Flashback, May 1525: German Peasant Revolt—Inspired, Then Disowned by, Martin Luther—Falters

After terrifying nobles with its rapidity and ferocity, the German Peasant Revolt, the most significant mass uprising in Europe before the French Revolution, received decisive blows in three separate engagements in May 1525 for the same reason it sprang to life in the first place: the rebels’ major material disadvantages vis-a-vis their feudal masters.

The three battles—Böblingen, Frankenhausen, and Saverne, all fought within a week of each other—proved that peasants on foot armed only with pitchforks, no matter how determined or brave, were no match for princes and knights on horseback, loaded with ammunition.

At Frankenhausen, for instance, though the peasants outnumbered their opponents, they had no cavalry and only 13 guns, facing an army with 2,500 cavalry and considerable manpower.

In the three engagements, once the peasants were surrounded, mass slaughter ensued. Altogether, estimates for the number of peasant casualties for the entire conflict range up to 100,000.

The painfully lopsided difference in casualties reflected the disparity in firepower: 5,000-6,000 dead, wounded or missing among the peasants with another 600 taken prisoner, versus no more than a dozen casualties for the princes. It didn’t help that, unlike the princes, the rebels did not learn to coordinate efforts beyond the regional level.

Unlike the French Revolution, this revolt was not confined to a single country. Starting in what is now southwestern Germany, near the Swiss border, it eventually spread to many parts of the Holy Roman Empire, including Alsace (now in France) and parts of what is now Austria and Hungary.

Much like today, the Holy Roman Empire was undergoing a wrenching transition to a new era that fundamentally altered economies and occupations.

Twenty-first century America has struggled to adjust to the digital revolution, not unlike how the Continental Europe of Martin Luther’s time moved from a rural-based feudal system to a more merchant-dominated, town-centered environment that represented the first stirrings of capitalism.

Instead of tech princes, the Holy Roman Empire numbered real ones who acted as disruptors. Called on to support monarchs waging expensive wars, they squeezed their peasants until it hurt—privatizing for their own purposes land that the serfs had previously used in common to farm and fish. Moreover, subsistence farming put tenants on edge when they experienced a crop failure or tax increase.

Lords were abrogating the system of mutual rights and obligations on which feudalism rested. But the nobles also used their privileged perch not just to exploit their tenants economically but also to punish them for lapses in deference (e.g., in one case, confiding a family member to a dudgeon for not doffing his hat as the lord passed by).

Against these powerful institutional forces was a revolutionary invention, Johann Gutenberg’s printing press. Though invented in 1450, its importance didn’t become fully apparent until nearly 70 years later, when Martin Luther begin to air his defiance of the church in a series of tracts widely circulated, in the peasants’ native German.

Before long, peasants were extending their person-to-person interactions in markets and fairs with pamphlets attacking the privileges of upper estates.

The most succinct summary of peasant grievances, the Twelve Articles, began with demands that were theologically based: the rights to elect their own preachers and to have ones with enough education to explain scripture adequately to them rather than simply to voice what nobles and the church hierarchy wanted them to say. Only after that did they get to monetary issues.

Tracts such as The Freedom of the Christian (1520) convinced the rebels that Luther sympathized with them. But it turned out there were limits to such feelings on his part.

The rebels focused on one statement in The Freedom of the Christian— “A Christian is an utterly free man, lord of all, subject to none” —without inquiring what Luther meant by a paradoxical statement later in the document: “A Christian is an utterly dutiful man, servant of all, subject to all.”

In his Admonition to Peace, Luther, while commiserating with the peasants, counseled them to obey their masters and not take up arms. He insisted that the freedom he had in mind applied to the spiritual, not the secular, environment.

Luther’s position was not without self-interest. He depended heavily on the Protestant princes to protect him against Rome’s decision to try, convict, and sentence him to death for heresy.

By spring 1525, the rebellion had gained a leader: Thomas Muntzer, an Anabaptist minister more radical than Luther in his views on the sacraments and divine revelation—and more willing to take on the old order through violence.

In the town of Weinsberg, in an episode that became notorious as the “Weinsberg Blood Easter,” Count Ludwig von Helfenstein and his attendants were seized from their castle and made to run a gauntlet lined with peasants screaming their grievances (e.g., “you caused the hands of my father to be cut off because he killed a hare on his own field”). The count was then executed for his transgressions.

