German Culture Past and Present

E >> Ernest Belfort Bax >> German Culture Past and Present

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Early in April occurred one of the most notable incidents. It was at
the little town of Weinsberg, near the free town of Heilbronn, in
Wuertemberg. The town, which was occupied by a body of knights and
men-at-arms, was attacked on Easter Sunday by the peasant bands,
foremost among them being the "black troop" of that knightly champion
of the peasant cause, Florian Geyer. It was followed by a peasant
contingent, led by one Jaecklein Rohrbach, whose consuming passion was
hatred of the ruling classes. The knights within the town were under
the leadership of Count von Helfenstein. The entry of Rohrbach's
company into Weinsberg was the signal for a massacre of the knightly
host. Some were taken prisoners for the moment, including Helfenstein
himself, but these were massacred next morning in the meadow outside
the town by "Jaecklein," as he was called. The events at Weinsberg
produced in the first instance a horror and consternation which was
speedily followed by a lust for vengeance on the part of the
privileged orders.

In Franconia and Middle Germany the peasant movement went on apace. In
Franconia one of its chief seats was the considerable town of
Rothenburg, on the Tauber. The episcopal city of Wuerzburg was also
entered and occupied by the peasant bands in coalition with the
discontented elements of the town. The sacking of churches and
throwing open of religious houses characterized proceedings here as
elsewhere. The locking up of a large peasant host in Wuerzburg was
undoubtedly a source of great weakness to the movement. In the east,
in the Tyrol and Salzburg, there were similar risings to those farther
west. In the latter case the prince-bishop was the obnoxious
oppressor.

The most interesting of the local movements was, however, in many
respects that of Thomas Muenzer in the town of Muelhausen, in Thuringia.
Thomas Muenzer is, perhaps, the best known of all the names in the
peasants' revolt. In addition to the ultra-Protestantism of his
theological views, Muenzer had as his object the establishment of a
communistic Christian Commonwealth. He started a practical
exemplification of this among his own followers in the town itself.

Up to the beginning of May the insurrection had carried everything
before it. Truchsess and his men of the Swabian League had proved
themselves unable to cope with it. Matters now changed. Knights,
men-at-arms, and free-lances were returning from the Italian campaign
of Charles V after the battle of Pavia. Everywhere the revolt met with
disaster. The Muelhausen insurgents were destroyed at Frankenhausen by
forces of the Count of Hesse, of the Duke of Brunswick, and of the
Duke of Saxony. This was on May 15th. Three days before the defeat at
Frankenhausen, on May 12th, a decisive defeat was inflicted on the
peasants by the forces of the Swabian League, under Truchsess, at
Boeblingen, in Wuertemberg. Savage ferocity signalized the treatment of
the defeated peasants by the soldiery of the nobles. Jaecklein Rohrbach
was roasted alive. Truchsess with his soldiery then hurried north and
inflicted a heavy defeat on the Franconian peasant contingents at
Koenigshaven, on the Tauber. These three defeats, following one
another in little more than a fortnight, broke the back of the whole
movement in Germany proper. In Elsass and Lorraine the insurrection
was crushed by the hired troops and the Duke of Lorraine; eastward, on
the little river Luibas. In the Austrian territories, under the able
leadership of Michael Gaismayr, one of the lesser nobility, it
continued for some months longer, and the fear of Gaismayr, who, it
should be said, was the only man of really constructive genius the
movement had produced, maintained itself with the privileged classes
till his murder in the autumn of 1528, at the instance of the Bishop
of Brixen.

The great peasant insurrection in Germany failed through want of a
well-thought-out plan and tactics, and, above all, through a want of
cohesion among the various peasant forces operating in different
sections of the country, between which no regular communications were
kept up. The attitude of Martin Luther towards the peasants and their
cause was base in the extreme. His action was mainly embodied in two
documents, of which the first was issued about the middle of April,
and the second a month later. The difference in tone between them is
sufficiently striking. In the first, which bore the title, "An
Exhortation to Peace on the Twelve Articles of the Peasantry in
Swabia," Luther sits on the fence, admonishing both parties of what he
deemed their shortcomings. He was naturally pleased with those
articles that demanded the free preaching of the Gospel and abused the
Catholic clergy, and was not indisposed to assent to many of the
economic demands. In fact, the document strikes one as distinctly more
favourable to the insurgents than to their opponents.

"We have," he wrote, "no one to thank for this mischief and sedition,
save ye princes and lords, in especial ye blind bishops and mad
priests and monks, who up to this day remain obstinate and do not
cease to rage and rave against the holy Gospel, albeit ye know that it
is righteous, and that ye may not gainsay it. Moreover, in your
worldly regiment, ye do naught otherwise than flay and extort tribute,
that ye may satisfy your pomp and vanity, till the poor, common man
cannot, and may not, bear with it longer. The sword is on your neck.
Ye think ye sit so strongly in your seats, that none may cast you from
them. Such presumption and obstinate pride will twist your necks, as
ye will see." And again: "God hath made it thus that they cannot, and
will not, longer bear with your raging. If ye do it not of your free
will, so shall ye be made to do it by way of violence and undoing."
Once more: "It is not peasants, my dear lords, who have set themselves
up against you. God Himself it is who setteth Himself against you to
chastise your evil-doing."

