The Peasant War in Germany

Notes

First appended to the Russian edition of 1926

1. Wilhelm Zimmermann – German historian and poet. Born January 2, 1807, in Stuttgart, in the family of an artisan. Graduated gymnasium in Stuttgart, studied in the University of Tuebingen together with F. Strauss. Was first pastor, then professor in the Polytechnic School of Stuttgart, occupying the chair of history, German language and literature. On April 23, 1848, he was elected representative of the National Assembly (Frankfurt). In St. Paul’s Cathedral he joined the extreme left group of representatives. In 1850, he was deprived of the University chair for actively participating in the March revolution. In 1854, he renewed his activities as pastor in Zabergau. He died September 22, 1888.

As a historian, Wilhelm Zimmermann is known by his book, The History of the Great Peasant War (1841, 2nd ed., 1856, 3rd ed., 1891). Zimmermann left a series of works on history, history of literature, and poetry: The History of the Hohenstaufens (2nd ed., 1865), Illustrated History of the German People, History of Poetry of All Nations (1947), etc.

The History of the Great Peasant War, Zimmermann’s chief historic work, was written with astonishing mastery and objectivity. The author utilised documents and materials mainly of the Stuttgart archive. Generally speaking, Zimmermann’s work remains the fullest presentation of the facts relating to the Peasant War. The objectivity of his presentation and “the revolutionary instinct which makes him an advocate of the oppressed classes” gives the book a special interest. But even in this book the radical bourgeois makes himself felt. Zimmermann’s negative attitude toward socialism and communism does not allow him correctly to appreciate the conflict of classes in the history of the peasant wars.

Kautsky’s book, Forerunners of Socialism, supplements that of Engels and corrects some inaccuracies in his presentation. The excerpts from Muenzer’s speech which are quoted by Engels as parts of the sermon given before the princes of Saxony after the destruction by the people of St. Mary’s Chapel in Moellerbach, were written by Muenzer on an entirely different occasion in a polemic work against Luther. Engels here depends on Zimmermann.

Kautsky corrected Zimmermann in another more important question. Zimmermann depicts Muenzer as a man towering above his epoch. In his book, Kautsky proved this standpoint to be unfounded:

“Muenzer was superior to his communist followers, not by philosophical gifts and organisational talents, but by his revolutionary energy, and, first of all, by his statesmanlike mind.”

Even some of the facts in the history of Muenzer’s dictatorship in Muehlhausen, as given by Engels, need correction in some details. Muenzer was not at the head of the Muehlhausen council. Pfeifer was not his disciple, but a representative of a middle-class faction.

2. Louis XI – King of France, son of Charles VII. Born 1423, reigned 1461–1483. He founded the absolute monarchy on the ruins of feudalism in France, and extended the boundaries of his country to the Jura, the Alps, and the Pyrenees. In his youth, as dauphin, Louis participated in the uprising of the nobility against Charles VII. Having ascended the throne after the death of his father, he started a fight against the feudal lords but was opposed by the Common Welfare League which united the big and small feudal lords of France. In his wars against the League, Louis, instead of using the crude methods of feudal policies, practised not only force but cunning, a diplomatic system of lies, deception and caution. Louis XI was defeated and compelled to sign a peace pact with the feudal lords on October 29, 1461. But peace with the feudal lords was not achieved. Aided by the commercial class, he started a new war in November, 1470. All of western France rose against him, but this time he was victorious. In order to be able more successfully to oppose the feudal lords, Louis XI decided to reform the army by freeing the cities from military duties, and to create an army of 50,000. His infantry consisted of Swiss hirelings. In 1481, he added Provence and Liége to his domains and subdued the whole of France outside of Navarre and the duchy of Breton. The absolute power of Louis XI could establish itself in France only through the support of the commercial elements. Louis XI in his turn protected commerce, industry and agriculture. Under his reign the old institution of the Roman empire, the mail, was restored.

3. Carolina – A criminal code of the Sixteenth Century, published in 1532 under Emperor Charles V. In the Sixteenth Century, Germany counted over 300 states, each having its own criminal laws with its own methods of cruelty. Justice at that time aimed at extorting a confession from the prisoner by means of torture. The prevailing Roman law, in the hands of the princes, was a cruel tool for the exploitation of the people. The development of a money economy, however, and the growth of absolutism, demanded a uniform criminal legislation and a reform of the existing laws. Attempts at reform had been made in Germany as early as the end of the Fifteenth and the beginning of the Sixteenth Century. The Reichstag, meeting in Augsburg and Regensburg in 1532, finally adopted a draft of a criminal code known as Carolina (‘Emperor Charles V’s and the Holy Roman Empire’s order of Penal Law’). This code did not abolish the Roman law, but was an attempt only to combine the prevailing Roman with the local law. Neither did the Carolina abolish the codes of the separate states, the new code serving only as a sort of guide for the princes and electors. The new code brought insignificant changes in the court procedure. It mitigated the inquisitional order of investigation and defined the right of defense. But torture as a means of examination of the defendant was retained in the new code. The chapters concerning the ‘cutting of ears,’ ‘cutting of noses,’ ‘burning,’ ‘quartering,’ adorned the new code as well. The code retained its great importance, however, up to the Eighteenth Century.

4. Waldenses – A religious sect which sprang up in the cities of southern France in the middle of the Twelfth Century. The cities of northern Italy and southern France of that time represented very favourable ground for the development of a religious reformist movement. Commerce and industry had developed here earlier than in the west; the bourgeoisie had come into existence, the crafts flourished. But while the cities of northern Italy, which were partly interested in the exploitation of Rome, since they derived from it no small profits, began to show spiritual independence only in relation to the doctrines of the Catholic Church, the cities of southern France, which were no less developed economically but at the same time less dependent upon Rome, started the first serious upheaval against the pope’s domination.

According to the legend, the sect of the Waldenses was founded by a rich merchant of Lyons called Petrus Waldus. It is possible, however, that it existed prior to that time. Petrus Waldus decided to follow the law of the Gospel. He distributed his possessions among the poor, gathered around himself a considerable number of followers, and began preaching (1176). Soon the Waldenses combined in Lombardy with the sect of the Humiliates, who also called themselves the paupers of Lyons. The Waldenses did not confine their preachings to southern France. We find them also in Italy, Germany and Bohemia. In southern France, as elsewhere, they recruited their followers from among the artisans, particularly the weavers.

Originally, the Waldenses did not plan to secede from the church. But their free reading of the Gospel and their lay preachings, their disagreement with Catholicism in understanding the mysteries of transubstantiation, as well as their militant character, compelled the official authorities, the clergy, to start a campaign of cruel persecution against them. Pope Sixtus IV even declared a crusade against them in 1477. Those persecutions continued down to the Eighteenth Century. In 1685, French and Italian armies killed 3,000 Waldenses and captured 1,000. Only in 1848 did they attain civil rights and religious freedom in Piedmont and Savoy. Italian Waldenses are to be found even at present in the Alpine valleys, Val-Martino, Val-Angrona. The Twentieth Century finds 46 communities of Waldenses with 6,276 parishioners.

The Evangelist communism of the Waldenses in the Middle Ages was of a monklike character. For the ‘perfect’ members of their community they made communism and celibacy obligatory. The ‘disciples,’ however, were allowed to marry and to possess property. The Waldenses rejected military service and the oath. They devoted their attention to the education of the masses. In those communities of the Waldenses where the peasants and the middle-class prevailed, they turned into a bourgeois–democratic sect. Where the proletarian elements prevailed, the Waldenses became communist ‘dreamers.’

5. Arnold of Brescia – Made the first serious attempt to reform the Catholic Church as early as the middle of the Twelfth Century. Arnold of Brescia was born between 1100 and 1110 in Brescia, Italy. A disciple of the theologian and philosopher, Abélard, he adopted his critical attitude towards the religious dogmas and the teachings of the fathers. In 1136, he participated, with his native city, Brescia, in its struggle against its lord, the bishop. Arnold of Brescia strove to bring the clergy back to the real Christianity of the Gospel. He demanded that the clergy should relinquish lay authority and should hand over its possessions to the lay rulers. The clergymen who preached must content themselves with the tithe and voluntary contributions, he said. At the second Lateran church council (1139), the Bishop of Brescia accused him of heresy. Arnold of Brescia was compelled to flee to Paris. In 1146, he returned to Rome, where he participated in the struggle between the city democracy and the pope.

