Archive for the ‘Luther and the Peasants’ War of 1525’ Category
My Pre-Graduate School Manuscripts are being recovered for Scholardarity
I’m painstakingly recovering old manuscripts that I wrote about Luther and the German Peasants’ War of 1525. They were on old 5 1/4 inch floppies, which I had copied on to 3 and 1/2 inch discs, and then to a flash drive. In those days I used an old Leading Edge Model D word processor. Wordperfect helped recover some data best. Microsoft word brought them in garbled with strange symbols.
The manuscript “Luther and the Niebuhr Brothers” is second part of a larger one, “Luther and the Peasants’ War,” which is also the tile of Part 1. Part 1 has 26 pages single spaced counting the endnotes and Part 2 has 23 pages, from page 27-49, and Part 3, “The Apology for Luther’s Theology and the Two Kingdom Theory” continues from page 50 to page 107, including 224 endnotes. It is a single-spaced document, which was on several floppies, because at the time, such floppies could not hold the whole document.
I am still working on recovering as many of these pre-graduate school works as possible. After these Luther manuscripts, I’ll try to recover my work on Dating the Exodus, a two hundred page manuscript finished on April 14, 1986. Trips with my congregation to Israel and Egypt sparked my interest in trying to nail down the early or late date for the Exodus. I wrote this manuscript before becoming interested in Luther, which was sparked because I attended the Luther Jubilee in Washington, D.C. in 1983 – Luther’s 500th birthday. I wrote my first manuscript thereafter: Reflections on the Luther Jubilee Lectures, (November 6-12, 1983).
After the Luther Jubilee, I must have written and revised one manuscript after another on Luther and the Peasants’ War and then went to graduate school to study the controversy further, only to have to change my course after five years to studying Luther’s pamphlets. The last manuscript I wrote on Luther and the Peasants’ War of 1525 before starting the pamphlet study was a socio-linguistic approach, which now has been posted. I wrote this note about my manuscripts on December 17, 2010 and just revised it on May 25, 2012.
I have not yet been able to recover Part 1. But three parts are finished:
In Four Parts
1. Luther and the Peasants War 2. Luther and the Niebuhr Brothers
3. Apologists for Luther’s Theology and the Two Kingdom Theory
4. Luther and the Great German Peasants’ War: a Little Known Story
(a manuscript in four parts recovered from 5 1/4 inch floppy disks)
MARTIN LUTHER, the PEASANTS’ WAR, the COMMUNAL REFORMATION, and the 28 ARTICLES OF ERFURT
A SCHOLARDARITY MANUSCRIPT
MARTIN LUTHER, the PEASANTS’ WAR,
the COMMUNAL REFORMATION, and the 28 ARTICLES OF ERFURT
November 27, 1992
Professors:
Peter Blickle
T. A. Brady, Jr.
Submitted by Peter D. S. Krey
History: Peasants and State Building in Central Europe 1300-1800
CONTENTS
1. Introduction The task of this paper charted
The communal reformation in a nutshell
2. Section I Biographical background of Luther
during the Peasants’ War
Luther’s abortive Campaign
3. Section II Pre-History of Luther and
the 28 Articles of Erfurt
4. Section III Luther’s response to the articles
Luther’s work with “communal”
election of pastors
Other articles
Article 6, the eternal council
Community, village, city council,
parishes, and pastoral election
Other articles with responses
5. Section IV Luther explodes in his afterword
Luther against communalism
Luther and social change
Inconsistently separating
Spiritual power and
political coercion
6. Appendices Luther’s Oculi Sermon
28 Erfurter Articles
MARTIN LUTHER, the PEASANTS’ WAR, the
COMMUNAL REFORMATION, and the 28 ARTICLES OF ERFURT
The Task of this Paper
This paper is an inquiry into Martin Luther’s relationship with the communal reformation, mostly by means of his response to the 28 Erfurter Articles. Peter Blickle’s thesis concerning the communal reformation of the 1520′s achieving a critical mass in the German Peasants’ War of 1525 will be briefly presented. Some biographical information about Luther will give us a window into his mentality during this time, especially his abortive campaign to squelch the uprising. Before looking at the articles themselves and Luther’s response to them, their context in Erfurt will also be described.
Introduction
Martin Luther’s (1483-1546) controversial stand in the great Peasants’ War of 1524-1525 is well known and has been thoroughly investigated. We certainly know Luther’s well balanced and perceptive pamphlet, “Admonition to Peace on the Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia,” as well as his harsh rejection of the “other” peasants[1] written thereafter in: “Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants.” Not so well known is his “Response to the 28 Articles of the City of Erfurt,” which he wrote in the aftermath of the Peasants’ War. These articles were first sent by that revolutionary council of that city to Luther on May 9, 1525, during the Peasants’ War, for the purpose of review and improvement.[2] After a long delay, Luther sent a hostile and terse reply on September 21, 1525.[3] This reply to the 28 Articles is important, because it gives us a window through which to view Luther and his relationship to what Peter Blickle calls the “communal reformation.”
According to Thomas A. Brady, Jr., the communal theory is one of four interpretations of the Reformation. The early bourgeois revolution, the inheritance of late medieval theological and religious thought, and the origin of confessionalism, are the other three.[4] According to Peter Blickle’s thesis, communalism, as it was already practiced in southwest of Germany, was now advancing into Thuringia – (as indeed it was spreading into many other areas, but the city of Erfurt, which is our concern, is in Thuringia). According to the thesis, this communal reformation reached its critical mass in the Great German Peasants’ War.[5] In a sense, Blickle’s thesis is like the Marxist early bourgeois revolution interpretation of the Reformation, in that it features a political and social movement oriented in the German Peasants’ War, rather than the traditional religious movement that launched the Protestant faith.
Blickle argued that the communal reformation was a historical process in which the “common man,” i.e., the peasants and the burghers, had been gradually gaining some limited self-government after their liege Lords had absented themselves from their feudal manors and had representatives collect rents and fees from their peasants, freemen and serfs. In the absence of their lords, the peasants were able to come together as a community, choose committees of Fours, Sixes, Eights, etc., agree on their laws, and control their lower courts. (At this time the peasants were not yet subjects of a state, as much as members of one of the three feudal legal estates of the medieval order.) They devised strategies to improve their inheritance rights, make grievances, regulate village questions in costomols (Weistumer), coordinate collective use of the commons, forests, baths, etc. Their values were congenial to biblical teachings: common good, neighborly love and the value of an adequate livelihood for each household (Hausnotdurft).
Then in the communal reformation of the 1520′s, culminating in the Peasants’ War, the peasants and the burghers, i.e. the common man, tried to reform their villages, towns and cities by demanding the right to elect and dismiss their own pastors, who were to preach the pure and untarnished word of God for them. They wanted to have the responsibility to take care of their local parishes. They had a vision of building Christian city republics like the one in Zurich, but with peasant parliaments. Their reformation took place in the spirit of Huldrich Zwingli (1484-1531). They rose up in a grass roots movement, because this communal reformation was one from below. When they became militant and revolutionary, they were crushed by the territorial princes in the battles of the Peasants’ War. After they were crushed, their movement was followed by the fateful magisterial reformation controlled by the princes of the territorial state from above.[6]
The question needs to be asked about the nature of Luther’s relationship with the communal reformation in these stormy years of the Reformation. It can come into bold relief by analyzing Luther’s response to the 28 Articles of the city council of Erfurt, prepared by the peasants, burghers, and craftsmen, i.e. the common man, in this arena of the Peasants’ War. It is important to focus on Luther’s responses to the common folk. What demands, petitions, grievances and aims were the peasants and burghers, i.e. the “common man,” addressing to Luther? If their demands fit into what Luther was preaching, why did he fight them? If they did not, then we need ask what the difference was between Luther’s understanding of the movement and that of the common folk. It may be possible then to place the arguments of the common people and Luther’s close enough together to ascertain what is striking about each from a theological point of view.
I
Biographical Background: Luther and the Peasants‘ War
Martin Luther’s mentality was quite stressed in this period of the second half of the Peasants’ War; that did not, however, reduce his prolific production of commentaries, treatises, pamphlets and books, nor his preaching at the university church, nor even his professorial duties. But after a poignant sermon pleading for an end to the hostilities of the war on Oculi (March 24, 1525), he published in a pamphlet entitled, “A Lesson Against the Gangster Spirits and What Position the Worldly Authorities Should Take to Them from the First Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy.”[7] Then Luther preached on Easter, April 16th, while all at the same time in Weingarten, – the Lake Peasant Band, and the Allgäu Peasant Bands were in a stand-off with Georg Truchsess, Freelord of Waldburg, the general of the forces of the Swabian League; and in Weinberg, Jäckeline Rohrbach was about to make eleven members of the nobility run the gauntlet after capturing them. In the terror that followed, many Lords and nobles accepted the 12 Articles of the Peasants of Swabia and swore allegiance to the peasants. The tide was soon to turn, however, and the peasants were massacred mercilessly by their rulers and lords.
Meanwhile Luther, after his Easter sermon, left Wittenberg with Philip Melanchthon for Eisleben, to embark on a preaching campaign to “bring the peasants to their senses.” Luther was not a fearful person. He did not hold up his finger to the wind to see which way it was blowing, to be on the winning side. He took his stand against them when the peasants were winning the day.
Luther had been called by the Count Albrecht of Mansfeld to open a Latin school in Eisleben under the direction of Johannes Agricola. He and Melanchthon finally arrived in Eisleben on April 19th where they stayed until the 20th. Here in the garden of the Chancellor of Mansfeld, Johann Dürr, Luther began to write “Admonition to Peace,” his response to the “12 Articles of the Peasants of Upper Swabia.” From here he made forays into the riot torn areas preaching against the uprising. “You peasants are being mislead by false prophets!”[8] he preached. But his sermons were hissed, and in Nordhausen the peasants sympathizing with Müntzer rang the church bells to drown out his words.[9] About this campaign Luther later states “How (God) had saved him in the recent uprising, where he had to risk injury to his body and endanger his life more than once.”[10]
Luther may well have thought his preaching campaign through Thüringia could produce the same effect as his Eight Invocavit Sermons, which had succeeded in quieting the Wittenberg Disturbances of 1521-1522. But these were not to be compared with the upheaval which now engulfed two thirds of Germany as well as spilling over into other countries of the Empire. In the words of Hans Zeiss, Schosser of Allstedt in a letter to the Elector on May 1st:
Doctor Luther is in Mansfeld lands, but he cannot avert such an uprising nor prevent the people from streaming to it from the lands of Mansfeld. So it goes from Sangerhausen and on top of that from Duke George’s country as well. What will become of it, only God knows.[11]
When the Elector was on his deathbed, he sent for Luther requesting communion in both kinds. Luther, to whom the elector had never given a personal audience, brought his campaign to an abrupt end. But Frederick the Wise died before Luther could get back, assigning Luther the sad chore of preaching two funeral sermons. In Frederick the Wise, not only Luther but also the peasants lost an important friend. Friedrich Weigandt wrote in a letter to Wendel Hippler:
Because Duke Frederick the Wise of Saxony, the Father of all evangelicals, has passed away, with that, I believe, for our part, we have lost a great comfort.[12]
Frederick the Wise had taken no initiatives to suppress the rebellion. In a letter to John the Steadfast he wrote:
If God wishes that the common man should rule, then it will come to pass. But if it is not his divine will, and (the uprising) has not been embarked on to his praise, then everything will soon change.[13]
Luther must have written his harsh pamphlet against the peasants, either just before or a little after the date of Frederick’s death (May 5, 1525). The precise date of this angry outburst is impossible to determine, but because its tone is so close to Luther’s letter to his relative, John Rühel, and the Mansfeld Council of May 4th, it might have been written close to this time. The ominous rejection of him by the peasants must have been fresh in his mind, or perhaps the news of the death of his protector, Frederick the Wise, pressed upon him, as well as his returning to Wittenberg from an abortive campaign. The timing in which his pamphlet was published could not have been worse, because his harsh words came when the peasants were already defeated and needed mercy.
II
Before analyzing Luther’s “approval of the 28 Articles of the community, his letter “To the Council at Erfurt,” it would be helpful to have an understanding of the context of the 28 Articles, to describe the course of events leading to the reformation of that city, to which Luther had such a close relationship.
Erfurt, at the time was a troubled city. With 20,000 inhabitants, it was the size of Augsburg and had become about the fifth largest city in the Empire. Not counting Sömmerda, it numbered 83 villages in its territory.[14] 1509 was for Erfurt the “year of madness.” Luther was a monk, a young priest, 26 years old, studying and teaching at its university. Most likely, during all the trouble, he set out for Rome on a mission for his Erfurt Augustinian monastery (1510-1511). In the city an uprising of the burghers had just taken place to protest what they considered the mismanagement of the city council. Then in the same year, 1509, the city plunged into a seven year war with Saxony. The council of Erfurt played off Saxony against Mainz, to whose spiritual/temporal territory Erfurt belonged. Erfurt was striving to become a city immediately under the emperor. The uprising of the burghers took place when a debt of 600,000 florins came to light. The burghers blamed it on the mismanagement of the council. The city, unable to keep up even with its interest payments, became bankrupt. They owed most of their debt to the clerical estate of Mainz. An internecine conflict between the faction that was influenced by the ecclesiastical holdings of Mainz struggled with that of Saxony, and the city went down in chaos, until the faction that adhered to the Mainz grew strong enough to restore order. But this city, which had been so prosperous, now waned steadily. In 1523 1,000 houses lay empty in the city.[15]
If Luther experienced this dreadful revolution in Erfurt, it may well have had a very negative impact upon him, making him react against all revolutions thereafter: the Wittenberg Disturbances, the Rebellion of the Knights under von Sickingen, and of course for our purposes, it may help to explain his vehement stand against the Peasants’ War.
In April 1521, en route to the Diet of Worms, Luther stopped in Erfurt, where he was welcomed formally by the council and fêted by the university.[16] Attempts by the clergy to discipline Luther’s supporters provoked students and craftsmen to participate in a Pfaffenstorm, a “Parson’s Storm”, in which they plundered and destroyed the homes of the priests of the city. The city council with an eye to the church’s wealth and cognizant of their great indebtedness, stood idly by and did not intervene.[17] Luther, absorbed in the drama at Wormes, and plucked away suddenly immediately thereafter, was informed about the disturbances in Erfurt, which followed his short visit. Luther was distraught and very critical of them. It showed that “we are not yet worthy before God to be servants of the Word.”[18]
Two years later in 1523, Luther admonished the council to proceed slowly, but his advice seems to have had the opposite effect.[19] Unauthorized preachers were soon active in and around the city bringing talk of refusing to pay tithes and of the Gospel releasing subjects from obedience to their magistrates. In June 1523 outbreaks of violence took place in town and country. When village parsonages were stormed, there were several deaths. In 1524, the council expelled Simon Hoffmann, a fiery spirit who later joined with Müntzer.[20]
The Lutherans monopolized the churches by the aid of the powerful Lutheran councilman, Adolar Huttener, who succeeded in closing those churches in which the mass was still held. The monasteries emptied, and the pastors began to marry.
The city had already lost its luster, and the university was no longer a popular place to study. Then the Peasants’ War broke out and 4,000 Thüringian peasants besieged the gates of the city. After having carefully inventoried the wealth of the monasteries, stashing it into their “protection” and promising to guard the monasteries from the peasants, the city council nonetheless opened the gates to the peasants, having convinced them that they had a common enemy in the faction that adhered to the spiritual jurisdiction of Mainz. They allowed the peasants to destroy the monasteries and all the buildings and property that belonged to the jurisdiction of Mainz.[21] The city council, however, had underestimated the power of the peasants. They toppled the council and established an “eternal council” – according to Thomas Brady, the German term, “eternal council,” has no religious or apocalyptic significance,[22] – but it was so named because it met continuously or perhaps, the members had life-long terms.[23] The peasants, craftsmen, and burghers made common cause, having deposed the old council, the committees of the community met in the Erfurt city hall, while those of the peasants met in the Petersberg. Both committees thrashed out their demands, and the 28 articles represent their final draft, which they presented to the reassembled council, which they now named the “eternal council” of the city. The council members bound themselves by oath to these articles in the presence of the revolutionary peasants. On May 9th, Luther and Melanchthon were invited to evaluate and approve the articles, which however, left out peasant concerns. The latter articles concerned such items as labor dues (Fronen) and the sheep farms of the nobility. The articles included represented the commercial interests of the burghers.[24] Both theologians refused to accept the invitation. After the Battle of Frankenhausen on May 15th, the eternal council was again deposed and the old council reinstated.
The council, however, had been devious and that not only by directing the peasants to destroy the customs house and other official buildings of their creditors. It had led the common people to believe it had really changed the city’s seal to the one the peasants had given it: the image of the risen Christ seated on a rainbow with the inscription: “Judge justly, Sons of Men, lest ye be judged.”[25] But the council was “pursuing a policy of cynical deception.”[26] They still sent the old seal of the honorable council on their letters to the elector. And when the tide turned against the peasants, they broke all agreements which they had made.
Luther still had the 28 Articles of the city of Erfurt on his desk four months later, when he finally answered them with a good measure of ridicule, and, for the most part, he made only glosses in the margins. He probably considered them unworthy of a reply. It is peculiar that he should have still answered them or that they would have still wanted an approval for such articles. Luther was hostile. It galled him to think that he needed to take this “eternal council” seriously. In fact overturned, deposed and reinstated, the devious city council of Erfurt was still composed of many of the same members.[27]
The most important articles among the 28 had been raised by the peasants in the last minute.[28] They wanted an “eternal council,” which should give an annual accounting and report to the representatives of the city districts, and the craftsmen of the community. (Article 6) New fees and taxes should not be levied without the knowledge and consent of the whole community and country folk. (Article 21) No peasant or burgher was to be arrested, except in the case of a capital crime (Leib und Leben). (Article 18) Interest payments were nullified (Articles 2 and 3). The 12 Articles were included only in the elections of the pastors (Article 1) and the right to the common use of the meadows again (Alemende)(Article 28). Actually, the articles show that the guilds had lost their power, and the non-guild craftsmen had come to power. These articles did not feature the demands of the peasants, because around Erfurt, the peasants were rather well off.[29]
III
Luther’s “approval” of the Erfurter Articles is really filled with ridicule and amounts to a hostile denunciation of this kind of a constitution for a council. His, September 21, 1525, terse and harsh response to the 28 Articles of the “Eternal Council” of the city of Erfurt, provides sufficient evidence.[30]
In Article 1, on the election of pastors by the community, Luther answers briefly:
The council should have the ultimate authority to know, who holds the offices in the city.[31]
If Luther’s response here means that other magistrates in the city are responsible for election of the pastors, then he is a rejecting what he himself established biblically in what is called his “Leisnig Pamphlet.” There he supports the Leisnig community for it to elect its own pastor.[32] What should be investigated, however, is if the community had one parish or was Leisnig like Erfurt, a city council, with a great many parishes, which would make a difference in Luther’s decision.
In order to check whether or not Luther is being inconsistent in his response to the Erfurter articles, it is necessary to understand that the term “community” had various meanings and there were differences between city communities and those of the town and country. In 1522-1523 Luther took one position when he was struggling to place the first evangelical pastors into various communities, whose number of parishes in relation to the city community, we do not know. He faced a very different political situation, however, leading up to and after the Peasants’ War late in 1525.
There is also an ambiguity in the German word, “Gemeinde.” It can mean the political community or the worshiping congregation, the parish.[33] But it would be a mistake to interpret Luther’s meaning in his tract (for the Leisnig community in 1523) in the latter sense. His use of both words “assembly” (Versammelung) and “community” (Gemeinde) seems to cover both meanings. Blickle points out that in every case the political community was involved in this choice of pastor and furthered the reformation, even if reforms might have begun in the parish because of the evangelical preaching, which in turn, then brought about the wish to choose or replace parish priests.[34] Blickle also notes that for the peasants no distinction could be made between the political community and religious parish, because, for example, in the Twelve Articles, it was the same entire community which demanded the right to elect the pastor, and reclaim the forests.[35]
Franziska Conrad makes an important distinction between the southwestern German city and village communities that is not only relevant to the election of pastors, but also presents a complication that the burghers faced within their community and that the peasants faced only outside of their community. “When the peasants rose up,” she states, “they did not confront – as in the city – the authorities within their association, but the village lords who threatened the autonomy of the community from the outside.”[36] The bid of the peasants to choose their own pastor in a village was up against the right of the Lord to do so, while the city community already chose its own magistrates, and now the parishes of the city wanted to choose their pastors.[37] Luther made the point that a city council also needed a voice in the election of pastors in the various parishes of the city. A conflict could exist between the city council of the whole commune and the many communities or parishes in it.
The assertion that the community had the right to elect the pastor was not a clear statement. Parishes in the city could conflict with the city council over pastoral elections, especially in a city like Erfurt, where the politics of the council first forced Lutheran elections, then because of the fear of reprisal and loss of independence, retreated to a neutral position. But “community” could also mean the city council representing the community, or a parish or congregation trying to elect a pastor for itself[38] in opposition to a monastery, a city council, a bishop, lord, or prince, who had the right of patronage, i.e., had the right for the election.
Gert Haendler relates how Luther helped a community represented by the city council, whose population had become evangelical, to elect its own pastor despite the catholic provost who had patronage and wanted to designate his own candidate.[39] That was in April, 1522. Again on July 29th in the same year, Luther became concerned with the election of an evangelical pastor by St. Michael’s Church in Erfurt. Luther takes the position that the ruling prince ought not oppose the choice of the congregation.[40] For Leisnig, the community for which Luther had written his important pamphlet, Luther supports their election of a pastor against a monastery which had the right of patronage. In August 1524, Luther battled with Karlstadt over his call and election to the pastorate in Orlamünde. Karlstadt had left Wittenberg, had driven out the officiating pastor, and had himself elected by this congregation. Luther, worried by Karlstadt’s peasant garb, radical stance, and his agitation for an iconoclastic campaign, opposed his election by the community. Luther feared another disturbance:
one can see very well that when God orders the congregation to do something, and names the people, he does not want it done by the mob (Pöbel) without the authorities, but by the authorities (Obrigkeit) with the people, so that the dog does not learn to eat leather to escape his leash – that is, use [the destruction of] images to become accustomed to rebelling against the authorities as well.[41]
Luther considered an image-breaking binge no work of righteousness, but a riot inspired by the devil.[42] He anticipated as much with Karlstadt, who became involved in the Peasants’ War, as well as having just observed the events in Erfurt. The latter explain his anger at the Erfurt council while responding to their articles. He wrote his response in September 1525, after all the buildings belonging to the jurisdiction of Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz were destroyed. He anticipated that the progression from an iconoclastic riot, went to the pillaging of monasteries, then to the burning castles, and finally to toppling the government.
This frame of reference, this context throws light on Luther’s response to the first article:
But the town council should have ultimate authority over who holds office in the town.[43]
And on his angry words in the afterword:
And is it not seditious that the parishes want to elect and dismiss their own parsons, without the oversight of the council, as if it were no concern of the council, as the authority, what the parsons did in the city?[44]
He certainly changed his position; the context, however, is the aftermath of the great Peasants’ War and the ambiguity remains about the meaning of community for a city, whether it included the will of the council or excluded it. These considerations should also be taken into account.
The first article is also very difficult to unravel.[45]
Luther’s response, therefore, to this article does not represent a blatant contradiction, nor does it show his complete rejection of communalism, which he himself taught in his Leisnig pamphlet a few years before. Although the article seems to reflect Luther’s position accurately, we should take into account, however, the many parishes within the city community itself and the right of the magistrates of the city council representing the community to nominate a pastor. Luther now required the parish to recognize the rights of the city council in the call, election, and dismissal of pastors.[46]
In the second article the townspeople and the peasants are
upset about paying “intolerable” interest on loans, and maintain that they will only pay back the principal without interest. Luther seems to hold them responsible for interest payments as well.
In article four, the commune wants to rule about property like wood and water removed from its land. Luther says not the commune, i.e. community should take charge of this, but the authorities, who should distribute it or sell it for the common good of the city. The council wanted to take the legacies and endowments away from the clergy, but Luther does not permit it. Let the Old Believing clergy enjoy these until they die. If the endowments are free, the council should put them into the common chest. If their original contributors are poor and needy, they should be returned to them. The article had wanted to take these away from the clergy out of hand. Luther is not anti-clerical here, nor will he stand for plundering the church’s wealth.
Luther does appreciate article 23 which wants to search out ways to revive the university. He stands with the authorities and will not allow them to shirk taxes and fees in several articles. Concerning other articles, Luther holds that they lie outside his competence as a theologian, and he therefore leaves them to the council to decide for itself. He had stated the same thing in his response to some of the Twelve Articles in his “Admonition” and reiterates it here. His point is that jurisprudence based on solid reason is more competent than theology in ruling these matters. This is a telling point against clericalism.
Article 6 deserves more attention, because it concerns establishing an eternal council which is to answer to the representatives of the community. In this way it mirrors article 1. Where article 1 expands communalism to the election of pastors, article 6 tries to limit the powers of the city council by communal oversight. That members of the council would be elected is only implied by the article. It reaps Luther’s irony:
If one does not trust the town council, why set one up? Why have one at all?[47]
This article has the word, “vierteln” in it, the way the preface to the article contains “viertel der Stadt.” It can be translated: “city quarters” or “districts of the city.”[48] Erfurt like many cities had two lines crossing through its center, dividing the city into quarters, which can also be called districts. The fact that the peasant committee met in the Petersberg and the burgher committees, in the City Hall, means that revolutionary committees had formed in the villages and city districts of Erfurt. That the craftsmen are also always mentioned seems to indicate that they, too, were represented by a committee. In this revolutionary atmosphere the Fours, Eights, and Twelves seem to have been the committees from the craftsmen, city districts, and villages.
Article 6 requires that the “eternal council give an annual account to its guardians, the districts, and the craftsmen of the community, who are not on the council, as far as this is useful.”[49]
The communal nature of this reconstitution of the council can be seen in a decree that it issued on May 6, 1525:
We, (the eternal council) together with the guardians and delegates of the city districts, craftsmen, and countryside regard as good and unanimously decide that each of our burghers and country folk not withhold or take for their own use (eigen nutz) all or any possessions that belonged to the spiritual estate or the faction of Mainz….”[50]
In this decree, it is obvious that the council is “immature” without the guardianship of the communal organs of representation.
Article 6 states that the council is required to account for itself annually before its guardians acting in behalf of the districts and craftsmen of the community.
Article 7, which is closely associated with article 6, states:
That the present council give account for all expenditures and income.
This article is a very important advance of communalism, because a decree or decision by the eternal council can only be made with the approval of the craftsmen, city districts, and peasants from the countryside. This means that any taxes and fees can be levied only with the knowledge and consent of the common people. The article nearly gives the people the power over financial appropriations, with which they can very effectively control their city government. How important this is for future parliamentarianism goes without saying.
Luther insults the council in response to this article:
Indeed, that the council should not be a council, but that the mob rule everything.[51]
Luther sees the common people trying to gain control over the city council. These common people are burghers, craftsmen, i.e., those in or outside of the guilds, and perhaps country folk and peasants, whom he calls “rabble.” He did not take kindly their attempt to monitor the council and hold it responsible in its expenditures to the people. He could not understand communalism here, nor feel that giving the common people a share and voice in their government was anything more than asking for another riot.
In considering the contrast between articles 1 and 6, it is peculiar that Luther wrote his pamphlet allowing the Christian assembly or community to elect its own pastor, but he could not envision that possibility at all for a community to elect a city council, an eternal council. Was the critical issue that of election?
When the revolutionary peasants entered Erfurt in May, they deposed the old council and drafted these articles. It does not say how the eternal council was filled, whether by election, or the reappointment of the old council, having sworn to effect the 28 Articles.[52] The peasant bands did elect their military captains, and their representation from their communes. But here the election does not play a role so much as the consent of the representatives of the community. Perhaps Luther saw the communal organs as a duplication of the council, and with the real locus of power in the former, and he felt the latter was being transformed into a rubber stamp, despite its being renamed an “eternal council.” This seems to make sense of his criticism in the afterword, where he insists the new council will be powerless, i.e., the cart drawing the horses.
Luther makes a separation between the political community and the church community. In the former he espoused elections, and in the latter he wanted the common people to accept the authority of the magisterial council. The problem or the opportunity for the peasants, depending on one’s point of view, develops because there was no distinction for them between their political and church community.[53] Luther began to make this distinction in his sermons of 1522 and published it in his pamphlet of 1523, “Temporal Authority: To What Extent It Should Be Obeyed,” calling it the theory of the two regiments. But the social identity of the congregation and community for the peasants in the villages and countryside made this distinction completely contradictory to them, and truthfully, also violated their social reality.
To cover some other articles briefly:
In articles 8-10, the burghers seem to want an open market, and Luther tells them they are thereby benefiting only the rich. In article 11, craftsmen outside the guilds are trying to get the right to ply their trade without hindrance by the guilds. Luther feels that this needs to be decided by the council, which he also states for articles 12 and 13. But he criticizes them sharply for their not wanting to pay the house of Saxony protection money. Likewise when they do not want to pay the safe conduct fee to Saxony, Luther states:
Indeed, may God allow us to injure princes and cities, as long as we have our own way![54]
This last comment is very patriarchal. It is much like a father speaking to a child, the prince to his subjects.
Luther seems to be humorous in 16-17 that the knaves and wenches should no longer be tolerated, nor debtors to the council. “Both go well together.” he quips.
In article 18 Luther is not helpful.
In all earnest we request and desire, as do the country folk, that no sworn citizen should be imprisoned without a hearing, unless it be for a capital offense.
Luther responds: “If the council deems it good.” Luther gets softer to the citizens that have been exiled during and after the rebellion, the ones who protest their innocence. Luther here agrees that it is fair that they be allowed to put their case.(20) Also it is surprising that Luther is lenient and supports understanding in article 24 which states:
No one should be placed in jeopardy by this revolt.
And in article 28: “Everyone should be able to use the commons without hindrance to his neighbor.” Luther states: This is up to the town council.
IV
Luther breaks loose in the Afterword
Luther is not naturally a man of few words. He has been holding back his anger. In his concluding remarks he explodes:
But one article has been left out: that an honorable council do nothing, have no power, nor be trusted with anything, but sit there like a powerless puppet, like a zero, and kowtow to the commune like a child, govern with its hands and feet tied, and pull the wagon like a horse, while the coachman is reining in and pulling the horses [back]. That’s how it will be according to the praiseworthy model of these articles.[55]
Luther continues not containing his hostility, claiming:
the articles have been composed by those, who have it too good, and who believe that there is no one in heaven and on earth that is not afraid of them. If I had power over Erfurt, I would not allow one article to stand, even if some are good. But must we for punishment bear and suffer this unheard of pretentiousness and mischief, and hear a repetition of all these articles? Nothing else is sought in these articles other than everyone=s own interest (nutz) and having their own way, that the bottom goes to the top, and everything turns upside down, that the council fear the community and be its servant, and again the community be the lord and master, and fear no one, which is against God and reason.[56]
According to Luther, the pretentiousness of these people should
be punished, because of all the damage these articles will do. In the torrent of words at the end, the old Luther is again himself, but not to our liking. He tries to persuade the Erfurters to become an honorable council. Otherwise he threatens them: or perhaps the authorities will have to march into the city and drive out the trash (Kutzel).
Is that evangelical, to but your head through a wall, without any humility and prayer, as if Erfurt did not need God. There is not one article about how one should first fear God, search, pray, and commit one’s cause to him. … And so I move some of you: is it not seditious that the parishes (pfarren) want to elect and dismiss parsons themselves, without the oversight of the council, as if it was no concern of the council, as the authority, what the parsons did in the city? And you hope they will pay taxes voluntarily. [57]
He addresses the council at the end by, your Majesty, and saying that he will nevertheless still serve them and commends them to God.
Luther understands authority only from the top down. A council is to be filled with magistrates, and not with craftsmen, and common people, who are burghers and peasants. The council should be nobility ruling over the common people. Luther must have already sealed off the temporal rulers, lords or councils into the other kingdom. Why would not the saying of Jesus occur to him:
You know the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men exercise authority over them. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant…[58]
Luther became uncomfortable over the point that parishes should choose their own pastor, feeling the city council should have a strong hand in electing them, or the common people could become seditious. Luther was fearful and quite hostile to the assertion of power by the people from below.[59] He claims the council will become paralyzed, will not be able to function or govern effectively.[60] His image above is that of the cart before the horse, and the horse bridling and leading the rider, instead of vice versa. The people overrate themselves, pretend to be a size larger than they are – in other places he says – they want to be lords instead of common people. Luther taught spiritual democracy, of course, with his slogan, “the priesthood of all believers;” but he did not integrate political democracy into his teaching. He lived in a city in Saxony under the territorial rule of an elector of the empire.
Luther has a very low regard for “Herr Omnes”, the common people. They are mostly knaves and whores (see his Oculi Sermon in the Appendix!) and need to be ruled by a heavy hand from above. They have to be governed like a dumb animal, a horse; bridled and ridden by the government. This image is more demeaning than the patriarchal one he uses of the Father to the child: “You just have to have your way!”
