The Peasants War

The Peasants’ War

What began as an urban movement turned into a war in the countryside in 1525.

Lutheran propaganda radiated outward from the German towns, where local officials had appointed clerics [clergy members] sympathetic to reform. Luther’s anticlerical message struck home with merchants and artisans who resented [hated] the clergy’s tax-exempt status, but peasants had even more reason for discontent because they paid taxes to both their lord and the church. The church was the largest landowner in the Holy Roman Empire: about one-seventh of the empire’s territory consisted of ecclesiastical principalities in which bishops and abbots exercised both secular and churchly power. In the spring of 1525, many peasants in southern and central Germany rose in rebellion, sometimes inspired by wandering preachers. Urban workers and artisans joined the peasant bands, plundering monasteries, refusing to pay church taxes, and demanding village autonomy, the abolition of serfdom, and the right to appoint their own [priests]. In Thuringia, the rebels were led by an ex-priest, Thomas Müntzer, who promised to [punish] the wicked and thus clear the way for the Last Judgment.

The uprising of 1525, known as the Peasants’ War, split the reform movement. In

Thuringia, Catholics and reformers joined hands to crush Müntzer and his supporters. All over the empire, princes rallied their troops to defeat the peasants and hunt down their leaders. By the end of 1525, more than 100,000 rebels had been killed and others maimed, imprisoned, or exiled. Luther had tried to mediate, criticizing the princes for their brutality toward the peasants but also warning the rebels against mixing religion and social protest. Luther believed that rulers were ordained by God and thus must be obeyed even if they were tyrants. The Kingdom of God belonged not to this world but to the next. When the rebels ignored Luther’s appeal and continued to follow radical preachers like Müntzer, Luther called on the princes to destroy ‘the devil’s work’ and slaughter the rebels. Fundamentally conservative in its political philosophy, the Lutheran church would henceforth depend on established political authority for its protection.

Emerging as the champions of an orderly religious reform, many German princes eventually confronted Emperor Charles V, who supported Rome. In 1529, Charles declared the

Lynn Hunt et al., The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures (Volume I: To 1740) [Second Edition] (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), 478. Roman Catholic faith the empire’s only legitimate religion. Proclaiming their allegiance to the reform cause, the Lutheran German princes protested and thus came to be called Protestants.

Lynn Hunt et al., The Making of the West: Peoples and Cultures (Volume I: To 1740) [Second Edition] (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2007), 478.