them. Finally, a more determined uprising, which may be regarded as the direct beginning of the Peasant War, took place in the Landgraviate of Stühlingen.
The peasants of Stühlingen suddenly refused to deliver anything to the Landgrave, assembled in strong numbers, and on August 24, 1524, moved towards Waldshut under the command of Hans Müller of Bulgenbach. Here they founded an evangelist fraternity jointly with the burghers. The latter joined the organisation the more willingly because they were at odds with the government of the Austrian Forelands[324] over the religious persecution of their preacher, Balthasar Hubmaier, Thomas Münzer's friend and disciple. A weekly tax of three kreutzers was imposed by the Union — an enormous figure, considering the value of money at that time. Emissaries were sent to Alsace, the Moselle, the entire Upper Rhine and Franconia to bring peasants everywhere into the Union. The Union announced that its purpose was to abolish feudal rule, destroy all castles and monasteries and to eliminate all lords except the Emperor. The German tricolour[325] was the banner of the Union.
The uprising gained momentum rapidly in all of what is now Upper Baden. Panic seized the nobility of Upper Swabia, whose armed forces were almost all in Italy, making war against Francis I of France. They had no choice but to drag out the affair by means of negotiations and, in the meanwhile, to collect money and recruit troops until strong enough to punish the peasants for their audacity with "fire and destruction, plunder and carnage".(1) There began that systematic betrayal, that continuous deceit and malice, which were typical of the nobility and the princes throughout the Peasant War and which were their strongest weapon against the decentralised peasants whom it was hard to organise. The Swabian League, consisting of the princes, the nobility and the imperial cities of South-West Germany, put itself between the warring forces, but did not guarantee the peasants any real concessions. The latter remained in motion. From September 30 to the middle of October Hans Müller of Bulgenbach marched through the Black Forest to Urach and Furtwangen, increased his troops to 3,500 men and took up positions near Ewattingen (in the vicinity of Stühlingen). The nobility had no more than 1,700 men at their disposal, and even those were divided. They had to seek an armistice, which was, indeed, concluded in the camp at Ewattingen. The peasants were promised an amicable settlement either directly between the parties concerned or through arbitrators, and an investigation of their grievances by the provincial court at Stockach. The troops of the nobility and of the peasants dispersed.
The peasants worked out sixteen articles which they would press for in the court at Stockach. The articles were very moderate, and went no further than abolition of hunting rights, statute labour, oppressive taxes and the privileges of lords in general, and protection against arbitrary imprisonment and biassed, arbitrary courts.
But no sooner had the peasants gone home than the nobility demanded the restoration of all controversial tributes pending the court decision. Naturally, the peasants refused and referred the lords to the court. The conflict flared up anew, the peasants reassembled and the princes and lords concentrated their troops. This time the movement spread farther beyond Breisgau and deep into Württemberg. The troops under Georg Truchsess of Waldburg, the Alba of the Peasant War, watched the manoeuvres of the peasants, attacked their contingents one by one, but did not dare to attack the main force. In the meantime, Georg Truchsess negotiated with the peasant chiefs and reached agreements here and there.
By the end of December proceedings began at the Stockach provincial court. The peasants objected to the court being composed entirely of noblemen. An imperial edict[326] was read to them in reply. The proceedings were drawn out, and in the meantime the nobility, the princes and the Swabian League armed themselves. Archduke Ferdinand who ruled Württemberg,[3] the Black Forest of Baden and Southern Alsace in addition to the hereditary lands which still belong to Austria, called for the utmost severity against the rebel peasants. They were to be captured, tortured and mercilessly slain in whatever manner was the most convenient, their possessions were to be burned and devastated, and their wives and children driven off the land. This shows how the princes and lords observed the armistice and what they meant by amicable arbitration and investigation of grievances. Archduke Ferdinand, to whom the house of Weiser, of Augsburg, advanced money,[327] armed himself in all haste. The Swabian League ordered money and a contingent of troops to be raised in three phases.
These above rebellions coincided with the five months of Thomas Münzer's presence in Upper Baden.[328] Although there are no direct proofs of the influence he had on the outbreak and course of the movement, it is completely established indirectly. The more resolute peasant revolutionaries were mostly his disciples, and put forward his ideas. The twelve articles and the Letter of Articles of Upper Baden peasants are ascribed to him by all his contemporaries, although beyond any doubt he had no part in composing at least the former. When still on his way back to Thuringia he addressed a decidedly revolutionary manifesto to the insurgent peasants.[329]
Duke Ulrich, exiled from Württemberg in 1519, conspired meanwhile to regain his land with the aid of the peasants. In fact, he had been trying to utilise the revolutionary party ever since he was exiled, and had supported it continuously. His name was associated with most of the local disturbances between 1520 and 1524 in the Black Forest and in Württemberg. Now he was arming for an attack on Württemberg from his castle, Hohentwiel. However, he too was only being used by the peasants, had no influence over them and, even less, their trust.
The winter passed but nothing decisive was undertaken by either side. The princely masters went into hiding. The peasant revolt was gathering momentum. In January 1525 the entire country between the Danube, the Rhine and the Lech was in great ferment, and in February the storm broke.
While the Black Forest and Hegau Troop under Hans Müller of Bulgenbach was conspiring with Ulrich of Württemberg and shared in a part of his unsuccessful march on Stuttgart (February and March 1525), the peasants in Ried, above the Ulm, rose on February 9, assembled in a camp near Baltringen protected on all sides by marshes, hoisted the red flag, and formed the Baltringen Troop under the leadership of Ulrich Schmid. This troop was 10,000 to 12,000 strong.
On February 25, the 7,000-strong Upper Allgäu Troop assembled at Schüssen, stimulated by the rumour that an armed force was marching against the discontented elements who had appeared in this locality as everywhere else. The people of Kempten, who had been at odds with their archbishop(2) all winter, assembled the next day and joined the peasants. The towns of Memmingen and Kaufbeuren joined the movement after laying down their conditions; yet the ambiguous attitude of the towns to this struggle was already apparent. On March 7 twelve articles were adopted in Memmingen for all the peasants of Upper Allgäu.
Tidings from the Allgäu peasants prompted the formation of a Lake Troop under Eitel Hans on Lake Constance. It also grew very quickly and established its headquarters in Bermatingen.
Similarly, early in March the peasants rose in Lower Allgäu, in the region of Ochsenhausen and Schellenberg, in Zeil and Waldburg, the estates of Truchsess. This Lower Allgäu Troop, which consisted of 7,000 men, had its camp near Wurzach.
These four troops accepted all the Memmingen articles, incidentally more moderate even than the Hegau articles because they showed a remarkable lack of determination in points relating to the attitude of the armed troops towards the nobility and the governments. Such determination as was shown appeared only in the course of the war, after the peasants had experienced the behaviour of their enemies.
At the same time, a sixth troop formed on the Danube. Peasants from the entire region, from Ulm to Donauwörth, from the valleys of the Hier, Roth and Biber, came to Leipheim and set up camp there. Every able-bodied man from fifteen localities had come, while reinforcements were drawn from 117. The leader of the Leipheim Troop was Ulrich Schön, and its preacher was Jakob Wehe, the pastor of Leipheim.
Thus, in the beginning of March there were 30,000 to 40,000 insurgent Upper Swabian peasants under arms in six camps. The peasant troops were a mixed lot. Münzer's revolutionary party was in thé minority everywhere. Yet it formed the backbone of all the peasant camps. The bulk of the peasants were always ready to come to terms with the lords wherever they were promised the concessions they had hoped to gain by their menacing attitude. As the uprising dragged on and the princes' armies drew nearer, they became war-weary and most of those who still had something to lose went home. Moreover, a vagabond mass of the lumpenproletariat had joined the troops and this undermined their discipline and demoralised the peasants, because the vagabonds came and went as they pleased. This alone explains why the peasants at first remained everywhere on the defensive, why their morale deteriorated in the camps and why, aside from their tactical shortcomings and the shortage of good leaders, they were no match for the armies of the princes.
While the troops were still assembling, Duke Ulrich invaded Württemberg from Hohentwiel with recruited detachments and a few Hegau peasants. The Swabian League would have been lost if the peasants had used the opportunity to attack the troops of Truchsess von Waldburg from the other flank. But because of the defensive attitude of the peasantry, Truchsess soon succeeded in concluding an armistice with the Baltringen, Allgäu and Lake peasants, starting negotiations and fixing Judica Sunday (April 2)[330]
as the day on which the whole affair was to be settled. This gave him a chance to march against Duke Ulrich, to occupy Stuttgart and compel him to abandon Württemberg again on March 17. Then he turned against the peasants, but the mercenaries in his own army revolted and refused to march against them. Truchsess succeeded in placating the mutineers and moved towards Ulm, where new reinforcements were being formed. He left an observation post at Kirchheim near Teck.
The Swabian League, its hands at last free and its first contingents gathered, now threw off its mask, declaring itself
"determined to end with arms in hand and with the aid of God that which the peasants have wilfully undertaken".(3) The peasants had meanwhile faithfully observed the armistice. They had drawn up their demands, the famous Twelve Articles, for the negotiations on Judica Sunday. They demanded the right to elect and depose clergymen through the communities; abolition of the small tithe and utilisation of the great tithe,[331] after subtraction of the pastors' salaries, for public purposes; abolition of serfdom, death tolls, fishing and hunting rights; restriction of excessive statute labour, taxes and rents; restitution of forests, pastures and privileges forcibly withdrawn from communities and individuals, and an end to arbitrary justice and administration. Clearly, the moderate conciliatory party still had the upper hand among the peasant troops. The revolutionary party had formulated its programme earlier in the Letter of Articles. It was an open letter to all peasant communities, calling on them to join the "Christian Alliance and Brotherhood" for the purpose of removing all burdens either through goodwill, "which was unlikely", or by force, and threatening all shirkers with "lay excommunication", i. e. with expulsion from society and ostracism by members of the league. All castles, monasteries and priests' endowments were also to be placed under lay anathema, the letter said, unless the nobility, the priests and monks relinquished them of their own accord, moved into ordinary houses like other people, and joined the Christian Alliance.—This radical manifesto, obviously composed before the spring insurrection of 1525, thus speaks above all of revolution, of complete victory over the still reigning classes, while the "lay excommunication" is designed for the oppressors and traitors who were to be killed, for the castles that were to be burned, and the monasteries and endowments that were to be confiscated and whose treasures were to be turned into cash.
But before the peasants came to present their Twelve Articles to the appointed courts of arbitration, they learned that the Swabian League had violated the armistice and that its troops were approaching. Instantly, they took countermeasures. A general meeting of all Allgäu, Baltringen and Lake peasants was held at Gaisbeuren. The four troops were combined and reorganised into four new columns. A decision was taken to confiscate the church estates, to sell their treasures in favour of the war chest, and to burn the castles. Thus alongside the official Twelve Articles, the Letter of Articles became the statute of warfare, and Judica Sunday, the day designated for the conclusion of peace, became the date of a general uprising.
The mounting unrest everywhere, continuous local conflicts between peasants and nobility, tidings of the uprising in the Black Forest, which had been brewing in the preceding six months, and of its spread to the Danube and the Lech, are enough to explain the rapid succession of peasant revolts in two-thirds of Germany. But that the individual[3] revolts broke out simultaneously proves that there were men at the head of the movement who organised them through Anabaptist and other emissaries. Already in the second half of March disorders broke out in Württemberg, in the lower reaches of the Neckar, in Odenwald, and in Lower and Middle Franconia. However, April 2, Judica Sunday, was named everywhere beforehand as the day of the general uprising, and everywhere the decisive blow, the revolt en masse, was delivered in the first week of April. The Allgäu, Hegau and Lake peasants also sounded the bells on April 1 and called mass meetings to summon all able-bodied men to their camp; they opened hostilities against the castles and monasteries simultaneously with the Baltringen peasants.
