This trend continued during the Peasant War and in its aftermath. This was the Radical or Popular Reformation, an effort by radicals, based on the Bible to live by God's Word and usually contrary to Martin Luther’s teachings. They took an advantageous position on the east bank of the Biber. [13] Accordingly, princes tended to gain economically from the ruination of the lesser nobility, by acquiring their estates. Luther only wanted people to see the Catholic Church as something that was not sanctioned by God. Two friends take a trip to see important historic places. The south-east of England had always been its wealthiest region, and as a result there were very few unpaid serfs there and the peasants enjoyed a better quality of life than elsewhere. They complained of peonage, land use, easements on the woods and the commons, as well as ecclesiastical requirements of service and payment. On 14 May, they warded off smaller feints of the Hesse and Brunswick troops, but failed to reap the benefits from their success. Later historians refuted both Franz's view of the origins of the war, and the Marxist view of the course of the war, and both views on the outcome and consequences. The princes stood to gain economically if they broke away from the Roman church and established a German church under their own control, which would then not be able to tax them as the Roman church did. The lack of cavalry with which to protect their flanks, and with which to penetrate massed landsknecht squares, proved to be a long-term tactical and strategic problem.[32]. Key to Franz's interpretation is the understanding that peasants had benefited from the economic recovery of the early 16th century and that their grievances, as expressed in such documents as the Twelve Articles, had little or no economic basis. High School. Accordingly, the harshness of the lesser nobles' treatment of the peasantry provided the immediate cause of the uprising. The 14th century was a terrible era to be alive: the Great Famine of 1315 to 1317 killed perhaps 10% of Northern Europe, and the Black Death, an even greater natural disaster, claimed between 1/3 and 1/2 of the continent’s population at the end of the 1340s and in later outbreaks in the 1360s. The town patricians were increasingly criticized by the growing burgher class, which consisted of well-to-do middle-class citizens who held administrative guild positions or worked as merchants. Since peasants were usually quite poor and lived in tough conditions, many of them were wiped out completely during the Plague. Its immediate cause was the imposition of the unpopular poll tax of 1381, which brought to a head the economic discontent that had been growing since the middle of the century. Friedrich Engels wrote The Peasant War in Germany (1850), which opened up the issue of the early stages of German capitalism on later bourgeois "civil society" at the level of peasant economies. While the men served, others absorbed their workload. The national aspect of the Peasants' Revolt was also utilised by the Nazis. Emperor Charles V and Pope Clemens VII thanked the Swabian League for its intervention. Some bishops, archbishops, abbots and priors were as ruthless in exploiting their subjects as the regional princes. To judge from his writings of 1523 and 1524, it was by no means inevitable that Müntzer would take the road of social revolution. However, this dissatisfaction with Luther and his teachings became more pronounced after 1524-1527. The first revolts were in 1524, and they had spread to all of South West Germany by 1525. [56], At Königshofen, on 2 June, peasant commanders Wendel Hipfler and Georg Metzler had set camp outside of town. The war was thus an effort to wrest these social, economic and political advantages back. He was deposed and replaced by a knight, Götz von Berlichingen, who was subsequently elected as supreme commander of the band. The German Peasants, especially the wealthier groups, wanted to safeguard a hard-earned prosperity that they believed was under threat … [3] Historians have interpreted the economic aspects of the German Peasants' War differently, and social and cultural historians continue to disagree on its causes and nature. [14], In the north of Germany many of the lesser nobles had already been subordinated to secular and ecclesiastical lords. As the rebellion escalated to violence, Luther took a harsher stance on the peasants, whom he now condemned as robbers and rebels to be killed on sight, as illuminated by the third passage. The Landgrave, Philip of Hesse and Duke George of Saxony were on Müntzer's trail and directed their Landsknecht troops toward Frankenhausen. Those who surrendered had to pay hefty fines. [7] It seemed that members of the lesser nobility and the urban elite would side with the peasants and the Imperial government, and the great nobles were forced to make concessions to these groups. The peasant armies were organized in bands (German: haufen), similar to the landsknecht. The German Peasants' War was Europe's largest and most widespread popular uprising prior to the French Revolution of 1789. This page was last edited on 22 November 2020, at 08:46. Upon identifying two squadrons of League and Alliance horse approaching on each flank, now recognized as a dangerous Truchsess strategy, they