When the sun rose and it became clear what had happened, there was an outcry among the more moderate rebels, who expelled Rohrbach and his group. As word of the atrocity spread, it caused deep disgust; no other incident, in fact, would do more damage to the peasants’ cause. In the short run, though, the massacre sowed terror among the Franconian nobility, and whatever modest resistance they had put up crumbled; during the first part of April 1525 alone, more than one hundred castles were seized or burned. During a three-day rampage through the bishopric of Bamberg, the peasants sacked and destroyed some seventy castles, monasteries, and religious foundations. In Mainz, Archbishop Albrecht fled at the first sign of trouble, and when the bishop ruling in his place failed in an effort to raise the territorial militia, the archbishopric was forced to endorse the Twelve Articles and pay a huge ransom. The most powerful ecclesiastical territory in Germany had fallen into rebel hands.
By this point, nearly all of Franconia had joined the revolt. The one major holdout was Würzburg. Located on the Main River, it was the seat of the most important bishopric in Germany after Mainz. The Franconian bands now headed toward it. Along the way they burned down all of the bishop’s castles and plundered thirty-one cloisters. In early May, they arrived before the walls of Würzburg to negotiate its surrender. In the end, it was the threat by the peasant armies to tear up the vineyards around the town that convinced its council, on May 8, 1525, to open its gates. As the rebels streamed in, 250 or so members of the Würzburg garrison, together with many nobles and clerics, retreated into the Marienberg, the great fortress that was perched on a spur overlooking the town. Preparations for a long siege began. If the peasants succeeded in capturing the fortress, their control of Franconia would be complete.
From Franconia, the rebellion swept northward into Hesse and Thuringia—and closer to Luther. By early April, copies of the Twelve Articles had reached Fulda. Located on the western fringe of the Thuringian Forest, the town was home to a famous Benedictine monastery with extensive landholdings, and radical preachers were rousing the locals against its powerful prince-abbot. The town was quickly overrun. The rebellion then spread eastward into the valley of the Werra River, and soon some eighteen thousand men were marching through the forest.
The center of the Thuringian revolt was Mühlhausen, where Thomas Müntzer and Heinrich Pfeiffer had been active the previous summer. In December 1524, Pfeiffer returned to the city and resumed his organizing. Müntzer arrived in early 1525. He had not had much success in the southwest—his calls for holy war did not much resonate with the practical-minded peasants—but their rebellion had convinced him that the final days were at hand, and on hearing of Pfeiffer’s return to Mühlhausen, he, too, had headed back there to lead the great apocalyptic struggle.
Müntzer was installed as the pastor of St. Mary’s, the city’s largest church, and from its pulpit he called for a final reckoning. In mid-March 1525, a group of his supporters, after being incited by him, marched through town, invaded a convent, drove out the remaining sisters, smashed everything in sight, and forced several council members to flee. Pfeiffer and Müntzer then inaugurated a new “eternal council” that was to serve in perpetuity. At St. Mary’s, Müntzer’s feverish sermons were followed by revolutionary anthems with words drawn from the Old Testament, and a banner was made from coarse silk showing a rainbow on a white background. The council began mobilizing the people of Mühlhausen for action against its clerical and feudal overlords.
Seeking allies, Müntzer sent sympathetic preachers south into the Thuringian Forest and north into the Harz Mountains. In the mining districts around Mansfeld—Luther’s hometown—the miners were stirring amid the general unrest, and Müntzer hoped to win them over. “The time has come, the evil-doers are running like scared dogs!” he thundered in an appeal sent to his former parishioners in Allstedt. “Alert the brothers, so that they may be at peace, and testify to their conversion. It is absolutely critical—absolutely necessary!” They were to show no pity and pay no attention to the cries of the godless: “Alert the villages and towns and especially the mineworkers and other good fellows who will be of use. We cannot slumber any longer. . . . Go to it, go to it, while the fire is hot! Don’t let your sword get cold! Hammer away ding-dong on the anvils of Nimrod.”
