The German Peasants’ War, 1524–1525 was the biggest uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. The rebellion extended to the Tyrol, Northern Italy and Alsace and at its peak covered most of Germany. It occurred at the height of the Reformation in successive waves, during which, thousands of people – miners, peasants, and townsfolk risked everything and lost their lives. Yet despite its significance, I would be surprised if you had ever heard of it.
In 2017 when Germany celebrated the quincentenary of the Reformation, the Peasants’ War remained something of an embarrassment: Luther, after all, had condemned the peasants and called on them to be slain like ‘mad dogs’. But the reason the Peasants’ War has passed out of modern consciousness lies in the divisions between East and West, which a reunited Germany is trying to overcome. Communist East Germany did not at first celebrate Luther and the Reformation but saw instead Thomas Müntzer as its hero and the Peasants’ War as the decisive world historical event. Indeed, the final and greatest artistic monument the East German state created was the Peasant War Panorama. Executed by the artist Werner Tübke, it is 14 metres high and 123 metres long, the biggest canvas oil painting in the world. In a final historical irony, it was opened in a ceremony just a few days before the fall of the Berlin wall.
When I first saw this work, erected on the battlefield where so many died, I was overwhelmed and moved and felt I had to write the history of these people. Why were they so inspired by ideas of brotherhood, freedom and the gospel? What did these words mean to them? I wanted to know how they got to the battlefields, and how they brought together people with different dialects and backgrounds to create a fighting force.
I became fascinated by the various landscapes in which the war took place and the agricultural economy that was the backdrop to their grievances. The revolt began in autumn when the harvest was in and reached its peak in the early summer. The research involved cycling the routes the peasants took to understand the lie of the land. Only after retracing their steps did I understand why the peasants targeted the high buildings, the monasteries and castles that made lordship visible. It became abundantly clear why they felt compelled to burn them down.
Thomas Müntzer[b] (c. 1489 – 27 May 1525) was a German preacher and theologian of the early Reformation whose opposition to both Martin Luther and the Catholic Church led to his open defiance of late-feudal authority in central Germany. Müntzer was foremost amongst those reformers who took issue with Luther's compromises with feudal authority. He was a leader of the German peasant and plebeian uprising of 1525 commonly known as the German Peasants' War.
One of the principal dialectics in Müntzer's teaching is the opposition of the "Fear of Man" to the "Fear of God". Regardless of one's position in society, it was necessary for the true believer to have a fear of God and to have no fear of man. This was the thrust of his Sermon Before the Princes and it was the rallying call in his final letter to Mühlhausen in May 1525: "May the pure, upright fear of God be with you my dear brothers." In his Sermon Before the Princes he stated quite clearly: "The fear of God must be pure, unsullied by any fear of men or creaturely things. How desperately we need a fear like this! For just as it is impossible to fear two masters and be saved, so it is impossible to fear both God and created things and be saved."
. . .Interwoven with Müntzer's mystical piety, as for many of his contemporaries, was a conviction that the whole cosmos stood at a tipping point. Now God would set right all the wrongs of the world, largely by destruction, but with the active assistance of true Christians. From this would emerge a new age of mankind. In the Prague Manifesto he wrote: "O ho, how ripe the rotten apples are! O ho, how rotten the elect have become! The time of the harvest has come! That is why he himself has hired me for his harvest." In a letter to the people of Erfurt, in May 1525, he wrote:
Help us in any way you can, with men and with cannon, so that we can carry out the commands of God himself in Ezekiel 34, where he says: "I will rescue you from those who lord it over you in a tyrannous way" [and] In Chapter 39 [...] "Come, you birds of heaven and devour the flesh of the princes; and you wild beasts drink up the blood of all the bigwigs". Daniel says the same thing in chapter 7: that power should be given to the common man".In his final confession under torture of May 1525, Müntzer stated that one of the primary aims of himself and his comrades was "omnia sunt communia" – "all things are to be held in common and distribution should be to each according to his need". This statement has often been cited as evidence of Müntzer's "early communism", but it stands quite alone in all of his writings and letters. It may have been a statement of what his captors feared rather than what Müntzer actually believed.[original research?] In the same confession, Müntzer is reported as recommending that princes should ride out with a maximum of eight horses and "gentlemen with two". Müntzer's own writings and letters clearly propose that power be taken from the feudal authorities and given to the people. For that proposal, he may be described as a revolutionary, but not proposing redistribution of wealth. Subsequent scholars have analysed Müntzer's movement as a communist movement. Friedrich Engels' analysis of Thomas Müntzer's work and the wider German Peasants' War led him and Karl Marx to conclude that the communist revolution, when it occurred, would be led not by a peasant army but by an urban proletariat.