He counsels the princes and lords to make peace with their peasants,
observing with reference to the "Twelve Articles" that some of them
are so just and righteous that before God and the world their
worthiness is manifested, making good the words of the psalm that they
heap contempt upon the heads of the princes. Whilst he warns the
peasants against sedition and rebellion, and criticizes some of the
Articles as going beyond the justification of Holy Writ, and whilst he
makes side-hits at "the prophets of murder and the spirits of
confusion which had found their way among them," the general
impression given by the pamphlet is, as already said, one of
unmistakable friendliness to the peasants and hostility to the lords.

The manifesto may be summed up in the following terms: Both sides are,
strictly speaking, in the wrong, but the princes and lords have
provoked the "common man" by their unjust exactions and oppressions;
the peasants, on their side, have gone too far in many of their
demands, notably in the refusal to pay tithes, and most of all in the
notion of abolishing villeinage, which Luther declares to be
"straightway contrary to the Gospel and thievish." The great sin of
the princes remains, however, that of having thrown stumbling-blocks
in the way of the Gospel--_bien entendu_ the Gospel according to
Luther--and the main virtue of the peasants was their claim to have
this Gospel preached. It can scarcely be doubted that the ambiguous
tone of Luther's rescript was interpreted by the rebellious peasants
to their advantage and served to stimulate, rather than to check, the
insurrection.

Meanwhile, the movement rose higher and higher, and reached Thuringia,
the district with which Luther personally was most associated. His
patron, and what is more, the only friend of toleration in high
places, the noble-minded Elector Friedrich of Saxony, fell ill and
died on May 5th, and was succeeded by his younger brother Johann, the
same who afterwards assisted in the suppression of the Thuringian
revolt. Almost immediately thereupon Luther, who had been visiting his
native town of Eisleben, travelled through the revolted districts on
his way back to Wittenberg. He everywhere encountered black looks and
jeers. When he preached, the Muenzerites would drown his voice by the
ringing of bells. The signs of rebellion greeted him on all sides.
The "Twelve Articles" were constantly thrown at his head. As the
reports of violence towards the property and persons of some of his
own noble friends reached him his rage broke all bounds. He seems,
however, to have prudently waited a few days, until the cause of the
peasants was obviously hopeless, before publicly taking his stand on
the side of the authorities.

On his arrival in Wittenberg, he wrote a second pronouncement on the
contemporary events, in which no uncertainty was left as to his
attitude. It is entitled, "Against the Murderous and Thievish Bands of
Peasants."[24] Here he lets himself loose on the side of the
oppressors with a bestial ferocity. "Crush them" (the peasants), he
writes, "strangle them and pierce them, in secret places and in sight
of men, he who can, even as one would strike dead a mad dog!" All
having authority who hesitated to extirpate the insurgents to the
uttermost were committing a sin against God. "Findest thou thy death
therein," he writes, addressing the reader, "happy art thou: a more
blessed death can never overtake thee, for thou diest in obedience to
the Divine word and the command of Romans xiii. 1, and in the service
of love, to save thy neighbour from the bonds of hell and the devil."
Never had there been such an infamous exhortation to the most
dastardly murder on a wholesale scale since the Albigensian crusade
with its "Strike them all: God will know His own"--a sentiment indeed
that Luther almost literally reproduces in one passage.

The attitude of the official Lutheran party towards the poor
countryfolk continued as infamous after the war as it had been on the
first sign that fortune was forsaking their cause. Like master, like
man. Luther's jackal, the "gentle" Melanchthon, specially signalized
himself by urging on the feudal barons with Scriptural arguments to
the blood-sucking and oppression of their villeins. A humane and
honourable nobleman, Heinrich von Einsiedel, was touched in conscience
at the _corvees_ and heavy dues to which he found himself entitled. He
sent to Luther for advice upon the subject. Luther replied that the
existing exactions which had been handed down to him from his parents
need not trouble his conscience, adding that it would not be good for
_corvees_ to be given up, since the "common man" ought to have
burdens imposed upon him, as otherwise he would become overbearing. He
further remarked that a severe treatment in material things was
pleasing to God, even though it might seem to be too harsh. Spalatin
writes in a like strain that the burdens in Germany were, if anything,
too light. Subjects, according to Melanchthon, ought to know that they
are serving God in the burdens they bear for their superiors, whether
it were journeying, paying tribute, or otherwise, and as pleasing to
God as though they raised the dead at God's own behest. Subjects
should look up to their lords as wise and just men, and hence be
thankful to them. However unjust, tyrannical, and cruel the lord might
be, there was never any justification for rebellion.

