Neue Rheinische Zeitung.
Politisch-ökonomische Revue.
H.5/6. Mai-Oktober 1850

The German people, too, has its revolutionary tradition. There was a time when Germany produced characters who can stand side by side with the best men of the revolutions of other countries, when the German people developed a perseverance and energy which, in a more centralised nation, would have produced the grandest results, when German peasants and plebeians were pregnant with ideas and plans at which their descendants often enough recoil in horror.

It is time, in the face of the momentary slackening that is evident almost everywhere after two years of struggle, to present once again to the German people the clumsy but powerful and tenacious figures of the great Peasant War. Three centuries have since passed, and many things have changed; and yet the Peasant War is not so very remote from our struggles of today, and the opponents to be combated are still to a great extent the same. The classes and class fractions that betrayed everywhere in 1848 and 49 we shall find already in 1525, though on a lower stage of development, as traitors. And if the robust vandalism of the Peasant War came into its own in the movement of recent years only in isolated places, in the Odenwald, the Black Forest, in Silesia, that is certainly no merit of the modern insurrection.

Let us first briefly go back to the conditions of Germany at the beginning of the sixteenth century.

German industry had experienced a significant upswing in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In place of feudal, rural local industry there had arisen the guild-based workshop production of the towns, which produced for wider circles and even for more distant markets. The weaving of coarse woollen cloths and linen had become a standing, widespread branch of industry, and even finer woollen and linen fabrics, as well as silks, were already being produced in Augsburg. Besides weaving, that industry bordering on art, which found its nourishment in the ecclesiastical and secular luxury of the later Middle Ages, had especially risen: that of gold- and silversmiths, sculptors and wood-carvers, copperplate engravers and woodcutters, medal-makers, turners, etc., etc. A series of more or less significant inventions, the historical high points of which were gunpowder and printing, had substantially contributed to the advancement of the crafts. Trade kept pace with industry. Through its century-long monopoly of the sea the Hanseatic League had secured the elevation of all North Germany out of medieval barbarism; and even though it already began to succumb rapidly to the competition of the English and the Dutch from the end of the fifteenth century, the great trade route from India to the north still went through Germany despite Vasco da Gama’s discoveries, and Augsburg was still the great staple for Italian silks, Indian spices, and all products of the Levant. The Upper German towns, particularly Augsburg and Nuremberg, were the centres of a wealth and luxury considerable for that time. The extraction of raw products had also risen significantly. The German miners were the most skilled in the world in the fifteenth century, and agriculture too had been torn out of its early medieval crudeness by the flourishing of the towns. Not only had extensive tracts been brought under cultivation, but dye-plants and other imported plants were also grown, whose more careful cultivation reacted favourably on agriculture in general.

The upswing of national production in Germany, however, had still not kept pace with the upswing of other countries. Agriculture lagged far behind that of England and the Netherlands, industry behind that of Italy, Flanders and England, and in sea-borne trade the English, and especially the Dutch, were already beginning to drive the Germans out of the field. The population was still very thinly scattered. Civilisation in Germany existed only sporadically, grouped around single centres of industry and trade; the interests of these individual centres themselves diverged widely, hardly anywhere had a point of contact. The south had quite different trade connections and markets from the north; the east and west stood almost entirely outside all intercourse. Not a single town was in a position to become the industrial and commercial centre of gravity of the whole country, as London, for example, already was for England. The whole internal traffic was limited almost exclusively to coastal and river navigation and to the few great highways, from Augsburg and Nuremberg via Cologne to the Netherlands and via Erfurt to the north. Further away from the rivers and highways lay a number of smaller towns, which, excluded from the great traffic, continued to vegetate undisturbed in the conditions of the later Middle Ages, used few foreign wares, and supplied few export products. Of the rural population, only the nobility came into contact with wider circles and new needs; the mass of the peasants never went beyond the nearest local relations and the local horizon connected with them.

While in England and France the rise of trade and industry resulted in the interlinking of interests over the whole country and thus in political centralisation, Germany achieved nothing more than the grouping of interests by provinces, around merely local centres, and thus political fragmentation; a fragmentation that soon afterwards became firmly established precisely through the exclusion of Germany from world trade. In the same measure as the purely feudal Empire disintegrated, the imperial bond dissolved altogether, the great imperial feudatories turned into almost independent princes, and the imperial towns on the one hand and the imperial knights on the other concluded alliances, now against each other, now against the princes or the emperor. The imperial authority, itself uncertain of its position, vacillated unsteadily between the various elements that composed the Empire, and in the process increasingly lost authority; its attempt to centralise in the manner of Louis XI did not, despite all intrigues and acts of violence, get beyond the cohesion of the Austrian hereditary lands. Who in this confusion, in these countless intersecting conflicts finally won and had to win were the representatives of centralisation within fragmentation, of local and provincial centralisation, the princes, beside whom the emperor himself became more and more a prince like the others.

Under these conditions the position of the classes handed down from the Middle Ages had changed essentially, and new classes had formed alongside the old ones.

From the high nobility the princes had emerged. They were already almost completely independent of the emperor and in possession of most sovereign rights. They made war and peace on their own authority, kept standing armies, convened provincial diets and imposed taxes. They had already brought a large part of the lower nobility and the towns under their sway; they constantly used every means to incorporate the remaining towns and baronies that were immediate to the Empire into their territory. In relation to these they centralised, just as they acted in a decentralising manner in relation to the imperial authority. Internally their rule was already highly arbitrary. They summoned the estates for the most part only when they could not help themselves otherwise. They imposed taxes and raised money as it pleased them; the right of the estates to grant taxes was seldom recognised and even more rarely exercised. And even then the prince usually had the majority through the two tax-exempt estates that participated in the enjoyment of the taxes, the knighthood and the prelates. The need for money of the princes grew with the luxury and the extension of the court, with the standing armies, with the growing costs of government. Taxes became ever more oppressive. The towns were mostly protected against them by their privileges; the whole weight of the tax burden fell upon the peasants, both on the domain peasants of the princes themselves, and on the serfs and bondsmen of the knights liable to feudal service. Where direct taxation was not sufficient, indirect taxation stepped in; the most refined maneuvers of fiscal art were applied in order to fill the leaky treasury. When nothing helped, when there was nothing more to pawn and no free imperial town was any longer willing to give credit, recourse was had to coinage operations of the filthiest kind, base coin was struck, high or low forced rates were set, according to what suited the treasury. Trading in urban and other privileges, which were subsequently forcibly revoked in order to sell them again at high prices, the exploitation of every attempt at opposition for exacting ransoms and plunder of all kinds, etc., etc., were likewise lucrative and everyday sources of money for the princes of that time. Justice too was a standing and not inconsiderable article of trade for the princes. In short, the subjects of that time, who in addition had to satisfy the private greed of the princely bailiffs and officials, tasted to the full all the blessings of the paternal system of government.

Out of the feudal hierarchy of the Middle Ages the middle nobility had almost completely disappeared; it had either elevated itself to the independence of small princes or sunk into the ranks of the lower nobility. The lower nobility, the knighthood, was heading rapidly towards its decline. A large part was already completely impoverished and lived solely from princely service in military or civil posts; another part stood in feudal dependence and subjection to the princes; the smaller part was immediate to the Empire. The development of warfare, the growing importance of the infantry, and the perfection of firearms did away with the importance of their military achievements as heavy cavalry, and at the same time destroyed the impregnability of their castles. Just like the Nuremberg handworkers, the knights were made superfluous by the progress of industry. The need for money of the knighthood contributed substantially to its ruin. The luxury in the castles, the rivalry in splendour at tournaments and festivals, and the price of arms and horses rose with the advances of civilisation, while the sources of income of the knights and barons increased little or not at all. Feuds with obligatory plunder and extortion, highway robbery and similar noble pursuits became over time too dangerous. The dues and services of the manorial subjects yielded hardly more than before. In order to cover their growing needs, the gracious lords had to resort to the same means as the princes. The fleecing of the peasants by the nobility was developed further with each passing year. The serfs were sucked dry to the last drop of blood, the bondsmen were burdened with new dues and services under all kinds of pretexts and names. Labour services, rents, ground rents, entry fines, death duties, protection money, etc., were all arbitrarily raised in defiance of all old contracts. Justice was refused or sold, and where the knight could not otherwise get at the peasant’s money, he simply threw him into the dungeon and forced him to buy his freedom.

With the remaining estates the lower nobility likewise lived on no friendly footing. The nobility owing feudal service sought to make itself immediatly subject to the Empire, the nobility immediately subject to the Empire sought to maintain its independence; hence ceaseless disputes with the princes. The clergy, who in their then bloated shape appeared to the knight as a purely superfluous estate, he envied for their great estates, their riches held together by celibacy and the church constitution. With the towns he was continually at loggerheads; he was indebted to them, he nourished himself from the plundering of their territory, from robbing their merchants, from the ransom of the prisoners taken from them in feuds. And the struggle of the knighthood against all these estates became all the more violent, the more the money question also became for it a question of life.

The clergy, the representative of the ideology of mediaeval feudalism, felt the influence of the historical upheaval no less. Through the printing press and the needs of expanded trade it was deprived of its monopoly not only of reading and writing, but of higher education. The division of labour also set in on the intellectual terrain. The newly emerging estate of jurists drove it out of a series of the most influential offices. It too began largely to become superfluous, and acknowledged this itself through its ever-increasing idleness and ignorance. But the more superfluous it became, the more numerous it became — thanks to its enormous riches, which it continually increased by applying every possible means.

Within the clergy there were two thoroughly distinct classes. The ecclesiastical feudal hierarchy formed the aristocratic class: the bishops and archbishops, the abbots, priors and other prelates. These high dignitaries of the Church were either themselves imperial princes, or they ruled as feudal lords under the overlordship of other princes great stretches of land with numerous serfs and bondsmen. They exploited their subjects not merely as ruthlessly as the nobility and the princes, they went to work far more shamelessly. In addition to brutal force, all the chicaneries of religion were set in motion, in addition to the terrors of the torture, all the terrors of anathema and refused absolution, all the intrigues of the confessional, in order to wrest the last penny from the subject or to increase the inheritance of the Church. Forgery of documents was for these worthy men a common and favourite means of fraud. But although they drew, besides the usual feudal dues and rents, also the tithes, all these revenues still did not suffice. The fabrication of miracle-working images of saints and relics, the organisation of prayer-stations promising salvation, the traffic in indulgences were resorted to in order to extort increased taxes from the people, and for a long time with the best success.

It was these prelates and their countless gendarmerie of monks, constantly reinforced with the spread of political and religious incitements, upon which the hatred of parsons, not only of the people but also of the nobility, concentrated. In so far as they were sovereign, they stood in the way of the princes. The sumptuous living of the corpulent bishops and abbots and their army of monks aroused the envy of the nobility and angered the people, who had to bear the cost, all the more as their preachings struck the people in the face all the more glaringly.

The plebeian faction of the clergy consisted of the preachers in the countryside and in the towns. They stood outside the feudal hierarchy of the Church and had no share in its riches. Their work was less controlled and, however important it was for the Church, at the moment far less indispensable than the police services of the barracked monks. They were therefore paid far worse, and their benefices were mostly very meagre. Being of burgher or plebeian origin, they were close enough to the living conditions of the masses to retain, despite their priestly estate, burgher and plebeian sympathies. Participation in the movements of the time, among the monks only the exception, was among them the rule. They provided the theoreticians and ideologists of the movement, and many of them, representatives of the plebeians and peasants, died for it on the scaffold. The people’s hatred of parsons turns against them only in individual cases.

Just as the emperor stood above the princes and the nobility, so the pope stood above the high and low clergy. Just as the “common penny”, the imperial taxes, were paid to the emperor, so the general church taxes were paid to the pope, from which he defrayed the luxury of the Roman court. In no country were these church taxes collected with greater conscientiousness and strictness than in Germany, thanks to the power and numbers of the parsons. This was especially true of annates when bishoprics fell vacant. With rising needs new means were then invented to procure money: trade in relics, indulgence and jubilee moneys, etc. Great sums thus travelled annually from Germany to Rome, and the increased pressure resulting from this heightened not only the hatred of parsons, but also aroused national feeling, especially among the nobility, the most nationally-minded estate at the time.

Out of the original outburghers of the mediaeval towns, three sharply distinct fractions had developed with the flourishing of trade and handicraft.

At the head of the urban society stood the patrician families, the so-called “honorables”. They were the richest families. They alone sat in the council and in all urban offices. They therefore not only administered the revenues of the town, they also consumed them. Strong in their wealth, in their traditional aristocratic position recognised by emperor and empire, they exploited both the urban community and the peasants subject to the town in every way. They practised usury in grain and money, imposed upon themselves monopolies of all kinds, deprived the community one after another of all rights to make joint use of the town’s woods and meadows, and used them directly for their own private advantage, arbitrarily levied road, bridge and gate tolls and other imposts, and trafficked in guild privileges, mastership and burgher rights, and in justice. They dealt no more gently with the peasants of the town’s territory than the nobility or the parsons; on the contrary, the town bailiffs and stewards in the villages, all patricians, brought to the aristocratic harshness and rapacity a certain bureaucratic exactitude in the collection. The thus accumulated urban revenues were administered with the utmost arbitrariness; the bookkeeping in the municipal accounts, a pure formality, was as negligent and confused as possible; embezzlements and cash deficits were the order of the day. How easy it was at that time for a caste surrounded on all sides by privileges, small in numbers and closely knit by kinship and interest, to enrich itself enormously out of the municipal revenues, one understands when one thinks of the numerous embezzlements and jobberies that the year 1848 brought to light in so many municipal administrations.

The patricians had taken care to let the rights of the urban community, especially in financial matters, become obsolete everywhere. Only later, when the frauds of these gentlemen became too flagrant, did the communities bestir themselves again to gain at least control over the municipal administration. In the majority of towns they actually regained their rights. But given the endless disputes among the guilds themselves, the tenacity of the patricians, and the protection they found with the empire and the governments of the towns allied with them, the patrician councillors very soon restored their old sole rule in fact, whether by craft or by force. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the community in all towns was again in opposition.

The urban opposition against the patriciate was divided into two fractions, which emerge very distinctly in the Peasant War.

The burgher opposition, the forerunner of our present-day liberals, comprised the richer and middling burghers, as well as a larger or smaller section of the petty burghers according to local circumstances. Their demands remained strictly on constitutional ground. They demanded control of the municipal administration and a share in the legislative power, whether through the communal assembly itself or through a communal representation (great council, communal committee); further, the restriction of patrician nepotism and of the oligarchy of a few families, which was becoming ever more conspicuous even within the patriciate itself. At most, they further demanded the filling of some council posts by burghers from their own midst. This party, to which the discontented and decayed fraction of the patriciate here and there attached itself, had the great majority in all orderly communal assemblies and in the guilds. The supporters of the council and the more radical opposition together were by far the minority among the actual burghers.

We shall see how, during the movement of the sixteenth century, this “moderate”, “lawful”, “propertied” and “intelligent” opposition played exactly the same role, and with exactly the same success, as its successor, the constitutional party, in the movement of 1848 and 1849.

Moreover, the burgher opposition still inveighed very seriously against the parsons, whose idle sumptuous living and loose morals gave them great offence. It demanded measures against the scandalous conduct of these worthy men. It demanded that the clergy’s own jurisdiction and their tax exemptions be abolished, and that the number of monks be restricted in general.

The plebeian opposition consisted of the decayed burghers and the mass of the urban inhabitants who were excluded from burgher rights: the journeymen, the day labourers and the numerous beginnings of the lumpenproletariat, which are found even in the lower stages of urban development. The lumpenproletariat is, in general, a phenomenon that occurs, in more or less developed form, in almost all previous phases of society. The multitude of people without a definite branch of work or a fixed domicile was at that time increased precisely by the dissolution of feudalism in a society in which every branch of work, every sphere of life, was still entrenched behind a host of privileges. In all developed countries the number of vagabonds had never been as great as in the first half of the sixteenth century. One part of these vagrants joined the armies in times of war, another begged its way across the country, the third sought its scant subsistence in the towns through day-labouring and whatever else was not guild-regulated. All three play a role in the Peasant War: the first in the armies of the princes, to which the peasants succumbed; the second in the peasant conspiracies and peasant bands, where their demoralising influence stands out at every moment; the third in the struggles of the urban parties. It is moreover not to be forgotten that a large part of this class, particularly those living in the towns, still possessed a substantial core of sound peasant nature and had by no means yet developed the venality and debasement of today’s civilised lumpenproletariat.

One sees that the plebeian opposition of the towns at that time consisted of very mixed elements. It united the degenerate components of the old, feudal and guild society with the as yet undeveloped,

barely emerging proletarian element of the nascent, modern bourgeois society. Impoverished guild burghers, still tied by the privilege to the existing bourgeois order, on the one hand; expelled peasants and discharged retainers, who could not yet become proletarians, on the other. Between them, the journeymen, momentarily outside official society and approximating in their living conditions the proletariat as closely as was possible under the industry of that time and the guild privilege; but at the same time almost all future bourgeois masters, precisely by virtue of this guild privilege. The party position of this mixture of elements was therefore necessarily highly uncertain and varied according to locality. Before the Peasant War, the plebeian opposition does not appear in the political struggles as a party; it appears only as a turbulent, plunder-addicted tail of the bourgeois opposition, to be bought and sold with a few barrels of wine. Only the risings of the peasants make it into a party, and even then it is almost everywhere dependent upon the peasants in its demands and its conduct—a striking proof of how greatly the town was still dependent upon the country at that time. In so far as it acts independently, it demands the establishment of the urban trade monopolies in the countryside, it wishes the urban revenues not to be curtailed by the abolition of feudal burdens in the city precincts, etc.; in short, in so far it is reactionary, subordinates itself to its own petty-bourgeois elements and thus delivers a characteristic prelude to the tragicomedy that the modern petty bourgeoisie has been performing for three years under the name of democracy.

Only in Thuringia, under the direct influence of Münzer, and in a few other places under that of his disciples, was the plebeian fraction of the towns carried away by the general storm to such an extent that the embryonic proletarian element in it momentarily gained the upper hand over all the other factors of the movement. This episode, which forms the culminating point of the entire Peasant War and groups itself around its most magnificent figure, Thomas Münzer, is at the same time the shortest. It goes without saying that it collapsed most quickly, and that at the same time it bears a predominantly fantastic stamp, that the expression of its demands had to remain extremely vague; it found least firm ground in the conditions of that time.

Beneath all these classes, with the exception of the last, stood the great exploited mass of the nation: the peasants. Upon the peasant weighed the entire structure of society: princes, officials, nobility, clergy, patricians and burghers. Whether he was the dependant of a prince, an imperial baron, a bishop, a monastery, or a town, he was everywhere treated as a thing, as a beast of burden, and worse. If he was a serf, he was at the mercy of his lord’s good or ill will. If he was a bondman, the legal, contractual dues were already sufficient to crush him; but these dues were daily increased. He had to work the greater part of his time on the estates of his lord; what he earned in the few free hours had to pay tithes, interest, ground-rent, the Bede, travelling money (war tax), provincial tax and imperial tax. He could neither marry nor die without payment to the lord. Besides the regular compulsory labour services, he had to gather litter for his gracious lord, gather strawberries, bilberries, snail shells, drive the game for the hunt, chop wood, etc., fishing and hunting belonged to the lord; the peasant had to look on quietly while the game destroyed his crops. The common meadows and woods of the peasants had almost everywhere been violently taken away by the lords. And, as over property, so the lord disposed arbitrarily over the person of the peasant, over that of his wife and his daughters. He had the right of the first night. He threw him into the tower if it pleased him, where torture awaited him, with the same certainty as now the examining magistrate. He beat him to death or had him beheaded if it pleased him. Of those edifying chapters of the Carolina which deal ‘of cutting off ears’, ‘of cutting off noses’, ‘of putting out eyes’, ‘of chopping off fingers and hands’, ‘of beheading’, ‘of breaking on the wheel’, ‘of burning’, ‘of pinching with red-hot tongs’, ‘of quartering’, etc., there is not a single one that the gracious liege or protecting lord did not apply at pleasure against his peasants. Who was to protect him? In the courts sat barons, clergy, patricians, or jurists, who well knew what they were paid for. All the official estates of the empire indeed lived by the sucking-out of the peasants.

