Soon afterward, the Frankenhausen band took up a position on the flat summit of a hill outside town and arranged their wagons and cannons in a sort of laager. Overnight the men waited, anxious and in prayer. In the morning, they saw to their horror that what had seemed a position of strength actually left them highly exposed. The Saxon forces had joined the Hessian and Brunswick cavalry to form a formidable army of between six thousand and eight thousand infantrymen and two thousand cavalry. The peasants had roughly the same number of men, but most were inexperienced, and they had but one or two pieces of artillery and a few horses. Desperate, they sent a message to the nobles saying that they wished harm to no one—they wanted only divine justice—and appealing for mercy.
The reply quickly came: if the peasants turned over the false prophet Müntzer and his top accomplices, they would receive favorable treatment. Müntzer, seeking to rouse the camp to reject the offer, began preaching with the usual messianic conviction, citing the examples of Gideon and David, who with small forces had prevailed over much larger ones. On his third day of preaching, an atmospheric halo formed a ring around the sun. Müntzer claimed it was a rainbow like the emblem on the flag of his “eternal council” and urged the peasant-soldiers to show courage and fight. Taking the halo to be a sign of God’s blessing, they decided not to surrender Müntzer. On the following day (May 15), the soldiers began singing the hymn “Come, Holy Spirit.” What came instead was a salvo from the princes’ cannons. The princes’ foot soldiers and horses then attacked the nearest of the rebel troops.
Panicking, the peasants broke ranks and fled, and the wagon stockade was quickly penetrated. The peasants raced toward Frankenhausen, but the princes’ forces gave chase and cut them down by the hundreds. Most managed to make it into the town, where they desperately sought shelter in its houses and churches, but the princes’ troops stormed in and, in an orgy of stabbing and smiting, killed everyone they could find. Within hours, five thousand lay dead. The princes suffered no more than half a dozen casualties. Not satisfied, they ordered three hundred prisoners brought into the square before the Rathaus to be beheaded. The women begged for mercy for their husbands and brothers. They were told that if they killed two captured priests (seen as the true source of the trouble) with their own hands, their men would be spared. Given clubs, the women proceeded to beat the priests so savagely that, according to one eyewitness, “their heads were like unto a rotten cabbage, and the brains did cling unto the clubs.” The men were freed.
Müntzer, on whose head a high price had been set, managed to reach Frankenhausen, where he entered a deserted house near the city gate. Hoping to avoid being recognized, he took off some of his clothes and lay down on a bed. Shortly afterward, the servant of a knight entered the house and discovered him. Müntzer pretended to be ill with fever, but when the servant searched his knapsack, he found letters from Count Albrecht. He at once informed his masters, and Müntzer was seized and brought before the princes. He was then taken to Count Ernst’s castle at Heldrungen to be tortured and interrogated.
Meanwhile, the princes marched their armies from Frankenhausen to Mühlhausen. Before such a mighty force, the population cowered behind the city’s walls. On May 21 or 22, 1525, as those walls were being breached, Heinrich Pfeiffer, who had remained in the city, escaped along with three hundred followers, hoping to join the insurgents in Franconia. A detachment was sent in pursuit, and Pfeiffer was captured near Eisenach. Three days later, Mühlhausen opened its gates to the princes’ troops. The citizens were forced to surrender their arms, and the “eternal council” that had been installed by Müntzer and Pfeiffer was deposed and the old council reinstated. Executions of the burgomaster and others quickly followed. Mühlhausen’s main fortifications were razed, and only by paying an enormous ransom was the city spared sacking.
The rout at Frankenhausen and the surrender of Mühlhausen would prove a turning point in the revolt. As the news circulated that thousands of peasants had been slaughtered, it spread fear among the rebels and raised hopes among the princes. As disruptive and destructive as the peasants had been, the princes—eager to ensure their utter submission—would now pursue them with unrestrained savagery.