By mid-April 1525, much of central Germany seemed on the verge of falling to the peasants.
Luther at that point had little sense of the scale or intensity of the uprising, but that would change as a result of a request from Count Albrecht of Mansfeld. Inspired by Luther’s tract on the need to establish Christian schools, the count asked him to set one up in Eisleben, and Luther agreed to do so. On April 16, 1525, he, along with Melanchthon and Johann Agricola, a friend and former student, left Wittenberg. Without knowing it, they were heading into the heart of the Thuringian rebellion.
Luther took with him a copy of the Twelve Articles. Because the peasants had proposed him as an arbiter of their demands, he felt he had to reply. On the way to Eisleben, he stopped in Mansfeld and, in the garden of the home of Johann Duhren, a town councilor, he hurriedly prepared his response. The Admonition to Peace: A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants in Swabia was the first of three pamphlets Luther would produce on the peasant revolt. In his three Reformatory tracts of 1520, he had proposed a bold program to transform society; he would now try to tamp down the expectations they had helped create.
Written in a frenzy, the Admonition reads like two separate tracts stitched together. In the first, Luther addressed the ruling class, and he was unsparing: “We have no one on earth to thank for this disastrous rebellion, except you princes and lords, and especially you blind bishops and mad priests and monks, whose hearts are hardened, even to the present day.” As temporal rulers, “you do nothing but cheat and rob the people so that you may lead a life of luxury and extravagance.” The poor could bear it no longer, and unless the princes and prelates mended their ways, God would undoubtedly visit his wrath on them. Many of the peasants’ articles were fair and just, and had he been writing them, he would have added others. Luther endorsed the peasants’ demands for the right to choose their own pastors and called their claims about economic exploitation no less just.
Luther then turned to the demands of the peasants, and his tone abruptly and bizarrely shifted. In calling themselves a Christian association, the peasants were taking God’s name in vain in violation of the Second Commandment. That their rulers were wicked and unjust did not excuse disorder and rebellion. As Paul taught at Romans 13, those in authority have been instituted by God, and it is they alone who have the right to bear the sword and punish wickedness. Although the rulers erred when they suppressed the gospel and oppressed the peasants in temporal affairs, the peasants were guilty of a much greater wrong when they suppressed God’s sword and trod it underfoot. While the rulers take the peasants’ property from them, the peasants take from the rulers their authority, without which they would have nothing. The peasants were therefore even greater robbers than the rulers. If authority and government disappeared from the world, the result would be nothing but murder and bloodshed.
For Luther, the peasants were blurring the lines between the two kingdoms—a crime far greater than any the princes had committed. The very idea of the peasants taking action to right wrongs enraged him. It was Christ’s desire that we not resist evil or injustice but yield and suffer. Romans, Corinthians, Matthew—all teach that Christians should suffer wrongs committed against them and love their prosecutors and enemies. From such passages,
even a child can understand that the Christian law tells us not to strive against injustice, not to grasp the sword, not to protect ourselves, not to avenge ourselves, but to give up life and property, and let whoever takes it have it. We have all we need in our Lord, who will not leave us, as he promised. Suffering! suffering! Cross! cross! This and nothing else is the Christian law!
In the past, of course, Luther had frequently written of how Christ came with a
sword. Now, however, with the peasants actively resisting injustice in Christ’s name, he was furiously demanding that they bear the cross. They had to stop calling themselves Christians and claiming that Christian law was on their side. “As long as there is a heartbeat in my body, I shall do all I can to take that name away from you.” The composer of the Twelve Articles was himself neither godly nor honest but a “lying preacher and false prophet” whose citations “smeared on the margin do not help you at all.” If the peasants were true Christians, they would strive to achieve their goals by patiently praying to God instead of seeking to compel the rulers to comply through force and violence.