redeployed the wagon-fort and guns to the hill above the town. The underlying cause of the war was economic change. [53], On 29 April the peasant protests in Thuringia culminated in open revolt. Instead the insurgents arranged a ceasefire and withdrew into a wagon fort. Historians disagree on the nature of the revolt and its causes, whether it grew out of the emerging religious controversy centered on Luther; whether a wealthy tier of peasants saw their own wealth and rights slipping away, and sought to weave them into the legal, social and religious fabric of society; or whether peasants objected to the emergence of a modernizing, centralizing nation state. Many pastors and ordinary people, who had been inspired by Luther, now turned against him, and this had begun before the Peasants War. Nevertheless, the peasants continued to revolt. Log in. Although they only managed to hold the allegiance of small numbers of the European population, they were enormously influential, especially in America.[19]. The princes of these dynasties were taxed by the Roman Catholic church. The peasant gunnery fired a salvo at the League advanced horse, which attacked them on the left. [57], Freiburg, which was a Habsburg territory, had considerable trouble raising enough conscripts to fight the peasants, and when the city did manage to put a column together and march out to meet them, the peasants simply melted into the forest. [33] Peasants were more concerned to protect the social, economic and legal gains they had made than about seeking further gains. During the Knights' Revolt the "knights", the lesser landholders of the Rhineland in western Germany, rose up in rebellion in 1522–1523. The Princes' troops included close to 6,000 mercenaries, the Landsknechte. The rest of the peasants returned to their farms. It began in the Black Forest in late summer and fall of 1524, reached its peak around Easter of 1525, and produced its last risings (notably in Tyrol) in 1526. [28], The peasant army was governed by a so-called ring, in which peasants gathered in a circle to debate tactics, troop movements, alliances, and the distribution of spoils. [5] Many educated peasants had also been disappointed with the course of the Reformation and they believed that it did not go far enough and they wanted a more radical church, one that was not hierarchical and dominated by the local notable. Over time, some Catholic institutions had slipped into corruption. The second was an organized inter-regional revolt that claimed its legitimacy from divine law and found its ideological basis in the Reformation. On 16 February 1525, 25 villages belonging to the city of Memmingen rebelled, demanding of the magistrates (city council) improvements in their economic condition and the general political situation. The battle is also called the Battle of the Turmberg, for a watch-tower on the field. [28], Haufen were formed from companies, typically 500 men per company, subdivided into platoons of 10 to 15 peasants each. On 4 June, near Würzburg, Müller and his small group of peasant-soldiers joined with the Franconian farmers of the Hellen Lichten Haufen. Some clergy were supported by the nobility and the rich, while others appealed to the masses. Luther's revolution may have added intensity to these movements, but did not create them; the two events, Luther's Protestant Reformation and the German Peasants' War, were separate, sharing the same years but occurring independently. In addition to this democratic construct, each band had a hierarchy of leaders including a supreme commander and a marshal (schultheiss), who maintained law and order. This position alienated the lesser nobles, but shored up his position with the burghers. Luther's Reformation became an increasingly conservative movement. [14], They and the clergy paid no taxes and often supported their local prince.[12]. Like the preceding Bundschuh movement and the Hussite Wars, the war consisted of a series of both economic and religious revolts in which peasants and farmers, often supported by Anabaptist clergy, took the lead. [12], To the degree that other classes, such as the bourgeoisie,[14] might gain from the centralization of the economy and the elimination of the lesser nobles' territorial controls on manufacture and trade,[15] the princes might unite with the burghers on the issue. However, it was precisely on this same theological foundation that Müntzer's ideas briefly coincided with the aspirations of the peasants and plebeians of 1525: viewing the uprising as an apocalyptic act of God, he stepped up as 'God's Servant against the Godless' and took his position as leader of the rebels.