In Franconia, where the movement had six centres, the insurrection broke out everywhere in the first days of April. At about the same time two peasant camps were formed near Nördlingen, with whose aid the revolutionary party of the town under Anton Forner gained the upper hand, appointed Forner town mayor, and consummated a union between the town and the peasants. In the region of Ansbach the peasants revolted everywhere between April 1 and 7, and from here the uprising spread as far as Bavaria. In the region of Rothenburg the peasants had been under arms since March 22. In the town of Rothenburg the rule of the honourables was overthrown by the petty burghers and the plebeians under Stephan von Menzingen on March 27, but since peasant dues were the chief source of revenue for the town, the new government also vacillated and acted ambiguously towards the peasants. A general uprising of the peasants and the townships broke out early in April in the Grand Chapter of Würzburg,[352] and in the bishopric of Bamberg a general insurrection compelled the bishopb to yield in five days. And a strong Bildhausen peasant camp formed in the North, on the border of Thuringia.
In Odenwald* where Wendel Hipler, nobleman and former chancellor of the Counts von Hohenlohe, and Georg Metzler, an innkeeper from Ballenberg near Krautheim, headed the revolutionary party, the storm broke out already on March 26. The peasants marched from all directions towards the Tauber. The two thousand men of the Rothenburg camp joined them as well. Georg Metzler took
The 1850 and 1870 editions have partiellen (partial) instead of einzelnen (individual).— Ed.
Weigand von Redwitz.— Ed.
command and after the arrival of all reinforcements marched on April 4 to the monastery of Schönthal on the Jagst, where he was joined by the peasants of the Neckar valley. The latter, led by Jäcklein Rohrbach, an innkeeper from Böckingen near Heilbronn, had begun their insurrection in Flein, Sontheim»etc, on Judica Sunday, while Wendel Hipler took Öhringen by surprise with a number of conspirators and drew the peasants in the vicinity into the movement. In Schönthal the two peasant columns combined into the Gay Troop, accepted the Twelve Articles and made a few raids on castles and monasteries. The Gay Troop was about 8,000 strong and had cannon and 3,000 muskets. Florian Geyer, a Franconian knight, joined the force and formed the Black Troop, a select corps recruited mainly from the Rothenburg and Öhringen army reserve.
The Württemberg magistrate in Neckarsulm, Count Ludwig von Helfenstein, opened the hostilities. He ordered all captured peasants to be executed on the spot. The Gay Troop marched to meet him. The peasants were embittered by the massacres and by news of the defeat of the Leipheim Troop, of Jakob Wehe's execution, and the Truchsess atrocities. Von Helfenstein, who had moved into Weinsberg, was attacked there. The castle was stormed by Florian Geyer,
the town seized in a prolonged battle and Count Ludwig taken prisoner along with several knights. On the following day, April 17, Jäcklein Rohrbach and the most resolute members of the troop held court over the prisoners and made fourteen of them, with von
Helfenstein at their head, run the gauntlet, this being the most humiliating death they could think of. The capture of Weinsberg and Jäcklein's terroristic revenge on von Helfenstein did not fail to have their effect on the nobility. The Counts von Löwenstein joined the peasant alliance. The Counts von Hohenlohe, who had joined previously but had given no aid, immediately sent the desired cannon and powder.
The chiefs debated among themselves whether they should make Götz von Berlichingen their commander, "since he could bring to them the nobility". The proposal found sympathy, but Florian Geyer, who saw the seeds of reaction in this mood of the peasants and their chiefs, separated from the Gay Troop and marched on his own with his Black Troop, first through the Neckar and then the Würzburg region, everywhere destroying castles and the lairs of the priesthood.
The rest of the troops marched first of all against Heilbronn. In this powerful free imperial town the patriciate was, as almost everywhere, confronted by a burgher and revolutionary opposition. In secret agreement with the peasants, the latter opened the gates to Georg Metzler and Jäcklein Rohrbach on April 17 during a disturbance. The peasant chiefs and their people took possession of the town, which was then admitted to their brotherhood and delivered 1,200 guilders in cash and a squad of volunteers. Only the possessions of the clergy and the Teutonic Order[333] were pillaged. On April 22, the peasants moved out, leaving a small garrison. Heilbronn was to become the centre of the various troops, the latter actually sending delegates and conferring over joint actions and the common demands of the peasantry. But the burgher opposition and the patricians, who had joined forces after the peasant invasion, regained the upper hand in the town, preventing decisive steps and waiting only for the approach of the princes' troops to openly betray the peasants.
The peasants marched toward Odenwald. Götz von Berlichingen, who had a few days before offered himself to the Elector Palatine,(4)
then to the peasantry, and then again to the Elector, was to join the Evangelist Fraternity on April 24 and assume supreme command of ' the Gay Bright Troop (as distinct from the Black Troop of Florian Geyer). At the same time, however, he was the prisoner of the peasants, who mistrusted him and bound him to a council of chiefs, without whose approval he could undertake nothing. Götz and
Metzler marched with the bulk of the peasants across Buchen to Amorbach, where, during their stay from April 30 to May 5, they roused the entire Mainz region. The nobility was everywhere compelled to join in, and its castles were thus spared. Only the monasteries were burned and pillaged. The troop had become visibly demoralised. The most energetic men had gone away with Florian Geyer or with Jäcklein Rohrbach who, after the capture of Heilbronn, also separated from the troop, apparently because he, the judge of Count von Helfenstein, could no longer remain with a body that was inclined towards reconciliation with the nobility. This gravitation towards reaching an understanding with the nobility was in itself a sign of demoralisation. Soon Wendel Hipler proposed a very sound reorganisation of the troop. He suggested that the mercenaries, who had been offering their services daily, should be taken on. He also suggested that the troop should no longer be renewed monthly through the arrival of fresh contingents and the dismissal of old ones, and that the men under arms, who had received a certain amount of military training, should be retained. But a community meeting rejected both proposals. The peasants had already become volatile and viewed the war as little more than pillage, where the competition of the mercenaries held no advantage for them and where they wanted to be free to go home as soon as their pockets were filled. In Amorbach matters came to a point where Hans Berlin, a Heilbronn councillor, induced the chiefs and troop councillors to accept a Declaration of the Twelve Articles,[334] a document wherein the remaining arrowheads of the Twelve Articles were blunted and words of humble supplication were put into the mouths of the peasants. But this was too much for the peasants; they rejected the Declaration with a display of vehemence and insisted upon the original Articles.
In the meantime, a decisive change had taken place in the Würzburg area. The bishop,(5) who had withdrawn to fortified
Frauenberg near Würzburg after the first peasant uprising early in April and had vainly sent messages in all directions asking for aid, was finally compelled to make temporary concessions. On May 2 a Diet opened in which the peasants were represented, but letters proving the bishop's treacherous moves were intercepted before any results could be achieved. The Diet broke up at once, and hostilities began between the insurgent townsmen and peasants, on the one hand, and the bishop's forces, on the other. The bishop escaped to Heidelberg on May 5, and on the following day Florian Geyer with his Black Troop entered Würzburg, and with him came the Franconian Tauber Troop, which consisted of the peasants of Mergentheim, Rothenburg and Ansbach. On May 7 Götz von Berlichingen arrived with his Gay Bright Troop, and the siege of Frauenberg began.
In Limburg and the Ellwangen and Hall regions another contingent was formed by the end of March, and in early April that of Gaildorf, or the Common Gay Troop. It showed considerable violence, roused the entire region, burned down many monasteries and castles, including the castle of Hohenstaufen, compelled all the peasants to join it, and forced the nobles, and even the cup-bearers of Limburg, to enter the Christian Brotherhood. Early in May it invaded Württemberg, but was compelled to withdraw. As in 1848 the separatism of the German system of small states obstructed joint action by the revolutionaries of the various states. The Gaildorf Troop, restricted to a small area, was naturally bound to disperse when all resistance within that area was broken. It concluded an agreement with the town of Gmünd and went home, leaving only 500 under arms.
In the Palatinate peasant troops were formed on either bank of the Rhine by the end of April. They destroyed many castles and monasteries, and oh May 1 took Neustadt on the Haardt after the Bruchrain peasants had crossed the river on the previous day and forced Speyer to conclude an agreement. Marshal von Habern at the head of the Elector's small force was powerless against them, and on May 10 the Elector was compelled to come to an agreement with the insurgent peasants, guaranteeing them redress of grievances through a Diet.
Finally, in Württemberg the revolt had already broken out early in some localities. The peasants of the Urach Jura formed a union against priests and lords already in February and the peasants of Blaubeuren, Urach, Münsingen, Balingen and Rosenfeld revolted at the end of March. The Württemberg region was invaded by the Gaildorf Troop at Göppingen, by Jäcklein Rohrbach at Brackenheim and by the remnants of the beaten Leipheim Troop at Pfullingen, inciting the rural population to revolt. There were also serious disturbances in other localities. Already on April 6 Pfullingen surrendered to the peasants. The Austrian Archduke's (6) government was driven to the wall. It had no money and only few troops. The cities and castles were in a bad state and had neither garrisons nor munition. Even Asperg was practically defenseless.
The government's attempt to call out the town reserves against the peasants caused its instant defeat. On April 16 the Bottwar(7) reserves refused to obey orders. Instead of marching to Stuttgart, they turned to Wunnenstein near Bottwar, where they formed the nucleus of a camp of burghers and peasants whose number increased rapidly. The rebellion in Zabergäu broke out on the same day. The Maul-bronn monastery was pillaged and a few more monasteries and castles were laid waste. Reinforcements marched from neighbouring Bruchrain to join the local peasants.
The Wunnenstein troop was under the command of Matern Feuerbacher, a Bottwar town councillor. He was a leader of the burgher opposition, but was so strongly compromised that he was compelled to go with the peasants. However, he remained at all times very moderate, prevented the implementation of the Letter of Articles against the castles, and sought everywhere to reconcile the peasants with the moderate burgherdom. He prevented the amalgamation of the Württemberg peasants with the Gay Bright Troop, and later likewise prevailed on the Gaildorf Troop to withdraw from Württemberg. On April 19 he was deposed for his burgher tendencies but again made commander the next day. He was indispensable, and even when Jäcklein Rohrbach arrived with 200 determined men to join the Württemberg peasants on April 22, he had no choice but to leave Feuerbacher in command and confined himself to rigid supervision of his actions.
On April 18 the government attempted to negotiate with the peasants stationed at Wunnenstein. The peasants insisted on the Twelve Articles, but naturally the government's representatives could not accept them. The troop set itself in motion. On April 20 it reached Lauffen, where, for the last time, it turned down the proposals of the government delegates. On April 22 the troop, numbering 6,000, appeared in Bietigheim and threatened Stuttgart. Most members of the Stuttgart Council had fled and a citizens' committee took over the administration. Among the citizenry there was the same division as everywhere else into parties of the honourables, the burgher opposition, and the revolutionary plebeians. On April 25 the latter opened the gates to the peasants and Stuttgart was instantly taken. Here the organisation of the Gay Christian Troop, as the Württemberg insurgents now called themselves, was completed and the rules of pay, division of booty, maintenance, etc., were rigidly defined. A detachment of Stutt-garters under Theus Gerber joined the troop.
On April 29 Feuerbacher marched with all his men against the Gaildorfers who had entered Württemberg region at Schorndorf. He drew the entire area into his alliance and thereby prevailed on the Gaildorfers to withdraw. In this way he prevented Rohrbach's revolutionary element in his troop from joining hands with the reckless Gaildorfers and thus being dangerously strengthened. Upon receiving news of Truchsess' approach, he left Schorndorf to meet him, and on May 1 made camp near Kirchheim unter Teck.