The peasants, groaning under the terrible pressure, were nevertheless hard to bring to insurrection. Their dispersion made any common agreement extremely difficult. The long habit of subjection handed down from generation to generation, the disaccustoming to the use of arms in many regions, the harshness of exploitation, now increasing, now diminishing according to the personality of the lords, all this helped to keep the peasants quiet. Hence we find in the Middle Ages plenty of local peasant insurrections, but—at least in Germany—before the Peasant War not a single general, national peasant rising. The peasants alone were not in a position to make a revolution as long as the organised power of the princes, the nobility and the towns confronted them united and compact. Only through an alliance with other estates could they obtain a chance of victory; but how were they to ally themselves with other estates when they were exploited by all of them equally?

We see, the various estates of the empire—princes, nobility, prelates, patricians, burghers, plebeians and peasants—formed at the beginning of the sixteenth century an extremely confused mass with the most diverse needs intersecting in every direction. Each estate stood in the way of the others, lived in a continuous, now open, now concealed struggle with all the rest. That division of the whole nation into two great camps, such as it existed at the outbreak of the first revolution in France, such as it exists now on a higher stage of development in the most advanced countries, was under these circumstances purely impossible; it could only come about even approximately when the lowest, by all the other estates exploited stratum of the nation rose up: the peasants and the plebeians. One will easily understand the confusion of interests, views and strivings of that time when one remembers what confusion the present, far less complicated composition of the German nation—feudal nobility, bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie, peasants and proletariat—has produced in the last two years. [15]

The grouping of the then so multifarious estates into larger wholes was already made almost impossible by decentralization, by local and provincial independence, by the industrial and commercial estrangement of the provinces from one another, and by the poor communications. This grouping only first emerges with the general spread of revolutionary religio-political ideas in the Reformation. The various estates which adhere to or oppose these ideas concentrate the nation, though only with great difficulty and approximately, into three great camps: the Catholic or reactionary camp, the Lutheran bourgeois-reformist camp, and the revolutionary camp. Even if we discover little consistency in this great cleavage of the nation, if we find partly the same elements in the first two camps, this is explained by the state of dissolution in which most of the official estates handed down from the Middle Ages found themselves, and by the decentralization which momentarily assigned opposite directions to the same estates in different places. We have had occasion in recent years to see quite similar facts so frequently in Germany that such an apparent jumbling of estates and classes under the far more complicated circumstances of the 16th century cannot surprise us.

German ideology, despite the most recent experiences, still sees in the struggles to which the Middle Ages succumbed nothing more than violent theological squabbles. If only the people of that time could have come to an understanding about heavenly things, then, in the opinion of our patriotic historical scholars and statesmen, there would have been no occasion whatever to quarrel about the things of this world. These ideologists are gullible enough to take at face value all the illusions that an epoch makes about itself, or that the ideologists of a time make about that time. The same class of people, for example, sees in the Revolution of 1789 only a somewhat heated debate over the advantages of constitutional over absolute monarchy, in the July Revolution a practical controversy about the untenability of the right ‘by the grace of God,’ in the February Revolution an attempt to solve the question: ‘Republic or monarchy?’ etc. Of the class struggles that are fought out in these upheavals, and of which the political phrase written upon the banner each time is merely the expression, of these class struggles even our ideologists today have hardly a presentiment, although tidings of it resound loudly enough not only from abroad but also from the murmuring and grumbling of many thousands of native proletarians.

In the so-called religious wars of the sixteenth century, too, it was primarily a question of very positive material class interests, and these wars were class struggles, just as much as the later internal collisions in England and France. If these class struggles at that time bore religious shibboleths, if the interests, needs and demands of the individual classes concealed themselves beneath a religious cloak, this changes nothing in the matter and is easily explained by the conditions of the time.

The Middle Ages had developed entirely from scratch. It had made a tabula rasa of the old civilisation, the old philosophy, politics and jurisprudence, and had begun everything again from the beginning. The only thing it had taken over from the vanished old world was Christianity and a number of half-ruined towns stripped of all their civilisation. The consequence was that, as in all primitive stages of development, the clergy obtained the monopoly of intellectual culture, and thereby culture itself acquired an essentially theological character. In the hands of the clergy, politics and jurisprudence, like all the other sciences, remained mere branches of theology and were treated according to the same principles that obtained in it. The dogmas of the Church were at the same time political axioms, and Biblical texts had the force of law in every court. Even when a separate estate of jurists formed itself, jurisprudence remained for a long time under the tutelage of theology. And this supremacy of theology over the entire domain of intellectual activity was at the same time the necessary consequence of the position of the Church as the most general synthesis and sanction of the existing feudal lordship.

It is clear that herewith all generally expressed attacks on feudalism, above all attacks on the Church, all revolutionary social and political doctrines had to be at the same time and predominantly theological heresies. In order for the existing social conditions to be touched, they had to be stripped of their halo.

The revolutionary opposition to feudality runs through the entire Middle Ages. It appears, according to the conditions of the time, as mysticism, as open heresy, as armed insurrection. As far as mysticism is concerned, it is well known how dependent the reformers of the 16th century were on it; Müntzer, too, took much from it. The heresies were the expression partly of the reaction of the patriarchal Alpine herdsmen against the feudality advancing upon them (the Waldenses); partly of the opposition of the towns that had outgrown feudalism against it (the Albigenses, Arnold of Brescia, etc.); partly direct insurrections of peasants (John Ball, the Master from Hungary in Picardy, etc.). The patriarchal heresy of the Waldenses we can, just like the insurrection of the Swiss, leave aside here as a reactionary attempt, in form and content, of barricading against the historical movement, of only local significance. In the two other forms of medieval heresy we find already in the 12th century the precursors of the great antagonism between burgher and peasant-plebeian opposition, on which the Peasant War foundered. This antagonism runs through the whole of the later Middle Ages.

The heresy of the towns — and it is the actual official heresy of the Middle Ages — turned mainly against the priests, whose riches and political position it attacked. Just as the bourgeoisie now demands a gouvernement à bon marché, a cheap government, so the medieval burghers demanded first of all a église à bon marché, a cheap church. Reactionary in form, like every heresy that can see in the further development of the Church and dogmas only a degeneration, the burgher heresy demanded the restoration of the simple church constitution of early Christianity and the abolition of the exclusive priestly order. This cheap arrangement removed the monks, the prelates, the Roman court, in short, everything that was costly in the Church. The towns, themselves republics, though under the protection of monarchs, gave voice through their attacks on the papacy for the first time in a more general form that the normal form of the rule of the bourgeoisie is the republic. Their enmity to a series of dogmas and church laws is explained partly by what has been said, partly by their other conditions of life. Why they, e.g., so fiercely opposed celibacy, no one gives better information on that than Boccaccio. Arnold of Brescia in Italy and Germany, the Albigenses in southern France, John Wycliffe in England, Huss and the Calixtines in Bohemia were the main representatives of this tendency. That the opposition to feudalism here appears only as opposition to ecclesiastical feudality is very simply explained by the fact that the towns everywhere were already a recognised Estate, and could sufficiently combat secular feudality with its privileges, with arms or in the diets.

Here also we see already, in southern France as in England and Bohemia, that the greater part of the lower nobility joined the towns in the struggle against the priests in the heresy — a phenomenon which is explained by the dependence of the lower nobility on the towns and by the community of interests of both in the face of the princes and prelates, and which we shall encounter again in the Peasant War.

The heresy which was the direct expression of the peasant and plebeian needs and which almost always attached itself to an insurrection had a quite different character. It shared all the demands of the burgher heresy concerning the priests, the papacy, and the restoration of the early Christian church constitution, but at the same time it went infinitely further. It demanded the restoration of the early Christian equality relation among the members of the community, and its recognition as the norm also for the civil world. From the “equality of the children of God” it drew the conclusion of civil equality, and even in part already equality of property. The equalisation of the nobility with the peasants, of the patricians and privileged burghers with the plebeians, the abolition of forced labour services, ground-rents, taxes, privileges, and at least the most crying differences of wealth — these were demands put forward with more or less definiteness and asserted as necessary consequences of early Christian doctrine. This peasant-plebeian heresy, which in the flowering period of feudalism, e.g., among the Albigenses, can hardly yet be distinguished from the burgher heresy, develops into a sharply separated party view in the 14th and 15th centuries, when it usually appears quite independently alongside the burgher heresy. Thus John Ball, the preacher of Wat Tyler’s insurrection in England, alongside the Wycliffe movement, thus the Taborites alongside the Calixtines in Bohemia. Among the Taborites even the republican tendency already appears under a theocratic guise, which was further developed by the representatives of the plebeians in Germany at the end of the 15th and beginning of the 16th centuries.

Joined to this form of heresy is the fanaticism of mysticising sects, the Flagellants, Lollards, etc., which in times of oppression perpetuated the revolutionary tradition.

The plebeians were at that time the only class that stood completely outside the officially existing society. They stood outside feudal and outside burgher association. They had neither privileges nor property; they did not even have, like the peasants and petty burghers, a possession burdened with oppressive dues. They were in every respect propertyless and rightless; their conditions of life did not even come into direct contact with the existing institutions, which completely ignored them. They were the living symptom of the dissolution of feudal and guild-burgher society, and at the same time the first precursor of modern-bourgeois society.

This position explains why the plebeian faction even at that time could not remain content with merely fighting feudalism and the privileged petty-bourgeoisie; why it, at least in fantasy, even reached out beyond the scarcely dawning modern-bourgeois society; why it, the completely propertyless faction, already had to call into question the institutions, views and conceptions common to all forms of society based on class antagonisms. The chiliastic dreams of early Christianity offered a convenient point of departure for this. But at the same time this reaching out beyond not only the present but even beyond the future could only be a violent, fantastic one, and at the first attempt at practical application was bound to fall back into the narrow limits which the conditions of the time alone permitted. The attack on private property, the demand for community of goods, had to dissolve into a crude organisation of charity; the vague Christian equality could at best amount to bourgeois “equality before the law”; the abolition of all authority transforms itself finally into 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, yet very explicable from the life-situation of the plebeian faction, anticipation of later history we find first in Germany, with Thomas Müntzer and his party. Among the Taborites, a kind of chiliastic community of goods had existed, to be sure, but only as a purely military measure. Only with Müntzer are these communist echoes the expression of the strivings of a real social faction, only with him are they formulated with a certain definiteness, and since him we find them again in every great popular upheaval, until they gradually flow together with the modern proletarian movement; just as in the Middle Ages the struggles of the free peasants against the feudal rule that was enmeshing them more and more flow together with the struggles of the serfs and bondsmen for the complete destruction of feudal rule.

While in the first of the three great camps, in the conservative Catholic camp, all the elements assembled which were interested in the preservation of the existing order, i.e., the imperial power, the ecclesiastical and a part of the secular princes, the richer nobility, the prelates and the urban patriciate, there gathered around the banner of the burgher-moderate, Lutheran reform the propertied elements of the opposition, the mass of the lower nobility, the burghers, and even a part of the secular princes who hoped to enrich themselves by confiscating the church estates and wanted to use the opportunity to achieve greater independence from the Empire. The peasants and plebeians, finally, grouped themselves into the revolutionary party, whose demands and doctrines were most sharply expressed by Müntzer.

Luther and Müntzer, in their doctrine as in their character and their appearance, each fully represented his party.

Luther, in the years 1517 to 1525, went through exactly the same transformations that the modern German constitutionalists went through from 1847 to 1849, and that every bourgeois party goes through which, placed for a moment at the head of the movement, is itself outflanked in this movement by the plebeian or proletarian party behind it.

When Luther in 1517 first came out against the dogmas and the constitution of the Catholic Church, his opposition still had by no means a definite character. Without going beyond the demands of the earlier burgher heresy, it excluded no single further-reaching tendency, and could not do so. In the first moment all oppositional elements had to be united, the most resolute revolutionary energy had to be applied, the whole mass of the heretical views previously existing had to be represented against the Catholic orthodoxy. Just in the same way our liberal bourgeois were still revolutionary in 1847, called themselves socialists and communists, and waxed enthusiastic about the emancipation of the working class. Luther’s powerful peasant nature gave itself the most unbridled vent in this first period of his activity. “If the raging fury of the Romanists should continue to have its way, it seems to me there would be scarcely a better counsel and remedy to stem it than that kings and princes should proceed with force, arm themselves and attack these harmful people who poison all the world, and once make an end of the game with weapons, not with words. If we punish thieves with the sword, murderers with the rope, heretics with fire, why do we not attack all the more these harmful teachers of perdition, as popes, cardinals, bishops and the whole swarm of the Roman Sodom with all kinds of weapons, and wash our hands in their blood?”

But this first revolutionary fire-eater mood did not last long. The lightning that Luther had hurled struck home. The entire German people came into movement. On the one hand, peasants and plebeians saw in his appeals against the priests, in his preaching of Christian freedom, the signal for insurrection; on the other hand, the more moderate

The burghers and a large part of the lower nobility joined him, even princes were carried away by the current. The former believed the day had come when they could settle accounts with all their oppressors, the latter merely wanted to break the power of the clergy, the dependence on Rome, the Catholic hierarchy, and to enrich themselves from the confiscation of church property. The parties separated and found their representatives. Luther had to choose between them. He, the protégé of the Elector of Saxony, the respected professor of Wittenberg, the great man who had overnight become powerful and famous, surrounded by a circle of dependent creatures and flatterers, did not hesitate for a moment. He dropped the popular elements of the movement and joined the bourgeois, noble and princely suite. The calls for a war of extermination against Rome fell silent; Luther now preached peaceful development and passive resistance (cf. e.g. his Address to the Nobility of the German Nation, 1520, etc.). To Hutten’s invitation to come to him and Sickingen at the Ebernburg, the centre of the noble conspiracy against clergy and princes, Luther replied: “I would not wish the Gospel to be championed by force and bloodshed. By the Word the world has been overcome, by the Word the Church has been preserved, by the Word it will also be restored, and the Antichrist, as he obtained his without force, will fall without force.”

From this turning-point, or rather from this more definite determination of Luther’s direction, began that chaffering and haggling over the institutions and dogmas to be retained or reformed, that repulsive diplomatising, conceding, intriguing and compromising, the result of which was the Augsburg Confession, the finally bargained-for constitution of the reformed burghers’ church. It is quite the same trafficking which has recently been repeated to the point of nausea in political form in German national assemblies, conciliation assemblies, revision chambers and the Erfurt parliament. The petty-bourgeois character of the official Reformation stood out in the most blatant manner in these negotiations.

That Luther, as now declared representative of the bourgeois reform, preached legal progress, had its good reasons. The bulk of the towns had gone over to the moderate reform; the lower nobility joined it more and more, a section of the princes fell in with it, another wavered. Its success was as good as assured, at least in a great part of Germany. With continued peaceful development, the remaining regions could not in the long run withstand the pressure of the moderate opposition. Any violent upheaval, however, was bound to bring the moderate party into conflict with the extreme, plebeian and peasant party, to alienate the princes, the nobility and many towns from the movement, and left only the chance either that the bourgeois party would be outflanked by the peasants and plebeians, or that all the movement parties would be suppressed by the Catholic restoration.
And how the bourgeois parties, as soon as they have won the least victories, seek to steer through between the Scylla of revolution and the Charybdis of restoration by means of legal progress, of that we have had examples enough in recent times.

Just as under the general social and political conditions of that time the results of any change necessarily had to benefit the princes and increase their power, so the bourgeois reform, the more sharply it separated itself from the plebeian and peasant elements, had to fall more and more under the control of the reformed princes. Luther himself became more and more their servant, and the people knew very well what it was doing when it said that he had become a servant of princes like the others, and when it pelted him with stones in Orlamünde.

When the Peasant War broke out, and indeed in regions where princes and nobility were mostly Catholic, Luther sought to adopt a mediating position. He decisively attacked the governments. They were to blame for the uprising through their oppressions; it was not the peasants who set themselves against them, but God himself. The uprising was of course also ungodly and contrary to the Gospel, it was said on the other side. Finally he advised both parties to give way and reach an amicable settlement.

But the uprising, despite these well-meant mediation proposals, expanded rapidly, even seized Protestant regions, ruled by Lutheran princes, lords and towns, and quickly outgrew the bourgeois, sober reform. In Luther’s immediate vicinity, in Thuringia, the most resolute faction of the insurgents under Müntzer set up its headquarters. A few more successes, and all Germany would be in flames, Luther would be surrounded, perhaps hunted down with spears as a traitor, and the bourgeois reform swept away by the storm-flood of the peasant-plebeian revolution. Then there was no more time for reflection. In the face of the revolution, all old enmities were forgotten; compared with the hordes of the peasants, the servants of the Roman Sodom were innocent lambs, meek children of God, and burghers and princes, nobility and clergy, Luther and the Pope united “against the murderous and plundering hordes of the peasants”. “They should be smashed, strangled and stabbed, secretly and openly, whoever can, as one must kill a mad dog!” shouted Luther. “Therefore, dear lords, loose here, rescue there, stab, strike, strangle them whoever can, if you die doing so, well for you, a more blessed death you can never obtain.” One should only have no false mercy with the peasants. They mingle themselves among the seditious, those who have mercy on those of whom God has no mercy, but whom he will punish and destroy. Afterwards the peasants themselves will learn to thank God when they have to give up one cow so that they can enjoy the other in peace; and the princes will recognise from the rebellion the spirit of the rabble, which can only be ruled by force. “The wise man says: cibus, onus et virga asino; for a peasant, oat-straw belongs, they do not listen to the Word and are insane, so they must hear the virga, the musket, and it serves them right. We should pray for them, that they obey; if not, then there is little mercy here. Just let the muskets whistle among them, otherwise they will make it a thousand times worse.”

Exactly in this way spoke our former socialist and philanthropic bourgeois, when the proletariat after the March days came to claim its share of the fruits of victory.

Luther had put a powerful weapon into the hands of the plebeian movement through his translation of the Bible. In the Bible he had contrasted the feudalised Christianity of his time with the modest Christianity of the first centuries, the decaying feudal society with the picture of a society that knew nothing of the ramified, artificial feudal hierarchy. The peasants had used this weapon against princes, nobility and clergy on all sides. Now Luther turned it against them, and put together from the Bible a veritable dithyramb in praise of the authority ordained by God, such as no bootlicker of absolute monarchy had ever achieved. Princedom by the grace of God, passive obedience, even serfdom was sanctioned by the Bible. Not only the peasant revolt, but also Luther’s whole rebellion against spiritual and temporal authority was disavowed in this; not only the popular movement, but also the bourgeois movement was thereby betrayed to the princes.

Need we name the bourgeois who have also recently given us examples again of this disavowal of their own past?

Let us now contrast the bourgeois reformer Luther with the plebeian revolutionary Müntzer.

Thomas Müntzer was born in Stolberg am Harz around the year 1498. His father is said to have died on the gallows, a victim of the arbitrariness of the Counts of Stolberg. Already in his fifteenth year, Müntzer formed a secret league at the school in Halle against the Archbishop of Magdeburg and the Roman Church in general. His scholarship in the theology of the time obtained him early the doctor’s degree and a post as chaplain in a nunnery in Halle. Here he already treated dogmas and the rites of the Church with the greatest contempt, at Mass he entirely omitted the words of consecration and ate, as Luther relates of him, the Lord’s gods unconsecrated. His chief study was the medieval mystics, especially the chiliastic writings of Joachim of Calabria. The thousand-year kingdom, the judgment of punishment upon the degenerate Church and the corrupted world, which the latter proclaimed and depicted, seemed to Müntzer to have come near with the Reformation and the general excitement of the time. He preached in the surrounding area with great acclaim. In 1520 he went as the first evangelical preacher to Zwickau. Here he found one of those fanatical, chiliastic sects which continued to exist in secret in many regions, behind whose momentary humility and withdrawal the ever-growing opposition of the lowest strata of society against the existing conditions had hidden itself, and which, with the growing agitation, emerged more and more openly and persistently into the light of day. It was the sect of the Anabaptists, at whose head stood Niklas Storch. They preached the approach of the Last Judgment and of the thousand-year kingdom; they had visions, ecstasies and the spirit of prophecy. Soon they came into conflict with the council of Zwickau; Müntzer defended them, although he never unconditionally joined them, but rather gained influence over them. The council proceeded energetically against them; they had to leave the town, and Müntzer with them. It was the end of 1521.

He went to Prague and attempted, linking up with the remnants of the Hussite movement, to gain a footing there; but his proclamations only had the result that he had to flee Bohemia as well. In 1522 he became preacher in Allstedt in Thuringia. Here he began by reforming the ritual.