Rome in the middle of the Twelfth Century was a spiritual and political centre whither material wealth was flowing from all sections of the Christian world. The popes ably exploited the favourable situation of the Christian capital. Arnold of Brescia appealed to the people to depose the pope and to restore the ancient Roman republic. Pope Hadrian IV, however, succeeded in expelling him from the city. He was taken prisoner by Emperor Frederick Barbarossa and extradited to the authorities of Rome. He was hanged as a rabid heretic, and his body was burned (1155).

6. The Albigenses – A religious sect of southern France, were widespread in the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries. Their name was derived from the city of Albi in Languedoc, one of the most important centres of the movement. The Albigenses preached apostolic Christianity and simple life according to the Gospel. They were called the ‘good men.’ The pope and the councils of the church claimed that they denied the Trinity doctrine, the Holy Communion and marriage, as well as the doctrine of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. At the council of Toulouse (1119), Pope Calixtus II, and subsequently in 1139 Pope Innocent II, excommunicated them. Finally, in 1209, Pope Innocent III organised a crusade against them. The war covered twenty years.

The stubbornness of the bloody fight against the Albigenses is explained partly by the fact that the Albigenses were aided in their war against the pope by the local feudal lords of southern France. When a papal legate and inquisitor was killed on the territory of Count Raymond VI of Toulouse, Pope Innocent III decided to use this occurrence as the occasion for taking away the lands from Count Raymond, who maintained a tolerant attitude towards the heretics. A struggle ensued between the lords of southern France and the pope, who was supported by the lords of the north. Northern France was in conflict with the south, which being economically more developed, was, therefore, a menace to it. The northern armies were headed by Count Simon de Montfort and papal legates. When the armies of the north took the city of Béziers, they killed 20,000 Albigenses. In the course of the ensuing struggle hundreds of thousands fell. The provinces of Provence and Languedoc were devastated. Peace was concluded only as late as 1229. In consequence of the wars against the Albigenses the wealthy south was destroyed and the territories of the French crown were expanded.

7. John Wycliffe (Born October 1320, died 1384) – An English reformer. One of those ideologists who, even prior to the Reformation (Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries), drew an outline of the coming reforms. John Wycliffe was a professor of Oxford University. Prior to his appearance on the social and political arena, he devoted himself entirely to research work in the fields of physics, logic and philosophy. The Fourteenth Century was an epoch of stubborn fighting between the royal power of England and the pope. The pope exploited England cruelly. In the Thirteenth Century, the English kingdom paid to the pope a yearly tribute of 1,000 pounds of silver. Under Edward III (Fourteenth Century), Parliament complained that the country was paying the pope a sum five times the amount of the taxes paid to the king. The development of industry and commerce increased the resisting power of England. The struggle between Rome and England was deepened by the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (1339–1456). This war affected the interests of all classes of the English people. The governing classes of England sought possession of the treasuries of Netherland, and they also looked with a covetous eye on the riches of the French nobility. The middle-class saw in this war a means of enrichment. The burden of the war fell primarily upon the peasantry. It is not surprising, therefore, that the pope, having become an ally of France, aroused universal hatred in England. In 1336, Parliament abolished the tribute to the pope. Heresies persecuted in Italy and France now spread to England. Wycliffe’s preachings were popular among all the strata of the people. He taught that in case of necessity the State had a right to deprive the Church of its possessions, that power was based upon service, and that consequently only service could justify the levying of taxes and duties by the clergy. In 1374, in disputes with the representatives of the Roman court, Wycliffe disclosed also the abuses of the Roman Church in appointing candidates to ecclesiastical posts in England. He was severely persecuted by the clergy, and only the interference of the court, and the intervention of the university and the cities, saved him.

In his doctrines, Wycliffe never overstepped the boundaries laid down by the ruling classes. He preached poverty and equality in Christ, but only for the clergy. He proposed that their lands should be expropriated; but this was entirely in the interests of the landowners and the king. The relations between man and God, Wycliffe pictured in the image of the feudal relations of his time. Man holds all his possessions, he said, from God. God’s mercy is the condition of this vassalage. Mortal sin deprives man, he preached, of his right to hold possessions by the mercy of God. Therefore, he said, the clergy should have common property, and should submit to civil jurisdiction. The supreme judge of the human conscience, he said, was not the pope, but God.

After the peasant insurrection of 1381, a general sympathy for Wycliffe in his struggle against the pope changed into a hatred on the part of the propertied classes. Oxford University condemned his Twelve Articles, which rejected the doctrine of transubstantiation. Wycliffe died in peace, but his doctrines were cruelly persecuted.

In 1415, the church council at Constance decided to burn his remains.

8. With the name of John Huss is connected the struggle against the Catholic Church in Bohemia, the so-called Hussite movement of the Fifteenth Century. During the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, the Roman Catholic Church had lost its authority among the masses of the people. The Roman pope was, in the eyes of all peoples, an exploiter who deprived them of earthly goods in the name of God and heavenly life. In England, France and Spain, the Church was assuming a national character, severing its relations with Rome. The exception was Germany, which became the object of the avaricious appetite of the pope. If the other countries were in a more favourable condition, if they were earlier in a position to free themselves from under the papal yoke, it is to be explained only by the development of capitalism, the growth of wealth, and the power of the middle-class and the princes. Of all Germany, only Bohemia was, in this respect, in an exceptional situation. Bohemia developed economically in the Fourteenth Century with incredible rapidity because of its silver mines. The Church and the king with his court, as well as the merchants and the artisans, received enormous profits. The pope and the emperor were keenly watching Bohemia lest it free itself from their dependence. Dissatisfaction had begun to gather in the country. The lower nobility, the peasantry and the middle-class were dissatisfied. A price revolution, due to the abundance of silver, caused a general dearth. Besides, the masses of the people in Bohemia were Czechs, while the exploiting upper layer, the lay and ecclesiastical authorities, were Germans. Therefore the class struggle here assumed the character of a religious and national struggle of the Bohemians against the Germans and the pope. In this revolutionary medium, the ideas of the English reformist, Wycliffe, penetrated into Bohemia. Jan Huss was the literary defender and propounder of Wycliffe’s ideas.

Huss was born in 1369, in a well-to-do peasant family. He was professor, and at one time rector, in the then famous Prague University, and also preacher in the Chapel of Bethlehem, where services were held in the Czech language. When the Prague University took a stand against the forty-five theses of Wycliffe, Huss came to their defence (1409). In 1412, Pope John XXIII, being in need of money, organised the sale of indulgences in Prague. Huss came forth with a heated sermon against the corruption of the Church, and demanded the termination of the traffic. He also opposed ‘miracles.’ In a special treatise, Huss proved that true Christians needed no miracles, and that true faith was contained only in the Holy Scriptures. Huss asserted that the Church was only an assembly of the faithful destined for Heaven, whereby he provoked the hatred of the ruling clique, who saw in the Church the dominance of the higher clergy.

On June 6, 1410, the books of Huss were burned, and he was excommunicated. In 1414, the Church council at Constance accused him of heresy, and though Huss declared that he wished to receive guidance and instruction from the princes of the Church as to wherein his opinions differed from the Word of God, he was turned over to the authorities and burned at the stake (June 6, 1415). His ashes were thrown into the Rhine.

9. Hussites (Taborites and Calixtines). The execution of Jan Huss set a revolution afoot in Bohemia. All the classes of the Bohemian people arrayed themselves against the power of the pope – for a church reform, and against the Germans – for national independence. In this nationalist religious struggle the masses of the people revealed their social hatred for the propertied classes. At the beginning, however, all classes of Bohemia acted in unison. The slogan of the struggle was the demand for communion under two forms. The rites of the Catholic Church gave to the layman in communion bread alone, and to the priests bread and wine. The masses rising against the privileges of the Church demanded equality in communion. ‘A chalice for the layman!’ – that was the slogan of the movement. The nobility which joined the movement used this struggle to annex the lands of the Church; and the clergy held no less than one-quarter of the kingdom’s territory. The rich bourgeoisie saw in the Hussite war also a means of gaining more riches from the clergy and the possessions of the German Catholic cities (Kuttenberg, with its famous silver mines was the most desirable of all). The nobility and the rich Bohemian bourgeoisie that joined the Hussite movement formed the moderate party of the Calixtines or Utraquists. Their centre was the city of Prague. Side by side with this moderate movement, however, there existed also a democratic one. Its bulk was formed by the peasants who wished to be free owners of the land, especially after the nobility had appropriated the land of the clergy. The lower middle-class of the cities and the proletarians were with the peasants. They were concentrated in the smaller cities of Bohemia. The democratic elements later began to call themselves Taborites after the name of their military and political centre, the communist city of Tabor. The Hussite movement was now headed by a group of communists.