In contrast the governing council, an honorable council, needs to be a real god with divine power. The communal control by the consent of the common people, makes the council into a wooden idol, which can do nothing having its hands and feet tied. The revolutionary eternal council is like a zero. It lets itself be sold to the community like a child. For Luther the council should be the parent and the community the child. For the common people in communal reformation the governing council, the rulers, are the child and the people are the guardians, are the parents.
“Nothing is sought in these articles than that everyone seek his own good (nutz) and live according to their own will.” For Luther this is not good because he believes in the bondage of the will. “So the bottom goes to the top, everything turns upside down, the council fears the community, and the community becomes its lord and master…and the community fears no one, which is against God and reason.”[61]
The clash here is between “Obrigkeit” and “Unterkeit,”[62] authority from above and authority from below. But revolution from the top down does not necessarily proceed with good order, nor does change initiated from the bottom, communalism, necessarily result in chaos.[63] The first seems to try to preempt the healthy resolve, will, strength, and creativity of the people. The second need not destroy positive authority that seeks to carry out the will of the people or even their correction if warranted, by a common sense of justice.
Problematically, Luther labels a communally-guided-governing body a powerless puppet, and implies that authority from the top down is divine. But power from the bottom up can be just as divine or both can be just as devilish. Perhaps as yet in the course of human history, there can be no guarantee, except in mutual checks and balances, which is the least bad arrangement that can be struck.
That Luther asks for religious articles in the charter seems to contradict his own two regiment theory, which assigned politics to reason and compromise, and spiritual things to the church and congregation. That the revolutionary peasants designed the new seal of the eternal council, described above, is certainly religious. Perhaps Luther did not know about the peasants’ seal, because the council never made use of it. But Luther to be consistent would have to criticize any religious articles contained in temporal rule rather than call for them.
Luther seemed oblivious to the peasants’ experience of the concrete identity of their social, political and religious community. The peasants could not understand his refusal to allow the Gospel to be used for direct political action and social change. He says this forcefully in the Oculi Sermon, a portion of which is quoted at length in an Appendix. His thought had a dialectic of human and divine agency, and only the latter through the word could affect social and political improvement.
To make changes and actually improve conditions are two different things: one is in human hands and God’s ordaining. The other is in God’s hands and his gracious majesty.[64]
The problem cannot be easily resolved by saying the peasants and Luther wanted the same goals and agreed theologically, but they had a political quarrel. The critical issue even invades the term “reformation”, and what the peasants meant by it was very different from what even Zwingli meant by it, even if he was much closer to them than Luther. The communal reformation of the peasants was genuine, and they were forced into a military solution (for the most part) by Leonhard von Eck, the chancellor of Bavaria, the strong man over the forces of the Swabian League. It would be hypocritical to maintain that the peasants were not also overcome by the temptations of looting the monasteries, the wealth of the clerical estate. But for the most part, they would have welcomed the resolution of their conflicts with treaties. They made many – but the Swabian League would not tolerate them nor any negotiations at the end. Erfurt also had to pay for all damages, restore the buildings, which they had torn down, that belonged to the jurisdiction under Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz, and give up six villages, which by oath they had subjected to themselves. They too had to revert back to being the subjects of Cardinal Albrecht of Mainz.[65]
The problem becomes how to accomplish political and revolutionary change. For Luther a revolution in the church was one thing, a revolution against the structures of the political society was quite another. The latter could not be accomplished without bloodshed. Luther’s blistering writings made the clerical estate evaporate. With their rationale pulled out from underneath them, the wealthy monasteries lay naked ready to be violated and destroyed. But that merely exposed the nobility and the castles to the peasant view. The powerful nobility in that society were not going to evaporate and the bloodshed became that of the peasants, because it was such an unequal battle. Their hope for communal self-government had no self-defense, except the traditional one, belonging to those in whose interests it was to subjugate them. They had no viable military defense, really, of their own.
Luther wanted the changeover filling the churches and communities with new evangelical pastors to be accomplished by Christian methods, martyrium, flight, or if workable by legal methods.[66] Otherwise the authorities needed to be convinced to help. To mount a violent campaign to reform the church and the society forfeits the grace of the Gospel, by long Christian tradition. Arnold Toynbee states
But the conversion of the first generation of Christians from the way of violence to the way of gentleness had to be purchased at the price of a shuttering blow to their material hopes.[67]
Perhaps the historical considerations which I have included along with Luther’s harsh reactionary statements will soften our judgment upon him somewhat. To be able to see through the chaos, a new communal order proposed by the revolutionary peasants, was not given to him.
Luther tried to make a distinction between material and spiritual power. The gospel aligned with the latter, and laws, rationality, compromise, and negotiation were appropriate for the former. Where reason is a whore before God, according to him, it was a queen of regal majesty in temporal affairs. Luther assigned the temporal rule of material conditions to the secular governing authorities, but himself still felt in charge of the spiritual affairs around him. Call him a pope, if you will, but he tried to separate his spiritual power from coercion – not very consistently in this chapter of his life, however.
But then in threatening the Erfurters with an invasion by the Elector of Saxony, he contradicted his own highest principle. In calling the ruling militia to smite stab and slay the raging peasants in a holy war, as he did in his harsh little book against the radical peasants, seems very much to show him well outside the Kingdom of Love in which he was to be the spiritual head. Granted he had a precondition. There had to be some semblance of order, or the Gospel could not be preached. He also argues that in his Oculi Sermon. But that then mandates a political order as a precondition of promulgating the Gospel, and that may contradict his division of the two governments, spiritual and temporal.
Often Luther had Anfechtungen in which he ran through horrendous doubts. Could he be the only one right and all the believers before him wrong? And he would overcome it – but if he had understood communalism, perhaps he could have a complementary horizontal aid to his lonely vertical doubts. Not that Luther was not a man of the people. But sadly, he here withdrew from the people.
Appendices
But after a poignant sermon pleading for an end to the hostilities on Oculi (March 24, 1525), he published in a pamphlet entitled, “A Lesson Against the Gangster Spirits and what position the Worldly Authorities should take to them from the First Epistle of St. Paul to Timothy,”[68] Luther says nothing can be done unless Christ does it through us. We are but the masks of God. The fighting by the peasants is the foolishness of hard gangster spirits. They are pretentious and do not know themselves. They are puffed up in their own eyes and don’t have a good conscience. They are suffering shipwreck in their faith, and are not accomplishing anything, because they want to propel this cause with their understanding alone.
Now their pretentiousness is dangerous in an external way, but much more so in a spiritual way. Pray God that you do not overrate yourself by Scripture – because God wants a humble and crushed spirit for Christ to strengthen and encourage. They think they have to accomplish it, or it will be lost. They should give it over to God and commit their cause to him…throw the keys at his feet, i.e. put him in charge and say: “Lord, if you don’t do it, then it is undone. Lord, if you don’t do it then I will go down in shame – the cause is not mine, so I will not have my honor in it. I will gladly be your mask, so that you alone go to battle and fight.
This is something that the bands never want, but insist on banging their head through the wall now – according to their reason, and no one has called them, they force their way in as if they were mad, as if God needs them and has to have them – that’s why they have lost their faith. Learn knowledge before God, commit everything to his care, and watch that you cleave to Christ your head.
The gangster spirits have become our enemies: the closer the friend, the more nasty an enemy he has become. God does not give power of coercion (Gewalt) to everyone – but alone to great spirits who know how to use it. Because should everyone have it, then one would eat the other, and you would give me the devil, and I give it back to you.
Pray for them in authority – because the world cannot be governed with the gospel, because the world is too little and too narrow, grasps little, even the thousandth man refuses it too – therefore one cannot arrange an external government with it. The Holy Spirit has a small band, the others are all whores and knaves, who need a worldly sword. Where worldly government does not use its office strictly and firmly, everyone grabs what he can, and murder, war, rape of wife and children follows, so that no one can live in security.[69] The common man is not a Christian. The king, ruler and lord must use the sword, take off the head, punishment must be, so that the others are held down by fear, and the pious can hear the gospel and await their work, so that everyone becomes quiet and at rest. The apostles had great awe and fear for the temporal sword.
So now we have dire need to pray for the authorities, because we have neither king nor emperor. The authorities are lazy and withdrawn. The overlords do not punish the lower lords. All the rulers are at loggerheads and with that the uproar is growing. It seems as if God is mixing us all up into one batter and is about to fix us a piece of cake so that we all swim in blood. So we should pray God that peace is restored. That God gives the emperor so much grace that he bridles the rulers, the rulers the nobility and the cities, and so on the overlords take control of the lower lords, and visit them until their thick skins squeak (die Schwart krachte), and so on, also with the officials – that peace spreads everywhere – it is a lamentable situation that so much domestic uproar has arisen. What we need to do, we who are called Christians, is the earnestly beg God that the authorities carry out their office correctly, the prayer is big, but our God is bigger, and he will also hear us. If the sword were stern enough, and a right regiment prevailed, then the Gospel could well be preached, but it can’t be helped. Amen.
The Erfurt “Peasant,” Articles, 9th of May, 1525[70]
[The Erfurt Articles are one of the most important documents of the urban popular movements in the Saxon-Thuringia area, and were composed at the beginning of May 1525 by a committee drawn from the urban opposition and the peasantry in the Erfurt territory. Although called "peasant articles," they reflect predominantly urban concerns. At the request of the town council, Luther wrote his opinion of them on the 21st of September, here indicated in italics after each article. Some articles have been omitted.]
Here follows the list of articles that all quartets of the city of Erfurt, and the guilds belonging thereto, have discussed for further improvement.
1. Concerning the parishes, it is thought good that these should be re-divided into parishes [of a size] more suitable to the town, and that the community of each parish should appoint and dismiss its own pastor. These appointed pastors should present the pure Word of God clearly and without addition of any human commands, regulations, or doctrines affecting the conscience.
But the town council should have authority over who holds office in the town.
2. On intolerable interest payments, by which we mean the redeemable loans or usury, where the sum repaid often exceeds the capital: these we will pay no longer. Where the capital sum has not yet been repaid, the balance outstanding shall be settled within a period to be agreed, so that a fair mean may be found. We also request that the exchange rates and coinage be investigated.
Indeed, nothing better than that one should pay interest on the sum with which it is secured in Erfurt.
4. On property removed from the commune, such as wood, water, etc. this should be returned to the use of the commune at once and a control instituted so that nothing further can be done without the consent of the commune.
That is not to be, but [if so] the authorities should do it, or purchase it for the common good of the town.
5. On legacies and endowments of altars. Where these are already established, the clergy should no longer receive them, but the heirs and the descendants of those who founded them. Where the heirs and descendants can no longer be traced, such endowments should be placed in a common chest.
The persons who now hold them should be allowed to enjoy them until they die, where such persona and monies stand under the town council=s control, or else let one entrust them to God [i.e. put them in the common chest], [except] in so far as the heirs are quite poor and needy.
6. On the town council: we should have an eternal council, which should present an annual accounting to the guardians [acting] on behalf of the quarters and the commune, in so far as this can be seen as useful.
If one does not trust the council, why set one up? Why have one at all?
7. The current council should present an account of all income and expenditure.
Indeed, that the council should not be a council, but that the mob should rule everything.
8. All forms of commercial activity should be free to every citizen who so desires.
So that no poor man should [be able to] stand before the rich or able to nourish himself.
9. Every citizen who has a house and home and resides therein should be free to brew.
So that the rich alone can be brewers!
10. The full quarter-measure [of beer and wine] should be given for the money.
Has that not always been the case?
11. Each person who fulfills civic duties and who conducts himself honorably and decently should be permitted to work at his trade unhindered by the guilds.
I leave that to the decision of the town council.
12. All matters placed before the town council for judgment according to the town statutes should be settled without delay within fourteen days, at the citizen=s plea presented in person. Where the citizen is unable to plead his own case, the town council should appoint someone from its own ranks to plead his case, without further cost to the citizen.
That is also a secular matter, and does not fall within my competence.
13. The city chancery should be investigated, so that no one will be deceived, as has hitherto occurred.
Likewise.
14. Negotiations should be held with the house of Saxony to obtain a gracious remission of protection fees [paid to the princes of Saxony in return for the military protection of the town].
Indeed, so that no one will defend the city of Erfurt, or that the princes should outlay cash in its defense. I should like to know if Erfurt will then spend the money to buy peace and protection!
15. Since the citizens and country folk are heavily burdened with the safe-conduct [fees], the matter should graciously be reviewed.
Indeed, may God allow us to injure princes and cities, as long as we have our own way!
16-17. Henceforth notorious knaves and wenches of all classes should no longer be tolerated, nor the house of common women. Also all those who are in arrears to the town council, whoever they are, should be firmly requested [to pay up].
Both go well together!
18. In all earnest we request and desire, as do the country folk, that no sworn citizen should be imprisoned without a hearing, unless it be for a capital offense.
Where the town council sees that as desirable.
19. All citizens held in Erfurt should be released on verbal sureties.
According to the pleasure of the town council.
20. Where some citizens have been exiled during and after the rebellion, and protest their innocence, they should be allowed to put their case.
That is fair.
21. The town council should henceforth levy no imposts without the will and knowledge of the entire commune and country folk.
It would then be necessary to pay the people!
22. Those living [in the suburbs] before the gates request the permission to sell their home-grown wine in the suburbs.
The town council will see to whatever is best.
23. It is our request that one should consider whether the illustrious university, such as it was until now, might not be revived.
That is best of all.
24. No one should be placed in jeopardy by this [revolt].
That is also good, for many perhaps mean well; the others should be given the benefit of the doubt and should be admonished to desist from their designs.
25. Although all excises and impositions are [declared to be] abolished, the council should see to it that meat and bread are sold at fair prices.
The council should normally do this as a duty of their office.
26. Foreign bakers and butchers should be allowed to sell twice weekly.
The council will see to it.
27. All properties taken from the common city and town council – i.e. taxation, rents, labor services, or whatever – should be returned to the city as before, namely, such as [those from the village of Melchendorf, Gispersleben, half of Kiliani.
God help the council thereto.
28. Every citizen should be able to use the common without hindrance to his neighbor.
That is up to the town council.
But one article was left out, that the council should do nothing, have no power entrusted to it, but must sit there like a ninny and kowtow to the commune like a child, govern with hands and feet tied, and pull the wagon like a horse while the driver reins in and pulls the horse [back]. Thus it would be according to the illustrious model of these articles.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Blickle, Peter. Gemeindereformation. München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1987.
______________. Communal Reformation. New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992.
Conrad, Franziska. Reformation in der Bäuerlichen Gesellschaft. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden, GMBH, 1984.
Franz, Günther. Der deutsche Bauernkrieg 1525. Berlin: Deutsche Buch Gemeinschaft,1926.
————–. Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg. 4. Auflage. Darmstadt: Hermann Gentner Verlag, 1956.
Fuchs, Walther Peter. Akten zur Geschichte des Bauernkriegs in Mitteldeutschland, Zwei Bände in 3 Teilen, Vol. II Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1964.
Haendler, Gert. Luther on Ministerial Office and Congregational Function. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981.
Kirchner, Hubert. Luther and the Peasants’ War. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972.
Kirn, Paul. Friedrich der Weise und die Kirche. Habilitationsschrift vor der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Leipzig, 28. April 1926.
Köhler, Hans-Joachim. Flugschriften des Frühen 16. Jahrhunderts. Microfiche Serie 1978: 41 Nr.109 in 8/Box No 1.
——————–. 144 Nr. 121 “ .
Lindsay, Thomas M. A History of the Reformation, Vol. I, Edinburgh: T & T. Clark, 1922.
D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kitische Gesamtausgabe, Band 18. Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1908.
Martin Luther, Ausgewählte Werke, Calwer Ausgabe, Vol 3, Stuttgart: Calwer’s Buchhandelung, 1933.
Luthers Werke, Vol. 5. München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1936.
Möller, Bernd. Imperial Cities and the Reformation. Durham, North Carolina: The Labyrinth Press, 1982.
Robisheaux. Rural Society and the Search for Order in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
Scribner, R. W. Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany. London: The Hambledon Press, 1987.
Scribner, Bob and Benecke, Gerhard. The German Peasants’ War: New View Points. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979.
Toynbee, Arnold. A Study of History, Abridged vols. I-VI. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946.
Weiss, Ulman. Ein fruchtbar Bethlehem. Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1982.
Williams, George Hunston. The Radical Reformation. Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1962.
[1] The best interpretation here is that the “Admonition” is to the peasants under Zwingli’s influence, and the other peasants are those under Thomas Müntzer, or very radical like his.
[2]See Walther Peter Fuchs, Akten zur Geschichte des Bauernkriegs in Mitteldeutschland, Zwei Bände in 3 Teilen, Vol. II, Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1964), p. 252, document #1390a and page 261, #1404. The council wrote directly to Luther and Melanchthon on May 10, 1525. They requested a Gutachten, which is an approval for the articles.
[3] D. Martin Luthers Werke, Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Vol. 18, (Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1908), p. 531 – 540. Hereafter this edition of Luther’s Works will be referred to as Weimar Ausgabe or W.A.
[4]Thomas A. Brady, Jr., “The Protestant Reformation in German History,” with a comment by Heinz Schilling, Occasional Paper #22 of the German Historical Institute, (Washington, D.C., 1997), page 26. This paper is in the Internet.
[5] Peter Blickle, Gemeindereformation, (München: R. Oldenbourg Verlag, 1987), p. 205.
[6]Now I have misgivings about the concept of the magisterial reformation. It is a term that makes sense from the point of view of the peasants and Anabaptists, but not for the Reformation as such. See Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, translated and edited by H.C. Erik Midelfort and Mark U. Edwards, Jr., (Durham, North Carolina: Labyrinth Press, 1982), page 61: “For the most part, however, the magistrates were anything but the motive force behind the Reformation. They were more of a brake.” (A note added to this paper on April 27, 2012.)
[7] Hans-Joachim Köhler Flugschriften des Frühen 16. Jahrhunderts, Microfiche Serie 1978: 41 Nr.109 in 8/Box No 1. “Ain Lectiõ wider die Rottengayster/ und wie sich weltlich oberkayt halten sol/ aus der ersten epistle S. Pauli zu Timotheo/ an Freytag nach Oculi.” See the appendix at the end of this paper for a translation of the end of his sermon. It provides a look at Luther=s mentality during this time. (WA To be determined.)
[8] WA, Vol 17, Part 1, xxxi.
[9] Thomas M. Lindsay, A History of the Reformation, Vol. I, (Edinburgh: T & T. Clark, 1922), p. 336. Lindsay gives an itinerary for Luther in this campaign placing Luther in Erfurt on April 28th, which is the day the councilman, Huttener, let the peasants into the gates of the city. Because this visit is not at all mentioned, not even in the letter the eternal council wrote to Luther shortly thereafter on May 9th, it must be based on an erroneous source: see W.A., Vol 17, Part 1, xxxi f. Perhaps there is a confusion with a journey of Luther’s to Orlamünde of the year before.
[10] WA, Vol 17, Part 1, xxxi f. Luther is here quoted concerning his trip from “A Warning to My Dear Germans.”
[11] Walther Peter Fuchs, Akten zur Geschichte des Bauernkriegs in Mitteldeutschland, Zwei Bände in 3 Teilen, Vol. II, Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1964), p. 163.
[12] Günther Franz, Der deutsche Bauernkrieg 1525, (Berlin: Deutsche Buch Gemeinschaft,1926),p. 277.
[13]Paul Kirn, Friedrich der Weise und die Kirche, (Habilitationsschrift vor der Philosophischen Fakultät der Universität Leipzig, 28. April 1926), p. 162.
[14] Ulman Weiss, Ein fruchtbar Bethlehem, (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1982), p.7.
[15]Günter Franz, (1956), page 246.
[16] R. W. Scribner, Popular Culture and Popular Movements in Reformation Germany, (London: The Hambledon Press, 1987), p. 195.
[17] WA, Vol XVIII, p. 531.
[18] Ulman Weiss, Ein fruchtbar Bethlehem, (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1982), p.71. Weiss is quoting WA Letters, Vol. II, No. 406. On pages 68-70 Weiss tells of Luther being fêted by the city and describes the students looting and destroying 44 houses of the curia in the conflict afterward.
[19]R. W. Scribner, op. cit., p. 197.
[20]Ibid., p. 198.
[21]R.W. Scribner, op. cit., p. 201.
[22] George Hunston Williams, in The Radical Reformation, (Philadelphia: Westminister Press, 1962), p. 77; finds that such a council might have an eschatological character referring to Peter Kamerau’s book entitled, Melchior Hoffman (Haarlem, 1954), 85,88; which book was not yet available for this paper. But Kamerow speaks of a “Council of the Endtime” as opposed to an “eternal council.” Thomas Müntzer and Heinrich Pfeiffer named their new council in Mühlhausen an “eternal council”. G. Franz relates that this was also the case for Nordhausen.
T. A. Brady, Jr., in responding to my paper, finds Williams’ suggestion unconvincing. He argues that the term “ewig” often meant “perpetual,” as opposed to having a limited term. Thus a perpetual rent (“ewig“) is one that is not limited to the life of the debtor. The term “ewig,” he argues, “has nothing to do with apocalypticism or eternity.” It would be interesting to see whether in other regions of the conflict, cities taken by the peasants, or city councils toppled by the peasants, were given such a designation.
[23] R.W. Scribner, op. cit., p. 202.
[24] G. Franz, (1956), op. cit., p. 247. also see Blickle, Communal Reformation, op. cit., p. 90. He notes that another set of articles representing the peasants’ interests may have become lost.
[25] R. W. Scribner, op. cit., p. 202.
[26] Ibid.
[27] Ibid., p. 202.
[28] According to Günther Franz, Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg (1956). See pages 245-248 for an account of how the Peasants’ War transpired in that city and how the 28 Articles were written.
[29]Günther Franz, Der Deutsche Bauernkrieg, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956),p.247-8.
[30] WA, Vol XVIII, p. 531.
[31] WA, op. cit.,p. 534. These following remarks are translated from the WA pages 534-540.
[32] “That a Christian Gathering or Community has the Right and Power to Evaluate All Teaching, call teachers, to elect and also to dismiss them: the Basis and Reason taken from the Scripture,” January, 1523. Hans-Joachim Köhler Flugschriften des Frühen 16. Jahrhunderts, Microfiche Serie 1978: 144 Nr.121 in 8/Box No 1. Also see WA 11: 408-416 and LW 39: 303-314.
[33]Gert Haendler, Luther on Ministerial Office and Congregational Function, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1981), p. 57. Ruth Gritsch translates G. Haendler i. e., Luther: “That a Christian Assembly or Congregation Has the Right and Power to Judge All Teaching and to Call, Appoint, and Dismiss Teachers, Established and Proven by Scripture.” At this early date in 1523, a communal principle cannot yet be differentiated from a congregational one. G. Haendler is distinguishing a congregational principle from the higher authority of the office of ministry represented by the priests, bishops, abbots, archbishops, and popes, i. e., the hierarchical principle.
[34]Peter Blickle, Communal Reformation, op. cit., p.101.
[35] Ibid.
[36]Franziska Conrad, Reformation in der Bäuerlichen Gesellschaft, ( Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, Wiesbaden, GMBH, 1984.) p. 115.
[37]In a response to my paper, Thomas Brady wrote: AConrad is talking about villages in southwestern Germany, whereas…urban communes and regimes [are the issue here]. The point is that a commune elects its magistrates (council), but a village does not select its own seigneur. Further, at Erfurt, with its immense number of parishes, no parish is identical with the commune (at Ulm, not much smaller, there was only one parish). [Comparing] the rural example [with] the Erfurt situation, it would suggest that each parish ought to select its own pastor. In a sense, Luther’s rule is similar to the seigneurial right to nominate to a parish. [This connection needs to be thought through.]
[38]Even today only a powerful congregation attains the privilege of choosing its own pastor independently. Some denominations have a stronger congregational principle, but most congregations have to negotiate with a bishop or even accept his or her appointment.
[39] Gert. Haendler, op. cit., p. 55-56.
[40] Gert Haendler, op. cit., p. 64.
[41]Gert Haendler, op. cit. page 72-73.
[42]Martin Luther, Ausgewählte Werke, Calwer Ausgabe, Vol 3, (Stuttgart: Calwer’s Buchhandelung, 1933), p.167.
[43] Tom Scott and W.R. Scribner in The German Peasants’ War, (New Jersey: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1991), p. 174.
[44] Ibid.
[45] The first article itself has grammatical problems which makes it difficult to translate and understand. It speaks of parishes (pfarner), parish (pfarr), parson (pfarrer), and that the community (gemein) should have the right to appoint or dismiss the parsons (pfarrer) of the said parish (pfarr). It reads:
Concerning the parishes, it is deemed good, that they should be divided into particular parishes (Pfarr) (of a size) most suitable for the town, and that an assembly (gemein) of each parish should elect and dismiss its own pastors. These appointed pastors should present the pure word of God clearly and without addition, for any and all human commands, regulations and teachings, affecting the conscience.
Walther Peter Fuchs, Akten zur Geschichte des Bauernkriegs in Mitteldeutschland, Zwei Bände in 3 Teilen, Vol. II, Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1964),p. 250. My translation is helped by that of Tom Scott and W.R. Scribner in The German Peasants’ War ( New Jersey: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1991), p. 174.
[46] It would be interesting to know how Luther would have reacted to a catholic city council electing its priest over the wish of a community for an evangelical pastor. He would certainly have upheld the communal principle in such a case. I wonder if Luther would have upheld the communal principle if an evangelical city council wanted to overrule a community of old believers? Would Luther have helped force this change on the community? I wonder.
[47] Scott and Scribner, op. cit., p. 175.
[48]Peter Blickle, Communal Reformation, translated by Thomas Dunlap, (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1192), p. 89, endnote 21.
Siegfried Hoyer makes the interesting point that when the towns people were mobilizing for battle, “The armed men of the towns were organized by quarters or districts (Vierteln).” This may well be the explanation for the term here used. Siegfried Hoyer in Bob Scribner and Gerhard Benecke, The German Peasants’ War: New View Points, (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979), p. 101.
[49]W.P.Fuchs, Akten, Vol. II, op. cit., p.250.
[50] Ibid., p. 211. Peter Blickle in Communal Reformation (New Jersey: Humanities Press, 1992), p. 66 explains that the “countryside” always referred to the peasants.
[51]WA, Vol. 18, p. 535.
[52] Tom Scott and Bob Scribner, editors and translators, The German Peasants’ War, (New Jersey: Humanities Press International, 1991), p. 145-6.Because they themselves wanted seats on the eternal council, when Thomas Müntzer and Heinrich Pfeiffer deposed the old council of Mühlhausen, they had a vote in their church but only on the question whether or not to depose the old council. This won by 660 to 204 votes. Then the preachers, along with the committee of Eight, took the offices of the old council and named themselves life-time council members of their new eternal council. But no election is mentioned for them.
[53]Bernd Möller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, (Durham, North Carolina: The Labyrinth Press, 1982), p. 89. Here Möller states “the essence of the theological evolution of Zwingli and Bucer was the increasingly clear conception of church and civic community as one body.” “In logically linking the concept of church to justification by grace alone and by faith alone, [Luther] had exploded the unity of the medieval town.” Also see page 73 in the same book: “For [Luther] the communal relationship was not the central idea but only one of second rank…..the town in the Middle Ages thought of the individual primarily as a member of the community…..Luther rejected this kind of thinking. For him the Christian, as far as salvation was concerned, stood alone before God. One could not reach God by membership in a town or by an oath of citizenship. Instead, a twofold personal requirement was set: baptism and faith….With this conclusion the ancient and simple identification of the parish with the town became impossible.”
[54] Ibid.
[55] WA, Vol XVIII, p. 539. I used Tom Scott and Bob Scribner=s, The German Peasants‘ War, page 176, for help with this translation.
[56]Ibid. My translation.
[57] W.A., Vol 18, p. 540.
[58] Matthew 20: 25-26.
[59] The council of Erfurt was rather devious and some consideration has to be given for Luther=s belief that he had to counter them angrily and also with a devious attitude. Remember that the council played off Saxony against Mainz, to whose spiritual/temporal territory Erfurt belonged, striving to become an imperial city. They had the peasants destroy the buildings of the clerical estate of Mainz, in order to get out of repaying their debt. Remember that the high official of the council (Oberstratsmeister Hüttner) let the 4,000 peasants into the city on April 28th, after having given them five kegs of beer and five wagon loads of bread the day before. He quartered the orderly peasants in the courts of the monasteries and had them destroy the signs of the government of Mainz: the customs house, the salt store, and the hangman’s building. The idea was to continue secularizing the wealth of the spiritual estate to get out from under the spiritual dominion of Mainz. The peasants were really manipulated into continuing the policy of the city against Saxony and Mainz. Günter Franz, (1956), page 247.
[60] Rereading my words from before, I now would see more nuances in my judgment of Luther. Here in California, the legislature passes laws and then all the voters can pass propositions, like proposition 13, that effectively prevents any increase in taxes and decimated educational funding. How does representative democracy and participatory democracy better harmonize together?
[61]WA XVIII, page 539.
[62]Luther uses this term often in his commentary of Psalm 101, but defines it differently from the way this study uses the term: See WA, Vol. 51, p. 239 ff.
[63]Thomas Brady commented on my paper here: “You touch briefly on what seems to me to be the essential point, so far as the explanation of Luther’s positions is concerned. Communalism, as it was practiced in the southwest and was advancing in Thuringia, implied a capacity for uniting common need with sound judgment, which in turn depended on the accumulation of competence through long participation in self-government. That is how self-governing villages worked.”
[64] Luthers Werke, Vol. 5,(München: Chr. Kaiser Verlag, 1936), p. 428. Today in the Arab Spring, we can see that a popular uprising does not automatically make things better; they can become much worse. [This note was added April 30, 2012.)
[65] Günter Franz, (1956), page 248.
[66]From Luther’s response to the First Article in “Admonition to Peace…”, WA, Vol 18, p. 325.
[67]Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History (Abridged vols. I-VI), (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), p. 379.
[68] Hans-Joachim Köhler Flugschriften des Frühen 16. Jahrhunderts, Microfiche Serie 1978: 41 Nr.109 in 8/Box No 1. “Ain Lectiõ wider die Rottengayster/ und wie sich weltlich oberkayt halten sol/ aus der ersten epistle S. Pauli zu Timotheo/ an Freytag nach Oculi.”
[69]Luther is Thomas Hobbes versus John Locke. Hobbes position: a year of anarchy is worse than 1,000 years of tyranny. John Locke: a year of tyranny is worse than 1,000 years of anarchy. The truth of each depends upon whether the people are wolves waiting for the chance to tear each other up or civilized like sheep, who can’t wait to benefit and support each other.
[70]From Tom Scott and Bob Scribner, The German Peasants‘ War, pages 174-176.
Luther and the Great German Peasants’ War of 1525
I just finished posting the first chapter of a book that I was writing on Luther and the Great German Peasants’ War of 1525. It is about 100 pages double-spaced in courier font. The wordpress font makes it about three quarters as long. I guess because of its size wordpress put it right into its category, Luther and the subcategory, the Peasants’ War, on the right of my blog.
I had to get the manuscript from little sections contained in 5 and 1/4 inch floppies. Where I thought a paragraph was missing, it turned out 40 pages were missing. But it was a labor of love. I have many more manuscripts that I never published. The next one I hope to get into my blog is Luther and the Niebuhr Brothers, again in relation to the position he took against the Peasants’ War. That is also a long chapter.
I had hoped to go to graduate school and start publishing my work, but after another six years of studying Luther and the Peasants’ War, I had to change my thesis to Luther and pamphlet studies. When I investigated what I thought was a legalistic ethos of his time, I was surprised to discover that there were actually two ecclesiastical court systems, the old arch-deaconal court and the newer episcopal courts besides all of the civil courts. Luther’s burning the canon law on Dec. 10, 1520 was incredibly revolutionary. The manuscript I just posted was my last writing before leaving for graduate school.
If only the German peasants could have known about a non-violent approach, they may have brought their regime down, the way the Egyptians just did. As it was, the murderous feudal transitioning to territorial structure of governance killed an estimated 100,000 peasants in that war that was no war but a massacre of peasants. Many an evangelical pastor sided with the peasants and had to stretch his neck out on the chopping block as well. I think that this underside of the Reformation is well worth remembering.
See The Great Peasants’ War in Germany of 1525: a Little Known Story.
Trapped in our Bodies, Nowhere to Go: Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, and Luther
Trapped in our Bodies, Nowhere to Go
Dr. Peter Krey, January 31, 2011
Reading Nicholas Berdyaev again after thirty-five years has been eye-opening to me. There are so many themes in his book on Dostoevsky that I also have in my dissertation and in my thought about Luther’s spirituality. I wonder whether my earlier reading of him actually came out in my writing unconsciously.
Writing from the perspective of the Orthodox Church, Berdyaev denounces the attempt of Roman Catholicism to want a temporal sword, an earthly kingdom among other earthly kingdoms. Because God wants humanity to come to freely love the Christ sent by heaven, no compulsion is allowed on the part of the church. That is precisely what I meant by denying the church the sword of iron, that is, its coercion, and allowing it only the sword of the spirit, thus my dissertation title, Sword of the Spirit, Sword of Iron.
As Berdyaev writes, quoting Dostoevsky, “Thou didst desire [a hu]man’s free love, that [s/]he should follow Thee freely, a willing captive.”[1] And further that Roman Catholicism’s conception was one “of the compulsory organization of an earthly kingdom” (page 145) and its system made “a denial of freedom of conscience and, [because of its] having misunderstood the mediaeval doctrine of ‘the two swords,’ [Dostoevsky] claimed that the Roman Church aimed at temporal dominion and had grasped the sword of Caesar”[2] (page 145).
