One of the first major peasant outbreaks occurred fifteen miles to the north of Waldshut, on the estate of Count Sigismund of Lupfen in the district of Stühlingen, on the outskirts of the Black Forest. On June 24, 1524, the count’s wife, who enjoyed spinning yarn, demanded that some of the tenants take time off from tending their hay to gather empty snail shells that she could use as spools. It was the type of flagrant abuse that the count’s peasants had long had to endure, but this time they refused. The count agreed to talk, and a meeting was scheduled for the neighboring town of Tiengen. The farmers were in a militant mood, however, and in the days leading up to the session they decided to organize militarily. They chose Hans Müller as their head, a skilled orator and former mercenary from a nearby village, who proceeded to form a band of several hundred peasants. Armed with flails, scythes, and other farm implements, they marched to Tiengen. No settlement could be reached, and on July 24 the parties agreed to a thirty-day moratorium.
Seeking broader support, Müller led a contingent of some six hundred peasants to Waldshut. He also sent agents through the hills and vales of the Black Forest, and in early October he led his band on a daring march through the region. At each village, the bells were rung to summon local residents. Wherever the band alighted, an eyewitness reported, “they had their grievances read out and heard, stating that they wished to do no harm to anyone; they paid for whatever they ate and drank and admonished the peasants to help them gain justice.” After a discussion, those assembled would vote on whether to join the militia. By mid-October 1524, several thousand men had enlisted under Müller’s banner. That same month, organizers began moving eastward into the lands around Lake Constance. As winter approached, thirty thousand peasants were under arms in southwestern Germany, many of them refusing to pay dues or provide services and committed to fighting to the death to better their lot.
Erasmus was not far from the action. The Black Forest began just to the north of Basel, and Waldshut was only forty miles up the Rhine. In a December 1524 letter to Heinrich Stromer, who was a physician and a member of the Leipzig town council, Erasmus took weary note of the iconoclastic outbursts occurring in the region: in Zurich, “they have thrown all the saints out of their temples; in Waldshut even out of the glass windows of private houses.” In Basel, the saints remained in place, but the evangelical party was advancing, with Oecolampadius preaching against Erasmus’s diatribe on free will and its pervasive Pelagianism.
On top of it all, Erasmus reported, “Karlstadt has been here.” In his travels around southwestern Germany, the irrepressible exegete had come to Basel in late October 1524. Given his reputation for troublemaking, any house that agreed to publish his tracts would take on great risk, but the potential readership was great, too, and two Basel printers, Thomas Wolff and Johann Bebel, signed on. The printers tried to conceal their names, but once the pamphlets came out, they were quickly identified and thrown into prison. Karlstadt, Erasmus observed, “teaches that the true body of the Lord is not present in the Eucharist. This no one can tolerate.” The matter “will stir great trouble for us, as though we had not more than enough already.”
That would prove an understatement. Karlstadt’s tracts would create a great commotion among the reformers, leading to years of acrimonious debate and the opening of deep rifts. Their main subject was what happens to the bread and wine during consecration. The reigning interpretation, which was based on centuries of Eucharistic theology and had been made official at the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, held that the bread and the wine on the altar are transformed into the body and the blood of Christ. Their outward appearance (called “accidents”) remains the same but their substance is fundamentally transformed, hence the doctrine’s name: transubstantiation. The awe and even terror with which the Eucharist was beheld reflected the belief that Christ becomes physically present in the sacrament, and questioning it was considered heretical.
To many reformers, however, ascribing such importance to the physical elements of the Eucharist seemed a case of superstition and idolatry. No matter what the inner disposition of the individual, partaking in the sacrament was seen as conferring all sorts of spiritual and material benefits, as if an act of magic were being performed. By contrast, the evangelicals, with their stress on the penitent’s faith in Christ, wanted to make the Eucharist an instrument for deepening it.
That was Karlstadt’s aim. Rejecting the doctrine of transubstantiation as the profane creation of subtle doctors, he argued that the Eucharist should be seen as a symbol or commemoration of Christ’s sacrifice on behalf of humankind. Rather than focus on the bread and wine becoming the flesh and blood of Christ, Christians should concentrate on how Christ had made the ultimate sacrifice so that man in his sinfulness could be redeemed.