Even before Luther dared to go so far, he totally abolished the Latin language and had the whole Bible, not merely the prescribed Sunday Gospels and Epistles, read. At the same time he organised propaganda in the surrounding area. The people flocked to him from all sides, and soon Allstedt became the centre of the popular anti-clerical movement of all Thuringia.

Müntzer was still above all a theologian; he still directed his attacks almost exclusively against the clergy. But he did not preach, as Luther was already doing, calm debate and peaceful progress, he continued Luther’s earlier violent sermons and called upon the Saxon princes and the people to armed intervention against the Roman clergy. “Christ Himself says, I have not come to bring peace, but the sword. But what are you (the Saxon princes) to do with it? Nothing else but to do away with the evil ones who hinder the Gospel and separate them, if you would be servants of God. Christ commanded with great earnestness, Luke 19:27, bring mine enemies and slay them before me... Do not give us any stale nonsense that the power of God should do it without your aid of the sword, else it might rust in the scabbard. Those who are opposed to God’s revelation shall be done away with, without any mercy, just as Hezekiah, Cyrus, Josiah, Daniel and Elijah destroyed the priests of Baal, otherwise the Christian...”

The church cannot return to its origin. One must pluck up the weeds from the vineyard of God in the time of harvest. God says in Deuteronomy 7: ‘Ye shall show no mercy unto the idolatrous; break down their altars, smash their images and burn them, that I be not wroth with you.’”

But these appeals to the princes remained without effect, while at the same time the revolutionary excitement among the people grew from day to day. Münzer, whose ideas became ever sharper and bolder, now broke decisively with the bourgeois Reformation and from now on appeared directly as a political agitator.

His theological-philosophical doctrine attacked all the main points not only of Catholicism but of Christianity in general. He taught, in Christian forms, a pantheism which has a remarkable similarity to the modern speculative mode of viewing things and in places even borders on atheism. He rejected the Bible both as the exclusive and as the infallible revelation. The true, the living revelation, he said, was reason, a revelation that has existed at all times and among all peoples and still exists. To oppose the Bible to reason meant killing the spirit by the letter. For the Holy Spirit of which the Bible speaks is nothing existing outside us; the Holy Spirit is precisely reason. Faith is nothing other than the coming alive of reason in man, and therefore the heathens too could have faith. Through this faith, through reason come alive, man becomes deified and blessed. Heaven is therefore nothing hereafter; it is to be sought in this life, and the calling of the faithful is to establish this heaven, the kingdom of God, here on earth. Just as there is no heavenly beyond, there is also no hell or damnation in the beyond. Likewise there is no devil other than the evil lusts and desires of men. Christ was a man like us, a prophet and teacher, and his Last Supper is a simple memorial meal in which bread and wine are consumed without further mystical addition.

Münzer preached these doctrines mostly veiled under the same Christian phrases under which modern philosophy was compelled for a time to conceal itself. But the arch-heretical fundamental idea shines forth everywhere from his writings, and one sees that he was far less serious about the biblical cloak than many a disciple of Hegel in modern times. And yet three hundred years lie between Münzer and modern philosophy.

His political doctrine closely followed this revolutionary religious mode of viewing things, and reached just as far beyond the immediately existing social and political conditions as his theology did beyond the accepted ideas of his time. Just as Münzer’s religious philosophy bordered on atheism, so his political programme bordered on communism, and more than one modern communist sect still had at its disposal on the eve of the February Revolution no richer theoretical arsenal than that of the “Münzerian” sixteen-century. This programme, less a summing-up of the demands of the plebeians of that time than a brilliant anticipation of the conditions of emancipation of the proletarian elements that were only just beginning to develop among these plebeians—this programme demanded the immediate establishment of the kingdom of God, of the prophesied millennium on earth, by the restoration of the church to its origin and the abolition of all institutions that stood in contradiction to this allegedly primitive Christian, but in reality quite new church. By the kingdom of God, however, Münzer understood nothing other than a state of society in which no class distinctions, no private property and no self-sufficient state power opposing the members of society any longer exist. All existing powers, insofar as they did not comply and join the revolution, were to be overthrown; all labour and all goods were to be held in common, and the most complete equality was to be carried through. A league was to be founded to achieve this, not only throughout Germany but throughout all Christendom. Princes and lords were to be invited to join; where they did not, the league was to overthrow them or kill them at the first opportunity, weapon in hand.

Münzer straightaway set about organising this league. His sermons took on a still more violent, more revolutionary character; alongside his attacks on the priests he thundered with equal passion against the princes, the nobility, the patriciate, depicted in glowing colours the existing oppression and held up against it his phantasy picture of the social-republican equality of the millennium. At the same time he published one revolutionary pamphlet after another and sent out emissaries in all directions, while he himself organised the league in Allstedt and the surrounding area.

The first fruit of this propaganda was the destruction of the Marienkapelle at Melierbach near Allstedt, according to the commandment: “Ye shall break down their altars, dash their pillars to pieces and burn their idols with fire, for ye are an holy people” (Deut. 7:5). The Saxon princes came themselves to Allstedt to quell the unrest and had Münzer summoned to the castle. There he held a sermon such as they were not accustomed to hearing from Luther, whom Münzer called “the softly living flesh at Wittenberg”. He insisted that the godless rulers, especially the priests and monks who treat the Gospel as heresy, must be killed, and appealed to the New Testament for this. The godless had no right to live, save by the grace of the elect. If the princes did not exterminate the godless, God would take the sword from them, for the whole congregation has the power of the sword. The dregs of usury, theft and robbery, he said, are the princes and lords; they take all creatures for their property—the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the earth. And then they even preach to the poor the commandment: ‘Thou shalt not steal’, while they themselves take wherever they find it, flay and fleece the peasant and the artisan; but if one of these transgresses in the very least, he must hang, and to all this Doctor Liar says Amen. “The lords make it so themselves that the poor man becomes their enemy. They do not want to remove the cause of the uprising—how can it end well in the long run? Oh, dear lords, how finely the Lord will smash the old pots with an iron rod! When I say this, I am to be accounted rebellious. So be it!” (see Zimmermann’s Peasant War, II, p. 75.)

Münzer had the sermon printed; his printer at Allstedt was forced as a punishment by Duke John of Saxony to leave the country, and Münzer himself was made subject, for all his writings, to the censorship of the ducal government in Weimar. But he paid no heed to this order. Straight afterwards he had a most inflammatory writing printed in the imperial city of Mühlhausen, in which he called upon the people “to make the hole wide, so that all the world may see and grasp who our great Hanses are, who have so blasphemously turned God into a painted manikin”, and which he concluded with the words: “The whole world must endure a great shock; there will be such a game that the godless shall be hurled from their stools and the lowly be lifted up.” As a motto “Thomas Münzer with the Hammer” placed on the title page: “Take heed, I have placed my words in thy mouth; this day I have set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, that thou mayest root out, break down, scatter and destroy, and build and plant. An iron wall against the kings, princes, priests and against the people is set up. Let them fight, the victory is wondrously doomed to bring down the strong godless tyrants.”

Münzer’s break with Luther and his party had long been in existence. Luther had had to accept himself a number of church reforms which Münzer had introduced without consulting him. He watched Münzer’s activities with the vexed mistrust of the moderate reformer towards the more energetic, further-driving party. Already in the spring of 1524, Münzer had written to Melanchthon, that very model of the philistine, hectic stay-at-home pedant, that he and Luther understood nothing of the movement. They sought to stifle it in biblical literalism, and their whole doctrine was worm-eaten. “Dear brothers, leave off your waiting and hesitating; it is time, the summer is at the door. Do not seek to keep friendship with the godless; they hinder the word from working in its full power. Do not flatter your princes, or you will yourself perish with them. You tender scribes, be not angry; I can do no otherwise.”

Luther challenged Münzer more than once to a disputation; but the latter, ready to take up the fight at any moment before the people, had not the least desire to become involved in a theological squabble before the partisan public of Wittenberg University. He did not wish “to carry the testimony of the Spirit exclusively before the high school”. If Luther were honest, he should use his influence to see that the chicanery against Münzer’s printer and the censorship order were stopped, so that the struggle might be fought out unhindered in the press.

Now, after Münzer’s aforementioned revolutionary pamphlet, Luther came forward publicly as a denouncer against him. In his printed “Letter to the Princes of Saxony concerning the Rebellious Spirit” he declared Münzer to be an instrument of Satan and called upon the princes to intervene and drive the instigators of the uprising out of the country, since they did not content themselves with preaching their wicked doctrines but called for insurrection and violent resistance to the authorities.

On 1 August Münzer had to answer for himself before the princes at the castle in Weimar to the charge of seditious machinations. Highly compromising facts were brought against him; his secret league had been traced, his hand had been discovered in the connections of the mine-workers and peasants. He was threatened with banishment. Hardly back in Allstedt, he learned that Duke George of Saxony was demanding his extradition; league letters in his handwriting had been intercepted, in which he called on George’s subjects to offer armed resistance to the enemies of the Gospel. The council would have delivered him up had he not left the city.

In the meantime the mounting agitation among peasants and plebeians had immensely facilitated Münzer’s propaganda. For this propaganda he had won invaluable agents in the Anabaptists. This sect, without definite positive dogmas, held together only by its common opposition to all ruling classes and by the common symbol of rebaptism, ascetically strict in its conduct of life, untiring, fanatical and fearless in agitation, had grouped itself more and more around Münzer. Excluded by persecution from every fixed dwelling-place, it roved across Germany and everywhere proclaimed the new doctrine in which Münzer had made clear to them their own needs and desires. Countless numbers were tortured, burned or otherwise executed, but the courage and endurance of these emissaries was unshakable, and the success of their activity, amid the rapidly growing excitement of the people, was immeasurable. That is why Münzer, on his flight from Thuringia, found the ground prepared everywhere, wherever he chose to turn.

In Nuremberg, where Münzer first went, a peasant uprising had been nipped in the bud scarcely a month earlier. Münzer agitated here in secret; soon people came forward who defended his boldest theological propositions, concerning the non-binding nature of the Bible and the nullity of the sacraments, declaring Christ to be a mere man and the power of the secular authorities to be ungodly. “There you see Satan going about, the spirit from Allstedt!” cried Luther. Here in Nuremberg Münzer had his reply to Luther printed. He openly accused him of fawning upon the princes and supporting the reactionary party by his half-heartedness. But the people would become free despite this, and Doctor Luther would then fare like a captured fox. — The writing was confiscated by order of the council, and Münzer had to leave Nuremberg.

He now travelled through Swabia to Alsace, Switzerland, and back again to the Upper Black Forest, where the uprising had already broken out some months before, hastened in large part by his Anabaptist emissaries. This propaganda journey of Münzer’s clearly contributed substantially to the organisation of the people’s party, to the clearer formulation of its demands, and to the final general outbreak of the uprising in April 1525. Münzer’s twofold activity—on the one hand among the people, whom he addressed in the language of religious prophetism, the only language they then understood, and on the other hand among the initiated, to whom he could speak openly of his ultimate tendency—emerges here with particular distinctness. If he had earlier in Thuringia gathered around himself a circle of the most resolute men, drawn not only from the people but also from the lower clergy, and placed himself at the head of the secret league, he now became the centre of the entire revolutionary movement of south-west Germany, organised the league from Saxony and Thuringia through Franconia and Swabia to Alsace and the Swiss border, and counted among his pupils and among the heads of the league the south-German agitators such as Hubmaier in Waldshut, Conrad Grebel of Zurich, Hans Rebmann of Griessen, Schappeler of Memmingen, Jakob Wehe of Leipheim, Doctor Mantel in Stuttgart—mostly revolutionary priests. He himself generally stayed in Griessen on the Schaffhausen border and from there roved through the Hegau, the Klettgau, etc. The bloody persecutions which the alarmed princes and lords everywhere undertook against this new, plebeian heresy did not a little to fan the rebellious spirit and draw the league more tightly together. Thus Münzer agitated for some five months in Upper Germany, and returned to Thuringia around the time when the outbreak of the conspiracy was approaching, where he intended to lead the uprising in person and where we shall find him again.

We shall see how faithfully the character and the bearing of the two party leaders reflect the attitude of their respective parties; how the indecisiveness, the fear of the movement itself as it became serious, the craven servility towards princes on Luther’s part corresponded exactly to the vacillating, ambiguous policy of the burghers, and how the revolutionary energy and determination of Münzer reproduced themselves in the most developed fraction of the plebeians and peasants. The difference is only that while Luther contented himself with expressing the ideas and wishes of the majority of his class and thereby acquiring a very cheap popularity among them, Münzer, on the contrary, far transcended the immediate ideas and aspirations of the plebeians and peasants and formed a party only from the elite of the revolutionary elements he found, a party, however, which, in so far as it stood on the height of his ideas and shared his energy, always remained only a small minority of the insurgent mass.

II.

About fifty years after the suppression of the Hussite movement, the first symptoms of the germinating revolutionary spirit showed themselves among the German peasants.*)

In the bishopric of Würzburg, a land already much impoverished by the Hussite wars, “by bad government, by manifold taxes, dues, feuds, enmities, war, fire, murder, imprisonment and the like,” and continually and shamelessly plundered by bishops, priests and nobility, the first peasant conspiracy arose in 1476. A young shepherd and musician, Hans Böheim of Niklashausen, also called the Drummer and Pfeiferhänslein, suddenly appeared as a prophet in the Tauber valley. He related that the Virgin Mary had appeared to him; she had commanded him to burn his drum, no longer to serve the dance and sinful lusts, but to exhort the people to repentance. Everyone, therefore, should renounce his sins and the vain pleasures of this world, put aside all adornment and finery, and make a pilgrimage to the Mother of God of Niklashausen to obtain forgiveness of his sins.

We already find here, in the first precursor of the movement, that asceticism which we encounter in all mediaeval uprisings with a religious colouring and, in modern times, at the beginning of every proletarian movement. This ascetic strictness of morals, this demand for the renunciation of all enjoyments and pleasures of life, sets forth, on the one hand, as against the ruling classes, the principle of Spartan equality, and is, on the other hand, a necessary transitional stage without which the lowest stratum of society can never set itself in motion. In order to develop its revolutionary energy, to become clear about its own hostile position towards all the other elements of society, to concentrate itself as a class, it must begin by stripping off everything that might still reconcile it with the existing social order, must renounce the few enjoyments that still momentarily make its oppressed existence bearable and that even the harshest pressure cannot tear from it. This plebeian and proletarian asceticism differs entirely, both in its wildly fanatical form and in its content, from the bourgeois asceticism preached by bourgeois Lutheran morality and by the English Puritans (in distinction from the Independents and more advanced sects), the whole secret of which is bourgeois thrift. It goes without saying, moreover, that this plebeian-proletarian asceticism loses its revolutionary character to the same extent that, on the one hand, the development of modern productive forces infinitely multiplies the material of enjoyment and thereby renders Spartan equality superfluous, and, on the other, the life situation of the proletariat, and thus the proletariat itself, becomes increasingly revolutionary. It then gradually disappears from the mass, and among the sectarians who cling to it, it either directly dissipates into bourgeois miserliness or into a high-flown knight-errantry of virtue, which in practice likewise amounts to a petty-bourgeois or guild-artisan-style skinflint economy. To the mass of the proletariat renunciation need be preached the less, as they have almost nothing left that they could still renounce.

The penitential sermon of Pfeiferhänslein met with great resonance; all prophets of uprising began with it, and, in fact, only a violent exertion, a sudden renunciation of the whole customary mode of existence could set in motion this dispersed, thinly sown peasant tribe, grown up in blind submission. The pilgrimages to Niklashausen began and rapidly increased; and the more massively the people streamed in, the more openly did the young rebel proclaim his plans. The Mother of God of Niklashausen, he preached, had announced to him that henceforth there should be no emperor, nor prince, nor pope, nor any other spiritual or secular authority; every man should be the brother of the other, earn his bread with the work of his hands, and no one should have more than another. All interest payments, ground-rents, corvées, tolls, taxes, and other dues and services should be abolished forever, and woods, water, and pasture should be everywhere free.

The people received this new gospel with joy. The fame of the prophet, “Our Lady’s Messenger”, spread quickly afar; from the Odenwald, from the Main, Kocher and Jagst, yes, from Bavaria, Swabia and the Rhine, troops of pilgrims flocked to him. Stories were told of miracles he was said to have performed; people fell on their knees before him and worshipped him as a saint; they snatched the tufts from his hood as though they were relics and amulets. In vain did the priests speak out against him, depicting his visions as delusions of the devil, his miracles as infernal frauds. The mass of believers swelled by leaps and bounds, the revolutionary sect began to form, and the Sunday sermons of the rebellious shepherd drew gatherings of 40,000 and more people to Niklashausen.

For several months Pfeiferhänslein preached before the masses. But he did not intend to stop at preaching. He stood in secret communication with the priest of Niklashausen and with two knights, Kunz von Thunfeld and his son, who adhered to the new doctrine and were destined to become the military leaders of the planned uprising. Finally, on the Sunday before St. Kilian’s Day, when his power seemed great enough, he gave the signal. “And now,” he concluded his sermon, “go home and ponder well what the most holy Mother of God has proclaimed to you; and on the coming Saturday leave women and children and the aged at home, but you, you men, come back here to Niklashausen on St. Margaret’s Day, that is the coming Saturday; and bring with you your brothers and friends, as many as they may be. But come not with the pilgrim’s staff, but arrayed with arms and weapons, in one hand the pilgrim’s candle, in the other sword and spear or halberd; and the holy Virgin will then proclaim to you what her will is, which you shall do.”

But before the peasants arrived in masses, the bishop’s horsemen had fetched the prophet of sedition by night and brought him to the castle of Würzburg. On the appointed day some 34,000 armed peasants came, but this news had a disheartening effect upon them. The greatest part dispersed; the more initiated held together, about 16,000, and marched with them to the castle under the leadership of Kunz von Thunfeld and Michael, his son. The bishop induced them to withdraw again by promises; but scarcely had they begun to scatter when they were set upon by the bishop’s horsemen and several were made prisoners. Two were beheaded, Pfeiferhänslein himself, however, was burnt. Kunz von Thunfeld fled and was only readmitted upon surrender of all his estates to the foundation. The pilgrimages to Niklashausen continued for some time afterwards, but were finally suppressed as well.

After this first attempt, Germany remained quiet again for a longer period. Only towards the end of the nineties did new uprisings and conspiracies of the peasants begin.

*) In the chronological data we follow the accounts of Zimmermann, upon which, given the lack of adequate sources abroad, we are dependent and which fully suffice for the purpose of this article.

We pass over the Dutch peasant uprising of 1491 and ’92, which was not suppressed until Duke Albert of Saxony defeated it in the battle of Heemskerk, the simultaneous uprising of the peasants of the Abbey of Kempten in Upper Swabia, and the Frisian uprising under Syaard Aylva around 1497, which was likewise suppressed by Albert of Saxony. These uprisings lie partly too far removed from the scene of the actual Peasant War, and are partly struggles of hitherto free peasants against the attempt to impose feudalism upon them. We proceed at once to the two great conspiracies that prepared the Peasant War: the Bundschuh and the Poor Conrad.

The same dearth that had provoked the uprising of the peasants in the Netherlands brought about, in Alsace in 1493, a secret league of peasants and plebeians, in which people from the merely middle-class opposition party also took part, and with which even a section of the lower nobility more or less sympathised. The seat of the league was the region of Schlettstadt, Sulz, Dambach, Stotzheim, Scherweiler, etc., etc. The conspirators demanded the plundering and extermination of the Jews, whose usury even then, as much as now, sucked the Alsatian peasants dry, the introduction of a jubilee year by which all debts should become statute-barred, the abolition of the toll, excise and other burdens, the abolition of the ecclesiastical court and the Rottweil (Imperial) court, the right to approve taxes, the restriction of the clergy to one benefice of 50–60 gulden each, the abolition of auricular confession, and own, self-elected courts for each commune.

The plan of the conspirators was, as soon as they were strong enough, to take the fortified town of Schlettstadt by surprise, to seize the monastery and town treasuries, and from there to raise the whole of Alsace in insurrection. The league’s banner, which was to be unfurled at the moment of the uprising, featured a peasant’s shoe with long laces, the so-called Bundschuh, which henceforth gave the peasant conspiracies of the next 20 years their symbol and name.

The conspirators used to hold their meetings at night on the lonely Hungerberg. Admission to the league was connected with the most mysterious ceremonies and the severest threats of punishment against traitors. Nevertheless, the affair was discovered just as the blow against Schlettstadt was to be struck, around Holy Week 1493. The authorities intervened swiftly; many of the conspirators were arrested and tortured, and some were quartered or beheaded, others maimed on hands and fingers and banished. A large number fled to Switzerland.