[11]. Militarily, the nobles had all the advantages. [7] Luther has often been sharply criticized for his position. Having taken the count as their prisoner, the peasants took their revenge a step further: They forced him, and approximately 70 other nobles who had taken refuge with him, to run the gauntlet of pikes, a popular form of execution among the landsknechts. The fighting was at its height in the middle of 1525. The peasants were caught off-guard and fled in panic to the town, followed and continuously attacked by the public forces. Since the quantity of working class peasants dropped greatly, many survivors saw themselves differently. The Peasants soon became radicalized, and the largest band was led by the radical preacher Thomas Muntzer. Urban poor joined in the rebellion as it spread to cities. Their rhetoric was religious, and several leaders expressed Luther's ideas on the split with Rome and the new German church. As the uprising spread, some … The victors destroyed their farming implements and homes and increased their tax burdens. [9] Returning to Saxony and Thuringia in early 1525, he assisted in the organisation of the various rebel groups there and ultimately led the rebel army in the ill-fated Battle of Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525. Friedrich Engels wrote The Peasant War in Germany (1850), which opened up the issue of the early stages of German capitalism on later bourgeois "civil society" at the level of peasant economies. Both sides perpetrated atrocities. A new economic interpretation arose in the 1950s and 1960s. [47] (The "great tithe" was assessed by the Catholic Church against the peasant's wheat crop and the peasant's vine crops. The war began with separate insurrections, beginning in the southwestern part of what is now Germany and Alsace, and spread in subsequent insurrections to the central and eastern areas of Germany and present-day Austria. They used these traditional entitlements to seize more of the peasants’ wealth through taxes and dues.[3]. This interpretation was informed by economic data on harvests, wages and general financial conditions. The count, much despised by his subjects, was the son-in-law of the previous Holy Roman Emperor, sfn error: multiple targets (2×): CITEREFBlickle1981 (, Hannes Obermair, "Logiche sociali della rivolta tradizionalista. The time of unrest that took place in The German states after 1848 was foreshadowed by widening political, economic, and social division with in each state. Consequently, some peasants, particularly those who had limited allodial requirements, were able to accrue significant economic, social, and legal advantages. Two thousand reached the nearby woods, where they re-assembled and mounted some resistance. Casualty figures are unreliable but estimates range from 3,000 to 10,000 while the Landsknecht casualties were as few as six (two of whom were only wounded). Keeping the bulk of his army facing Leipheim, he dispatched detachments of horse from Hesse and Ulm across the Danube to Elchingen. Trains (tross) were sometimes larger than the fighting force, but they required organization and discipline. He condoned the elite’s domination of the new Church and theology that justified and promoted the existing social and economic system. Luther wanted to prevent rebellion, but originally sided with the peasants. By September 1525 all fighting and punitive action had ended. The peasant’s revolt was the result of the reformation in which Martin Luther and others went against the religion and traditions of the Catholic Church. This was just what the Lutheran and Catholic aristocracy wanted to hear, and it is precisely what they did. Others sought to escape across the Danube, and 400 drowned there. The majority of peasant rebellions ended prematurely and were unsuccessful. This sometimes meant producing supplies for their opponents, such as in the Archbishopric of Salzburg, where men worked to extract silver, which was used to hire fresh contingents of landsknechts for the Swabian League. In this tract, Luther instructed the German Nobility to strike down the peasants as one would kill a mad dog. [19][20] The clergy who did not follow Luther tended to be the aristocratic clergy, who opposed all change, including any break with the Roman Church.[21]. It is just as one must kill a mad dog; if you do not strike him he will strike you. It was often led by members of the minor nobility and leading peasants in their communities. Blickle and his students later modified their ideas about peasant wealth. In the following days, a larger number of insurgents gathered in the fields around the town. Each company, in turn, was composed of smaller units of 10 to 12 men, known as rotte. At the battle of Frankhausen, the Swabian League shattered the peasant army. Several other bands arrived, bringing the total to 18,000, and within a matter of days, the city was encircled and the peasants made plans to lay a siege.[58]. Officers were usually elected, particularly the supreme commander and the leutinger. The burghers also opposed the clergy, whom they felt had overstepped and failed to uphold their principles. The plebeians did not have property like ruined burghers or peasants. Within days, 1,200 peasants had gathered, created a list of grievances, elected officers, and raised a banner. The conservative Reformation forced commoners to establish faith and church that met their needs and gave birth to the Radical or Popular Reformation. They demanded town assemblies made up of both patricians and burghers, or at least a restriction on simony and the allocation of council seats to burghers. Because of the Peasant War crisis, the new Protestant Churches became more conservative and came under the elite's total control. Each company was commanded by a captain and had its own fähnrich, or ensign, who carried the company's standard (its ensign). League reconnaissance reported to the Truchsess that the peasants were well-armed. Unexpectedly, the peasants delivered a uniform declaration that struck at the pillars of the peasant-magisterial relationship. c. Criminals kidnap a famous politician. The Reformation had always been dependent on the support of the elite. Labor shortages in the last half of the 14th century had allowed peasants to sell their labor for a higher price; food and goods shortages had allowed them to sell their products for a higher price as well. In 1381, a vast rebel army ransacked the Tower of London, burned the palaces and assassinated government officials. However, the Knights' Revolt was not fundamentally religious. The great tithe often amounted to more than 10% of the peasant's income. For Franz, the defeat thrust the peasants from view for centuries.