Luther was now ready to disown various adherents of the movement he had spearheaded. His bloodthirsty turn towards the lords in his tract Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants (“Stab, smite, slay whoever you can”) alienated many peasants. He did not disguise his eventual pleasure in the May 1525 destruction of Muntzer’s printing press and his execution for inspiring the peasants.

“When Luther opted for the state-church model, placed the Lutheran church under the authority of the state, and persecuted minority churches, Anabaptists believed that Luther had betrayed the teachings of the Bible,” observed religion historian John J. Friesen in an October 2017 article for Meetinghouse.

The Anabaptists soon joined the Roman Catholic Church among the targets of Luther’s vitriol. Their movement would veer markedly away from what was becoming his more theologically and conservative direction.

Luther’s defiant stance against papal authority—an attempt to de-politicize religion—would, ironically, be replaced by an ironclad commitment to civil authority that seeped into the German consciousness, finding its most terrible expression in obedience to the Third Reich.

But the Nazis were also ready to capitalize on the posthumous reputation of the peasants. The name of one of their leaders at the “Weinsberg Blood Easter,” Florian Geyer, was given to the 8th SS Cavalry Division in March 1944.

Today, the German peasant revolt is largely forgotten—not merely because it occurred five centuries ago, but because it failed. It deserves to be better known, however, with lessons applicable for today:

*Violence by aggrieved groups are counterproductive, triggering backlashes that can be fatal to their cause.

*The forces of reaction are extremely powerful, limiting reformers’ progress.

*Freedom of thought and freedom to worship usually don’t immediately carry the day, requiring decades—or, in this case, even centuries—to achieve goals.

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Martin Luther, on Greed and Unconcern for God)

“If it be the case with you that you let others preach and teach and exhort as they will, and you go along, thinking that you have enough, and live in style; never ask whether you are doing right or wrong by your neighbor, if you only have your own, and make your calculation so that with one penny you may gather two, yes ten, and have no concern about God's word and preachers, and about the world with its laws, then you can also understand that your treasure is not above in heaven, but remains with the moth and rust; so completely, that you would rather anger God and the world before you would lose a penny, and give up anything for its sake: as now peasants, citizens, noblemen everywhere shamelessly talk and live, who for the sake of a penny venture to dare defy the government of God in the Church and in the world, so that this saying may remain true and practically convict them, since they will not hear nor be instructed. For it cannot be otherwise, even if we worry long about it and would gladly see it otherwise. Therefore it is best, if we have told it to them, that we let them go their way, and despise and laugh at them as much as they do at us. For God says in the second Psalm that he can laugh too, and laugh so that they will have bitter weeping; that means that he will speak with them in his wrath and will alarm them in his sore displeasure.”—German Protestant theologian and hymnwriter Martin Luther (1483-1546), Commentary on The Sermon on The Mount, translated by Charles A. Hay (1892) 

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Martin Luther, on the ‘Pope’s Court’)

“If we took away ninety-nine parts of the Pope's Court and only left one hundredth, it would still be large enough to answer questions on matters of belief. Now there is such a swarm of vermin at Rome, all called papal, that Babylon itself never saw the like. There are more than three thousand papal secretaries alone; but who shall count the other office-bearers, since there are so many offices that we can scarcely count them, and all waiting for German benefices, as wolves wait for a flock of sheep? I think Germany now pays more to the Pope than it formerly paid the emperors; nay, some think more than three hundred thousand guilders are sent from Germany to Rome every year, for nothing whatever; and in return we are scoffed at and put to shame. Do we still wonder why princes, noblemen, cities, foundations, convents, and people grow poor? We should rather wonder that we have anything left to eat.”—German theologian and Protestant Reformation leader Martin Luther (1483-1546), Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation Concerning the Reform of the Christian Estate (1520)

The argument advanced by Martin Luther in this passage will elicit nods of agreement not just for millions of those who followed his lead in leaving the Roman Catholicism Church, but also theologians who have remained in the hope that the central teaching authority of the Church would eventually accept their thinking.

The vast bureaucracy underlying the Church has been the subject of both humor (Pope John XXIII, asked how many people worked at the Vatican, joked, “About half”) to lamentation (“The Curia does its best to stifle criticism in the episcopate and in the church as a whole and to discredit critics with all the means at its disposal,” German theologian Hans Kung charged in a 2010 “Open Letter to Catholic Bishops”).

