Some five hundred years ago, in 1524–25, a huge revolt swept through central Europe. Led by the poorest and most oppressed people of Germany, hundreds of thousands rose up and challenged the feudal system itself. It was the largest rebellion of ordinary people to have taken place in Europe since the English Rising of 1381, and there would be nothing else on a scale like it until the French Revolution of 1789.

The German Peasants’ War, as it has become known, was a rising that drew in wide sectors of the population in a revolt that had economic, religious, and social contexts. The scale of the revolt terrified the German ruling class.

One clerk in Upper Swabia, a key area of the rebellion, wrote a report to the regional bailiff, in which he expressed a fear that the rebellion would spread to Bavaria and South Tyrol. If that happened, the clerk said, “no one in these lands would be the peasants’ master.”