We have herewith traced the origin and development of the uprising in the part of Germany that should be regarded as the territory of the first group of peasant armies. Before we proceed to the other groups (Thuringia and Hesse, Alsace, Austria and the Alps) we must give an account of the military operations of Truchsess, in which he, alone in the beginning and later supported by various princes and townships, annihilated this first group of insurgents.
We left .Truchsess near Ulm, where he had come late in March after leaving an observation corps in Kirchheim unter Teck under the command of Dietrich Spät. Truchsess' corps, which, including the League reinforcements concentrated in Ulm, had not quite 10,000 men, of whom 7,200 were infantry, was the only army available for an offensive war against the peasants. Reinforcements came to Ulm very slowly, due partly to the difficulties of recruiting in insurgent localities, partly to the governments' lack of money, and partly to the fact that the few available troops were everywhere more than indispensable for manning the fortresses and castles. We have already taken note of the small number of troops at the disposal of the princes and towns outside the Swabian League. Everything therefore depended upon Georg Truchsess and his League army. Truchsess turned first against the Baltringen Troop, which had in the meantime begun to destroy castles and monasteries in the vicinity of Ried. The peasants, who withdrew at the approach of the League troops, were outflanked and driven out of the marshes, crossed the Danube and plunged into the ravines and forests of the Swabian Jura. In this region the cannon and cavalry which formed the backbone of the League army were of little avail against them, and Truchsess did not pursue them farther. He marched against the Leipheim Troop which had 5,000 men stationed at Leipheim, 4,000 in the Mindel valley, and 6,000 at Illertissen. The Leipheim Troop was fomenting rebellion in the entire region, destroying monasteries and castles, and preparing to march against Ulm with all its three columns. It seems that a certain degree of demoralisation had set in among the peasants here as well, undermining their military morale, for Jakob Wehe tried at the very outset to negotiate with Truchsess. The latter, however, backed by a sufficient military force, declined to negotiate and on April 4 attacked and routed the main troop at Leipheim. Jakob Wehe, Ulrich Schön and two other peasant leaders were captured and beheaded; Leipheim capitulated, and several expeditions to the adjacent countryside subdued the entire region. A new mutiny of mercenaries, who demanded plunder and additional pay, delayed Truchsess again until April 10, when he marched south-west against the Baltringen Troop which had, in the meantime, invaded his estates, Waldburg, Zeil and Wolfegg, and besieged his castles. Here, too, he found the peasants disunited, and defeated them on April 11 and 12 successively in several battles, which completely disrupted the Baltringen Troop. Its remnants withdrew under the command of priest Florian and joined the Lake Troop. Truchsess now turned against the latter. The Lake Troop, which had not merely roved through the countryside all this time, but had also drawn the towns of Buchhorn (Friedrichshafen) and Wollmatingen into the brotherhood, held a big military council in the monastery of Salem on April 13 and decided to move against Truchsess. Alarm bells were sounded at once, and 10,000 men joined by the defeated Baltringen Troop assembled in the Ber-matingen camp. On April 15 they stood their ground in a battle with Truchsess, who did not want to risk his army in a decisive battle and preferred to negotiate, strengthened in this purpose by news of the approach of the Allgäu and Hegau troops. On April 17 he therefore concluded an agreement with the Lake and Baltringen peasants in Weingarten. On the face of it, the agreement was quite favourable for the peasants, and they accepted it without hesitation. Ultimately, he also prevailed on the delegates of the Upper and Lower Allgäu peasants to accept this agreement, and marched towards Württemberg.
Here Truchsess' cunning saved him from certain defeat. Had he not succeeded in fooling the weak, dull-witted, and for the most part already demoralised peasants and their mostly incapable, timid and venal leaders, he and his small army would have been enveloped by four columns of at least 25,000 to 30,000 men, and would have faced inevitable disaster. It was his enemies' narrow-mindedness, always unavoidable when peasants gather in a mass, that enabled him to dispose of them at the very moment when they could have ended the war with one blow, at least in Swabia and Franconia. The Lake peasants observed the agreement, which naturally was turned against them in due course, so rigidly that they later took up arms against their allies, the Hegau peasants. Although the Allgäu peasants, drawn into the betrayal by their leaders, soon renounced the agreement, Truchsess was by then out of danger.
Though not bound by the Weingarten agreement, the Hegau peasants soon gave a new display of the infinite parochial bigotry and stubborn provincialism that proved the undoing of the entire Peasant War. When, after futile negotiations with them, Truchsess marched off to Württemberg, they followed him and were continually on his flank, but it did not occur to them to unite with the Württemberg Gay Christian Troop, and this because previously the peasants of Württemberg and the Neckar valley had refused them assistance. When Truchsess had marched far enough from their home country, they simply turned back and marched on Freiburg.
We left the Württemberg peasants under the command of Matern Feuerbacher at Kirchheim unter Teck, from where the observation corps left by Truchsess under the command of Dietrich Spät had withdrawn towards Urach. After an unsuccessful attempt to take Urach, Feuerbacher turned towards Nürtingen and sent messages to all insurgent troops in the vicinity to assist him in the decisive battle. And considerable reinforcements did come from both the Württemberg lowlands and from Gäu. The Gäu peasants, who had joined the remnants of the Leipheim Troop that had withdrawn to West Württemberg and roused the valleys of the Upper Neckar and Nagold up to Böblingen and Leonberg, came in two strong columns to join Feuerbacher at Nürtingen on May 5. Truchsess stumbled upon the united troop at Böblingen. Its number, its artillery and position perplexed him. As was his custom, he at once began to negotiate and concluded an armistice with the peasants. But no sooner had he thus secured his position than he attacked them on May 12 during the armistice and forced a decisive battle on them. The peasants offered long and courageous resistance until Böblingen finally surrendered to Truchsess owing to betrayal by the burghers. The peasants' left wing, deprived of its base of support, was forced back and outflanked. This decided the issue. The poorly disciplined peasants were thrown into confusion and fled in disorder; those who were not killed or captured by League horsemen threw away their weapons and hurried home. The Gay Christian Troop, and with it the whole Württemberg insurrection, were crushed. Theus Gerber fled to Esslingen and Feuerbacher to Switzerland, while Jäcklein Rohrbach was taken prisoner and dragged in chains to Neckargar-tach, where he was bound to a stake, surrounded with firewood and roasted to death on a slow fire, while Truchsess, carousing with his knights, gloated over this knightly spectacle.
From Neckargartach Truchsess supported the operations of the Elector Palatine by invading Kraichgau. On receiving word of Truchsess' success, the Elector, who meanwhile had gathered an army, immediately broke his agreement With the peasants, attacked Bruchrain on May 23, captured and burned Maisch in spite of its vigorous resistance, pillaged a number of villages, and garrisoned Bruchsal. At the same time Truchsess attacked Eppingen and captured the chief of the local movement, Anton Eisenhut, whom the Elector immediately executed along with a dozen other peasant leaders. Bruchrain and Kraichgau were thus subdued and compelled to pay an indemnity of about 40,000 guilders. Both armies, that of Truchsess — reduced to 6,000 men in the preceding battles — and that of the Elector (6,500 men), united and moved against the Odenwalders.
Word of the Böblingen defeat spread terror everywhere among the insurgents. The free imperial cities which had come under the heavy hand of the peasants, heaved a sigh of relief. The city of Heilbronn was the first to seek reconciliation with the Swabian League. In Heilbronn the peasants' chancellory and delegates of the various troops deliberated over the proposals they would make to the Emperor(8) and the Empire in the name of all the insurgent peasants. These negotiations, whose outcome was to apply to all Germany, revealed again that none of the estates, including the peasants, was sufficiently developed to alter the situation in Germany according to its own lights. It was obvious at once that the support of the nobility and particularly of the burghers had to be gained for this purpose.
Wendel Hipler took charge of the negotiations. Of all the leaders of the movement he had the best grasp on the existing situation. He was not a far-seeing revolutionary like Münzer, nor a peasant representative like Metzler or Rohrbach; his extensive experience and his practical knowledge of the attitude of the various estates towards each other prevented him from representing any one of the estates involved in the movement in opposition to the others. Just as Münzer, a representative of the budding proletariat, a class which then stood totally outside the official organisation of society, was driven to anticipate communism, Wendel Hipler, the representative of what may be described as the cross-section of the nation's progressive elements, anticipated modern bourgeois society. The principles he represented and the demands he made were not really immediately practicable. They were the somewhat idealised and inevitable result of the dissolution of feudal society. And the peasants, having set themselves to drafting legislation for the whole Empire, were compelled to accept them. In Heilbronn, therefore, the centralisation demanded by the peasants assumed a more definite form which was, however, worlds removed from the peasants' own idea. For instance, it was much more clearly expressed in the demands for a standard currency, standard weights and measures, abolition of internal customs, etc., that is, in demands that were far more in the interest of townsmen than in that of the peasants. Concessions were made to the nobility that substantially approached the modern system of redemption and that would in the long run transform feudal into bourgeois landownership. In short, since the peasants' demands were composed as an "imperial reform", they necessarily complied with the definitive interests rather than the immediate demands of the burghers.
While this imperial reform was still being debated in Heilbronn, the author of the Declaration of the Twelve Articles, Hans Berlin, was already on his way to meet Truchsess and negotiate the surrender of the township on behalf of the honourables and burghers. Reactionary movements within the town supported this betrayal, and Wendel Hipler was obliged to flee with the peasants.
He went to Weinsberg, where he attempted to assemble the remnants of the Württemberg Troop and the small mobile unit of Gaildorfers. But the approach of the Elector Palatine and Truchsess drove him from there as well, and he was compelled to go to Würzburg to rouse the Gay Bright Troop into action. In the meantime, the armies of the League and the Elector subdued the entire Neckar region, compelled the peasants to renew their oath of allegiance, burned many villages, and slayed or hanged all runaway peasants who fell into their hands. Weinsberg was burned to avenge the execution of von Helfenstein.
The peasant troops assembled near Würzburg had in the meantime laid siege to Frauenberg, and on May 15, before even a breach was made in the wall of the fortress, they bravely but unsuccessfully attempted to storm it. Four hundred of the best men, mostly of Florian Geyer's Troop, were left behind in the ditches, dead or wounded. Two days later, on May 17, Wendel Hipler arrived and ordered a military council. He proposed to leave only 4,000 men at Frauenberg, and to encamp with the main force of about 20,000 men at Krautheim on the Jagst under the very nose of Truchsess, so that all reinforcements might be concentrated there. It was an excellent plan. Only by keeping the masses together and securing numerical superiority could the peasants hope to defeat the princely army, which now numbered about 13,000 men. The demoralisation and discouragement of the peasants, however, was too far gone to contemplate any energetic action. Besides, Götz von Berlichingen, who soon turned traitor, may have helped to hold the troop in check, and Hipler's plan was thus never executed. Instead, the forces were split up as usual. Not until May 23 did the Gay Bright Troop go into action after the Franconians promised to follow without delay. On May 26 the Ansbach detachments encamped in Würzburg were induced to return home on receiving word that their Margrave(9) had opened hostilities against the peasants. The rest of the besieging army, along with Florian Geyer's Black Troop, occupied positions at Heidingsfeld in the vicinity of Würzburg.