But this first break-up by no means destroyed the Bundschuh. On the contrary, it continued to exist in secret, and the many refugees scattered over Switzerland and Southern Germany became just as many emissaries, who, finding everywhere the same oppression and the same inclination for revolt, spread the Bundschuh throughout the whole of present-day Baden. The tenacity and perseverance with which the Upper German peasants, from 1493 onwards, conspired for thirty years, with which they overcame all the obstacles raised to a larger, centralised association by their scattered rural way of life, and after countless dispersals, defeats, executions of leaders, ever again conspired anew, until finally the opportunity for a mass uprising came — this stubbornness is truly admirable.

In 1502, signs of a secret movement among the peasants appeared in the Bishopric of Speyer, which then also included the area of Bruchsal. The Bundschuh had really reorganised itself here with considerable success. Some 7,000 men belonged to the association, whose centre was at Untergrombach, between Bruchsal and Weingarten, and whose ramifications stretched down the Rhine as far as the Main, and up into the Margraviate of Baden. Their articles contained the following: No rent, tithe, tax, or toll should be paid any longer to princes, nobility, and priests; serfdom should be abolished; monasteries and other ecclesiastical properties should be confiscated and distributed among the people, and no lord other than the Emperor should be recognised.

We find here for the first time among the peasants the two demands expressed: the secularisation of ecclesiastical property for the benefit of the people, and the one and indivisible German monarchy; two demands which from now on regularly reappear among the more developed fraction of the peasants and plebeians, until Thomas Münzer turns the division of ecclesiastical property into its confiscation in favour of the community of goods, and the one German Empire into the one and indivisible German republic.

The renewed Bundschuh had, like the old one, its secret meeting place, its oath of silence, its admission ceremonies, and its Bundschuh banner with the inscription: ‘Nothing but the justice of God!’ The plan of action was similar to that of the Alsatians; Bruchsal, where the majority of the inhabitants belonged to the league, was to be taken by surprise, a league army organised there and sent out as a moving rallying centre into the surrounding principalities.

The plan was betrayed by a priest to whom one of the conspirators had confessed it. The governments at once took counter measures. How far the league was ramified is shown by the terror that seized the various Alsatian Imperial Estates and the Swabian League. Troops were concentrated and mass arrests carried out. Emperor Maximilian, the ‘last knight’, issued the most bloodthirsty penal decrees against the unheard-of undertaking of the peasants. Here and there, gatherings and armed resistance took place; but the isolated peasant bands did not hold out long. Some of the conspirators were executed, many fled; but the secret was so well kept that most of them, even the leaders, were able to remain entirely undisturbed either in their own localities or in the territories of neighbouring lords.

After this new defeat, a longer apparent calm set in again in the class struggles. But work continued in secret. In Swabia, the Poor Conrad took shape, apparently in connection with the dispersed members of the Bundschuh, as early as the first years of the sixteenth century; in the Black Forest, the Bundschuh persisted in isolated smaller circles, until after ten years an energetic peasant chief succeeded in knotting the individual threads together again into a great conspiracy. Both conspiracies came to light shortly after one another, and fall within the agitated years 1513–15, in which, simultaneously, the Swiss, Hungarian and Slovenian peasants staged a series of major insurrections.

The restorer of the Upper Rhenish Bundschuh was Joß Fritz of Untergrombach, a fugitive from the conspiracy of 1502, a former soldier and an outstanding character in every respect. Since his flight, he had stayed in various places between Lake Constance and the Black Forest and had eventually settled down in Lehen near Freiburg im Breisgau, where he had even become a bailiff responsible for the fields. How from there he reorganised the association, how skilfully he knew how to draw in the most diverse people, the investigation records contain the most interesting details. The diplomatic talent and inexhaustible perseverance of this model conspirator succeeded in involving an extraordinary number of people of the most varied classes in the league: knights, priests, burghers, plebeians and peasants; and it seems quite certain that he even organised several, more or less sharply distinguished, degrees of conspiracy. All usable elements were employed with the greatest circumspection and skill. In addition to the initiated emissaries who roamed the country in the most varied disguises, vagrants and beggars were used for the subordinate missions. Joß stood in direct communication with the beggar kings and, through them, kept the whole numerous vagabond population under his hand. These beggar kings play a significant role in his conspiracy. They were highly original figures; one roamed about with a girl, for whose allegedly sore feet he begged; he wore more than eight signs on his hat – the fourteen auxiliary saints, St. Ottilia, Our Lady, etc. – besides a long red beard and a large knotted stick with a dagger and spike; another, who begged on behalf of St. Valentine, hawked spices and wormseed, wore a long iron-grey coat, a red biretta with the infant Jesus of Trent on it, a rapier at his side and many knives together with a dagger in his belt; others had artificially open wounds and similarly adventurous costumes. There were at least ten of them; they were, for a reward of 2,000 gulden, simultaneously to set fires in Alsace, in the Margraviate of Baden and in the Breisgau, and, on the day of the Zabern fair, to place themselves with at least 2,000 of their people at Rosen under the command of Georg Schneider, a former lansquenet captain, to capture the town. Among the actual league members, a courier service was established from station to station, and Joß Fritz and his chief emissary, Stoffel of Freiburg, rode constantly from place to place and held nightly reviews of the newly recruited. The investigation records provide ample testimony to the spread of the league on the Upper Rhine and in the Black Forest; they contain countless names of members from the most diverse places of that region, together with their descriptions. The majority are journeymen artisans, then peasants and innkeepers, some nobles, priests (even the one from Lehen itself), and unemployed lansquenets. Already from this composition one can see the far more developed character that the Bundschuh had assumed under Joß Fritz; the plebeian element of the towns was beginning to assert itself more and more. The ramifications of the conspiracy extended over the whole of Alsace, present-day Baden, as far as Württemberg and the Main. At times, larger assemblies were held on remote mountains, on the Kniebis, etc., etc., and league affairs were discussed.

The meetings of the chiefs, which were frequently attended by the members of the locality as well as delegates from the more distant places, took place on the Hartmatte near Lehen, and here the fourteen league articles were adopted. No lord but the Emperor and (according to some) the Pope; abolition of the Rottweil court, and restriction of the ecclesiastical court to spiritual matters; abolition of all interest payments that had been paid so long that they equalled the capital; five per cent interest as the highest permissible rate; freedom of hunting, fishing, pasture and timber; restriction of the clergy to one benefice each; confiscation of ecclesiastical property and monastery treasures for the league’s war chest; abolition of all unfair taxes and tolls; perpetual peace in the whole of Christendom; vigorous action against all opponents of the league; a league tax; capture of a fortified town – Freiburg – to serve as the league’s centre; opening of negotiations with the Emperor, as soon as the league’s troops were assembled, and with Switzerland, in case the Emperor refused – these are the points on which agreement was reached. One sees from them how, on the one hand, the demands of the peasants and plebeians were assuming an ever more definite and firmer shape, and, on the other, concessions had to be made to the moderate and timid in the same measure.

By the autumn of 1513 the blow was to be struck. All that was still wanting was the confederate banner, and to have it painted Joß Fritz went to Heilbronn. Besides all kinds of emblems and pictures, it bore the Bundschuh and the inscription: Lord, uphold thy divine justice. But while he was away, a premature attempt was made to take Freiburg by surprise and was discovered before its time; some indiscretions in the propaganda helped the Freiburg council and the Margrave of Baden on to the right track, and the treachery of two conspirators completed the series of revelations. The Margrave, the Freiburg council and the imperial government at Ensisheim immediately dispatched their myrmidons and soldiers; a number of Bundschuh members were arrested, tortured and executed; but this time too the majority escaped, especially Joß Fritz. The Swiss governments this time persecuted the fugitives with great vehemence and even executed several themselves; but they could no more than their neighbours prevent the greater part of the fugitives from remaining continually in the vicinity of their former places of residence and even gradually returning. The Alsatian government at Ensisheim raged most of all; by its command very many were beheaded, broken on the wheel and quartered. Joß Fritz himself stayed mainly on the Swiss bank of the Rhine, but often crossed over into the Black Forest without anyone ever being able to lay hands on him.

Why the Swiss this time allied themselves with the neighbouring governments against the Bundschuh members is shown by the peasant uprising which broke out the following year, 1514, in Bern, Solothurn and Lucerne and resulted in a purge of the aristocratic governments and the patriciate generally. The peasants also secured a number of privileges for themselves. That these local Swiss uprisings succeeded was simply due to the fact that centralisation was far less advanced in Switzerland than in Germany. The peasants everywhere defeated their local lords in 1525 as well, but they succumbed to the organised military forces of the princes, and these precisely did not exist in Switzerland.

Simultaneously with the Bundschuh in Baden, and evidently in direct connection with it, a second conspiracy had formed in Württemberg. According to documents, it had existed since 1503, and since the breaking up of the Untergrombacher had made the name Bundschuh too dangerous, it adopted that of Poor Conrad. Its main seat was the Remsthal, below the Hohenstaufen mountain. Its existence had long ceased to be a secret, at least among the people. The shameless oppression of Duke Ulrich’s government and a series of famine years, which contributed powerfully to the outbreak of the movements of 1513 and ’14, had swelled the number of the confederates; the newly imposed taxes on wine, meat and bread, as well as a capital tax of one penny yearly on every gulden, provoked the outbreak. The town of Schorndorf, where the heads of the plot met in the house of the cutler Kaspar Pregizer, was to be taken first. In the spring of 1514 the uprising broke out. 3,000, according to others 5,000, peasants moved against the town, but were induced to withdraw by the amicable promises of the ducal officials. Duke Ulrich hurried up with eighty horsemen, after having promised the abolition of the new taxes, and found everything quiet in consequence of this promise. He promised to convene a diet to examine all grievances there. But the leaders of the league knew very well that Ulrich intended nothing more than to keep the people quiet until he had recruited and concentrated sufficient troops to break his word and forcibly collect the taxes. They therefore sent out from Kaspar Pregizer’s house, “Poor Conrad’s chancery”, invitations to a league congress, which emissaries in all directions supported. The success of the first rising in the Remsthal had boosted the movement among the people everywhere; the messages and emissaries found favourable ground everywhere, and thus the congress held on 28 May at Untertürkheim was numerously attended by delegates from all parts of Württemberg. It was resolved to continue agitating rapidly and to strike at the first opportunity in the Remsthal in order to spread the uprising from there. While Bantelhans of Dettingen, a former soldier, and Singerhans of Würtingen, a respected peasant, brought the Swabian Alb into the league, the uprising was already breaking out on all sides. Singerhans was indeed surprised and captured, but the towns of Backnang, Winnenden, Markgröningen fell into the hands of the peasants allied with the plebeians, and the whole country from Weinsberg to Blaubeuren and from there to the Baden frontier was in open insurrection. Ulrich had to give way.

But while he summoned the diet for 25 June, he at the same time wrote to the neighbouring princes and free cities for help against the uprising, which endangered all princes, authorities and the honourables in the empire and “had a strange Bundschuh-like appearance”.

Meanwhile the diet, i.e. the deputies of the towns and many delegates of the peasants, who likewise demanded seats at the diet, assembled already on 18 June in Stuttgart. The prelates were not yet there, the knights were not invited at all. The Stuttgart civic opposition, as well as two near, threatening peasant bands at Leonberg and in the Remsthal, supported the peasants’ demands. Their delegates were admitted and it was resolved to dismiss and punish the three hated councillors of the duke, Lamparter, Thumb and Lorcher, to add a council of four knights, four citizens and four peasants to the duke, to grant him a fixed civil list, and to confiscate the monasteries and foundations for the benefit of the state treasury.

Duke Ulrich countered these revolutionary resolutions with a coup d’état. He rode on 21 June with his knights and councillors to Tübingen, whither the prelates followed him, ordered the citizenry likewise to come there, which they did, and here continued the diet without the peasants. Here the citizens, placed under military terrorism, betrayed their allies, the peasants. On 8 July the Treaty of Tübingen was concluded, which burdened the country with almost a million of ducal debts, imposed on the duke a few restrictions that he never observed, and fobbed off the peasants with a few thin general phrases and a very positive penal law against rebellion and leagues. Of representation of the peasants at the diet there was of course no further question. The country folk cried treachery; but since the duke, after the assumption of his debts by the estates, again had credit, he soon assembled troops, and his neighbours, especially the Elector of the Palatinate, also sent auxiliary troops.

Thus by the end of July the Treaty of Tübingen was accepted by the whole country and the new homage rendered. Only in the Remsthal did Poor Conrad offer resistance; the duke, who again rode there himself, was almost murdered, and a peasant camp was formed on the Kappelberg. But as the matter dragged on, most of the insurgents dispersed again for lack of provisions, and the remainder likewise went home as a result of an ambiguous treaty with some diet deputies.

Ulrich, whose army had meanwhile been reinforced by the readily provided companies of the towns, which now, having obtained their demands, turned fanatically against the peasants—Ulrich now, despite the treaty, fell upon the Remsthal, whose towns and villages were plundered. 1,600 peasants were arrested, of whom 16 were immediately beheaded, the rest mostly sentenced to heavy fines for the benefit of Ulrich’s coffers. Many remained long in prison. Severe penal laws were enacted against the renewal of the league, against all assemblies of the peasants, and the Swabian nobility concluded a special league for the suppression of all attempts at insurrection. — The chief leaders of Poor Conrad had, however, fortunately escaped to Switzerland, and from there returned home after some years, mostly one by one.

Simultaneously with the Württemberg movement, symptoms of new Bundschuh agitations appeared in the Breisgau and the Margraviate of Baden. Near Bühl an attempt at insurrection was made in June, but it was immediately broken up by Margrave Philipp, and the leader Gugel-Bastian was arrested in Freiburg and beheaded.

In the same year 1514, likewise in the spring, a general peasant war broke out in Hungary. A crusade was preached against the Turks, and as usual freedom was promised to the serfs and bondmen who joined. Some 60,000 assembled and were placed under the command of George Dosa, a Szekler who had already distinguished himself in earlier Turkish wars and had acquired nobility. But the Hungarian knights and magnates viewed this crusade with reluctance, as it threatened to deprive them of their property, their bondsmen. They hurried after the individual peasant bands and fetched back their serfs by force and with ill-treatment. When this became known in the crusading army, the fury of the oppressed peasants broke loose. Two of the most zealous crusade preachers, Laurentius and Barnabas, further inflamed the hatred against the nobility in the army through their revolutionary speeches. Dosa himself shared his troops’ wrath against the treacherous nobility; the crusading army became a revolutionary army, and he placed himself at the head of this new movement.

He encamped with his peasants on the Rakos field near Pesth. Hostilities were opened by disputes with the people of the nobility party in the surrounding villages and the suburbs of Pesth; skirmishes soon followed, finally a Sicilian Vespers for all nobles who fell into the peasants’ hands, and the burning down of all surrounding castles. The court threatened, but in vain. When the first popular justice had been executed on the nobility beneath the walls of the capital, Dosa proceeded to further operations. He divided his army into five columns. Two were sent to the mountains of Upper Hungary to raise the whole district in insurrection and to extirpate the nobility. The third, under Ambros Szaleres, a citizen of Pesth, remained on the Rakos to observe the capital; the fourth and fifth were led by Dosa and his brother Gregor against Szegedin.

Meanwhile the nobility assembled in Pesth and called upon the Voivode of Transylvania, Johann Zapolya, for help. The nobility, together with the citizens of Budapesth, defeated and annihilated the corps encamped on the Rakos, after Szaleres had gone over to the enemy with the bourgeois elements of the peasant army. A number of prisoners were executed in the most cruel manner, the rest sent home with their noses and ears cut off.

Dosa failed before Szegedin and moved against Csanad, which he captured, after defeating a noble army under Batory Istvan and Bishop Csakyi, and exacted bloody reprisals for the cruelties on the prisoners, among whom were the bishop and the royal treasurer Teleki.

had taken up position on the Rákos. In Csanád he proclaimed the republic, the abolition of the nobility, universal equality and the sovereignty of the people, and then marched against Temesvár, into which Báthory had thrown himself. But while he besieged this fortress for two months and was reinforced by a new army under Anton Hosza, the two Upper Hungarian army bands succumbed in several battles before the nobility, and John Zápolya advanced against him with the Transylvanian army. The peasants were surprised by Zápolya and dispersed, Dózsa himself captured, roasted on a red-hot throne and eaten alive by his own men, who were granted their lives only on this condition. The scattered peasants, rallied again by Laurentius and Hosza, were once more defeated, and all who fell into the hands of the enemy were impaled or hanged. Thousands of peasant corpses hung along the roads or at the entrances of burnt-down villages. It is said that some 60,000 fell in battle or were massacred. But the nobility took care, at the next diet, to have the bondage of the peasants once more recognised as the law of the land.

The peasant uprising in the “Windic March”, i.e., in Carinthia, Carniola and Styria, which broke out at the same time, was based on a Bundschuh-like conspiracy that had already formed in 1503 in this region, exploited by the nobility and imperial officials, devastated by Turkish incursions and plagued by famine, and had provoked a rising. The Slovene peasants of this region, as well as the German ones, already raised in 1513 the banner of *stara prawa*, the old rights; and if in that year they again allowed themselves to be appeased, if in 1514, when they gathered together still more massively, they were induced to disperse by Emperor Maximilian’s express promise to restore the old rights, then in the spring of 1515 the war of vengeance of the constantly deceived people broke out all the more fiercely. As in Hungary, castles and monasteries were everywhere destroyed, and captured noblemen were tried by peasant juries and beheaded. In Styria and Carinthia the imperial captain Dietrichstein succeeded in quickly suppressing the rising; in Carniola it was only suppressed by the surprise attack on Rain (autumn 1516) and by the countless Austrian atrocities that followed, worthy of the infamies of the Hungarian nobility.

It is comprehensible that after a series of such decisive defeats and after these mass atrocities of the nobility, the peasants in Germany remained quiet for a longer period. And yet neither the conspiracies nor the local risings ceased entirely. As early as 1516 most of the fugitives of the Bundschuh and Poor Conrad returned to Swabia and the Upper Rhine, and in 1517 the Bundschuh in the Black Forest was again in full swing. Joß Fritz himself, who still carried the old Bundschuh banner of 1513 concealed on his breast, once more roamed the Black Forest and developed great activity. The conspiracy organised itself anew. As four years earlier, meetings were again announced on the Kniebis. But the secret was not kept, the governments learned of the matter and intervened. Several were captured and executed; the most active and most intelligent members had to flee, among them Joß Fritz, who again could not be laid hands on, but who appears to have died soon afterwards in Switzerland, as from then on he is nowhere mentioned again.

IV.

At the same time that the fourth Bundschuh conspiracy was suppressed in the Black Forest, Luther gave the signal in Wittenberg for the movement that was to sweep all the estates into the vortex and shake the whole Empire. The theses of the Thuringian Augustinian struck like a flash of lightning into a powder keg. The manifold, criss-crossing aspirations of knights and burghers, peasants and plebeians, princes craving sovereignty and the lower clergy, mysticising, secret sects and the most learned, satirically burlesque, literary opposition found in them a common, general expression around which they grouped themselves with astonishing swiftness. This overnight alliance of all the opposition elements, short-lived as it was, suddenly revealed the colossal power of the movement and drove it all the more rapidly forward.

But precisely this rapid development of the movement was bound very soon to develop the seeds of dissension that lay within it, was bound at least to tear apart again those constituents of the aroused mass that were directly opposed to one another by their entire position in life and to bring them back into their normal, hostile stance. This polarisation of the motley oppositional mass around two centres of attraction emerged already in the first years of the Reformation; nobility and burghers grouped themselves unconditionally around Luther, while peasants and plebeians, without yet seeing in Luther a direct enemy, formed a separate revolutionary opposition party as before. Only that the movement was now much more general, much more deeply gripping than before Luther, and that thereby the necessity of a sharply pronounced antagonism, of the direct struggle of the two parties against each other, was given. This direct antagonism soon set in: Luther and Münzer fought each other in the press and from the pulpit, just as the armies of the princes, knights and towns, consisting for the most part of forces that were Lutheran or at least inclined towards Lutheranism, dispersed the bands of peasants and plebeians.

How far the interests and needs of the different elements that the Reformation had embraced diverged was shown even before the Peasant War by the attempt of the nobility to push through their demands against the princes and priests.