In the forefront was Truchsess George von Waldburg. With his force augmented by troops returning from the fighting in Italy, he unleashed a vengeful pacification campaign in Franconia, burning villages, hanging rebels, massacring civilians. On May 12, at Böblingen (sixty miles northwest of Ulm), the sight of the approaching Swabian force sent the twelve-thousand-man peasant army into flight. Giving pursuit, Waldburg’s horsemen stabbed, slashed, and cut to pieces every man they could catch, and for seven or eight miles the way was strewn with bodies. In Ochsenfurt, another five thousand peasants were slaughtered. Neighboring villages were set on fire, and all inhabitants who were not consumed by it were put to the sword. It was a decisive blow to the rebellion in Franconia.
By June 5, the Swabian League army was on the outskirts of Würzburg. An earlier rebel assault on the Marienberg fortress had been repelled at a cost of many lives, but five thousand to six thousand peasants and burghers remained under arms and determined to defend the town. Now, however, the burgomaster and members of the old council entered into secret negotiations with Waldburg’s representatives, and Waldburg and hundreds of horsemen and mercenaries with halberds were let in. They met little resistance. All local citizens and peasants who had helped lead the revolt were ordered to assemble at three separate sites. Each site was then surrounded by armed men. Waldburg appeared on horseback in the market square, accompanied by several executioners with swords. After denouncing the men for their crimes and declaring their lives forfeit, he retired with the princes into the Rathaus to deliberate. A little more than an hour later he reappeared, and the reading of names began. According to a report by the city secretary, three executioners stepped forward “like roaming wolves” and at once beheaded a peasant captain, a pewterer, a painter, a coppersmith, and a barber. Twenty-four people were beheaded at one of the other sites and thirty more at the third. All together, eighty-one people were executed, “guilty or innocent, as the whim took them.” The rank and file then had staves placed in their hands as a sign of surrender and were driven from the town. As they marched out, however, they were set upon by the mercenaries who were prowling about, and many more were slain.
While this bloodletting was going on in Würzburg, Margrave Kasimir of Brandenburg-Ansbach was carrying out a similarly sadistic campaign in the surrounding countryside. In Kitzingen, eighty were beheaded and sixty-nine had their eyes put out; twelve died from the pain and others were left to lie in the street. It was forbidden on severe penalty to shelter or guide them or give any medical assistance. After Rothenburg was taken on June 20, 1525, twenty-five rebels, including the town’s most prominent preacher, were beheaded in two days.
For sheer butchery, however, Alsace would stand out. Responding to the pleas of its nobles and burghers, Duke Antoine of Lorraine assembled a large force that included German, Italian, and East European mercenaries. In mid-May, they appeared before Saverne, where the main Alsatian force was encamped. On May 17, a body of peasants that had come to relieve the force at the town was defeated and driven back to an outlying village, which was surrounded and burned. After fierce fighting, the duke’s army was able to penetrate the peasant stockade and enter the village. The defenders took refuge in the church, but fires broke out on all sides, and when the flames reached the church itself and they begged for mercy, it was too late. Rushing from the building, they were mercilessly cut down. In all, between two thousand and six thousand were slain. The East European mercenaries added an element of cold-blooded cruelty. Children as young as eight, ten, and twelve were killed; women and girls were dragged through the cornfields, raped, and murdered.
When news of these atrocities reached Saverne, the town surrendered, and the next morning the peasants opened the gates. Promised mercy by the duke, they streamed out without their arms and be
aring white staves; the duke’s freelances accompanied them. “Long live Luther!” some peasants shouted, taunting the soldiers. A quarrel broke out between a mercenary and a peasant who feared being robbed, and suddenly a cry went up among the soldiers: “Strike! It is allowed us!” Skirmishing quickly escalated into slaying, with the freelances pursuing and striking down the defenseless peasants as they desperately tried to reenter the town. There the killing continued, with not only peasants but also many town dwellers cut down. The princes finally intervened to stop the bloodshed, but not before sixteen thousand to twenty thousand lay dead. So many bodies were heaped at the town’s gates that it was barely possible to pass through. The rotting flesh gave off such a stench that many women would eventually flee the area, some of them abandoning their children, who perished of hunger.