In 1414, the people drove King Wenceslaus out of Prague, after which heretics began to flow into Bohemia from all parts of Europe.

The Beghards and the Waldenses found in Bohemia a refuge from persecution. The communists fortified themselves in Tabor where they started their propaganda. They declared that the Millennium of Christ had come, that there would be no more servants and masters, and that the people would return to the state of pristine innocence. In various cities, particularly in Tabor, the insurgents began to organise communist centres. Tabor was located in the vicinity of gold mines. Commerce and industry flourished there. When the communists became strong in Tabor they attracted large masses of the people. It is said that one gathering numbered 42,000 (July 22, 1419). The inhabitants of Tabor called each other brother and sister, and recognised no difference between ‘thine’ and ‘mine.’ The Taborites taught that ‘there should be no kings, no masters, no subjects on earth, and that taxes and duties should be abolished.’ According to their doctrine there was to be no coercion, everything was to belong to all, and therefore, they said, he who possesses property commits a mortal sin. This communism, however, was of a Christian nature. It was a communism of consumption, not production. Every family worked for itself, contributing its surplus to the general treasury. There were among the Taborites the most extreme communists, who allowed no concessions, and denied the family. Those ‘brothers and sisters of the free spirit’ called themselves Adamites. The majority of the inhabitants of Tabor and the knights, under the leadership of Zizka, launched a struggle against the Adamites.

The communist community of Tabor was surprisingly well organised. As a military community it alarmed the German princes for a long while. The Taborites represented the first regular army, and they were the first to use artillery in battle. That the Taborites could hold their own for almost a generation is explained by their attention to education, by the order and discipline in their community. Tabor fell, due, mainly, to a split among the Hussites. The moderate Calixtines, having appropriated the land of the clergy, did not wish to recognise the supremacy of Tabor. The war of the Taborites against the king, the pope, and all of Europe, was not in the interests of the nobility. After the victory of the Taborites at Tauss (1431), it seemed that there was no enemy capable of coping with them. But the Calixtines started negotiations with the enemy. They decided to call to a Diet all barons, knights, and representatives of the cities, to discuss a plan for a state organization. Tabor itself was divided. The lower middle-class and the peasantry were indifferent to the communist programme. They wanted peace. Tabor’s communism was not stable. It had not the foundation of communist production, therefore equality of the means of subsistence soon disappeared. There were both rich and poor in Tabor.

The army of Tabor was being overcrowded by ‘crooks and riff-raff of all nations.’ As soon as the nobility began to recruit soldiers for a war against Tabor, offering better conditions than the communist community, treason crept into the ranks of the Taborite army, and wholesale desertion began. This explains the fall of Tabor. On May 30, 1434, the Taborites suffered a crushing defeat near Czeski Brod. Out of 18,000 Taborite soldiers, 13,000 were killed. In 1437, they were compelled to conclude a treaty with Sigismund, who guaranteed them the independence of Tabor. But in spite of this the communist community of Tabor soon disappeared.

10. Scourging Friars (Flagellants) – A sect of people who whip themselves. It appeared in Europe as early as the Eleventh Century, and became widespread in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. From Italy, the movement spread through southern France, Netherlands, Alsace and Lorraine. The Flagellants taught that it was possible to obtain absolution from sin by inflicting sufferings on one’s body. One of the first ecclesiastical theorists of this sect, George VII, taught that in this way the faithful emulated Christ, laboured to obtain a martyr’s crown, deadened and castigated their flesh, and expiated their sins. This doctrine was in line with the prevailing asceticism of the Middle Ages, which demanded of the faithful to harden and torture their bodies by fasting, poor clothing, etc., in the name of Christ. The Flagellant movement, however, assumed the character of an epidemic, of a mass psychosis. Thus, in the Thirteenth Century, bands of people marched through the cities of Italy, whipping themselves with straps and lashes, and praying for absolution. After the devastating epidemic of the ‘Black Death,’ the movement assumed a dangerous character. In many localities of Germany, France and Flanders, Flagellants in mortal terror, imagining that Christ was about to destroy the world for the sins of mankind, inflicted cruel punishment upon themselves. In German cities, Flagellant communities began to come into existence. ‘Those desirous of partaking of self-castigation had to pay a small fee, and this was all demanded of proselytes.’ In the Fifteenth Century, the movement weakened, but it did not disappear. The Flagellants of the Fifteenth Century spoke evil of the monks and demanded a series of church reforms. The Roman Church, which at the beginning had not opposed the movement since, in Italy, it was anti-imperial and therefore a means of strengthening the Church, began to persecute the Flagellants. In the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, the movement became fashionable at court. Sex elements began to dominate in it. Traces of this sect can be found even in the Nineteenth Century.

11. The Lollards – A religious sect widespread among the working populations of England in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. The heresies of those times found favourable ground not only among the master classes. As a matter of fact, every class formulated its demands through the reform movement. Thus, among the poorest weavers of England the sect of Beghards, or, as they were commonly called in England, Lollards, came into existence. (The Lollards were funeral chanters.) The Beghards first appeared in the Netherlands (Flanders and Brabant), in a country where commerce and industry had progressed earlier than in the rest of Europe and where sheep-breeding and the woollen industry were highly developed. The sect of Beghards was in most cases a fraternity of weavers. Unmarried artisans belonging to the sect lived in common houses, where they kept a communist household. The movement started in England when the weavers of Flanders migrated into that country. Norfolk, the centre of the woollen industry, became also the centre of the movement of the English Beghards, the Lollards. The Lollard propagandists, called ‘poor brothers,’ spread the new doctrine over the country. Errant ‘poor ministers’ preached to the people that lay and ecclesiastical possessions should be common property. They urged the people to pay neither dues nor tithes to the clergy, and appealed to the servants to refuse to work for the masters. In 1395, the Lollards petitioned Parliament, demanding a reform of the Anglican Church, abolition of its worldly possessions and celibacy. The petition was rejected.

The most outstanding representative of the Lollards was John Ball, the mad minister of Kent. Coming from the ranks of the Franciscan monks who sympathised with the Lollard movement, he became one of the leaders of the peasant uprising of 1381 in England. Beginning with 1356, John Ball preached mainly in Essex and in Norfolk, delivering his sermons in city squares and cemeteries. They became very popular. He preached common property, and urged the people to exterminate the nobility. Only then, he said, would people be equal, and the masters would be no higher than the rest. All men originated from Adam and Eve, he said. ‘When Adam dolf and Eve span, who was then the gentleman?’ he queried. He was killed during the suppression of the revolt in 1381.

The Lollard movement gained in importance when it became connected with the peasant uprising and with the opposition movement of the middle-class in the cities, After 1381, the Lollards found themselves in a precarious situation. Every Lollard was considered a criminal and treated accordingly. Terrorist acts against the sect continued for a long while, but it did not disappear from the lower strata of the working population, as is proven by pamphlets appearing even at the end of the Fourteenth and the beginning of the Fifteenth Century: The Ploughman’s Prayer and The Lanthorne of Light. The Lollards spread among the people a knowledge of the Bible in the English language.

12. Chiliastic dreams, Chiliasm – The doctrine of the second coming of Christ and the Millennium on earth. This Millennium was pictured as one thousand years of joy and happiness. All sufferings and privations, the adherents of this doctrine said, would disappear, and perfect harmony between mankind and rejuvenated nature would be re-established. The dreams of a Millennium became widespread in the Middle Ages, in years of elemental sufferings and socio-political cataclysms; in more quiet epochs, Chiliasm was the doctrine of small insignificant sects. Large masses of people were fired with Chiliastic dreams during the persecutions of the Christians in the Tenth Century, because the end of the world was expected to come in the year of Christ 1000. More widespread, however, were the Chiliastic dreams in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, in the Reformation period. A back-to-the-Gospel movement, religious unrest, coupled with an increasing exploitation of the working population, were fertile soil for Chiliastic visions. Thomas Muenzer, the Anabaptists, and the Taborites, all paid tribute to the mystic doctrine of the Millennium.

