Though physically safe, however, Erasmus faced a bitter new round of attacks from his conservative critics as a result of the rebellion. In the past, their main charge had been his part in inspiring Luther. Now he was also being charged with having incited the peasants. The center of complaint was the University of Paris. Prior to 1525, Erasmus had largely escaped attack by the Sorbonne theologians, owing to the protection of King Francis I, who was an admirer of humanists in general and Erasmus in particular. But in February 1525 Francis had been captured by Charles V at the battle of Pavia, and for months he had been held prisoner in a grim tower in Madrid. His absence left Erasmus exposed. For years the doctors in Paris had bristled at the application of the new critical methods to the Bible and at the resulting erosion in the authority of the Vulgate. The turmoil and sectarianism in Germany showed the disorder that could result, and the theology faculty was determined to keep France free of Lutheranism and of the humanist methods that had incubated it.
In early 1525, Pierre Cousturier, a former Sorbonne theologian turned Carthusian monk, came out with De Tralatione Bibliae, a fierce indictment of the application of grammar and languages to theological studies. “Mere rhetoricians” were not qualified to discuss matters of doctrine, he sniffed. The Vulgate was not only authentic but perfect, since it had been produced under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and any effort to change the biblical text on stylistic grounds was irreverent. Cousturier did not mention Erasmus by name, but it was clear from his argument that it was Erasmus, along with Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples, the dean of French humanists, to whom he was referring. Lefèvre felt so threatened by these attacks that he left French territory for Strasbourg. Erasmus, though not on French soil, nonetheless feared the Sorbonne’s reach.
His anxiety grew when, in the spring of 1525, he learned that he was being investigated by Noël Béda. For the past two decades, Béda had served as the head of the Collège de Montaigu, the same punitive institution whose rotten eggs, moldy walls, reeking latrines, and harsh discipline Erasmus had endured as a young man. In 1520, Béda had persuaded his fellow theologians to revive the long-dormant office of syndic, and he quickly turned it into an agency for rooting out heresy. Working through it, he would become the main watchdog of orthodoxy on the Paris faculty, carrying out his duties with a zeal that unsettled even some of his fellow doctors.
Much of his ardor would be directed at Erasmus. In May 1525, Béda sent him a long and menacing letter informing him that three of his works (including the Encomium Matrimonii) had been condemned by the theology faculty. The works had been translated into French by an energetic but impulsive scholar named Louis de Berquin, who had inserted provocative material from other texts. Béda also complained about Erasmus’s paraphrases of the New Testament. For months he had scoured them for passages that strayed from orthodoxy, and he had found dozens. “You have treated many matters in a manner which is dangerous and likely to cause grave scandal to Christ’s people,” he warned. Béda was especially disturbed by Erasmus’s support for translating the Scriptures into the vernacular. “You have been busy propagating this view with great frequency and persistence, not noticing the spiritual dangers and disastrous disturbances which the church has suffered time and again as a consequence; for this reason she banned the practice on more than one occasion.” And, he went on, “you will know better than I if the translation of the Scriptures into the German tongue has increased piety among peasant men and women in that country.”
Béda was raising many of the same points that Martin Dorp and Edward Lee had made years earlier. Now, with Germany being overrun by Bible-quoting peasants, those charges carried added weight. Erasmus refused to bend, however. In a lengthy rejoinder to Béda that showed him at his eloquent best and blustery worst, he insisted that when he had first set out to revise the New Testament, nothing was further from his mind than displacing the Vulgate. (He had, of course, been trying to do just that.) Nor, he insisted, had he ever encouraged anyone to translate the Scriptures into the vernacular. (In the Paraclesis, he had explicitly done so.) He dismissed those who wasted their time on the “labyrinthine intricacies” and “sophistical hairsplitting” of Aristotle or Scotus and mocked those who took refuge in the doctrines of the Schoolmen, “clinging to them as to a holy anchor.”