In the Black Forest, a Swiss chronicler noted, the lords stripped the peasants “of their honor and weapons, especially their firearms and armor, their fine clothing, berets, and leather shoes” and prohibited them from visiting inns “on pain of life and property.” They were prohibited from banding together and sounding the alarm and “had to undertake an oath to seize, stab, and execute any refugees.” Even those peasants who had resisted the rebels and been useful to the lords and were therefore “hardly or not guilty at all” were “shorn and butchered.” Finally, not only were all the demands that the peasants had put forward rejected, but the rejection was “enforced with strict prohibitions and relentless punishments. In sum, what the peasants and their supporters undertook, namely, to free the Gospel and themselves through rebellion, was itself overthrown by rebellion, so that evangelical teaching and preaching were accused under the names of Luther, Zwingli, and the Anabaptists of being ‘evan-hellical’ and rebellious.” The gospel in many places was “rooted out with severe destruction of life and property. And so it was that the burdened peasantry had slipped their cart traces, but were now bound to the wagon with chains.”
Here and there, pockets of rebels held out. Near Basel, fighting would continue into the summer, and in Austria, where many miners had joined the peasants, resistance persisted well into 1526. In most of Germany, however, the revolt was quashed by midsummer 1525. The death toll was estimated at between 100,000 and 130,000; another 50,000 became fugitives. The peasants were certainly guilty of many crimes. Coercion and threats were used to force many to join the rebel cause, and those who refused faced social ostracism and economic hardship. The drunken sprees and wanton behavior spread much terror. But it was property that bore the brunt of the peasants’ fury. Most of the carnage was inflicted by the armies of the princes. For years afterward, the maimed and blinded could be seen stumbling pitifully about, a chilling reminder of the price of protest.
No one fared worse than Thomas Müntzer. Held in the dungeon of the castle at Heldrungen, he was subjected to various tortures. Thus brutalized, he admitted to a long list of offenses—that he had believed that the nobility with their many castles were “grievously oppressive” and had imposed compulsory dues and other forms of exploitation; that the purpose of the rebellion had been to make all Christians equal; that he wanted the holy sacrament to be adored not in an external way “but only in the spirit,” with each individual allowed to decide for himself. Müntzer also stated that he wished to die “a true and reconciled member” of the Catholic Church. The agony he suffered cast doubt on the sincerity of these statements. Nonetheless, his “confession” was quickly circulated, first in handwritten copies and then in print, in an effort to discredit him.
On May 25, 1525, Müntzer along with Pfeiffer was brought to Duke George’s camp at Görmar. Two days later the sentence was handed down. Müntzer was so physically and mentally shattered that he could barely say the Apostles’ Creed. He stammered that he had attempted matters beyond his power, and he urged the nobles to deal mercifully with their subjects. He then fell silent, awaiting the executioner’s stroke. It quickly came. Pfeiffer, who scorned confession and the taking of the sacrament, was similarly dispatched. The heads and bodies of both men were struck on pikestaffs and displayed outside the city of Mühlhausen. Twenty-six others were also executed.
Luther received a copy of Müntzer’s confession from John Rühel, the Mansfeld counselor. Rühel added an account of the princes’ vengeful campaign in Thuringia, including the incident in Frankenhausen in which the prisoners’ wives had cudgeled two priests to death. Many of Luther’s supporters, Rühel noted, believed that Luther had allowed the peasants “to be slain without pity by the tyrants.” In Leipzig it was being said that because of Frederick’s death, “you are afraid for your skin and play the hypocrite to Duke George by approving of his deeds.”
Luther was hearing similar charges on all sides. His Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes, with its exhortation to smite and slay the peasants, had appeared as the mass killing was under way, making it seem as if the princes were following his advice, although in fact the bloodletting had begun before its publication. Whatever the timing, Luther’s full-throated support for slaughtering the peasants was causing widespread revulsion. The title of a tract issued by a Catholic polemicist summed up the case against him: Luther Speaks with Forked Tongue, or How Luther, on the One Hand, Led the Peasants Astray, While, on the Other, He Condemned Them. From Magdeburg, his old friend Nikolaus von Amsdorf wrote that Luther was being called a toady of the princes.
