The revolution of 1525

The events of the revolutionary years 1524–25 impelled Lutheran rulers to establish centrally controlled church organizations. In their own time and often since then, these events were labeled a “peasant rebellion”; but modern scholarship has made it clear that the insurrection was far more than a series of uprisings by rural bands. The tens of thousands of peasants drawn into the movement, some of them massed in major military actions, were a symptom of the general unrest that had gripped Germany since the middle of the 15th century. Both peasants and city dwellers resented the concentration of land and economic and political power in the hands of the landed nobility and wealthy merchants, as well as the burden of the tributes, taxes, and forced labour that these elites exacted. The growth of the population heightened these resentments by causing a shortage of available land, particularly in the south, and driving up prices and rents. The particular demands pressed in the 1520s—mitigation of fiscal and labour burdens imposed on peasants by their lords, autonomy for village communes, and relief from high taxes—had been voiced before.

New were the linkage of these demands with the grievances of restive urban groups also protesting exploitation and disenfranchisement and their formulation as an agenda of social reform on the principle of Christian communitarianism. This ideological redirection of old patterns of resistance could not have occurred without the impetus of the Reformation, specifically the incendiary preaching in towns and villages of Evangelical pastors who presented Lutheran and Zwinglian ideas as solutions to the problems at hand. The clearest evidence of the Reformation’s impact on the shaping of what some modern scholars call “the revolution of the common man” are the Twelve Articles drawn up for the Swabian peasantry by an Evangelical cleric and associate of Zwingli’s. Article 3 of this document asserts, “The Bible proves that we are free, and we want to be free,” while another article claims for every congregation the right to choose its minister; these articles are a strong indication of how vital the principle of Biblicism had become to people preeminently concerned with worldly life.

In the regions involved—Franconia, Swabia, the Upper Rhine and Alsace, Thuringia, and Tirol—large forces of peasants attacked castles, monasteries, and some cities. News of these actions encouraged discontented urban groups to rise against their oligarchic town governments, and for a while it looked as though a united revolutionary front of ordinary—i.e., nonprivileged—people might be forged. Manifestos and lists of articles abounded; there was talk everywhere of judging things by “God’s law” (meaning the Gospel), and some groups even laid plans for a “Christian association” across regional and urban-rural lines. But before long the forces of the propertied won the upper hand, and the insurrectionaries were put down with the ferocity customary in those days. The war’s final stage was dominated by Thomas Müntzer, a visionary theologian with a message of social deliverance for and by the poor. The defeat of his forces at Frankenhausen in May 1525 marked the final victory of the old order over the would-be new dispensation.

Luther was heavily implicated in this turnabout. Realizing that his words and deeds had served to encourage popular action against rulers, he sought to separate himself drastically from the movement, going so far as to urge the rulers’ soldiers to “cut [the peasants] down, hit them, choke them wherever you can.” His brush with revolution confirmed Luther in the rigorous segregation he made between “two realms,” the worldly and the spiritual, the respective laws and ideals of which must not be confounded, as, he claimed, the revolutionaries had done. The Gospel, he said, cannot be used as a standard for governing in the world, which has its own rules and ways of justice, many of them, he acknowledged, unfair and blameworthy. Luther’s separation of worldly and Evangelical values, soon made binding law by Lutheran governments, brought an abrupt end to the early phase of the Reformation, during which events seemed to many to be moving toward a sweeping transformation of social, as well as religious, structures. At the same time, Lutheran governments read 1525 as a lesson on the need to control subjects, concluding that preaching in particular, and religious behaviour generally, must be controlled. To accomplish this purpose, new laws and bureaucracies were set up everywhere.