We have already seen above what position the German nobility occupied at the beginning of the sixteenth century. It was on the point of losing its independence to the ever more powerful secular and ecclesiastical princes. At the same time it saw, in the same measure as it declined, the imperial authority also declining and the Empire dissolving into a number of sovereign principalities. For the nobility, its own downfall was bound to coincide with the downfall of the Germans as a nation. Added to this was the fact that the nobility, especially the immediate imperial nobility, was precisely that estate which, by its military calling as well as by its position vis-à-vis the princes, represented the Empire and the imperial authority in particular. It was the most national estate, and the more powerful the imperial authority, the weaker and fewer the princes, the more united Germany, the more powerful it was. Hence the universal indignation of the knighthood at the pitiable political condition of Germany, at the impotence of the Empire abroad, which grew to the same degree as the imperial house, through inheritance, annexed one province after another to the Empire; at the intrigues of foreign powers within Germany and the plots of German princes with foreign powers against the imperial authority. The demands of the nobility therefore had to be summed up above all in the demand for a reform of the Empire, at the expense of the princes and the higher clergy. The formulation of this programme was undertaken by Ulrich von Hutten, the theoretical representative of the German nobility, together with Franz von Sickingen, its military and political representative.

Hutten formulated the imperial reform he demanded on behalf of the nobility very definitely and in a very radical manner. It was a question of nothing less than the elimination of all the princes, the secularisation of all ecclesiastical principalities and estates, and the establishment of a nobility-democracy with a monarchical summit, roughly as it had existed in the best days of the erstwhile Polish republic. By establishing the rule of the nobility, the predominantly military class, by removing the princes, the bearers of fragmentation, by destroying the power of the priests and by tearing Germany away from the ecclesiastical rule of Rome, Hutten and Sickingen believed they would once more make the Empire united, free and powerful.

A nobility-democracy based on serfdom, as it existed in Poland, and in a somewhat modified form in the first centuries of the empires conquered by the German tribes, is one of the coarsest forms of society, and it develops quite normally further into the fully-fledged feudal hierarchy, which is already a considerably higher stage. This pure nobility-democracy was therefore impossible in Germany in the sixteenth century. It was already impossible because significant and powerful towns existed in Germany at all. On the other hand, however, that alliance of the lower nobility and the towns was also impossible which in England brought about the transformation of the feudal-estate monarchy into the bourgeois-constitutional one. In Germany the old nobility had maintained itself; in England it was exterminated by the Wars of the Roses down to 28 families, and was replaced by a new nobility of bourgeois origin and with bourgeois tendencies. In Germany serfdom continued and the nobility had feudal sources of income; in England it was almost entirely abolished and the nobility was simply bourgeois landed proprietors with the bourgeois source of income of ground-rent. Finally, the centralisation of the absolute monarchy, which in France had existed since Louis XI. through the antagonism of nobility and bourgeoisie and developed ever further, was impossible in Germany simply because the conditions for national centralisation were not present here at all, or only in an undeveloped form.

The more Hutten engaged in the practical implementation of his ideal under these conditions, the more concessions he had to make, and the more indefinite the outlines of his imperial reform were bound to become. The nobility alone was not powerful enough to carry through the enterprise; its growing weakness vis-à-vis the princes proved that. Allies had to be found, and the only possible ones were the towns, the peasants, and the influential theoreticians of the Reformation movement. But the towns knew the nobility well enough not to trust it, and rejected any alliance with it. The peasants rightly saw in the nobility, which exploited and mistreated them, their bitterest enemy. And the theoreticians sided either with the burghers, the princes, or the peasants.

What positive thing, moreover, could the nobility promise the burghers and peasants from an imperial reform whose main purpose was always the elevation of the nobility? Under these circumstances Hutten had no choice but to say little or nothing in his propaganda writings about the future mutual position of the nobility, the towns and the peasants, to push all the evil onto the princes and priests and the dependence on Rome, and to demonstrate to the burghers that their interest commanded them, in the impending struggle between princes and nobility, at least to remain neutral. There is nowhere any mention in Hutten of the abolition of serfdom and of the burdens that the peasant owed to the nobility.

The position 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 since 1830. As in the modern Polish uprisings, in Germany at that time the movement could only be carried through by an alliance of all opposition parties, and especially of the nobility and the peasants. But precisely this alliance was impossible in both cases. Neither was the nobility placed under the necessity of giving up its political privileges and its feudal rights in relation to the peasants, nor could the revolutionary peasants enter into an alliance with the nobility on the basis of vague and indefinite prospects—with the very estate that oppressed them most severely. As in Poland in 1830, so in Germany in 1522 the nobility could no longer win the peasants over. Only the complete abolition of serfdom and bondage, the surrender of all noble privileges could have united the rural population with the nobility; but the nobility, like every privileged estate, had not the slightest desire voluntarily to give up its prerogatives, its whole exceptional position, and the greater part of its sources of income.

The nobility, therefore, when it finally came to a fight, stood alone against the princes. That the princes, who had been steadily gaining ground at the nobility’s expense for two centuries, must this time as well crush it with little effort was to be foreseen.

The course of the struggle itself is known. Hutten and Sickingen, who was already recognised as the political-military chief of the central German nobility, brought about, in 1522 at Landau, a League of the Rhenish, Swabian and Franconian nobility for six years, ostensibly for self-defence; Sickingen assembled an army, partly from his own means, partly in conjunction with the neighbouring knights, organised recruiting and reinforcements in Franconia, on the Lower Rhine, in the Netherlands and Westphalia, and opened hostilities in September 1522 with a declaration of feud against the Elector Archbishop of Trier. But while he lay before Trier, his reinforcements were cut off by the swift intervention of the princes; the Landgrave of Hesse and the Elector Palatine came to the aid of the Trier archbishop, and Sickingen was forced to throw himself into his

ii

The Peasant War in Germany. V

castle of Landstuhl. Despite all the efforts of Hutten and his other friends, the allied nobility, intimidated by the concentrated and rapid action of the princes, left him here in the lurch; he himself was mortally wounded, then surrendered Landstuhl, and died soon afterwards. Hutten had to flee to Switzerland and died a few months later on the island of Ufnau in Lake Zurich.

With this defeat and the death of the two leaders, the power of the nobility as a body independent of the princes was broken. From now on, the nobility appears only in the service and under the direction of the princes. The Peasant War, which broke out soon afterwards, forced it even more to place itself directly or indirectly under the protection of the princes, and proved at the same time that the German nobility preferred to go on exploiting the peasants under princely sovereignty rather than to overthrow the princes and priests by an open alliance with the emancipated peasants.

V.

From the moment when Luther's declaration of war against the Catholic hierarchy set all the opposition elements of Germany in motion, not a year passed in which the peasants did not likewise come forward with their demands. Between 1518 and 1523, one local peasant uprising followed another in the Black Forest and in Upper Swabia. From the spring of 1524 onwards, these uprisings assume a systematic character. In April of that year, the peasants of Marchthal Abbey refused socage services and dues; in May, the St. Blasien peasants refused serfdom fees; in June, the peasants of Steinheim near Memmingen declared that they would pay neither tithes nor other dues; in July and August the Thurgau peasants rose up, and were partly brought back to

Friedrich Engels

peace by the mediation of the Zurich authorities, partly by the brutality of the Confederacy, which had several of them executed. Finally, a more decisive uprising occurred in the Landgraviate of Stühlingen, which may be regarded as the immediate beginning of the Peasant War.

The Stühlingen peasants suddenly refused dues to the Landgrave, formed themselves into strong bands, and marched on 24 August 1524 to Waldshut under their leader Hans Müller of Bulgenbach. Here they founded, in common with the citizens, an evangelical brotherhood. The citizens joined the alliance all the more readily since they were simultaneously in conflict with the government of Further Austria on account of religious persecutions against Balthasar Hubmaier, their preacher, a friend and pupil of Thomas Münzer. A confederation tax of three kreuzers a week—an enormous sum for the monetary value of the time—was levied; emissaries were sent into Alsace, the Moselle region, the whole of the Upper Rhine and Franconia, to bring the peasants everywhere into the league, and the aim of the league was proclaimed to be the abolition of feudal rule, the destruction of all castles and monasteries, and the removal of all lords except the Emperor. The league banner was the German tricolour.

The uprising rapidly gained ground throughout the whole of what is now the Baden Oberland. A panic terror seized the Upper Swabian nobility, whose armed forces were almost all occupied in Italy, in the war against Francis I of France. There was nothing left for it but to spin out the affair through negotiations and meanwhile raise money and enlist troops, until it should be strong enough to chastise the peasants for their insolence with “burning and scorching, plundering and murdering”. From this point on there began that systematic treachery, that consistent breach of faith and perfidy, by which the nobility and the princes distinguished themselves throughout the entire Peasant War and which, vis-à-vis the decentralised peasants, who were difficult to organise, constituted their strongest weapon. The Swabian League, which embraced the princes, the nobility, and the imperial cities of south-west Germany, interposed itself, but without guaranteeing the peasants any positive concessions. The peasants remained in motion. Hans Müller of Bulgenbach marched from 30 September to the middle of October through the Black Forest as far as Urach

| and Furtwangen, brought his band up to 3,500 men, and took up position with them near Ewatingen (not far from Stühlingen). The nobility had not more than 1,700 men at its disposal, and these were divided. It was forced to enter into an armistice, which was actually concluded in the camp at Ewatingen. The peasants were promised an amicable settlement, either directly between the parties or through arbitrators, and an investigation of grievances by the territorial court at Stockach. Both the noble troops and the peasants dispersed.

The peasants agreed upon 16 Articles, whose acceptance was to be demanded of the Stockach court. They were very moderate. Abolition of hunting rights, of socage services, of oppressive taxes and of seigneurial privileges in general, protection against arbitrary arrest and against partial courts that judged according to caprice—more than this they did not demand.

The nobility, however, as soon as the peasants had gone home, immediately demanded again all the disputed dues, until the court should have decided. The peasants naturally refused and referred the lords to the court. The conflict broke out anew; the peasants

drew together again, the princes and lords concentrated their troops.

This time the movement again spread further, beyond the Breisgau and deep into Württemberg. The troops under Georg Truchsess of Waldburg, the Alba of the Peasant War, observed them, defeated individual reinforcements, but did not dare to attack the main body. Georg Truchsess negotiated with the peasant chiefs, and brought about agreements here and there.

At the end of December the negotiations began before the territorial court at Stockach. The peasants protested against the court’s being composed entirely of nobles. An imperial letter of appointment was read out to them as an answer. The negotiations dragged on; meanwhile the nobility, the princes, and the Swabian League authorities armed. Archduke Ferdinand, who besides the then still Austrian hereditary lands also ruled Württemberg, the Baden Black Forest and southern Alsace, ordered the utmost severity against the rebellious peasants. They were to be seized, tortured and struck down without mercy; they were to be destroyed as seemed most convenient, their goods and chattels burned and laid waste, and their wives and children driven out of the country. One sees how the princes and lords observed the armistice, and what they understood by amicable mediation and investigation of grievances. Archduke Ferdinand, to whom the house of Welser in Augsburg had advanced money, armed in all haste; the Swabian League called for a contingent of money and troops to be furnished in three terms.

These uprisings so far coincide with Thomas Münzer’s five-month presence in the Oberland. Although there is no direct evidence of the influence he exercised on the outbreak and course of the movement, this influence is fully established indirectly. The more resolute revolutionaries among the peasants are mainly his pupils and represent his ideas. The Twelve Articles as well as the Article Letter of the Oberland peasants are attributed to him by all contemporaries, although he certainly did not compose the former, at least. On his return journey to Thuringia he even issued a resolute revolutionary writing to the insurgent peasants.

Friedrich Engels

At the same time, Duke Ulrich, who had been expelled from Württemberg in 1519, intrigued in order to regain possession of his country with the help of the peasants. It is a fact that since his expulsion he had sought to make use of the revolutionary party and constantly supported it. His name is mixed up in most of the local disturbances that occurred in the Black Forest and Württemberg from 1520 to 1524, and now he was directly preparing an incursion from his castle of Hohentwiel into Württemberg. He was, however, only used by the peasants, never had any influence over them, and still less their confidence.

Thus the winter passed without either side arriving at anything decisive. The princely lords hid themselves; the peasant uprising gained in extent. In January 1525 the whole country between the Danube, the Rhine and the Lech was in full ferment, and in February the storm broke loose.

| While the Black Forest-Hegau band under Hans Müller of Bulgenbach was conspiring with Ulrich of Württemberg and partly participated in his unsuccessful march to Stuttgart (February and March 1525), the peasants in the Ried, above Ulm, rose up on 9 February, assembled in a camp protected by marshes near Baltringen, planted the red banner and, under the leadership of Ulrich Schmid, formed the Baltringen Band. They were 10–12,000 men strong.

On 25 February the Upper Allgäu Band, 7,000 strong, assembled on the Schüssen, on hearing a rumour that troops were moving against the malcontents who had appeared here as well. The Kempten people, who had been in dispute with their Archbishop throughout the winter, assembled on the 26th and united with them. The towns of Memmingen and Kaufbeuren joined the movement on conditions; yet already here there came to light the ambiguity of the position which the towns adopted in this struggle. On 7 March, the Twelve Memmingen Articles were adopted in Memmingen for all the Upper Allgäu peasants.

At the call of the Allgäu peasants, the Lake band formed on Lake Constance under Eitel Hans. This band too rapidly gained in strength. Its headquarters were in Bermatingen.

Likewise, in Lower Allgäu, in the area of Ochsenhausen and Schellenberg, in the territories of Zeil and Waldburg, the domains of the Truchsess, the peasants rose up, as early as the first days of March. This Lower Allgäu band encamped near Wurzach, 7,000 strong.

These four bands all adopted the Memmingen Articles, which, incidentally, were much more moderate than those of the Hegau peasants, and also displayed a remarkable lack of resolution in the points that dealt with the attitude of the armed bands towards the nobility and the governments. Such resolution as they did develop came only in the course of the war, after the peasants had gained experience of the way their enemies acted.

Simultaneously with these bands, a sixth one formed on the Danube. From the whole area between Ulm and Donauwörth, from the valleys of the Iller, Roth and Biber, the peasants came to Leipheim and encamped there. Every man capable of bearing arms from 15 localities, and reinforcements from 117, were present. The leader of the Leipheim band was Ulrich Schön, its preacher Jakob Wehe, the pastor of Leipheim.

Thus at the beginning of March, some 30,000–40,000 insurgent Upper Swabian peasants stood under arms in six camps. The character of these peasant bands was very mixed. The revolutionary — Müntzer — party was everywhere in the minority! Nevertheless, everywhere it formed the core and backbone of the peasant camps. The mass of the peasants was always ready to enter into an agreement with the lords, if only they were assured the concessions which they hoped to extort by their threatening attitude. Added to this, as the affair dragged on and the princely armies approached, they grew weary of waging war, and those who still had something to lose mostly went home. Moreover, the vagabond lumpenproletariat had attached itself in masses to the bands, making discipline more difficult, demoralising the peasants, and likewise frequently coming and going. This alone explains why the peasant bands remained everywhere on the defensive from the outset, became demoralised in their camps, and, even apart from their tactical inadequacy and the scarcity of good leaders, were by no means a match for the armies of the princes.

While the bands were still assembling, Duke Ulrich invaded Württemberg from Hohentwiel with mercenary troops and some Hegau peasants. The Swabian League would have been lost if the peasants had now advanced from the other side against the troops of the Truchsess von Waldburg. But given the merely defensive posture of the bands, the Truchsess soon succeeded in concluding an armistice with the Baltringen, Allgäu and Lake peasants, in initiating negotiations, and in setting a date for the settlement of the matter on Judica Sunday (2 April). In the meantime he was able to move against Duke Ulrich, occupy Stuttgart and force him to leave Württemberg again as early as 17 March. Then he turned against the peasants; but in his own army the Landsknechts mutinied and refused to march against them. The Truchsess also succeeded in pacifying them, and now he marched to Ulm, where new reinforcements were gathering. He had left an observation camp near Kirchheim unter Teck.

The Swabian League, which at last had its hands free and its first contingents assembled, now threw off the mask and declared that it was “resolved with arms and God’s help to turn against that which the peasants of their own accord venture upon”.

In the meantime the peasants had strictly kept the armistice. For the negotiations on Judica Sunday they had drawn up their demands, the famous Twelve Articles. They demanded election and deposability of the clergy by the congregations, abolition of the small tithe and use of the great tithe for public purposes, after deduction of the pastor’s salary, abolition of serfdom, of fishing and hunting rights and of the death-tax, restriction of excessive forced labour services, taxes and rents, restitution of woodlands, pastures and privileges forcibly taken from the communities and individuals, and the removal of arbitrary rule in justice and administration. As can be seen, the moderate, conciliatory party still preponderated considerably among the peasant bands. The revolutionary party had already earlier set forth its programme in the “Artikelbrief” (Article-Letter). This open letter to all peasantries calls on them to join the “Christian Union and Brotherhood” for the removal of all burdens, whether by kindness, “which may not well be possible”, or by force, and threatens all who refuse with the “worldly ban”, i.e., expulsion from society and from all intercourse with members of the Union. All castles, monasteries and priestly foundations are likewise to be placed under the worldly ban, unless the nobility, priests and monks voluntarily leave them, move into ordinary houses like other people, and join the Christian Union. — In this radical manifesto, which was obviously drawn up before the spring uprising of 1525, the issue is therefore above all revolution, the complete defeat of the still ruling classes, and the “worldly ban” designates only the oppressors and traitors who are to be struck down, the castles to be burnt, the monasteries and foundations to be confiscated and their treasures to be converted into money.

Before the peasants, however, got around to presenting their Twelve Articles to the appointed arbitrators, they received the news of the Swabian League’s breach of the treaty and the approach of its troops. They immediately took their measures. A general assembly of the Allgäu, Baltringen and Lake peasants was held at Gaisbeuren. The four bands were merged and four new columns organised out of them; the confiscation of ecclesiastical property, the sale of their valuables for the benefit of the war treasury, and the burning of castles were resolved. Thus, alongside the official Twelve Articles, the Artikelbrief became the rule of their warfare, and Judica Sunday, the day set for the conclusion of peace, became the date of the general rising.

The everywhere growing excitement, the continual local conflicts of the peasants with the nobility, the news of the uprising in the Black Forest, which had been steadily growing for six months, and of its spread as far as the Danube and the Lech, are certainly sufficient to explain the rapid succession of peasant risings in two-thirds of Germany. But the fact that people stood at the head of the movement who had organised it by means of Anabaptist and other emissaries is proved by the simultaneity of all the partial uprisings. In the second half of March disturbances had already broken out in Württemberg, on the lower Neckar, in the Odenwald, in Lower and Middle Franconia; but everywhere the second of April, Judica Sunday, had been fixed beforehand as the day of the general outbreak, everywhere the decisive blow, the rising en masse, took place in the first week of April. The Allgäu, Hegau and Lake peasants also called all men capable of bearing arms to the camp on 1 April by alarm bells and mass assemblies, and, simultaneously with the Baltringen peasants, opened hostilities against the castles and monasteries.

In Franconia, where the movement grouped itself around six centres, the uprising broke out everywhere in the first days of April. Near Nördlingen two peasant camps formed around this time, with the help of which the revolutionary party in the town, whose chief was Anton Forner, gained the upper hand and pushed through Forner’s appointment as burgomaster, as well as the town’s adherence to the peasants. In the Ansbach region the peasants rose up everywhere from 1 to 7 April, and the uprising spread from there across into Bavaria. In the Rothenburg region the peasants had been under arms since 22 March; in the town of Rothenburg the rule of the honourables was overthrown on 27 March by the petty-bourgeois and plebeians under Stephan von Menzingen; but since here the peasants’ dues were precisely the main revenues of the town, the new government also behaved very shakily and ambiguously toward the peasants. In the Bishopric of Würzburg the peasants and the small towns rose up generally at the beginning of April, and in the Bishopric of Bamberg the general insurrection forced the bishop to yield within five days. Finally, in the north, on the Thuringian border, the strong Bildhausen peasant camp assembled.