On May 24 the Gay Bright Troop, not really ready for battle, arrived in Krautheim. Many learned here that in their absence their villages had sworn allegiance to Truchsess, and used this as a pretext to go home. The troop moved on to Neckarsulm, and on May 28 started negotiations with Truchsess. At the same time messengers were sent to the peasants of Franconia, Alsace and Black Forest-Hegau to ask for reinforcements as quickly as possible. From Neckarsulm Götz [von Berlichingen] marched back to Öhringen. The troop steadily melted away. Götz von Berlichingen also disappeared during the march. He had gone home, having previously negotiated with Truchsess through his old brother-in-arms, Dietrich Spät, on going over to the other side. At Öhringen a false rumour of the enemy's approach threw the perplexed and discouraged peasantry into panic. The troop dispersed in utter confusion, and it was with difficulty that Metzler and Wendel Hipler succeeded in keeping together about 2,000 men, whom they again led toward Krautheim. In the meantime, the Franconian army of 5,000 men had come, but due to a side march through Löwenstein towards Öhringen, ordered by Götz with obviously treacherous intents, it missed the Gay Troop and moved towards Neckarsulm. This town, occupied by several detachments of the Gay Bright Troop, was besieged by Truchsess. The Franconians arrived at night and saw the fires of the League camp, but their leaders had not the courage to venture an attack and retreated to Krautheim where they at last found the remainder of the Gay Bright Troop. In the absence of aid, Neckarsulm surrendered to the League force on May 29. At once Truchsess had thirteen peasants executed and set out against the other peasant troops, burning and ravaging, pillaging and murdering along the way. His route through the valleys of the Neckar, Kocher and Jagst was marked with ruins and the corpses of peasants hanging on trees.
At Krautheim the League army encountered the peasants who had been forced by a flanking movement by Truchsess to withdraw towards Königshofen on the Tauber. Here they took up their position, 8,000 strong and with 32 cannon. Truchsess approached them behind the cover of hills and forests. He sent out columns to envelop them, and on June 2 attacked in such greatly superior force and with so much energy that they were defeated and dispersed in spite of the stubborn resistance of several of their troops that lasted into the night. As everywhere, it was the League horsemen, the "Peasants' Death", who were mainly instrumental in annihilating the insurgent army, charging down upon the peasants who were shaken by artillery and musket fire and lance attacks, breaking their ranks completely and slaying them one by one. The fate of 300 Königshofen burghers who had joined the peasant army serves as an illustration of the warfare led by Truchsess and his horsemen. All but fifteen of them were killed in the battle and four of the survivors were subsequently beheaded.
Having thus settled with the peasants of Odenwald, the Neckar valley and Lower Franconia, Truchsess subdued the whole region in a series of punitive expeditions, burning down whole villages and executing countless people. Then he marched against Würzburg. On the way he learned that the second Franconian Troop under Florian Geyer and Gregor von Burgbernheim was stationed at Sulzdorf, and instantly turned against it.
After his unsuccessful storming of Frauenberg, Florian Geyer had mainly devoted himself to negotiating with the princes and towns, especially with Rothenburg and Margrave Casimir of Ansbach, urging them to join the peasant brotherhood. But the negotiations were brought to an abrupt end by the news of the Königshofen defeat. His troop was joined by that of Ansbach under Gregor von Burgbernheim. The Ansbach troop had only recently been formed. Margrave Casimir had managed to keep in check the peasant revolt in his possessions in true Hohenzollern style, partly with promises and partly by means of a threatening mass of troops. He maintained complete neutrality towards all outside troops as long as they did not recruit Ansbach subjects, and tried to direct the hatred of the peasants mainly against the church endowments, through whose ultimate confiscation he hoped to enrich himself. In the meantime he kept arming and biding his time. As soon as he learned of the Böblingen battle he opened hostilities against his rebellious peasants, pillaging and burning their villages and hanging or otherwise killing many of them. But the peasants rallied quickly and defeated him at Windsheim under the command of Gregor von Burgbernheim on May 29. The call of the hard-pressed Odenwald peasants reached them as they were still pursuing him, and they headed at once for Heidingsfeld and from there, with Florian Geyer, again towards Würzburg (June 2). With no word arriving from the Odenwald troop, they left behind 5,000 peasants in Würzburg and with 4,000 — the rest having deserted — they followed the others. Made complacent by false news of the outcome of the Königshofen battle, they were attacked by Truchsess at Sulzdorf and completely defeated. Truchsess' horsemen and mercenaries staged a terrible bloodbath. Florian Geyer rallied the remainder of his Black Troop, 600 in number, and fought his way to the village of Ingolstadt. Two hundred occupied the church and churchyard, and 400 took the castle. The Elector Palatine's forces pursued Geyer, and a column of 1,200 men captured the village and set fire to the church. Those who did not perish in the flames were slaughtered. The Elector's troops then breached the dilapidated castle wall and attempted to storm the fortress. Turned back twice by the peasants, who had taken cover behind an inner wall, they shot up the inner wall as well, and tried a third assault, which was successful. Half of Geyer's men were massacred, but Geyer managed to escape with the other 200. Their hiding place, however, was discovered on the following day (Whit-Monday). The Elector Palatine's soldiers surrounded the woods in which they lay hidden, and slaughtered all of them. Only seventeen prisoners were taken during those two days. Again Florian Geyer fought his way out of the encirclement with a few of his most intrepid fighters and set out to join the Gaildorf peasants, who had again assembled a body of about 7,000 men. But upon his arrival he found them mostly dispersed by the crushing news from every side. He made a last attempt to assemble the peasants dispersed in the woods, but was surprised by enemy forces at Hall on June 9 and laid down his life fighting.
Truchsess, who had sent word to besieged Frauenberg on the heels of the Königshofen victory, now marched towards Würzburg. The Council came to a secret understanding with him, so that on the night of June 7 the League army was allowed to surround the city where 5,000 peasants were stationed, and the following morning marched with sheathed swords through the gates opened by the Council. This betrayal of the Würzburg "honourables" caused the last troop of the Franconian peasants to be disarmed and all its leaders to be arrested. Truchsess immediately ordered 81 of them decapitated. The various Franconian princes arrived in Würzburg one after the other, and among them the Bishop of Würzburg himself,[3] the Bishop of Bamberg(10) and the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. The gracious lords distributed the roles among themselves. Truchsess marched with the Bishop of Bamberg, who presently broke the agreement concluded with his peasants and opened his land to the fierce and murderous hordes of the League army. Margrave Casimir devastated his own land. Deiningen was burned and numerous villages were pillaged or gutted. In every town the Margrave held a bloodthirsty court. He ordered eighteen rebels beheaded in Neustadt on the Aisch and in Bergel forty-three suffered the same fate. From there he went to Rothenburg where the honourables had already made a counter-revolution and arrested Stephan von Menzingen. The Rothenburg petty burghers and plebeians now had to pay heavily for behaving so ambiguously towards the peasants, refusing them all help until the very last, insisting in their local narrow-minded egotism on the suppression of countryside crafts in favour of the city guilds, and only unwillingly giving up the city revenues flowing in from the feudal services of the peasants. The Margrave ordered sixteen of them executed, Menzingen naturally first of all.— The Bishop of Würzburg marched through his region in a similar manner, pillaging, ravaging and burning everything on his way. He had 256 rebels decapitated on this triumphal march, and upon returning to Würzburg crowned his handiwork by beheading another thirteen Würzburg rebels.
In the Mainz region the viceregent, Bishop Wilhelm von Strassburg, restored order without resistance. He executed only four men. Rheingau, which had also been in revolt but where everybody had long since come home, was eventually invaded by Frowin von Hütten, a cousin of Ulrich, and fully "pacified" by the execution of twelve ringleaders. Frankfurt, which also experienced considerable revolutionary unrest, was held in check first by the conciliatory attitude of the Council and later by recruited troops. In the Rhenish Palatinate about 8,000 peasants had assembled anew after the Elector's breach of faith, and had again burned monasteries and castles, but the Archbishop of Trier [3] came to the aid of Marshal von Habern and made short work of them on June 23 at Pfed-dersheim. A series of atrocities (eighty-two were executed in Pfed-dersheim alone) and the capture of Weissenburg on July 7 put an end to the insurrection.
Of all the peasant troops only two were still unvanquished: the Hegau-Black Forest Troop and that of Allgäu. Archduke Ferdinand had tried intriguing against both. Just as Margrave Casimir and other princes sought to utilise the insurrection to annex church lands and principalities, Ferdinand wished to use it for the aggrandisement of the House of Austria. He had negotiated with the Allgäu commander, Walter Bach, and with the Hegau commander, Hans Müller of Bulgenbach, in the hope of prevailing on the peasants to declare allegiance to Austria, but though both chiefs were venal they could not talk their troops into anything more than an armistice between the Allgäu Troop and the Archduke, and neutrality towards Austria.
Retreating from the Württemberg region, the peasants of Hegau destroyed a number of castles and gathered reinforcements in the provinces of the Margraviate of Baden. On May 13 they marched on Freiburg, bombarded it from May 18, and entered it triumphantly when the town surrendered on May 23. From there thev moved towards Stockach and Radolfzell, and waged a long but unsuccessful small war against the garrisons of those towns. Together with the nobility and other surrounding towns, the latter appealed to the Lake peasants for help in accordance with the Weingarten agreement. The former rebels of the Lake Troop rose, 5,000 strong, against their confederates. These peasants were so narrow-minded and short-sighted that only 600 refused to fight, expressing their wish to join the Hegau peasants, for which they were massacred. Meanwhile, persuaded by Hans Müller of Bulgenbach, who had sold himself to the enemy, the Hegau peasants lifted their siege, and when thereupon Hans Müller ran away, most of them dispersed. The remainder entrenched themselves on the Hilzingen Steep, where they were beaten and annihilated on July 16 by troops that had in the meantime become available. The Swiss cities negotiated an agreement on behalf of the Hegau peasants, which, however, did not prevent the other side from capturing and beheading Hans Müller in Laufenburg, his betrayal notwithstanding. In Breisgau the town of Freiburg also deserted the peasant union (July 17) and sent troops against the peasants, but due to the weakness of the princely force an agreement was reached here as elsewhere, known as the agreement of Offenburg[335] (September 18), which also applied to Sundgau. The eight Black Forest groups and the Klettgau peasants, who were not as yet disarmed, were again compelled to rebel by the tyranny of Count von Sulz, and were defeated in October. On November 13 the Black Forest peasants were forced to conclude an agreement,[336] and Waldshut, the last bulwark of the insurrection in the Upper Rhine, fell on December 6.
After Truchsess' departure the Allgäu peasants renewed their campaign against the monasteries and castles and wreaked vengeance for the ravages caused by the League army. They were confronted by few troops, who risked only insignificant isolated skirmishes and never followed them into the woods. In June, a movement against the honourables broke out in Memmingen, which had hitherto been more or less neutral. This movement was defeated only due to the accidental presence in the vicinity of some League troops, who came in time to aid the honourables. Schappeler, preacher and leader of the plebeian movement, took refuge in St. Gallen. The peasants appeared before the town and were about to begin shooting breaches in its wall when they learned that Truchsess was approaching from Würzburg. On June 27 they set out against him in two columns across Babenhausen and Obergünzburg. Archduke Ferdinand again attempted to win the peasants for the House of Austria. On the strength of the armistice concluded with them, he demanded of Truchsess to march no farther against them. The Swabian League, however, ordered Truchsess to attack, but to refrain from pillaging and burning. But Truchsess was too clever to relinquish his prime and most effective weapon even if he were able to hold in check the mercenaries whom he had led from Lake Constance to the Main, from one atrocity to another. The peasants, numbering about 23,000, took up battle positions across the Hier and Leubas. Truchsess opposed them with 11,000 men. The positions of both armies were very strong. The cavalry was ineffective due to the terrain, and if the Truchsess mercenaries were superior to the peasants in organisation, ammunition and discipline, the Allgäu peasants had in their ranks a host of former soldiers and experienced commanders, and many well-manned cannon. On July 19 the League army opened fire, which was continued on both sides through July 20, but with no result. On July 21 Georg von Frundsberg joined Truchsess with 3,000 mercenaries. He knew many of the peasant commanders, for they had served under him in the Italian military expeditions, and entered into negotiations with them. Treason succeeded where military resources proved insufficient. Walter Bach and several other commanders and artillerymen sold out. They set fire to the powder stores of the peasants and induced the troop to attempt an enveloping movement, but as soon as the peasants left their strong positions they ran into an ambush engineered by Truchsess in collusion with Bach and the other traitors. The peasants' ability to defend themselves was impaired since their traitorous commanders had left them under the pretext of reconnoitring and were already on their way to Switzerland. Thus, two of the peasant columns were routed, while a third, under Knopf of Leubas, was able to withdraw in good order. It resumed its position on the mountain of Kollen near Kempten, where it was surrounded by Truchsess. But the latter did not dare attack the peasants; he cut off their supply routes and tried to demoralise them by burning about 200 villages in the vicinity. Hunger and the sight of their burning homes finally brought the peasants to their knees (July 25). More than twenty were immediately executed. Knopf of Leubas, the only leader of this troop who did not betray his banner, fled to Bregenz. There he was captured and hanged after a long imprisonment.