I also forgot that I had read about “centripetal and centrifugal movement of human beings” in Berdyaev (page 44). Having forgotten about it, I discovered the concept again in a British historian[3] and it has become prominent in my analysis of Luther’s spirituality. His centripetal spirituality moves toward the center of community with involvement, participation, and commitment; not out of it and away from it, centrifugally, with detachment as in monasticism. Thus Luther’s theology is always centripetal, toward marriage, toward the source and center of community.
Another scholar also said something enlightening to this effect, helping me to understand Luther’s theology, i.e., that there were two kinds of abstractions, one that leads away and the other that leads toward the body and concrete realities.[4] Again the movement of the latter is centripetal and the former is centrifugal.
Berdyaev also champions a dynamic dialectical mind (Note how good a description that is of Luther’s mind!) and he criticizes static monolithic kinds of minds. (Luther is often criticized from a static absolute point of view that fails to take account of his nuanced, dialectical approach.) As Berdyaev describes Dostoevsky, to me he seems a kindred spirit with Luther. Both were dynamic dialectical thinkers. Luther also puts opposites together in tension with one another and finds that his opponents claim that his arguments are nothing more than a pack of contradictions, e.g., their response to being sinners and saints at one and the same time, being sovereign over all and enslaved to all at the same time, having freedom in faith and being enslaved in love.
Look at the similar way Berdyaev describes the thought of Dostoevsky: “There was a dash of the spirit of Heraclitus about him: everything is heat and motion, opposition, and struggle” (page 12) and “His conception of the world was to the highest degree dynamic and we must look at it this way; the internal contradictions of his work will then vanish, and it will verify the principle of coincidentia oppositorum,” that means, the coincidence of opposites (page 13) and “The battle between the divine and hellish elements is carried on deep down in the spirit of man” (page 58) and “[Beauty] is a terrible thing because it can’t be fathomed, for God makes nothing but riddles and in this one extremes meet and contraries lie down together…” (page 59) and “There is an antinomy in the nature even of God” (page 58).
Could the antinomy derive from deus absconditus, that is, the hidden God versus how God wished to be revealed in Jesus Christ? Or could it derive from the Creator and Redeemer’s diverse ways of ruling the world, – in the terms of Luther’s theology, through judgment and grace, the law and the gospel, command and promise?
Luther’s sense of freedom also often seems contradictory. Listen to Berdyaev write of Dostoevsky’s view. “Behind the renouncement of [freedom] there is also an excessive affirmation of freedom, of a [human’s] own arbitrary will. Here again is an ineluctable dialectic” (page 84).
Think of Luther’s manifesto against the “Babylonian Captivity of the Church,” i.e., “The Freedom of a Christian Person.” (Both were written in 1520.) Then he writes the “Bondage of the Will” in 1525. Berdyaev says that Dostoevsky finds all contradictions of freedom resolved in Christ: “In Christ freedom is given grace, wedded to infinite love, and no longer need it become its own opposite” (page 144). Finally, according to Berdyaev, Dostoevsky’s “system of ideas is highly dynamic and contradictory: it is no use stopping one in motion and asking for a plain “yes” or “no” about it” (page 154). Like Dostoevsky, Luther went deep into the spirit and found good and evil there, God and the devil struggling there.
Like Luther, Dostoevsky according to Berdyaev strides beyond Humanism. Before Humanism spiritual realities like heaven and hell were felt to be very real. Spiritual realities, however, were shut out by Humanism by its anthropo-centrism [man as the measure of all things], leaving the human being with psychological realities alone. Berdyaev puts it this way: “The ecclesiastical authorities’ hostility to all Gnosticism led to increased agnosticism” and “their attempts to make spiritual profundity external to [humanity] resulted in the denial of all spiritual experience and the shutting-up of all humankind in a material and psychological reality” (page 36).
I believe that Humanism often goes even further today into a materialism and biological naturalism, which becomes a reductionism of spirituality to psychology and that often, like the young Sigmund Freud, to a physiology that slowly evolved to a psychology. In biological naturalism, we can be trapped in our bodies, nowhere to go. This movement is very distant from a spirituality of personhood that is grounded in the eternal soul, based on the promises of the eternal God, who came down to receive a body (Hebrews) and celebrate our humanity in Jesus Christ our Lord.
To continue with Berdyaev and Humanism, “The human had been left with only his body envelope and the lesser faculties of the soul, s/he could no longer see the dimension of depth” (page 36). “The human [her or] himself became a flat creature in two dimensions – s/he had lost that of depth; his soul was left to him, but his spirit had gone” (page 48). “The Humanist conception of the world, a conception directed towards its psyche and not its spiritual aspect, turned away from the human’s ultimate spiritual self” (page 48).
Dostoevsky, however, opened up our human inward spiritual depths again. He “unveiled a new spiritual world; he restored to the human the spiritual depth of which s/he had been bereft when it was removed to the inaccessible heights of a transcendent plane” (page 36). Dostoevsky opened up the spiritual life imminent in humans; not at all, however, denying transcendence as well (page 50). “In the human himself an abyss opened [for Dostoevsky] and therein God and Heaven, the Devil and Hell were revealed anew” (page 49).
Luther was also influenced by Humanism and for a while he gave himself the name, Elutherius, meaning the Liberator, much like the Humanist names, Melanchthon, Schwarzerd in German; Agricola, Bauer, etc. but Luther’s intense religious convictions made him transcend Humanism and experience and confront spiritual realities. Berdyaev claims that Dostoevsky also opened up these spiritual realities again after they had been shut off for a long while for a great many.
Berdyaev points out that there are demonic forces at play in the Dionysian spirit of a Friedrich Nietzsche wanting to become God, a man-god, a superman. Luther had the slogan, “Let God be God,” meaning that our calling is to be human beings. Wanting to be God is a source of evil, perhaps the main source among others. In his Christian Existentialism, Berdyaev champions the God-Man, Jesus Christ, who taught us love of neighbor, as well as love of the other, even love of our enemy, our opposite.
Berdyaev now, not Dostoevsky, however, whose human being was ultimately male, believed that the final expression of human nature was androgynous (page 115). Berdyaev is thinking in spiritual terms, in terms of the spiritual body, not the psychological terms of Carl Gustav Jung. The latter had a theory of Syzygy, i.e., of opposites being yoked together, where in the union of a man and woman, there were two triads: the masculine subject opposite the feminine subject with a transcendent anima, i.e., a female soul in the male; while the reverse holds true for the woman: her feminine subject is opposite the masculine subject with her transcendent animus or a male soul in the female. Jung also speaks of a chthonic mother or Earth mother in the woman and wise old man in the man.[5]
Granted, when introducing the transcendent dimension here, Jung does not remain strictly psychological. But Berdyaev underscores the spiritual realm so much more when he speaks of an eternal person, because belief in God predicates a person being eternal and belief in God is the affirmation of human beings, while the rejection of God in atheism or the shutting out of God and the spiritual realm in agnostic Humanism, also becomes a rejection of the human being. Berdyaev interprets Nietzsche’s superman as a rejection of human beings as inadequate. As Berdyaev puts it, “Nietzsche…was dominated by the idea of the superman and it killed the idea of the real [human being] in him. Only Christianity has cherished and protected the idea of [humankind] and fixed the human image forever and ever. The human essence presupposes the divine essence; kill God and at the same time you kill the human [being] and on the grave of these two supreme ideas of God and the human [being] there is set up a monstrous image – the image of the human [being] who wants to be God, of the superman in action, of Anti-Christ” (page 64). Berdyaev writes, “Self-deification was the inevitable goal of Humanism” (page 64). Again Luther’s dictum rings the warning, “Let God be God!”
Thus in philosophical terms as opposed to psychological ones, Berdyaev speaks of the masculine and feminine principles, whose final human expression is androgynous. Androgyny then is taken in a spiritual sense for a spiritual union, a spiritual body that has become complemented by the opposite sex.
The way the final expression of humanity is male in Dostoevsky, some theologians maintain that men and women become sons of God and there is no such thing as a daughter of God. Rather than ultimate masculinity there may well be better arguments for ultimate femininity. Our traditional values (vir-tue, manliness versus being effeminate or a “sissy,” that is, “like a sister”) are reversed by divine light. A medieval artist depicting souls in hell, purgatory, and heaven unconsciously moved from the most masculine image of the soul in Hell to the most feminine looking soul in Heaven. Some theologians argue that angels are sexless. In sexual intercourse, Berdyaev’s androgyny can be maintained, because a man unites with his femininity in the woman and she unites with her masculinity in the man. Berdyaev’s saying the “final expression of human nature is androgynous” precludes it being male or female and argues for the children of God being complete men-women.
As far as I know, Luther does not say anything about androgyny. But returning to how deeply Berdyaev influenced my later thought, I can refer to the main thesis of my projected work on Luther and the Great German Peasants’ War of 1525, viz., that Luther was not conservative, but was involved in a more subtle and profound revolution than the peasants. I was going to write my dissertation about this subject after studying it for many years, but then had to change my subject at the very end of my graduate work.
Luther took a very harsh stand against this revolt. Listen to Berdyaev on this topic. He shares Luther’s stand against revolt and revolution and depicts Dostoevsky as being “revolutionary-minded in a deeper way” (page 135). Berdyaev maintains that “no one has denounced more strongly [than Dostoevsky] the falsehood and unrighteousness that make revolutions” (pages 134-135). Berdyaev, it seems, never read Luther on the subject. I sincerely wonder if Dostoevsky’s stand against revolution could match the harshness and vehemence of Luther against the revolting peasants! Interestingly enough, Dostoevsky saw in the revolutionary falsehood, “the mighty spirit of the Anti-Christ, the ambition to make a god of man” (page 135).
Of course, Dostoevsky is reacting to an earthly unbounded messianism, which depicts Thomas Müntzer’s position, but not those of many of the other very moderate peasant leaders in other arenas of the Peasants’ War. He also does not know the approximations of justice, a private personal ethic versus public collective ethic, and working out the fine art of the possible of a Reinhold Niebuhr or Max Weber. Nor does he know Bonhoeffer’s this-worldliness of Christianity that the apocalyptic spirit does not dissolve.
Be that as it may, I often argued that Luther was a more subtle revolutionary. Berdyaev’s words capture this thought: “Dostoevsky was revolutionary-minded in a deeper way” (page 135). Continuing with Berdyaev, the one who “marches with Christ with his face towards the last great battle at the end of time is a human [being] of the future and not the past, every bit as much as the [one] who marches with the Anti-Christ and fights in his ranks on the last day. Generally speaking, the conflict between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries is a superficial affair, an opposition of interests: [Luther also said this in so many words!] on the one side the ‘has beens’ who have been supplanted, on the other, the supplanters, who now have the first place at the feasts” (page 135).
Here Paulo Freire comes to mind with the Pedagogy of the Oppressed. The oppressed cannot just turn the tables and themselves become oppressors, but have to complete their mission of also liberating the oppressors. In Paulo Freire’s words: “As the oppressed, fighting to be human, take away the oppressors’ power to dominate and suppress, they restore to the oppressor the humanity they lost in the exercise of oppression. It’s only the oppressed who, by freeing themselves can free their oppressors. That latter oppressive class, can free neither others nor themselves. It is therefore essential that the oppressed wage the struggle to resolve the contradiction in which they are caught; and the contradiction will be resolved in the appearance of the new human [being]: neither oppressor or oppressed, but human beings in the process of liberation.”[6] and “This is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well.[7] and “The authentic solution of the oppressor-oppressed contradiction does not lie in a mere reversal of position, in moving from one pole to the other. Nor does it lie in the replacement of the former oppressors with new ones who continue to subjugate the oppressed- all in the name of liberation.”[8])
In these citations from Freire, it is obvious that he is thinking in terms of social groupings, while Berdyaev is an existentialist. Luther also first made the mistake of thinking that the peasants were going to protect and carry out the Reformation. But they had not been conscientized enough, to use Freire’s terminology, i.e., they did not have “a deepened [enough] attitude of awareness of their emergence”[9] I would add, of the spirituality of grace. To use Freire again: “the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed [is] to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well….Only power that stems from the weakness of the oppressed will be sufficiently strong to free both, the oppressor and the oppressed.”[10] As God answers the prayer of St. Paul: “My power is made perfect in weakness” (2 Corinthians 12:9). In Freire’s conscientization, however, I think he does not yet understand the apocalyptic notes that Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, and Luther are striking.
Thus Berdyaev continues, “A revolution of the spirit opposes a spirit of revolution. Dostoevsky was very much the apocalyptic man and the usual standards of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary cannot be applied to him. For him revolution was as near as may be to reaction” (page 136).
Luther’s apocalyptic stand again made him a kindred spirit in this regard. For example, in the pope’s naming himself the vicar of Christ on earth and very much wielding a temporal sword and fervently involved in aggrandizing his territorial monarchy in Italy, he was presenting himself as a man-god and hence, very much an anti-Christ, who destroyed human consciences. He could be seen in the ranks of those fighting against Christ in the last battles. He fits Dostoevsky’s description of the Grand Inquisitor very much more than the powerless Christ, who had “only” the Holy Spirit with him.
God becomes a human being in Jesus Christ. The kingdom cannot be taken; it can only be received when given by the hand of God. In Luther’s apocalyptic view, he saw the Peasants’ War as being fought on the wrong side of the future. It certainly locked the peasants into the past for several hundred years and perhaps it is the reason Mennonites and other representatives of the “radical reformation” have stepped out of history altogether. And although Luther would say that people can be transformed while institutions can only be reformed; the incredible changes in the relationship of the church and state, the elimination of two ecclesiastical court systems along with the canon law, the secularization of price-bishoprics, and the end of monasteries to arise in new secular corporate transformations – are just some of the revolutionary changes brought about because of Luther’s concern with ultimate questions and the ultimate spiritual battle.
So the spirit of the revolution is the story of human beings trying to be God, lusting after the absolute power that corrupts them absolutely. In a penultimate sense, a limited this worldly sense, very much mindful of our accountability to the one at God’s right hand in Heaven, standards of living can be increased and greater approximations of justice can be achieved. But the revolution of the spirit is a revolution of hearts and minds, where in a centripetal sense, God became a human being in Jesus Christ, receiving a body, as Epistle to the Hebrews says, “a body you have prepared for me” (10:5). And in this spirituality we continue by becoming Christs to one another in the movement of the incarnation, realizing that “we are strangers and foreigners on earth” (11:13) who “desire a better country, that is, a heavenly one” (11:16). “For here we have no lasting city, for we are looking for that city which is to come” (13:14). Thus in the spirit of receiving the New Jerusalem, all manner of good this-worldly changes do come about, while our direct grasping and man-handling such realities tend to shut out the spiritual realities for the sake of earthly ones. I dare say that Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, and Luther stand in the ranks of Christ fighting the last battle at the end of time.
[1] Nicholas Berdyaev, Dostoevsky, (New York: Meridian Books, the World Publishing Company, 1968), page 69. Page numbers in the text will hereafter be those of this book. Wherever possible, I have also changed quotes so that they contain non-sexist language. “Man” to “human” or “humanity,” then “he to “s/he.” Because this is very difficult, I’ve not in all cases been consistent.
[2] Ibid. Actually at that time I did not finish the book. I had read it only to page 94; but I could well have followed Berdyaev’s line of thought.
[3] In Francis Oakley, The Western Church and the Later Middle Ages, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979).
[4] Bram Dijkstra speaking about his book, “Naked: the Compelling Role Nudity Plays in America,” Michael Krasny on Forum, NPR (January 25, 2011 at 10AM).
[5] Carl Gustav Jung, The Portable Jung, (New York: Penguin Books, 1971-1976), page 161.
[6] Paulo Freire, The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, (New York: the Corinthian Publishing Company, 1970, 1993), page 38.
[7] Ibid., page 26.
[8] Ibid., page 39.
[9] Ibid., page 90.
[10] Ibid., page 26.
Thirty readers in one day. Thank you. I invite your comments!
The Great Peasants’ War in Germany of 1525: a Little Known Story
Please note that this copy comes from back up files saved from 5 1/4 inch floppies. I found out that over 40 pages were missing and other sections as well. It took me way too long to finish editing it. Peter Krey
LUTHER AND THE PEASANTS’ WAR of 1525
CHAPTER ONE: THE LITTLE KNOWN STORY of the GREAT GERMAN PEASANTS’ WAR[1]
September 20, 1991 by Peter D. S. Krey
What was the German Peasants’ War of 1525 but an abortive revolution, even if they did not yet have this word in their vocabulary or actually use it in this sense? What a thing to make a nobleman walk on his feet, while the peasant climbed the mount and rode on the nobleman’s high horse! What was it when the notorious peasants could load Margarethe von Helfenstein, the natural daughter of Emperor Maximilian, on a manure wagon in Weinsberg, and pack her and her child off to Heilsbronn? Less harmless was this insult to her noble estate than the fact that despite her pleading for her husband’s life, Duke Helfenstein, along with seventeen other noblemen and knights, was still forced to run a gauntlet of peasants before her eyes, witnessing this cruel sport with her two year old son. (By and large the peasants had not been bloodthirsty, but Duke Helfenstein had just carried out a murderous march against the peasants on his way from Stuttgart to Weinsberg.)[2] Abortive as the revolution was, for a small space in time, from 1524 to 1525, and longer in Tyrol, the peasants hunted and fished as equals to the ruling nobility.
Because the story of the German Peasants’ War from 1524-1526 is a little known story, this chapter will briefly describe what happened in the various arenas in which it took place and then begin a preliminary interpretation of the relationship of the Reformation and Martin Luther (1483-1546) to it. Today our description of what happened unfolds as a premature social and political revolution. (Note that the word, “revolution,” however, began taking on the meaning of “taking one step farther in history” during the Enlightenment.) The substance of the precise relation of the Peasants’ War to the religious upheaval of the day, which we call the Reformation today, remains a controversy for later chapters of this investigation to explore.
Although a revolution, the demands of the Great Peasants’ War by the peasants were first moderate enough. More extreme revolutionary ideas came about later and tended to derive more from the city folk or burghers and radical preachers. The streams of the landless and poor from the wretched suburbs were swept along in the current. The poorer folk and the craftsmen of the cities also rose up against the patrician city elites who controlled the city councils. Thus the unrest was not only rural, but also widespread in the towns and cities.
From rivulets of peasants in the Black Forest in June of 1524, the peasant uprising surged into rivers when the “common man” or the towns people joined them. It swelled into a torrential stream in the Fall and Winter of 1524-1525, flash-flooding whole regions of the country in the Spring: Upper Swabia, Franconia, Austria, Northern Switzerland, Thuringia, and later Tyrol. In some places like Franconia, nobility also joined the peasants, or were compelled to join, and then criminal elements were also carried along in the torrent, bringing with them the forces of destruction, pillage and disorder.
The “common man” as he was called in the time, is certainly part of this revolution, but it seemed the basic initiative was taken by the peasants, who were feeling the dignity of their estate. They even made the nobility honorary peasants: When the peasants had won the day in Württemberg, they forced Bamberg and Würzburg to join their cause. Following their command, the Dukes Albrecht and George von Hohenlohe surrendered their canon to the peasants and accepted their “Twelve Articles.” “Brother George and Brother Albrecht,” a peasant addressed them, “You are now no longer Lords, but peasants.”[3]
This uprising of the “common man” (the term that Peter Blickle’s prefers) threatened to inundate all of Germany. Geographically charted, it began in Southern Germany or Upper (i.e., southern) Swabia, near the boarders of the Swiss cantons, and it spread into northern Swabia and into Württemberg. It went east as far as the city of Memmingen, but did not cross over into Bavaria. By the spring of 1525 it had gone northward into Franconia, Hessen, and Thuringia. It swept westward into Lorraine and over into Alsace. Southeast of Swabia it moved into Salzburg and Austria, and due south into Tyrol. At one point, all of southern and central Germany was in the hands of the peasants, except for Bavaria, in the south (interestingly enough),[4] and the six Forest Cantons of central Switzerland; and of course, North and East Germany were spared the revolution. But here the cities, too, became restless and one isolated uprising in Samland of Eastern Prussia is also reported. Perhaps the speedy overthrow of Thomas Müntzer in Thuringia prevented the revolution from spreading further northward.
Southern Germany, or more precisely, Upper Swabia, had a long pre-history of peasant revolts. Württemberg was also not without an earlier uprising. What follows is a list which is not exhaustive, but a mere sampling of all the unrest: In Swabia the Piper of Nicklashausen, Hans Böheim, whose religious-social revolt took place in 1476, caused fear among the feudal lords and rulers. The Hegau peasants revolted in 1460. The “Bundschuh” or (Union Boot) conspiracies were rampant starting in 1493. The Bundschuh, the Union Boot, the laced boot of the peasants on a banner, was the symbol for these dreaded peasant revolts. One Bundschuh took place in Schlettstadt in 1496, another in Untergrombach in 1502, and in Breisgau in 1513. The two latter conspiracies were led by Joss Fritz, a young peasant from Untergrombach, who cleverly eluded the authorities. He emerged again in Upper Swabia in 1524 in the first stages of the great uprising, only to disappear without a trace. In the abbey of Kempten, the peasants revolted in 1490 and in the abbey of Ochsenhausen, they revolted in 1502. The “Poor Conrad” uprising in Württemberg was crushed brutally by Duke Ulrich in 1514, and the battle cry of the Steier peasants of 1515 was “Stara prauda”, or “the old law.” Another Bundschuh took place along the upper Rhine in 1517. To understand the motives a word said by a peasant to an abbot will suffice:
“What we all win, if we pull off a Bundschuh, we will find out by luck. At least, however, we have to be free, like the Swiss, and rule alongside others in spiritual things, like the Hussites.”[5]
This peasant gives more insight on what produced this list of uprisings, which are comparable with union and worker strikes of today.
Although obviously southern or Upper Germany had this long and chronic peasant unrest, Middle Germany did not. Therefore social and political factors play a larger role in the former, while religious factors play a larger role in the latter. Discounting all social and political factors, the Catholic opponents of Martin Luther blamed the whole Peasants’ War on him. According to the old believers or Catholics, his stand against the pope before the emperor in the Diet of Worms in 1521, his attack against the spiritual estate, his sharp tongue that sometimes lashed the authorities with unbridled anger, delighted the lower estates and brought an attack on the civil order along with it.[6]
Nevertheless in 1522 Luther wrote his “Sincere Warning By Martin Luther To All Christians To Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion.” Returning from the protection of the Wartburg, he squelched the Wittenberg Disturbances of 1521-1522, and would not join Franz von Sickingen’s Rebellion of the Knights in 1522-1523, in spite of Ulrich von Hutton’s fervent requests. Although Luther wished to divert his followers from confronting the civil order, many of his followers disagreed with him, as did Zwingli from Zürich, who was very influential in Upper Swabia where the revolution first began.[7] These theologians represented a different reformation from Luther’s by their unwillingness to separate the religious from the political and social factors. The Catholic reaction, however, did not make a distinction, and in Upper Swabia, theologians under Zwingli’s influence often lost sight of these distinctions as well.[8]
The image of the peasant took on a peculiar quality that was somewhat larger than life in those days. In the literature he was depicted as the rebellious peasant, “Karsthans,”[9] who refused to pay tithes and deliver services to his liege Lords. On the other hand, some saw in this image of the peasant a savior. Because of his innocent oppression, they considered him to be the only one truly worthy to defend the gospel. Romantically conceived, – when it came to the inevitable Catholic reaction against the new religious movement, which only the military entanglements of the pope and emperor seemed to be delaying, he would protect the spreading new belief with hoe and flail. Luther certainly did not see the peasants or even the “common man” as saviors, but he also saw them as larger than life. According to him, they would turn the wrath of God loose upon the princes and prelates for not accepting his gospel. The peasants sensed their historic mission, and a power was unleashed that was uncontrollable. The coming tragedy proved unpreventable.
Stühlingen, located in the southern Black Forest in Upper Swabia, only a short distance from Zürich, is the place where the uprising began in the late summer harvest season of 1524. A summer hail storm had destroyed much of the crop, and tensions ran high as peasants tried to save as much of the harvest as possible. But the insensitivity of the Countess von Lupfen was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back. She had the peculiar custom of winding yarn onto snail shells, and she wanted the peasants to interrupt their harvesting and gather them for her on the shore to resupply her need. The angry peasants refused to obey and began to gather and congregate together in demonstration and protest. In doing so they were stepping over a dangerous line drawn by the nobility by breaking the laws against peasant conspiracies. But they were determined to take their case to higher authorities.
But the incident with the countess was only in the foreground and represented a great number of peasant grievances. They complained of the enclosure of the forests, alienation of the common meadows, and the denial of the right to fish. They were compelled, they said, to do much field work for their Lord, assist at hunts, and draw ponds and streams for fish without regard to their needs. The Lord’s streams were diverted across their fields, while water necessary for their irrigation and for turning their mills was cut off. Their crops were ruined by huntsmen trampling them down. They accused their Lord of abusing his jurisdiction, of inflicting intolerable punishments, and of appropriating stolen goods. They felt that justice could no longer be expected from his hands, and they could not support their wives and children in the face of all his exactions.[10]
Sixty-two articles listed their local grievances, and interestingly enough, they made no mention of the Reformation, i.e., Luther and the Gospel, or any religious issues of the time.[11] These were purely social, economic and political issues. The peasant wanted to have justice and wished to demonstrate, to underscore how seriously they felt about it. For protection they began to organize. They chose the former Landsknecht, or peasant mercenary, Hans Müller of Bulgenbach, as their captain. He was a good organizer, eloquent speaker, and experienced soldier, and riding from village to village in a brightly decorated cart, with a large feather in his cap, he was like the peasant emperor.
Soon contact with the new religious movement would take place, however. In late August of that year Hans Müller led his peasant band to the city of Waldshut, which is located only a short distance from Stühlingen, to a church dedication, (August 24, 1524)[12] where the controversial Dr. Balthasar Hubmaier was pastor. The whole area was suffering a savage persecution of the new believers at the hand of the Austrian authorities. The persecution did not differentiate between the most moderate and harmless pastors and the most radical and revolutionary ones. It was hard to tell whom the Catholic authorities hated more, the Lutherans or the revolting peasants, whom they held to be Lutherans as well. Waldshut, too, was under the jurisdiction of the Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, who commanded that Hubmaier be extricated to the authorities for introducing the Reformation into that city. Hubmeier was trying to make Waldshut another Zürich and represented the expansion of Zwingli’s reformation.[13] Waldshut was in extreme danger because it refused to obey the Archduke, but decided to protect its pastor. The peasants under Hans Müller and the burghers of Waldshut covenanted together for mutual protection.
Dr. Hubmaier was part of a radical circle of theologians around Ulrich Zwingli, (Grebel, Manz and Blaurock) many of whom were soon to become Anabaptists in late January or early February, 1525. At this point in time many Anabaptists were still quite militantly revolutionary. Hubmeier taught and preached that the authorities had disqualified themselves from ruling. Because they attacked the Gospel and tried to prevent its preaching they had forfeited their right to govern. Henceforth the peasants need no longer carry out their duties for their Lords. The Lord God alone should be honored. And the peasants agreed that they wanted no other Lord than the Lord God Almighty. Hubmaier took a radical stance and the peasants and townspeople “gave great weight to what he said, because they held him to be a good Lutheran, praising the fact that he came to them by a special dispensation and calling from God the Almighty.”[14]
While the new religious movement from Zürich, which confused ecclesiastical power with temporal power[15] played a role in Waldshut; the abuse of ecclesiastical power played a large role in such places like Kempten, Upper Swabia. The ecclesiastical Lords of Kempten were often more unjust and oppressive to the serfs in their holdings than the secular ones. That they were religious added special pain and increased the resentment of the serfs in face of the social injustices. Nowhere were the complaints of the peasants more justified than those belonging to the Abbots of the monastery of Kempten. The serfs had already revolted in 1492, and unrest had sprung up again in 1523, when they refused to swear homage to the new Abbot, Sebastian von Breitenstein, unless he would redress their many grievances. Every means, just and unjust, secular and ecclesiastical, was being used to press the peasants back into feudal serfdom, peasants who had long ago won more freedom. Sometimes excommunication was used unabashedly for punishing non-payment of debt to the abbot, their lord. The peasant courts were suppressed and protection money paid by the serfs was increased twenty-fold. The money was used by the Abby for building projects and travel. When negotiations failed and the peasants refused obedience, von Breitenstein threatened he would have to get the cruel commander, Georg von Frundsberg, to teach them obedience. The peasants decided to protect themselves and use force to repel force. They gathered together at Luibas near the courthouse of Kempten and elected Jörg Schmid, otherwise known as, Knopf, to be their leader. They had no more use for their old Lords, and wished to be their own Lords. And they beheld peasants all round them doing the same.
The uprisings in Stühlingen, Kempten, and all around Lake Constance were no different than all the other uprisings of the peasants in the past, with the exception of the fact that they were not being brutally crushed as had always happened before. The Swabian League, the great alliance of South Germany, had first organized its army to defend against any attack by Swiss mercenaries. Now it was also used against peasant revolts. Swiss freedom represented a constant threat to the feudal lords of the peasants near the Swiss Cantons. Switzerland and Germany were not different countries in those days. But the Swabian League could only muster a force of 2,000 Landsknechte against the peasants. (Landsknechte were farmhands who had become soldiers.) All available mercenaries were being sent by Archduke Ferdinand of Austria to help his brother, Emperor Charles V, in his up-coming battle in Pavia (northern Italy) with Francis I, the king of France. And those that were not in Italy, were hired by Duke Ulrich in Hohentwiel in Hegau, who had mustered 10,000 Swiss mercenaries, to take back the Württemberg that he had lost to Austria. Thus in this center of peasant unrest, Duke Ulrich was leading a military campaign to Stuttgart and the great Battle of Pavia was about to take place. Swiss freedom would win great influence and expand should the Hapsburg emperor be defeated.
Given this respite from repression and the revolutionary climate of the day, the peasant uprising grew with amazing speed and spread from one region to another. There was no need for secret conspiracies like those of the earlier Bundschuh. The peasants began to rise up en masse in what they now considered to be their right by divine law. Because of the religious element introduced by Hubmaier and another pastor, Christoph Schappeler of Memmingen, they were going to defend the Gospel and its right to be preached “without human additive.” The latter formulation described for them the old believers’ Gospel. (For example, in their reading of Luther’s recently published New Testament, there was no mention of monasteries!) First the peasants of Klettgau and Hegau joined the Stühlingers. Then all of those around Lake Constance, with those of Allgäu and Thurgau as well, came together and mustered themselves into army-assemblies (Haufen in German) and swore oaths of allegiance to each other for mutual protection in face of the possible attack.
With such a demonstration of power in the rising peasants, Hans Müller realized that merely overthrowing Count Siegmund von Lupfen was no longer worthy of his consideration. He now wanted to organize the peasants throughout all of Germany and overthrow all the rulers. Thomas Müntzer was also campaigning in the area at the time, preaching in Klettgau and Hegau that the New Israel of God was at hand. He also expanded Müllers vision and aspirations, preached for the rebellious peasants, and met with Hubmaier as well. He spent eight weeks there in the Fall of 1524, and perhaps a good deal of the Winter also. He is best characterized as a fanatical preacher and not as a peasant leader[16] – although upon his return to Thuringia in February of 1525, he would win great control over the common people there.
Duke Ulrich of Württenberg added a great deal to the turmoil in this region seething with peansant unrest. He had been driven out of his duchy in 1519 by the knights von Sickingen and von Hutton after falling out of favor with the emperor. From his fortress, Hohentwiel in Hegau, he was looking for a chance to retake Württemberg and had assembled an army of 10,000 Swiss mercenaries to accomplish this conquest. He had been agitating peasants for some time in order to carry out his plans and now the same duke who had crushed the Poor Conrad rebellion so brutally several years before, was posing as “Utz the Peasant.” The harsh rule of Austria over Württemberg in his absence, he hoped, had made the peasants forget his character.
Now Duke Ulrich invaded Württemberg taking Ballingen, Herrenberg, and Sindelfingen in a successful campaign which brought him to the outskirts of Stuttgart. He began the siege of that important city on the ninth of March, 1525.[17]
The Swabian League could not deal with the Peasant army-assemblies, while Duke Ulrich was in the field. Duke Ulrich and the Swiss mercenaries represented a very powerful threat to the Swabian League. The league now began to fulfill its original purpose: to stand guard against the forces of the Swiss Cantons and the temptation by the peasants to revolt for the Swiss freedom that they coveted. Peasants yearned to overturn regressive and feudal conditions in Swabia. The Swabian League had difficulty, however, mustering sufficient numbers of soldiers. Realistically speaking, Duke Ulrich certainly did not represent Swiss freedom, but with him in the field, the peasants bid for freedom could not be crushed.
The real power behind the Swabian League was the Chancelor of Bavaria, Leonhard von Eck, who hated everything new, and most especially the new evangelical heretics, called the Lutherans. As far as he was concerned, these were nothing but traitors, and he saw the peasant uprising as nothing but an outgrowth of this unchecked heresy. He would not let any moderate who proposed negotiations with the peasants stand in the council, and ordered the Swabian League to punish the rebellious peasants by a general blood-letting. Negotiations, like those with the Stühlingers at Stockach, were used merely to gain time to muster sufficient forces to crush the peasants brutally as had always been the custom. While the Swabian League marched toward Stuttgart and Duke Ulrich, they attacked and massacred small unsuspecting bands of Hegau peasants, which they met along the way. During this time, however, they acted as though their negotiations were done in good faith.