The German Peasants' War, Great Peasants' War or Great Peasants' Revolt (German: Deutscher Bauernkrieg) was a widespread popular revolt in some German-speaking areas in Central Europe from 1524 to 1525. It was Europe's largest and most widespread popular uprising before the French Revolution in 1789. The revolt failed because of intense opposition from the aristocracy, who slaughtered up to 100,000 of the 300,000 poorly armed peasants and farmers. The survivors were fined and achieved few, if any, of their goals. Like the preceding Bundschuh movement and the Hussite Wars, the war consisted of a series of both economic and religious revolts involving peasants and farmers, sometimes supported by radical clergy like Thomas Müntzer. The fighting was at its height in the middle of 1525.
. . .Martin Luther, the dominant leader of the Reformation in Germany, initially took a middle course in the Peasants' War, by criticizing both the injustices imposed on the peasants, and the rashness of the peasants in fighting back. He also tended to support the centralization and urbanization of the economy. This position alienated the lesser nobles, but shored up his position with the burghers. Luther argued that work was the chief duty on earth; the duty of the peasants was farm labor and the duty of the ruling classes was upholding the peace. He could not support the Peasant War because it broke the peace, an evil he thought greater than the evils the peasants were rebelling against. At the peak of the insurrection in 1525, his position shifted completely to support of the rulers of the secular principalities and their Roman Catholic allies.
In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants (May 1525), Luther encouraged the nobility to swiftly and violently eliminate the rebelling peasants, stating,"[the peasants] must be sliced, choked, stabbed, secretly and publicly, by those who can, like one must kill a rabid dog." After the conclusion of the Peasants' War, he was criticized for his writings in support of the violent actions taken by the ruling class. He responded by writing an open letter to Caspar Muller, defending his position. However, he also stated that the nobles were too severe in suppression of the insurrection, despite having called for severe violence in his previous work. Luther has often been sharply criticized for his position.
. . .On 29 April the peasant protests in Thuringia culminated in open revolt. Large sections of the town populations joined the uprising. Together they marched around the countryside and stormed the castle of the Counts of Schwarzburg. In the following days, a larger number of insurgents gathered in the fields around the town. When Müntzer arrived with 300 fighters from Mühlhausen on 11 May, several thousand more peasants of the surrounding estates camped on the fields and pastures: the final strength of the peasant and town force was estimated at 6,000. The Landgrave, Philip of Hesse and Duke George of Saxony were on Müntzer's trail and directed their Landsknecht troops toward Frankenhausen. On 15 May joint troops of Landgraf Philipp I of Hesse and George, Duke of Saxony defeated the peasants under Müntzer near Frankenhausen in the County of Schwarzburg.
The Princes' troops included close to 6,000 mercenaries, the Landsknechte. As such they were experienced, well-equipped, well-trained and of good morale. The peasants, on the other hand, had poor, if any, equipment, and many had neither experience nor training. Many of the peasants disagreed over whether to fight or negotiate. On 14 May, they warded off smaller feints of the Hesse and Brunswick troops, but failed to reap the benefits from their success. Instead the insurgents arranged a ceasefire and withdrew into a wagon fort.The next day Philip's troops united with the Saxon army of Duke George and immediately broke the truce, starting a heavy combined infantry, cavalry and artillery attack. The peasants were caught off-guard and fled in panic to the town, followed and continuously attacked by the public forces. Most of the insurgents were slain in what turned out to be a massacre. Casualty figures are unreliable but estimates range from 3,000 to 10,000 while the Landsknecht casualties were as few as six (two of whom were only wounded). Müntzer was captured, tortured and executed at Mühlhausen on 27 May.
Adam is joined by Massimiliano Tomba, O.L. Silverman, and Loren Goldman to discuss the biggest series of uprisings in Europe before the French Revolution, the German Peasants' War, which had its 500th anniversary in 2025. In this discussion, we considered what it meant for everyday people to engage in insurrectionary struggle against Pope and Prince alike, the influence of the conflict on Marxist conceptions of history, the apocalyptic communism of Thomas Müntzer in his allegiance with the peasants of Thuringia, and how Martin Luther's counter-revolutionary thought laid the foundations for the concepts of freedom, authority, and rebellion which underlie modern European philosophy.