Taking up the individual articles, Luther was no less dismissive. Concerning the right of communities to choose their own pastors, he was of course the originator of this idea, and earlier in the Admonition he had said that the peasants were just in proposing it, but now, in a startling shift, he maintained that the peasants should first humbly ask their rulers to provide a pastor to their liking. If he refused, the peasants could choose their own pastor and support him out of their own resources. If, however, the rulers would not tolerate the pastor they chose, the pastor should flee to another city. Whoever does otherwise “is a robber and brawler.” Similarly, the peasants, in calling for the tithe to be used to support the pastor and for the remainder to be distributed to the poor, were engaging in “nothing but theft and highway robbery.”
Even on the matter of serfdom, Luther was unyielding. When the peasants asserted that no one was to be the serf of anyone else, on the grounds that Christ makes all free, they were turning Christian freedom into a material matter. “Did not Abraham and other patriarchs and prophets have slaves?” This article therefore absolutely contradicted the gospel. “It proposes robbery, for it suggests that every man should take his body away from his lord, even though his body is the lord’s property.” A slave can be a Christian and have Christian freedom, in the same way that a prisoner or a sick man is a Christian, yet not free. This article “would make all men equal, and turn the spiritual kingdom of Christ into a worldly, external kingdom; and that is impossible. A worldly kingdom cannot exist without an inequality of persons, some being free, some imprisoned, some lords, some subjects, etc.”
By this point, Luther was being charged on all sides with having helped spark the uprising. Vehemently objecting, he noted that he had always opposed rebellion and forcefully exhorted the people “to obey and respect” even “wild and dictatorial tyrants.” The rebellion came not from him but from “the murder-prophets” (i.e., Müntzer and Karlstadt), whom he alone had fought.
Many disputed this judgment. “It is not the case,” a Saxon official observed at the time, “that Müntzer is a captain or in command of the troop, as is alleged. He is simply the Mühlhauseners’ preacher. There are many other preachers in the troop, who preach the Gospel according to Luther’s interpretation.” By inflating Müntzer’s part in causing the revolt, Luther was seeking to diminish his own.
Overall, Luther devoted three times as much space to attacking the peasants as he did to the princes. In doing so, he was clearly reacting to the growing anarchy and violence in the land. In his 1522 tract admonishing all Christians to guard against rebellion, he had warned Herr Omnes not to use the Bible to justify demands for political and social betterment. Mr. Everyman was not listening. In his fury, Luther was rejecting not only violent actions but actions of any kind undertaken by the poor and oppressed to improve their lot. No matter how just and equitable the peasants’ demands, he maintained, their efforts to act on them ran counter to Christian law. As faithful Christians, they had but one available path: acceptance and acquiescence.
When the tract was done, Luther sent it off to Wittenberg to be printed. After completing his business in Eisleben, he continued on through northern and central Thuringia to see his parents, friends, and relatives. He found the whole land south of the Harz Mountains in a state of insurrection. On May 1, 1525, he was in Wallhausen, less than a day’s journey from Allstedt, and he preached against the “false prophets.” On the following day, he was in Nordhausen, which was thirty miles from Mühlhausen and where a group of radicals was demanding the installation of an eternal council like Müntzer’s. In his sermon, Luther cited the crucified Christ as the model for Christians facing injustice; theirs was to suffer and endure. The congregation was in no mood for such instruction. Luther was interrupted by hecklers, and bells were rung so that he could not be heard. He would later recall feeling that his life was in danger.
By then, it seemed only a matter of time before all of central Germany fell to the peasants. Seeing the gravity of the situation, Philip of Hesse, the young landgrave, sent two urgent appeals in late April 1525 to Duke George of Saxony. The peasants “are forming bands and have already seized many important towns and markets,” he warned. They “have been heard to say” that “they want to punish all princes, counts, lords, and nobles at their pleasure.” He implored the duke to send him five hundred well-armed horses. “If we do not counter such wanton people with seriousness and boldness, then it is a sure and fearful certainty that your grace and all authority must expect the next slap in the face.”
Duke John was similarly trying to rally his brother Frederick. He estimated that there were 35,000 troops in the field. “It’s wild around here,” he wrote from Weimar. “Everyone is in shock. God grant us his divine grace. We probably had it coming to us.”