Social conditions prevailing in the Middle Ages created an atmosphere favourable for mysticism. The ignorance of the masses nurtured it. Besides, Chiliasm, belief in miracles, and mystic visions were an outlet at a time when the masses saw no way of improving their condition by their own efforts. Only a miracle could, in their opinion, overthrow all oppressors and exploiters. The masses were driven to believe in the miracle of the second coming of Christ, in order that they should not sink into despair.

13. With the name of Martin Luther is connected the history of the religious and socio-political transformation of the Germany of the Sixteenth Century, the history of the so-called Reformation. Luther was not the initiator of that movement. His activities and doctrines by no means cover the social history of the Reformation. In the revolutionary movement of the Sixteenth Century, he was the representative of the coalition of the middle-class and the nobility.

From the Fourteenth to the Sixteenth Century, trade capital transformed the old natural economy of the European peoples, and rendered superfluous the political system of feudalism. The victory of absolutism became an economic necessity. On the other hand, development of commercial capital induced the masters to increase the exploitation of the peasants. Freeing the peasants from the feudal yoke, the masters increased their burdens, substituting cash payments for manual labour and payments in kind. The peasants were being driven off the land, and thus the nucleus of the future proletarian class was formed. This incipient proletariat was utilised by the army commanders and the merchants, by the former as material for the armies, by the latter as workers in their manufactories. In a period of economic revolution, feudal nobility became a hindrance to historic development. The lower nobility, the knights, took an intermediary position between the peasantry and the high nobility. The knighthood attempted to halt its own imminent ruin. In Germany, the struggle of these two class groupings was complicated by the peculiarities of German economic development. At the beginning of the Sixteenth Century, Germany, because of its mines and commerce, was still a powerful country economically. But the economic centre of Europe soon moved from the Mediterranean basin to the coast of the Atlantic. The development of Germany, as of all Eastern Europe, became stagnant. Under these circumstances well-established social and political conditions were either breaking down or changing radically. For a century Europe was shaken by terrific wars and revolutions. The exploitation on the part of the Roman Church was most keenly felt in Germany. The monasteries and the princes of the Church exploited the peasantry and the cities to the point of ruin. The middle-classes protested against the aid that the monasteries gave to the poor, because it limited them in their exploitation of the masses.

The Roman Church found a lucrative source of income in the sale of church offices and especially in the sale of the so-called indulgences – absolution for cash. The princes of the Church exploited the people in their own realm, as did the feudal land owners and the capitalist merchants in theirs. A struggle against the Roman Church became inevitable. But while England and France, economically more advanced than Germany, soon succeeded in freeing themselves from papal rule, Germany required a long and stubborn struggle.

In Germany, all classes of the population suffered gravely under papal exploitation, but each formulated its own programme. Luther’s propaganda was the centre which originally united, first, the knighthood struggling against the princes, second, the lower clergy and the peasantry struggling against the princes of the Church and the feudal barons, and, third, the city middle-class chafing under the rule of the city aristocracy, the patricians.

Luther was born November 10, 1483, in a peasant family. His father worked in the mines. In 1501, he entered Erfurt University, where he led a very gay life in the circles of the Humanists, those advocates of radical ideas. In 1505, he entered a monastery, and, as every good Catholic, went to see the pope. In 1509, Luther gave a course of lectures in the Wittenberg University. In 1517, when Tetzel, the representative of Pope Leo X, opened a sale of indulgences in Saxony, Luther hung out on the doors of the Wittenberg chapel, his ninety-five theses against indulgences. His first protest against the Roman Church was very timid. Luther protested against corruption. Thesis 21 read: ‘Advocates of indulgences are mistaken when they say that through papal absolution a man is freed of all punishment.’ Thesis 27: ‘It is nonsense to preach that as soon as the penny jingles in the box, the soul leaves purgatory.’ Luther was surprised at the effect of his theses. He gave impetus to a movement which had started before him, and it engulfed all classes of Germany. Three groups became engaged in the struggle: the Catholic conservatives, the middle-class reformists, and the plebeian revolutionists. As a leader of the middle-class reformist movement, Luther at first appealed to violence, to the use of fire and iron for the extermination of the cancer that, he said, was destroying the world. He called for a decisive struggle against the lay and clerical princes. Between 1517 and 1522, Luther was ready to enter an alliance with the democratic factions. Between 1522 and 1525, however, he betrayed his allies, the peasantry and the lower clergy. His change was due to the Anabaptists in Zwickau and the peasant movement. He was also influenced by the uprising of the knighthood (Autumn, 1522).

At the head of the uprising of the knighthood were Franz von Sickingen and Ulrich von Hutten. The former was the commander, and the latter the ideologist of the movement. Their hatred for the pope and the princes and their striving for the reconstruction of a united Germany made them, by the middle of the Sixteenth Century, the heroes of the German bourgeoisie. In substance, however, the movement of united knighthood in a society where capitalism had begun to develop, was reactionary. Sickingen and Hutten dreamed of a renewed mediaeval state where power was in the hands of the nobles and the emperor was their subject. They never aimed at freeing the cities or the peasantry, though they were compelled to appeal to them for aid. In the summer of 1522, Franz von Sickingen led troops against the ‘priestly nest’ of Trier. But the armies of the united Rhenish and Suabian princes dealt him a decisive blow. Many castles were destroyed and many knights perished. Luther did not support that movement, but condemned it as well as that of the peasants.

In his first works, where he called the princes ‘the greatest fools on earth and the most heinous scoundrels,’ and in his first appeals relative to the Peasant War, Luther defended the insurgents. He wrote, for instance, ‘It is not the peasants who arose against you masters, but God himself, who wishes to punish you for your evil doings.’ Luther hoped to find in the peasant movement a support for his struggle against Rome. But when, in April and May, the peasantry revolted all over the country, burning and destroying castles, the movement assuming a communist character, Luther defended the princes against the insurgent peasants. He attributed the movement to the peasants’ easy life. He urged the princes to ‘strangle them as you would mad dogs.’ When the insurrection was quelled, he bragged that he ‘had killed the peasants because he had given the orders to kill.’ ‘All their blood is upon me,’ he said.

An alliance was established between Luther and the princes, who were well satisfied with the acquisition of the church estates. The Reformation was profitable both to them and to the insurgents of the big cities. In 1526, at a Diet session in Speyer, it was for the first time decreed that the subject must follow the faith of his master. This saved the princes, who openly joined Luther. It is true that in 1529 Catholic services were reinstated and the confiscation of the lands of the clergy was halted in the provinces of the Lutheran princes, but the Lutheran minority protested against this decision – hence the name Protestants. In 1530, at a Diet session in Augsburg, the Protestant princes submitted to Emperor Charles V the so-called Augsburg Confession of the Lutherans. It consisted of two parts, the first giving an exposition of the new faith, and the second condemning the corruption of the Roman Church and outlining the necessary reforms.

‘We reject those,’ says the Augsburg Confession, ‘who preach that absolution can be reached, not by faith, but by good deeds.’ Man can find favour in the eyes of God, says the document, only by the word of God and by the guidance of the Holy Spirit. We must not, it says, confuse the authority of the State with the authority of the pope; the Church has the power to preach the Gospel and to perform rites, but it should not participate in the affairs of the State.

The publication of the Augsburg Confession was not the end of the struggle. In September, 1555, at the Augsburg Diet, the so-called Augsburg Religious Peace confirmed the decision of 1526 relative to the obligation of the subjects to follow the faith of their masters. This decision made it obvious that Germany was to remain dismembered, under the rule of the princes.

Lutherism became the religion of the economically backward countries. It spread in northern and western Germany, Denmark and Sweden, where the princes, the bishops and the landlords became the protectors of the Lutheran Church. But even this partial reform could succeed only as a result of the revolutionary movement of the peasantry, the cities and the knighthood.

14. Joachim of Floris (of Calabria) – An Italian mystic of the Twelfth Century. His doctrine of the eternal gospel is known under the name of Joachimism. In his conception, the Apocalypse teaches us that the world passes through three ages, the age of the Law, or of the Father, the age of the Gospel, or of the Son, and the age of the Spirit, which will bring the ages to an end. The first age, he said, corresponds to the Old Testament, the rule of lay authority, of external law and the preponderance of the flesh. The second age marks the predominance of the clergy, and the combination of spiritual and material interests. This, he said, was the age he lived in. The third age, he prophesied, would soon come and would be marked by a dominance of the spirit over the flesh, the monks becoming the ruling power, and the eternal gospel being the law of the world. Joachim denied that humanity was saved by Christ.

