Fatal Discord

by Michael Massing

  The most important of them, the Baltringen Haufen, arose out of a meeting of aggrieved farmers held on Christmas Eve 1524 at an inn in the village of Baltringen. They began meeting every Thursday, and when carnival arrived, they used the traditional eating and drinking as a cover to move from village to village in search of recruits. By mid-February 1525, nearly ten thousand had signed up. As their leader they chose Ulrich Schmid, a blacksmith of Lutheran sympathies. A canvass of villages about local conditions produced several hundred depositions (like the cahiers of the French Revolution), and from them the most common complaints were extracted. Leading the list was serfdom, followed by high rents and dues, the punitive death tax, and the limits placed on access to the forests.

  The Baltringen peasants submitted their grievances to the Swabian League, an association of princes, barons, and cities created in 1488 to enforce imperial decrees and put down internal revolts. From its base in Ulm (Upper Swabia’s largest city), the league informed the peasants that they should pursue their complaints through the imperial courts. Because the peasants considered those courts biased in favor of the lords, however, Schmid proposed using divine law instead. But who would define such a law? the league mockingly asked. Would God come down from heaven to hold court on the case? Schmid said he would seek out a priest to help define the contents of that law.

  He went to Memmingen, the center of unrest in Upper Swabia. There, he was directed to Sebastian Lotzer, a journeyman furrier who was an avid Lutheran. Lotzer had no formal theological training, but—taking to heart the idea of the priesthood of all believers—he had closely studied Luther’s German New Testament, and he could frequently be found in the street, debating questions of faith. “Whoever has two coats,” he declared, “let him sell one and buy a New Testament. Then you can learn the living words of God yourselves and will understand whenever they try to mistreat you.”

  Lotzer initially declined Schmid’s plea for help, maintaining that he was a simple artisan inexperienced in public affairs, but under further prodding he gave in, and within days he had drawn up a summary of the peasants’ grievances. A local evangelical preacher named Christopher Schappeler added a preamble and sixty or so supportive biblical citations to be placed in the margins. The Twelve Articles, as they were called, would become the main manifesto of the peasant uprising. Some consider it the first written set of human rights in Europe, and Memmingen today calls itself Stadt der Menschenrechte—City of Human Rights.

  The document shows how deeply both the Bible and Luther’s ideas about Christian freedom had penetrated the countryside. The preamble, in language at once modest and solemn, offered “a Christian justification for the disobedience, indeed, the rebellions, of all the peasants.” In the Gospels, Christ’s words and life “teach nothing but love, peace, patience, and concord.” If God chose to hear the peasants’ plea that they be allowed to live according to his word, who would dare deny him? Just as he had heard the cries of the children of Israel and delivered them from the pharaoh, so would he now save his own children.

  The first article—drawn directly from Luther—was a “humble plea” for each community to have the right to elect and appoint its own pastor. This pastor should preach “the holy Gospel to us purely and clearly,” without any human additions. According to the Scriptures, man can come to God only through true faith and be saved only through his mercy. “That is why we need such a guide and pastor; and thus our demand is grounded in Scripture.” The second article expressed a willingness to pay the tithe on grain, but only to support such a pastor and the needy poor. The small tithe should not be paid, for God “created cattle for the free use of man.”

  But it was the third article that was the document’s centerpiece. The lords’ custom of treating the peasants as if they were their serfs, it stated, was “pitiable,” for “Christ has redeemed and bought us all by the shedding of his precious blood—the shepherd just as the highest, no one excepted. Therefore it is demonstrated by Scripture that we are free and wish to be free.” After making such a bold assertion, the manifesto hastened to show its reasonableness: “Not that we wish to be completely free and have no authority, for God does not teach us that.” Rather, “we should humble ourselves before everyone.” But no doubt the princes “as true and genuine Christians” would “gladly release us from serfdom, or else show us from the Gospel that we are serfs.”

