Despising the Powerful and Mighty

This small refusal was the beginning of what became known as the German Peasants’ War, the largest popular uprising in Europe until the French Revolution of 1789 and an episode that Friedrich Engels called the first “national peasant revolt.”

Conditions in the German-speaking Habsburg lands were already disastrous by the time of Countess Lupfen’s demand. The arrival of Aztec gold from Mexico and Peruvian silver had triggered runaway inflation, while the commons that were the traditional free-grazing grounds for peasants were being enclosed across the continent, in an early modern version of privatization. By the war’s conclusion five hundred years ago this month, as many as a hundred thousand rebels would be dead, including its elusive, beguiling, confusing, terrifying, and inspiring leader, the visionary Reverend Müntzer, who preached that “God despises the powerful and mighty.”

It was a testament to the anarchic principle that desires to turn the world upside down, present in Christianity since the Gospels and occasionally evident in popular uprisings like Müntzer’s, where attempts are made to fell the mighty over something as small — but as consequential — as a snail shell. Today on the five-hundredth anniversary of his death, it behooves all who imagine a fairer and more equitable world to consider his example, and the strange but essential relationship between faith and politics that motivated that failed rebellion.

Müntzer has always struck an idiosyncratic figure in the historiography of the sixteenth century, even by the standards of the Reformation, which did not want for apocalyptic preachers. Born into the comfortable burgher class, Müntzer was — as with so many other early Reformation theologians and preachers — originally an ordained Catholic priest. However, in the years leading up to Martin Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses in 1517, he had begun to embrace more unorthodox ideas, from the importance of vernacular preaching to the central role of the laity in worship.

Indeed, Müntzer was present in Wittenberg when Luther circulated his ninety-five dissenting theses, and he was a confidante of Luther’s, with the two men speaking positively of each other, though that too would change. After he had lived a peripatetic existence between various German and Bohemian towns, the hamlet of Zwickau provided Müntzer with his radical education.

He acquired a ministerial position in that city, ironically by recommendation of Luther, and began to imbibe the proto-Protestant theology of the Hussites who had been prominent in Zwickau for a century. He was also influenced by the radical economic thinking that guilds in the town’s weaving industry promoted, especially as the community more generally faced ever greater social stratification.

By the time he came to the small town of Altstadt in 1523, Müntzer’s preaching had become increasingly radical, as he denounced “snakes and eels,” explaining that “evil clerics are the snakes . . . and the secular lords and rulers are the eels.” Both Catholic Habsburg authorities and their Lutheran opponents were wary of Müntzer and the threat he posed to civil authority. By the time he arrived in Mühlhausen, he had conveniently come upon a rebellion that was already beginning.

In Search of a Leader

Rather than serving as a vanguard figure in his own right, Müntzer in some ways discovered a revolution that was in search of a leader. The conditions across southern Germany, from crop failure and catastrophic weather to hyperinflation, offered impetus enough to the rebellion, but Müntzer provided a powerful rhetoric and theory that justified the uprising.

He denounced the princes and lords — the same men who protected Luther from the Roman Catholic Church — as a

stinking puddle from which usury, thievery and robbery arises. . . . They make all creatures their property — the fish in the water, the bird in the air, the plants in the earth must all be theirs. . . . They oppress everyone, the poor peasant, the craftsman are skinned and scraped.

Among the most salient novelties of the rebellion were the Twelve Articles composed in Altstadt, though Müntzer himself was only minimally involved in this task. Anticipating subsequent texts like the US Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man, the demands of the rebels largely dealt with issues of church governance, but they also expressed the beginnings of a language of human rights — though one that was far more radical than would later be promulgated during the American Revolution or even the French.

Such rights included common ownership of all livestock, free access to all to the commons, collective ownership of woodlands, and the prohibition of arbitrary punishment. “Accordingly we hereby declare that we are free and want to remain free,” wrote the authors.

So powerful was that call — and so hungry were peasant bellies — that as many as 300,000 women and men throughout Germany rose up in rebellion during those lean months a half-millennium ago. In her book Summer of Fire and Blood, Lyndal Roper describes the spread of the revolt “like a vast contagion . . . from southwest Germany through Württemberg, Swabia, the Allgäu, Franconia, Thuringia, and Saxony to Alsace in what is now France, Austria, and Switzerland.”

Crushing the Revolt

Rebel leaders like Michael Gaismair, Hans Müller, Wendel Hipler, Florian Geyer, and Müntzer himself faced off on the battlefield against the combined military expertise of the Swabian League, the Landgraviate of Hesse, and the Electorate of Saxony. Sieges, battles, and massacres marked that brief but bloody war, where the professional armies of the nobility had perhaps no more than 8,500 men engaged in battle against more than a quarter of a million peasants.