As for the peasant revolt, Erasmus rejected any suggestion that vernacular Bibles had contributed to it. “A few radical preachers were partly to blame,” he wrote to Béda, “but much greater responsibility rests with certain scandalmongers who were born to make trouble.” Erasmus was more specific in a letter to Willibald Pirckheimer, identifying as the main culprits of the revolt neither the peasants nor the princes but the monks. In the face of the “tyranny of these evil men,” the world “cannot endure these scheming hordes of provocateurs much longer.” While the looting of the monasteries by the peasants was undoubtedly “a monstrous crime,” they had been provoked by the monks’ depravity, since “no laws could reform them, and they are blind to their own shortcomings.”
As these passages suggest, Erasmus felt considerable sympathy for the peasants and their cause (if not their conduct). Far from wanting to keep the heavenly and earthly kingdoms distinct, as Luther did, he believed that the spiritual had to shape the secular. Manifestos like the Twelve Articles echoed his own philosophy of Christ, envisioning a more just society founded on the principles of the New Testament.
By May 1525, the peasant armies seemed unstoppable. From Alsace in the west to Bavaria in the east, from the Swiss border in the south to the Thuringian Forest in the north, castles, cloisters, towns, and villages were falling to the ragtag bands with little or no resistance.
And the revolt continued to spread. By early June, the peasants had swarmed into Salzburg, Austria. Its archbishop, Matthäus Lang—despised for his arrogance, pride, and fierce allegiance to Rome—was forced to retreat into the Hohensalzburg, a mammoth castle that sat on the bluff that dominated the city. The fighting around Innsbruck, meanwhile, grew so intense that Archduke Ferdinand, who lived there, would not venture beyond its walls. In the towns and valleys of the Inn and Etsch Rivers, the scale of the unrest made it dangerous to walk the streets, and robbing and plundering were so rife that “not a few pious men” were tempted to join in, as a witness put it.
More and more, the insurgency was taking on the air of an anticlerical crusade. In Alsace, convents were a popular target, for they were lightly guarded and thus easily overrun. Many precious works of medieval art were destroyed, and books and manuscripts were used to light fires. The Alsatian rebels considered themselves so well versed in the Bible that they ordered abbots and priests to attend a public disputation at their headquarters, with severe penalties for those who refused. Only Strasbourg and a few other Alsatian towns managed to hold out, and local lords, aware of their helplessness, appealed to Duke Antoine in neighboring Lorraine to intervene.
In the Black Forest, Freiburg, after an eight-day siege, fell on May 23. Several days later, the peasants surged into Breisach, a fortress town on the east bank of the Rhine. These two victories marked the triumphant culmination of Hans Müller’s three-month campaign across the Black Forest. The peasants now faced the challenge of converting their military victories into political gains in order to address the economic and social demands that had been aired after the initial refusal to collect snail shells for the countess of Lupfen.
That was the task facing the movement as a whole. After occupying so many towns and seizing so much territory, the peasants needed to develop a practical program to implement the reforms outlined in the Twelve Articles and other petitions. But they seemed incapable of doing so. They were hampered by their political inexperience, by a shortage of skilled leaders, and, most of all, by a lack of discipline.
Wine in particular was proving the peasants’ undoing. Much more expensive (and potent) than beer or ale, it had long been an upper-class luxury. Even during Communion, wine in the Catholic service was restricted to the priest
; religious doctrine thus reinforced social privilege. In a special affront, landlords sometimes forced tenants to cart bulky barrels of wine that they could never hope to taste. Now, with wine cellars in manor houses and monasteries beckoning, the peasants guzzled away.
The result, in many cases, was bedlam. The peasants’ occupation of Würzburg, for example, seemed on the surface a great victory, securing control of a powerful episcopal seat. But the soldiers, noblemen, and clerics in the Marienberg fortress continued to resist, and while the preparations to storm it went on, pandemonium set in. The peasants, joined by the urban poor, looted wine from the city’s many ecclesiastical foundations. The rebels, wrote the local bishop’s historian, “were always drunk, created much disorder in word and deed, and would be ruled by no one in the afternoons and, if they were drunk, in the mornings as well.” In an effort to deter wrongdoers, three gallows were erected in the town, but the rebels took no notice, saying that “they would hang the monks, priests, and all their servants from them.” According to an episcopal secretary, it was not clear whether the conflict should be called a peasants’ war or a wine war.