But few have matched the extraordinary vigor of the questioning by Luther. It cites striking statistics (those “three thousand papal secretaries”!), historical allusion (sinful ancient Babylon), animal imagery, and tying it all to the condition of his native Germany.

In contrast to another pillar of the Protestant Reformation, John Calvin, whose presentation and style often reflected his early training as a lawyer, Luther’s prose burned with passion and invective.

Address to the Christian Nobility, issued 500 years ago this month, was the first of three tracts in 1520 that propelled the rebellious monk further towards irrevocable defiance of the Pope. In The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, he called for reducing the number of sacraments instituted by the Roman Catholic Church from seven to two. In The Freedom of a Christian, he continued to attack abuses of the Vatican, only this time he began to explore, with greater eloquence, the essential equality of all believers: “A Christian is a perfectly free lord of all, subject to none. A Christian is a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to all.”

But Address to the Christian Nobility especially fell on fertile ground. It helped that Luther wrote it in German rather than the Latin common to theological explication of the time. Communicating in the vernacular, coupled with the rise of the printing press (particularly in Luther’s own Wittenberg), meant that his attacks on the papacy found a far wider audience of lay readers than just his own community of theologians.

Within this wider lay community, Luther reached two receptive groups. The first—more important in ensuring he would not be executed like an earlier Church dissident, the Bohemian cleric Jan Huss—was the German nobility. 

Jealous of their prerogatives, they resented especially what Luther called the “three walls” used to safeguard the papacy’s absolute sway: the elevation of spiritual power above secular; the claim that nobody but the pope could interpret scripture; and the assertion that only he could convene a council of the Church.

In this environment, Luther’s call for secular princes to assert their proper temporal authority (“Oh noble princes and gentlemen, how long will you suffer your lands and your people to be the prey of these ravening wolves?”) furnished them with intellectual and theological justification for defying the papacy. 

The second lay audience for Luther’s tract—those outside the nobility—was far more problematic for him. He predicted that Germany would suffer the same fate as Italy, where, to create and maintain cardinals of the Church, “the convents are destroyed, the sees consumed, the revenues of the prelacies and of all the churches drawn to Rome; towns are decayed, the country and the people ruined.”

This baleful prophecy fed anger not only among merchants who might have read his tracts themselves but also German peasants who, though illiterate, would have heard his thoughts spread through the network of preachers already flocking to his standard. 

Five years later, when the “Peasants’ Revolt” erupted and spread in southern Germany, Luther—angry at insinuations that he had provoked the disorder, alarmed that he might lose the protection of powerful princes against the papacy—reacted with another tract whose title conveys better than any commentary the intensity of his feelings: Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants.

Luther’s appeal to secular authority and his frequent, revolutionary use of the German language arose from his intense identification as a German—an instinct all the more remarkable because that land was still a motley collection of states within the Holy Roman Emperor, not the united nation-state it became after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871.

But in calling for the overthrow of one form of unequaled authority, he was merely exchanging it for another: the power of the princes. Once he advocated for obedience to these secular rulers—even urging these princes to forsake leniency against protesters (“It is the time of the sword, not the day of grace”)—he was priming the masses for absolute fealty to a political colossus unrestrained by the fear of God that gripped and restrained him throughout his life: Hitler’s Third Reach.

 (For a searching discussion of the consequences of this, please see William Castro’s “Luther and German Nationalism” in the Alliance of Confessing Evangelicals’ “Reformation21.”) 

Quote of the Day (Martin Luther, on Grace)

“Grace is given to heal the spiritually sick, not to decorate spiritual heroes.”—Protestant theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546), “Heidelberg Disputation,” Apr. 26, 1518

Quote of the Day (Martin Luther, on How a Christian Lives in Christ and in His Neighbor)

“We conclude, therefore, that a Christian lives not in himself, but in Christ and in his neighbor. Otherwise he is not a Christian. He lives in Christ through faith, in his neighbor through love. By faith he is caught up beyond himself into God. By love he descends beneath himself into his neighbor. Yet he always remains in God and in his love….As you see, it is a spiritual and true freedom and makes our hearts free from all sins, laws and commands, as Paul says, 1 Tim 1 [:9]. The law is not laid down for the just. It is more excellent than all other liberty, which is external, as heaven is more excellent than earth. May Christ give us this liberty both to understand and to preserve.”—German theologian Martin Luther (1483-1546), The Freedom of a Christian (1520), in Classics of the Reformation, edited by Kirsten Birkett (2000)