To help make his case, Karlstadt relied on grammar, applying it to such key passages as Matthew 26. There, Jesus takes the bread and, after blessing it, breaks it into pieces and distributes it to his disciples, saying, “Take, eat; this is my body.” To generations of Catholic theologians, the meaning was clear: by “this,” Jesus was referring to the bread; in the reenactment of the ceremony, the bread becomes his body. But Karlstadt, examining the underlying Greek, saw that touto (“this”) is neuter; therefore, it could not refer to artos (“bread”), which is masculine. Instead, he insisted, the word referred to soma, or “body,” which is also neuter. In other words, Christ, in saying “This is my body,” must have been pointing not to the bread but to his actual body. In this way, he was directing his followers to focus on the bodily sacrifice he was about to make; the elements were simply symbols to help them recall it. “He who partakes of the Lord’s Supper unworthily is guilty as were the murderers of Christ,” Karlstadt declared.
In so arguing, Karlstadt was challenging not only the Roman Church but also Luther. While violently attacking many aspects of the Catholic Mass, Luther had continued to believe that the consecrated elements do become the body and blood of Christ. (In a twist, however, he argued that the body and blood of Christ are in the bread and the wine without actually becoming them, just as there is fire in a red-hot piece of metal without the metal’s actually changing its nature.)
Seeking support for his position, Karlstadt in November 1524 went to Strasbourg. The city was alive with religious excitement. With its reputation for open-mindedness, it had attracted reformers, refugees, and freethinkers from both French- and German-speaking lands, which it straddled. In its taverns and beer halls, carpenters and wagoners loudly debated the new gospel, while its presses turned out crude fly sheets inveighing against both Romanists and evangelists. At the cathedral, Matthias Zell continued to draw large crowds with his powerful descriptions of the personal transformation that faith and grace can work in the soul, in contrast to the burdensome laws of Moses and the stultifying rituals of Rome.
Also now in Strasbourg was Wolfgang Capito. He had arrived in the spring of 1523 after extricating himself from the court of Archbishop Albrecht of Mainz. Taking a position as the provost at St. Thomas’s church, he had planned to withdraw from public life and devote himself to study, but he quickly found that this was impossible in the city’s charged atmosphere. In a tense confrontation, Zell accused him of being a self-seeking humanist interested mainly in making a name for himself. After a period of painful introspection, Capito concluded that Zell was right, and by October 1524 he had openly embraced Scripture as the sole authority and faith as the one true path to salvation. Another Erasmian humanist had joined the evangelical camp.
The emerging power in the city, though, was Martin Bucer. Ever since 1518, when he had seen Luther in action in Heidelberg, Bucer had been drawn to his ideas. After several unhappy years as a Dominican friar and a priest, he had come to Strasbourg in May 1523 without a job or direction. His reputation as a godly man spread, however, and with Zell’s help he would eventually gain a pulpit at St. Aurelia’s, the church of the gardeners. Bucer’s sermons on the power of the Gospel and its ability to transfo
rm the lives of even the damned and unregenerate would help establish him as the city’s spiritual leader.
Given Strasbourg’s growing influence among the reformers, Karlstadt saw winning its approval as pivotal to his cause. Though he remained only a few days, he as usual caused an uproar. At every opportunity he assailed Luther, complaining that he had forced him and his wife (along with their newborn child) into exile. He inveighed against infant baptism as unsupported by the Bible, denounced images as forbidden by Moses, and promoted his new interpretation of the Eucharist. While put off by Karlstadt’s boorishness, the Strasbourgers were impressed by his knowledge of Greek and the insights it had given him into the Bible. Try as they might, they could not rebut him, and so seven of the city’s preachers, led by Bucer, Capito, and Zell, decided to approach Luther. In a November 23, 1524, letter, they asked for his assessment of Karlstadt’s views on both the Eucharist and infant baptism. Wary of Luther’s temper, they urged him to reply “without stomach,” i.e., calmly. To the Strasbourgers, the internal divisions opening up among the reformers seemed an even graver threat than that from the papists, and they hoped that Luther could help point a way out.