Luther did not care. The peasants, he believed, were getting exactly what they deserved. “They have gone mad and will not hear the Word, and so they must bear the rod, that is, the guns,” he wrote to Rühel. “It serves them right. We ought to pray for them that they may be obedient; if not, let the shot whistle, or they will make things a thousandfold worse.” As for Müntzer, Luther was greatly displeased by his confession—not because of the savage means used to extract it, but because of its content. Upset that Müntzer had maintained to the end that he had done no wrong, Luther observed, “I should have asked very different questions.” He took satisfaction, however, in his execution: “Anyone who has seen Müntzer can say that he has seen the very devil, and at his worst. O God! If this is the spirit that is in the peasants it is high time that they were killed like mad dogs.” To Amsdorf he wrote that “it is better that all the peasants be killed than that the magistrates and princes perish, because the peasants took the sword without divine authority.” Under the princes “it is possible for both kingdoms to exist. Therefore no pity, no patience is due the peasants.”
With so much blood being shed across Germany, Luther was under intense pressure to explain or even retract his strong language, and with great reluctance he agreed to draft An Open Letter on the Harsh Book Against the Peasants. As was so often the case when he felt on the defensive, he restated his position in even starker terms. He was proud that his tract against the peasants had been so severely criticized, he wrote, and all who condemned it were themselves “rebels at heart.” To those who said that he was being unmerciful, Luther (relying as always on Romans 13) wrote that “this is not a question of mercy; we are talking of God’s word. It is God’s will that the king be honored and the rebels destroyed.” The “Scripture passages that speak of mercy apply only to the kingdom of God” and “not to the kingdom of the world,” for “it is a Christian’s duty not only to be merciful, but also to endure every kind of suffering—robbery, arson, murder, devil, and hell.” The tool of that kingdom “is not a wreath of roses or a flower of love, but a naked sword; and a sword is a symbol of wrath, severity, and punishment.” Those who are advocates of the peasants “say that we are flattering the furious princes and lords when we teach that they are to punish the wicked. And yet they are themselves ten times worse flatterers of the murderous scoundrels and wicked peasants.” Therefore, he went on, “as I wrote then so I write now: Let no one have mercy on the obstinate, hardened, blinded peasants who refuse to listen to reason; but let everyone, as he is able, strike, hew, stab, and slay, as though among mad dogs.”
Interestingly
, Luther conceded the point—made by some of his critics—that the peasants had slain no one in the way they themselves were being slain. The reason for this, he insisted, was that they had forced people to do what they wanted. To those who argued that the princes were wielding their sword cruelly, Luther said that when he had the time, he would attack them, too, “for in my office of teacher, a prince is the same to me as a peasant.” For now, he wrote, “the donkey needs to feel the whip, and a people need to be ruled with force.” As for the complaint that it was innocents who were suffering the most, Luther maintained that it is ever thus in wartime. “These are plagues that God sends; and they are always well deserved.” It is time “to stop complaining and murmuring and thank God that, by his grace and mercy, we have not experienced the greater misfortune that the devil intended to bring us through the peasants.” The work of the head of government is so essential to society that when he comes under attack, everyone must help rescue him “by stabbing, hewing, and killing” and risking his own life and goods. Even though he himself was a clergyman, if he saw his own lord in danger, “I would forget my spiritual office and stab and hew as long as my heart beat,” for rebellion “is a crime that deserves neither a court trial nor mercy.”
With such statements, disillusionment was setting in even among his staunchest backers. Hermann Mühlpfort, the mayor of Zwickau, to whom Luther had dedicated The Freedom of a Christian, wrote to a correspondent in Wittenberg, “Doctor Martin has fallen into great disfavor with the common people, also with both learned and unlearned.” The preachers in Zwickau “have been greatly disconcerted and amazed by the tracts recently issued.” The nobility would rely on Luther’s statements to convince themselves that the blood they had spilled would “gain them eternal salvation.” Whoever now spoke out on behalf of the common man would be accused of being a rebel.
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