Joachim was of an urban family. Stricken by the horrors of the plague epidemic, he became a monk and founded the monastery of San Giovanni in Fiore. He wrote two books: The Concordance Between the New and the Old Testaments and Commentary on the Apocalypse. Several decades later (1260), the Joachimites were cursed by the pope and severely persecuted.

15. Nicolas Storch – A cloth-maker in Zwickau, where he became famous by preaching religious communism. Thomas Muenzer was under his influence and asserted that he knew the Bible better than all priests combined. In a short time, a whole community, which counted twelve apostles in its midst, gathered around Storch. His disciples believed that the truth was given to him in holy revelations. On May 16, 1521, the community of Zwickau invited a new preacher, Nicolas Hausmann of Schneeberg, a devoted friend of Luther’s, and thus Storch’s activities met with a stubborn opposition. He was expelled from the city, and went to the city of Wittenberg, where the ‘Zwickau prophets’ hoped to find support in Carlstadt, a former co-worker of Luther. But they were compelled to flee to southern Germany where Storch dreamed of establishing the kingdom of God on earth. A holy revelation, he said, made clear to him the true paths of social reformation. In 1522, Storch settled in Thuringia, where he became one of the initiators and leaders of the Peasant War. In collaboration with Muenzer, Pfeifer and others, he composed a programme of demands, which declared property to belong to all alike, since God had created all men equally bare and had given to them everything on the land, in the water and under the sky. All officers, lay and ecclesiastical alike, the programme said, must be removed from their offices, or killed. Every man could freely preach the law of God, as every one had a free will and was able to accept the good and reject the evil. Storch died in Munich in 1525.

16. György Dózsa – Leader of the peasant insurrection of the Sixteenth Century in Hungary. At that time, the struggle between the absolute power of the king and the feudal lords of Hungary still continued. After the death of King Matthias, who, supported by the people, had conducted a successful struggle against the feudal lords, the latter regained the upper hand under Uladislaus, and abolished all the reforms of King Matthias including the standing army. The country was suffering under the struggles of the feudal lords. In 1514, the pope declared a new crusade against the Mohammedans. György Dózsa, who had become famous as a warrior in the fight against the Turks, was offered the post of commander. Within twenty days he gathered a people’s militia numbering 60,000 men. Dózsa was the head of military operations. He was accompanied by two priests, who aroused the soldiers, peasants and city folk by their sermons. The feudal lords were loath to let their servants join the crusade, and, as harvest time was approaching, they demanded their return. In reply, Dózsa and the priests appealed to the people to rebel. The peasants arose all over Hungary, and the war with the feudal barons began. The situation of the peasantry in Hungary of that time was less intolerable than it was in the other countries, but having a little more freedom in Hungary, the peasants felt more keenly the yoke of serfdom. Incessant wars with the Turks were ruining the country, the population was being enormously depleted, and the peasants found themselves in a position to force upon the feudal lords a number of concessions. The peasants, however, being skilled in the art of war, hoped for full liberation. The lower clergy of the villages, hating the princes of the Church, joined the peasants. But they, along with the city middle-class, which also joined the peasant movement, soon betrayed it.

The leaders of the peasant uprising (1514) preached that the nobles were a criminal class which had enslaved the body and the soul of the peasant. They encouraged the destruction of the houses and the castles of the lords. György Dózsa, who had taught the peasants the use of arms, called them to rise all over the country. An army of feudal barons under John Zápolya moved against him. This army, aided by the city middle-class and the nobility, the former allies of the peasants, suppressed the movement cruelly. György Dózsa offered long and stubborn resistance. He proclaimed a republic declaring the power of the king and the privileged classes abolished. Notwithstanding the sympathy of the peasant masses throughout the country, György Dózsa was defeated at Temesvár. His execution was a refined torture. He was placed on a red hot iron throne, his head was adorned with a red hot iron crown, and a red hot iron sceptre was forced into his hand. Dózsa’s only exclamation was: ‘These hounds!’ No less than 60,000 peasants were killed in this uprising. The lords in Diet assembled, decided to increase the burden of the peasantry and declared serfdom a perpetual institution.

17. The War of the Roses (1455–1485) – After the termination of the Hundred Years’ War between England and France (1339–1450) and after the English armies were compelled to evacuate France, a bloody war started between the two dynasties, Lancaster and York, which lasted over thirty years. The Lancaster dynasty, with a red rose as its emblem, represented the interests of the large feudal masters in Wales and in the north where their large estates were located. The York dynasty, with a white rose as its emblem, depended on the commercial southeast, the city population, the peasants and the House of Commons. The stubborn feud between the two dynasties was to decide whether England would become an absolute monarchy in case of the victory of the York dynasty, or whether it would be divided among the feudal masters with the victory of the Lancaster dynasty.

As early as the Fourteenth Century, large land possessions concentrated in the hands of a few noble families. In the Fifteenth Century, the House of Lords counted only one-third of its old members. The surviving dynasties annexed the land of those families that had disappeared. When the Hundred Years’ War was over, the army was disbanded and the former soldiers taken into the service of the feudal masters. In the second half of the Fifteenth Century, the war between the two dynasties began. In the battle of Northampton (1460), York captured the king and compelled the House of Lords to recognise him as the protector of the state and the heir to the throne. He was defeated by the army of the hostile dynasty, but his son Edward returned to London victorious (1451). Edward’s armies dealt mercilessly with the nobility. In the Taunton battle, forty-two knights and two lords were executed, while Warwick, one of Edward’s commanders, saw to it that little harm was done to the Commoners.

The ascension to the throne of Edward IV, that is, the victory of the White Rose, marked the beginning of the period of absolutism. Edward IV did not raise the question of his election by the English Parliament. He expelled all feudal masters, even his closest friends who opposed his will (his fight against Warwick, ‘the maker of kings’). In his struggle against the feudal masters he used hired armies, thus making the feudal militia superfluous. He cruelly annihilated the adherents of the Lancaster dynasty. To make his victory secure, he refused to make new compulsory loans, and to secure the aid of the peasantry he demanded of Parliament laws prohibiting the dispossession of peasants. Thus the War of the Roses strengthened absolutism in England.

The Peasant War in Germany by Frederick Engels

Chapter 3

Precursors: Peasant Uprisings, 1475–1517

About fifty years after the suppression of the Hussite movement, the first symptoms of a budding revolutionary spirit became manifest among the German peasants.

The first peasant conspiracy came into being in 1476, in the bishopric of Wuerzburg, a country already impoverished “by bad government, manifold taxes, payments, feuds, enmity, war, fires, murders, prison, and the like,” and continually plundered by bishops, clergy and nobility in a shameless manner. A young shepherd and musician, Hans Boeheim of Niklashausen, also called the “Drum-Beater” and “Hans the Piper,” suddenly appeared in Taubergrund in the role of a prophet. He related that the Virgin had appeared to him in a vision, that she told him to burn his drum, to cease serving the dance and the sinful gratification of the senses, and to exhort the people to do penance. Therefore, he said, everybody should purge himself of sin and the vain lusts of the world, forsake all adornments and embellishments, and make a pilgrimage to the Madonna of Niklashausen to attain forgiveness.

Already among these precursors of the movement we notice an asceticism which is to be found in all mediaeval uprisings that were tinged with religion, and also in modern times at the beginning of every proletarian movement. This austerity of behaviour, this insistence on relinquishing all enjoyment of life, contrasts the ruling classes with the principle of Spartan equality. Nevertheless, it is a necessary transitional stage, without which the lowest strata of society could never start a movement. In order to develop revolutionary energy, in order to become conscious of their own hostile position towards all other elements of society, in order to concentrate as a class, the lower strata of society must begin with stripping themselves of everything that could reconcile them to the existing system of society. They must renounce all pleasures which would make their subdued position in the least tolerable and of which even the severest pressure could not deprive them.