[64]. This was the first important battle of the war. Thus embezzlement and fraud became common, and the patrician class, bound by family ties, became wealthier and more powerful. One of the most notable was Thomas Müntzer, who preached a radical apocalyptic message and who was executed in 1525 for his role in the Peasants’ Revolt. The German Peasants' War, Great Peasants' War or Great Peasants' Revolt (German: Deutscher Bauernkrieg) was a widespread popular revolt in some German-speaking areas in Central Europe from 1524 to 1525. The peasants were overtaken by the League's horse, which encircled and pursued them for kilometres. The clergy in 1525 were the intellectuals of their time. A variety of local studies showed that participation was not as broad based as formerly thought. Click to see full answer. They had helped Luther to defy the Pope. The reformers' ideas inspired the peasantry and others to challenge the existing hierarchal order and change the socio-economic system. 5.5 Peasant Revolts in the German States DBQ In the midst of immense religious upheaval accompanied by political confusion and social despair during the mid-1500s, German peasants turned to revolt as a means of expressing their discontent. 1. They failed to achieve any of their aims, and the existing elite only became more entrenched. [c], 49°9′1.90″N 9°17′0.20″E / 49.1505278°N 9.2833889°E / 49.1505278; 9.2833889 (Weinsberg Massacre), An element of the conflict drew on resentment toward some of the nobility. After his death, many local nobles effectively became head of the local Lutheran Church. The council rejected many of the demands. Plato users select the correct text in the passage. Luther, especially after the Peasant’s War, believed that temporal authority should not be challenged in any way. Müntzer's theology had been developed against a background of social upheaval and widespread religious doubt, and his call for a new world order fused with the political and social demands of the peasantry. The plebeians comprised the new class of urban workers, journeymen, and peddlers. In approximately two hours, more than 8,000 peasants were killed. The justice system, operated by the clergy or wealthy burgher and patrician jurists, gave the peasant no redress. The German elite could also use Roman law, which was increasingly popular in German lands, to enforce their rights. Engels' analysis was picked up in the middle 20th century by the French Annales School, and Marxist historians in East Germany and Britain. [59] However the overall goals of change for these peasants, particularly looking through the lens of the Twelve Articles, had failed to come to pass and would remain stagnant, real change coming centuries later. Then there were the unintended consequences of Luther’s attack on the Church hierarchy. A band of five companies, plus approximately 25 citizens of Leipheim, assumed positions west of the town. Peasants' War, 1524–26, rising of the German peasants and the poorer classes of the towns, particularly in Franconia, Swabia, and Thuringia. At Waldburg-Zeil near Würzburg they met the army of Götz von Berlichingen ("Götz of the Iron Hand"). The so-called Book of One Hundred Chapters, for example, written between 1501 and 1513, promoted religious and economic freedom, attacking the governing establishment and displaying pride in the virtuous peasant. The gemein had its own leader (schultheiss), and a provost officer who policed the ranks and maintained order. Many rulers of Germany's various principalities functioned as autocratic rulers who recognized no other authority within their territories. Princes had the right to levy taxes and borrow money as they saw fit. The revolts usually began with a symbolic act of defiances, such as refusing to carry out some order or custom. Their luxurious lifestyle drained what little income they had as prices kept rising. Luther and others sought to distance themselves from the War and supported the nobility and the Swabian League unequivocally. Typically, the rehnnfahne were the second and third sons of poor knights, the lower and sometimes impoverished nobility with small land-holdings, or, in the case of second and third sons, no inheritance or social role. There were many reasons for the outbreak. Many had seen in Luther’s teachings an opportunity to enrich themselves and gain control over their own local churches. In the chaos that followed, the peasants and the mounted knights and infantry conducted a pitched battle. 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