The peasants’ unruliness was causing terror among the well off and well educated—Karlstadt included. On May 10, 1525, Rothenburg (where he continued to live) swore allegiance to the peasant cause. A resolution was enacted for the seizure of ecclesiastical goods, with wine and corn stocks to be divided among the citizens. Many drank themselves senseless, and even young children could be seen staggering in the streets. In the surrounding countryside, meanwhile, the peasants were storming castles and convents. Karlstadt, who despite his inflammatory sermons remained opposed to violence, felt it was his duty to go out among the peasants to try to calm them.
On May 15, he was escorted by a supporter to a rebel camp near the front. As soon as he was outside the town gates, however, he got into an altercation with a peasant mercenary, and only the swift intervention of a young councilor kept him from being stabbed. In the camp, Karlstadt wrote an open letter to the peasants, urging them to show mercy and warning that those who engaged in violence would feel God’s wrath. The peasants were furious at being thus rebuked, and Karlstadt—barely managing to escape—was forced to return alone to Rothenburg across the turbulent countryside. At one point, he approached an inn where a number of armed peasants were gathered, and when they discovered that he was not a peasant but a scholar, they tried to take everything he had; Karlstadt was barely able to talk them out of it.
In Rothenburg, Karlstadt found the place in utter turmoil. One peasant threatened to knife him; another tried to run him down. Concluding that it was no longer safe to remain, he, together with his wife and child, traveled fifty miles north to the town of Karlstadt, where he had grown up and where his mother now took them in. Even there, however, it was dangerous, and Karlstadt, after giving a sermon, was aggressively accosted in the market square. “I was among the peasants as a hare among ferocious dogs,” he wrote, adding that they “would have choked me to death on several occasions had not God protected me.”
The lords, too, were after Karlstadt, regarding him as an architect of the revolt. Desperate to find a haven, he looked to Saxony. For months he had been in touch with the electoral court, seeking a safe-conduct so that he could return, and with Franconia in ferment, his pleas grew more urgent. The court in turn sounded out Luther on the idea. Given his conviction that Karlstadt had helped instigate the revolt, he was firmly opposed. For the moment, though, the matter was left unresolved, for the peasants were marching uncontested through the Thuringian countryside, threatening the survival of the Reformation—and of Luther himself.
After arriving back in Wittenberg on May 6, 1525, Luther had to wait several days for the body of Frederick to arrive. In the meantime, a new edition of his Admonition to Peace was being prepared, and Luther decided to add a section on the growing disorder. It would eventually be published as a stand-alone tract whose title—Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants—would add to its infamy. The peasants, Luther wrote, “are robbing and raging like mad dogs.” As their actions showed, the statements made in the Twelve Articles “were nothing but lies presented under the name of the gospel.” The peasants’ rebellion and plundering were not like murder, which produced individual victims, but like “a great fire” that “attacks and devastates a whole land,” producing widows and orphans. “Therefore,” he declared, in words that would become notorious,
let everyone who can smite, slay, and stab, secretly or openly, remembering that nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel. It is just as when one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him, he will strike you, and a whole land with you.
For princes who might recoil from slaying the peasants, Luther advised them on how they could proceed with a clear conscience. If a ruler is a Christian and a believer in the new gospel, he must first offer the “mad peasants” an opportunity to come to terms, even though they did not deserve it. If no settlement could be reached, the ruler should then fulfill his duty under Romans 13 and “swiftly take to the sword.” If he is in a position to punish them but does not do so, because of a reluctance to kill or shed blood, he himself “becomes guilty of all the murder and evil that these people commit.” There could be “no place for patience or mercy. This is the time of the sword, not the day of grace.” The rulers should feel assured that killing the peasants was a just cause, for they were simply carrying out the duties of their office, and the peasants in any case deserved death many times over. Anyone killed while fighting on the side of the rulers “may be a true martyr in the eyes of God.” Anyone who perished on the side of the peasants was “an eternal firebrand of hell.” A “pious Christian ought to suffer a hundred deaths rather than give a hairsbreadth of consent to the peasants’ cause.” Luther then repeated his central message: “Let whoever can stab, smite, slay. If you die in doing it, good for you! A more blessed death can never be yours.”