In the Odenwald, where Wendel Hipler, a nobleman and former chancellor of the Counts of Hohenlohe, and Georg Metzler, an innkeeper from Ballenberg near Krautheim, stood at the head of the revolutionary party, the storm broke loose as early as 26 March. The peasants came from all quarters towards the Tauber. Also 2,000 men from Orenbach, from the camp before Rothenburg, joined them. Georg Metzler assumed the captaincy and, after all reinforcements had arrived, marched on 4 April to the monastery of Schönthal on the Jagst, where the Neckar valley peasants joined him. The latter, led by Jäcklein Rohrbach, innkeeper of Böckingen near Heilbronn, had proclaimed the insurrection on Judica Sunday in Flein, Sontheim, etc., while at the same time Wendel Hipler with a number of conspirators had surprised Oehringen and swept the surrounding peasants into the movement. At Schönthal the Twelve Articles were adopted by the two peasant columns, which now united into the “Bright Band” (Helle Haufen), and raids against castles and monasteries were organised. The Bright Band was about 8,000 strong and had cannon and 3,000 arquebuses. Florian Geyer, a Franconian knight, also joined it and formed the Black Troop, an elite corps recruited especially from the Rothenburg and Oehringen militia.

The Württemberg Vogt at Neckarsulm, Count Ludwig von Helfenstein, opened hostilities. He had all peasants who fell into his hands cut down without further ado. The Bright Band marched against him. These massacres, as well as the just-arrived news of the defeat of the Leipheim band, of Jakob Wehe’s execution and the cruelties of the Truchsess, enraged the peasants. Helfenstein, who had thrown himself into Weinsberg, was attacked there. The castle was stormed by Florian Geyer, the town taken after a long struggle, and Count Ludwig together with several knights taken prisoner. The next day, 17 April, Jäcklein Rohrbach, with the most resolute men of the band, held a court over the prisoners and had fourteen of them, with Helfenstein at their head, run the gauntlet through the spears — the most disgraceful death that he could make them suffer. The capture of Weinsberg and Jäcklein’s terrorist revenge on Helfenstein did not fail to have their effect on the nobility. The Counts of Löwenstein joined the peasant alliance; those of Hohenlohe, who had already joined earlier but had not yet provided any help, immediately sent the requested cannon and powder.

The captains deliberated on whether they should not take Götz von Berlichingen as their chief captain, “since he could bring the nobility over to them”. The proposal met with approval; but Florian Geyer, who saw in this mood of the peasants and captains the beginning of a reaction, thereupon separated himself from the band with his Black Troop, roamed on his own account first the Neckar region, then the Würzburg district, and destroyed everywhere the castles and priestly nests.

The remainder of the troop now marched first on Heilbronn. In this mighty free imperial city, as almost everywhere, the patriciate was opposed by a burgher and a revolutionary opposition. The latter, in secret understanding with the peasants, opened the gates to G. Metzler and Jäcklein Rohrbach during a tumult as early as 17 April. The peasant captains took possession of the city with their men; the city was admitted into the brotherhood and provided 1,200 guilders in money, as well as a company of volunteers. Only the clergy and the possessions of the Teutonic Order were made to pay contributions. On the 22nd the peasants marched off again, after leaving a small garrison behind. Heilbronn was to become the centre of the various bands, which actually sent delegates there and deliberated on joint action and joint demands of the peasantry. But the burgher opposition and the patriciate, which had allied itself with it since the peasants’ entry, now again had the upper hand in the city, prevented all energetic steps, and only awaited the approach of the princely armies to definitively betray the peasants.

The peasants moved towards the Odenwald. On 24 April, Götz von Berlichingen, who a few days before had first offered his services to the Elector of the Palatinate, then to the peasants, then again to the Elector, was compelled to join the evangelical brotherhood and assume the supreme command of the bright, shining band (as distinguished from Florian Geyer’s Black Band). But at the same time he was a prisoner of the peasants, who guarded him suspiciously and bound him to the advice of the captains, without whom he could do nothing. Götz and Metzler now marched with the bulk of the peasants via Buchen to Amorbach, where they remained from 30 April to 5 May and raised the entire Mainz territory in insurrection. Everywhere the nobility was forced to join and their castles were thereby spared; only the monasteries were burned and plundered. The band had become visibly demoralised; the most energetic men had left with Florian Geyer or with Jäcklein Rohrbach, for the latter also had separated after the capture of Heilbronn, evidently because he, the avenger of Count Helfenstein, could no longer remain with a band that wanted to come to terms with the nobility. This insistence on coming to an understanding with the nobility was itself already a sign of demoralisation. Soon after, Wendel Hipler proposed a very appropriate reorganisation of the band: the daily offering mercenaries should be taken into service and the band should no longer be renewed monthly by calling up new and dismissing old contingents, but the men already under arms and to some extent trained should be retained. But the general assembly rejected both proposals; the peasants had already become overbearing, and regarded the whole war as a plundering expedition in which competition from the mercenaries could not suit them, and in which they had to be free to go home as soon as their pockets were filled. In Amorbach, things went so far that the Heilbronn councillor Hans Berlin pushed through the “Declaration of the Twelve Articles”, a document in which even the last sharp points of the Twelve Articles were blunted and an obsequiously supplicating language put into the peasants’ mouths, among the captains and councillors of the band. This time the matter was too much for the peasants; they rejected the declaration amid great uproar and persisted in the original articles.

Meanwhile, a decisive turn had taken place in the Würzburg region. The bishop, who at the first peasant uprising at the beginning of April had withdrawn to the strong Frauenberg near Würzburg and had written in all directions, but in vain, for help, was finally forced into momentary compliance. On 2 May a diet was opened, in which the peasants were also represented. But before any result could be reached, letters were intercepted which proved the bishop’s treasonable machinations. The diet at once dispersed, and hostilities began between the insurgent townsmen and peasants and the bishop’s forces. The bishop himself fled on 5 May to Heidelberg; the very next day Florian Geyer and the Black Band arrived in Würzburg, together with the Franconian Tauber bands, which had formed from peasants of Mergentheim, Rothenburg, and Ansbach. On 7 May Götz von Berlichingen also moved in with the bright, shining band, and the siege of the Frauenberg began.

In the Limpurg region and in the area of Ellwangen and Hall, another band, the Gaildorf or common bright band, had formed as early as the end of March and the beginning of April. It acted very violently, raised the whole region in insurrection, burned many monasteries and castles, among others also the castle of Hohenstaufen, forced all peasants to join the march and all nobles, even the Schenks of Limpurg, to enter the Christian brotherhood. At the beginning of May it made an incursion into Württemberg, but was induced to retreat. The particularism of the German petty states permitted then as little as in 1848 that the revolutionaries of different state territories should act in common. The Gaildorf band, confined to a small territory, necessarily collapsed after it had overcome all resistance in that territory. It came to terms with the town of Gmünd and disbanded, leaving only 500 armed men behind.

In the Palatinate, peasant bands had formed on both banks of the Rhine towards the end of April. They destroyed many castles and monasteries, and on 1 May took Neustadt an der Hardt, after the Bruchrain peasants who had crossed over had already forced Speyer to conclude a treaty the day before. Marshal von Habern could accomplish nothing against them with the few troops of the Elector, and on 10 May the Elector was obliged to conclude a treaty with the insurgent peasants, in which he guaranteed them redress of their grievances at a diet.

In Württemberg, finally, the uprising had already broken out early in isolated areas. On the Urach Alp the peasants had already formed a league against the priests and lords in February, and at the end of March the peasants of Blaubeuren, Urach, Münsingen, Balingen, and Rosenfeld rose. The Gaildorf band invaded Württemberg territory at Göppingen, Jäcklein Rohrbach at Brackenheim, the remnants of the defeated Leipheim band at Pfullingen, and they raised the country people in insurrection. Serious unrest also broke out in other areas. As early as 6 April Pfullingen had to capitulate to the peasants. The government of the Austrian archduke was in the greatest embarrassment. It had no money at all and very few troops. The towns and castles were in the worst condition and had neither garrisons nor munitions. Even the Asperg was almost defenceless.

The government’s attempt to concentrate the city levies against the peasants decided its momentary defeat. On 16 April the Bottwar levy refused to march, and instead of going to Stuttgart, moved to the Wunnenstein near Bottwar, where it formed the core of a camp of burghers and peasants which rapidly increased. On the same day the uprising broke out in the Zabergau; the monastery of Maulbronn was plundered, and a number of monasteries and castles were completely devastated. Reinforcements came to the Gäu peasants from the neighbouring Bruchrain.

Matern Feuerbacher, a councillor of Bottwar, one of the leaders of the burgher opposition, but sufficiently compromised to be obliged to go with the peasants, placed himself at the head of the band on the Wunnenstein. He remained, however, very moderate throughout, prevented the execution of the Articles’ letter against the castles, and sought everywhere to mediate between the peasants and the moderate burghers. He prevented the union of the Württemberg peasants with the bright, shining band and later also induced the Gaildorf band to retreat from Württemberg. On account of his burgher tendencies he was deposed as early as 19 April, but the very next day he was again appointed captain. He was indispensable, and when even Jäcklein Rohrbach on the 22nd joined the Württemberg peasants with 200 determined men, there was nothing left for him but to leave him in his post and to confine himself to close supervision of his actions.

On 18 April the government attempted to negotiate with the peasants on the Wunnenstein. The peasants insisted that the government must accept the Twelve Articles, and this, naturally, the plenipotentiaries could not do. The band now set itself in motion. On the 20th it was at Lauffen, where the government’s deputies were repulsed for the last time. On the 22nd it stood, 6,000 strong, in Bietigheim and threatened Stuttgart. Here the council had mostly fled, and a citizens’ committee was placed at the head of the administration. In the burgher community there were the same party divisions between patriciate, burgher opposition and revolutionary plebeians as everywhere. The latter opened the gates to the peasants on 25 April, and Stuttgart was immediately occupied. Here the organisation of the bright Christian band, as the Württemberg insurgents now called themselves, was completely carried out, and pay, distribution of booty, and provisioning, etc., were reduced to fixed rules. A company of Stuttgart men under Theus Gerber joined up.

On 29 April Feuerbacher marched with the whole band against the Gaildorf band, which had invaded Württemberg near Schorndorf, took the whole area into the league, and thereby induced the Gaildorf band to retreat. Thus he prevented the revolutionary element in his band, headed by Rohrbach, from receiving dangerous reinforcement through mixing with the reckless Gaildorf peasants. On receiving news that the Truchsess was approaching, he marched from Schorndorf to meet him and encamped on 1 May near Kirchheim unter Teck.

We have thus described the origin and development of the uprising in that part of Germany which we must regard as the terrain of the first group of peasant bands. Before we deal with the remaining groups (Thuringia and Hesse, Alsace, Austria and the Alps), we must recount the campaign of the Truchsess, in which, at first alone and later supported by various princes and cities, he annihilated this first group of insurgents.

We left the Truchsess at Ulm, to which he had turned at the end of March, after having left a corps of observation under Dietrich Spät at Kirchheim unter Teck. The Truchsess’s corps, including the League reinforcements concentrated at Ulm, was not quite 10,000 strong, of whom 7,200 were infantry; it was the only army available for offensive war against the peasants. The reinforcements assembled in Ulm only very slowly, partly owing to the difficulty of recruiting in insurgent lands, partly owing to the lack of money of the governments, partly because everywhere the few troops were more than indispensable for garrisoning fortresses and castles. We have already seen how few troops the princes and cities not belonging to the Swabian League had available. Thus everything depended on the successes that Georg Truchsess would achieve with his League army.

The Truchsess first turned against the Baltringen band, which had meanwhile begun to devastate castles and monasteries in the neighbourhood of the Ried. The peasants, having withdrawn into the Ried as the League troops approached, were driven out of the swamps by a flanking movement, crossed the Danube and threw themselves into the ravines and forests of the Swabian Alp. Here, where the cavalry and the artillery, the main—

the strength of the League’s army could not harm it, the Truchsess did not pursue it further. He marched against the Leipheim band, who were stationed 5,000 strong near Leipheim, 4,000 in the Mindel valley, and 6,000 near Illertissen, had raised the whole region in insurrection, destroyed monasteries and castles, and were preparing to advance on Ulm with all three columns. Here too a demoralisation already seems to have taken hold among the peasants and destroyed the military reliability of the band; for Jakob Wehe sought to negotiate with the Truchsess from the outset. But he, now that he had sufficient troops behind him, would have none of it, and on 4 April attacked the main band at Leipheim and dispersed it completely. Jakob Wehe and Ulrich Schön, as well as two other peasant leaders, were captured and beheaded; Leipheim capitulated, and with a few raids in the surrounding area the whole district was subjugated.

A fresh mutiny of the Landsknechte, caused by their demand for plunder and extra pay, again delayed the Truchsess until 10 April. Then he moved south-west against the Baltringen band, who had meanwhile invaded his lordships of Waldburg, Zeil and Wolfegg and were besieging his castles. Here too he found the peasants scattered, and on 11 and 12 April beat them in a series of separate engagements, which likewise completely dissolved the Baltringen band. The remainder withdrew under Priest Florian to the Lake band. It was against this that the Truchsess now turned. The Lake band, which had meanwhile not only carried out raids but had also drawn the towns of Buchhorn (Friedrichshafen) and Wollmatingen into the fraternal association, held a large council of war on the 13th in Salem Abbey and resolved to march against the Truchsess. Immediately the alarm was sounded everywhere, and 10,000 men, joined by the defeated Baltringen peasants, assembled in the Bermatingen camp. On 15 April they fought a favourable engagement with the Truchsess, who did not wish to stake his army here in a decisive battle and preferred to negotiate, the more so as he learned that the Allgäu and Hegau bands were also approaching. On 17 April he therefore concluded a treaty with the Lake and Baltringen peasants at Weingarten that appeared fairly favourable to them, and which the peasants accepted without hesitation. He further brought it about that the delegates of the Upper and Lower Allgäu also accepted this treaty, and then marched off to Württemberg.

The Truchsess’s cunning saved him here from certain destruction. Had he not known how to beguile the weak, narrow-minded, for the most part already demoralised peasants, and their mostly incapable, timid and corruptible leaders, he and his small army would have been hemmed in between four columns, together at least 25,000–30,000 strong, and

Friedrich Engels

would have been inevitably lost. But the bigotry of his enemies, always unavoidable with peasant masses, made it possible for him to rid himself of them precisely at the moment when they could have ended the whole war, at least for Swabia and Franconia, with one blow. The Lake peasants kept the treaty, by which they were of course eventually swindled, so faithfully that they later took up arms against their own allies, the Hegau band; the Allgäu peasants, through their leaders being involved in the betrayal, did at once disavow it, but meanwhile the Truchsess was out of danger.

The Hegau peasants, although not included in the Weingarten treaty, soon provided fresh proof of the boundless local bigotry and obstinate provincialism that ruined the entire Peasant War. After the Truchsess had negotiated with them in vain | and had marched off to Württemberg, they followed him and remained constantly on his flank; but it never occurred to them to unite with the Württemberg Bright Christian Band, for the very reason that the Württemberg and Neckar valley peasants had also once refused them help. When, therefore, the Truchsess had moved far enough from their home region, they quietly turned back and marched against Freiburg.

We left the Württemberg peasants under Matern Feuerbacher near Kirchheim unter Teck, from where the observation corps left behind by the Truchsess under Dietrich Spät had withdrawn to Urach. After an unsuccessful attempt on Urach, Feuerbacher turned towards Nürtingen and wrote to all neighbouring insurgent bands requesting reinforcements for the decisive battle. Indeed, considerable reinforcements arrived both from the Württemberg Unterland and from the Gäu. In particular, the Gäu peasants, who had gathered around the remnants of the Leipheim band that had withdrawn as far as East Württemberg, and who had raised the whole upper Neckar and Nagold valley as far as Böblingen and Leonberg in insurrection, advanced in two strong bands and united with Feuerbacher on 5 May at Nürtingen. At Böblingen the Truchsess encountered the united bands. Their numbers, their artillery and their position gave him pause; according to his usual method he at once entered into negotiations and concluded a truce with the peasants. No sooner had he made them feel safe thereby than he fell upon them on 12 May during the truce and forced them to a decisive battle. The peasants offered long and brave resistance until Böblingen was finally delivered to the Truchsess through the treachery of the citizenry. The left wing of the peasants was thereby deprived of its point of support, and was routed and outflanked. This decided the battle. The undisciplined peasants fell into

The Peasant War in Germany. V

disorder and soon into wild flight; those who were not cut down or captured by the League’s horsemen threw away their weapons and hurried home. The “Bright Christian Band”, and with it the whole Württemberg insurrection, was completely dissolved. Theus Gerber escaped to Esslingen, Feuerbacher fled to Switzerland, Jäcklein Rohrbach was taken captive and dragged in chains as far as Neckargartach, where the Truchsess had him chained to a stake, had wood piled around him, and roasted alive over a slow fire, while he himself feasted with his knights and relished this knightly spectacle.

From Neckargartach the Truchsess supported the operations of the Elector of the Palatinate by an incursion into the Kraichgau. The Elector, who had in the meantime assembled troops, broke the treaty with the peasants immediately on receiving news of the Truchsess’s successes, fell upon the Bruchrain on 23 May, took and burned Malsch after fierce resistance, plundered a number of villages and occupied Bruchsal. At the same time the Truchsess surprised Eppingen and captured the local leader of the movement, Anton Eisenhut, whom the Elector had put to death straight away, together with a dozen other peasant leaders. The Bruchrain and Kraichgau were thus pacified and forced to pay some 40,000 guilders in fire tax.

The two armies – the Truchsess’s, reduced to 6,000 men by the battles so far, and the Elector’s (6,500 men) – now united and marched against the Upper Forest bands.

News of the defeat at Böblingen spread terror everywhere among the insurgents. The free imperial cities, so far as they had fallen under the oppressive hand of the peasants, suddenly breathed freely again. Heilbronn was the first to take steps towards reconciliation with the Swabian League. In Heilbronn the peasants’ chancellery and the delegates of the various bands were sitting to discuss the proposals that were to be submitted to the Emperor and the Empire in the name of all the insurgent peasants. In these negotiations, which were intended to yield a general result valid for the whole of Germany, it once more emerged that no single estate, not even that of the peasants, was developed enough to reorganise the entire German situation from its own standpoint. It immediately became clear that to this end the nobility and, in particular, the

35 citizenry had to be won over. Wendel Hipler accordingly took the direction of the negotiations into his hands. | Of all the leaders of the movement, Wendel Hipler saw the existing conditions most clearly. He was no far-reaching revolutionary like Münzer, no representative of the peasantry like Metzler or Rohrbach. His varied experience, his practical knowledge of the stance of the individual estates towards one another, prevented him from one-sidedly representing any one of the estates involved in the movement against the others. Just as Münzer, as the representative of the class that existed entirely outside the official social nexus of the time, the beginnings of the proletariat, was driven to a premonition of communism, so Wendel Hipler, the representative, so to speak, of the average of all progressive elements of the nation, arrived at a premonition of modern bourgeois society. The principles he represented, the demands he set forth, were admittedly not what was immediately possible; they were, however, the somewhat idealised necessary result of the existing dissolution of feudal society, and the peasants, as soon as they set about drawing up draft laws for the whole empire, were compelled to accept them.

Thus the centralisation demanded by the peasants took on here in Heilbronn a more positive shape, a shape, however, that was poles apart from the peasants’ own conception of it. For instance, it was given more concrete form in the establishment of uniform coinage, weights and measures, in the abolition of internal tolls, etc., in short, in demands that were far more in the interest of the townspeople than of the peasants. Concessions were made to the nobility which came close to modern redemption payments and which ultimately amounted to the transformation of feudal landed property into bourgeois property. In short, as soon as the demands of the peasants were combined into an “Imperial Reform” they were bound to subordinate themselves not to the momentary demands but to the definitive interests 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 travelling to meet the Truchsess in order to negotiate the surrender of the city in the name of the notables and citizenry. Reactionary movements inside the city supported the betrayal, and Wendel Hipler had to | flee with the peasants. He went to Weinsberg, where he sought to gather the remnants of the Württemberg peasants and the few mobile men of the Gaildorf band. But the approach of the Elector of the Palatinate and the Truchsess drove him from there as well, and he was forced to go to Würzburg to set the Bright Shining Band in motion. The League and Electoral troops meanwhile subdued the entire Neckar region, forced the peasants to swear fealty anew, burned many villages, and stabbed or hanged all fleeing peasants they got hold of. Weinsberg was burned down in revenge for the execution of the Helfenstein count.