Frederick was in no position to act on such reports, however, for at that moment he lay gravely ill in his castle in Lochau. Even apart from his failing health, however, the elector was reluctant to intervene. Almost alone among the princes, he believed that the peasants had good reason to rebel and that the uprising might be an act of divine retribution for all the years of mistreatment they had suffered. “In many ways,” he wrote to Duke John, “the poor are being burdened by us temporal and spiritual rulers.” If God willed it, “the common man will rule.” If he did not, things would rapidly change. “Let us pray God to forgive our sin.” Frederick held out the hope that the conflict could be resolved through negotiations, and Duke John even considered resigning if that would help.
On his way back to Wittenberg, Luther decided to stop in Weimar to speak with Duke John. Arriving on May 3, he found the electoral court in a state of panic. The duke asked him if he should consent to the demands of the Twelve Articles. Not a single one, Luther insisted. Continuing on to Mansfeld, he met with his friend John Rühel, who was now serving as a counselor to Count Albrecht of Mansfeld. From him, Luther heard how Albrecht and his fellow count Ernst were still struggling with how to respond to the revolt. After leaving Mansfeld, Luther sent Rühel a letter urging him to stiffen Albrecht’s resolve. Even if there were thousands more peasants, they would still be “robbers and murderers” who in their insolence and wickedness had taken the sword without God’s authority. The peasants’ revolt showed that the Devil was angry with him and wanted him dead. If he managed to make it home safely, he would prepare for martyrdom and await the arrival of the murderers and robbers. “I would rather lose my neck a hundred times than approve of and justify the peasants’ actions.”
Luther then dropped a bombshell: If he did survive, he would marry Katharina von Bora. He would do so “to spite the devil,” i.e., the peasants, who, he felt sure, wanted him dead.
On May 5, 1525, Frederick died. The man who had been Luther’s chief protector and without whom he would have surely ended up in a dungeon or at the stake was gone, and Luther hurried home so that he could preach at his funeral. He also had the idea for a new tract in which he would urge the princes of Germany to strike at the peasants, and strike them hard.
37
The Murdering Hordes
“It is not safe for me to stay here any longer,” Erasmus wrote from Basel to Jean Lalemand, an influential member of Charles V’s court, on February 24, 1525. As he explained, he lived “within a cluster of regions where the Lutheran faction is especially infl
uential, Zurich being on one side and Strasbourg on the other.” Even Wolfgang Capito, his longtime friend and former assistant, had turned against him. Having joined the evangelicals, Capito was now sending accusatory messages from Strasbourg. “You are set in the theater of the world whether you will or no, and you must be seen to be either a clear friend of the truth or a dissembler—such are the times now,” Capito wrote. Feeling increasingly at risk, Erasmus around Easter made plans to leave Basel. But then the Peasants’ War broke out, making the roads unsafe, and so, as he wearily observed, “I am stuck in this place, between Scylla and Charybdis.”
From around the region he received reports of the chaos and fear the uprising was causing. The Benedictine cloister in Alsace where his friend Paul Volz was the abbot had been taken over by peasants, who had destroyed much of its furnishings, including its library and archives, and Volz had lost not only his residence but also many unpublished manuscripts. “My neighbors and even those who claim to be my protectors have stripped me of everything,” he wrote to Erasmus. “I have nothing left except the clothes that cover me and a pocket edition of the New Testament.” Volz had sought refuge in Strasbourg, but the Austrian authorities who governed the region, suspecting him of Lutheran sympathies, had denied him any assistance, and so he hoped Erasmus could recommend someone who might be able to help.
To Erasmus’s relief, Basel itself was untouched by the uprising. In early May 1525, the peasants had marched on the city with demands similar to those of the Twelve Articles. Basel had refused to open its gates but promised concessions, and the peasants were persuaded to return to their villages. Neighboring districts were provided with charters of liberty, and within a month or so peace was restored.
Fatal Discord Page 76