“Stab, smite, slay” would become a lurid catchphrase for Luther’s position on the Peasants’ War. He was, in effect, calling for mass slaughter and using the Epistle to the Romans to justify it.
By its language alone, Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants would have caused shock, but the outcry over it was magnified by a sudden change of fortunes on the ground. Philip of Hesse, tired of waiting for his fellow princes to act, decided to proceed on his own. Young, brash, and dynamic, he was convinced that the peasant bands, despite their size, were hollow. On April 29, 1525, with just 350 horsemen and 1,400 footmen, he attacked the troop at Hersfeld, in Hesse, and, as he had expected, it quickly folded. On May 3, he marched on Fulda, and the peasants again scattered. By the time he reached Eisenach, the rebellion in southwestern Thuringia as a whole was fizzling.
Philip then headed toward the major center of resistance, Frankenhausen. At the end of April, the citizens of this town on the border between Thuringia and Saxony had staged a popular revolt against its overlords, the counts of Schwarzburg, and six thousand to seven thousand peasants and townsmen from Allstedt, Mansfeld, and other communities converged on it to form a unified army. Hoping to push north and open a new front among the miners, this army sent an urgent appeal for reinforcements to Thomas Müntzer and the Mühlhausen band he had formed.
Müntzer pledged his full support. But, as was so often the case with the peasants, the prospect of plunder intervened. During one expedition, the Mühlhausen force met a party of insurgents from Eichsfeld, thirty miles to the west, who wanted it to travel there and help them resist a counteroffensive by the lords. As if to publicize their cause, the Eichsfelders brought with them eight or nine wagons filled with cured meats, household goods, and other items taken from local convents. Eager for a share, the Mühlhauseners promptly set off in that direction and spent a week pillaging and burning, with scores of castles and cloisters plundered and their inmates forced to flee.
This would prove a fateful moment in the Thuringian revolt, for it t
ied the Mühlhausen army down in the west just as the princes were preparing to move against Frankenhausen. Finally answering Philip’s pleas, Duke George of Saxony and Duke Henry of Brunswick sent detachments of men and horses to join the Hessian forces at Frankenhausen. Also responding was Duke John, Frederick’s successor as elector of Saxony. Convinced that his brother had been too lenient toward the peasants, he now dispatched a Saxon brigade to the front.
When Müntzer finally did set out for Frankenhausen, he was accompanied by only three hundred men—another sign of his limited support. Arriving at the Frankenhausen camp, he immediately took charge and with typical bravado sent taunting messages to the counts of Mansfeld, the main lords in the area. To Albrecht, who sympathized with Luther, he was especially crude:
In your Lutheran gruel and Wittenbergian soup, have you not been able to find what Ezek. 37 prophesies? Besides, have you not been able to taste in your Martinian peasant shit how the same prophet goes on to say in chapter 39 that God makes all the birds under heaven devour the flesh of princes and all the dumb animals guzzle the blood of the big shots?
Despite such provocations, another count, Ernst, sent three emissaries, including a priest, to the nearby town of Artern to negotiate with the peasants. The men were immediately captured, bound, and led into a field; a debate then broke out as to whether they should be executed. No decision could be reached, and the three were transferred to Frankenhausen. Müntzer called an assembly in the square by the gate, and, speaking before several thousand men, he asked whether anyone had charges to lay against the three. The prisoners were then interrogated while being subjected to gruesome tortures; finally, with Müntzer’s assent, they were beheaded.
Fatal Discord Page 77