While negotiations and treaties looked possible, the moderate peasant leaders held command of the Peasant army-assemblies. But when it slowly became obvious that the Swabian League wanted to force a military solution as the only option, the peasants turned to more militant leaders ready to do battle. The revolting peasants now used much more pressure on their fellow peasants to join them. If a peasant refused, they pounded a stake into the ground before his cottage door placing him into a ban and making him a public enemy for the other peasants, who henceforth would have nothing more to do with such a peasant.[1View Post8]
Perhaps the peasants began to take to heart what the mayor of Ulm said to them over the negotiation table:
“With you peasants it’s like the frogs in the spring. At this time of the year they all come together and cry: `rivit, rivit’. Then the stork comes and swallows them. In the same way you cry: `Law! Law!’ Then the Lords will come and strike you dead.”[19]
It was difficult for the peasants to accept the fact that the Lords did not take negotiations with them seriously.
But early in February spontaneous revolts were taking place in many localities. Dietrich Hurlewagen of Lindau leading the Allgäu Army of Peasants, rose up against the Bishop of Augsburg. Their center of command was in Baltringen and the peasants from the monastic holdings of the Abbots of Kempten and Ochsenhausen and even peasants from beyond the Alps joined this campaign. All the peasants of the area around Lake Constance joined them and no church bells could be sounded for services, because this would make all the peasants rush to their center ready to depart for battle. These peasants were led by Eitelhans of Thüringia, whose followers celebrated him “as a good captain of the Lord, who kept a faithful hand over them.”[20]
Many other local campaigns could be described, but this one is an example for the powerful spontaneity that obtained in these early months of 1525.
It became necessary for the peasant assembly-armies to organize themselves better. But in the Fall of 1524, Hans Müller had not yet succeeded in organizing three of them (assemby-armies were called Haufen in German) into the Christian Union, although it is sometimes claimed that he did and he is given the credit for it. It was Christoph Schappeler, however, with the “religious” assistance of Zürich that brought them together in Memmingen during February and March of 1525. The Baltringen Peasant army-assembly chose the moderate, Ulrich Schmid of Sulmingen, as its captain. Ulrich Schmid was a convinced Lutheran artisan, who joined the peasants because he believed in their cause. It took some persuasion before he agreed to lead the Baltringen army-assembly of Peasants:
“He wanted to have it openly expressed for all to know that it was not for his own person and for the sake of his own grievances, that in any way he wanted to raise complaints with his Lords. He was a good craftsman, and could make a good living for his wife and children….He wanted it understood that he was acting as a mediator and negotiator in their behalf and that of the Lords, and it should not be perceived differently.”[21]
He persuaded Sebastian Lotzer[22] to become the scribe of the assembly. At one point 30,000 peasants gathered together under him. He was very influential around the time of the Memmingen gathering of delegates.
Of interest is Schmid’s moderate approach and the fact that he was Lutheran. His rationale for leading the peasants was two-fold, material and spiritual: the latter in that the people were being robbed of the preaching of the Word of God, which placed their souls in extreme danger, and the former, in that the taxation and burdens upon the peasants were too severe and cruel so that they were no longer able to bear it.[23] Ulrich Schmid was moderate in that he did not at all intend to use force. The arms the peasants bore were only for self-defense in case the Lords placed a bad interpretation upon their demonstration and suddenly turned on them to slay them. The Lords came to him and offered him litigation in court. Schmid refused because he yearned for divine justice that would inform each estate what it must or must not do. The Lords responded with ridicule:
“Dear Ulrich, you ask for Godly justice. Tell us. Who will pronounce such justice? God will not hurry down from heaven in order to schedule a legal convention for us.”[24]
According to Ulrich, he did not yet have judges or the jurisprudence, but three weeks of prayer should be scheduled and every church yard and priest questioned concerning this issue.
When the Baltringen peasants sent delegates to the city of Memmingen, along with those of the Lake Peasant and Allgäu Peasant Army- Assemblies, a gathering of peasants into a parliament took place on March 5. The “Christian Association” or “Christian Union” of Peasant Army-Assemblies was formed the next day and Wendel Hipler was chosen to be the Peasant Chancellor.
At this time, Zürich prevailed upon the peasants to rally their cause in behalf of the Gospel.[25] (From Luther’s perspective, such a stance is a cloak that Von Sickingen had also used to cover the self interests of his military rebellion. According to Luther’s theology, the Gospel is antithetical to armed force and should not be used in that way for material and political ends. Coercion contradicted the Gospel, which could be furthered only by a spiritual movement.) The Zürich city council where Zwingli had great influence, now exhorted the peasants to adopt the Word of God for their banner. The peasants of Baltringen asserted that they wanted no disturbances but only that their grievances be redressed according to godly justice (as already shown by Ulrich Schmid). And the Allgäu peasants, where the peasant, Häberlin, had preached and baptized, now decided to call themselves a “Godly Union.”[26] The Lake Peasants, who had some contingents of von Sickingens army among them, wanted nothing to do with religious moderation, but wanted to attack the Lords and the cities.
Memmingen was a city friendly to the cause of the peasants. Here Zwingli’s friend, the Pastor Christoph Schappeler, and his colleague, the journeyman furrier, Sebastian Lotzer, had been preaching about the plight of the peasants and the poor common man, and they had been active in the spirit of the new teachings for several years. In March, 1525, the “Twelve Articles of the Swabian Peasants” appeared in the Memmingen parliament. They were penned by Sebastion Lotzer between February 28 – March 1, 1525, the official scribe of the Baltringen peasants,[27] but Schappeler was their inspiration, and even Hubmaier probably had a hand in them. Throughout the uprising, the peasants supplied the physical force and their hardships supplied the real motive, but the intellectual inspiriation came from the radical element in the towns.[28] Schappeler under Zwingli’s influence, now gave a religious aspect to the revolt based on ideas of fraternal love and Christian liberty drawn from the Gospel.
With the use of the printing press, the Twelve Articles were read all over Germany within weeks of their acceptance in Memmingen. They were accepted on March 7, 1525. Soon thereafter, the organized peasants of Swabia, Franconia, Thuringia, and Alsace had accepted them as their platform. Never has a manifesto been so enduring and effective in German history as this one. At first glance the articles seem rather moderate, but they actually call for radical reform.
For example, the peasants wanted the right to call or retire their own pastors. Pastors were often the only leaders and intellectuals close enough to the peasants to represent them. They demanded the right to hunt and fish, which was the sole right of the nobility at the time. Therefore this was a demand for equality between the estates. They held that the small tithe was not Biblical and should not be paid and the regular tithe should be redistributed for the payment of the pastor and relief of the poor:
“And thirdly it has been the custom that we have been held as feudal serfs, which is pitiful in view of the fact that Christ has redeemed and purchased us all by shedding for us his precious blood. Therefore the Scriptures teach that we are free, and so we also want to be.”[29]
With that they demanded the abolition of the feudal system. Therefore they dislodged the established secular order by the concept of divine law on the basis of the Word of God. This sampling of the articles shows that although they appear to be moderate enough, they are very radical indeed, hoping to introduce far reaching change.
On March 10 the attempt to renegotiate with the Swabian League or other higher authorities was proposed by the Christian Association of Peasants in Memmingen. Here Martin Luther was also chosen to be one of the arbitrators or interpreters of the divine law for the peasants, along with Archduke Ferdinand, Frederick the Wise, and Melanchthon or Bugenhagen.[30] This reference to Luther was important because it made him respond to the Swabian peasantry with his “Admonition for Peace on the Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia.” He wrote this pamphlet between April 17th and 20th) on his campaign to calm the peasant uprisings in Thuringia between April 21 and May 6, 1525.[31] (Luther and his colleagues left for Eisleben after the Wittenberg Easter services on April 16th to organize a Christian Latin School. [32] Endnote: See my dissertation, page 97.)
The Twelve Articles and many other variations of them were revised and expanded to meet local conditions. By their influence a phase of the uprising began that sought to resolve the conflict by means of negotiation and treaties. Many of the Lords were amenable to this resolution and in many places the conflict was reconciled through such articles. The Area of Renchen is a case in point and the Bishop of Salzburg, Matthew Lang, is another example of a successfully negotiated treaty. In Rheingau, the knight, Friedrich von Greiffenklau, led a coalition of peasants and burghers to a successful treaty. Archduke Ferdinand, who was designated to represent Charles V, was not able to see beyond his own troubles in Austria, and the Council of Regency was paralyzed and powerless. Only the territorial Lords and the Swabian League wielded real power, which did not bode well for negotiations and reconciliation.
Two problems developed: first of all, much of the negotiation by the Swabian League, the Dukes, Counts and Bishops took place in bad faith. They merely tried to gain time until more soldiers and mercenaries could be recruited. That they were all absorbed in the battle of Pavia was only one side of the difficulty of their recruitment. Another was that the Landsknechte did not wish to fight their own people. Secondly, Leonhard von Eck, the most powerful actor on the scene of the time, demanded the bloody suppression of the revolt as the only option. All treaties successfully negotiated had to be rescinded, despite protest on both sides, even if that might be the Bishop or the Archduke. Against the will of even his superiors, Leonhard von Eck and the Swabian League ignored the treaties and put the peasant leaders to the edge of the sword.
When the Swabian League under its commander, George III Truchsess von Waldburg, a very experienced and brutal general, comparable to George von Frundsberg, arrived at Stuttgart, he arrayed his forces before those of Duke Ulrich of Württemberg. Suddenly, in all haste the Swiss mercenaries, who were with Duke Ulrich, were recalled to their Cantons. Word had just come to them that on February 24 Emperor Charles V had defeated the French King at Pavia, and the Swiss might need all their soldiers for their own defense upon the Emperor’s return. This state of affairs left Duke Ulrich with no alternative but to make an ignominious retreat South. With the Duchy of Württemberg safely in the hands of the Austrian Hapsburgs once again, Truchsess with all his Landsknechte and with the undivided forces of the Swabian League, was free to march against the peasants.
With the advancing threat of the Swabian League, the peasants began to confront their ambiguity and confusion. They were torn between their posturing merely for self-defense and a military posture that entailed threat. The moderate non-violent leaders hoped to interpret their whole uprising as demonstrations to back up their negotiations for a peaceful settlement with merely a show of strength. Wendel Hipler and Ulrich Schmid of Sulmingen are examples of this type. But right from the first the peasants had also massed in an obviously military manner. Formerly they had been called together again and again by a Lord for a feud or some other petty war. Now they had had the audacity of calling themselves together for their own cause.
Indecision about non-violent demonstration and force of arms was not the only problem, confusion was also among them because they were supposedly responding to their historic mission to defend the Gospel by providing a new political order that did not persecute its preaching. This religious overlay came about through Schappeler, Lotzer, and Hubmaier, who were influenced by Zwingli and the city Council of Zürich. The Peasant Army from the north shore of Lake Constance wanted a more political attack,[33] but the Allgäu and Baltringen Peasant Armies gave the gospel agenda more support. That they formed a “Christian Union” mindful of their religious mission must have jarred with the fact that they would have to kill and destroy or be killed. The advancing Swabian League, however, gave them little choice. The peasants had to turn to new leaders ready to use force of arms for their protection. Ulrich Schmid was replaced by Walter Bach, a veteran of the Landsknecht army of Georg von Frundsberg. When Bach[34] showed too much willingness to negotiate, he was in turn replaced by Paulen Probst. These military hardliners started destroying castles and pillaging monasteries. On March 26, the Castle of Schemmerberg was the first to go up in flames.[35]
Sympathy for the peasant cause diminished: “There is no sharper sword, but when a peasant becomes a Lord!” said a monk whose monastery was devastated by the peasants. A great many castles and monasteries were destroyed in the course of the insurrection, especially by such violent characters as Jörg Schmid, alias, Knopf of Luibas with the Kempten peasants, who were part of the Allgäu band; and Jäcklein Rohrbach, an enraged leader of the large band of peasants from the Neckar Valley. Criminal elements joined Rohrbach, of Weinsberg notoriety. When Matern Feuerbacher and other moderate peasant leaders rejected him, he continued in a strategically useless campaign of pillage and destruction.
Georg Truchsess von Waldburg headed south into Swabia from Württemberg, a general, whose own peasants were in full revolt and had burned down his own ancestral castle. His army grew stronger by the day with new Landsknechte returning from Pavia. The first peasant army he met were in Leipheim, somewhat northeast of Ulm on April 4, 1525.
Here on the Danube, the peasants had risen up under Ulrich Schoen and the priest of Leipheim, named Jacob Wehe. Their forces had attacked and taken Leipheim, Weissenkorn, and stormed the castle of Roggenburg. In this same vicinity Dietrich Hurlewagen led the peasants in the campaign against the Bishop of Augsburg, and Eitelhans of Thuringia commanded the peasants of Allgäu covenanted with the Kempten serfs. All of the peasants from around Lake Constance and even from behind the Alps had come together here at the end of February. But now on April 4th, Truchsess caught one portion of the peasant army by surprise.
Truchsess had trouble with his Landsknechte. Most of them mutinied and refused to fight the peasants who were their own brothers and kinsmen. Besides, they murmured, weren’t the peasants entering the battlefield for “divine justice and God’s Word, for Godly and natural law”? Truchsess made a bid for the higher moral ground in a speech that tried to overcome their unwillingness to fight:
“We want to confront the peasants and take the field against them, because they are against the law, and they misuse the divine Gospel as a pretext, in order to convince you to go over to their side. The (Landsknechte) would never see the day that they go to battle against Law and the Word of God. That is guaranteed by the sincerity of the Emperor and the rulers. The peasants claim to be Evangelical, but unjustly so, because they are revolting against the whole law….Not alone (against) the worldly law, but also the Holy Gospel, and they can not with their rampaging, unChristian action with any truth call themselves Evangelical.”[36]
Those troops, about two thousand regulars, who had just come back from Pavia, were willing to fight for their wages. With them Truchsess engaged 4,000 peasants of Baltringen and upper Allgäu composing the Leipheim Peasant Army, which had chosen an advantageous battlefield. They had placed a marsh between themselves and the League, which made it impossible for the Knights, the cavalry, to fight effectively. But whether it was great cowardice or an inability to fight, or possibly, because of religious confusion, it is hard to ascertain: the peasants fled almost immediately toward the city. Truchsess ordered the gates closed. He then cut them off, killing many. They fled back into the swords and spears of the main force – others dove into the waters of the Danube and “drowned like pigs.” Those who made it to the other side were killed by Hessians. All 4,000 peasants were killed or drowned.
Later in the town, the Landsknechte rounded up the peasant leaders with the evangelical pastor of Leipheim among them, whom they executed outside the city walls. This pastor, a priest named Hans Jacob Wehe had led 250 burghers out of the city to join the peasants under Ulrich Schoen and he had become influential over the whole Leipheim Peasant Army. Another Pastor of Günzburg was also among the eight peasant leaders who were to be executed. Jacob Wehe died a very Christian death, seemingly, that of a martyr. He comforted and strengthened all the peasant leaders about to be beheaded, until he himself was executed. His pastoral care of the others, who were also doomed, amazed the soldiers of the Swabian League. The other pastor of Günzburg and an old man, could not be executed in time before the darkness set in and thus were spared.
Before Pastor Wehe died, Truchsess encountered him:
“Had you preached the Word of God, the way you are supposed to, and preached peace, then you would not now be in distress and you would be secure before me.”
“Gracious Lord, you do me wrong.” the Pastor answered. “I never preached insurrection, but the Word of God.”
“I have experienced you differently. If you were an evangelical man, you would not have helped the people take away what is not theirs. Now commit your cause to God!” said Truchsess.
The Pastor said a prayer thanking God that he was dying for the sake of God’s Word, and that God was taking him out of this vale of tears and sorrows – not because of the Word of God, but because of the insurrection. “Father forgive them, they do not know what they are doing – (forgive them) not for the sake of my righteousness, but for their unknowing.” After another prayer, he was beheaded.[37]
This first battle was a harbinger of things to come, for the most part. And if rightly described, it needs to be called the first of many massacres of the peasants. They certainly presented themselves as an army. But when it came for them to fight, they were veritable sheep for the slaughter. [38]
With this victory of the Swabian League, the Baltringen Army dropped out of the Christian Union. That reason could perhaps explain why the Allgäu and Lake Armies refused to march to their aid and rescue then in the following battle. The peasant army under Jacob Wehe and Ulrich Schoen had been the Leibheim Peasant Band, although other peasant contingents were among them as well.
Truchsess continued his rapid southern campaign into Upper Swabia looking for the Allgäu, Hegau, Baltringen and Lake Armies. On April 10, he came upon the Lower-Allgäu Peasant Army, 7,000 strong, with Pastor Florien Greisel in command. The peasants liked to appoint pastors to these positions, not because they were good soldiers; but with it they hoped for the protection of God. In his own territory, Truchsess defeated the Allgäu army driving them toward Wurzach, where he then defeated the Baltringen army on April 13th. Six peasant bands had converged in the area and contingents of the Lower Allgäu and Baltringen armies together with others were among the 7,000 peasants decimated in this southern campaign of the Swabian League. Meanwhile Knopf (Jörg Schmid) was leading the Upper Allgäu Army trying unsuccessfully to lay seige to several of Truchsess’ own castles, as well as leading a pillage campaign. The remainder of the Allgäu Peasant Army and Lake Army gathered together at Gaisbeuren near the monastery of Weingarten. The Swabian League had a force of about 7,000, while the peasants had about 12,000. But the peasants’ number was increasing every day. The Lake Peasant Army was composed of hardened mercenaries, who were well armed: every third man among them had real weapons (a telling remark about lack of armaments among many of the peasants). Truchsess had such a disadvantageous strategic position, he decided to make concessions and negotiate with the peasants offering them rather favorable terms.
The outcome was the famous Weingarten Treaty of Aril 22, which Luther also published in full (in early May) with a preface and epilogue, so significant an event he felt it to be. He commended it to all as a good way to bring a resolution to the uprising. But what effect could he have on Leonhard von Eck, who considered Luther an arch heretic anyway. The irony of the situation, however, lay in the fact that the best peasant army agreed not to fight, while the other poorly armed and inexperienced armies were getting cut down one by one. And after Truchsess had completed his campaign in Franconia, he returned to the Weingarten area and defeated these forces anyway. Luther took the treaty seriously and was not being cynical, but ardently hoping for reconciliation. Thomas Müntzer, on the other hand, saw through the deceptive strategy of false treaties devised by the rulers for military advantage, and hoped the peasants would not fall for them. Müntzer should have been opposite the Swabian League and these moderate peasants should have faced Frederick the Wise. But it would have all come to a bad end anyway.
The inability for the peasants to fight with resolution was a real disadvantage that the Swabian League knew how to exploit to its uttermost advantage. Perhaps the peasants could not make up their mind whether to fight or to demonstrate in the image of those commissioned to defend the Gospel. It may well be that if every third man was well armed in the Lake Peasant Army, most of the peasants may well have fought with scythes and pitchforks against well armed Landsknechte. This Weingarten Treaty could really be said to have been the greatest defeat for the peasants, who, however, could not see that after the other peasant armies were defeated one by one, thereafter they would also have their turn to be massacred.
Back before the monastery at Weingarten, the two armies had a cease fire over Easter Sunday, April 16th, so that the soldiers could pray and worship. Most of the peasants were evangelical, while the Truchsess Army was composed of Roman Catholic and Evangelical Landsknechte. The patrician Dietrich Hurlewagen and the nobleman, Hans Jacob Humpis von Senftenau, negotiated the treaty for the peasants.
Truchsess had not dared risk his army against the Hegau (the Black Forest) and Lake Peasants. They had reinforcements coming in from every side, and he had no back up at all. And truthfully, the treaty freed him up to respond for all the desparate calls for help in the Württemberg, the Odenwald, and Franconian uprisings. Because, while the cease fire and negotiations took place in Weingarten, Rohrbach with the Neckar-Odenwald Peasant Army was taking Weinsberg and revenging the peasants, precisely on Easter Sunday and Monday. Truchsess started quick- marching his troops north.
The Peasants Take Control over Franconia
Each arena of the uprising had its own color and characteristics. In Swabia the uprising was basically social in nature. The peasants opposed the nobility’s privatizing their commons and wanted to resurrect the ancient German communal society. They were also more exclusive, wanting only peasants in their movement. In Franconia, the uprising took a further step, trying to give the peasants a political voice to buttress what had been socially achieved. Here the peasants were very inclusive, even of the burghers and the nobility. While the definitive document of Swabia, therefore, was a social one, “The Twelve Articles,” that of the Franconian movement was political one, a new draft of the constitution of the empire. It was written by a pension official, Friedrich Weigandt. He sent it to his friend, the peasant chancellor, Wendel Hipler, who called the Peasant Parliament together in Heilbronn in early May, 1525, in order to start the political reformation that would give a place to the peasant in the political process. With that he hoped to secure the freedom the peasants had so far achieved.
And the peasants had achieved very much in Franconia. No one was able to stand against them. They had come into complete control of the whole area up to the boarders of Swabia by mid- April. Here they had indeed won the day, or so it seemed.
For example, in the free imperial city of Rothenburg on the River Tauber, the burghers were in full revolt. They were led by a certain craftsmen, Stephan von Menzingen. Together the townspeople overthrew the patrician council of the city and opened their gates to the peasants. The burghers and peasants united on April 5, 1525. Carlstadt, Luther’s adversary, was active in this city, after having left first Wittenberg and then Orlamunde. Carlstadt dressed like a peasant, and in every way had been trying to show solidarity with them in his ministry.
Luther’s colleague, Carlstadt had left Wittenberg angrily, because Luther had stopped the fast reforms and image breaking he initiated. After leaving Wittenberg, Carlstadt left a short controversial ministry in Orlamunde. He had disciples, who already had prepared his way in Franconia. Diepold Beringer, for example, the so-called peasant of Wöhrd, went from this city to Nuremberg, to Kitzingen, and then to Rothenburg. Carlstadt had Martin Reinhard, the Jenenfer pastor, in Nuremberg, as well as Franz Kolb in Wertheim.[39]Carlstadt and his disciples had meetings in the house of Phillip Tuscherer. But no direct connections can be found between Stephan von Menzingen and Carlstadt, although Carlstadt may have had a connection with Duke Ulrich of Württemberg.[40]
Carlstadt proceeded with the breaking of images as he had in the Wittenberg disturbances of 1521-1522. He wished to see the whole of life drenched in the Gospel; indeed, all of life’s arrangements should be aligned with it. He could not condone a sense of moderation and gradual change. He felt that it was no time to sympathize with the weak. He dressed in the garb of peasants to show his solidarity with them. His instructions were simple:
“Where Christians rule, they should recognize no authority; but they should freely let loose and destroy what is against God, even without sermons. Such offenses are many, namely, the mass, images, the flesh of idols that the parsons now eat….”[41]
The militia of Rothenburg had been the first group to rise up and they became the nucleus of the Tauber Peasant Army, whose slogan was agreed upon April 5, 1525: “What the Gospel establishes is to be established and what the Gospel destroys is to be destroyed.”[42]
Bildhausen, which lay north of Würzburg, became the center where all the peasants gathered and organized themselves. The Odenwald and Neckar Peasants came together on the Lenten Sunday of Laetare, March 26, 1525. They chose the inn keeper, Georg Metzler, as their leader. All the local militia were overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of peasants. The two cities, Bamberg and Würzburg, which were the seats of the Franconian bishops, joined the movement freely. (Indeed, they had no alternative.) And they made their artillery and munitions available to the peasants. Here the Dukes Albrecht and Georg Hohenlohe had to surrender themselves to the peasants and were declared “honorary peasants” to their dismay. An uncompleted tally counts 162 castles and 48 monasteries conquered and destroyed in Franconia alone. In the pillage and destruction, the peasants respected the lives of the Lords, for the most part.
Weinsberg was, of course, the exception and it was used to great effect as propaganda against the peasants. Perhaps it can be explained, if not excused, in that some of the serfs were filled with a bitter rage over their lot. Jäcklein Rohrbach, who instigated the atrocity, was such a one and was little better than a criminal. He also had a rather shady consort, Margaret Renner, called, “Black Margaret,” who seemed to have him under her control. Both hailed from Böckingen and were filled by the hate that abject serfs were wont to have for those of higher estates.
Rohrbach commanded the Neckar Valley Peasant Army which committed the atrocity. He had built up his army to 1,500 men strong, and joined Georg Metzler’s Odenwald Army, which numbered 6,500 peasants. Rohrbach accepted Metzler as his commander. But he was in charge of the siege of Weinsberg, the first big victory for the peasants. They overwhelmed the city’s small but famous garrison. Duke Helfenstein had only a small number of knights to help protect the city, but he displayed the bravery or brazen attitude here as he had shown by distinguishing himself in the battle of Stuttgart against Duke Ulrich.
Perhaps brazen, because, before all the Neckar Peasants arrived, Helfenstein made a foray against them stabbing and slaying quite a number of peasants, and then returned to the city to encourage the burghers to fight. Here before they could withdraw to their fortress, the peasants came upon them in the city. This massacre of peasants perpetrated by von Helfenstein himself, might have enraged the peasants or, otherwise, hearing about the one that Truchsess perpetrated on them in Wurzach may have. In any case, the peasants sought revenge. The burghers opened the gates to them and the peasants started stabbing the nobles and knights. One Dietrich von Weiler ran up a tower pleading for his life, but they shot him and threw him from the tower. The killing only stopped when Metzler arrived. This revenge had taken place on Easter Sunday.
The next morning without Metzler’s knowledge or orders, although Metzler had placed Rohrbach in charge of the prisoners, Rohrbach took twenty-four knights and squires, and ran them through a gauntlet of spears, Duke Ludwig von Helfenstein among them. This gruesome sport was designed to make them have as slow and painful a death as possible. Despite the pleas of Emperor Maximillians daughter and Helfenstein’s promise to pay them a ton of gold, they made him run the gauntlet.
In many ways the tide of sympathy turned against the peasants after the Weinsberg atrocity, because this action was very hard to combine with the image of the peasants as the saviors and defenders of the pure gospel. The opponents of the peasants also used it to great advantage in the propaganda campaign against them. Even the peasants themselves rejected Rohrbach. Matern Feuerbacher, who had become the commanding general of the combined Württemberg Peasant Armies would have nothing more to do with him and with all those involved in the incident.
The immediate effect of the brutality at Weinsberg, however, because of the terror it spread, was the subjugation of all the Odenwald nobility up to the boarders of Swabia. All of the nobility now accepted the law of the peasants. So terrorized were they that scores of nobles joined the Evangelical Brotherhoods of the Peasants, surrendered their artillery and munitions. Count William von Henneberg, whose great strength was to protect the Bishop of Würzburg, also surrendered, as did the abbots of Fulda and Herfeld. The Bishops of Bamberg and Speier, and a high official under the Bishop of Würzburg himself, and the Margrave Casimir as well, were compelled to accept Hipler’s modified Twelve Articles or make similar concessions.
The struggle between the hardline peasants and moderates continued. Wendel Hipler was a moderate, and he sought a political compromise in modifying the Twelve Articles and offering the ecclesial wealth to the rulers. Matern Feuerbacher, a respectable innkeeper, also sided with the moderates.
At this time, Hipler recruited the knight, Götz von Berlichen, to lead the powerful Odenwald forces beside Georg Metzler. Von Berlichen made famous by Göthe’s play, “Götz of the Iron Fist” (He had lost one hand), played a rather negative role for the peasants. He probably joined them to lead them away from his castle and then quietly deserted them in a critical juncture. Another nobleman, Florien Geyer, a knight of the von Sickingen variety from Ingolstadt, emerged in the Tauber army at this time as well. He in turn was also made into a folk hero, but this time by a Hauptmann play. Although he espoused the cause of the peasants and even joined them freely, both he himself and his romantic Black Regiment played a negligible role in the crucial battles. Because the peasants had an undying mistrust of all the knights, he was used mostly for peasant negotiations. Florien Geyer was in Rothenburg when the peasants failed in their siege of the Frauenburg, the Marien Fortress. After Truchsess arrived on the scene of the Würzburg seige, the peasant cause was lost. When Florien Geyer returned, he and the Black Regiment tried to fight their way through to the north, but he was murdered by his own cousin, William von Grumbach on June 9, 1525.
In Franconia, not only nobility began to fill the ranks of the peasant leadership, but also some rather shadey characters, like a certain Hans Bermeter, alias, Linck. He is important to consider, much like Rohrbach and Black Margaret, to show that the Hiplers, Ullrich Schmids, and Matern Feuerbachers were not the only leadership in this uprising. Linck was much like a con man, gang leader. Exploiting anti-clericalism, he and his men plundered the houses of clergy of their wine and provisions. He forged letters from the council of the city of Würzburg to the peasant leaders offering to unite the city’s burghers with the cause of the peasants. This brought peasant embassaries to the gates of the city with quite an interesting exchange, with words to this effect:
“Would they [the people of the city] please give them to understand if they would be their Christian Brothers and help them to erect the Gospel, and also whether they would have safe entry and passage among them. To that they should answer yes or no. If yes, it would be good; if no, they would report back and take counsel concerning their further actions.”
To the people standing by: “Take care, if you refuse to join us, we’ll tear up all your vineyards before morning….”[43]
In desperation the mayor like a madman, agreed to “abide in the Gospel and help them erect it.” The council decided to send three delegates to the peasants to see if any of their doing was against the Gospel – and if so, to come back and report it to the council.[44] The use of religious language here is very cynical and empty, cloaking threats on the one side, and mindless fear on the other.
The city therefore opened its gates to the peasants on May 8th. But the siege of the fortress in Würzburg thereafter was a crucial mistake on the part of the peasants, because it bottled them up in a futile exercise, while they needed to think of massing together and organizing a defense against the advancing Truchsess. Perhaps they decided on this course of action, because this fortress was the last stronghold in Franconia, and in falling, it would secure for them victory in the war. The siege was not of the city, which had opened its gates, but of its Marien Fortress, the “Frauenburg,” as it is called in German. The Bishop of Würzburg, himself, who was simultaneously also the Duke of Franconia, had fled into this almost impregnable castle.
What else could the Bishop do? Archduke Ferdinand was defending himself against his own peasants. The Duke von Henneberg could not come to his aid, because he had already surrendered to the peasants. The words of Florien Geyer were true: “No nobleman could come to the aid of another, because the peasants were doing their jig in front of each one of their castles.”[45]And therefore the Würzburgers offered moderate conditions to the peasants in terms of their willingness to surrender the castle. The peasants, as well as Florien Geyer, and against the advice of Götz von Berlichen, wished to see the castle destroyed in a siege. Perhaps they longed to erase it, seeing it only as the terrible symbol of their oppression by the nobility.
It was an undisciplined, misguided and futile siege. Rothenburg had just officially gone over to the peasants, and Florien Geyer may have been negotiating there on May 14th for that reason. In any case, many of the most able peasant commanders were not present when the siege took place. Some of the peasants believed in radical equality, by which they meant that they were also equal to their commanders. Götz von Berlichen just watched the siege from a forest clearing. He may have betrayed the peasants, because someone neglected to give artillery cover to the peasants while they stormed the walls, and they thus experienced heavy losses. The battle ended in a disastrous defeat. The peasant obsession of taking the fortress remained, even while their power to take it continued to diminish. They did not realize how little time they had, because their doom inflicted by the Swabian League and its commander, Truchsess drew nearer.
Wendel Hipler called another meeting of the peasant delegates together known as the Heilbronn Peasant Parliament. The first meeting was the one in Memmingen where the Twelve Articles were ratified and promulgated by the peasants. Now the plan was to organize a new political and social order that included the peasants, their interests, and concerns. But although the concept “reformation” is used in this new draft of the constitution many times, it is understood in the sense of a reformation of the empire, and very mindful of social reforms as well, necessary for the betterment of the peasants and the common people. Sometimes Weigandt speaks of the “divine reformation” or under what strategy the “actualized reformation” could be won.[46]
This is a far-sighted document, which forbad clergy from being Lords, and also wisely abolished ecclesial intervention in the matters of state. It goes almost as far as the demands of the Alsatian peasants, in asking not only for the election of pastors, but also for that of other officials. And a peoples’ Emperor is envisioned as a minister of the common people, who are conceived as subjects endowed with sovereign authority, upon which that of the emperor is founded. Peasants preferred a popular despotism to feudal anarchy. The patchwork of petty feudal holdings and the multiple loyalties and artificial and narrow boundaries dominated by petty absolute Lords, gave the peasants unending frustration. The new draft of the constitution also tried to unify the legal and economic systems of the empire, and politically it tried to block the increasingly divisive territorial powers through greater centralism under a Volk’s Emperor.
When Weigandt sent this draft of the constitution to Hipler, he felt that since Würzburg had surrendered, it would only be a matter of time before the fortress, Marienburg, would also surrender. But he did not comprehend how much real military power, far surpassing that of the peasants, would be required to enact such a constitution. A slight weakness about all the plans with the people’s Emperor lay in the fact that the reigning Emperor Charles V was the last one interested in any notion of representing the peasants and common people. On the contrary, the Emperor later thanked Truchsess for his role in defeating the peasants. So the plans of Weigandt, the pension official from Mainz, and Hipler, the peasant chancellor, needed to await later German history for implementation. The vision of a political reformation did not go under with the defeat of the peasants. These ideas belonged to the future.