The bands united before Würzburg had in the meantime besieged the Frauenberg, and on 15 May, before the breach was made, attempted a brave but fruitless assault on the fortress. 400 of the best men, mostly from Florian Geyer’s troop, remained lying dead or wounded in the ditches. Two days later, on the 17th, Wendel Hipler arrived and had a

Der deutsche Bauernkrieg. V

Held a council of war. He proposed leaving only 4,000 men before the Frauenberg, and with the entire main force, some 20,000 strong, under the eyes of the Truchsess, to pitch camp near Krautheim on the Jaxt, where all reinforcements could be concentrated. The plan was excellent; only by holding the masses together and by superior numbers could one hope to beat the princely army, now some 13,000 strong. But by now the demoralisation and discouragement among the peasants had become too great to permit any energetic action. Götz von Berlichingen, who soon afterwards openly appeared as a traitor, may also have contributed to holding up the throng, and so Hipler’s plan was never carried out. Instead, as always, the bands were split up. Only on 23 May did the Bright Band set itself in motion, after the Franconians had promised to follow immediately. On the 26th, the margravial-Ansbach companies, encamped before Würzburg, were summoned home by the news that the Margrave had opened hostilities against the peasants. The remainder of the besieging army, together with Florian Geyer’s Black Troop, took up position near Heidingsfeld, not far from Würzburg.

The Bright Band arrived at Krautheim on 24 May, in a state little fit for battle. Here many learned that their villages had meantime submitted to the Truchsess, and seized this as a pretext to go home. The band moved on to Neckarsulm and negotiated with the Truchsess on the 28th. At the same time messengers were sent to the Franconians, Alsatians and Black Forest-Hegau peasants, with the summons to hasten to join them. From Neckarsulm Götz marched back to Oehringen. The band melted away daily; Götz von Berlichingen also disappeared during the march; he had ridden home, having earlier, through his old comrade-at-arms Dietrich Spät, already negotiated his desertion with the Truchsess. At Oehringen, as a result of false reports of the enemy’s approach, a sudden panic seized the helpless and dispirited mass; the band scattered in complete disorder, and only with difficulty did Metzler and Wendel Hipler manage to hold together about 2,000 men, whom they led back to Krautheim. In the meantime the Franconian levy, 5,000 strong, had arrived, but, by a flank march ordered by Götz, evidently with treasonable intent, via Löwenstein to Oehringen, it missed the Bright Band and moved to Neckarsulm. This little town, occupied by a few companies of the Bright Band, was besieged by the Truchsess. The Franconians arrived during the night and saw the fires of the League camp; but their leaders lacked the courage to risk a surprise attack, and withdrew to Krautheim, where they finally found the remnant of the Bright Band. Neckarsulm, when no relief came, surrendered on the 29th to the League; the Truchsess had thirteen peasants immediately executed, and then marched forth burning and ravaging, plundering and murdering, against the band. Throughout the entire valleys of the Neckar, Kocher and Jaxt, heaps of rubble and peasants hanged on trees marked his path.

At Krautheim the League army fell upon the peasants, who, forced by a flank movement of the Truchsess, had withdrawn to Königshofen on the Tauber. Here they took up position, 8,000 men with 32 cannon. The Truchsess approached them, concealed behind hills and woods, sent forward outflanking columns, and fell upon them on 2 June with such superior force and energy that, despite the most stubborn resistance by several columns, maintained until nightfall, they were completely defeated and dispersed. As always, the League cavalry, “the death of the peasants”, bore the chief part in the destruction of the insurgent army, throwing itself upon the peasants, shaken by artillery, musket fire and lance attacks, completely shattering them and cutting them down singly. The kind of war the Truchsess waged with his horsemen is proved by the fate of the 300 citizens of Königshofen who were with the peasant army. They were hewn down during the battle to fifteen, and of these fifteen four were afterwards beheaded.

Having thus done with the Odenwald, Neckar valley and Lower Franconia peasants, the Truchsess pacified the whole surrounding country by raids, the burning of entire villages and innumerable executions, and then marched against Würzburg. On the way he learned that the second Franconian band under Florian Geyer and Gregor von Burg-Bernheim was at Sulzdorf, and immediately turned against it.

Florian Geyer, who since the unsuccessful assault on the Frauenberg had been negotiating chiefly with the princes and towns, particularly with Rothenburg and Margrave Casimir of Ansbach, about their joining the peasant confraternity, was suddenly summoned away by the news of the Königshofen defeat. His band was joined by the Ansbach contingent under Gregor von Burg-Bernheim. This band had only recently been formed. Margrave Casimir had, in true Hohenzollern fashion, contrived to keep the peasant revolt in his territory in check partly by promises, partly by threatening concentrations of troops. He maintained complete neutrality towards all outside bands as long as they did not draw off any Ansbach subjects. He sought to direct the hatred of the peasants mainly against the ecclesiastical foundations, by whose ultimate confiscation he hoped to enrich himself. At the same time he armed steadily and awaited events. Scarcely had the news of the battle of Böblingen arrived than he immediately opened hostilities against his rebellious peasants, plundered and burned their villages and had many of them hanged and cut down. The peasants, however, rapidly gathered together and defeated him under Gregor von Burg-Bernheim on 29 May near Windsheim. While they were still pursuing him, the call of the hard-pressed Odenwald peasants reached them, and they immediately turned towards Heidingsfeld, and from there, together with Florian Geyer, back to Würzburg (2 June). Here they left 5,000 peasants behind, still without news of the Odenwald peasants, and with 4,000 men—the rest had dispersed—marched after the others. Misled by false reports about the outcome of the battle of Königshofen, they were surprised by the Truchsess at Sulzdorf and completely defeated. As usual, the horsemen and men-at-arms of the Truchsess perpetrated a terrible massacre. Florian Geyer held together the remnant of his Black Troop, 600 men, and cut his way through to the village of Ingolstadt. Two hundred men occupied the church and the churchyard, 400 the castle. The Palatines pursued him; a column of 1,200 men took the village and set fire to the church; those who did not perish in the flames were cut down. Then the Palatines shot a breach in the dilapidated wall of the castle and attempted the assault. Twice repulsed by the peasants, who stood covered behind an inner wall, they shot that second wall to pieces as well, and then attempted a third assault, which succeeded. Half of Geyer’s men were hewn down; he escaped with the last two hundred. But his place of refuge was discovered the very next day (Whit Monday); the Palatines surrounded the wood where he lay hidden and cut down the whole band. Only seventeen prisoners were taken during these two days. Florian Geyer, with a few of the most resolute, had again cut his way through and now turned to the Gaildorf peasants, who had again assembled, some 7,000 strong. But when he arrived, he found them, as a result of the disheartening news from all sides, for the most part dispersed again. He made one further attempt to rally the scattered men in the woods, but was surprised by troops on 9 June near Hall and fell fighting.

The Truchsess, who immediately after the victory of Königshofen had sent word to the besieged on the Frauenberg, now advanced on Würzburg. The council secretly came to an understanding with him, so that the League army was able to surround the town, together with the 5,000 peasants inside it, on the night of 7 June, and on the following morning march in through the gates, opened by the council, without striking a blow. Through this treachery of the Würzburg “notables” the last Franconian peasant band was disarmed and all its leaders captured. The Truchsess had eighty-one of them beheaded at once. Here in Würzburg the various Franconian princes now arrived one after another: the Bishop of Würzburg himself, the Bishop of Bamberg, and the Margrave of Brandenburg-Ansbach. The gracious lords divided the parts among themselves. The Truchsess marched off with the Bishop of Bamberg, who now immediately broke the treaty he had concluded with his peasants and delivered his land over to the madly murdering and burning hordes of the League army. Margrave Casimir devastated his own land. Deiningen was burned; countless villages were plundered or given over to the flames; at the same time the Margrave held a blood tribunal in every town. In Neustadt an der Aisch he had eighteen rebels beheaded, in Markt Bergel forty-three. From there he moved to Rothenburg, where the notables had already carried out a counter-revolution and had arrested Stephan von Menzingen. The petty burghers and plebeians of Rothenburg now had to pay dearly for their equivocal behaviour towards the peasants, for having refused them all help to the very last, for having insisted, out of their locally narrow-minded selfishness, on the suppression of rural industry in favour of the urban guilds, and for having given up only reluctantly the town revenues derived from the peasants’ feudal dues. The Margrave had sixteen of them beheaded, Menzingen, naturally, at their head. — The Bishop of Würzburg traversed his territory in the same manner, plundering, devastating and burning everywhere. On his triumphal progress he had 256 rebels executed and crowned his work, on his return to Würzburg, by the beheading of a further thirteen Würzburg citizens.

In the territories of Mainz the governor, Bishop Wilhelm of Strassburg, restored order without resistance. He had only four put to death. The Rheingau, which had also been agitated but where everyone had long since gone home, was afterwards fallen upon by Frowin von Hutten, Ulrich’s cousin, and completely “pacified” by the execution of twelve ringleaders. Frankfurt, which had likewise experienced considerable revolutionary movements, had been kept in check at first by the council’s compliance and later by hired troops. In the Rhenish Palatinate some 8,000 peasants had again banded together since the Elector’s breach of the treaty and had burned monasteries and castles anew; but the Archbishop of Trier came to the help of Marshal von Habern and defeated them as early as 23 May at Pfedersheim. A series of atrocities (82 were executed in Pfedersheim alone) and the capture of Weissenburg on 7 July ended the uprising there.

Of all the bands, only two now remained to be defeated: the Hegau-Black Forest peasants and the Allgäu peasants. Archduke Ferdinand had intrigued with both. Just as Margrave Casimir and other princes used the uprising for the appropriation of ecclesiastical lands and principalities, so he sought to use it to enlarge the power of the House of Austria. He had negotiated with the Allgäu captain Walter Bach and with the Hegau leader Hans Müller

had negotiated to bring the peasants to declare for union with Austria, but although both leaders were venal, they could achieve nothing more with the bands than that the Allgäuers concluded an armistice with the Archduke and observed neutrality towards Austria.

On their retreat from Württemberg territory, the Hegauers had destroyed a number of castles and had drawn reinforcements to themselves from the margravial Baden lands. They marched against Freiburg on 13 May, bombarded it from the 18th, and entered it on the 23rd, after the town had capitulated, with colours flying. From there they advanced against Stockach and Radolfzell, and waged a long, unsuccessful petty war against the garrisons of these towns. The latter, as well as the nobility and the surrounding towns, by virtue of the Treaty of Weingarten, called upon the Lake peasants for help, and the former rebels of the Lake band rose up, 5,000 strong, against their allies. So great was the local narrow-mindedness of these peasants. Only 600 refused, wanting to join the Hegauers, and were massacred. The Hegauers, however, prompted by Hans Müller von Bulgenbach, who had been bought off, had already raised the siege and, when Hans Müller fled shortly afterwards, had mostly dispersed. The remnant entrenched themselves on the Hilzingen escarpment, where they were defeated and annihilated on 16 July by the troops that had in the meantime become available. The Swiss towns mediated a treaty for the Hegauers, which, however, did not prevent Hans Müller from being arrested at Laufenburg and beheaded, despite his treachery. In the Breisgau, Freiburg too now fell away from the peasant league (17 July) and sent troops against them; yet here too, given the weakness of the princely forces, a treaty was concluded at Offenburg on 18 September, which also included the Sundgau. The eight unions of the Black Forest and the Klettgauers, who were not yet disarmed, were once again driven to insurrection by the tyranny of Count von Sulz, and were defeated in October. On 13 November the Black Forest peasants were forced into a treaty, and on 6 December Waldshut, the last bulwark of the insurrection on the Upper Rhine, fell.

Since the withdrawal of the Truchsess, the Allgäuers had resumed their campaign against monasteries and castles, and exerted energetic reprisals for the devastations committed by the League's troops. They had few troops facing them, who only undertook isolated small raids, but could never follow them into the forests. In June, a movement against the patriciate broke out in Memmingen, which had remained fairly neutral; it was suppressed only through the accidental proximity of some League troops, who were able to come to the aid of the patriciate just in time. Schappeler, the preacher and leader of the plebeian movement, escaped to St. Gallen. The peasants now advanced on the town and were just about to begin the breaching fire when they learned that the Truchsess was approaching from Würzburg. On 27 June they marched to meet him in two columns, via Babenhausen and Obergünzburg. Archduke Ferdinand once again tried to win the peasants over to the House of Austria. Relying on the armistice he had concluded with them, he called upon the Truchsess not to advance further against them. The Swabian League, however, ordered him to attack them, forbidding only burning and laying waste; the Truchsess, however, was far too clever to renounce his first and most decisive means of warfare, even had it been possible for him to hold in check the Landsknechte who had been led from excess to excess all the way from Lake Constance to the Main. The peasants took up position behind the Iller and Leubas, some 23,000 strong. The Truchsess stood opposite their front with 11,000 men. The positions of both armies were strong; the cavalry could not operate on the terrain that lay before them; and if the Truchsess's Landsknechte were superior to the peasants in organisation, military resources and discipline, the Allgäuers counted a number of veteran soldiers and experienced captains in their ranks and had numerous, well-served cannon. On 19 July the League's forces opened a cannonade, which was continued by both sides on the 20th, but without result. On 21 July, Georg von Frundsberg joined the Truchsess with 300 Landsknechte. He knew many of the peasant captains who had served under him in the Italian campaigns, and he entered into negotiations with them. Treachery succeeded where military resources were insufficient. Walter Bach, several other captains, and master gunners allowed themselves to be bought. They had the entire powder supply of the peasants set on fire and moved the band to attempt an outflanking manoeuvre. But no sooner had they left their strong position than they fell into the ambush that the Truchsess, by arrangement with Bach and the other traitors, had laid for them. They were all the less able to defend themselves as their captains, the traitors, had left them under the pretext of a reconnaissance and were already on their way to Switzerland. Two of the peasant columns were thus completely dispersed; the third, under Knopf of Leubas, was still able to withdraw in order. She took up position again on the Kohlenberg near Kempten, where the Truchsess surrounded her. Here, too, he did not dare to attack; he cut off her supplies and sought to demoralise her by having some 200 villages in the vicinity burned down. Hunger and the sight of their burning homes finally brought the peasants to surrender (25 July). More than twenty were executed on the spot. Knopf of Leubas, the only leader of this band who had not betrayed his flag, escaped to Bregenz; but here he was arrested and, after a long imprisonment, hanged.

With this, the Swabian-Franconian Peasant War was at an end.

VI.

Immediately upon the outbreak of the first movements in Swabia, Thomas Müntzer had hastened back to Thuringia, and from the end of February or the beginning of March had taken up his abode in the free imperial city of Mühlhausen, where his party was strongest. He held the threads of the entire movement in his hands; he knew what general storm was about to break out in southern Germany, and had undertaken to transform Thuringia into the centre of the movement for northern Germany. He found a most fertile soil. Thuringia itself, the chief seat of the Reformation movement, was stirred to the highest degree; and the material distress of the oppressed peasants, no less than the circulating revolutionary religious and political doctrines, had also prepared the neighbouring lands—Hesse, Saxony, and the Harz region—for a general uprising. In Mühlhausen especially, the whole mass of the petty bourgeoisie had been won over to the extreme Müntzer tendency, and could scarcely await the moment when they could make their numerical superiority felt against the haughty patriciate. In order not to anticipate the right moment, Müntzer himself had to act soothingly; but his disciple Pfeifer, who directed the movement there, had already compromised himself so far that he could not hold back the outbreak, and already on 17 March 1525, even before the general uprising in southern Germany, Mühlhausen made its revolution. The old patrician council was overthrown, and the government placed in the hands of the newly elected “Eternal Council”, whose president was Müntzer.

The worst thing that can befall the leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to assume the government at an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the rule of the class he represents, and for the implementation of the measures that the rule of that class requires. What he can do depends not on his will, but on the level to which the antagonism of the various classes has been driven, and on the degree of development of the material conditions of existence, of the relations of production and exchange, upon which the given degree of development of the class antagonisms always rests. What he ought to do, what his own party demands of him, again does not depend on him, nor yet on the degree of development of the class struggle and its conditions; he is bound by his previous doctrines and demands, which again proceed not from the momentary position of the social classes towards one another and from the momentary, more or less accidental state of the relations of production and exchange, but from his greater or lesser insight into the general results of the industrial and political movement. He thus finds himself necessarily caught in an insoluble dilemma: what he can do contradicts his whole previous conduct, his principles, and the immediate interests of his party; and what he ought to do cannot be carried through. In a word, he is compelled to represent, not his party, his class, but the class for whose rule the movement is just ripe. In the interest of the movement itself, he must carry through the interests of a class alien to him, and fob off his own class with phrases and promises, with the protestation that the interests of that alien class are their own interests. Whoever falls into this false position is irretrievably lost. Even in the most recent period we have witnessed examples of this; we need only recall the position taken by the representatives of the proletariat in the last French provisional government, although they themselves represented only a very subordinate level of development of the proletariat. Whoever, after the experiences of the February government—not to speak of our noble German provisional governments and imperial regencies—can still speculate on holding official office must either be boundlessly narrow-minded or belong to the extreme revolutionary party in phrase alone.

The position of Müntzer at the head of the Eternal Council of Mühlhausen was, however, far more hazardous than that of any modern revolutionary regent. Not only the movement of the time, but his whole century, was not ripe for the realisation of the ideas that he himself had only just begun to darkly divine. The class he represented, far from being fully developed and capable of subjugating the whole of society, was itself only just coming into being. The social revolution that hovered before his imagination was still so little grounded in the existing material conditions that these very conditions were even preparing a social order that was the exact opposite of the social order of his dreams. Yet he remained bound by his previous sermons on Christian equality and evangelical community of goods; he had at least to make the attempt at their realisation. Community of all goods, equal obligation of all to labour, and the abolition of all authority were proclaimed. In reality, however, Mühlhausen remained a republican imperial city with a somewhat democratic constitution, with a senate elected by universal suffrage, standing under the control of the forum, and with a hastily improvised system of poor relief in kind. The social upheaval that seemed so horrible to the Protestant bourgeois contemporaries never, in fact, went beyond a feeble and unconscious attempt hastily to establish the later bourgeois society.

Münzer himself seems to have felt the yawning gulf between his theories and the immediately given reality, a gulf that could remain hidden from him all the less, the more distortedly his brilliant views were bound to be reflected in the crude heads of the mass of his followers. He threw himself, with an eagerness unheard of even in him, into the propagation and organisation of the movement; he wrote letters and sent messengers and emissaries out in all directions. His writings and sermons breathe a revolutionary fanaticism that is astonishing even by comparison with his earlier writings. The naïve, youthful humour of Münzer’s pre-revolutionary pamphlets has completely vanished; the calm, developing language of the thinker, which was not unfamiliar to him earlier, no longer appears. Münzer is now entirely a revolutionary prophet; he ceaselessly fans the hatred against the ruling classes, he goads the wildest passions, and speaks only in those violent turns of phrase which religious and national delirium put into the mouths of the Old Testament prophets. One can see from the style into which he now had to work himself at what level of education the public stood upon which he had to act.

The example of Mühlhausen and Münzer’s agitation rapidly had an effect far and wide. In Thuringia, the Eichsfeld, the Harz, the Saxon duchies, Hesse and Fulda, Upper Franconia and the Vogtland, peasants everywhere rose up, assembled in bands, and burned castles and monasteries. Münzer was more or less recognised as the leader of the whole movement, and Mühlhausen remained its central point, while in Erfurt a purely bourgeois movement won the day, and the party ruling there constantly maintained an ambiguous attitude towards the peasants.

The princes in Thuringia were at first just as helpless and powerless in the face of the peasants as in Franconia and Swabia. It was only in the last days of April that the Landgrave of Hesse succeeded in assembling a corps — the same Landgrave Philip of whose piety the Protestant and bourgeois histories of the Reformation have so much to say, and of whose infamies against the peasants we shall immediately hear a small word. The Landgrave Philip, by a few rapid moves and resolute demeanour, soon subjugated the largest part of his territory, called up new levies, and then turned into the territory of the Abbot of Fulda, his feudal superior up to that time. He defeated the Fulda peasant band on 3 May at the Frauenberg, subdued the whole region, and used the opportunity not only to free himself from the Abbot’s suzerainty, but even to convert the Abbey of Fulda into a Hessian fief — subject, of course, to its later secularisation. Then he took Eisenach and Langensalza, and, united with the ducal Saxon troops, marched against the main centre of the rebellion, against Mühlhausen.