Yet the nobles won, and handily, with perhaps a third of the peasants killed while the princes suffered virtually no losses at all. The peasants were fighting a professional fighting force of men conditioned and trained in military strategy. Furthermore, when they marched into battle armed with hoes, spades, and shovels, they were confronted by men who carried swords, crossbows, and blunderbusses.

By the time of the Battle of Frankenhausen in mid-May, the rebellion was all but lost, with most leaders either dead or captured and executed shortly thereafter. A particularly gruesome example was the fate of the commander “Little” Jack Rohrbach, who was chained to a stake in the middle of a ring of fire, while being forced to run in circles until consumed by the flames.

A contemporary pamphlet described the scenes of devastation:

Houses are burned; fields and vineyards lie fallow. . . . The prince, the gentleman, or the nobleman will have his rent and due. Eternal God, whither shall the widows and poor children go forth to seek it?

One of those bereaved widows was Müntzer’s, having wed her husband, the former priest, only a year before his execution. He stood on a scaffold where he was decapitated, his head displayed on a pike as a warning to any others who might have the temerity to dream of a better world.

Müntzer’s Legacy

Some historians have presented Müntzer as the driving force behind the rebellion, while others reduce him to the status of an ancillary player. There is a similar diversity of opinion about the balance between religious and socioeconomic motivations among the rebels. Yet Müntzer’s name remains the one that is most often associated with the events of 1524–25.

As such, there have been various ways of commemorating Müntzer. Just a few months after the collapse of the rebellion, the elector Cardinal Albert of Brandenburg commissioned a fountain for the Marktbrunnen in Mainz that mockingly depicted a drunken peasant lollygagging with the words “O Consider the End” emblazoned on the base. In the twentieth century, on the other hand, the East German authorities placed the preacher on a banknote, sternly gazing out from beneath his reformer’s cap.

They also marked the five-hundredth anniversary of Müntzer’s birth in 1989 with the opening of the Peasants’ War Panorama in Bad Frankenhausen, Thuringia. This was a museum that featured a gigantic oil painting by Werner Tübke, the largest mural in the world, unveiled shortly before the demise of the German Democratic Republic itself.

In his new study of Müntzer’s life, Andrew Drummond presents him as “a man dedicated to improving the spiritual position of the common people,” who was “deeply sympathetic to the misery of the peasantry and the poor,” whether his motivations were political, religious, or both.

Marxist theorists have often been drawn to Müntzer as a forerunner of latter-day revolutionary movements. In his 1850 pamphlet The Peasant War in Germany, Engels interpreted the central apocalyptic vision in Müntzer’s rhetoric as fundamentally a secular call for revolution filtered through religious language, with the preacher as a “representative of a budding proletariat.” Karl Kautsky’s 1897 work Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation praised his “revolutionary vigor” and “statesmanlike view.”

Contemporary scholars of the early modern period, on the other hand, are much more cautious about separating faith from politics when it comes to a figure like Müntzer. After all, Müntzer’s call for all property to be held in common can be traced all the way back to the New Testament Book of Acts, which spoke of a moment in the early days of Christianity when “distribution was made unto every man according as he had need” and the followers of Jesus “had all things in common.” The rebellion was both a religious war and a social conflict over material demands.

While historians have debated just how much of a catalyzing role Müntzer played in the revolt, it is beyond dispute that many of the peasant rebels marched under the preacher’s standard, a white flag emblazoned with a curved rainbow that read “The word of the Lord remains eternal.” His former mentor Luther certainly blamed Müntzer for the rebellion in his 1525 pamphlet Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants.

Luther’s text asserted that the revolutionaries “doubly deserved death in body and soul as highwaymen and murderers,” branding them as “the worst blasphemers of God and slanderers of his holy name” while singling out his former colleague as the “arch-devil himself who reigns at Mühlhausen.” This was the city where, just a few weeks after Luther had finished the pamphlet, the radical preacher would take his last stand.

Luther’s pamphlet would most likely have been printed and distributed only after the rebellion had ended and thus had less influence on the decisions of the nobles than some accounts might suggest. Yet it certainly gave the nobility moral cover for the violent atrocities they committed.

Müntzer saw Luther as a Judas who had betrayed the Reformation beliefs that he believed himself to be carrying to their logical conclusion, branding the father of Protestantism as “Brother Fatted Pig and Brother Soft Life.” Müntzer, who challenged the inequities of civil authority, was beheaded for his pains, while Luther preached subservience to the powers that be and expired peacefully in his bed two decades later.