But in all this, Weigandt and Hipler did not even have a chance to propose the new constitution before the assembled delegates of the peasants. News came to them of the defeat of the peasant armies in Böblingen on May 12th, and all the delegates had to hurry away, because their seemingly sovereign position suddenly became insecure once again. Truchsess was a very experienced general and he fought the peasants in Böplingen on his way up to Würzburg.
In the Battle of Böblingen, the peasants fought somewhat more valiantly, at least in giving each other mutual support and taking strategic positions. When the Black Forest Peasant and the Hegau Peasant armies noticed that the Württemberg Peasants were going to be attacked, they joined their forces into a 20,000 man army. They had a position where the League’s cannonade could not be effective, and Truchsess had to reposition in order to gain a better shot at them. When the Swabian Forces moved, so did the peasants, and to a strategic hill beside the city, precisely as Truchsess feared they would, where they could cover and control a narrow bridge. But the people of the city came to Truchsess and offered to open the gates to him, if he would spare them. This he agreed to do, because the force of the peasants was too ominous. But when seventy of his troops arrived at the gate, the peasants were already too close, and the burghers changed their mind and refused to open. Truchsess made a personal intervention and let the gate-keepers know that if he won, every man, woman and child would be massacred and the city burned to the ground unless they kept their promise to open the gates. Thus terrorized, they opened them to his forces. Then Truchsess’ artillery fired on the peasants from three sides.
The battle lasted four hours. This time it was not a matter of minutes before the peasant army caved in and fled. But much of the time was really involved in maneuvering into strategic positions. When Truchsess’ cannonade began, the peasants again actually held out only a matter of minutes. The main force took to flight even before the vanguard did. And 8,000 peasants were smitten, stabbed and slain. Truchsess did not plan to attack until more of his forces arrived, but seeing the panic the guns caused among the peasants, he decided on an immediate attack. The Swabian League was not very self confident going into this battle, but the reaction of the peasants made it easy for them to route them decisively.
Böblingen was a devastating loss for the peasants. If all of Truchsess troops had been there, almost all the 20,000 peasant forces would have been massacred, according to Truchsess’ chronicler.
The Swabian League and later the Ducal forces hardly sustained any losses, while the peasants were massacred by the thousands in every battle. This is a quandary of the history of the war. Despite overwhelming numbers, the peasants lacked courage and a resolute desire to fight. Most of the peasants had never experienced battle, lacked weaponry, and they were up against battle-hardened mercenaries. In military history, the Peasants’ War marked the introduction of large scale artillery fire and it was turned on terrified peasants, many of whom were unarmed. Even the armaments the peasants had at their disposal, including their artillery, may have been very inferior to that of the opposite side. Perhaps they were also deeply convinced of their inferior status, for all their revolt against it, and were awaiting inevitable punishment for having “acted out.” They were easily deceived and not at all as capable of the brutality of the Lords, in a time when brutality seemed to have the last word. Perhaps they wanted to be “Christian,” and could not kill the opposing Landsknechte. There was also a short sightedness and lack of self discipline engrained in the peasants, who were very mesmerized by monastic and royal wealth, which they looted and pillaged from the monasteries and castles. They basked in this immediate glory and failed to take the long view and prepare for the real battles that winning against experienced soldiers would require.
The Peasants in Alsace
In Alsace the new evangelical faith had already been introduced in 1520 and for five years it was fermenting among the people of the whole area. The Alsatian peasants rose up as well in the Spring of 1525, actually right during Easter week. Three peasant army-assemblies organized around Strasbourg. They plundered the monasteries and compelled the little cities and the nobility to join them. Saverne, the seat of an Alsatian bishop, also opened its gates to the peasants. This region was largely a possession of the Hapsburgs, but Archduke Ferdinand had his hands full with the uprisings in Stiermark and Tyrol, and could not think of sending help to distant Alsace. The Bishop of Strasbourg administered his foundational church establishment from Mainz and was forced to negotiate a treaty. The powerful city of Strasbourg maintained a strict policy of neutrality.
“Up, up against the peasants!” called a councilman of the city of Reichenweihe. And the response was representative for all of Alsace: “I have no powder or ball with which to shoot the peasants.” said one guard. “I have no hellebarde that could smash a peasant.” said the next. “I have no spear that could stab a peasant.” said the third.[47]
Where no real opposition formed in Alsace and the peasants carried the whole region by storm, their scourge suddenly reared up its head from outside of Alsace, indeed, outside of Germany, from France. Duke Anton of Lorraine invaded Alsace in a crusade, a holy war, against the peasants. These were nothing but Lutheran heretics for him and he wanted to force them back into the fold of the one true church. He wanted none of their influence to invade his native France, “the Land of God.”
Erasmus Gerber had become the leader of the Alsatian peasant armies. His pitiful pleas for help against this unanticipated invader, this cruel tyrant, went out to Strasbourg, but that city remained neutral and did nothing to prevent the great slaughter.
Duke Anton first began his siege of Saverne on May 16. The battle began with a thunderous exchange of canon fire. One of the Duke’s captains, Claudius of Lorraine, the Duke of Guise, spotted a strong and well armed troop of peasants advancing to aid the people of Saverne near Lupfstein, a village about 9 kilometers east of Saverne. The Duke of Guise took a portion of Duke Anton’s best troops along with the artillery and smashed their defenses so that the peasants had to retreat behind the city walls of Lupfstein. It took many attacks before the French forces broke through and began fighting among the peasants. When many of them took refuge in a church, they set it on fire, giving what they declared an appropriate end for these “Lutheran heretics with their hardened hearts.” Then they set fire to the whole city, and five to six thousand peasants lost their lives, many of them burning in the flames.
In Saverne negotiations were transpiring between Duke Anton and Erasmus Gerber and the city council. They agreed that the city would surrender to the Duke unconditionally, but that the peasants were to be given safe conduct to leave the city and they were to return to their homes, promising to pay Martin Luther and his cohorts no further mind, because this constituted a crime against his majesty and would certainly bring them into disfavor once more.
While the column of peasants, however, was passing unarmed through the army of Duke Anton, on a hill outside the walls known as Martyrberg (Montmartre), they shouted: “Long live the excellent Luther!” (“Es lebe der treffliche Luther!” in German.) The Landsknechte of Lorraine turned on the peasants slaughtering them until they were driven back within the walls. Then they forced their way into the city that they had agreed they would not harm, and began an orgy of uninhibited bloodletting so that almost 20,000 peasants along with townspeople were slaughtered. Perhaps because Duke Anton’s campaign was a “holy” crusade of the old believers against Lutherans, it became such a gruesome massacre. Duke Anton’s chronicler presents these atrocities with a very pious veneer. When the massacre began on the Martyrberg, he declared that a voice from heaven said: “It is permitted.”[48]
This religious language used by the chronicler, the French knight, Nicolas Vollcyr, who wrote his account of the campaign in Paris in 1526, is quite spurious. It is a thin pious veneer over a blood bath, an unspeakable atrocity. 1,800 French, Dutch, and Italian Landsknechte could not be stopped from perpetrating an orgiastic slaughter, along with the pillaging, looting, and raping of a city, a city that had been promised protection and safety. A few rich folk were able to buy their lives. Most of the townspeople and all of the peasants were massacred. Other peasant leaders along with Erasmus Gerber, whose cries for help to the city of Strasbourg fell on deaf ears, were discovered hanging by their necks from the trees outside the city walls the next day.
Duke Anton marched south to continue his carnage, meeting an 8,000 man peasant army, immediately engaging in the third battle of this Alsatian war. It took place in Kestenholz, in Schwerweiler, right on the boarder of Upper and Lower Alsace. This city and area is in the proximity of Slettstadt where a Bundschuh had been fought in 1493. But now the peasants were bent on revenge for the Saverne massacre.
Duke Anton realized that the peasants were growing in number and resolution, and therefore decided to attack immediately on the afternoon of his arrival (May 20). Although the peasants were defeated, and an additional 4,000 lost their lives, a good number of Duke Anton’s army was also killed, including a Lord von Isenburg, the general commander of the cavalry, a Welsh nobleman, and about 500 Dutch Landsknechte.
Notwithstanding this military improvement, the back of the peasant revolt in Alsace was broken. Duke Anton made a speedy march back to Lorraine to lick his wounds. He was suddenly deaf to the other requests from Sundgau that he also come there and punish the peasants.
One more word about casualties: The disparity of the estimates of the number of peasants killed in Alsace makes real accuracy difficult. Some record as few as 7,000 peasants killed in all three battles, whereas others report the number at 38,000.[49] The most widely accepted number of peasants who lost their lives in the Alsatian region is 25,000. On the other hand, it seems that many more losses were inflicted on the Ducal forces in Alsace than in the battles of Swabia, Franconia and Thuringia for instance.
Thomas Müntzer and the Uprising in Thuringia
While the social factors predominated in Upper Swabia and the political factors in Franconia, it was the religious factors that predominated in Thuringia. Perhaps it can be said that the closer the uprisings were to Wittenberg, the more religious they were in character. For example, the Wittenberg Disturbances of 1521 – 1522 were, of course, completely religious and the scenario above fits this picture. The Wittenberg Disturbances took place during Luther’s absence from the university. They were initiated by his colleague, Carlstadt, and his associate, Gabriel Zwilling, an Augustinian monk. Here the peasants did not begin the disturbance, but the religious leaders themselves. Thinking Luther dead, they were carrying out what they thought were his teachings. Had Luther not come out of hiding against the wishes of the Elector Frederick the Wise and squelched this disturbance, the great uprising may have begun three years earlier.
Von Sickingen’s Knights’ Revolt that came between the Wittenberg Disturbances and the Peasants’ War does not fit this picture. It is a more complicated case needing special explanation. [50]
At first the revolt of the peasants in Stühlingen fits the picture, because it began as a completely social movement and the peasants made no mention of religious concerns in their 62 articles. But then it does not fit after the peasants meet with Hubmeier in Waldshut and listen to Schappeler in Memmingen, because then they also represent a religious movement, albeit, that of Zwingli and not Luther’s. Newer studies also indicate that the Anabaptists played a role in the peasant upheaval, because many Anabaptists were quite militant and revolutionary.[51]
The composition and concern of those participating in the uprising was also different for the different arenas of the revolt. In Upper Swabia it remained an exclusively peasant movement with the social agenda characterized best by the Twelve Articles. The Franconian peasants allowed some nobility to join their campaign, even if the mistrust ran very high. And for this region the political agenda to reform the empire was attempted and the Heilbronner Peasant Parliament and Friedrich Weigandt’s draft of the new constitution of the empire originated here. In Thuringia, it was more an uprising of the common people, than peasants, because much of the following of the radicals came from the landless poor in the wretched suburbs of Mühlhausen and other cities. These landless poor had been peasants, but the right of primogeniture or ultimogeniture, kept the farms large enough to provide for a family, but crowded many of the farmer children out of having a means for a livelihood. But if the farms were split up among all the children for inheritance, then they became too small to provide for all, and a general impoverishment still followed. In Thuringia, Mühlhausen, for example, had 19 suburbs of wretchedly poor, who had no land and were shut out of the city.
When Thomas Müntzer preached in Allstedt, located in the Pfaltz of Saxony, thousands of common people came to hear his sermons. He attacked Luther as “Brother Gentle-flesh” (Sanftleben), “that spiritless, soft-living flesh at Wittenberg”[52] and charged that his reformation was misguided and misdirected. It was for the spirit-filled, the chosen and elected of God to introduce the real reformation. The common people flocked together to hear him preach against the tyrants who withheld the true faith from them and should be “strangled like dogs.” Their power had to be given to the common people. The unGodly who opposed this new order did not deserve to live. Müntzer wanted to establish the Kingdom of God on earth. He was an early proponent of a theology of revolution. There is abundant evidence that the religious factors predominated in this theatre of the conflict.
Much then of the story of the Thuringian uprising revolves around Thomas Müntzer. An apostate monk named Heinrich Pfeiffer, alias Schwertfeger, however, was also deeply involved. He worked in Mühlhausen, agitating for reforms there before Müntzer even arrived in that city. His views were much more narrow than those of Müntzer. He was satisfied to organize the guilds and give them real power and representation, where Müntzer had the establishment of a theocracy in mind.
Müntzer was a chiliastic, radical and today we would say, charismatic theologian who longed to establish the new Israel in Germany. He felt that the common people would not be free to worship God while the rulers they feared still existed. Therefore he taught the annihilation of the unGodly, especially the rulers, who had forfeited their chance to fight alongside him. Having traveled to Bohemia, he became influenced by the Hussites, especially those of the violent Taborite variety. The cities of Allstedt and Mühlhausen are situated very near the border of Bohemia. Müntzer wanted a final liberation of the common people from the “bigwigs”. And he believed in sharing all things in common. Because he organized and agitated, it is no surprise that he was expelled from one city after another: from Zwickau, from Allstedt, from Halle and from Mühlhausen. Not even in Bohemia were they comfortable with him. As a matter of fact in Prague, after posting some theses imitating Martin Luther, and wanting to be the Martin Luther of Bohemia, he was placed under house arrest and then exiled from that city as well.[53]
There was also not a little friction between Müntzer and Pfeiffer, the other leader of the revolt in Thuringia. In the Battle of Frankenhausen, Pfeiffer did not come to Müntzer’s aid from nearby Mühlhausen. Pfeiffer must have been a very persuasive leader. He entered this free imperial city when the common people and the guilds were in revolt against the patricians, who held the control of the council. The patricians conceded their power to the dissatisfied, common people in the spring of 1523. But one of the conditions for accepting the political and legal demands was the expulsion of Pfeiffer from the city.
Müntzer could well be called an itinerant preacher, because nowhere would the authorities abide him. He had associated with the radical charismatic Zwickau prophets, Nicholas Storch and Marcus Stübner: the latter was really Müntzer’s disciple. He had appropriated the Taborite teachings and even some Hussite military strategy, e.g. the circle of wagons used in defense in the battle of Frankenhausen.
While in Allstedt, Müntzer had gained a great following. There he became more and more adversarial to Luther and despite Luther’s invitation, he would not go to Wittenberg to debate his views with him. After he organized a five hundred man conspiracy and it was discovered, Allstedt became too dangerous a place for him. In July 1524, Duke John and George expelled him from that city.
Müntzer then turned up in Mühlhausen about August 10, 1524[54] where Pfeiffer had already returned. After several weeks of constant unrest, on September 27, 1524, both leaders were expelled from that city again.[55] First they both went to Nuremburg together. Thomas Müntzer wrote his last tract against Luther and Heinrich Pfeiffer tried to organize a revolt, meeting intense resistance, however. The city council recommended Pfeiffer’s expulsion for continuing to propagate the “enthusiasm” of Thomas Müntzer. Müntzer left for Switzerland in November.[56] (Their exact itineraries, there after became too hard to follow.) Müntzer met with the peasants of Basel, visiting Oecolampadius, the reformer of that city.[57] In Zürich the radical Swiss Brethren under Conrad Grebel criticized Müntzer for his violence. They could not agree with him because “True and faithful Christians are like sheep among the wolves, sacrificial lambs who must be baptized by fear, misery, persecution, suffering, and dying.”[58]
Both Müntzer and Pfeiffer then go to southern Germany where the unrest of the peasants was the most pronounced. Müntzer went to the Black Forest, to Griesen, which is just south of Stühlingen and beside Waldshut. He proceeds to do a campaign through Klettgau, Allgäu and Hegau, preaching to the rebellious peasants. In this September tour he most probably met with and influenced Hans Müller of Bulgenbach and there is a record of his meeting with Balthasar Hubmeier.[59]
It would be quite interesting comparing Martin Luther’s preaching campaign with that of Müntzer. Luther swept through Thuringia from April 21 to May 6th, 1525 where he tried to calm the peasants and squelch the disturbances the way he had done for the ones at Wittenberg. Müntzer’s campaign was of course designed to enflame the peasants farther with chiliastic aspirations, offering the hope that the peasants might usher in the Israel of God. Luther and Müntzer had certainly become diametrically opposed to one another. Here in the Black Forest and upper Swabian regions Thomas Müntzer must have added to the furor that sometimes saw 30,000 peasants band together at a time without fear of the authorities, in a region that raised six peasant army-assemblies. Perhaps these numbers can only be understood from the fact that not only was Müntzer spiritualist and charismatic, but the peasants must have been as well.
Imagine Luther preaching to stop this insanity, preaching to pour water onto the fire! He had little success. On May 7th the electoral commissioner, Hans Zeiss reported to the Elector (not knowing that he had already died on May 5th) that rebel peasant bands had plundered thirty monasteries, that about 15,000 peasants had gathered in or near Mühlhausen, and that some nobles had joined them.[60] Such “campaigns” of pillage were going on concurrently with Luther’s quixotic one. Luther could even have been overtaken by Müntzer himself, but Luther only came as close as Erfurt.
Even before this campaign, Luther had gone into the troubled areas of Thuringia again and again. Some furor must have been afoot when it is estimated that 60,000 peasants of Thuringia were up in revolt.[61] Luther warned the people of the danger they courted with their rebellion. After Müntzer’s inflammatory letter to the minors of Mansfeld, spreading fire and sword where Luther’s own parents were living, that Luther started his last campaign to attempt to bring the peasants to reason. He made a preaching tour through the area of Eisleben, west to Stolberg on April 21, 1525. In Nordhausen his words were drowned out by church bells rung by Müntzer’s follower. Luther barely escaped with his life in Orlamunde, where Carlstadt had ministered. Luther was in Erfurt on April 28th and then headed north through the fertile valley of the Golden Aue. He was in Wallhausen on May 1st, then traveled southward again, preaching in Weimar on May 3rd.[62]
In this city his tour was cut short by the call of his elector, Frederick the Wise, from his deathbed, wishing to receive communion from the hands of Luther in both kinds. Never before had the Elector granted Luther an audience and Luther did not make it to the bedside of the dying ruler in time. Luther made it back to Wittenberg on the evening of May 6th [63] and the Elector had died the day before, on May 5th 1525. In returning, Luther, the leader of the new evangelical movement, now saw that his worst fears had become realized, because his leadership went to that “murderous prophet,” his antagonist, Thomas Müntzer. On Luther’s return journey or shortly thereafter, he penned his furious pamphlet against the “murderous hordes of peasants,” which included the notorious words, “smite, stab, and slay!”
Back in February, 1525, Müntzer had returned to Mühlhausen, where Pfeiffer had already returned and been working since December, 1524. The unrest in this important city of the day had not ceased in their absence. They began to plunder monasteries. On March 17, 1525, they overthrew the city council, and in its place they established an “eternal council” in what was envisioned as a communist theocracy.
The revolt spilled out of Mühlhausen spreading quickly to the peasants of northwestern Thuringia and the Eichsfeld. When some of the copper minors of Mansfeld demonstrated their dissatisfaction, Müntzer, whose agenda was to purge the ungodly, wrote them a manifesto filled with powerful and fiery language exhorting them to revolt. The following are some excerpts:
“Fight the battle of the Lord! It is high time….Have no mercy – as with Moses (God ordered a holy war) – at them, at them, while the fire is hot. Do not let the blood on your swords get cold! Forge [your swords] clinkety-clank on the anvil of Nimrod and throw his tower to the ground…..It is not possible, while they are alive for you to lose your human fear of them. One can tell you nothing of God while they still rule over you! At them, at them, at them, while it is still day, God goes before you, so follow! Signed: Thomas Müntzer, Servant of God against the Godless”[64]
Heinrich Pfeiffer joined Müntzer and the Eichfeld peasants on a violent campaign of pillage. Castles and monasteries went up in flames.
Duderstadt, Heilgenstadt, Frankenhausen, Langensalza as well as Erfurt joined the peasants. The cities were forced to open their gates to the peasants, and John the Steadfast and the Counts of Mansfeld and Hohenstein had to negotiate terms with the peasants, because they had no standing army.[65]
All the peasants of north-west Thuringia began to congregate at Frankenhausen. Müntzer went to join them with 300 men. Pfeiffer would not join him, but remained in Mühlhausen with the majority of the peasants as well as 300 of the “elect.” Perhaps he had difficulty with Müntzer’s visionary idealism, his wanting the kingdom of heaven on earth. Müntzer was teaching a total overthrow of the political and ecclesiastical relations of the time. His theocracy was to be based on a transparent, translucent, democracy as innocent as in paradise.[66] For the people to be free, God alone had to be Lord over them.
The Dukes of this area now mobilized to crush the revolt. Philipp, the Landgrave of Hessen, who was interested in being a new believer, approached Frankenhausen from the West. He had just crushed the rebellion in Fulda. The strict old believer, Duke George of Saxony, Philipp’s Father-in-law, was coming from the East, and the Duke Henry of Brunswick, from the North. They arrayed themselves outside of Frankenhausen before the barricade of wagons (the Hussite type of defense) the peasants had placed on the Hausberg (House-Hill) before the city.[67] The dukes first negotiated with the peasants demanding that they deliver Thomas Müntzer into their hands and then surrender unconditionally. The peasants were not at all happy about the coming battle. They must have noticed with dismay that they had cannons, but Müntzer had failed to secure the gunpowder for them. Müntzer had no military experience, but became the sole authority, like a prophet, as it were, and he preached as if the whole coming battle depended upon his superior command of the language. He stood under a flag depicting a rainbow, and when some Mansfelder servants claimed they had been unjustly treated by Duke Ernest, he immediately sat down and penned a letter addressing him:
“Brother Ernst, I, Thomas Müntzer, former Parson at Allstedt, warn you for God’s sake to void your tyrannical rampaging. You have begun to martyr and destroy Christians. Tell us, you miserable, indigent sack of worms, who made you ruler over us?…..eternal offense will fall on your neck, and you’ll be the devil’s martyr…!”[68]
And with that four subjects of the Duke of Mansfeld, who had been captured by the Frankenhausen troop, one of whom was the priest, Stefan Hartenstein, were beheaded before the assembly.[69] Müntzer justified the execution on the grounds of divine law.[70]
Müntzer succeeded in winding the peasants into his spell, after constant preaching. They need have no fear of the rulers. He would be able to catch the cannon balls in the arms of his robes, and they would harm no one. When a halo appeared around the sun that Hans Hut[71] described as a rainbow, all took it as a sign from God for the verity of his prophet, Müntzer, who asserted that it foretold their victory. Singing, “Come Holy Ghost, God and Lord,” a Hymn Luther had just written the year before, 6,000 peasants marched to the barricade of wagons on the Hausberg.
Then the battle, which was no battle, but a veritable slaughter, began. Philipp of Hesse did not have many men, but he had a large and experienced artillery. Its first round fell short of the mark, but then it became devastatingly accurate. The peasants also had nothing to counter the great strength of the Brunswick cavalry attacking them. A wild panic set in. The prophet with the long flowing robes, who was supposed to catch the canon shot in his sleeves, was gone. The peasants were sheep for the slaughter. As many as 5,000 were killed by means of stabbing and decapitation before the dukes halted the slaughter. Only six Landsknechte on the dukes’ side lost their lives.
Müntzer was found hiding in a bed, in a house beside the city gates, posing as a sick man. After his identity was discovered, by the sack of letters slung over his bed, he was taken to Duke George, where they sat him on a bench and questioned him: the Duke next to him asked how he could have beheaded four men on Saturday? It was the divine law and not he who had done it. He answered. And Duke Henry of Brunswick joined the interrogation debating with Müntzer, who based his arguments more on the Old Testament, while the Duke based his more on the New. In any case Müntzer was tortured, and collapsing completely under this brutality, seemingly recanted of all before being beheaded on May 27, 1525. Philipp of Hesse, however, related later that he had admitted errors, but no more.[72]
Upon the advance of the ducal forces on Mühlhausen, Heinrich Pfeiffer, alias Schwertfeger, escaped with 300 of the “league of the elect,” but was then captured on May 21, after a brave fight outside of Eisenach. On May 27, 1525, alongside Müntzer, Pfeiffer was also beheaded with over 50 other peasant leaders. Müntzer and Pfeiffer’s heads were impaled on posts on either side of the city gate of Mühlhausen to warn all those still left alive in that city. Mühlhausen lost its free imperial status as a city, becoming a fief of the dukes and had to pay heavy reparations for decades. The dukes continued their campaigns of revenge upon the towns and villages from which the rebellious peasants had risen up. The punishment was relentless and cruel and quite irrational until the nobility realized that they needed the peasants or they would have no bread.
The Peasant War in Austrian Territory and Michael Gaismair in Tyrol
Before getting back to the continued fighting and the final stages of the war in Franconia and Swabia, where other ducal forces now joined George Truchsess von Waldburg, who commanded the Swabian League against the peasants, we need to turn very briefly to the other Austrian territories and to the far South. The upheaval was taking place in Salzburg, in the Hapsburg holdings of Kärnten, and in Styria. In Tyrol the outbreak of the hostilities came somewhat later, starting only in the summer of 1525 and getting crushed in July of 1526. The clever and tenacious leadership of Michael Gaismair gave this rebellion a somewhat longer life.
Interestingly enough, the major battles by the peasants were mostly lost around mid May. The Battle of Böplingen, which disrupted the Heilbronner Peasant Parliament on May 12, the failure of the storming of the Frauenberg on May 15, the Battle of Frankenhausen on May 15, and the carnage at Saverne on May 17. The Thousand Year reign of Müntzer lasted but 59 days. The earlier victories of the peasants were short-lived. But farther south the peasants held out for a whole year longer than their fellow peasants to the North.
In what is now present day Austria, the peasant revolt brought together peasants, townsmen, and miners. The revolt was indirectly abetted because the Dukes of Bavaria coveted Salzburg, which belonged to Archbishop Matthew Lang. But then Archduke Ferdinand also had his designs on the archbishop’s holdings, aiding the peasant revolt in the hope he and the Bavarian Dukes could divide his ecclesiastic dominion amongst themselves.[73] The peasants and miners rose up against the Archbishop and took the city of Salzburg in June 1525. This strike by the peasants was prompted partly by the Archbishop persecution of the Lutherans and partly by their desire for a new territorial constitution.[74]
From Salzburg the revolution spread over the mountain into the lands of the eastern Alps. Here in Styria, the Governor, Siegmund von Dietrichstein, gathered a force of Knights and mercenaries, and was soundly defeated and even captured by the peasant leader, Michael Gruber, and the peasant forces in the Enns valley. This was the greatest victory of the entire war for the peasants and it took place near Schladming on June 3, 1525, where Gruber took Dietrichstein by surprise. But the peasants failed to exploit their victory.
In Tyrol Michael Gaismair, a former official of the Hapsburg court became the recognized leader of the peasant revolt. He hailed from a family of peasants and miners from the city of Sterzing, and was elected to be the commander of the peasant army in Bressanone on May 13, 1525.[75] He had a close relationship with Zwingli in Zurich, having to seek refuge there, after a military defeat. He was also promised aid from Francis I and other enemies of the Hapsburgs. Early in 1526, he returned and laid siege to Radstadt. Gaismair succeeded in defeating the contingents of the Swabian League twice, which were sent by Leonhard von Eck to dislodge him, but then was finally overcome, and sought refuge in Venetia. The despotic archbishop, Matthew Lang, did not want the help of the Swabian League and Archduke Ferdinand and the Dukes of Bavaria also tried to prevent Leonhard von Eck’s intervention, but to no avail. When the Swabian League arrived in their territory, they did not let stand the concessions that Archbishop Lang and Archduke Ferdinand had granted to the peasants. Not even the Archduke and the Archbishop, supposedly superior to someone like Leonhard von Eck, could prevent the Swabian League from doling out their punishment on the rebellious peasants and turning back their hard won concessions. Even in a place like Rheingau, where Friedrick von Greiffenklau brought all the knights and nobility together, joined the peasants, negotiated concessions, and brought their peasants uprising to a successful end, the Swabian League marched in and also turned back the clock. Even Cardinal Albrecht von Brandenburg could not deter Truchsess.[76]
Michael Gaismair wrote a constitution for an egalitarian Christian democratic peasant republic, a very sophisticated document, which may well have been inspired by his conversations with Zwingli. After he escaped into Venetia, he also took part in the sack of Rome in 1527, and finally was murdered in 1532 by two Spanish assassins in the payment of Archduke Ferdinand. As the case of Michael Gaismair shows, Germany became a police state, very much like modern ones today, where all who had participated in the uprising were mercilessly hunted down and executed.[77] In Kempten, the ruling Abbot prepared a list of 173 names of the peasant leaders to be executed, with Jörg Schmid, alias, Knopf of Leubas on the list.[78]
Downthrow of the Uprising in Franconia and Swabia
From Easter Day in mid-April when the Odenwald peasants under Matern Feuerbacher and Jäcklein Rohrbach took Weinsberg, and carried out the Weinsberg atrocity, until the middle of May, the peasantry was sovereign in these regions. Where they had not taken military command, they had received concessions and treaties that had granted them their demands. When they were defeated, they usually flared right back up after the Swabian League had departed. The latter, along with Philipp of Hesse were the two pillars of the old order. The territorial princes would have been hard put to do without the energetic Philipp. Few other Dukes were very helpful. Had either the Swabian League or Philipp of Hesse been defeated, the old order would have been much more seriously challenged. The Frauenberg (Marien Castle) at Würzburg was still under siege, with the pressure mounting.
Suddenly in mid-May the whole tide of the war changed. The Thuringian revolt was overthrown. The Alsatian peasants had been massacred. And in the battle of Böplingen May 14, fought between this city and Sindelfingen, slightly southwest of Stuttgart, the Württemberg peasants were defeated. Perhaps the peasants directed their siege against the Bishop of Würzburg, because he was at the same time the Duke of Franconia, the most powerful prince of the whole region. His defeat would have had a powerful symbolic value, and Wendel Hipler and Friedrich Weigandt were ready to compromise and allow the ecclesiastical wealth of so great an ecclesiastical lord, by means of their attack to come into the dukes’ possession, which could more than offset the ducal loss in peasant feudal dues.[79]
On May 21 Truchsess entered the city of Weinsberg, in which only women and children remained. He had captured Jäcklein Rohrbach and devised a clever way to roast him slowly to death, while he and his cohorts feasted in full view enjoying their revenge. Melchior Nonnenmacher, von Helfenstein’s former piper, who had played his flute happily as the nobles were marched to their gruesome execution, was also roasted alive in the same way. Then the women and children were driven out of the city and it was put to the torch with all its wine cellars and laden granaries. (That next Easter, 1526, the nobility sent a goodly number of peasants through the spears to run the gauntlet in the full view of their wives and children to revenge the deaths of Ludwig von Helfenstein and the other nobility.)[80]
Then Truchsess joined with the forces of the Rheinland Elector, Ludwig von der Pfalz, and the Archbishop of Trier, Richard von Greiffenklau, and the ruling Bishop of Würzburg, Conrad von Thüngen, to move against the center of the peasant strength at Würzburg. They defeated the Odenwald Peasant army at Königshofen on June 2. Filled with fear at the news of all the victories of the Swabian League, they had left Würzberg in order to meet the advancing army. Here Götz von Berlichen suddenly vanished quietly, later giving word that his contract had expired, which he regretted he was unable to renew.
When the vanguard of the League arrived, it immediately attacked the peasant army positioned on the heights of the Tauber. The three salvos from the peasants did nothing. When the peasants started to flee in disarray, the peasant captains and commanders cut the horses from the supply and munitions wagons, mounted them, and succeeded to escape, leaving the peasant army to fend for itself. The cavalry decimated the peasants from the flanks. All those who were able to play dead, were later finished off by the Landsknechte, who followed after. About four thousand peasants were killed that day. Three hundred peasants hid themselves in the trees and were inaccessible to the cavalry and spears of the Landsknechte. They gave themselves up for a ransom. The Landsknechte were angered because they felt they deserved extra pay for the battle, whereas the Commanders ruled the cavalry had fought the battle and not the mercenaries. They marched to the next battle at snails pace in protest.
Therefore, two days later on Pentecost, the cavalry alone first attacked the Franconian peasants at Sulzdorf. They were under the peasant commander Jakob Kohl. The peasant force was deceived into coming out to rescue the peasants at Königshofen, where they were decimated by the cavalry who had clear riding in that open area. Because in anger the peasants were to have said that they were going to take no prisoners, the forces of the nobility did the same to the peasants, killing them all. Some knights first wanted to take peasants and brand them as their serfs. But then angered that the peasants were not going to take prisoners, they stabbed them, ran them through, in piles of sixty for each knight. The corpses of about five thousand of peasants lay strewn upon the battlefield of Sulzdorf.
Those that could hide themselves in the Florien Geyer’s castles of Ingolstadt were also stabbed to death or burned. When some escaped into the thickly wooded area around the castle walls, the knights shouted to them that whoever killed his fellow peasants would be spared. One peasant killed five of his fellows. The next would not be so easily killed. He wrestled with the killer, and while wrestling, they both fell into the moat and drowned. Florien Geyer, a knight who fought with the peasants, was not there, because he was still negotiating in Rothenberg with Count Casimir. When he had to flee the city, he detoured around Ingolstadt, where they had already destroyed his castles. Around Würzburg, he was murdered by the squires of his distant relative, Wilhelm von Grumbach on June 9th as already noted.