The letter, along with several of Karlstadt’s tracts, was given to a deacon in Zell’s church, who promptly rode off with it toward Saxony.
36
Uprising
In Wittenberg, the presence of the three remaining Nimbschen nuns was continuing to spur gossip and speculation. Luther had, in fact, grown so close to them that he jokingly referred to them as his wives. He was especially taken with Ave von Schönfeld. She was also interested in him, but, tiring of waiting for him to make a move, she instead married a pharmacist’s assistant. Her sister Margaret likewise became betrothed. That left Katharina von Bora. Jerome Baumgärtner, the man to whom she had become engaged, found on his return to Nuremberg that his parents were adamantly opposed to his marrying a penniless runaway nun. When she heard the news, Katharina was heartbroken. As a substitute, she said she would take Luther himself.
Now forty-one, Luther was under growing pressure to marry. Having so loudly denounced celibacy, he could punctuate the point through his own example. But he was less taken with Katharina than she was with him, considering her too proud and prickly, and in any case he lacked the means to support a family. He was so impoverished that when a former member of his order got married in Magdeburg, he was unable to send a wedding gift.
But he had another, graver reason for not marrying, as he explained to Spalatin in late November 1524. Spalatin had told Luther that he was thinking of resigning his position as chaplain at the electoral court, for he was physically and emotionally drained. His efforts to spread the new gospel had foundered, and some courtiers had poked fun at his preaching style and even his small stature. None of that was a reason to give up, Luther wrote, especially in light of Frederick’s declining health. “If it should happen that you were to retire, and he were to die soon afterwards, you would never cease to regret that you had not held on till the time of his death.” The only valid reason for resigning would be if Spalatin wanted to marry and so felt he could no longer serve as chaplain. Luther noted his own reluctance to wed. “Not that I lack the feelings of a man (for I am neither wood nor stone), but my mind is averse to marriage because I daily expect the death decreed to a heretic.”
With great sorrow, Luther was following the persecution of his followers in the Low Countries. On July 1, 1523, two young friars from the Augustinian cloister in Antwerp had been burned as Lutheran heretics—the first martyrs of the new gospel. In the Austrian town of Rattenberg, a monk who admired Luther was savagely tortured on the orders of Archduke Ferdinand, and in Vienna a merchant named Caspar Tauber had been beheaded after refusing to recant his Lutheran opinions. In Buda, Hungary, a bookseller who had distributed Luther’s New Testament and other writings was lashed to a post and his books were piled around him; the books were set on fire, and he was consumed along with them. He “suffered bravely for the Lord,” Luther observed.
It was in this grim state of mind that he received the letter from the Strasbourg theologians. When he saw the seriousness with which those learned men were taking Karlstadt’s rantings, he became alarmed. His friend Nicholas Gerbel, a lawyer in Strasbourg, informed him of the malicious things Karlstadt had said about him, including the charge that Luther was behind the banishment of him and his family from Saxony. Not even the Catholics had attacked him so sharply, Gerbel wrote. On top of it all, Karlstadt’s ideas about images, baptism, and the Lord’s Supper were gaining support among the lower classes.
Dismayed, Luther hurriedly drafted an open letter To the Christians at Strassburg in Opposition to the Fanatic Spirit, warning them against Karlstadt’s “loose, lame, empty talk.” Luther denied that he bore any responsibility for Karlstadt’s expulsion from Saxony but acknowledged that he was “glad that he is out of our land, and I wish he were not among you.” Christ “finds not only Caiaphas among his enemies, but also Judas among his friends.” The “fanaticism” of Karlstadt and the other “new prophets” could lead only to dissension, sects, and errors.
After examining Karlstadt’s tracts, Luther decided to prepare a fuller rebuttal. In it, he would ignore the pastors’ request that he write without stomach. He was simply incapable of doing so, especially when he felt under attack. Against the Heavenly Prophets in the Matter of Images and Sacraments, as Luther called it, grew so long that it would have to be published in two parts. In both, he attacked Karlstadt with a ferocity that even for Luther stood out.