This plebeian and proletarian asceticism differs widely, both by its wild fanatic form and by its contents, from the middle-class asceticism as preached by the middle-class Lutheran morality and by the English Puritans (to be distinguished from the independent and farther-reaching sects) whose whole secret is middle-class thrift. It is quite obvious that this plebeian-proletarian asceticism loses its revolutionary character when the development of modern productive forces increases the number of commodities, thus rendering Spartan equality superfluous, and on the other hand, the very position of the proletariat in society, and thereby the proletariat itself becomes more and more revolutionary. Gradually, this asceticism disappears from among the masses. Among the sects with which it survives, it degenerates either into bourgeois parsimony or into high-sounding virtuousness which, in the end, is nothing more than Philistine or guild-artisan niggardliness. Besides, renunciation of pleasures need not be preached to the proletariat for the simple reason that it has almost nothing to renounce.

Hans the Piper’s call to penitence found a great response. All the prophets of rebellion started with appeals against sin, because, in fact, only a violent exertion, a sudden renunciation of all habitual forms of existence could bring into unified motion a disunited, widely scattered generation of peasants grown up in blind submission. A pilgrimage to Niklashausen began and rapidly increased, and the greater the masses of people that joined the procession, the more openly did the young rebel divulge his plans. The Madonna of Niklashausen, he said, had announced to him that henceforth there should be neither king nor princes, neither pope nor other ecclesiastic or lay authority. Every one should be a brother to each other, and win his bread by the toil of his hands, possessing no more than his neighbour. All taxes, ground rents, serf duties, tolls and other payments and deliveries should be abolished forever. Forests, waters and meadows should be free everywhere.

The people received this new gospel with joy. The fame of the prophet, “the message of our Mother,” spread everywhere, even in distant quarters. Hordes of pilgrims came from the Odenwald, from Main, from Kocher and Jaxt, even from Bavaria and Suabia, and from the Rhine. Miracles supposed to have been performed by the Piper were being related; people fell on their knees before the prophet, praying to him as to a saint; people fought for small strips from his cap as for relics or amulets. In vain did the priests fight him, denouncing his visions as the devil’s delusions and his miracles as hellish swindles. But the mass of believers increased enormously. The revolutionary sect began to organise. The Sunday sermons of the rebellious shepherd attracted gatherings of 40,000 and more to Niklashausen.

For several months Hans the Piper preached before the masses. He did not intend, however, to confine himself to preaching. He was in secret communication with the priest of Niklashausen and with two knights, Kunz of Thunfeld and his son, who accepted the new gospel and were singled out as the military leaders of the planned insurrection. Finally, on the Sunday preceding the day of St. Kilian, when the shepherd believed his power to be strong enough, he gave the signal. He closed his sermon with the following words: “And now go home, and weigh in your mind what our Holiest Madonna has announced to you, and on the coming Saturday leave your wives and children and old men at home, but you, you men, come back here to Niklashausen on the day of St. Margaret, which is next Saturday, and bring with you your brothers and friends, as many as they may be. Do not come with pilgrims’ staves, but covered with weapons and ammunition, in one hand a candle, in the other a sword and a pike or halberd, and the Holy Virgin will then announce to you what she wishes you to do.” But before the peasants came in masses, the horsemen of the bishop seized the prophet of rebellion at night, and brought him to the Castle of Wuerzburg. On the appointed day, 34,000 armed peasants appeared, but the news had a discouraging effect on the mass; the majority went home, the more initiated retained about 16,000 with whom they moved to the castle under the leadership of Kunz of Thunfeld and his son Michael. The bishop, by means of promises, persuaded them to go home, but as soon as they began to disperse, they were attacked by the bishop’s horsemen, and many were imprisoned. Two were decapitated, and Hans the Piper was burned. Kunz of Thunfeld fled, and was allowed to return only at the price of ceding all his estates to the monastery. Pilgrimages to Niklashausen continued for some time, but were finally suppressed.

After this first attempt, Germany remained quiet for some time; but at the end of the century rebellions and conspiracies of the peasants started anew.

We shall pass over the Dutch peasant revolt of 1491 and 1492 which was suppressed by Duke Albrecht of Saxony in the battle near Heemskerk; also the revolt of the peasants of the Abbey of Kempten in Upper Suabia which occurred simultaneously, and the Frisian revolt under Shaard Ahlva, about 1497, which was also suppressed by Albrecht of Saxony. These revolts were mostly too far from the scene of the actual Peasant War. In part they were struggles of hitherto free peasants against the attempt to force feudalism upon them. We now pass to the two great conspiracies which prepared the Peasant War: the Union Shoe and the Poor Konrad.

The rise in the price of commodities which had called forth the revolt of the peasants in the Netherlands, brought about, in 1493, in Alsace, a secret union of peasants and plebeians with a sprinkling of the purely middle-class opposition party; and a certain amount of sympathy even among the lower nobility. The seat of the union was the region of Schlettstadt, Sulz, Dambach, Rossheim, Scherweiler, etc. The conspirators demanded the plundering and extermination of the Jews, whose usury then, as now, sucked the blood of the peasants of Alsace, the introduction of a jubilee year to cancel all debts, the abolition of taxes, tolls and other burdens, the abolition of the ecclesiastical and Rottweil (imperial) court, the right to ratify taxation, the reduction of the priests’ incomes to a prebend of between fifty and sixty guilders, the abolition of the auricular confession, and the establishment in the communities of courts elected by the communities themselves. The conspirators planned, as soon as they became strong enough, to overpower the stronghold of Schlettstadt, to confiscate the treasuries of the monasteries and the city, and from there to arouse the whole of Alsace. The banner of the union to be unfurled at the moment of insurrection, contained a peasant’s shoe with long leather strings, the so-called Union Shoe, which gave a symbol and a name to the peasant conspiracies of the following twenty years.

The conspirators held their meetings at night on the lonesome Hungerberg. Membership in the Union was connected with the most mysterious ceremonies and threats of severest punishment against traitors. Nevertheless, the movement became known about Easter Week of 1493, the time appointed for the attack on Schlettstadt. The authorities immediately intervened. Many of the conspirators were arrested and put on the rack, to be quartered or decapitated. Many were crippled by chopping their hands and fingers, and driven out of the country. A large number fled to Switzerland. The Union Shoe, however, was far from being annihilated and continued its existence in secret. Numerous exiles, spread over Switzerland and South Germany, became its emissaries. Finding everywhere the same oppression and the same inclination towards revolt, they spread the Union Shoe over the territory of present-day Baden. The greatest admiration is due the tenacity and endurance with which the peasants of upper Germany conspired for thirty years after 1493, with which they overcame the obstacles to a more centralised organisation in spite of the fact that they were scattered over the countryside, and with which, after numberless dispersions, defeats, executions of leaders, they renewed their conspiracies over and over again, until an opportunity came for a mass upheaval.

In 1502, the bishopric of Speyer, which at that time embraced also the locality of Bruchsal, showed signs of a secret movement among the peasants. The Union Shoe had here reorganised itself with considerable success. About 7,000 men belonged to the organisation whose centre was Untergrombach, between Bruchsal and Weingarten, and whose ramifications reached down the Rhine to the Main, and up to the Margraviate of Baden. Its articles provided: No ground rent, tithe, tax or toll to be paid to the princes, the nobility or the clergy; serfdom to be abolished; monasteries and other church estates to be confiscated and divided among the people, and no other authority to be recognised aside from the emperor.

We find here for the first time expressed among the peasants the two demands of secularising the church estates in favour of the people and of a unified and undivided German monarchy – demands which henceforth will be found regularly in the more advanced faction of the peasants and plebeians.

In Thomas Muenzer’s programme, the division of the church estates was transformed into confiscation in favour of common property, and the unified German empire, into the unified and undivided republic.

The renewed Union Shoe had, as well as the old, its own secret meeting places, its oath of silence, its initiation ceremonies, and its union banner with the legend, “Nothing but God’s justice.” The plan of action was similar to that of the Alsatian Union. Bruchsal, where the majority of the population belonged to the Union, was to be overpowered. A Union army was to be organised and dispatched into the surrounding principalities as moving points of concentration.

The plan was betrayed by a clergyman to whom one of the conspirators revealed it in the confessional. The governments immediately resorted to counter action. How widespread the Union had become, is apparent from the terror which seized the various imperial estates in Alsace and in the Union of Suabia. Troops were concentrated, and mass arrests were made. Emperor Maximilian, “the last of the knights,” issued the most bloodthirsty, punitive decree against the undertaking of the peasants. Hordes of peasants assembled here and there, and armed resistance was offered, but the isolated peasant troops could not hold ground for a long time. Some of the conspirators were executed and many fled, but the secrecy was so well preserved that the majority, and also the leaders, could remain unmolested in their own localities or in the countries of the neighbouring masters.