On June 6, the last resistance of the Franconian peasants was broken and after negotiations with courageous members of the council of the city, the victorious Truchsess and the Dukes marched into the city of Würzburg. The councilmen were executed. Jacob Kohl, who had escaped from the Battle of Sulzdorf, had been captured by other peasants and the city had saved him in the dungeon to surrender to Truchsess. He was beheaded with four others. Then Truchsess chose 200 of the remaining 2,000 peasants, circled them with cavalry, and had the executioners begin to decapitate them. When one peasant pressed into the circle of horses to see the fate of his companions, he could not get back out. The servant of the executioner brought him up and he was also promptly beheaded. One peasant, tired of it all, placed himself forward in the line to be over and done with it. He was one of the last to die, because the knights grew tired of all the blood and killing and requested Truchsess to pardon the remaining. This the commander did, so that only about seventy-five had been executed.[81]
The bitterness of the revenge of the victors was matched only by its brutality. Droves of executioners roamed the luckless land. Professional incendiaries, i.e. fire-brands, (Brandmeistern) put village after village to the torch. The Margrave Casimir now took Rothenburg. Carlstadt was among those peasant leaders, who had been able to escape from this city. Like St. Paul, he was let down a rope from a window of a house on the town wall. From Rothenburg, Casimir continued his campaign of vengeance. Arriving in Kitzingen, he put out the eyes of 59 townsfolk, because he wanted to grant them their wish never to see him again. No one was permitted to come to the aid of the victims under severe penalties. Eleven of their number died from the pain.
After the taking of Würzburg, the combined forces of the Archbishop, Elector, Duke and Swabian League went their separate ways. The Elector von der Pfalz returned home and defeated the Rheinland peasants at Pfeddersheim in the vicinity of Worms on June 23. This put an end to the uprising there.
Now Truchsess moved South because the Allgäu peasants were “still restless” even with the Weingarten Treaty. Truchsess joined forces with George von Frundsberg (the commander who later sacked Rome under Charles V in 1527), who now had just returned from the Battle of Pavia and the imperial Italian campaign. What was not accomplished by brutality and deception was now done by treachery. The commanders of the two Allgäu armies, Walter Bach and Kaspar Schneider, had fought under von Frundsberg and now secretly sold out their armies for money, promising to deliver them helpless to the Swabian League. In the heat of the battle, they set the peasant munitions afire and dashed off for the boarder of Switzerland with a great sum of money. The Swabian League moved in and dispersed these two powerful peasant armies on July 22. The commander of the third army was still Jörg Schmid, alias, Knopf of Luibas. He was compelled to surrender on the banks of the Luibas, where the merciless decimation of the peasants had already started in the Spring.
Then Count Felix von Werdenberg, who had just returned with a force mercenaries from Pavia with von Frundsberg, moved into action in the Black Forest. He defeated the Hegau contingent at Hilzingen on July 16, 1525, relieved Radolfzell, and beheaded Hans Müller of Bulgenbach.[82] Before the end of the summer, the whole peasant uprising had come to a cruel, crushing, and bloody end.
The city of Walshut still held out until December 12, 1525. Hubmeier escaped, but a new draft of a constitution was found in his desk. Martial Law obtained and the hope for freedom, justice, and equality was dashed into the ground. Cruel oppression was at hand. A contingent of the Swabian League remained somewhat like a modern-day death-squad, to execute peasants out of hand, those who had been missed, or returned, or Anabaptists. A very sad statistic estimates that 100,000 peasants lost their lives in this massive revolt.[83]
Some amelioration of conditions for the peasants did take place. This was mostly the case in the Duchies of Austria. Margrave Philip of Baden, whose humanity was recognized on all sides, pursued a similar policy and the Landgrave Philipp of Hessen also made some concessions.[84] Truchsess, perhaps suffering from a guilty conscience, spoke up for honoring the terms of the Weingarten Treaty. He did not get much of a hearing.
A Few Afterthoughts:
Was there any possible scenario in this war that could have changed the devastatingly brutal outcome? It is possible, if the peasants would have accepted the surrender of the Marien Castle on moderate conditions. Instead they stormed the castle and experienced a very sound defeat. Then they became obsessed with starving out and bombing the inhabitants into surrender. This strategy took a period of time that the peasants did not have to spare. Interestingly enough, Götz von Berlichen was right and Florien Geyer was wrong. The former advised the peasants to accept the castle’s surrender, while the latter wanted it overthrown. In much the same way, Müntzer was right and Luther was wrong about making treaties. By and large they were merely a means for Truchsess’ buying time.
The peasants would still have ultimately been defeated. They remained in a basically provincial perspective in the war, while the Swabian League moved from Swabia to Württemberg to Franconia, to Austria and Tyrol. At one point a peasant Army of Swabia followed the Swabian League all the way to the boarder of Württemberg, and there turned back to let the Württemberger peasants be defeated by it. The peasant armies and their leaders were in different compartments, and would not come to each other’s aid, made separate treaties, and were easily played off one against the other. Truchsess just annihilated each army one by one.
Not only therefore did bad judgments, easy deceptions, lack of a central command, and the short-sighted orgies of pillage doom the peasants’ cause, but Heike Obermann is basically correct about the status of peasant weaponry. Except for the Lake Armies and some of the Franconian Peasant Armies, they fought with flails, sickles and pitchforks.[85] Even for the Lake Bands only every third man had real weaponry! Perhaps the peasants harness of weapons was no match at all for the state of the art weapons of the professional mercenaries.[86] The artillery terrified the peasants most of all in what was actually the first “modern war.” While the peasants had some field pieces, 18 at Böplingen and forty-seven at Königshofen, they had virtually no cavalry, which also accounts for their dreadful record in this war. Sometimes a thousand peasants were slain for every one Landsknecht, as in Frankenhausen.
The peasants looked up to Luther and expected moral support from him, as well as Scriptural support. They expected armed assistance from Frederick the Wise. Friedrich Weigandt was right in his letter to Wendel Hippler:
“Because Duke Frederick the Wise of Saxony, the Father of all evangelicals, has passed away, with that, I believe, for our part, we have lost a great comfort.”[87]
Frederick the Wise died in his Castle Lochau on May 5, 1525 and that spelled a real loss to the peasants as well as for Martin Luther, whom he always protected. But it would be hard to imagine the hesitant and passive Elector taking the field for the peasants. And if he had, he would have provoked the war against himself and Saxony that so many would have gladly wanted. The battles that Charles V had to fight with France and Suleiman the Magnificent, postponed that war until after Luther’s death.
If Charles V had been defeated in the Battle of Pavia, then the Swiss would not have called back their mercenaries fighting under Duke Ulrich. An expansion of Swiss freedom may have occurred. Duke Ulrich was really no friend of the peasants, however. As soon as Württemberg had been his, he would have turned on the peasants again. The Swiss mercenaries would have had to defeat the Swabian League. That would not have been very likely.
What if Luther had taken the side of the peasants? It would have spelled his martyrdom, most likely. But Luther did not, but placed a resolute “NO!” against the revolutionary ideals of the peasants.
Had Luther been a Zwingli and had he aided and abetted the revolution, the reaction would have wiped out Wittenberg. And in addition, if he sided with them, and they had been victorious, his human religious quest would have sunk into a mundane one-sided party platform.[88]
But even so Luther’s work suffered immensely because of the peasant uprising. Before it Luther’s movement carried the broad spectrum of the estates of the German Nation. There were hopes for a National Evangelical Church of Germany.[89] Thereafter, the Fourth Estate became indifferent or hostile. From the living congregation of the spring-time of Luther, a rigor mortis of a new state-church hierarchy set in.[90]
Franz Lau argues against this assessment: The Reformation as a movement did not stop. His article is entitled: “The Peasants’ War and the So-Called End of the Lutheran Reformation as a Spontaneous People’s Movement.”[91] The northern cities of Germany opted for the Reformation and the imperial cities of southern Germany followed, except for Rothenburg and Böpfingen that returned to the old faith immediately after the war.
In a letter to Amsdorf on May 30, 1525 Luther states:
“The consequence of this wickedness of Satan can only be the satanic devastation of the kingdom of God and of the world. Even if the sovereigns exceed [their authority], yet at least they carry the sword by God’s authority; under their government it is still possible for both kingdoms to exist.”[92]
Luther maintains that the confusion of the peasants would devastate both the church and state. And of course this brings us to the issue that this first and the coming chapters hope to investigate more thoroughly: the evaluation of Luther’s relationship and theology with the Peasants’ War of 1525. In the same letter Luther states:
“Afterwards the Lord will judge which spirit is from the devil, theirs or mine.”[93]
This is afterwards. It is still controversial. And the judgment is not easily made. Many issues will have to be thought through to make a sound evaluation about so complicated and controversial a set of events in the tragic relationship between the Reformation and the Great Peasants’ War.
N.B. February 14, 2011: Thinking about what just happened in the recent 18 days in Egypt: Had the peasants practiced non-violence and maintained a higher moral ground, they would have had a far better chance of improving their lot. As it was, they assembled in a quasi military formation. But what could they do? Because of the history of the Bundshuh, however, they had absolutely no right of assembly. Then after plundering the monasteries and burning down so many castles they certainly needed armed protection from the vengeance of their Lords, but they were overwhelmingly incapable and inadequate militarily in their own self-defense. The Peasants’ War was a murderous atrocity on the part of the nobility and an unfathomable tragedy for the peasants. It would take over a century and a half before John Locke would argue that a government existed by the consent of its people.
Here is a non-religious rationale for non-violent protest. It comes from Gene Sharp, who wrote “From Dictatorship to Democracy” a 93 page guide-book on how to topple autocrats: “Peaceful protest is best, he says – not for any moral reason, but because violence provokes autocrats to crack down. ‘If you fight with violence, you are fighting with your enemy’s best weapon and you may be a brave but dead hero’” (New York Times, 2/17/2011, pages A1 and A11). In some important ways, some of the Swabian peasants’ army-assemblies were given no alternative, but the Peasants’ War certainly illustrates what Gene Sharp is arguing.
It might do well to list Luther’s writings which are involved in the Peasants’ War.
“Admonition to Peace, A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia,” of April 1525 in Eisleben.
“Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants”, written about May 4, and published before May 26, 1525.
“Treaty between the Praiseworthy League of Swabia and the Two Armies of Peasants of Lake Constance and Allgäu,” republished by Luther with a preface and epilogue in the beginning of May, but after “Against the Robbing and Murdering Peasants…”
“A Dreadful Story and a Judgment of God on Thomas Müntzer,” a selection of Müntzer’s letters with Luther’s commentary, published in the second half of May, 1525.
Luther’s “Pentecost Sermon” on June 4, 1525, transcribed by Stephan Roth, against his critics.
“An Open Letter on the Harsh Book against the Peasants”, which counters the arguments of his divers critics, written in middle of July, 1525.
“Whether Soldiers, Too, Can Be Saved”, written in 1526
There are also many letters that reveal his relationship with the revolt, and the writings of his that give early warning that a rebellion was a foot:
“A Sincere Admonition by Martin Luther to All Christians to Guard against Insurrection and Rebellion”, from the Wartburg in December, 1521.
The “Invocavit Sermons,” March 9-16, 1522. Here he confronts the false approach of the Zwickau Prophets, Carlstadt and Zwilling, which created the Wittenberg Disturbances.
“Letter to the Princes of Saxony Concerning the Rebellious Spirit,” referring to the danger in Müntzer’s teachings and activities, in 1524.
“In Opposition to the Fanatic Spirit,” a response to an inquiry by the City Council of Strasbourg on the teachings of Carlstadt, in 1524.
“Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments” Part I in December, 1524, and Part II in January, 1525.
Bibliography
Peter Blickle. The Revolution of 1525. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977.
A. F. Pollards Chapter IV: “Social Revolution and Catholic Reaction in Germany” in A. W. Ward, G. W. Pothero, Stanley Leathes, eds. The Cambridge Modern History, Vol. II, New York: The MacMillan Company, 1902-1912.
Dr. Günther Franz. Der deutsche Bauernkrieg 1525. Berlin: Deutsche Buch Gemeinschaft, 1926.
——————. Der deutsche Bauernkrieg 1525, 4th Edition. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956.
Wilhelm Stolze. Bauernkrieg und Reformation. Verein für Reformations Geschichte, 140-145. Leipzig: M. Heinsius, Nachfolger Eger & Sievers, 1926.
Adolf Waas. Die Bauern im Kampf um Gerechigkeit 1300-1525. München: Verlag Georg D.W. Callwey, 1964.
Leo Sievers. Revolution in Deutschland. Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980.
James M. Stayer. Anabaptists and the Sword. Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1976.
Leopold von Ranke. History of the Reformation in Germany, Vol.I. New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966.
Otto Nasemann. Friedrich der Weise, Kurfurst von Sachsen. Halle: Verein der Reformationgeschichte, 1889.
Gottfried G. Krodel, editor and translator. Helmut T. Lehman, General Editor. Luther’s Works, Vol. 49, Letters II. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972.
Thomas Lindsay. A History of the Reformation, vols. I and II. Edinburgh: T & T. Clark, 1907.
Eric W. Gritsch. Reformer without a Church: the Life and Thought of Thomas Müntzer (1488?-1525). Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1967.
—————–Thomas Müntzer: a Tragedy of Errors. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989.
Bernd Moeller. Imperial Cities and the Reformation. (Durham, N.C.: The Labyrinth Press, 1982.
[1] It is very difficult to find a brief descriptive account in English about what took place and constituted the Peasants’ War. But the translators’ introduction by Thomas A. Brady, Jr. and H. C. Erik Midelfort in Peter Blickle’s The Revolution of 1525 (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1977), pages xi-xxvi. is one, in which another brief account is also mentioned: A. F. Pollard’s chapter in the old Cambridge Modern History, Vol.2, published in 1903.
[1a] The old Cambridge Modern History,including this chapter by Pollard can now be read online: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cambridge_Modern_History#II._The_Reformation:_The_end_of_the_Middle_Ages_.281903.29
As insightful as this account is, it is somewhat distorted by false assumptions. (I refer to this reference in footnote 10.)
[2] The Duke von Helfenstein had been under Austrian orders from Stuttgart to take the offensive and capture the center of the Odenwald territory. He made a march from Stuttgart to Weinsberg and had strangled and killed every peasant along the way. See Wilhelm Stolze, Bauernkrieg und Reformation, (Leipzig: M. Heinsius, Nachfolger Eger & Sievers, 1926), page 90-91.
[3] Dr. Günther Franz, Der deutsche Bauernkrieg 1525, (Berlin: Deutsche Buch Gemeinschaft, 1926), p. 133.
[4] No Luther pamphlets had been allowed into Bavaria.
[5] Günther Franz, (1926), op. cit., p. 16.
[6] On the other hand, the ecclesiastical lords had signed an agreement with the Austrian authorities to proceed against the Lutherans and a campaign against the free proclamation of the Word of God was afoot, angering the peasants. Stolze, p. 76. Lending support to the repression of the faith renewal causing the uprising – this note added April 22, 2012 – is a peasant revolt from 1594-1597, that took hold of almost all of upper Austria and parts of lower Austria against the measures taken to recatholigize the peasants there by the “Catholic” authorities. See Harm Klueting, Luther und die Neuzeit, (Darmstadt: Primus Verlag, 2011), page 171.
[7] The Swiss had an alliance with the French, because Austria threatened their freedom. Zwingli planned a military campaign to protect the peasants from the coming Austrian attack. Stolze, pages 71-72.
[8]James M. Stayer in his book: Anabaptists and the Sword (Lawrence, Kansas: Coronado Press, 1976), pages xix-xxii, argues that Waldshut in 1524-1525 was really an expansion of the unrest of the radical circle around Zwingli. Hubmaier tried to make Waldshut another Zürich. Stayer argues that the Anabaptists had not yet made the decision for separatist nonresistance. They were still militant social revolutionaries. 1525 brings about or reveals the differentiation in the movement we call the Reformation, as well as for Anabaptists: the distinction between those of the sword and those of the staff, i.e., the militants and the pacifists.
[9]Evidently this was first a real physician from Frieburg, who took this appellation for himself, whose name later became the archetype of the ominous revolting peasant. See Stolze, page 42.
[10] A. W. Ward, G. W. Pothero, Stanley Leathes, eds. The Cambridge Modern History, Vol. II, (New York: The MacMillan Company, 1903), p. 177-178. In A. F. Pollards Chapter IV: “Social Revolution and Catholic Reaction in Germany”.
[11]Ibid., page 178.
[12]Stolze, op. cit., p. 70.
[13]Stolze, op. cit., p.84-85. Stolze refers to Hubmeier’s concluding remarks in his “Disputation against Eck” of November 1524, where Hubmeier calls himself Zwingli’s brother in Christ. Stolze also finds many parallels and echoes in Hubmeier writings that come from Zwingli.
[14]Dr. Günther Franz, op. cit., p. 55-56.
[15] The confusion of ecclesiastical and temporal power comes from a Lutheran perspective. Governments cannot claim to be Christian, because that designation can belong to the Kingdom of God alone. Governments stand under reason and law and are not about the Gospel. “It is better to be ruled by a wise Turk than an ignorant Christian.” Thus a government did not become disqualified with an attack on the Gospel and its preaching, although that did constitute a violation of the freedom of speech. A theocracy, as Calvin would later establish in Geneva, is unsound, according to Luther’s theology.
[16] Adolf Waas, Die Bauern im Kampf um Gerechigkeit 1300-1525, (München: Verlag Georg D.W. Callwey, 1964) pages 128-130. Heinrich Pfeiffer, Schwertfeger, had independent visions, and did not seem to be under Müntzer’s command. Hans Sippel was a leader of one peasant band and the military leader of the Frankenhausen army was a citizen of that city named Bonaventura Kürschner. See Leo Sievers, Revolution in Deutschland (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, 1980), p. 303. Among the Thuringians, Müntzer seems to have had the most authority, however.
[17] The Hapsburgs stood to lose much if Charles V would be defeated in Pavia and Duke Ulrich would be able to retake its Württemberg holdings. This would have strengthened the Swiss Cantons by defeating the Emperor who still threatened their freedom. It is very conceivable that the peasants had a victory in mind, like the one that the Swiss had attained before them, when they all rose up in the agitation of this uncertain time. But Charles V won, and the Swiss called back their mercenaries under Duke Ulrich, and a great political advantage was lost.
[18] Leopold von Ranke, History of the Reformation in Germany, Vol. I, New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1966), p.339.
[19] Adolf Waas, op. cit., p. 185-186. Also in G. Franz, op. cit., p. 89.
[20] Ibid.
[21] G. Franz, op. cit., p. 89. Ulrich Schmid seems to be taking a conscious Lutheran stance, in that he feels that as a Christian, he can represent and fight for the rights of others, but not his own.
[22] Lotzer along with Schappeler is thought to have written the Twelve Articles of the Peasants’ War.
[23] G. Franz, op. cit., p. 90.
[24] G. Franz, op. cit., 92. And also in A. Waas, op. cit., p. 93.
[25]Stolze, op. cit., pages 71-72. Stolze shows that citizens from Zürich rushed to the city of Waldshut to show solidarity and support. In addition Zwingli was contemplating a military campaign “in honor of God and for the benefit of the Gospel of Christ, in order that mischief and injustice not take the upper hand and oppress the God-fearing and innocent.”
[26] Cambridge Modern History, op. cit., p. 179.
[27] Eric W. Gritsch, Reformer without a Church: the Life and Thought of Thomas Muentzer, page 97.
[28] Cambridge Modern History, op. cit., p. 180.
[29] Günther Franz, op. cit., p. 105.
[30] ibid., p. 98.
[31] Thomas M. Lindsay, A History of the Reformation, (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1906), p. 336.
[32] Peter Krey, Sword of the Spirit, Sword of Iron: Word of God, Scripture, Gospel, and Law in Luther’s Most Often Published Pamphlets, (Ph.D. Diss. Graduate Theological Union, 2001), page 102. Luther wrote his notorious pamphlet against the rampaging peasants around May 4th and its late publication and its attachment to his Admonition pamphlet, which was quite balanced, added to its negative impact. The disparity between when an author writes and the time of publishing can be a real problem. The timing of the publishing of Luther’s negative pamphlet could not have been worse.
[33] Cambridge Modern History, op. cit., p. 180.
[34] This peasant leader, Walter Bach, along with Kaspar Schneider, betrayed the peasant cause to von Frundsberg and Truchsess. See E. Belfort Bax, The Peasants War in Germany, 1525-1526, (New York: Augustus M. Kelley Publishers, 1968), pages 308-310. Belfort Bax wrote his monograph in 1899.
[35] Günther Franz, Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, 4th Edition, (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1956), page 131.
[36] Adolf Waas, op. cit., p. 66. In some nineteenth century histories, the historians made up speeches, conjecturing that something of the sort must have been said. Hopefully, that is not the case here.
[37] G. Franz, (1926), op. cit., p. 123-124.
[38] Günther Franz, 4th Edition, page 132. Franz notes that what happened were bloody persecutions rather than battles.
[39] W. Stolze, op. cit., p. 95.
[40] Ibid.
[41] Ibid., p. 102.
[42] Ibid., p. 101.
[43] G. Franz, op. cit., p. 168 – 169.
[44] Ibid., p. 170.
[45] Ibid., 181.
[46] Ibid, p. 196.
[47] G. Franz, op. cit., p. 251.
[48] G. Franz, op. cit., p. 269.
[49] Horst Buszello/Peter Blickle/Rudolf Endres, Der deutsche Bauernkrieg, (München: Ferdinand Schöningh, 1984) p. 328.
[50] The knights attempted to reverse their diminishing influence and bring back the powerful standing they once had in feudal times. They understood Luther in terms of trying to secularize the Prince-Bishop of Trier, perhaps, however, wanting his principality for themselves. A coalition of territorial princes defeated them.
[51] James A. Stayer, op. Cit., p. xxiv-xxv. Here James Stayer argues that Hans Hut was a rather “dangerous man” for the order of the day. Indeed, he is in the last scene with Thomas Müntzer and points out the vision of the rainbow, which he prophesizes as indicating victory for the peasants. Stayer sees Müntzer and Pfeiffer as “slain, unburied witnesses of the Apocalypse” (page xxiv). The decision for separatist non-resistance was preceded by earlier active resistance and participation in the overthrow of the civil order. On page xxi he states, “[The Anabaptist] movement was a socially militant movement led by radical pastors and local worthies – not by the dispossessed – and in this it foreshadowed the Puritan non-separating congregationalism of seventeenth-century England.” W. Stolze, however, argues that the Anabaptist ideas were not causative in the uprising, but were part of popular culture, which the peasants only tapped to expand the support of their movement, to recruit more peasants into their midst (page 84). Stolze tends to negate the social and political aspects of the Peasants’ War (page 85), and argues that it was purely a religious-ecclesiastical movement in the secularization of monastic wealth and power (page 93). A critique of Stolze is that he has too narrow a religious interpretation, organizing disparate events too closely around Luther, Carlstadt, and Müntzer.
[52] G. Franz, op. cit., p. 202.
[53]Ibid.
[54] Eric W. Gritsch, Thomas Müntzer, (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989), p. 42. (I have to compare these footnotes with the manuscript. Pages 54-58.)
[55] Ibid., p. 83.
[56] Ibid., p. 91.
[57] Ibid., p. 94 and Franz, 4th edition, (1956), page 110.
[58] Gritsch, (1989 edition), p. 93.
[59] Franz, (1926 edition), p. 202.
[60] Gritsch, (1989 edition), p. 100-101.
[61] Ibid., p. 101.
[62] Thomas M. Lindsay, op. cit., p. 336.
[63] Peter Krey, Sword of the Spirit, Sword of Iron, page 102.
[64] Alfred Meusel, Thomas Müntzer und Seine Zeit, (Berlin: Aufbau Verlag, 1952), pages 273-274. (my translation). Also in Eric Gritsch, (1967), op. cit., p. 99-100.
[65] Otto Nasemann, Friedrich der Weise, Kurfurst von Sachsen, (Halle: Verein der Reformationgeschichte, 1889), p.46. [66] G. Franz, op. cit., p. 203.
[67]The Cambridge Modern History, op. cit., p. 189.
[68]Leo Sievers, op. cit., p. 304. Also in Gritsche, (1989), page 102 and Meusel, op.cit., p. 275-276.
[69]Ibid.
[70]Eric Gritsch, (1967), op. cit., p. 103.
[71]Hans Hut, of Anabaptist fame, escaped from this battle with his life, in successful flight.
[72] Eric Gritsch, (1989), op. cit., p. 109.
[73]Cambridge Modern History, Pollard, op. cit.,p. 190. and Peter Blickle, op. cit., p.xix.
[74]Peter Blickle, op. cit., p. xix.
[75]Blickle, op.cit., p. xix.
[76]A. Waas, op. cit., p.243-244.
[77]Leo Sievers, op. cit., p. 336.
[78]A. Waas, op. cit., p. 242.
[79]The Cambridge Modern History, op. cit., p. 188.
[80]G. Franz, (1926), op. cit., p. 313.
[81]Ibid.
[82] The Cambridge Modern History, op. cit.,p. 190. Also in E. B. Bax, op. cit., p.319.
[83]This estimate comes from Luther himself in a letter to John Briessmann, dated after August, 1525. Gottfried G. Krodel, editor and translator. Helmut T. Lehman, General Editor, Luther’s Works, Vol. 49, Letters II, (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1972), p.124. Luther also adds the numbers of casualties up for Nicholas von Amsdorf in a letter to him dated June 21, 1525. page 118 of the same volume.
[84]The Cambridge Modern History, op. cit., p. 190.
[85]Eric Gritsch, op. cit., p.95.
[86]Peter Blickle, op. cit., p.xx-xxii.
[87]G. Franz, op. cit., p. 277.
[88]G. Franz, op. cit., p. 278.
[89]Thomas Lindsay, A History of the Reformation, vol. I. (Edinburgh: T & T. Clark, 1907), p. 338.
[90]G. Franz, op. cit.,p.278. These are some of the arguments of Günter Franz. But A.F. Pollard’s Chapter VI in the old Cambridge Modern History, Vol II, published in 1903, is much more hard hitting still. The underlying assumptions that inform these historical judgments need to be aired and discussed.
[91] See Bernd Moeller, Imperial Cities and the Reformation, (Durham, N.C.: The Labyrinth Press, 1982), page 57.
[92]LW, Vol. 49, p. 114.
[93]Ibid.
The Peasants and the Word of God: the Failed Popular Reformation of 1525: A Social-Linguistic Approach
The Peasants’ and the Word of God: The Failed Popular Reformation of 1525
A Social-Linguistic Approach
(from the title page)
A Research Paper for the Special Comprehensive Requirements
March 31, 1997
Submitted by Peter D.S. Krey
For Graduate Theological Union
Area II: History of Christianity
Doctoral Committee
Chair: Prof. Christopher Ocker,
San Francisco Theological Seminary
Prof. Timothy Lull, President,
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary
Prof. Thomas A. Brady, Jr., University of California
Prof. Jane Strohl, Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary
Title
The Peasants’ and the Word of God: The Failed Popular Reformation of 1525
A Social-Linguistic Approach
This study intends to investigate the significance of several words, with their modifiers, reoccurring continually in the documents left by the Peasants’ War of 1525. “Clear and pure Gospel,” or “Word of God, [required] without addition of human teaching,” call attention to themselves. They even appear in the first of the famous Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Upper Swabia:
“The elected pastor should preach to us the holy gospel purely and clearly, without human additions or human doctrines or precepts.”[1]
In the first of the articles that the peasants swore to each other, in the formation of their Christian Union in Memmingen, the term, “Word of God,” is also included:
“First we desire men of skill and understanding in holy Scripture to preach and teach us the holy Gospel and the Word of God, purely and clearly, with all its fruits and without the addition of human teaching.”[2]
In addition, the word, “gospel” comes up eleven times in the Twelve Articles alone; the words, “Scripture, Holy Writ, Bible,” come up ten times, and the “Word of God,” seven times, not to mention the sixty Scriptural citations in the margins![3] Sebastian Lotzer, a furrier who wrote them, and Pr. Christoph Schappeler, were certainly trying to fasten these articles to the Scriptures. Counting words is a rather superficial exercise, but it does indicate that these are key words. They underscore the way Peter Blickle now writes about this event, not merely as a social-political “Revolution of 1525,” but as the “Popular Reformation” that escalated into the “Peasants’ War.”[4]
Using a social linguistic approach is designed not to allow this study to take a myopic point of view, which focuses only on language. Luther cites Hilary making this point: “For meaning must be sought in the reason for speaking and does not lie in the words alone.“[5] Thus the social implications of the words will be held in view. For example, Luther and Erasmus make an exegetical issue of the clarity of Scripture.[6] The social implication of the “clear” gospel in the peasants’ usage would mean that the mediation of the priests was no longer necessary, because the laity could now understand Scripture for themselves.[7] Its authority would replace that of the ecclesiastical magisterium, a shift with unfathomable social consequence. Luther’s forceful translation of the Scriptures from Latin into the language of the common people underscored these convictions.
Space does not permit a full discussion of this social linguistic methodology, and therefore, it is provided in an addendum. This approach, however, includes a new paradigm, that seems to reflect such a shift in the Reformation. Following G. Lindbeck, religion is understood like a language. Such language shaped new social realities and not only reflected them.[8] Luther’s powerful dictum, “For the Word of God comes whenever it comes, to change and renew the world.“[9] reflects that mode of language. But it will be important to see whether the documents mention this aspect of the Word of God or imply it, rather than imposing [this dynamic concept of the word] upon them, if it is not there.
Tom Scott and Bob Scribner’s work, called The German Peasants‘ War: A History in Documents,[10] provides a representative translation of the programmatic documents of the peasants. Throughout these pages, I will use this primary source to analyze the terms in question, i.e., “the clear and pure Gospel,” and “Word of God without addition of human teaching.” Because space does not permit differentiation of meanings in the many strands and localities in which the Peasants’ War took place, it will be necessary to take a general view. But strings of words, allusions to tracts, and extra-linguistic evidence can help to point out whether the Word of God is being understood from Luther’s, Zwingli’s, a more radical perspective, or even one of the peasants’ own or of the common man’s own perspective that they held independently of the others.
To give some illustrations already: a string of words usually entails: “To stand by and protect (carry out) the divine Word and holy Gospel and righteousness (justice),“[11] and never the string: “Law and Gospel,” or “Word and Sacrament.” The latter are associated with Luther and almost exclude reference to temporal rule and secular affairs, while the former, “Word, Gospel, and justice,” are a thrust directly at them. Allusions in the first of the Twelve Articles point to Luther’s Leisnig tract and his tract “On Avoiding Human Teaching.” The distinction, however, he makes between divine and human teaching is a recurrent theme in many of his tracts 1522-1526.
To provide an extra-lingual example: the banners [like flags carried before troops marching in formation] are interesting and are known to be very important to the different forces. When the Klettgau peasants hoist the colors of Zürich, blue and white, instead of the Austrian white, red, and black in January 1525, the Word of God has definitely become associated with Zwingli’s sense of Scripture and godly law.(25,115)(i.e., Scribner and Scott, pages 25, 115.)
Most of the places, in which “Gospel” and “Word of God” occur, are followed by references to the Old and New Testament. Only once are they followed by “according to the teachings of St. Paul.”(Michael Gaismair in the Tyrol revolt)(78). With this word string the peasants tend to equate the “Word of God” or “Gospel” with the Scriptures, which is antithetical to Luther. But, at the same time, Luther placed these Scriptures into their hands.[12] Common people who were only half literate struggled to read the New Testament and argued faith issues with masters and doctors of theology.[13] The peasants memorized tracts by singing them, and of course, in a trip to Nuremberg, the coveted evangelical preaching could be heard and the new belief could penetrate into the oral culture of the peasantry.
After considering Luther’s two tracts, to which the first of the Twelve Articles alludes, and the submission of the peasants to the Word of God, and the relationship of Latin and German, this study will present language that is more or less adequate from the documents. To explain: George Lindbeck notes that a religion is like a language, and adherents learn to interpret and experience themselves in its terms. He notes that for Christians, these terms derive from the story of Jesus, and the history of Israel. (Indeed Schappeler starts the Twelve Articles’ preface with the latter, and the third article, concerning the redemption of the serfs, is certainly imbued in the story of the former.) Reading Luther’s translation of the New Testament or hearing it read or preached to them, gave the peasants the opportunity to interpret and experience themselves and their community, their tithes and dues, their serfdom, their relationship with their magistrates, lords, bishops, and abbots, in short, their whole world, in the terms Lindbeck theorizes. Reading the documents, the language was not equally adequate to this criterium.[14] Often the terms seem like a slogan. In other documents, there is an astonishing command of the language and even word-play.
Secondly, the language was congruent with integral religion in the Popular Reformation component, but became dissonant in the Peasants’ War component into which this reformation escalated.[15] For integral religion the language needs to be homologous[16] with social formation and behavior. An army mustered is a social formation not consonant with the Gospel, from Luther’s standpoint, because what can only transpire through grace, and not by human hand,[17] is actually attempted by a military campaign. For the most part, the peasants would have negotiated – and who can deny they needed to protect themselves? – while the ecclesiastical and secular lords, for the most part, did not negotiate in good faith, but merely bided their time, until they could muster sufficient force to slaughter easily defeated peasants in a military solution.