  This was an extraordinary statement: the peasants of Upper Swabia were, on the basis of Christian teachings, demanding the abolition of serfdom. The document’s remaining articles addressed more specific grievances—the walling off of waterways, the high price of wood, the increase in labor services, and the onerous death taxes that robbed widows and orphans of their goods. In concluding, the manifesto noted that if one or more of its articles could be shown from Scripture not to be in accord with God’s Word, it would be abandoned. If, on the other hand, the Bible revealed other grievances as offensive to God, they would be added. Such comments showed the temperate character of the Twelve Articles. Rather than seek the overthrow of the social order, they recognized the existence of different ranks and classes.

  Even so, the Twelve Articles packed an explosive punch. If implemented, they would have done away with serfdom and the many restrictions imposed on rights and movement. By granting communities the right to choose their own pastors, they would have eliminated a key source of Church patronage and control. And, by casting their demands in the language of the Bible, the articles sought to give them divine sanction.

  In the first week of March 1525, representatives of the three Upper Swabian bands met in the hall of the haberdashers’ guild in Memmingen to discuss the articles. After several days of debate, they were duly adopted. The bands also agreed to join together in a Christian Union of Upper Swabia. In submitting the Twelve Articles to the Swabian League, they offered a list of individuals who, as proven expositors of divine law, could serve as arbiters. At the top was Martin Luther. Others included Melanchthon, Zwingli, Bugenhagen, Andreas Osiander of Nuremberg, and Matthias Zell of Strasbourg. Luther’s premier position showed the great prestige he continued to enjoy among the people.

  Within two months, the Twelve Articles were reprinted two dozen times in cities from Strasbourg to Zwickau, putting as many as 25,000 copies in circulation. Couriers, agitators, preachers, and tradesmen carried them west into the highlands of the Black Forest, south over the Alps into the Tirol, and north beyond Ulm into the duchy of Franconia.

  When the Twelve Articles arrived in a village, tocsins were rung, summoning farmers and laborers to meet under a tree, in a field, or at an inn. Grievances were aired and discussed and, finally, a decision was taken on whether to sign up. In this way, the movement quickly spread. To broaden their base, the peasants sent emissaries into the towns. Though many town dwellers remained hostile to rural residents, they disliked the clergy even more, and the biblical language of the Twelve Articles served as a bridge between them. Pressed from within, the towns agreed to provide men or supply firearms and provisions. The insurgency thus came to include not only peasants but also artisans, millers, clerks, butchers, cobblers, smiths, and shopkeepers. It attracted many marginal figures as well, including the urban proletariat, day laborers, beggars, and criminals.

  While waiting to hear back from the Swabian League, the peasant bands grew restless. Their disgust with the Church and its exploitive practices, having built up over so many years, proved difficult to contain. An early outburst occurred on March 20, 1525, when a contingent gathered before the abbey of Ottobeuren, eight miles from Memmingen. In the villages that surrounded it there lived several thousand serfs who had been pauperized by the death duties imposed by the cloister. Finding the abbey poorly defended, the peasants quickly overran it. Making for its pantries, they rummaged through its stocks; barging into its cellar, they guzzled its wine. In the abbey itself, they smashed the windows, desecrated the church, drove off the cattle, and burned every piece of paper they could find. Other m
onasteries quickly followed.

  Castles, too, were seized, pillaged, and burned. The peasants met little resistance. In the face of their fury, the nobility—lacking both manpower and willpower—seemed paralyzed. According to the Bavarian chancellor, the lords were like “old women” in their hesitation to fight the peasants. “They fear for their houses and no one will do anything until troops are assembled, which will take some time.” The peasants’ revolt, which had been undertaken “to repress the princes and the nobility,” had “its ultimate source in Lutheran teaching, for the peasants relate the majority of their demands to the Word of God, the Gospel, and brotherly love.” Given the authorities’ “ineffable faintheartedness,” the main challenge was to bring them “to a more manly resolve: that would be the end of the peasantry.”