After this new defeat, there followed a prolonged period of apparent quiet in the class struggles. The work, however, was continued in an underground way. Already, in the first years of the Sixteenth Century, Poor Konrad was formed in Suabia, apparently in connection with the scattered members of the Union Shoe. In the Black Forest, the Union Shoe continued in isolated circles until, ten years later, an energetic peasant leader succeeded in uniting the various threads and combining them into a great conspiracy. Both conspiracies became public, one shortly after the other, in the restless years from 1513 to 1515, in which the Swiss, Hungarian and Slovenian peasants made a series of significant insurrections.

The man who restored the Upper Rhenish Union Shoe was Joss Fritz of Untergrombach, a fugitive from the conspiracy of 1502, a former soldier, in all respects an outstanding figure. After his flight, he had kept himself in various localities between the Lake Constance and the Black Forest, and finally settled as a vassal near Freiburg in Breisgau, where he even became a forester. Interesting details as to the manner in which he reorganised the Union from this point of vantage and as to the skill with which he managed to attract people of different character, are contained in the investigations. It was due to the diplomatic talent and the untiring endurance of this model conspirator that a considerable number of people of the most divergent classes became involved in the Union: knights, priests, burghers, plebeians and peasants, and it is almost certain that he organised several grades of the conspiracy, one more or less sharply divided from the other. All serviceable elements were utilised with the greatest circumspection and skill. Outside of the initiated emissaries who wandered over the country in various disguises, the vagrants and beggars were used for subordinate missions. Joss stood in direct communication with the beggar kings, and through them he held in his hand the numerous vagabond population. In fact, the beggar kings played a considerable role in his conspiracy. Very original figures they were, these beggar kings. One roamed the country with a girl using her seemingly wounded feet as a pretext for begging; he wore more than eight insignia on his hat – the fourteen deliverers, St. Ottilie, Our Mother in Heaven, etc.; besides, he wore a long red beard, and carried a big knotty stick with a dagger and pike. Another, begging in the name of St. Velten, offered spices and worm-seeds; he wore a long iron-coloured coat, a red barret, with the Baby of Trient attached thereto, a sword at his side, and many knives and a dagger on his girdle. Others had artificial open wounds, besides similar picturesque attire.

There were at least ten of them, and for the price of two thousand guilders they were supposed to set fire simultaneously in Alsace, in the Margraviate of Baden, and in Breisgau, and to put themselves, with at least 2,000 men of their own, under the command of Georg Schneider, the former Captain of the Lansquenets, on the day of the Zabern Parish Fair in Rozen, in order to conquer the city. A courier service from station to station was established between real members of the union. Joss Fritz and his chief emissary, Stoffel of Freiburg, continually riding from place to place, reviewed the armies of the neophytes at night. There is ample material in the documents of the court investigations relative to the spread of the Union in the Upper Rhine and Black Forest regions. The documents contain many names of members from the various localities in that region, together with descriptions of persons. Most of those mentioned were journeymen, peasants and innkeepers, a few nobles, priests (like that of Lehen himself), and unemployed Lansquenets. This composition shows the more developed character that the Union Shoe had assumed under Joss Fritz. The plebeian element of the cities began to assert itself more and more. The ramifications of the conspiracy went over into Alsace, present-day Baden, up to Wuerttemberg and the Main. Larger meetings were held from time to time on remote mountains such as the Kniebis, etc., and the affairs of the Union were discussed. The meetings of the chiefs, often participated in by local members as well as by delegates of the more remote localities, took place on the Hartmatte near Lehen, and it was here that the fourteen articles of the Union were adopted: No master besides the emperor, and (according to some) the pope; abolition of the Rottweil imperial court; limitation of the church court to religious affairs; abolition of all interest which had been paid so long that it equalled the capital; an interest of 5 per cent as the highest permissible rate; freedom of hunting, fishing, grazing, and wood cutting; limitation of the priests to one prebend for each; confiscation of all church estates and monastery gems in favour of the Union; abolition of all inequitable taxes and tolls; eternal peace within entire Christendom, energetic action against all opponents of the Union; Union taxes; seizure of a strong city, such as Freiburg, to serve as the centre of the Union; opening of negotiations with the emperor as soon as the Union hordes were gathered, and with Switzerland in case the emperor declined – these were the points agreed upon. We see that the demands of the peasants and plebeians assumed a more and more definite and decisive form, although concessions had to be made in the same measure to the more moderate and timid elements as well.

The blow was to be struck about Autumn, 1513. Nothing was lacking but a Union banner, and Joss Fritz went to Heilbrun to have it painted. It contained, besides all sorts of emblems and pictures, the Union Shoe and the legend “God help thy divine justice.” While he was away, a premature attempt was made to overwhelm Freiburg, but the attempt was discovered. Some indiscretions in the conduct of the propaganda put the council of Freiburg and the Margrave of Baden on the right track. The betrayal of two conspirators completed the series of disclosures. Presently the Margrave, the council of Freiburg, and the imperial government of Ensisheim sent out their spies and soldiers. A number of Union members were arrested, tortured and executed. But the majority escaped once more, Joss Fritz among them. The Swiss government now persecuted the fugitives with great assiduity and even executed many of them. However, it could not prevent the majority of the fugitives from keeping themselves continually in the vicinity of their homes and gradually returning there. The Alsace government in Ensisheim was more cruel than the others. It ordered very many to be decapitated, broken on the wheel, and quartered. Joss Fritz kept himself mainly on the Swiss bank of the Rhine, but he also went often to the Black Forest without ever being apprehended.

Why the Swiss made common cause with the neighbouring governments this time is apparent from the peasant revolt that broke out the following year, 1514, in Berne, Sollothurne and Lucerne, and resulted in a purging of the aristocratic governments and the institution of patricians. The peasants also forced through some privileges for themselves. If these Swiss local revolts succeeded, it was simply due to the fact that there was still less centralisation in Switzerland than in Germany. The local German masters were all subdued by the peasants of 1525, and if they succumbed, it was due to the organised mass armies of the princes. These latter, however, did not exist in Switzerland.

Simultaneously with the Union Shoe in Baden, and apparently in direct connection with it, a second conspiracy was formed in Wuerttemberg. According to documents, it had existed since 1503, but since the name Union Shoe became too dangerous after the dispersal of the Untergrombach conspirators, it adopted the name of Poor Konrad. Its seat was the valley of Rems underneath the mountain of Hohenstaufen. Its existence had been no mystery for a long time, at least among the people. The shameless pressure of Duke Ulrich’s government, and the series of famine years which so greatly aided the outbreaks of 1513 and 1514, had increased the number of conspirators. The newly imposed taxes on wine, meat and bread, as well as a capital tax of one penny yearly for every guilder, caused the new outbreak. The city of Schorndorf, where the heads of the complot used to meet in the house of a cutler named Kaspar Pregizer, was to be seized first. In the spring of 1514, the rebellion broke out. Three thousand, and, according to others, five thousand peasants appeared before the city, and were persuaded by the friendly promises of the Duke’s officers to move on. Duke Ulrich, having promised the abolition of the new tax, came riding fast with eighty horsemen, to find that everything was quiet in consequence of the promise. He promised to convene a diet where all complaints would be examined. The chiefs of the organisation, however, knew very well that Ulrich sought only to keep the people quiet until he had recruited and concentrated enough troops to be able to break his word and collect the taxes by force. They issued from Kaspar Pregizer’s house, “the office of Poor Konrad,” a call to a Union congress, this call having the support of emissaries everywhere. The success of the first uprising in the valley of Rems had everywhere strengthened the movement among the people. The papers and the emissaries found a favourable response, and so the congress held in Untertuerkheim on May 28, was attended by numerous representatives from all parts of Wuerttemberg. It was decided immediately to proceed with the propaganda and to strike a decisive blow in the valley of Rems at the first opportunity in order to spread the uprising from that point in every direction. While Bantelshans of Dettingen, a former soldier, and Singerhans of Wuertingen, a prominent peasant, were bringing the Suabian Alp into the Union, the uprising broke out on every side. Though Singerhans was suddenly attacked and seized, the cities of Backnang, Winnenden, and Markgroenningen fell into the hands of the peasants combined with the plebeians, and the entire territory from Weinsberg to Blaubeuren and from there up to the frontiers of Baden, was in open revolt. Ulrich was compelled to yield. However, while he was calling the Diet for June 25, he sent out a circular letter to the surrounding princes and free cities, asking for aid against the uprising, which, he said, threatened all princes, authorities and nobles in the empire, and which “strangely resembled the Union Shoe.”