Two Luther Tracts
The peasants would not have had to learn to sing the Leisnig pamphlet, from hearing it read aloud, to spread its contents among their number.[18] That their whole community ought to have the right and power to elect, appoint, and dismiss pastors who behave improperly, is right in Luther’s title: “THAT A CHRISTIAN ASSEMBLY OR CONGREGATION HAS THE RIGHT AND POWER TO JUDGE ALL TEACHINGS AND TO CALL, APPOINT, AND DISMISS TEACHERS, ESTABLISHED AND PROVEN BY SCRIPTURE“[19] (1523). If they had sung and memorized the contents of this tract, they would have heard this introductory paragraph:
To quote: First, it is necessary to know where and what the Christian congregation is,[20] so that men do not engage in human affairs (as the non-Christians were accustomed to do) in the name of the Christian Congregation. The sure mark by which the Christian Congregation can be recognized is that the pure gospel is preached there. For just as the banner of an army is the sure sign by which one can know what kind of lord and army have taken to the field, so, too, the gospel is a sure sign by which one knows where Christ and his army are encamped. We have the sure promise of this from Isaiah 55 [:10-11], “My word” (says God) “that goes forth from my mouth shall not return empty to me; rather, as the rain falls from heaven to earth, making it fruitful, so shall my word also accomplish everything for which I sent it.” Thus we are certain that there must be Christians wherever the gospel is, no matter how few and how sinful and weak they may be. Likewise, where the gospel is absent and human teachings rule, there no Christians live but only pagans, no matter how numerous they are and how holy and upright their life may be.[21] End of quote.
The peasants may have ridden rough-shod over the detail that Luther spoke of the “banner of the gospel” and “Christian armies taking to the field” – figuratively. But they were now actually so assembled. And they felt they were depending on the Word of God, and not human teachings. They quite literally followed banners with the “Word of God” and the name, “Jesus Christ,” upon them.[22] With the Isaiah passage concerning rain and harvests so strikingly fitting for them, Luther was veritably planting the Word of God among them. But notice that the numbers concerned, and strength and weakness mentioned in this passage, are now ominously reversed. (The Christian is not a rare bird here, but a throng laying claim to the name.) And because of the military formation of the peasants, Luther will say they, too, misuse the Christian name.
Luther’s tract, “On Avoiding Human Teaching,“[23] is an exegetical study of the contrast of human teaching with the Word of God and explains the puzzling phrase, “without the addition of human teaching.” (Whether the peasants followed Luther’s meaning will need to be determined.) To use a word play, consciously chosen for the social linguistic nature of this study: by this phrase, Luther means his “canon” of the Scripture to which nothing can be added. Naturally, “canon” refers to those Scriptures recognized and ratified by the church or council. It can also mean a “regulative decree,” a “church law,” as in canon law. Or it can mean the church lawyer, as in “canons” living on benefices. But Luther, who has burned the canon law with the bull of his excommunication, starts from scratch and means very clear commands in the New Testament, to which consciences are bound. But human teaching, he argues, contradicts these commands with laws about externals like food, clothing, celebration of days, location (that a monk not be permitted out of his cell), celibacy (elsewhere), images in churches, etc. to which consciences may not be bound. Human teaching is forbidden to reestablish the laws which Christ annulled. According to Luther, monasteries rest on human teachings, on an addition to the Word of God!,[24] (Thus, note that in this formula is hidden the rationale for what Heiko Oberman calls the Peasants’ War, i.e., the “cloisterkrieg!” i.e., a war against the monasteries.[25]) because their orders are oriented around these externals. Nothing is wrong with human teachings, except if they imprison and side-track Christians by binding their consciences, which robs them of their Christian freedom. To reintroduce the word play, then, other writing is good, but it is not to be considered “canon,” that is, a rule or standard.
Thus Luther’s tracts certainly inform the first article of the Twelve. The second article is a different story. Never does Luther claim that the Scripture frees the peasants from the small or large tithe, nor claim that dues, like the small tithe may be an “addition” to Scripture.[26] That exegesis was made of Matthew 23:23, where Jesus names the scribes and Pharisees hypocrites, because they care more about gathering in their tithes of mint, dill, and cumin rather than the weightier matters of the law: justice, mercy, and faith. But Luther would approach this treacherous issue through persuasion via the community of faith, rather than direct action. The peasants, however, could not make such a distinction between taxes and tithes quite so easily if they were under a prince-bishop, or under the abbot of a monastery, in Kempten, for example.
The peasants certainly submitted to the authority of Scripture i.e., as Popular Reformation.[27] Their articles became like an authoritative blue print for the structure of society. If an article agreed with the blue print, it obtained, if not the article fell, along with their practices, social advantages or disadvantages attached. In their words from the twelfth article conclusion:
“If any one or more of these articles are not in agreement with God’s Word (which we doubt), then this should be proved to us from Holy Writ. We will abandon it, when this is proved from the Bible.“[28]
The conception behind this idea of the gospel is a legal one. The sense of the gospel in which grace brings about change and bears fruit, as presented by Luther in the Isaiah passage of the Leisnig tract, and emphasized in his Eight Invocavit Sermons,[29] which quelled the Wittenberg disturbances, is not in this gospel conception. Instead of the persuasive, converting, and communicative power of the language, a legal and direct action approach spreads from Zürich, in which iconoclastic riots become the stepping stones to plunder of monasteries.[30]
In his writing, “On Avoiding Human Teaching,” Luther’s language is so strong it could be considered like depth charges which blew the monasteries out of the water. But not by human hand. He insulted the image-stormers roundly: they soiled the camp of the Reformation, and God had to teach them the decency of burying their droppings outside the camp.[31] His reaction to the plunder and destruction of monasteries is the wrath of a prophet.
In terms of the revolutionary social implications of Luther’s translation of the New Testament into the nascent common language, this corpus of documents delivers insufficient material.[32] It records that Hubmaier in Waldshut is charged with the offense of preaching the Gospel in German in the procession of Corpus Christi in 1524.(120) An insult leveled at the macaronic Latin of the priests is also included in Shappeler’s description of corruption of the clergy of Memmingen:[33] common men and women knew the meaning of the gospel and the priests did not, the time had come for the laity to confess the clergy, and the priests had deteriorated to “filthy rogues who preached a gruel of kitchen Latin.“[34]
On what he calls an intra-language, endoglossic level,[35] Peter von Polenz analyzes the sophisticated way Luther alienated the conceptual system of the papalists, labeling their usage “strange speech,” (Rotwelsch or Küdderwelsch), and asserting that it functioned to obscure the reality of things, to hide the truth from the people.[36] Language of the nobility could also be contorted and obscure, while the burghers wanted direct, clear, and concise language. Not only with macaronic in mind, Schappeler is to have said: “God be praised the truth has now come to light after having for so long been repressed by the priests for their own purposes.” – according to a complaint by a Procurator Fiscal.(101)
These examples indicate a resistance on the side of the old believers to give up elite, ecclesiastical and academic language, as well as the attack on that language from the side of the Popular Reformation. But the attack is also aimed at the mixture of German and Latin in the preaching of an uneducated clergy. Finally the vantage-point of clear, forceful, and dramatic German represented by Luther and clear evangelical common language preaching of the gospel represented by Schappeler, produce a new light in which the old language can be criticized. Now the gospel is “clear” because the tracts, Scripture, and the preaching are in a vernacular the common people can understand. That was not to the liking of the old order, which was convinced that only heresy would be the outcome.
The impression received reading these documents, that some of the language is far more adequate than other language, derives from the social linguistic methodology of this study. The presupposition that a language event experienced creates a greater command of the language in the hearers or readers,[37] or those encountered and addressed by the Word, seems to allow Luther’s version of the Word of God as a language initiative in persuasion, encounter, and conversion to take precedence over one that is basically already legal. It is very significant that Luther’s dialectic, Law and Gospel, never comes up, but only gospel as godly law. A legal gospel is somewhat transcended in places in the Merano Articles, articles over which Michael Gaismair probably had some influence.(86) The referent of the Gospel becomes the common good, brotherly love, and equality, but it issues into godly law and judicial affairs,[38] while the Luther version of the gospel as promise is never understood clearly.[39] That makes the sense of Luther’s gospel different from the one found in these documents.
The most concise peasants’ formula of their conception is found in the Molscheim Articles:
“To stand by the gospel and protect (carry out) the divine Word and holy Gospel and Righteousness (justice).”[40]
The stress here is completely on the shoulders of the hearers, on human responsibility, without the carrying power of what Luther understood as the Gospel. [They, therefore, laid the emphasis on human agency instead of the divine agency through the word.]
One usage of the term, “Word of God,” stood out as a polar opposite to what Luther meant by it, again from the Merano Articles, numbers 3 and 4. This is the context: Monks have just recently entered their calling to the chagrin of the authors of the articles. “They shall be provided food and drink, and remain in a house until they die off.” “They should be told that they are subject to the Word of God, and should observe it.”(88)
To be “subject to the Word of God” is not at all to allow it to function persuasively, to have it instruct consciences [in Luther's sense]. A pensive Franconian nobleman writes how future rebellion can be avoided: “No one should be forced into belief; God wants a willing heart.”(210) This sentiment is very different from such a sense of a sovereign word. Persuasion through language is displaced by being subjected to a king, becoming an object of a ruler’s will. God’s Word, certainly also reflects that majesty, but not like that of the Lords of the world, who lord it over their subjects. [God's working through the word] means being moved by One closer than the closest friend, and a Leader dying for the love and well being of his “subjects.” The Salzburg Articles to follow make this distinction between genuine and corrupt government better.[41]
But the Merano Articles also contain more adequate language. Here is a more positive version of the peasants’ gospel:
“all matters turn on self interest and not the common good….And so that the Word of God may be preached without any self interested additive, brotherly love be preserved, and the common good enhanced, we desire….”(87)
The additive here is greed or self-interest. That can be reversed into a “canon,” i.e., a standard of selfless sharing and participation in the common weal. That is far more adequate than to name tithes or taxes “additives.” The latter is too concrete and leaves no room for rational discriminating judgment.
Language becomes very powerful in the Twenty-Four Articles of Salzburg. A powerful indictment of the old order and its injustices is made here – as seen in the “mirror of the holy Gospel.”(105) Note how the articles avoid slogans: “The thieves and tyrants are so stubborn they will not turn to God and the divine evangelical truth.” This “fire of greed cannot be quenched other than by the Mouth of God.” The “poor common folk” are “hunted [and caught] in their money net with violent coercion.”(105) And the genuine way to govern:
“[The authorities] have not held before their eyes what God commanded and ordained in the Old and New Testaments, to judge the mass of men justly, to serve them truly and to protect and rule them well.”(106)
This language explains what the peasants themselves mean by the Word of God – what God commanded and ordained in the Old and New Testaments.
The command of the language even proceeds to word-play:
“So the ‘groundless’ (i.e., without ground) call themselves ‘Lords of the ground,’ i.e., landlords, and have invented a prodigious robbery [of the people].”[42]
On the other side, those who blamed the rebellion and the misfortune it brought to the land on the gospel, coined the word, “Evan-hellical.” From English it is possible to see the word, “hell” inserted, but in German the word inserted means “plague” or “damage.” (303)
This Merano and Salzburg language stands in sharp contrast to these important terms used as slogans. The Word of God was placed on banners. Then the Word of God was “helped, established, upheld, protected, supported, confirmed, promoted,” etc. To Erasmus Luther wrote something concerning theologians that also fits here:
“They make a parade of Scripture, yet they are as uncertain of it as the other side; though they boast of the Spirit, they give no sign of possessing it.“[43]
The most banal use of the word comes from Eisenhut, a very radical priest and peasant leader. “Appear here with a wagon, so that the Gospel and justice will be furthered.”(236) It is, however, couched in a confrontation or perhaps, a threat.
The language of the Peasants’ War also becomes dissonant with the Word of God while using it. Peter von Polenz gives an example of what he calls a sample of advanced, intimately expressive language achieved by the peasants, which spread a sense of equality. He cites Hans Muller von Bulgenbach (the peasant emperor) addressing a city in the Black Forest and inviting it to join the peasants’ cause. Polenz must have become distracted by beautiful words, because after all the solidarity, endearment, and brotherly affection, the paragraph concludes: “You have been warned for the first time!“[44] Müller is the commander of the whole fighting force, (Huffen) giving the address, and their battle cry is “Gospel, Gospel, Gospel!” (Evangelium, Evangelium, Evangelium)- that Greek loan word in the German, which has “taken” as a real German word, is here not only emptied, but used as a fighting word.
Examples abound in which extortion and compulsion are connected with the Gospel. One city is warned unless they join the cause of the gospel, the peasants will burn and destroy their vineyards, their livelihood growing around the city.
“To avoid being throttled, ruined, and devastated by [the peasants] and to escape the accusation of resisting God’s Word and divine justice, we have finally decided to stand by the Word of God,”(195) the Miltenbergers write to another city.
Altdorf is confronted in a similar way, immediately to swear into the armed contingent, literally, the “bright band” (heller Haufen) and add to this peasant fighting force.(138) For twenty florins some could purchase protection, but the word “gospel” was not used, just the “united bands of evangelical brothers.”(138-139) Because many were coerced to join the peasants, their cohesiveness could not have been genuine.[45]
In the escalation of the Popular Reformation into full blown Peasants’ War, the word “additive” began to refer to more and more. Thus pure Gospel, a code word for “Word of God without the addition of human teaching,” came to mean no lords as well. “What increases the Swiss, but the greed of the Lords?” the Zwinglian revolutionary asks.(275) The Swiss cantons are a lordless society, if one does not count the lordship of the burghers over the peasants of their suburbs. But a greater measure of freedom for the common man was prevalent there, which would, of course, have been a Godsend to German peasants.
In this escalation, a more radical theology permeated “the pure gospel,” i.e., “without additive,” which are the terms, this study is concerned with. A mandate arose to reject all lords but God as an additive to the gospel. When the peasants of Schaffhausen do so,(81,121) they do not explicitly mention additives, but their radical religious ideas relate to Hubmaier’s, if the hostile report of his ideas can be believed. Coming back from Zwingli’s Second Colloquy at Zürich (26-28 of October, 1523), Hubmaier noted that requiem masses, altars, images, church bells, altar lamps, etc., were to be destroyed or removed; no one was to render rents, tithes, interest payments, or annuities; nor obey their lords or be subject to them.(100-101) In an Apology of 1526, Hubmaier claims he never held these positions, but does speak of the “innovations and impositions” burdening the poor, thus estranging them from the Gospel.(232)[46]
If Hubmaier did not teach such a radical concept of additives to the gospel, a graduated scale of radical theologies can be distilled from peasants’ ideas and actions. These convictions ranged from the rejection of all lords, except God; all lords but the emperor; or all lords, even the captains of the peasants’ bands. The anarchy that prevailed at the failed siege of the Marienburg in Würzburg, is a case in point, a failure that helped doom the peasants in Franconia.
But the peasants had a severe problem with their leaders, many of whom betrayed them. Matern Feuerbacher, for example, whose house had been plundered when he opposed the Poor Conrad rebellion in 1514, went to the peasants with the assignment to dissuade them from rebelling. If that was impossible, he was to have himself elected captain and seek to contain the rebellion, especially to prevent the assembly from uniting with other bands.(141) The peasants grew suspicious of him and tried him in a ring. Feuerbacher defended himself:
“The emperor is our lord; it’s him we want to have; [not Duke Ulrich]; we are here because of the Word of God, to establish it, and where anyone complains of being denied justice, to help him gain it.”(142)
Meanwhile it was his assignment to get the peasants defeated.[47] This appeal to the Word of God successfully covered up his deception.
The Upper Swabian, Zwinglian revolutionary who wrote a long tract to the Assembly of Common Peasantry in the end of April or beginning of May, 1525, rings very true, despite his complete justification of battle for the defense of the gospel. (But ultimately, such a position is self-contradictory.) His tract rings so true, however, because he is so realistic about the attitude of self-defense that the peasants sorely need, but are not free to exercise. Perhaps they were still enjoying their self-image as the agents of the Reformation. After Jäcklin Rohrbach led the atrocity of Weinsberg in which noblemen were forced to run the gauntlet, among them the son-in-law of Ferdinand, Ludwig von Helfenstein, with the daughter of Ferdinand and her small son looking on, and precisely on Easter Day, April 16, 1525,(158) much of the good will the peasants enjoyed evaporated.(32)[48] The common wood-cut image of the peasant guarding the Reformation with his flail, no longer held true. On the other hand, this kind of terror was understood, and many who had held out against the peasants now collapsed, and surrendered to them, while Georg Truchsess von Waldburg, commander of the Swabian League, when he returned with his Landsknecht army from the Italian campaign, roasted the perpetrators of the gauntlet alive – to have the last word on terror.
To return to the revolutionary Zwinglian realist, who was routing for the peasants to attain Swiss freedom:
“If your opponents want to fight and follow their evil heads, and to dispute the Gospel with lances, halberds, muskets, and high breastplates, then be it as God wills, and let the anger burn against those who will not have it otherwise. Their criminal attacks are hated by God. But you should trust in God! Be steadfast in faith! You are not fighting for yourself, but for God, to preserve the Gospel and to tear down the Babylonian prison! Each should strive to help his neighbor in all loyalty and love!…”(273)
Of course, “help his neighbor” with the exception of the enemy to be slain. The peasants had organized themselves into armed units. War cannot protect what in and of itself it is also erasing, i.e., the Gospel.
This revolutionary takes religious judgments into deeper waters. The Gospel certainly has the last word, but the second to last, third, fourth to last judgments may have to be social, political, or military. The problem is not just one of having the gospel and human teaching mixed up (anvermischt), but having a confusion about what action to take in the face of what reality. Thomas Müntzer may or may not have been a fine theologian, but he was no general. To advance as an army geared for battle, singing hymns, and preaching the gospel is contradictory. The battle formation of the peasants into which they mustered themselves was completely reasonable, but to do so for the Gospel was not honest. The words of this tract ring true, calling complete solidarity, with no look “to becoming rich with the goods of others,” and realizing the consequences for them involved in any showing of weakness: torture, maiming, being drawn and quartered! Worst of all he lamented:
“Woe, woe forever for the eternal murder of the entire peasantry!”(274)
There can be a case, as in the Battle of Mohács, where in a superficial way the issue of the outcome is one or another faith, Islam or Christianity. But how much more honest to fight for ones’ lives rather than for the Gospel. Then this tract could be completely realist for spiritual reasons. The peasants were irresolute sometimes for spiritual and sometimes for material reasons. The peasants were justified in fighting for their lives, because circled by cavalry horsemen, they were butchered by the thousands like pigs, as accounts refer to them, or like frogs, which the nobles like storks, would swallow for dinner.[49] The peasants needed to fight for their lives, if not for their faith, and fighting resolutely, may have saved a chance for their new faith as well. The quandary for an army fighting for the Gospel is that the Gospel bids them to love their enemies.
But being realistic and resolute would mean to compare their chances for attaining Swiss freedom outside of the Alpine mountain fortress of Switzerland, one hundred percent of whose fierce menfolk were militarized, and ready to defend it. When Charles V defeated Francis I at Pavia February 24, 1525, and the Swiss immediately called back their 7,000 mercenaries from Duke Ulrich’s siege of Stuttgart, then in reality Swiss freedom itself was jeopardized let alone attainable for large reaches of Germany. It is this same tract that iterates the false hope, even two months after Pavia, that “a cow will stand on the Schwanberg in the land of Franconia, and low or bellow until it is heard in the middle of Switzerland.”(276) But the lordless society of Swiss freedom cannot be identified with Christian freedom, as interpreted by the Gospel without additive, because the Swiss cantons were divided against themselves, six for the old faith and three for the new.(121)[50]
When the two hundred volunteers from Zürich, who joined the Waldshut garrison to “uphold the Gospel” and prevent Hubmaier from being delivered to old believing executioners, the Word of God was not only being resisted from the old side, it was being compromised on the new. For Luther social justice and equality had to be named adiaphora; i.e., as part of human teaching. Christian freedom could not be identified with Swiss freedom. Adiaphora does not mean unimportant, only not ultimate. The ultimate is not attainable by direct human action. Luther’s translation of the New Testament, which had such an impact on the peasants and common people, removed a fixed social barrier blocking the way to equality. His passive mode in terms of social, political, and military action,[51] set the direct action of God through speech, writing, or print, into bold relief. (Witness his Invocavit Sermons‘ citation. See footnote 29 above.)
Broad and comprehensive action taken through language, indeed, God’s direct action through holy language, the Word of God, made advances for equality and solidarity by in-roads to the heart, by education, persuasion, instruction of conscience, the gracious conversion to integrity through faith. Human speech, its transmission and reception, unleashes an invisible direct action aimed at the better life that Luther called, “the betterment of the Christian estate,” (Christlichen Standes Verbesserung).[52] If the Popular Reformation had not been confused and mixed up with the Peasants’ War, had remained “anvermischt,” (that is, not confused and mixed up) there would have been better chances for both, the Popular Reformation and the Peasants’ War. The Gospel does not allow revenge for the blood of innocent preachers shed by the lords. Hubmaier had the right to place them in a Christian ban, but no Christian authority allows such military retribution, nor for the replacement of such lords by election of members of a country parliament (Landschaft). If deemed possible, however, it may be the rational thing to do. But such action cannot have Gospel legitimation.
What our study has tried to classify as inadequate language, Austrian authorities called “pretense and evil camouflage” to attribute to the Word of God “their disobedience to the Holy Empire.”(150) And they saw Zwingli and Zürich behind it, fearing Zürich’s French alliance. When the peasants in the Black Forest pitifully cried for reinforcements from Zürich, which had promised protection and help:
“Yes, [the Zürichers replied,] they were willing to aid the Word of God, but not rebellion, which overturned the same Word of God, and was not to be tolerated.”(302)
This dreadful account of the Swiss abandoning the peasants to protect themselves, is similar to the one in which Zürich arrested four image-stormers in Ittingen pro forma, and then to prevent attack from the Catholic cantons handed them over for execution.(100) Such duplicity produces the suspicion that Zürich was using the Word of God to destabilize Austrian holdings to its own advantage, and in the moment of truth, chose its security over the “Word of God.“[53]
The four weeks between the Easter of Weinsberg and the middle of May, 1525, the peasants spoke about what changes would take place “when the Reformation was established.” (Amorbach Articles: “We have a mission of God to rectify the great lack of the Word of God that has hitherto prevailed.”)(283) But in swift battles in the middle of May, their edifice turned out to be a house of cards. The lords unleashed untold savagery upon them. Ernest Gelner has an apt epithet, calling the lords, “thugs,” which is indeed what some of them were.[54]
Conclusion
The string of words, “clear and pure Gospel and Word of God without the addition of human teaching,” certainly evokes the “ubiquitous presence” of Luther, to turn a phrase. But then one can find Zwingli referring to the “bright and clear Gospel,” as well as the “pure Word of God,” too.[55] Although Luther is present in the meaning of these words, the spirit of them belongs to Zwingli. Not at all religiously or spiritually circumscribed, their thrust is directly at the social and political dimension of a mutually sworn commune, whether urban, town, or country. When it comes to tithe-revolt and rejection of civil magistrates, Zwingli parts company with peasants having such views. To a wishfully-thinking peasant, these can be “additions” to the Word of God. Zwingli’s Swiss republicanism allows him to reject lords, but not in such a way that would call all authority into question. Most peasants also did not do that either. But radical theology was present, when “additional human teaching” was considered to refer to secular authority and tithes. Make no mistake, Swiss freedom would entail constitutional change of the secular and ecclesiastic principalities, duchies, monastic holdings of Upper Germany. But the radically religious also rejected decisions of the civil magistrates of Zürich. They tried to achieve a polarization of that society, in order to elect a non-coercive council (senatus) from those who had chosen the evangelical side.[56]
A sectarian spirit does not describe many peasants, nor their aspirations. Like the urban commune later, they wanted to integrate the priesthood into their communes and equalize the nobility. In Franconia they wanted peasant representation in ruling councils, thus they did not reject governmental office. Perhaps some of the rejection of all secular government came about later among the Anabaptists as a deep structured reaction against the brutal annihilation of peasants for even wanting to participate in government.
Because the string of words, and the positions held by the peasants are thus shown to be distinct from those of Luther, Zwingli, and radical religious adherents, this particular phrasing of the words must be their own.
Perhaps a wood-cut, the Allegory of the Godly Mill, in which Zwingli personally had a hand, can relate the multiple involvement in the Popular Reformation component better.[57] The traditional allegory of the mill is reinterpreted for the spreading of the “pure Word of God.” The Father and the Holy Spirit turn the wheel by grace, Christ pours the evangelists and St. Paul into the hopper-funnel to be ground, Erasmus is the miller. The baker is the Augustinian monk, Luther, behind him, kneading the dough in the baking trough, and making the breads, which turn into books. The only unlabeled character, a scholar, most likely Zwingli himself, is handing them to the church hierarchy: a Dominican monk, a cardinal, bishop, and pope, who let the bread-turned into Bibles fall to the ground and reject them. Birds cry, “ban, ban!” over these ecclesiasts, who have just finished banning Luther. The peasant with a threshing flail protects the preaching of the Gospel and threatens the enemies of the Reformation. So Luther and Zwingli, the peasants, and others play their various roles in the mill that turns out the bread of the Word of God for the Reformation.
What the picture does not show, because indeed it came out in the Spring of 1521, is the protracted persecution and frustration of those in the mill that was churning away at the Popular Reformation. Now the peasant was swinging his flail. Zwingli himself drew up plans for a military campaign between July 1524 -January 4, 1525.[58] Later he tells that the “nerve of the oligarch has to be cut” or otherwise “neither the evangelical truth nor its servants could be secure.” and For Zwingli, in the last analysis (ultima ratio), power politics and war would come into question for the defense of the Gospel.[59] Zwingli’s direct pressure and action to try to open up the forest cantons for evangelical preaching, brought the Catholic cantons up to Zürich to take their lethal revenge.
The defense of the Gospel is a very precarious thing. It is with this issue that the peasants and Zwingli differed diametrically from Luther. The pure Gospel, as a code word for “without addition of human teaching,” advanced to the direct action of destroying images and then monasteries, then even castles had to be attacked.
By the “pure Word of God,” Luther also “meant without the addition of human teaching,” but he held that those institutions which rested on human teaching, did not need to be destroyed by human hands. The physical sound of the naked words had their way of getting into human hearts[60] and dissolving institutions and raising them up in a new form. Thus the personal passive stance involved with justification by grace through faith, correlated with a passive social one as well, featuring the direct action of the Word of God. It was to be helped by no human hand, let alone force, coercion, or military campaigns. Luther thus felt that those who had to lend the word a hand, or who tried to defend it, really entered works righteousness, and were “falling out of the Kingdom” and experiencing a “ship-wreck in faith.”
That is not the conception of the pure Word of God represented by Zwingli, the peasants and the common man. The Word of God, for them, referred to Scripture, basically. Old and New Testaments, especially Luther’s new translations, which made it clear in the many social meanings shown in this study.
For Luther it was Word of God in so far as it was brought to speech in preaching.[61] Pure Gospel for Luther did not only refer the Word of God without the addition of human teaching, but also the Word alone, doing what could not be done by human hand, and most certainly not by force or coercion.
“Pure Word of God” is peasant short-hand, according to Peter Blickle, for that Word, without the addition of human teaching and precepts. According to Luther, the latter are condemned if they try to annul or replace clear commands from Scripture and bind believers to externals. Canon law and traditional dogma of the church could no longer be trusted, because the pope and the entire hierarchy had hopelessly mixed up human and divine law, and the peasants called upon preachers to be the judges to distinguish the two. They wanted out of the Babylonian captivity of their consciences.[62] But in the process they added to the “additives” what was advantageous for them, and their burdens makes this understandable, given all the burdens of others they were forced to carry.[63]
When the “addition was self-interest” as in Gaismair’s Merano Articles, then the formula was much more genuine. Then it became shorthand for the common good, brotherly love, the promotion of equality. When that continues into the identification of the godly law with the gospel, as Blickle writes, making the latter a kind of law to guide political and judicial affairs, then the most important communicative aspect of the Gospel is lost sight of. Certainly God is also a judge and life takes place in court and we are all on trial and the giving of laws is a necessity. But Moses is transcended by the Gospel of Christ, out of which Gospel-of-promise, more than just a blue print for a new society becomes possible. A renewal of language, renewal of lives, renewal of institutions pours out of this Word.
In my analysis the range of meanings of the Word of God in the usage of the peasants ranged from adequate to very inadequate slogans. The latter do correlate with violence and coercion, but Hans Müller of Bulgenbach showed that intimate language can also be used to veil threats. Clearly, very adequate, even incredibly adept language can also be used to incite violence. (Witness the letter of Müntzer to the miners of Mansfeld.) Thus, language, too, does not escape the Tillichian ambiguity, in which it can be the law that kills or the promise that gives new life. But in the latter sense of the Gospel, a striking command of the language can be noticed, which derives from the hearing or experience of the language event. The social formation and behavior need to be homologous or consonant with that language, and if words get into the heart they make them so.
The Word of God as promise is the divine source of language, which is the source of relationships, institutions, society. It builds a verbal universe freer than the physical universe, (because it is invisible and more easily revisable). The verbal society can be rearranged in different ways, so that the social one does not have to be brought into disarray, until the verbal one has gotten it right, and knows how the social one can be changed, or the physical one for that matter, always noting Reinhold Niebuhr’s distinction between what can and cannot be changed. (Think of his Serenity Prayer.) A language command gained from the experience of the Word of God, can absorb an earthly order and reconfigure it a more heavenly one.
This was attempted in the Peasants’ War, with force of arms, however, and a rather more oppressive and sorry world resulted.
Methodological Addendum
The Social Linguistic Approach to the Popular Reformation
A word needs to be said about the social linguistic method of this study,[64] even while using it to advance the Scriptural reception argument, that is, the peasants’ reading Luther’s fresh and powerful translation of his New Testament. The basic concept of a linguistic culture comes from Emil Durkheim,[65] and the notion of the linguistic construction of social realities, and the power of language to bend the world to fit the word, come from John Searle.[66] More, however, will need to be said about George Lindbeck’s cultural-linguistic model of religion and Peter von Polenz’ social-linguistics, because Lindbeck’s religion as a language model really transcends an interpretive method. It entails a shift in the paradigm, from extra- to intra-textuality, one that seems to be illustrated by the sources and is thus fruitful for this study. It can explain a great deal about the Word of God in the Reformation, in general and the Popular Reformation and its escalation into Peasants’ War in the towns and countryside, in particular.[67]
In The Nature of Doctrine,[68] George Lindbeck works out a cultural-linguistic paradigm, which conceives religion to be like a language operating with grammatical, regulative rules. This language has deep grammar and a superficial one with more exceptions than illustrations of the rule (so frustrating to those learning the language).
In the peasants’ own reception of the Word of God, Lindbeck’s arguments are apposite with the peasants’ hearing Scriptures preached and read to them. They learn to interpret and experience their own lives and their world in the terms of the story of Jesus and the history of Israel.[69] Rather than being outside the Scriptures and interpreting them, they are transported into the Scriptures. Lindbeck calls this intra-textuality. The text absorbs the world, rather than the world absorbing the text.[70] The euphoria among the peasants and common people resulted from the powerful impact of a fresh hearing of Scriptures. Here in their hands they could have the Scriptures themselves, the source of the story of Jesus and the history of Israel.[71] They could learn the basic vocabulary of Christianity and interpret their lives and world in its light. And this amazing return to the sources was not in Latin, but in a language they could understand.
Luther translated the Scriptures into his Eastern Middle German, Meisenisch, the language from the Saxon chancellory with his ear to the marketplace and how the common people talked.[72]
It is still hard, however, to imagine the intensity of the euphoria in which hundreds of thousands of peasants suddenly rose up; a movement, Peter Blickle finds to have never happened before nor since in the history of central Europe.[73] This word “euphoria,” however, does not capture a seething rage also present among the peasants, one in which the peasants of Bamberg, for example, could destroy 200 castles in three days.[74] Some of this rage resulted from suddenly understanding their oppression and who their oppressors were. But keyed into that was also a sense of having been deceived by the priests,[75] of the very great discrepancy between their experienced religious life and the picture of it they received right from the very source.
Lindbeck notes that for those who are steeped in the authoritative texts, no world is more real than these create.[76] A Scriptural world is able to absorb the universe. The text absorbs the world rather than the world the text.[77] (Lindbeck seems to be playing a variation on Searle’s theme.) He continues that for the intra-textual stand the interpretative direction goes from the Bible to the world rather than vice versa.[78] (Lindbeck’s schema here resembles Searle’s direction of fit. See footnote [8].) Because the church had become the problematic entity[79] and was the entity that needed to be reformed, it could not be a locus from which to interpret Scripture. Therefore it was relegated to the human domain and authority became located in the Word of God. The word, “alone” now referred to the fact that the church was to be measured by the yardstick of the Scripture, rather than allowing the church to avoid that corrective by controlling its interpretation.
(In his book, Lindbeck is not at all dealing with the Peasants’ War, but because he has the Reformation in mind, what he says applies to the Popular Reformation component of it.)