Münzer assembled his forces, some 8,000 men with a few pieces of artillery, near Frankenhausen. The Thuringian band was far from possessing the striking power which part of the Upper Swabian and Franconian bands developed against the Truchsess; it was poorly armed and poorly disciplined, had few seasoned soldiers, and lacked leaders of any kind. Münzer himself evidently possessed not the slightest military knowledge. Nevertheless, the princes deemed it appropriate to apply here too the tactic which had so often helped the Truchsess to victory: breach of faith. On 16 May they initiated negotiations, concluded an armistice, and then suddenly fell upon the peasants before the truce had expired.

Münzer stood with his men on the hill still called the Schlachtberg, entrenched behind a wagenburg. Dejection among the band was already rapidly growing. The princes promised an amnesty if the band would deliver Münzer to them alive. Münzer had a circle formed and the princes’ offers debated. A knight and a priest spoke in favour of capitulation; Münzer had both of them led immediately into the circle and beheaded. This act of terrorist energy, received with jubilation by the resolute revolutionaries, brought the band back to some steadiness; but in the end it would still largely have dispersed without resistance had it not been noticed that the princely Landsknechte, after surrounding the entire hill, were advancing in close columns in spite of the armistice. The front was quickly formed behind the waggons, but already the cannonballs and bullets were striking into the half-defenceless, battle-unaccustomed peasants, and already the Landsknechte had reached the wagenburg. After brief resistance the line of waggons was broken through, the peasants’ cannon were captured, and they themselves routed. They fled in wild disorder, only to fall all the more surely into the hands of the encircling columns and the cavalry, who inflicted an appalling bloodbath upon them. Of eight thousand peasants, over five thousand were cut down; the rest got into Frankenhausen, and with them the princely horsemen. The town was taken. Münzer, wounded in the head, was discovered in a house and taken prisoner. On 25 May Mühlhausen also surrendered; Pfeifer, who had stayed behind there, escaped but was arrested in the Eisenach region.

Münzer was put to the rack in the presence of the princes and then beheaded. He went to the place of execution with the same courage with which he had lived. He was at most twenty-eight years old when he was executed. Pfeifer, too, was beheaded; and besides these two, countless others. In Fulda the man of God, Philip of Hesse, had begun his blood tribunal; he and the Saxon princes, among others, had 24 rebels executed by the sword in Eisenach, 41 in Langensalza, 300 after the Battle of Frankenhausen, over 100 in Mühlhausen, 26 at Görmar, 50 at Tüngeda, 12 at Sangerhausen, 8 in Leipzig — to say nothing of mutilations and other milder means, of plunderings and burnings of villages and towns.

Mühlhausen had to surrender its imperial freedom and was incorporated into the Saxon lands, just as the Abbey of Fulda was into the Landgraviate of Hesse.

The princes now crossed the Thuringian Forest, where Franconian peasants from the Bildhausen camp had joined forces with the Thuringians and burned many castles. A battle took place before Meiningen; the peasants were defeated and withdrew to the town. The town suddenly shut its gates and threatened to attack them in the rear. The band, hard-pressed by this betrayal by its allies, capitulated to the princes and dispersed while the negotiations were still in progress. The Bildhausen camp had long since scattered, and with the break-up of this band the last remnant of the insurgents from Saxony, Hesse, Thuringia and Upper Franconia was annihilated.

In Alsace the uprising broke out later than on the right bank of the Rhine. Only towards the middle of April did the peasants rise in the Bishopric of Strasbourg, and soon after them the Upper Alsatians and Sundgauers. On 18 April a Lower Alsatian peasant band plundered the monastery of Altdorf; other bands formed near Ebersheim and Barr, as well as in the Willer Valley and the Urbis Valley. They soon concentrated into the great Lower Alsatian band, and organised the taking of towns and market towns, as well as the destruction of monasteries. Everywhere, every third man was called up for the army. The Twelve Articles of this band are considerably more radical than the Swabian-Franconian ones.

While one column of the Lower Alsatians concentrated at the beginning of May near St Hippolyte, and after a vain attempt to win this town, gained possession of Bergheim on 10 May, Rappoltsweiler on 13 May, and Reichenweier on 14 May through an understanding with the citizens, a second column under Erasmus Gerber set out to take Strasbourg by surprise. The attempt failed; the column now turned towards the Vosges, destroyed the monastery of Maursmünster, and besieged Zabern, which surrendered on 13 May. From here it moved to the Lorraine frontier and raised the adjacent part of the duchy in insurrection, while at the same time entrenching the mountain passes. Large camps were formed at Herbitzheim on the Saar and at Neuburg; at Saargemünd 4,000 German-Lorraine peasants entrenched themselves; finally two advanced bands, the Kolben band in the Vosges near Stürzelbronn, and the Kleeburg band near Weissenburg, covered the front and the right flank, while the left flank leant on the Upper Alsatians.

These, in movement since 20 April, had on 10 May forced Sulz, on 12 May Gebweiler, on 15 May Sennheim and the surrounding area into fraternisation with the peasants. The Austrian government and the surrounding imperial cities promptly allied themselves against them, but were too weak to offer them serious resistance, let alone to attack them. Thus, with the exception of a few towns, by the middle of May the whole of Alsace was in the hands of the insurgents.

But the army was already approaching that was to break the insolent audacity of the Alsatian peasants. It was Frenchmen who here carried out the restoration of noble rule. Duke Anton of Lorraine had already set himself in motion on 6 May with an army of 30,000 men, including the flower of the French nobility, and Spanish, Piedmontese, Lombard, Greek and Albanian auxiliary troops. On 16 May he encountered 4,000 peasants at Lupstein, whom he defeated without difficulty, and already on the 17th he forced Zabern, occupied by the peasants, to capitulate. But even during the entry of the Lorrainers into the town and the disarming of the peasants, the capitulation was broken; the defenceless peasants were fallen upon by the Landsknechte and for the most part massacred. The remaining Lower Alsatian columns dispersed, and Duke Anton now marched against the Upper Alsatians. The latter, who had refused to move to Zabern in support of the Lower Alsatians, were now attacked at Scherweiler by the whole might of the Lorrainers. They defended themselves with great bravery, but the enormous superiority of numbers — 30,000 against 7,000 — and the treachery of a number of knights, especially the Vogt of Reichenweier, thwarted all valour. They were completely defeated and scattered. The Duke now pacified the whole of Alsace with customary cruelty. Only the Sundgau remained spared from his presence. The Austrian government there, by threatening to call him into the country, brought its peasants to the conclusion of the Treaty of Ensisheim at the beginning of June. But it promptly broke this treaty itself and had the preachers and leaders of the movement hanged en masse. The peasants then made a fresh uprising, which finally ended with the Sundgau peasants being included in the Treaty of Offenburg (18 September).

It remains for us now to report on the Peasant War in the Austrian Alpine lands. These regions, as well as the adjoining Archbishopric of Salzburg, had been in continuous opposition to government and nobility since the *stara prawa*, and the reformed doctrines had also found favourable ground here. Religious persecutions and arbitrary tax oppressions here too brought the uprising to the point of eruption.

The town of Salzburg, supported by the peasants and miners, had been in conflict with the archbishop since 1522 over its municipal privileges and the exercise of religion. At the end of 1524 the archbishop fell upon the town with hired Landsknechte, terrorised it with the cannon of the castle, and persecuted the heretical preachers. At the same time, he imposed new, oppressive taxes and thereby provoked the entire population to the utmost. In the spring of 1525, simultaneously with the Swabian-Franconian and Thuringian insurrection, the peasants and miners of the whole region rose up suddenly, organised themselves in bands under the captains Praßler and Weitmoser, freed the town, and besieged the castle of Salzburg. Like the West German peasants, they formed a Christian league and drew up their demands in articles, of which there were here fourteen.

In Styria, Upper Austria, Carinthia and Carniola, too, where new illegal taxes, tolls and ordinances had severely injured the people in their most immediate interests, the peasants rose up in the spring of 1525. They took a number of castles and defeated the conqueror of the stara prawa, the old field captain Dietrichstein, near Gayssern. Although the government succeeded in calming a part of the insurgents with its delusive promises, the mass remained together and united with the Salzburgers, so that the whole of the Salzburg region and the greater part of Upper Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola was in the hands of the peasants and miners.

In Tyrol, too, the reformed doctrines had found a large following; here, even more than in the other Austrian Alpine lands, Münzer’s emissaries had been active with success. Archduke Ferdinand persecuted the preachers of the new doctrine here as well, and also encroached upon the prerogatives of the population by new, arbitrary financial regulations. The result, as everywhere, was the uprising in the spring of the same year 1525. The insurgents, whose supreme captain was a Münzerian, Geismaier, the only significant military talent among all the peasant chieftains, took a number of castles and proceeded, especially in the south, in the Etsch region, very energetically against the priests. The Vorarlbergers also rose up and joined the Allgäu peasants.

The archduke, hard-pressed from all sides, made concession after concession to the rebels, whom he had shortly before wanted to exterminate by fire and sword, plundering and murder. He convoked the diets of the hereditary lands and concluded an armistice with the peasants until their assembly. In the meantime, he armed with all his might in order to be able to speak a different language to the malefactors as soon as possible.

Naturally, the armistice was not kept for long. In the duchies, Dietrichstein, running out of money, began to levy contributions by force. His Slav and Magyar troops, moreover, permitted themselves the most shameless cruelties against the population. The Styrians therefore rose up again, fell upon the field captain Dietrichstein in Schladming during the night of 2–3 July, and cut down everything that did not speak German. Dietrichstein himself was captured; on the morning of the 3rd, the peasants set up a jury court and condemned 40 Czech and Croatian nobles from among the prisoners to death. They were immediately beheaded. That had an effect; the archduke forthwith approved all the demands of the Estates of the five duchies (Upper and Lower Austria, Styria, Carinthia and Carniola).

In Tyrol, too, the demands of the diet were granted and the north thereby pacified. The south, however, persisting in its original demands as against the watered-down diet resolutions, remained under arms. It was not until December that the archduke was able to restore order here by force. He did not fail to have a large number of the instigators and leaders of the rebellion who had fallen into his hands executed.

Now, in August, 10,000 Bavarians under Georg von Frundsberg moved against Salzburg. This imposing force, together with dissensions that had broken out among the peasants, induced the Salzburgers to conclude a treaty with the archbishop, which was concluded on 1 September and accepted also by the archduke. The two princes, however, who had meanwhile sufficiently reinforced their troops, very soon broke this treaty and thereby drove the Salzburg peasants to a renewed uprising. The insurgents held out over the winter; in the spring Geismaier came to them and opened a brilliant campaign against the troops advancing from all sides. In a series of brilliant engagements—in May and June 1526—he successively defeated Bavarians, Austrians, Swabian League troops and archiepiscopal Salzburg Landsknechte, and for a long time prevented the various corps from uniting. In between, he still found time to besiege Radstadt. Finally, surrounded on all sides by superior forces, he was obliged to withdraw at last, fought his way through and led the remnants of his corps right through the Austrian Alps into Venetian territory. The Republic of Venice and Switzerland offered the indefatigable peasant chieftain starting points for new intrigues; for another year he tried to entangle them in a war against Austria, which was to give him the opportunity for a new peasant uprising. But during these negotiations, the hand of a murderer reached him; Archduke Ferdinand and the Salzburg archbishop were not easy as long as Geismaier was alive: they paid a bandit, and he succeeded in eliminating the dangerous rebel in 1527.

VII.

With Geismaier’s retreat onto Venetian territory, the last epilogue of the Peasant War had reached its end. The peasants were everywhere brought back under the subjection of their ecclesiastical, noble or patrician masters; the treaties that had been concluded with them here and there were broken, the previous burdens were increased by the enormous contributions levied by the victors upon the vanquished. The most magnificent revolutionary attempt of the German people ended in ignominious defeat and, for the moment, redoubled oppression. In the long run, however, the situation of the peasant class did not worsen through the suppression of the uprising. What the nobility, the princes and the priests could wring out of them year in, year out, had been securely wrung out even before the war; the German peasant of that time had this in common with the modern proletarian, that his share of the products of his labour was limited to the minimum of means of subsistence required for his maintenance and the propagation of the peasant race. On average, therefore, there was nothing more to be taken here. Some more well-to-do middle peasants were, of course, ruined; a multitude of bondsmen were forced down into serfdom; whole stretches of common lands were confiscated; a large number of peasants were thrown into vagabondage or among the plebeians of the towns by the destruction of their dwellings and the devastation of their fields, as well as by the general disorder. But wars and devastations were among the everyday phenomena of that time, and in general the peasant class stood too low for a lasting deterioration of its position through increased taxes. The subsequent wars of religion and finally the Thirty Years’ War, with its constantly repeated, massive devastations and depopulations, hit the peasants far harder than the Peasant War; in particular, the Thirty Years’ War destroyed the most significant part of the productive forces employed in agriculture, and thereby, and through the simultaneous destruction of many towns, degraded the peasants, plebeians and ruined burghers for a long time to the level of Irish misery in its worst form.

The ones who suffered most from the consequences of the Peasant War were the clergy. Their monasteries and foundations had been burned, their treasures plundered, sold abroad or melted down, their supplies consumed. They had everywhere been able to offer the least resistance, and at the same time the whole weight of the people’s hatred had fallen most heavily upon them. The other estates, princes, nobility and burghers, even took a secret pleasure in the distress of the hated prelates. The Peasant War had made the secularisation of ecclesiastical property in favour of the peasants popular; the secular princes and, in part, the towns set about carrying out this secularisation to their own advantage, and soon in the Protestant countries the holdings of the prelates were in the hands of the princes or of the patricians. But the rule of the ecclesiastical princes had also been attacked, and the secular princes understood how to exploit the people’s hatred in this direction as well. Thus we have seen how the Abbot of Fulda was degraded from liege lord to servant of Philipp of Hesse. Thus the town of Kempten compelled the prince-abbot to sell it a series of valuable privileges that he possessed in the town for a ridiculously low price.

The nobility had also suffered considerably. Most of its castles were destroyed, a number of the most respected families were ruined and could find an existence only in the service of the princes. Its powerlessness vis-à-vis the peasants had been demonstrated; it had been beaten everywhere and forced to capitulate; only the armies of the princes had saved it. It had to lose more and more its significance as an estate directly under the Empire and fall under the subjection of the princes.

The towns, on the whole, also gained no advantage from the Peasant War. The rule of the patricians was almost everywhere re-established; the opposition of the burghers remained broken for a long time. The old patrician routine dragged on in this way, fettering trade and industry on all sides, right down to the French Revolution. The towns were, moreover, held responsible by the princes for the momentary successes that the burgher or plebeian party had won within their midst during the struggle. Towns that had already earlier belonged to the territories of the princes were heavily levied upon, robbed of their privileges, and, defenceless, subjugated under the rapacious arbitrariness of the princes (Frankenhausen, Arnstadt, Schmalkalden, Würzburg etc., etc.), incorporated into princely territories (e.g. Mühlhausen), or at least brought into moral dependence on neighbouring princes, like many Franconian imperial towns.

Those who alone derived advantage from the outcome of the Peasant War under these circumstances were the princes. We saw at the very beginning of our account how the defective industrial, commercial and agricultural development of Germany made any centralisation of the Germans into a nation impossible, how it permitted only a local and provincial centralisation, and how therefore the representatives of this centralisation within the fragmentation, the princes, formed the only estate to which every alteration of the existing social and political conditions was bound to redound. The degree of development of the Germany of that time was so low, and at the same time so uneven in the different provinces, that alongside the secular principalities ecclesiastical sovereign territories, urban republics, and sovereign counts and barons could still exist; but at the same time this development was pressing, albeit very slowly and feebly, towards provincial centralisation, i.e. towards the subordination of the remaining imperial estates under the princes. Therefore at the end of the Peasant War only the princes could have gained. So it was in fact. They gained not only relatively, in that their rivals, the clergy, the nobility, the towns, were weakened; they also gained absolutely, in that they carried off the *spolia opima* from all the other estates. The ecclesiastical estates were secularised to their advantage; a part of the nobility, half or completely ruined, had gradually to submit to their suzerainty; the money extorted from the towns and peasant communes flowed into their treasuries, which, moreover, through the abolition of so many urban privileges gained far freer scope for its favourite financial operations.

The fragmentation of Germany, whose intensification and consolidation was the main result of the Peasant War, was at the same time the cause of its failure.

We have seen how Germany was fragmented, not only into countless independent provinces almost totally alien to one another, but also how in each of these provinces the nation fell apart into a manifold articulation of estates and estate fractions. Besides princes and priests we find nobility and peasants in the countryside, patricians, burghers and plebeians in the towns – all estates whose interests were totally alien to one another if they did not cross and run counter to one another. Over and above all these complicated interests, moreover, those of the emperor and the pope. We have seen how clumsily, incompletely and, according to locality, unevenly these different interests finally formed themselves into three large groups; how despite this laborious grouping each estate opposed the direction given to national development by the conditions, made its movement on its own account, thereby came into collision not only with all conservative but also with all other opposing estates and was finally bound to succumb. Thus the nobility in Sickingen’s revolt, the peasants in the Peasant War, the burghers in their whole tame Reformation. Thus even peasants and plebeians in most parts of Germany did not arrive at common action and stood in each other’s way. We have also seen what causes gave rise to this fragmentation of the class struggle and the complete defeat of the revolutionary, and the half-defeat of the burgher movement resulting from it.

How the local and provincial fragmentation, and the local and provincial narrow-mindedness necessarily arising from it, ruined the whole movement; how neither the burghers, nor the peasants, nor the plebeians arrived at a concentrated, national appearance; how the peasants, for example, in every province acted on their own account, constantly refused help to the neighbouring insurgent peasants and were therefore worn down one after another in individual engagements by armies which mostly did not amount to a tenth of the total insurgent mass – this will surely be clear to everyone from the preceding account. The various truces and treaties of the individual bands with their opponents constitute just so many acts of betrayal of the common cause, and the only possible grouping of the different bands, not according to the greater or lesser community of their own action but according to the community of the specific opponent they succumbed to, is the most striking proof of the degree of estrangement of the peasants of different provinces towards one another.

Here again the analogy with the movement of 1848–50 presents itself spontaneously. In 1848 too the interests of the oppositional classes collided with one another, each acted for itself. The bourgeoisie, too far developed to be able to put up with the feudal-bureaucratic absolutism any longer, was not yet powerful enough to be able to immediately subordinate the claims of other classes to its own. The proletariat, much too weak to be able to count on a rapid skipping over of the bourgeois period and on its own early conquest of power, had already come to know the sweets of the bourgeois regime too well under absolutism and was altogether too developed to be able to see its own emancipation in the emancipation of the bourgeoisie even for a moment. The mass of the nation, petty bourgeois, petty-bourgeois associates (artisans) and peasants, was abandoned by its initially still natural ally, the bourgeoisie, as already too revolutionary, and in places by the proletariat, as not yet advanced enough; divided among itself again, it too achieved nothing, and opposed its fellow-opponents left and right. Finally, the local narrow-mindedness can have been no greater among the peasants in 1525 than it was among all the classes involved in the movement in 1848. The hundred local revolutions, the hundred local reactions carried out just as unhindered attaching themselves to them, the maintenance of petty-statehood, etc., etc., are proofs that speak loudly enough indeed. Whoever after the two German revolutions of 1525 and 1848 and their results can still drivel about a federal republic deserves nowhere else but the madhouse.

But the two revolutions, that of the sixteenth century and that of 1848–50, are, in spite of all analogies, very essentially different from one another. The revolution of 1848 proves, if not the progress of Germany, yet the progress of Europe.

Who profited by the revolution of 1525? The princes. – Who profited by the revolution of 1848? The great princes, Austria and Prussia. Behind the small princes of 1525 stood, chaining them to themselves through taxation, the petty philistines; behind the great princes of 1850, behind Austria and Prussia, rapidly subjugating them through the state debt, stand the modern big bourgeois. And behind the big bourgeois stand the proletarians.

The revolution of 1525 was a German local affair. Englishmen, Frenchmen, Bohemians, Hungarians, had already gone through their peasant wars when the Germans fought theirs. If Germany was already fragmented, Europe was so far more. The revolution of 1848 was no German local affair, it was a single piece of a great European event. Its driving causes, throughout its whole course, are not compressed into the narrow space of a single country, not even into that of a continent. Indeed, the countries that were the theatre of this revolution are precisely the ones least involved in its generation. They are more or less conscious and will-less raw materials that are remoulded in the course of a movement in which the whole world now takes part, a movement that under the existing social conditions can indeed appear to us only as a power alien to us, although in the end it is only our own movement. The revolution of 1848 to 1850 can therefore not end like that of 1525.

Friedrich Engels.