In the meantime, the Diet, representing the cities, and many delegates of the peasants who also demanded seats in the Diet, convened on June 18 in Stuttgart.

The prelates were not there as yet. The knights had not been invited. The opposition of the city of Stuttgart, as well as two threatening hordes of peasants at Leonberg nearby in the valley of Rems, strengthened the demands of the peasants. Their delegates were admitted, and it was decided to depose and punish three of the hated councillors of the Duke – Lamparter, Thumb and Lorcher, to add to the Duke a council of four knights, four burghers and four peasants, to grant him a civil list, and to confiscate the monasteries and the endowments in favour of the State treasury.

Duke Ulrich met these revolutionary decisions with a coup d’état. On June 21, he rode with his knights and councillors to Tuebingen, where he was followed by the prelates. He ordered the middle-class to come there as well. This was obeyed, and there he continued the session of the Diet without the peasants. The burghers, confronted with military terrorism, betrayed their allies, the peasants. On July 8, the Tuebingen agreement came into being, which imposed on the country almost a million of the Duke’s debt, imposed on the Duke some limitations of power which he never fulfilled, and disposed of the peasants with a few meagre general phrases and a very definite penal law against insurrection. Of course, nothing was mentioned about peasant representation in the Diet. The plain people cried “Treason!” but the Duke, having acquired new credits after his debts were taken over by the estates, soon gathered troops while his neighbours, particularly the Elector Palatine, were sending military aid. Thus, by the end of July, the Tuebingen agreement had been accepted all over the country, and a new oath taken. Only in the valley of Rems did Poor Konrad offer resistance. The Duke, who rode there in person, was almost killed. A peasant camp was formed on the mountain of Koppel. But the affair dragged on, most of the insurgents running away for lack of food; later the remaining ones also went home after concluding an ambiguous agreement with some representatives of the Diet. Ulrich, whose army had in the meantime been strengthened by voluntarily offered troops of the cities which, having attained their demands, now fanatically turned against the peasants, attacked the valley of Rems contrary to the terms of the agreement, and plundered its cities and villages. Sixteen hundred peasants were captured, sixteen of them decapitated, and the rest receiving heavy fines in favour of Ulrich’s treasury. Many remained in prison for a long time. A number of penal laws were issued against a renewal of the organisation, against all gatherings of peasants, and the nobility of Suabia formed a special union for the suppression of all attempts at insurrection. Meantime, the chief leaders of Poor Konrad had succeeded in escaping into Switzerland, whence most of them returned home singly, after the lapse of a few years.

Simultaneously with the Wuerttemberg movement, symptoms of new Union Shoe activities became manifest in Breisgau and in the Margraviate of Baden. In June, an insurrection was attempted at Buehl, but it was immediately dispersed by Margrave Philipp – the leader, Gugel-Bastian of Freiburg, having been seized and executed on the block.

In the spring of the same year, 1514, a general peasant war broke out in Hungary. A crusade against the Turks was being preached, and, as usual, freedom was promised to the serfs and bondsmen who would join it. About 60,000 congregated, and were to be under the command of György Dózsa,[16] a Szekler, who had distinguished himself in the preceding Turkish wars and even attained nobility. The Hungarian knights and magnates, however, looked with disfavour upon the crusade which threatened to deprive them of their property and slaves. They hastily followed the individual hordes of peasants, and took back their serfs by force and mistreated them. When the army of crusaders learned about it, all the fury of the oppressed peasants was unleashed. Two of the men, enthusiastic advocates of the crusade, Lawrence Mészáros and Barnabas, fanned the fire, inciting the hatred of the army against the nobility by their revolutionary speeches. Dózsa himself shared the anger of his troops against the treacherous nobility. The army of crusaders became an army of the revolution, and Dózsa assumed leadership of the movement.

He camped with his peasants in the Rakos field near Pest. Hostilities were opened with encounters between the peasants and the people of the nobility in the surrounding villages and in the suburbs of Pest. Soon there were skirmishes, and then followed Sicilian Vespers for all the nobility who fell into the hands of the peasants, and burning of all the castles in the vicinity. The court threatened in vain. When the first acts of the people’s justice towards the nobility had been accomplished under the walls of the city, Dózsa proceeded to further operations. He divided his army into five columns. Two were sent to the mountains of Upper Hungary in order to effect an insurrection and to exterminate the nobility. The third, under Ambros Szaleves, a citizen of Pest, remained on the Rakos to guard the capital. The fourth and fifth were led by Dózsa and his brother Gregor against Szegedin.

In the meantime, the nobility gathered in Pest, and called to its aid Johann Zapolya, the voivode of Transylvania. The nobility, joined by the middle-class of Budapest, attacked and annihilated the army on the Rakos, after Szaleves with the middle-class elements of the peasant army had gone over to the enemy. A host of prisoners were executed in the most cruel fashion. The rest were sent home minus their noses and ears.

Dózsa suffered defeat before Szegedin and moved to Czanad which he captured, having defeated an army of the nobility under Batory Istvan and Bishop Esakye, and having perpetrated bloody repressions on the prisoners, among them the Bishop and the royal Chancellor Teleky, for the atrocities committed on the Rakos. In Czanad he proclaimed a republic, abolition of the nobility, general equality and sovereignty of the people, and then moved toward Temesvar, to which place Batory had rushed with his army. But during the siege of this fortress which lasted for two months and while he was being reinforced by a new army under Anton Hosza, his two army columns in Upper Hungary suffered defeat in several battles at the hand of the nobility, and Johann Zapolya, with his Transylvanian army, moved against him. The peasants were attacked by Zapolya and dispersed. Dózsa was captured, roasted on a red hot throne, and his flesh eaten by his own people, whose lives were granted to them only under this condition. The dispersed peasants, reassembled by Lawrence and Hosza, were defeated again, and whoever fell into the hands of the enemies were either impaled or hanged. The peasants’ corpses hung in thousands along the roads or at the entrances of burned-down villages. According to reports, about 60,000 either fell in battle, or were massacred. The nobility took care that at the next session of the Diet, the enslavement of the peasants should again be recognised as the law of the land.

The peasant revolt in Carinthia, Carniola and Styria, the “windy marshes,” which broke out at the same time, originated in a conspiracy akin to the Union Shoe, organised as early as 1503 in that region, wrung dry by imperial officers, devastated by Turkish invasions, and tortured by famines. It was this conspiracy that made the insurrection possible. Already in 1513, the Slovenian as well as the German peasants of this region had once more raised the war banner of the Stara Prawa (The Old Rights). They allowed themselves to be placated that time, and when in 1514 they gathered anew in large masses, they were again persuaded to go home by a direct promise of the Emperor Maximilian to restore the old rights. Still, the war of vengeance by the deceived people broke out in the Spring of 1515 with much more vigour. Here, as in Hungary, castles and monasteries were destroyed, captured nobles being tried and executed by peasant juries. In Styria and Carinthia, the emperor’s captain Dietrichstein soon succeeded in crushing the revolt. In Carniola, it could be suppressed only through an attack from Rain (Autumn, 1516) and through subsequent Austrian atrocities which formed a worthy counterpart to the infamies of the Hungarian nobility.

It is clear why, after a series of such decisive defeats, and after these mass atrocities of the nobility, the German peasants remained quiescent for a long time. Still, neither conspiracies nor local uprisings were totally absent. Already in 1516 most of the fugitives of the Union Shoe and Poor Konrad had returned to Suabia and to the upper Rhine. In 1517 the Union Shoe was again in full swing in the Black Forest. Joss Fritz himself, who still carried in his bosom the old Union Shoe banner of 1513, traversed the Black Forest in various directions, and developed great activity. The conspiracy was being organised anew. Meetings were again held on the Kniebis as they had been four years before. Secrecy, however, was not maintained. The governments learned the facts and interfered. Many were captured and executed. The most active and intelligent members were compelled to flee, among them Joss Fritz, who, although still not captured, seems, however, to have died in Switzerland a short time afterwards. At any rate, his name is not mentioned again.