Sola Scriptura is the cry for the Reformers, but not for the peasants. They wish their lives and articles to reflect the Scripture, however, and wish to hear the viva vox evangelii[80] (that is, the living voice of the Gospel) in preaching to bring about the necessary changes in the church.
Was this change of authority necessary? Critical statements by Schappeler argue that they were, in criticisms that have already been cited. Peter Burke’s observation that the corruption charge used in the struggle to dislodge an old paradigm by a new one is also apt.[81] If the corruption charge became convincing, what authority was left but for the Scripture alone? That was the new paradigm. In addition, to follow Lindbeck, the grammar and the regulative rules had to be discovered in the language of the religion itself. Perhaps what Lindbeck is searching for, when he tries to reinterpret scriptura sui ipsius interpres, (i.e., the Scriptures interpret themselves) is the shift from the Scripture interpreted from outside itself, to the Word of God coming to speech, and reshaping the world from within itself. The world in the grip of this language does not reflect upon the textual, quite so much as become a reflection of it. (This is the performative dimension of the word or language in terms of speech acts. It is well illustrated in Luther’s dictum, “For the Word of God comes, whenever it comes, to change and renew the world.” See footnote [5])
George Lindbeck has taken this study into its argument: in a nutshell, the intensity of the Popular Reformation of the peasants and common people came about by their linguistic reception of Luther‘s newly translated Scriptures, both printed and preached, and expounded by many tracts.[82] The Word of God unleashed powerful religious and social forces. In a characteristic reversal, the language they began to grasp now grasped and moved them. But the escalation of the Reformation into the Peasants‘ War undermined the new language and the movement. The following social-linguistic study will take this argument further.
In Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart,[83] (translated into English the title is: The History of the German Language from the Middle Ages to the Present), Peter von Polenz writes about inter- and intra-language politics [Sprach(en) Politik]. He defines such language politics as planned, process and goal oriented, government interventions, or interventions of organized circles of power, into the relationships of languages.[84] Such politics try to steer exoglossic/inter-ethnic or endoglossic/intra-ethnic processes, but most often these take place unconsciously, behind the backs of the subjects.[85] Thus there is a continuous, bi-lingual, long-lasting, medieval relationship between the universal high-culture of Latin and the particular, underdeveloped languages of the people.[86] Clearly Luther’s translation of the Scriptures into the Eastern Middle German and the beginnings of the urban oriented Early New High German,[87] in which his translation played an important role, illustrates such an intervention. In the process, no longer are Latin, Greek, and Hebrew the only languages capable of containing the Scriptures, or the Word of God, but now a German designed to be understood by the common people, is, too.[88] To attempt to shut out the common people from the Scriptures and worship and from all knowledge by means of a language represents a very heavy social handicap. The mendicant friars were certainly preaching to the people and initiating earlier evangelical movements since the Thirteenth Century.[89] Their focus induced the common people to more devotion, the aspirations of the religiosi, and their orders, pilgrimages, etc. But something is unique about a situation in which the peasant leader of the Baltringen Band, Ulrich Schmid of Sulmingen, faces the city magistrates and some nobles, who have to come to him, and requires judgment between them according to the words of the Scripture(124) – (Schmid is reported to have come to a marvelous ability to preach to the peasants[90]) and when the rulers return, a week later, he is no longer there with 3,000 but 30,000 common people.(123)
It was certainly a long and slow process taking centuries before High German replaced Latin, but these early modern people of the popular Reformation must have gotten a glimpse of what was possible and, of course, what has become actual in our times. With Early New High German beginning to dislodge Latin, inter-language processes began to be replaced by intra-language ones. Without Latin subordinating all dialects equally, a struggle began between the German dialects, in which ENHG started the demise of Low German as a literary language.[91] Language ridicule set in discriminating against those who could not transcend their dialects and speak High German. Dates are given for when it was no longer forbidden to speak German in the Strassbourg Gymnasium (1538),[92] when the first lectures were held in German (1687), and the Eighteenth Century when the language of instruction became German in the universities,[93] but this was an uneven and slow process. Even in the late Nineteenth Century, it was in Latin that Emil Durkheim had to write his dissertation. High German then began to take over the role, that Latin once had, to discriminate against the lower classes.[94]
The furor and euphoria of the people from 1524-1526 needs explanation not only because of the long drawn out process the displacement of Latin by German entailed, but also the fact that there were many other German translations of the Scriptures. Counting Johann Mentel’s Strassbourg Bible of 1466, there were fourteen German publications of the whole Bible into a high German dialects and four into Low German ones. These along with many partial translations, were mostly from the Vulgate. After Luther’s powerful translation, in which he used Erasmus’s Greek New Testament of 1516 for help in difficult places, none of these pre-Luther Bibles were published again. Luther’s language was simple and understandable for the laity, good for reading aloud, designed to be spoken and heard, figurative and drastic[95] and the earlier versions could not compete. Even the anti-Luther Bibles published by Emser (1527), Dietenberger (1534), and Eck (1537)used Luther’s translation only changing some of the words, about which Luther protests in a circular letter. (Sendebrief)[96]
Thus it is not a matter of Luther’s giving the German people a language, although he plays a significant role in the development of ENHG; it is not a matter of his translation being the first, because it wasn’t; it is not a matter of his discovering the Gospel, (Who lost it?); but it is something unique about his language. Peter von Polenz notes that he placed German into the same category as Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, the three holy languages, the only ones in which the Word of God was legitimate.[97] He also claimed Luther strengthened the Scriptures poetically maintaining a sacral character despite using common language.[98] But perhaps what this social-linguist writes needs to be joined with Lindbeck’s model. Luther’s Scriptures had the power to draw the people into its world, address them with language that moved the heart, and give them a new language command after the experience. (Witness Ulrich Schmid of Sulmingen.) Again, von Polenz maintains that his vital spoken language style, his language of address, his dialogical forms of question and answer, his freedom in sentential word order, anacoluthons,[99] modal words (which designate emotional nuances in what is said), proverbs, in short, he was more interested in speaking about God with the common people, and the preaching in the “Mouth-house” of the church than in academic high German,[100] spoken as if written and ready for publication for scholars.
But there is still something more. And it has been touched upon with the word “performative,” not in a mere technical sense, but in its dynamic ability to change realities. Consider Austin’s distinction about promises, i.e., “to talk about a promise is not to make one.” And in Luther’s reinterpretation of the gospel in terms of the promises of God, and his emphasis on faith, corresponding to Searle’s sincerity conditions, required in speech acts, Austin’s word could be modified: “to write about the Gospel is not the same as making God’s promises and bidding the people to trust in them.” God spoke in this Scriptural language. God acted through speech by changing the fabric of social reality. Institutions were dismantled and (others) reconstructed in the powerful motion of the Word of God. After all,according to John Searle, the fabric of social institutions is made out of language.
Although the Bondage of the Will could not have been received by the peasants’, first, because it came out in 1526 and secondly, because it was written in Latin; nevertheless, it has very interesting sections, in which Luther is arguing with Erasmus about the Word of God, and how it functioned in the Peasants’ War. It is here that Luther declares: “For the Word of God comes, whenever it comes, to change and renew the world.” And it comes accompanied by tumult and bloodshed, he continues, and that makes him rejoice, because it is the sign that the Word of God is afoot. He is convinced that it has come to bring about the collapse of the kingdom of the pope. Even if the whole world is shattered on account of the Word of God, what is shattered would be lost on any account, if it is not changed by the Word of God. “It is preferable to lose the world, rather than God, its creator, who is able to create innumerable worlds again, and who is better than infinite worlds.”[101]
Luther assures Erasmus that the Word of God cannot be suppressed or prohibited.[102] The Scriptures are “clear,” meaning, they are not obscure so that the meaning has to be mediated to the common people by priests. Exegetical skills need to be learned, but these can be learned by the common people as well as the clergy. Luther’s “exegetical experience” (Lindbeck) with the Word of God needs to be added to the one he experienced with Romans 1:17, where he is in the throes of justification by grace through faith. Back in 1514 in his lecture on Psalm 118 he exclaims: “Behold the Word of God! Oh, if one were only able to weigh, with the feeling we ought, what it means by saying, ‘God is speaking,’ ‘God is promising,’ ‘God is threatening!’ Who I ask would not be shaken to the very depths? This is a great word, a great sound, and one to be feared: ‘Behold, the Word of God!’“[103]
Luther may not be able to give a technical definition of performativity, but he certainly has his finger on Austin’s discovery on “How (God) does things with words” – to modify Austin’s title slightly. Again back in the Dictata Super Psalterium, explicating Psalm 115:10, “I have believed, therefore, I have spoken.” He notes, “All our goods are only in words and promises. For heavenly things cannot be shown as present; they can only be proclaimed by the Word.“[104] [It is out of such dynamic language that new realities issue out and refresh our old world.]
The Dictata was not published, so the peasants and common people could not have read or heard it, but many a student heard these lectures and by spreading the word, they represent another important factor. Wittenberg had become the largest university between 1521 to 1525. Between 1515 and 1520 only Leipzig is competing with it’s numbers of registered students, having 1770, while Wittenberg had 1714. They averaged 705 and 600 students per year in this same period. The figures drop between 1521 to 1525: 940 to 1069, and averages of 331 and 379, respectively, making Wittenberg outdistance Leipzig, and become the largest of all twelve German universities.[105] Many of these students were preaching what they learned under Luther and Melanchthon.
In addition to living words the peasants encountered in real persons, Bernd Moeller’s tries to depict the revolution in printing that Luther and his contemporaries represent for the reception of his version of the Reformation. In 1519 there were 45 single publications, the overwhelming majority of them by Luther. He counts 1,000 copies as a conservative estimate for each edition, of which there were 259. That put 259,000 copies of Luther’s writings into the hands of his contemporaries. This he calls the first epiphany of the masses in the Reformation. No author had ever had that kind of publishing success. Very importantly they were more easily read tracts rather than long books.[106] They were by a living author, not by the Fathers of the past, and they dealt with the deepest questions of their existence.[107] Moeller counts only one other set of Luther’s publications, those of 1522 to 1523. Luther published 150 single titles, published in 1,100 editions, meaning that it is likely that over a million copies of his writings came into the hands of the people. Moeller is telling us about the way the explosion of printed tracts, mostly by Luther in these years, were received by the masses. If the crowning achievement of the New Testament is added to that, then the intensity of the Popular Reformation is better understood.
[1]Blickle, The Revolution of 1525, (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1977, 1981), p. 196. Derselbig erwölt Pfarrer soll uns das hailig Evangeli lauter und klar predigen one allen menschlichen Zçsatz, Leer und Gebot. Günter Franz, Quellen zur Geschichte des Bauernkrieges, (München: R.Oldenbourg, 1963), p. 174-179, no. 43.
[2]Scott and Scribner, translators and editors, The German Peasants‘ War, (New Jersey: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1991), p. 132. Item das wir welln, uns das heilig Evangelium und Wort Gots lauter und clar anvermischt menschlicher Lere mit seinen Fruchtn von geschicktn Verstendign der Heilign Geschrift gepredigt und furtragen werdt. Franz, Quellen, p. 197-198. No. 52.
[3]Blickle, 195-201.
[4]Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, editors, Handbook of European History 1400-1600, v.2, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), p. 161-192.
[5]LW,33,205. WA 18,600-787. From Bondage of the Will.
[6]Ibid., p. 25.
[7]Luther was not a Carlstadt, who dressed in a peasants’ gray garb, gave up his professorship, and now wanted to be taught by the peasants. Luther remains dialectical. His Leisnig tract for the circumspect replacement of legal patronage by that of the congregation to insure evangelical preaching, is not at all the angry position he takes against the common man in the Erfurter Articles after the Peasants’ War. A portion of the former tract makes his position more transparent: “And since in these last accursed times the bishops and the false spiritual government neither are nor wish to be teachers – moreover they want neither to provide nor tolerate any, and God should not be tempted to send new preachers from heaven – we must act according to Scripture and call and institute from among ourselves, those who are found to be qualified….” From Todd Nichol, “Bishops in the Lutheran Tradition,” J.M. Tuell and R.W. Fjeld, eds., Episcopacy: Lutheran-United Methodist Dialogue II, (Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1991),p. 36-37.
[8]If the Reformation was a language event, and those who experienced it, received a new command of language; and, if a component of the Peasants’ War was the Popular Reformation, then it, too, was involved with a language event. See John Searle and the direction of fit of language, (word to world and world to word)[in Expression and Meaning, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pages 3-4], George Lindbeck’s religion as a language model, [See below.] and Peter von Polenz (See footnote 13.) on inter and intra-language politics in the Addendum. Lindbeck’s intra-textuality seems to have real explanatory power for some of the attitudes in these documents, but what the documents themselves reveal before explanation will be the focus of this part of the study. George Lindbeck in The Nature of Doctrine, Philadelphia: The Westminister Press, 1984.
[9]LW,33,52. WA 18,600-787.
[10]Scott and Scribner, The German Peasants‘ War, has already been cited. Sometimes going back to the original German from their translation is necessary for this study. References to the page numbers of this basic source will henceforth be given in parentheses after the citation.
[11]G. Franz, Quellen, No. 76, p. 244.
[12]See Addendum: Luther’s September and December Testaments numbered about 240,000 copies, while well over a million copies of his tracts were in the hands of the people between 1520 and 1524. See the argument of the Addendum undergirding this study.
[13]Peter von Polenz, Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart,v. I, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991), p.252. Johannes Cochläus’ observed in amazement that shoemakers, wives, simple lay people, who only half-way know how to read, are reading the New Testament eagerly and disputing with masters and doctors of theology about the faith issues of the Gospel!
[14]After applying this method it become clear that Lindbeck’s model dovetails with Luther’s sense of the Word of God. But theories about language event are independent of Luther.
[15]Durkheim’s dictum on methodology in the Addendum is encouraging here, because further thought is needed. [See footnote 64.]
[16]A homology avoids a materialist doctrine such as that of the social infrastructure determining the intellectual superstructure. It asserts that the social formation is a factor in the theology in this case, and vice versa: theology is a factor in the social formation.
[17]LW,39,278-279. WA 10:2,140. “The So-Called Spiritual Estate.”
[18]Peter von Polenz, p. 147.
[19]LW, 39, 300. WA 11, 408.
[20] R. Gritsch explains that Luther distinguishes “church,” i.e., “Kirche” from “congregation,” “gemeyne.” Footnote: LW, 39, 305.
[21]LW, 39, 305. WA 11, 408-416.
[22]Scott and Scribner, p.45. For the Süngau Band the banner quite simply bore the inscription, “Jesus Christ.” In Ebermünster they carried the motto, VDMIE, Verbum Dei Manet in Eternum.
[23]WA, v.10:2, 72-92.
[24]WA, 10:2, p. 76.
[25]Oberman, Heiko A. “The Gospel of Social Unrest: 450 Years After the So-Called ‘German Peasants’ War of 1525.” Harvard Theological Review. 69 (1976), 103-129. Note that “pure gospel” can also function the same way, because, according to Peter Blickle, it is short hand for “the gospel without addition of human teachings.” Hence, also, an implicit attack on monasticism. But Blickle defines “pure gospel” much more inclusively: “a repudiation of the doctrinal tradition of the Church, both dogmas and canon law.” Brady, Oberman, and Tracy, vol. II, p. 168.
[26]N.B. Unlike Zwingli, who had argued in 1520 that the tithe could not be grounded on godly law. This debate then surfaced around Zürich. Zwingli distanced himself from such tithe or tax revolt, but granted its abuse in the prevailing practice. He argued that peasants could not just refuse to pay tithes because they are not founded in Scripture: pacta sunt servanda, i.e., agreements are obligating. Berndt Hamm, Zwingli‘s Reformation der Freiheit, (Neukirchen-Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag, 1988), p. 104.
[27] Let Thomas Müntzer’s biblical mandate to purge the ungodly in accord with the Old Testament mandate to purge the Canaanites, simply be condemned as misuse of Scripture. According to Luther, such biblical laws are contextual, and need to be mediated through natural law and reason. See Luther’s treatise “How Christians Should Regard Moses (1525).” LW,35:161-174.
[28]Peter Blickle, p. 200-201.
[29]LW,51,77: “In short I will preach it, teach it, write it, but I will constrain no man by force, for faith must come freely without compulsion. Take myself as an example. I opposed indulgences and all the papists, but never with force. I simply taught, preached and wrote God’s Word; otherwise I did nothing. And while I slept [cf. Mark 4:26-29.], or drank Wittenberg beer with my friends Philip and Amsdorf, the Word so greatly weakened the papacy that no prince or emperor ever inflicted such losses upon it.” WA 10:3,1-64.
[30]Scott and Scribner agree with this judgement. See p. 24.
[31]WA 10:2,72.
[32]N.B. Perhaps, it is impossible to see the forest for the trees. A turn to the common language is a precondition for the request for evangelical preachers, and all the articles about the Word of God by the peasants and common man.
[33]Corruption is not a technical term. Peter Burke has some important insights about it. One of the ways a new organization of society fights to replace the old one is by calling it corrupt. In part corruption is in the eye of the beholder.
Peter Burke, History and Social Theory, (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1992), p. 74. N.B. Better training and education of the new believing preachers, their access to printed New Testaments, use of the vernacular, and their emphasis on pastoral care, however, set the inadequacies of the untrained priests into bold relief.
[34]Ibid., p. 101. He called them Küchen und Suppenprediger. N.B. Peter Blickle uses this source as a representative case for the urban reformation associated with the Popular Reformation. See Brady, Oberman, and Tracy, p. 164-165.
[35]See Approach to Methodology.
[36]Peter von Polenz, p. 254.
[37]Rev. A.C. Thiselton, “The Parables as Language-Event: Some Comments on Fuch’s Hermeneutics in the Light of Linguistic Philosophy,” Scottish Journal of Theology, 23, 1970, p. 447.
[38]Blickle in Brady, Oberman, and Tracy, p. 172. “The peasant meaning of the Word of God, drawing practical consequences for their life in the world [meant that] pure gospel encourages the common good (gemein Nutzen) and the practice of ‘brotherly love,’ promotes equality, and aims at the Christianization of society. In this sense pure Gospel functioned as a kind of law (lex) and was supposed to guide political and judicial affairs. This was their godly law.”
[39]A creation takes place in a promise [to jump ahead to my unfinished book called Creation via Language]. “I promise to be with you” is a performative because a commitment of the speaker to a future act is received by the hearer of the promise-speech-act.
[40]Franz, Quellen, No. 76, p. 244.
[41]See the citation below starting with: [The authorities]…
[42]Franz, Quellen, p. 296.
[43]LW,33,72. WA 18,600-787.
[44]P. v. Polenz, p. 263. He tries to take the sting out of the word, “ermahnt,” i.e., warned, but he is not convincing.
[45]In the revolution of the sailors and some returning German forces ending WWI, a mockery of comradrie went like this, (according to my father who fought in that war): “Willst Du nicht mein Bruder sein, so schlag ich dir den Schedel ein.“ Freely translated, “If you refuse to be my brother, I break your skull like any other.” (Just to make it rhyme as in German.)
[46]N.B. On a religious level, this is an irrelevant external. Suffering can bring one closer or estrange a person from the Gospel. But on a social or political level, it can be systemically immanent violence.
[47]Interestingly enough, when the Jews revolted against Rome 60-70 C.E., Josephus had a similar assignment. He became a commander of peasants-in-insurrection, to bring them into the hands of the Roman legions. See Ched Meyers, Binding the Strongman, (Maryknoll, New York: Orbis Books, 1988), page 67 and 86.
[48]One account mentions 14 nobles, another 17, and 24 servants killed in and around running the gauntlet.(158) The peasants did not take many lives, it seems. But they destroyed many monasteries and castles. They themselves, however, were massacred.
[49]A mayor of Ulm spoke sharply and bravely to the assembled peasants: “You peasants are like the frogs in the spring. They all come together and croak and cry: “rivit, rivit.” At that, the stork comes and swallows them. You also cry, ‘Woe! Woe!’ And the Lords will come and strike you dead.” Franz, Quellen, no. 31, p. 145.
[50]Was such an increase in political freedom, which the Swiss enjoyed, the fruit of faith in the gospel, a previous evangelical movement? That is a fair question.
[51]N.B. Military action gives the illusion of being able to do what it is not in its competence to do. Government, too, but here it is more complex.
[52]“Language is a social institution,” according to John Searle. (See footnote 66.) Luther’s version of “freedom of speech:” is the freedom over an invisible institution, which can consciously or (not) reshape the other institutions – although speech is to be understood, here, executively, to change realities, rather than vestigially, to merely reflect them.
[53]N.B. Their concerns for security were justified. The Catholic forest cantons surprised them at the Battle of Kappel, October 11, 1531, killing Zwingli, and at least seven other clergy. Then on October 24, they cut down another Reformed force at Gubel. Euan Cameron, The European Reformation, (Oxford: Clarendon, 1991),p. 223.
[54]Ernst Gellner, Plough, Sword, and Book: the Structure of Human History, (University of Chicago Press, 1988), p.277.
[55]B. Hamm, p. 16.
[56]G. H. Williams, The Radical Reformation, Third Edition, (Kirksville, Missouri: Sixteenth Century Journal Publishers, Inc., 1992), p. 188.
[57]B. Hamm, prefatory picture with explanation.
[58]B. Hamm, p. 20. More recent research redates it to 1526.
[59]Ibid.
[60]James Preus, p. 252-254. This reference is interesting on three counts: 1)How words enter and move the heart, 2) “How words prevail over things — even the most contrary and powerful things!” and 3) How a sacramental view of words makes them ambiguous and obscure signs, while “naked words” are completely clear. (This speaks to clarity of Scriptures.)
[61]B. Hamm, p. 19: A Zwinglian expression spoke of the “Word of God, in so far as it could be drawn, witnessed, and proven from the Old and New Testaments.”
[62]Note the Zwinglian revolutionary’s allusion to the “Babylonian prison” (previously cited). On page 18, B. Hamm cites Zwingli: “Thus, if you want to be Christian authorities, you must let us preach the clear Word of God, and let it do its work, because you are not lords over souls and consciences of people.” “Also wellend ir obren Christen sin, so müssend ir uns das heiter [klare] wort gottes lassen predigen und es demnach lassen würcken; denn ir sind nit herren über die selen und conscientzen [Gewissen] der menschen.”
[63]N.B. It may be that justification was extended by peasants to cover secular burdens. Bernd Moeller argues that justification by grace through faith may be complex for us, but was the lived experience of the people of the Reformation. It relieved them of the burden of achieving merits required by the penitential system of the church. Bernd Moeller, “The Reception of Luther in the Early Reformation,” A Lecture for the International Congress of Luther Research, Oslo, August 14-20, 1988. Helmar Junghans, ed., Luther Year Book, No 57:1990, p. 64. Only in one document in Scott and Scribner, however, is justification by grace through faith mentioned. Preachers are cautioned to formulate it in such a way that the common people do not misunderstand it. It should not be preached to make the temporal duties of the peasants unnecessary. (330)
[64]N.B. Sociological studies usually place the description of their method at the beginning. A history paper, if it does not hide its method, places its description at the end. This study will conform the practice of the historians.
[65]According to Emil Durkheim, there are three distinct educational cultures: a scientific, a historical, and a linguistic one. See Emil Durkheim, The Evolution of Educational Thought, (London: Routledge & Kegan, 1977), p. 348. N.B. I believe my investigation of the linguistic culture of the Peasants’ War is quite helpful and promising for future scholarship. A methodological dictum of Durkheim’s is also worth citing and remembering for linguistics as well as sociology: “At first we manage only to achieve what are sometimes gross approximations, but they are not without usefulness; for they constitute the mind‘s initial grasp of things and, as schematic as they may be, they are a necessary precondition of subsequent specification.” From Mark Traugott, ed., Emil Durkheim On Institutional Analysis, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 153.
[66]John Searle’s philosophy of language is helpful to the social linguistic approach of this study, especially his analysis of performative speech acts, [See "How Performatives Work," Linguistics and Philosophy 12, 535-558, 1989.] and his work to unravel the linguistic component in the construction of social realities. [See his The Construction of Social Reality, (New York: the Free Press, 1995 and Making the Social World, (Oxford University Press, 2010).] He interprets language itself as an institution. [See The Construction of Social Reality, page 60.] He has an important insight, which he developed from the discovery of performatives by J.L. Austin in How To Do Things With Words,(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). Language can attempt to reflect the world empirically, or it can try to shape the world by its power. Thus words and world have a direction of fit. [Expression and Meaning, (Cambridge University Press, 1979), pages 3-4.] Either the word has to match the world, or the world has to match the word. Here we will be speaking about the Word of God. But Searle, a philosopher, speaks about the difference between having a grocery list and filling it into the shopping cart in a supermarket (where realities are made to match words), versus someone checking the list to see if the list really reflects what is in the shopping cart (Searle, Ibid., page 3.) The Word of God was being used in the former, rather than the latter way. N.B. In other terminology, it is the executive use of words and language rather than the vestigial, the weak use, i.e., mere words rather than actions, in the false alternative of common parlance. A different mode of language, here, even affects historiography. It’s one thing to write history as an empirical reflection of events, and quite another to make history by means of this command of the language.
[67]Brady, Oberman, and Tracy, p. 173.
[68]George Lindbeck in The Nature of Doctrine, (Philadelphia: The Westminister Press, 1984). I was first introduced to this approach by Robert Bellah in his lectures on the Sociology of Religion. Both Bellah and Lindbeck receive it from the anthropologist, Clifford Geertz. Ibid., p. 20.
[69]Ibid., p. 34. Note that on this page Lindbeck strikes rich chords in Luther’s theology, throwing light upon them from the difference between the cultural-linguistic versus the experiential-expressive paradigms of sociology. The relation of the inner and outer are reversed going from one to the other: “instead of deriving the external features of a religion from inner experience, [in the cultural-linguistic model] it is the inner experiences which are viewed as derivative.” “A religion [for this model] is above all an external word,…” The internal word is also crucially important, for its capacity of hearing and accepting the true religion. Also see page 114, where Lindbeck notes the interesting difference between the immanence of meaning in the intra-textuality of the cultural-linguistic approach, as opposed to the extra-textuality of the other two paradigms. This throws light on Luther’s powerful sense of immanence, especially in a “text which absorbs the world.” p. 118. G. F. W. Hegel, whom I hold to be the philosopher of Luther’s theology, speaks of the “concept absorbing the world.” The immanence of the linguistic culture must be involved here, and it’s peculiar transcendence is performative.
[70]Ibid., p. 118.
[71]Peter von Polenz notes on page 138 that the September Testament of 1522, the first edition of which came out in three to five thousand copies was sold out in a few weeks at the price of about a weeks wages of a craftsman’s apprentice. The corrected and improved December Testament was then published in Wittenberg, and in a few months editions were published in Basel and Augsburg. In all fourteen authorized and sixty-six unauthorized editions were printed from 1522 to 1524. By my calculations then: if about 3,000 copies are in an edition, then about 240,000 printed New Testaments came into the hands of the people.: See Johannes Cochläus’ amazement already cited that common people disputed faith issues of the Gospel! Polenz, p. 252 (Of course, the complete Luther Bible with the Old Testament Exodus story came out later in 1534, after the Peasants’ War.)
[72]Note that because Luther did not write in middle low German, and the Hanseatic League was weakening, taken together with the fact that Bugenhagen made an atrocious translation of Luther’s Bible into this language, MLG, – the demise of low German as a literary language resulted. See von Polenz, p. 286ff. Luther’s September and December Testaments were not easily comprehensible to the low German speaking people of the North. If my theory about the role the Scriptures played in the Peasants’ War is valid, then this may have been one of the factors which excluded northern Germany and the low countries from it.
[73]Thomas A. Brady, Jr., Heiko A. Oberman, and James D. Tracy, editors, Handbook of European History 1400-1600, v.2, (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995), p. 172-173.
[74]Ibid., P. 174.
[75]Scott and Scribner, p. 101: A Procurator Fiscal complained that Schappeler is to have said: “God be praised the truth has now come to light after having for so long been repressed by the priests for their own purposes.” (To cite this again.)
[76]Luther is a good example for that. To display some of his dialectics and rhetoric for Erasmus he constructs a sentence that equates Scripture with creation: Duae res sunt Deus (et) Scriptura Dei, non minus quam duae res sunt Creator (et) creatura Dei. Hans-Ulrich Decius, Luther: Studien Ausgabe,III, (Berlin: Evangelische Verlagsanstalt, 1983),p. 184. WA,18,606.
[77]Lindbeck, p. 117-118. Intra-textuality or the word absorbing the world may be argued to be delusional. Referents are outside of the word. For much of the physical universe that could be argued, but another standpoint places a person inside even the physical universe, which is indeed true of our case. The sociological universe can be approached from inner participation and involvement or “objective” empirical detachment. But Wittgenstein’s description of interpreting a picture from the outside versus entering it as a participant (Thiselton, in the Scottish Journal, p.47) is not delusional as much as another way of knowing and experiencing.
[78]Ibid., p. 118.
[79]See Brady, Oberman, Tracy, p. 165. The city of Memmingen was at loggerheads with their priests since 1494. They were acting out, and not only while Schappeler was instigating the reformation in the city: they flouted the council’s authority (For the sake of reform, Schappeler did, too.), marched through the streets at night, had drunken brawls, carried long knives, and were anything but exemplary, the city council complained. Note, however, that the religious may have been acting out because the civil authorities were trying to subordinate them. Traditionally they needed to answer only to their abbots and bishops.
[80]Lindbeck, p. 118-119.
[81]N.B. To generalize from this particular viewpoint would be problematic, except, as already noted, Peter Blickle uses this as a representative case for the urban reformation associated with the Popular Reformation. See Brady, Oberman, and Tracy, p. 164-165.
[82]In Akten zur Geschichte des Bauernkrieges in Mitteldeutschland,II, (Scientia Verlag, Aalen, 1964), p. xxxvi, Walther Peter Fuchs argues that Luther’s stand against the revolt needs to be aware that he also provided the consciousness that led to it. To here argue that Luther provided the language, concurs. Language for Luther is the embodiment of consciousness.
[83]Peter von Polenz, Deutsche Sprachgeschichte vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Gegenwart,v. I, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1991).
[84]Von Polenz, p. 271-272.
[85]Ibid., p. 275.
[86]Ibid., p. 271.
[87]Astrid, Stedje, Deutsche Sprache Gestern und Heute, (München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, GmbH & Co.KG, 1989), p. 115. She notes that Old High German was handed down to us by the spiritual estate, while the ideal of Middle High German is one the courtly knights helped shape, and Early New High German is the language that is primarily stamped by the speech of the cities. Thus Luther’s language absorbed the cities into its world.
[88]Finitum capax infiniti. P. v. Polenz tells of the Mainzer Archbishop Berthold v. Henneberg, a very powerful political figure who issued a Translation – Verbot (in 1484) of any Greek or Latin into German. The latter lacked the abundance of words (copia verborum) which Latin contained, and therefore was not capable of theological and scientific content, and, thus, translation would necessarily distort the truth. See von Polenz, p. 277.
[89]Perhaps their preaching the Word of God originated new orders going outside the monasteries. New monastic “charters” originated from the Word. Now new constitutions for the empire were becoming projected from the Word of God. A long process of monastics going out into the secular society continued from the friars preaching and competing with the “seculars,” to Luther’s becoming secular, to Jesuits living their ministries out in the world, to Max Weber finding secular people with inner-worldly asceticism.
[90]Peasants delighted in hearing him preach: “Give the lords what they are worth: nothing!” Scott and Scribner, p.234.
[91]P. Von Polenz, p. 286.
[92]Ibid., p. 279.
[93]Astrid, Stedje, p. 128. She also notes that in 1570 – 70% of all books were in Latin, while in 1770 only 17% still were.
[94]Von Polenz, p. 289.
[95]Ibid., p. 244.
[96]Ibid., p. 252 and 278. Peter von Polenz designates Luther’s translation of the Scriptures as a political revolt in language and speech.
[97]Ibid., p. 275.
[98]Ibid., p. 248-249.
[99] This effect comes from the failure, accidental or deliberate, to complete a sentence according to its structural plan. See W. F. Thrall, A. Hibbard, and C. H. Holman, A Handbook to Literature, (New York: The Odyssey Press, 1960), p.15.
[100]245.Ibid., p.
[101]LW, 33, 52-53. A remarkable detachment! Not often do we see this philosophical detachment in the very immanent Luther. Here Luther is still a prophet exuding the wrath of God. Later he will feel the tragedy and lament that he killed 100,000 peasants with his own pen. (in Table Talks?)
[102]Ibid, p. 52.
[103]James Preus, From Shadow to Promise, (Cambridge: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1969), p. 253-254. WA 4, 380, 15-18.
[104]Ibid., p. 247. WA 4.272, 16-24.
[105]Heiko Oberman, The Masters of the Reformation, (Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 296-297.
[106]Bernd Moeller, Luther Year Book, No 57:1990, p. 61.
[107]Ibid., p. 62.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Tom Scott and Bob Sribner, translators and editors. The German Peasants‘ War. New Jersey: Humanities Press International, Inc., 1991.
Günter Franz. Quellen zur Geschichte des Bauernkrieges. München: R. Oldenbourg, 1963.
Jeroslav Pelican, et. al., ed. Luther’s Works, v. 26, 33, 35, 39, 46, and 51. Saint Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 1963 - 1970.
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