The German Peasants’ War was the greatest social explosion in Europe before the French Revolution. As Lyndal Roper explains in “Summer of Fire and Blood,” her engrossing new history of the upheaval, “It all began with snails.”
In 1524, in the small town of Stühlingen, on the southeastern edge of the Black Forest, the Countess of Lupfen demanded that her peasants gather snail shells for the ladies at court to use as bobbins to spool their thread. On top of all their other duties, this was a burden too far. More than a thousand peasants refused to undertake the additional mindless labor.
Within months, they had a list of 62 grievances. Across the southern German-speaking lands, other groups of peasants followed suit. They were fed up with obeying restrictions on taking wood out of forests and fish out of ponds; watching their fields get ravaged by aristocratic hunting parties; and paying nonsensical and onerous taxes, death duties and marriage fees to lords who, as their own wealth increased dramatically, offered their serfs little in return besides lives on a short leash.
There had been countless peasant uprisings in Europe before. What made the revolts of the 1520s different, Roper explains, was that the peasants were freshly emboldened by the early shocks of the Reformation. Just four years before the revolts started ramping up, the renegade monk Martin Luther published “On the Freedom of a Christian.” Luther later insisted that he was interested only in religious freedom, but his work suggested to the serfs that the lords’ ownership of their bodies was a theological travesty; Christ had already bought every human soul with his blood. Sacking monasteries and castles became easier when peasants could believe they had God — and some very clever people — on their side.
Snail shells aside, no general calamity triggered the unrest. Population levels had bounced back since the Black Death and the price of agricultural goods was rising. The lives of German serfs had probably gotten a little worse in recent seasons, Roper writes, “but even more importantly, peasants felt they were worse because they were becoming less submissive.”
With the treasure they seized, the peasants were able to provision their armies and overwhelm all but the most impregnable strongholds. The alliances they forged with miners in towns were just as important, as was the support from the knights and lords from the lower nobility who sensed opportunities of their own in concessions from the great princes and the plundering of ecclesiastical properties.
Who exactly was getting the best of the other was at first unclear. With a sharp eye for the imagery the war produced, Roper shows how the peasants briefly became “fashionable.” In the 1520s, some opportunistic elites dressed like rustics and pretended to be illiterate, the better to goad bands of serfs to attack established institutions. Pamphlets from the period depict earthy peasants outwitting the clergy and academics in raucous arguments.
The energies of the revolt were concentrated in the striking figure of Thomas Müntzer, a rogue preacher and disciple of Luther who spread the word of the coming revolution. Müntzer performed the Mass in German so the peasants could understand it. He also believed it was against nature for a man to own more than eight horses. When Luther started to turn against the peasants, Müntzer spared none of his verbal acid for the sellout he called “the spiritless, easy living flesh at Wittenberg.”
One of the many merits of “Summer of Fire and Blood” is how Roper — despite being the author of a luminous biography of Luther — shifts the focus away from the face-off between Luther and Müntzer and back onto the peasants themselves, dealing resourcefully with the fact that few of them left any written record of their time in the sun. “It must have been sensational,” Roper memorably writes of peasant invasions of monasteries, “to enter these enclosed communities, to find their warm heating ovens, feather beds, down pillows, libraries, jeweled chalices and massive stores of food, and to see and touch them for the first time.”
But it could not last. The peasants, townsfolk and lesser nobles shared few interests and their unsteady ad hoc alliances quickly foundered. The savior of the great princes showed up in the form of the young Philip of Hesse, who cannily connected the armies of the greater lords in a series of coordinated attacks on the peasants. Luther knew which way the wind was blowing. Killing peasants was now a godly work. “Let everyone who can, smite, slay and stab, secretly or openly,” Luther counseled. “It is just as when one must kill a mad dog.”
Roper estimates that as many as 100,000 peasants were slaughtered in the space of a few weeks. By the end of 1525, the great princes had restored order: The Peasants’ War was over. Along with the peasants, who never saw the world they had imagined, the biggest losers were the clergy. The monks of Central Europe never recovered. The winners were the great princes who had taught their more restive nobles a lesson, and further entrenched their power and wealth — many of them kept what remained of the loot from the plundered monasteries. “The peasants’ bloody defeat affected peasant communities for generations,” Roper concludes, “and transformed the Reformation from a movement that challenged the social order into one that supported the existing authorities.”
The German Peasants’ War has preoccupied artists and playwrights from Goethe to Jean-Paul Sartre. The events have also commanded a special place in the annals of the international left. Friedrich Engels, who wrote what is still the most widely read account of the Peasants’ War, picked the uprising apart as he and Karl Marx tried to understand the pitfalls of the Revolution of 1848. A century ago, the Weimar Marxist prophet Ernst Bloch interpreted the nearby Russian Revolution as the delayed gratification of Thomas Müntzer.
In a wide-ranging conclusion on the war’s legacy, Roper becomes impatient with the Marxist determination to explore why the momentum of the peasants could never durably join with the petty interests of the lower nobility. Engels, she claims, gives short shrift to peasants for not being “truly revolutionary,” and for getting their hopes up ahead of historical schedule.
Whether there was really any alliance that could have helped the peasantry maintain the upper hand in the Peasants’ War may appear as a drearily dated question, but it’s precisely such questions that have lately sprung back to life in our own time. Across the West, vying political parties, led on both sides by different coalitions of capitalists, seek to advance their agendas by harnessing the fury and fear of citizens who work for a living.
For Roper, who lived in Berlin in the years after the wall fell, the history of the German Peasants’ War became, if anything, only more urgent in the wake of the revolutions of 1989, when the communist system of Eastern Europe collapsed. Whether “the people” of those revolutions ended up as beneficiaries, and were even the revolution’s prime movers, or whether the gains redounded to a new set of modern princes — in the form of oligarchs — depends on whom you ask.
In the 21st century, however, one thing remains clear: The legacy of the Peasants’ War is still being co-opted for opposite ends. Some of the most recent invocations of the Peasants’ War in Germany have appeared at rallies for the far-right political party, the Alternative for Germany. In the past decade, Müntzer has been cited on their podiums, and the image of the peasant shoe, with its long lace, has emblazoned the flags of their supporters. If the meaning of the Peasants’ War is to be recovered for a different movement, it is worth trying to grasp why they lost rather than simply reliving their experiences and applauding their higher ideals.
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