This brought the Peasant War in Swabia and Franconia to an end.
VI
Directly after the outbreak of the first movement in Swabia, Thomas Münzer again hurried to Thuringia, and in late February or early March stayed in the free imperial town of Mühlhausen, where his party was stronger than elsewhere. He held the threads of the whole movement and knew that a storm was brewing in South Germany. So he set out to turn Thuringia into the centre of the movement in North Germany. He found the soil extremely fertile. Thuringia itself, the main scene of the Reformation movement, was in great ferment. The misery of the downtrodden peasants and the prevailing revolutionary, religious and political doctrines had also made a general uprising imminent in the neighbouring provinces of Hesse and Saxony, and in the Harz region. In Mühlhausen itself the bulk of the petty burgherdom was won over to Münzer's extreme standpoint and could hardly wait to assert its superiority over the arrogant honourables. To prevent premature action, Münzer was compelled to act as a moderator, but his disciple, Pfeifer, who held the reins of the movement there, had committed himself so greatly that he could not hold back the outbreak, and as early as March 17, 1525, before the general uprising in South Germany, Mühlhausen made its revolution. The old patrician Council was overthrown and the government handed over to the newly elected "eternal council", with Münzer as president.[337]
The worst thing that can befall the leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to assume power at a time when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class he represents and for the measures this domination implies. What he can do depends not on his will but on the degree of antagonism between the various classes,
17-1124 and on the level of development of the material means of existence, of the conditions of production and commerce upon which the degree of intensity of the class contradictions always reposes. What he ought to do, what his party demands of him, again depends not on him, but also not on the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions. He is bound to the doctrines and demands hitherto propounded which, again, do not follow from the class relations of the moment, or from the more or less accidental level of production and commerce, but from his more or less penetrating insight into the general result of the social(1) and political movement. Thus, he necessarily finds himself in an unsolvable dilemma. What he can do contradicts all his previous actions and principles and the immediate interests of his party, and what he ought to do cannot be done. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whose domination the movement is then ripe. In the interests of the movement he is compelled to advance the interests of an alien class, and to feed his own class with talk and promises, and with the asseveration that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. He who is put into this awkward position is irrevocably lost. We have seen examples of this in recent times, and need only recall the position in the last French Provisional Government of the representatives of the proletariat,[338] though they themselves represented only a very low stage of development of the proletariat. He who can still speculate with official posts after the experiences of the February government — to say nothing of our own noble German provisional governments and imperial regen-cies[339]—is either foolish beyond measure or belongs to the extreme revolutionary party at best in word only.
Münzer's position at the head of the "eternal council" of Mühlhausen was indeed much more precarious than that of any modern revolutionary regent. Not only the movement of his time, but also the age, were not ripe for the ideas of which he himself had only a faint notion. The class which he represented was still in its birth throes. It was far from developed enough to assume leadership over, and to transform^ society. The social changes of his fancy had little root in the then existing economic conditions. What is more, these conditions were paving the way for a social system that was diametrically opposite to what he envisioned. Nevertheless, he was still committed to his early sermons of Christian equality and evangelical community of property, and was compelled at least to attempt their realisation. Community of property, the equal obligation of all to work, and abolition of all authority were proclaimed. But in reality Mühlhausen remained a republican imperial city with a somewhat democratised constitution, a senate elected by universal suffrage and controlled by a forum, and with a hastily improvised system of care for the poor. The social upheaval that so horrified its Protestant burgher contemporaries actually never went beyond a feeble, unconscious and premature attempt to establish the bourgeois [bürgerliche] society of a later period.
Münzer himself seems to have sensed the chasm between his theories and the surrounding realities, a chasm that he must have felt the more keenly, the more his visionary aspirations were distorted in the crude minds of his mass of followers. He devoted himself to extending and organising the movement with a zeal rare even for him. He wrote letters and sent messengers and emissaries in all directions. His writings and sermons breathed a revolutionary fanaticism astonishing even when compared with his former works. The naive youthful humour of Münzer's revolutionary" pamphlets was totally gone. The placid explicative language of the thinker typical of his earlier years was gone too. Münzer became a positive prophet of the revolution. He untiringly fanned hatred against the ruling classes, he stimulated the wildest passions, and used only the forceful language that the religious and nationalist delirium had put into the mouths of the Old Testament prophets. The style he now had to adopt reflected the educational level of the public he sought to influence.
The example of Mühlhausen and Münzer's propaganda had a rapid and far-reaching effect. In Thuringia, Eichsfeld, the Harz, the duchies of Saxony, in Hesse and Fulda, in Upper Franconia and in Vogtland, the peasants arose, assembled in troops, and set fire to castles and monasteries. Münzer was recognised as the leader of more or less the entire movement, and Mühlhausen remained its centre, while a purely burgher movement won in Erfurt and the ruling party there kept acting ambiguously towards the peasants.
The princes in Thuringia were at first just as perplexed and helpless against the peasants as they had been in Franconia and Swabia. Only in the last days of April did the Landgrave of Hesse succeed in assembling a corps. It was the same Landgrave Philip whose piety is praised so much by the Protestant and bourgeois histories of the Reformation, and of whose infamies against the
;l The 1850 edition has "prerevolutionary" instead of "revolutionary".— Ed.
peasants we shall presently have a word to say. By a series of swift movements and decisive actions, Landgrave Philip quickly subdued the major part of his land, called up new contingents, and then marched into the region belonging to the Abbot of Fulda,(2) who had hitherto been his feudal lord. On May 3 he defeated the Fulda peasant troop at Frauenberg, subdued the whole land, and seized the opportunity not only for freeing himself from the sovereignty of the Abbot, but also for making the Abbey of Fulda a vassalage of Hesse, naturally pending its subsequent secularisation. He then took Eisenach and Langensalza, and advanced against Mühlhausen, the headquarters of the rebellion, jointly with the ducal Saxon troops. Münzer assembled his forces, comprising some 8,000 men and several cannon, at Frankenhausen. The Thuringian troop had little of the fighting power which a part of the Upper Swabian and Franconian troops had developed in their struggle with Truchsess. It was poorly armed and badly disciplined; it had few ex-soldiers in its ranks and lacked sorely in leadership. It appears Münzer himself had not the slightest military knowledge. All the same, the princes thought it best to use the same tactics against him that so often helped Truchsess to victory: breach of faith. They launched negotiations on May 16, concluded an armistice, and then suddenly attacked the peasants before the armistice had elapsed.
Münzer had stationed his people on a mountain still called Schlachtberg,(3) behind a barricade of wagons. Discouragement was spreading rapidly among his men. The princes promised them indulgence if they delivered Münzer alive. Münzer called a general assembly to debate the princes' proposals. A knight and a priest spoke in favour of surrender. Münzer had them both brought inside the circle and decapitated. This act of terrorist energy, jubilantly received by resolute revolutionaries, instilled a certain order among the troop, but most of the men would still have gone away without resistance had it not been noticed that the princes' mercenaries, who had encircled the mountain, were approaching in closed columns in spite of the armistice. A front was hurriedly formed behind the wagons, but already shells and bullets were showering upon the half-defenseless peasants unaccustomed to battle, and the mercenaries had reached the barricade. After a brief resistance the line of wagons was breached, the peasant cannon captured, and the peasants dispersed. They fled in wild disorder to fall into the hands of the enveloping columns and the cavalry, who loosened an appalling massacre. Out of 8,000 peasants over 5,000 were slaughtered. The survivors went to Frankenhausen, and the princes' cavalry came hot on their heels. The city was captured. Münzer, wounded in the head, was discovered in a house and taken prisoner. On May 25 Mühlhausen also surrendered. Pfeifer, who had remained there, escaped, but was captured in the region of Eisenach.
Münzer was put on the rack in the presence of the princes, and then decapitated. He went to his death with the courage he had shown throughout his life. He was twenty-eight at the most when executed. Pfeifer was also beheaded, and many others besides. In Fulda Philip of Hesse, that holy man, opened his bloody court. He and the Saxon princes had many killed by the sword, among them in Eisenach, 24; in Langensalza, 41; after the battle of Frankenhausen, 300; in Mühlhausen, more than 100; at Görmar, 26; at Tüngeda, 50; at Sangerhausen, 12; in Leipzig, 8, not to speak of mutilations and more moderate measures, pillaging and burning of villages and towns.
Mühlhausen was compelled to give up its imperial liberty, and was incorporated in the Saxon lands just as the Abbey of Fulda was incorporated in the Landgraviate of Hesse.
The princes now marched through the forest of Thuringia, where Franconian peasants of the Bildhausen camp had joined the Thuringians and had burned many castles. A battle took place outside Meiningen. The peasants were beaten and withdrew towards the town, which suddenly closed its gates to them and threatened to attack them from the rear. Thrown into confusion by its allies' betrayal, the troop surrendered to the princes and ran off in all directions while the negotiations were still under way. The
Bildhausen camp had long since dispersed, and after the troop's defeat the remaining insurgents in Saxony, Hesse, Thuringia and Upper Franconia were annihilated.
In Alsace the rebellion broke out later than on the right bank of the Rhine. The peasants of the Bishopric of Strassburg rose up as late as the middle of April. Soon after, there was an uprising of peasants in Upper Alsace and Sundgau. On April 18 a contingent of Lower Alsace peasants pillaged the monastery of Altdorf. Other troops formed near Ebersheim and Barr, as well as in the Wilier and Urbis valleys. These soon amalgamated into a large Lower Alsace troop and seized towns and hamlets and destroyed monasteries. Everywhere, one out of every three men was called to serve in the troop. The troop's Twelve Articles were much more radical than those of the Swabians and Franconians.[340] While early in May one column of Lower Alsatians concentrated near St. Hippolite and after a futile attempt to take that town occupied Bercken on May 10, Rappoltsweiler on May 13, and Reichenweier on May 14 by an understanding with their citizens, a second column under Erasmus Gerber moved in for a surprise attack on Strassburg. The attempt failed, and the column now turned towards the Vosges, destroyed the monastery of Mauersmünster and besieged Zabern, which surrendered on May 13. From here it moved towards the Lorraine frontier and roused the adjacent section of the duchy, and at the same time fortified the mountain passes. Big camps were formed at Herbitzheim on the Saar and at Neuburg. Nearly 4,000 German-Lorraine peasants entrenched themselves at Saargemünd. Finally, two advanced troops, the Kolben troop in the Vosges at Stürzelbronn and the Kleeburg troop at Weissenburg, covered the front and the right flank, while the left flank hugged the Upper Alsatians.
The latter, on the march since April 20, had forced Sulz into the peasant brotherhood on May 10, Gebweiler on May 12, and Sennheim and its vicinity on May 15. Though the Austrian Government and the surrounding imperial towns lost no time to join forces against them, they were too weak to offer serious resistance, not to speak of attacking. Thus, the whole of Alsace, with the exception of a few towns, fell into the hands of the insurgents by the middle of May.
