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.