  One person who had such resolve was Truchsess (Lord High Steward) George von Waldburg. The commander of the army of the Swabian League, he would be a decisive figure in the coming contest. During two decades of military service, he had gained a reputation for both ruthlessness and efficiency, and even as the peasants were deliberating in Memmingen, he was preparing to confront them. With many German soldiers off fighting in northern Italy and others engaged in putting down an uprising by a local duke, Waldburg found recruitment more difficult than usual, but by the end of March 1525 he had assembled a force of 7,000 foot soldiers and 1,500 horsemen.

  The first major encounter was at Leipheim, located on the Danube near Ulm. The town had been recently captured by a band of several thousand rebels, and in early April Waldburg laid siege to it. The peasants, frightened and undisciplined, quickly surrendered. What began as an orderly retreat by the rebels quickly turned into a savage rout as Waldburg’s troops mercilessly pursued and slaughtered them. As many as a thousand were killed or drowned in the Danube; the rest were captured.

  The slaughter had a deeply demoralizing effect on the Baltringen Haufen. After a series of minor skirmishes, it submitted to the league and dissolved itself. Buoyed by this victory, Waldburg marched south to confront the Lake Constance band. On April 15, he came near it at the town of Weingarten. With twelve thousand foot soldiers, including some former mercenaries, this regiment had more experience than most of the other bands. In addition, the terrain was ill suited to the deployment of the league’s horses, and the rebels had a number of cannons. Feeling overmatched, Waldburg decided to negotiate rather than fight, and on April 17 a peace treaty was signed.

  Waldburg would be fiercely criticized by some nobles for refusing to fight the peasants, but he had astutely read the situation. In return for a promise to arbitrate their grievances, the peasants agreed to surrender the castles and cloisters they had seized, disband their army, and resume rent payments. In effect, the largest of the Upper Swabian armies gave up fighting in return for minor concessions. With Upper Swabia thus pacified, Waldburg began preparing for future battles.

  There would be many of them, for peasant bands throughout the southwest were on the move. In the spring of 1525, Hans Müller led a campaign through the Black Forest aimed at gaining by force the concessions that the rebels in the winter had failed to win by negotiation. Traveling around the region in a brilliant red cloak and cap, he was accompanied by a herald who at each stop summoned the villagers to hear the Twelve Articles read aloud. Those who refused to join the evangelical brotherhood (as it was called) were subject to a secular ban, by which they were to be denied all social and economic intercourse and access to all forests and pastures. Müller’s army swelled, and over the spring it seized one castle after another, including that of the count of Lupfen, where the infamous snail-shell episode had occurred the previous summer.

  By early May, Müller’s sights were set on Freiburg. Situated at the strategic point where the Black Forest passes meet the plain of the Rhine valley, it was the best-defended town in the region. Six bands totaling more than ten thousand peasants, many bearing swords and pikes, bore down on it, and refugees from the surrounding region streamed in. “Everything here is in a state of depression and disquietude for fear of an attack,” wrote Ulrich Zasius, a prominent jurist and friend of Erasmus, “and not an hour goes by in which we do not dread some catastrophe. Luther, the destroyer of peace, the most pernicious of two-legged creatures, has thrown the whole of Germany into such a state of frenzy that we have come to consider it peace and security if we are not slaughtered at every moment.”

  Meanwhile, the rebellion was spilling westward across the Rhine into Alsace. In this region of vineyards, wheat fields, and cow pastures, the Church was a major landholder, and peasant indebtedness was a serious problem. The arrival of the Twelve Articles, with their demand for social justice in God’s name, had an electrifying effect, and on April 16 several hundred peasants took over the Benedictine abbey at nearby Altorf, plundering its stores. Heading north, they did the same to the abbey at Marmoutier. Marching along a spur of the Vosges Mountains, they reached the town of Saverne, where the bishop of Strasbourg resided. After occupying it, the peasants ransacked its clerical properties. Captured priests were forced to confess their adherence to false teachings and to promise thereafter to preach only the pure gospel. Also targeted were the Jews, some of whom worked in the countryside as moneylenders and so were considered enemies of the poor. By the start of May 1525, the various Alsatian bands had coalesced into a united contingent of twenty thousand, causing panic among the propertied.