But the army that was to break the mischievous spirit of the Alsatians was already approaching. It was the French who here restored the power of the nobility. On May 6 Duke Anton of Lorraine marched with an army of 30,000, among them the flower of the French nobility and Spanish, Piedmontese, Lombardic, Greek and Albanian auxiliaries. On May 16 at Lützelstein he engaged 4,000 peasants, whom he defeated without effort, and on May 17 he forced Zabern, which was occupied by the peasants, to surrender. But even while the Lorrainers were entering the city and the peasants were being disarmed, the terms of the surrender were violated. The defenseless peasants were attacked by the mercenaries and most of them slain. The remaining Lower Alsace columns disbanded, and Duke Anton marched on to engage the Upper Alsatians. The latter, who had refused to reinforce the Lower Alsatians at Zabern, were now attacked at Scherweiler by the entire force of Lorrainers. They put up a plucky fight, but the enormous numerical superiority of 30,000 against 7,000, and betrayal by a number of knights, especially that of the magistrate of Reichenweier, reduced their daring to nought. They were beaten and dispersed to the last man. The Duke now proceeded to subdue the whole of Alsace with the usual cruelty. Only Sundgau was spared his presence. By threatening to call him into the land, the Austrian Government persuaded the peasants to conclude the Ensisheim agreement early in June. But it broke the agreement very soon and hanged the preachers and leaders of the movement en masse. The peasants rebelled anew, and Sundgau was finally drawn into the Offenburg agreement (September 18).
Now it only remains to describe the Peasant War in the Alpine regions of Austria. These regions and the adjoining Archbishopric of Salzburg had been in continuous opposition to the government and the nobility since the Stara Prawa* As a result, the Reformation doctrines found a fertile soil there. Religious persecution and arbitrary oppressive taxation precipitated a rebellion.
The city of Salzburg, supported by peasants and pitmen, had been in conflict with the Archbishop(4) since 1522 over its city privileges and religious practices. Late in 1524 the Archbishop attacked the city with recruited mercenaries, terrorised it with the cannon of the castle, and persecuted the heretical preachers. At the same time he imposed new crushing taxes and thereby irritated the population to the extreme. In the spring of 1525, simultaneously with the Swabian-Franconian and Thuringian uprisings, the peasants and pitmen of the whole country suddenly rose up in arms, organised under the commanders Prassler and Weitmoser, liberated the city and besieged the castle of Salzburg. Like the West-German peasants, they organised a Christian Alliance and formulated their demands in articles, of which they had fourteen.(5)
In Styria, Upper Austria, Carinthia and Carniola, where new extortionate taxes, duties and edicts had severely injured the basic interests of the people, the peasants rose up in the spring of 1525. They took a number of castles and at Goyss defeated Dietrichstein, the old field commander and conqueror of the Stara Prawa. Although the government succeeded in placating some of the insurgents with false promises, the bulk of them stayed together and united with the Salzburg peasants, so that the entire region of Salzburg and the bigger portion of Upper Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola were in the hands of the peasants and pitmen.
In Tirol the Reformation doctrines had also found numerous adherents. Münzer's emissaries had been successfully active here, even more so than in the other Alpine regions of Austria. As elsewhere, Archduke Ferdinand persecuted the preachers of the new doctrine and impinged on the rights of the population by means of new arbitrary financial regulation«. The result, as everywhere, was an uprising that broke out in the spring of 1525. The insurgents commanded by Geismaier, a Münzer man who was the only one of the peasant chiefs to possess any military talent, took a great number of castles, and carried on energetically against the priests, particularly in the South, in the Etsch(6) region. The Vorarlberg peasants also rose up and joined the Allgäu peasants.
The Archduke, hard pressed from all sides, now began to make concession after concession to the rebels whom a short time before he had wished to annihilate by fire and destruction, plunder and carnage. He summoned the Diets of the hereditary lands and pending their opening concluded an armistice with the peasants. In the meantime he was arming for all he was worth, in order to be able to speak to the blasphemers in a different tongue in the nearest possible future.
Naturally, the armistice was not observed for long. Having run short of cash, Dietrichstein began to levy contributions in the duchies; besides, his Slavic and Magyar troops indulged in the most disgraceful brutalities against the population. This incited the Styrians to a new revolt. The peasants attacked Dietrichstein at Schladming in the night of July 3, and slaughtered everybody who did not speak German. Dictrichstein himself was captured. In the morning of July 3 the peasants called a jury and sentenced to death forty Czech and Croatian nobles among their prisoners. They were beheaded on the spot. That had its effect; the Archduke immediately consented to all the demands of the estates of the five duchies (Upper and Lower Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola).
The demands of the Diet were also granted in Tirol, and thus the North was pacified. The South, however, stood firm on its original demands, scorning the much more moderate decisions of the Diet, and remained under arms. Only in December was the Archduke able to restore order by force. He did not fail to execute a great number of the instigators and leaders of the upheaval who fell into his hands.
Ten thousand Bavarians moved in August against Salzburg under Georg von Frundsberg. This impressive show of strength and the quarrels that broke out in their ranks persuaded the Salzburg peasants to conclude an agreement with the archbishop on September 1, which was also accepted by the Archduke. However, the two princes, who had meanwhile considerably strengthened their troops, soon violated the agreement and thereby compelled the Salzburg peasants to start a new uprising. The insurgents held their own throughout the winter. In the spring Geismaier came to them and launched a splendid campaign against the forces approaching from every side. In a series of brilliant battles in May and June 1526, he successively defeated the Bavarian, Austrian and Swabian League troops and the mercenaries of the Archbishop of Salzburg, and for a long time prevented the various corps from uniting. He also found time to besiege Radstadt. Surrounded finally by superior forces, he was compelled to withdraw and fought his way out of the encirclement, leading the remnants of his troop across the Austrian Alps into Venetian territory. The Republic of Venice and Switzerland served the indefatigable peasant chief as starting points for new intrigues. For a whole year he endeavoured to involve them in a war with Austria, which would have given him an opportunity to begin a new peasant uprising. The hand of an assassin struck him down, however, in the course of these negotiations. Archduke Ferdinand and the Archbishop of Salzburg could not rest as long as Geismaier was alive. They hired an assassin who succeeded in ending the life of the dangerous rebel in 1527.(7)
VII :
The epilogue of the Peasant War closed with Geismaier's withdrawal into Venetian territory. The peasants were everywhere brought back under the sway of their ecclesiastical, noble or patrician overlords. The agreements concluded with them here and there were violated and the heavy services augmented by the enormous indemnities imposed by the victors on the vanquished. The most magnificent revolutionary effort of the German people ended in ignominious defeat and, for the time being, in redoubled oppression. In the long run, however, the situation of the peasants was not made any worse by the suppression of the uprising. Whatever the nobility, princes and priests could wring out of the peasants year after year, had been wrung out even before the war. The German peasant of that time has this in common with the present-day proletarian, that his share in the products of his labour was limited to a subsistence minimum necessary for his maintenance and the propagation of the peasant race. On the whole, nothing more could be wrung out of the peasants. True, some of the better-off middle peasants were ruined, hosts of bondsmen were forced into serfdom, whole stretches of community land were confiscated, and a great many peasants were forced into vagabondage or became city plebeians due to the destruction of their homes, the devastation of their fields and the general dislocation. But war and devastation were everyday phenomena at that time and, in general, the peasant class was at too low a level for increased taxation to cause any lasting deterioration of its condition. The subsequent religious wars and, finally, the Thirty Years' War[342] with its recurrent general devastation and depopulation affected the peasants much more painfully than the Peasant War. Notably, it was the Thirty Years' War which destroyed the most important part of the productive forces in agriculture, through which, as well as through the simultaneous destruction of many towns, the peasants, plebeians and ruined burghers were for a long time reduced to a state of Irish misery at its worst.
Those who suffered most from the Peasant War were the clergy. Their monasteries and endowments were burned, their treasures plundered, sold abroad or melted down, and their stores consumed. They were everywhere the least capable of resistance, and yet they were the main target of the people's wrath. The other estates— princes, nobles and burghers — even experienced a secret joy at the distress of the hated prelates. The Peasant War had made popular the idea of secularising the church estates in favour of the peasants. The lay princes, and partly the towns, determined to secularise the estates for their own benefit, and soon the possessions of the prelates in Protestant regions were in the hands of the princes or the honourables. But the power of the ecclesiastical princes, too, was impaired, and the lay princes knew how to exploit the people's hatred in this respect. We have seen, for instance, how the Abbot of Fulda(1) was relegated from feudal lord to vassal of Philip of Hesse. The town of Kempten forced its prince-abbot(2) to sell it a number of the precious privileges he had enjoyed in the town for a ridiculous trifle.
The nobility had also suffered considerably. Most of the noblemen's castles were destroyed and some of the most respected families were ruined and found a living only in the employ of the princes. Their weakness in face of the peasantry had been proved. They had been beaten everywhere and had been forced to surrender. Only the armies of the princes had saved them. The nobility was bound to lose more and more of its significance as an estate of the Empire, and to fall under the dominion of the princes.
The towns, too, generally gained nothing from the Peasant War. The rule of the honourables was almost everywhere re-established; the burgher opposition was broken for a long time. The old patrician routine dragged on in this way, tying up commerce and industry hand and foot up to the time of the French Revolution. Moreover, the towns were made responsible by the princes for the momentary successes the burgher or plebeian parties had gained within their borders during the struggle. The towns that had even previously belonged to princely estates had to pay heavy indemnities, to give up their privileges, and became defenceless prey to the avarice and whims of the princes (Frankenhausen, Arnstadt, Schmalkalden, Würzburg, etc.). Towns of the Empire were incorporated into the territories of the princes (Mühlhausen, for example) or at least made morally dependent on the neighbouring princes, as was the case with many imperial towns in Franconia.
Under the circumstances, the princes alone had benefited from the Peasant War. We have seen at the very beginning of our account that the deficient development of industry, commerce and agriculture in Germany ruled out any centralisation of Germans into a nation, that it allowed only local and provincial centralisation, and that the princes, representatives of centralisation within disruption, were the only estate to profit from all the changes in the existing social and political conditions. The development of Germany in those days was at so low a level and at the same time so dissimilar in the various provinces that alongside the lay principalities there could still exist ecclesiastical sovereignties, city republics, and sovereign counts and barons. Simultaneously, however, this development was continually, though slowly and feebly, pressing for provincial centralisation, i.e. for the subordination of all the other imperial estates to the princes. That is why only the princes could have gained from the outcome of the Peasant War. And that is exactly what had happened. They gained not only relatively, from a weakening of their opponents — the clergy, nobility and the towns — but also absolutely, since they carried off the spolia opima (the main spoils) of all the other estates. The church estates were secularised in their favour; part of the nobility, fully or partly ruined, was obliged gradually to accept vassalage; the indemnities they received from the towns and peasant communities swelled their treasuries and, furthermore, the abolition of so many town privileges now afforded much greater scope to their favourite financial operations.
The chief result of the Peasant War, the deepening and consolidation of German disunity, was also the reason for its failure.
We have seen that Germany was split not only into countless independent, almost totally alien provinces, but that in every one of these provinces the nation was broken up into a multifold structure of estates and fractions of estates. Besides princes and priests we < ir;d nobles and peasants in the countryside, and in the towns we find patricians, burghers and plebeians, whose interests as estates differed radically even where they did not cross each other or come into conflict. Besides all these complicated interests there were still the interests of the Emperor and the Pope. We have seen how ponderously, imperfectly, and how differently in the various localities, all these interests finally gave shape to three major groups.
We have seen that in spite of this painful grouping each estate opposed the line indicated by circumstances for the national development, that each estate acted on its own, coming into conflict not only with all the conservative, but also with the other opposition estates, and that it was bound to fail in the end. That was the fate of the nobility in Sickingen's uprising, of the peasants in the Peasant War, and of the burghers in all of their insipid Reformation. Thus, even the peasants and plebeians in most parts of Germany failed to unite for joint action and stood in each other's way. We have also seen the causes of this fragmentation of the class struggle and the resulting total defeat of the revolutionary and partial defeat of the burgher movements.