“Karlstadt has deserted us and on top of that has become our worst enemy,” he declared. Everyone should know “that he has a perverted spirit that thinks only of murdering the conscience with laws, sin, and works.” Luther twitted Karlstadt for wearing the gray garb and felt hat of the peasants and insisting on being called “Brother Andreas”—acts for which he hoped to be “praised as a remarkable Christian.” This Satan and his helpers had to be stopped; otherwise, disorder would spread and the masses would be driven to kill all of the wicked. Karlstadt claimed he did not want to kill, but Luther did not believe him, for Karlstadt carried a “murderous weapon”—“the false interpretation of the law of Moses.”
Luther mocked Karlstadt for taking the Bible so literally. It was not necessary to do or refrain from all that Christ had done or refrained from. Otherwise, we would “have to walk on the sea, and do all the miracles that he had done”; we “would have to refrain from marriage, abandon temporal authority, forsake field and plow.” Karlstadt’s assertion that the Ten Commandments prohibit all graven images was similarly misguided. If people wanted to do away with them, they should be allowed to; if they wanted to keep them, that, too, should be permitted. What was unacceptable was doing away with them “in a Karlstadtian manner” (i.e., through the use of force). Such an approach could only make the masses “mad and foolish” and “accustom them to revolution” and other forms of violence.
In offering such judgments, Luther came across as a scriptural pluralist open to differing interpretations of the text. When he turned to the matter of the Eucharist, however, he became a strict constructionist, insisting that the relevant passages allowed for only one reading—that the consecrated bread and the wine are the body and blood of Christ. For page after page Luther mocked Karlstadt’s analysis of “This is my body,” gleefully referring to his “dear touto,” his “hopeless touto,” his touto tauta (an onomatopoeic nonsense phrase). How could one take seriously a spirit willing to risk so priceless a truth on the basis of such small technical points? “The ass’s head wants to master Greek, and knows neither German nor Latin, let alone Greek and Hebrew.” Karlstadt latched on to small words and smeared them over “with his spittle” while not taking into account other texts that contradict him, “so that he is up-ended with four limbs in the air.”
Erasmus, in promoting the use of grammar to understand the Bible, had hoped that such a method, by exposing the true meaning of the text
, would help reduce the level of theological strife. In the hands of Luther and Karlstadt, though, grammar was giving rise to a new scholasticism, with cases and tenses replacing syllogisms and corollaries as the main weapons. The vehemence of Luther’s response reflected his growing awareness that Scripture—newly proclaimed as the sole Christian authority—could give rise to interpretations different from his own.
Luther’s abusiveness would backfire. Against the Heavenly Prophets “displeases almost everyone in Zurich, Basel, and here,” Gerbel wrote from Strasbourg. Almost all defended Karlstadt and esteemed Zwingli. Gerbel rued the fact that the Eucharist—that supreme symbol of love—was giving rise to such hatred, wrath, and recrimination.
Against the Heavenly Prophets would help feed the sacramentarian controversy, as it came to be called, in which leading reformers would for years violently assail one another over what happens to the bread and wine during Communion. The tract would widen the divide between Luther and Wittenberg, on the one hand, and the reformers in the south (Strasbourg, Zurich, and Basel), on the other. It would also mark the start of the decline of Luther’s prestige within the Reformation.
Having dispensed with the challenge from Karlstadt, Luther wearily acknowledged another that demanded his attention. “I owe a book on the freedom of the will,” he wrote to Nicholas Hausmann on March 26, 1525. A few days later, Melanchthon informed Joachim Camerarius that Luther had finally begun working on his response to Erasmus and would shortly be done with it. Once again, though, Melanchthon was misinformed. For Luther’s life was about to be overtaken by a far more epic development—the outbreak of the Peasants’ War.
Over the winter, the agitation in the German southwest had spread from the Black Forest and the Lake Constance region into Upper Swabia. This region—bound by the Danube to the north and the Algäu Alps to the south (and today part of southwestern Bavaria)—was an agrarian Eden, with bountiful orchards, fertile meadows, extensive pastureland, and productive dairy farms. To its peasants, however, it was a suffocating hell, ruled by an array of powerful lords (aristocratic and ecclesiastical) exercising untrammeled control over them. But a revolt was brewing, with those peasants organizing themselves into three large Haufen, or military bands.
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