  The movement was also pushing north from Upper Swabia into Franconia. In this highly fragmented region crisscrossed by the Main, Neckar, and Tauber Rivers, serfdom was less prevalent than in either Upper Swabia or the Black Forest, but the Franconian nobility—moving heavily into sheep farming—were aggressively expanding their estates and in the process grabbing much common land. The resulting shortage had produced a large population of immiserated day laborers. Taxation was onerous and mounting, with monasteries among the heaviest leviers. In Nuremberg, Franconia’s largest city, thousands were taking Communion in both kinds, and Dominican friars were being angrily accosted in the streets. From March 3 to March 14 a disputation was held on the religious question; Andreas Osiander carried the day, and the city officially declared for the reform. Churches were ordered to stop celebrating the Roman Mass and instead follow the evangelical service that had been introduced in the city’s two great parish churches. The dissolution of the monasteries would soon begin. Nuremberg thus became the first large imperial city in Germany to join the Reformation. The old patriciate remained in charge, however, and it made sure to seal the city off from the agitation in the countryside.

  In its absence, Franconia’s next largest town, Rothenburg, became the center of revolt. Perched picturesquely on the Tauber River, it was known for the roseate hue given off by its red-tiled roofs, but by early 1525 its mood had darkened as evangelical pastors inveighed against the fatted clergy and pampered oligarchs who ruled its affairs. Adding to the unrest was the presence of Andreas von Karlstadt. After his brief stay in Strasbourg, he had slipped into Rothenburg in late 1524. By now a wanted man, he hid in the home of a former burgomaster. Eventually discovered, he was expelled by the town council, but in February 1525, amid the growing ferment, he managed to return, and at Easter he preached on the Eucharist, to the approval of the urban poor. At the end of March, the ex-burgomaster provoked an iconoclastic campaign, marked by the destruction of images, the driving of the priests from the cathedral, and the leveling of a chapel devoted to the Virgin Mary.

  The unrest quickly spread into the nearby Tauber valley, attracting especially the vinedressers, who tended the vines that supported the wine industry and whose fortunes fluctuated with the vagaries of the weather and the swings of the market. In western Franconia another regiment formed, drawing peasants from villages nestled in both the Neckar valley and the Odenwald, a low mountain range. Commanding this force was George Metzler, one of the many innkeepers who became rebel leaders. Under the standard of a Bundschuh attached to a pole, he quickly organized a force
of two thousand men, who began traveling around the region, encouraging (and in many cases compelling) farmers and laborers to commit themselves to the Twelve Articles. The Neckar-Odenwald district was dotted with castles and abbeys, and in the name of divine justice and Christian liberty, thousands of peasants armed with swords and farm implements assaulted these strongholds of the late-medieval order.

  For all their wantonness, the peasants’ violence was directed mostly at property; the taking of life was rare. A notorious exception occurred at Weinsberg, a small town in central Franconia that was home to a castle occupied by Ludwig von Helfenstein, a count much hated for his cruelties. On April 16, 1525—Easter Sunday—while many leading citizens were at church, two peasant bands descended on the town. Within minutes, forty people lay dead, and the count, together with his wife and two-year-old son and a number of noblemen and knights, was taken prisoner. They were placed in the charge of Jäcklein Rohrbach, a peasant leader and ruffian known for his frequent run-ins with the law. Metzler ordered Rohrbach not to kill the prisoners, but the next morning, as other commanders slept off a night of heavy drinking, Rohrbach led the count and thirteen other noblemen to a meadow, where they were sentenced to death. Shortly before sunrise, the peasants formed a double row of spears. The countess, hysterical, begged for her husband’s life, but Rohrbach ordered two men to hold her up and make her watch. Entering the gauntlet, the count was speared, stabbed, and slashed by the peasants, who while striking angrily recalled the brutal acts he had inflicted on them. Horribly mutilated, he quickly fell. In half an hour, the other prisoners were similarly dispatched. The countess was stripped and dressed in the rags of a beggar and thrown onto a dung cart and driven away. She would spend the rest of her days in a convent.