How local and provincial disunity and the consequently inevitable local and provincial narrow-mindedness ruined the whole movement; how neither burghers, peasants nor plebeians could unite for concerted national action; how the peasants of every province acted only for themselves, as a rule refusing aid to the insurgent peasants of the neighbouring regions, and were consequendy annihilated in separate battles one after another by armies which in most cases were hardly one-tenth the total number of the insurgent masses — all this should be sufficiently clear from this account. The various armistices and agreements concluded by individual troops with their adver-saries represent just as many acts of betrayal of the common cause, and the fact that the only co-operation possible between the different troops was not according to the greater or lesser unity of their action, but to that of the particular enemy to whom they succumbed, is the most striking proof of the degree of the peasants' mutual alienation in the various provinces.
Here also the analogy with the movement of 1848-50 leaps to the eye. In 1848 as well, the interests of the opposition classes conflicted and each class acted on its own. The bourgeoisie, too developed to suffer any longer the feudal and bureaucratic absolutism, was, however, not as yet powerful enough at once to subordinate the claims of other classes to its own interests. The proletariat, much too weak to count on a rapid passage through the bourgeois period and on an early conquest of power, had already learned too well under absolutism the honeyed sweetness of the bourgeois regime and was generally much too developed to iden-tify for even a moment its own emancipation with that of the bourgeoisie. The mass of the nation — petty burghers, their associates (artisans), and peasants — was left in the lurch by its as yet natural ally, the bourgeoisie, because it was too revolutionary, and partly by the proletariat, because it was not sufficiently advanced.
Divided against itself the mass achieved nothing and opposed fellow opponents on the Right and Left. As to provincial narrow-mindedness, it could hardly have been greater among the peasants in 1525 than it was among the classes participating in the movement of 1848. The hundred local revolutions as well as the consequent and unhindered hundred local reactions, survival of the separation of numerous small states, etc., etc.—all this is eloquent testimony indeed. He who still dreams of a federated republic after the two German revolutions of 1525 and 1848 and their results, belongs nowhere else but in a lunatic asylum.
Still the two revolutions, that of the sixteenth century and that of 1848-50, are, in spite of all analogies, essentially different. The Revolution of 1848 speaks for the progress of Europe, if not of Germany.
Who profited from the Revolution of 1525? The princes. Who profited from the Revolution of 1848? The big princes, Austria and Prussia. Behind the minor princes of 1525 stood the petty burghers, who chained the princes to themselves by taxes. Behind the big princes of 1850, behind Austria and Prussia, there stand the modern big bourgeois, rapidly getting them under their yoke by means of the national debt. And behind the big bourgeois stand the proletarians.
The Revolution of 1525 was a domestic German affair. The English, French, Bohemians and Hungarians had already had their peasant wars when the Germans began theirs. If Germany was disunited, Europe was much more so. The Revolution of 1848, on the other hand, was not a domestic German affair, and was an episode in a great European event. Its motive forces throughout its duration transcended the narrow limits of one country and even those of one part of the world. In fact, the countries which were the arena of revolution were the least active in producing it. They were more or less unconscious ancl hesitant raw material, moulded in the course of the movement in which the entire world participates today, a movement which under the existing social conditions may appear to us only as an alien power but which, in the end, is nothing but our own. This is why the Revolution of 1848-50 cannot end like the Revolution of 1525.
Endnotes
[295] Excerpts from Chapter VI of Engels' Peasant War were also printed in the Sozialdemokratische Monatsschrift, Wien, 1890, No. 10-11, November 30, and in the Népszava, Budapest, 1891, February 6 (translated from the Sozialdemokratische Monatsschrift). In the 1880s Engels intended to revise his Peasant War in Germany and incorporate extensive supplementary material on the history of Germany. In his letter to Sorge dated December 31, 1884, Engels wrote: "I am radically revising my Peasant War. The war of the peasants will be presented as the cornerstone of German history in its entirety." Work on the second and third volumes of Capital and other urgent matters prevented Engels from carrying out his intentions. In the 1890s he made another attempt at the supplement, but failed to complete it. Only an unfinished manuscript and several rough notes are extant. (The former was published under the editorial heading "Decay of Feudalism and Rise of National States".) In this edition sources are quoted in the form given by Engels; whenever he introduces his own italics, this is mentioned in a footnote. Where the meaning differs significantly from that of the last authorised edition of 1875 and the previous author's publications of 1850 and 1870, this is also indicated in footnotes. Account is also taken in this edition of corrections made by Engels in his copy of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue (see Note 63). Obvious misprints and inaccuracies in dates, geographical and personal names are silently corrected. The Hanseatic League—a commercial and political alliance of medieval German towns along the southern coasts of the North and Baltic Seas, and their feed rivers; its aim was to establish a trade monopoly in Northern Europe. The Hanseatic League was in its prime in the latter half of the fourteenth century and the early half of the fifteenth century, and began to decay at the end of the fifteenth century.
[296] Tributes—one of the feudal obligations imposed on the holders of small plots of land. Death taxes ( Sterbefall, Todfall) were levied on the land and property inherited from the deceased peasant on the basis of the feudal lord's right (in France, "the right of the dead hand"). In Germany the feudal lords usually took the best cattle. Protection moneys ( Schutzgelder)—a tax levied by the feudal lord in payment for the "judicial protection" and "patronage" which he claimed to extend to his subjects.
[297] T\ie "general pfennig" (der gemeine Pfennig)—a tax collected in German lands in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and appropriated by the Emperor; it was a combination of a poll-tax and a property tax, the main burden of which fell on the peasantry.
[298] Annates were lump sums paid to the Pope by persons appointed to church offices. In the fourteenth century they equalled half the first year's income or more. Holders of church benefices made up this loss by levying additional taxes and by extortions from the population.
[301] The reference is to a religious philosophical doctrine opposed to the medieval Catholic Church and its orthodox teaching; mysticism was widespread in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Mystics, who believed it possible to know God through direct intercourse with the divine spirit, undermined the faith in the need for a church hierarchy. Particularly radical ideas were preached by the Italian twelfth-century monk Joachim of Calabria and other plebeian and peasant ideologists, with whom they assumed the form of a chiliastic dream of a millennium of equality (see Note 308).
[302] The Waldenses—a religious sect that originated among the urban lower classes of Southern France at the end of the twelfth century and later spread to Northern Italy, Germany, Bohemia, Spain and Switzerland. Its founder is said to have been Petrus Waldus (or Peter Waldo), a Lyons merchant who gave his wealth to the poor. The Waldenses repudiated property and advocated insubordination to the ecclesiastical and secular authorities; they condemned the accumulation of wealth by the Catholic Church and called for a return to the customs of early Christianity. Among the backward rural population of the mountainous regions of South-western Switzerland and Savoy, the heresy of the Waldenses amounted to a defence of the survivals of the primitive communal system and patriarchal relations.
[303] The Albigenses—a religious sect that existed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in the towns of Southern France (particularly in Provence and Toulouse) and in Northern Italy. This movement took the form of a "heresy", being directed against the power and doctrine of the Catholic Church, as well as against the secular power of the feudal state. Its adherents — the townspeople and the lesser nobility, supported by the peasants — were called Albigenses from the city of Albi, one of the sect's main centres. Between 1209 and 1229 the feudal magnates of Northern France, together with the Pope, waged wars against the Albigenses that wiped out the movement and resulted in a considerable part of Southern France being annexed to the lands of the French kings.
[304] The Hungarian teacher in Picardy—a preacher by the name of Jakob said to be born in Hungary. He was one of the leader's of the anti-feudal peasant revolt in France in 1251, known as the shepherds' revolt, whose participants called themselves "God's shepherds".
[305] The Calixtines (from Calix, the Latin for cup)—a moderate trend in the Hussite national liberation and reformation movement in Bohemia (first half of the fifteenth century) against the German nobility, the German Empire and the Catholic Church. The Calixtines (who maintained that the laity should receive the cup as well as the bread in the Eucharist, i.e. "sub utraque specie"—for which they were also known as Utraquists), supported by the burghers and part of the Czech nobility, sought no more than a national Czech church and the secularisation of church estates. p: 413
[306] The Taborites (so called from their camp in the town of Tabor, in Bohemia)—a radical trend in the Hussite movement. In contrast to the Calixtines, they formed a revolutionary, democratic wing of the Hussites and their demands reflected the desire of the peasantry and the urban lower classes for an end to all feudal oppression, all manifestations of social and political arbitrariness. The Taborites were the core of the Hussite army. The betrayal of the Taborites by the Calixtines led to the suppression of the Hussite movement.
[307] The Flagellants (from flagellantis in Latin, one who whips himself)—an ascetic religious sect widespread in Europe in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. They propounded self-castigation as a means of expiating sins. The Lollards (from the middle Dutch lollaert, literally, one who is murmuring prayers)—a religious sect (that originated in the fourteenth century) widespread in England and other European countries, which bitterly opposed the Catholic Church. The Lollards were followers of Wycliffe, the English reformer, but they drew more radical conclusions from his teaching and their opposition to feudal privileges took a religiously mystical form. Many Lollards, who came from the people and the lower clergy, were active participants in Wat Tyler's rebellion of 1381 and were cruelly persecuted in the late fourteenth century.
[308] Chiliasm (from the Greek chilias, a thousand,—a mystical religious doctrine that Christ would come to earth a second time and usher in a millennium of justice, equality and well-being. Chiliastic dream-visions sprang up during the decay of slave-owning society; they were widespread among the oppressed during early Christianity and were continuously revived in the doctrines of the various medieval sects, which voiced the opinions of the peasants and plebeians.
[15] The Orangemen—members of the Orange Society (Order), a Protestant terrorist organisation founded in Ireland in 1795 and employed by the authorities, Protestant landlords and the clergy against the Irish national liberation movement. The name was derived from William III, Prince of Orange, who suppressed the Irish uprising of 1689-91 for restoration of the Stuart monarchy. The Order had an especially strong influence in Ulster, Northern Ireland, with a mainly Protestant population.
[309] The Confession of Augsburg (Augsburgische Konfession, Confessio Augustana)—a statement of the Lutheran doctrine read to Emperor Charles V at the Imperial Diet in Augsburg in 1530; it adapted the burgher ideas of a "cheap church" (abolition of lavish rites, modification of the clerical hierarchy, etc.) to the interests of the princes. A sovereign prince was to replace the Pope at the head of the church. The Confession of Augsburg was rejected by the Emperor. The war waged against him by princes who adopted the Lutheran Reformation ended in 1555 in the religious peace of Augsburg, which empowered the princes to determine the faith of their subjects at their own discretion.
[310] See Notes 16 and 199.
[312] The Anabaptists (those who baptise over again) belonged to one of the most radical and democratic religious-philosophical trends spread in Switzerland, Germany and the Netherlands during the Reformation. Members of this sect were so called because they repudiated infant baptism and demanded a second, adult baptism.
[313] Engels refers to the views of David Strauss and other Young Hegelians who treated questions of religion from a pantheist standpoint in their early writings.
[314] According to later verified data Münzer went first to the imperial city of Mühlhausen, from where he was banished by municipal authorities in September 1524 for his part in disturbances among the city poor. From Mühlhausen Münzer came to Nuremberg.