Quote of the Day (Charles Austin, on 500 Years After Luther)

“This year, I am ready to declare the Reformation over. Lutherans and Roman Catholics have been in intensive dialogue for 50 years, reaching remarkable agreements on matters of faith and piety. We still disagree on many things, but we no longer consider each other enemies and believe we are on the way to further unity. Some of our agreements are on the very issues at the heart of Luther's dispute.”— Charles Austin, “The Protestant Reformation: It’s Over,” The Record (Bergen County, NJ), Oct. 22, 2016

Charles Austin, interim pastor at Church of the Savior-Lutheran, of Paramus, NJ, is also a former reporter for The Record and other news organizations. His two professions have offered him a front-row view of the rapprochement between Roman Catholics and Lutherans. The ecumenical movement that led to this growing harmony is all to the good, considering the bad blood that developed between the two religions after Martin Luther's momentous break with the Vatican.

Tomorrow starts a year of observances marking the 500^th anniversary of that spiritual tragedy. Let’s hope that Austin is right that, after so much time, the chasm no longer looms so large.

When I was a schoolboy, I had my first inkling of the power of labels to form impressions. Our world history textbook, when it came time to discuss the conflict between Martin Luther and the papacy and the repercussions, announced that it would not use the name that historians to the period, “The Protestant Reformation,” because that would imply that the Roman Catholic Church needed reformation. Instead, it would talk about the “Protestant Revolt.”

In one sense, the writers of the textbook were correct: the most influential historians in the English-speaking world years ago were Protestant and etermined to justify their faith, if not in works then in words. On the other hand, real abuses in the Church (notably, the sale of indulgences) did need to be reformed.

All these years later, having come to understand the anguish caused by loss of faith and loss in lives that resulted from the clash between the Vatican and the rebellious German monk, I think a third term, also using an “R” word, would be more appropriate: the Protestant Rupture—a breach of what had been, by and large, a harmonious relationship, a sudden and complete burst. The religious fissure had repercussions in the political and cultural realms as well, consequences that became seemingly settled for so long that we in the Western world take them largely for granted now.

Austin’s article reinforces the impressions I gleaned on this subject from a current exhibit at the Morgan Library and Museum, “Martin Luther: Words and Images.” The peerless New York cultural institution has supplemented its own collection of rare material from the 16^th century with other artifacts on loan from several German museums that have never before been exhibited in the United States.

Austin’s article mentions that new printing presses were the “social media” of their time, and indeed the Morgan exhibit displays several artifacts of this new technology, most notably the document that started it all, Luther’s “Ninety-Five Theses” denouncing the practice of indulgences (used at the time to raise funds for the Sistine Chapel), as well as “On the Babylonian Captivity of the Church” and “On the Freedom of a Christian.”

Luther was a master polemicist, and his vigorously argued broadsides, along with his translation of the Bible into the vernacular, his hymnbooks (“A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” was his composition), and his catechisms did much to stimulate use of the German language.

But his cultural influence went beyond the merely literary. The pamphlet war between Luther and the Church often featured pungent caricatures on both sides, and the appearances of himself and other early Protestant theologians in paintings (such as the very well-known one accompanying this post, by Lucas Cranach the Elder, Luther's friend and neighbor) opened an entirely new area of religious imagery beyond that of the saints.

The Vatican and Luther, believing everything rested on their struggle (including eternal life), hurled the worst kind of invective at each other. The bloodshed that followed the Vatican-Luther split would not abate until the Peace of Westphalia that ended the Thirty Years War in 1748. By the end of that war, eight million people had lost their lives. One can only hope that in these times, people will come to respect each other's good faith, even if they might disagree about their beliefs.

Quote of the Day (Martin Luther, on Faith, the ‘Yes of the Heart’)

"Faith is the 'yes' of the heart, a conviction on which one stakes one's life." —Martin Luther, sermon for the Sunday after the Feast of Circumcision, January 4, 1540, Weimar Edition, Volume 49, quoted in Grace A. Brame, Faith, the Yes of the Heart (1999)