[315] The Puritans (from the Latin puritas—purity)—participants in a religious political movement in England and Scotland at the close of the sixteenth and in the early half of the seventeenth centuries. Their object was a Protestant Calvinist Reformation and purification of the Church of England of every trace of Catholicism (elimination of bishops, simpler church rites, etc.). They advocated modesty, abstinence, thrift, encouraged prudence and enterprise. The Puritans expressed the religious opposition of the bourgeoisie to absolutism and played an important part in the ideological preparations for the English bourgeois revolution. The Independents—representatives of one of the Protestant trends in England. In the 1580s and 1590s they formed the Left wing of Puritanism and represented radical opposition to absolutism and the Church of England by the commercial and industrial bourgeoisie and the "new" bourgeois nobility. During the English revolution of the seventeenth century, the Independents formed a separate political party which came to power under Oliver Cromwell at the end of 1648.
[316] The Swabian League of princes, noblemen and patricians of the imperial cities of South-Western Germany was founded in 1488. Its chief purpose was to combat the peasant and plebeian movement. The South- and West-German princes who headed this League also viewed it as a means to consolidate their oligarchic rule. The League had its own administrative and judicial bodies, and an army. It fell apart in 1534 due to internal squabbles.
[317] This refers to the government of the viceregent of the Austrian Habsburgs in Ensisheim, the centre of the Austrian Forelands, the name used to denote the possessions of the Habsburgs and their immediate vassals in Upper Alsace, Upper Swabia and the Black Forest.
[318] Szeklers—an ethnic group of Hungarians, mostly free peasants. In the thirteenth century their forefathers were settled by Hungarian kings in the mountain regions of Transylvania to protect the frontiers. The region inhabited by them was usually called Szekler land.
[319] The reference is to a popular rising in Sicily against the French Anjou dynasty, which conquered Southern Italy and Sicily in 1267. On the evening of March 31, 1282, the population of Palermo took the vespers bell-toll as a signal to massacre several thousand French knights and soldiers. As a result, the whole of Sicily was freed from French domination and came under the Aragon King.
[320] Engels refers to the 95 theses that Luther (who began his clerical career as a simple monk in the Augustinian monastery in Thuringia) nailed to a church door in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. The theses contained a vigorous protest against the sale of indulgences and the abuses by the Catholic clergy. They also presented the initial outline of Luther's religious teaching in the vein of burgher ideals.
[321] Burlesque—satirical literature and parodies by writers of the Renaissance and humanitarian ideologists who ridiculed the high-flown style of court poetry and the strict behaviour of upper feudal society.
[322] The Wars of the Roses (1455-85)—wars between the feudal Houses of York and Lancaster fighting for the throne, the white rose being the badge of the House of York, and the red rose of the House of Lancaster. The Yorkists were supported by some of the big feudal landowners from the south-eastern, more economically developed part of the country and also by the knights and the townspeople, while the Lancastrians were backed by the feudal aristocracy of the backward north and of Wales. The wars almost completely wiped out the ancient feudal nobility and brought Henry VII to power to form a new dynasty, that of the Tudors, who set up an absolute monarchy in England.
[323] T h e reference is to the Polish national liberation uprising in November 1830-October 1831, and also to that in Cracow in 1846 (see Note 66).
[324] See Note 317.
[325] This refers to the black-red-and-gold banner symbolising German unity. The information on such a banner provided by Zimmermann is not, however, corroborated by contemporary sources, i.e. chronicles, etc. The usual peasant colours were red-white, red-black, etc.
[326] Emperor Maximilian's edict ruled that only representatives of "noble" estates could be members of provincial courts.
[327] Another big credit was advanced to Archduke Ferdinand by the Augsburg banking house of Fuggers, who owned vast tracts of land north of Lake Constance and had a vital interest in suppressing the peasant insurrection.
[328] The reference is to the southern mountainous part of Baden adjacent to Switzerland. In the sixteenth century, part of this region was owned by the Margrave of Baden and the rest of it either belonged to the Austrian land of Breisgau or to petty ecclesiastical and secular feudal lords.
[329] Engels refers to the anonymous pamphlet printed in Nuremberg in early 1525, entitled An die Versammlung gemeiner Pawerschaft, so in Hochteutscher Nation und viel anderer Ort, mit empörung und uffruhr entstanden, ob ihr Empörung billicher oder unbillicher gestalt geschehn, und was sie der Oberkeit schuldig oder nicht schuldig seind, gegründet aus der heil, göttlichen Geschrift, von Oberlendischen Mitbrüdern guter maynung ausgangen und beschriben (To the Assembly of All the Indignant and Insurgent Peasantry of the Upper German Nation and Many Other Places on Whether or Not Its Indignation Is Just and What It Should or Should Not Do to the Authorities. Based on the Holy Scripture, Composed and Rendered with the Full Approval of the Highland Brotherhood). Wilhelm Zimmermann believed this pamphlet to have been written by Thomas Münzer (Allgemeine Geschichte des grossen Bauernkrieges, Th. 2, S. 113).
[330] Judica Sunday (from judex—judge, literally "judgment Sunday")—the fifth Sunday in Lent.
[331] The small and the great tithe—two varieties of tax paid to the Catholic Church.The size and nature of this tax varied in different parts of Germany, and in most cases greatly exceeded a tenth of the peasants' produce. As a rule the great tithe ( décima major) was imposed on the corn and vine harvest whereas the small tithe ( décima minor) was imposed on other crops.
[352] In 1833 the English Parliament adopted an Act for the Abolition of Slavery Throughout the British Colonies. A sum of £20 million was allocated to compensate slave-owners.
[333] The Teutonic Order—a German religious Order of knights founded in 1190 during the crusades. The Order seized vast possessions in Germany and other countries. These were administered by dignitaries known as commandores (or comthurs). In the thirteenth century, East Prussia fell under the rule of the Order after it was overrun and the local population exterminated. In 1237 the Order amalgamated with the Livonian Order, which also had its seat in the Baltic area. The Eastern possessions of the Order became a seat of aggression against Poland, Lithuania and the adjoining Russian principalities. After the defeat at Chudskoye Lake in 1242 and in the battle at Grunwald in 1410, the Order rapidly declined and was only able to maintain a small part of its former possessions.
[334] Later research into the Peasant War in Germany proves that the Heilbronn Councillor Hans Berlin who, as Engels describes, became a traitor and negotiated with Truchsess, military chief of the Swabian League, on behalf of patricians and wealthy burghers (see p. 461 of this volume), and the author of the Declaration of the Twelve Articles who induced the peasant leaders to accept it, were two different people, the latter being the Heilbronn notary and procurator Hans (Johannes) Berlin.
[335] T\\e agreement of Offenburg, concluded by the Breisgau insurgents and the Austrian Government on September 18, 1525, stipulated the restoration of former peasant services and the institution of harsh measures against peasant societies and "heretics". For its part, the government undertook to pardon rank-and-file members of the movement and confine itself to relatively modest fines. The amnesty, however, did not extend to the leaders of the uprising. Even this agreement, unfavourable as it was to the peasants, was soon violated by the Austrian authorities and local feudal lords, who subjected the insurgents to bloody reprisals as soon as they had laid down their arms.
[336] The agreement, concluded with the Austrian Government on November 13, 1525, forced the Black Forest peasants to repeat their oath of allegiance to the Habsburgs, to resume their former feudal services and not to interfere with the bloody reprisals of the victors against the town of Waldshut, headquarters of the movement. The defenders of Waldshut, however, stood their ground for several weeks, and the town fell only due to the treachery of the rich burghers.
[337] Later research has proved that Münzer held no official post in the Mühlhausen "eternal council", but his presence at its sittings and his advice to the council made him the virtual head of the new revolutionary government.
[338] Engels refers to Louis Blanc and Albert (Alexandre Martin), who represented the proletariat in the bourgeois Provisional Government of the French Republic instituted in February 1848 (see this volume, p. 53).
[339] See Note 11.
[340] The Articles of the Alsatian peasants not only defined more sharply the anti-feudal demands of the Twelve Articles (see this volume, p. 451) of the Swabian and Franconian peasantry (abolition of serfdom, return of common lands usurped by the nobility, etc.), but in many respects went even further. They were also directed against usurers (the clause on the abolition of usurers' interest, and others); they demanded the abolition not only of the small, but of the great tithe as well, and proclaimed the right of the local population to depose and replace officials with whom they were dissatisfied.
[342] The Thirty Years' War (1618-48)—a European war, in which the Pope, the Spanish and Austrian Habsburgs and the Catholic German princes rallied under the banner of Catholicism and fought the Protestant countries: Bohemia, Denmark, Sweden, the Republic of the Netherlands and a number of Protestant German states. The rulers of Catholic France — rivals of the Habsburgs— supported the Protestant camp. Germany was the main battle arena or the object of plunder and territorial claims. The Treaty of Westphalia (1648) sealed the political dismemberment of Germany.
[3] In May 1849, when the counter-revolution was on the upsurge, the Prussian Government issued an order expelling Marx and the other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from Prussia. This measure, prepared well in advance, was applied when the main uprisings in the Rhine Province had been virtually suppressed. On his return to Cologne in April 1848, Marx applied for Prussian citizenship which he had been forced to renounce in 1845 when he was living in Belgium as an emigrant. Despite the Cologne Magistrate's favourable reply to his application, however, the Cologne royal district authorities and the Minister of the Interior refused to grant it, and Marx remained a "foreigner", who could at any moment be accused of abusing hospitality and expelled. The royal district authorities' note to this effect followed on May 11, 1849, and on May 16 Marx was given 24 hours to leave Prussia. Weerth and Dronke, who did not enjoy Prussian citizenship either, received similar orders. Legal proceedings were instituted against Engels for his part in the Elberfeld uprising. The last issue, No. 301, of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appeared on May 19, 1849.
[2] After the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which had been published by Marx and Engels in Cologne from June 1, 1848, till May 19, 1849, was banned Marx did not give up the idea of resuming, in one way or another, the publication of a paper that would continue the revolutionary traditions of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. He wrote about this to Engels in Switzerland on August 1, 1849, inviting him to London to help start one up. Marx succeeded in raising funds and finding a publisher, and in mid-December 1849 a contract to publish the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue was signed between the responsible publisher Konrad Schramm and Schuberth and Co., a Hamburg bookselling firm. The periodical's aims were to assess the results of the 1848-49 revolution, to reveal the nature of the new historical situation, and to develop further the proletarian party's tactics. Most of the articles and literary and international reviews were written by Marx and Engels, who also drew contributions to the Revue from their followers Wilhelm Wolff, Joseph Weydemeyer, and Johann Georg Eccarius. Issue No. 1 also carried an item by Karl Blind, "Oesterreichische und preussische Parteien in Baden", and issue No. 4 — verses by the French democrat Louis Ménard. The cover named the places of publication as London, where Marx and Engels lived at the time, Hamburg, where the journal was printed, and New York since a great number of those who had participated in the 1848-49 revolution in Germany emigrated to America, and Marx and Engels hoped to find suitable ground there for distributing the journal. Presuming the possibility of a new revolutionary upsurge, they intended shortly to make their publication a weekly, and later a daily newspaper (see this volume, pp. 605-06). This plan was not, however, carried out. Altogether six issues were published; the last issue, a double one (5-6),came out at the end of November 1850. All further attempts to continue publication were blocked by police persecution in Germany and lack of funds. Marx sent the text of the Announcement to Joseph Weydemeyer in Frankfurt am Main on December 19, 1849, with a request to publish it in the Neue Deutsche Zeitung. It was printed in Nos. 14, 23 and 31 of January 16 and 26, and February 5, 1850. It was also printed in the Berner Zeitung No. 361 of December 27, 1849; in the Westdeutsche Zeitung (published by Hermann Becker in Cologne) on January 8, 9, 11 (supplement), 12 and 13 (supplement), 1850; in the Schweizerische National-Zeitung, Basle, No. 8, January 10, 1850; in the Düsseldorfer Zeitung No. 9, January 10, 1850; in the Norddeutsche Freie Presse, Hamburg-Altona, No. 254, January 18, 1850; in Der Volksfreund, Lemgo, No. 3, January 18, 1850.