A friend and follower of Luther and Melanchthon--Martin Butzer by
name--went still farther. According to this "reforming" worthy a
subject was to obey his lord in everything. This was all that
concerned him. It was not for him to consider whether what was
enjoined was, or was not, contrary to the will of God. That was a
matter for his feudal superior and God to settle between them.
Referring to the doctrines of the revolutionary sects, Butzer urges
the authorities to extirpate all those professing a false religion.
Such men, he says, deserve a heavier punishment than thieves,
robbers, and murderers. Even their wives and innocent children and
cattle should be destroyed (_ap. Janssen_, vol. i. p. 595).

Luther himself quotes, in a sermon on "Genesis," the instances of
Abraham and Abimelech and other Old Testament worthies, as justifying
slavery and the treatment of a slave as a beast of burden. "Sheep,
cattle, men-servants and maid-servants, they were all possessions,"
says Luther, "to be sold as it pleased them like other beasts. It were
even a good thing were it still so. For else no man may compel nor
tame the servile folk" (_Saemmtliche Werke_, vol. xv. p. 276). In other
discourses he enforces the same doctrine, observing that if the world
is to last for any time, and is to be kept going, it will be necessary
to restore the patriarchal condition. Capito, the Strassburg preacher,
in a letter to a colleague, writes lamenting that the pamphlets and
discourses of Luther had contributed not a little to give edge to the
bloodthirsty vengeance of the princes and nobles after the
insurrection.

The total number of the peasants and their allies who fell either in
fighting or at the hands of the executioners is estimated by Anselm in
his _Berner Chronik_ at 130,000. It was certainly not less than
100,000. For months after the executioner was active in many of the
affected districts. Spalatin says: "Of hanging and beheading there is
no end." Another writer has it: "It was all so that even a stone had
been moved to pity, for the chastisement and vengeance of the
conquering lords was great." The executions within the jurisdiction of
the Swabian League alone are stated at 10,000. Truchsess's provost
boasted of having hanged or beheaded 1,200 with his own hand. More
than 50,000 fugitives were recorded. These, according to a Swabian
League order, were all outlawed in such wise that any one who found
them might slay them without fear of consequences.

The sentences and executions were conducted with true mediaeval levity.
It is narrated in a contemporary chronicle that in one village in the
Henneberg territory all the inhabitants had fled on the approach of
the Count and his men-at-arms save two tilers. The two were being led
to execution when one appeared to weep bitterly, and his reply to
interrogatories was that he bewailed the dwellings of the aristocracy
thereabouts, for henceforth there would be no one to supply them with
durable tiles. Thereupon his companion burst out laughing, because,
said he, it had just occurred to him that he would not know where to
place his hat after his head had been taken off. These mildly humorous
remarks obtained for both of them a free pardon.

The aspect of those parts of the country where the war had most
heavily raged was deplorable in the extreme. In addition to the many
hundreds of castles and monasteries destroyed, almost as many villages
and small towns had been levelled with the ground by one side or the
other, especially by the Swabian League and the various princely
forces. Many places were annihilated for having taken part with the
peasants, even when they had been compelled by force to do so. Fields
in these districts were everywhere laid waste or left uncultivated.
Enormous sums were exacted as indemnity. In many of the villages
peasants previously well-to-do were ruined. There seemed no limit to
the bleeding of the "common man," under the pretence of compensation
for damage done by the insurrection.

The condition of the families of the dead and of the fugitives was
appalling. Numbers perished from starvation. The wives and children of
the insurgents were in some cases forcibly driven from their
homesteads and even from their native territory. In one of the
pamphlets published in 1525 anent the events of that year we read:
"Houses are burned; fields and vineyards lie fallow; clothes and
household goods are robbed or burned; cattle and sheep are taken away;
the same as to horses and trappings. The prince, the gentleman, or the
nobleman will have his rent and due. Eternal God, whither shall the
widows and poor children go forth to seek it?" Referring to the
Lutheran campaign against friars and poor scholars, beggars, and
pilgrims, the writer observes: "Think ye now that because of God's
anger for the sake of one beggar, ye must even for a season bear with
twenty, thirty, nay, still more?"

The courts of arbitration, which were established in various districts
to adjudicate on the relations between lords and villeins, were
naturally not given to favour the latter, whilst the fact that large
numbers of deeds and charters had been burnt or otherwise destroyed in
the course of the insurrection left open an extensive field for the
imposition of fresh burdens. The record of the proceedings of one of
the most important of these courts--that of the Swabian League's
jurisdiction, which sat at Memmingen--in the dispute between the
prince-abbot of Kempten and his villeins is given in full in Baumann's
_Akten_, pp. 329-46. Here, however, the peasants did not come off so
badly as in some other places. Meanwhile, all the other evils of the
time, the monopolies of the merchant-princes of the cities and of the
trading-syndicates, the dearness of living, the scarcity of money,
etc., did not abate, but rather increased from year to year. The
Catholic Church maintained itself especially in the South of Germany,
and the official Reformation took on a definitely aristocratic
character.

According to Baumann (_Akten, Vorwort_, v, vi), the true soul of the
movement of 1525 consisted in the notion of "Divine justice," the
principle "that all relations, whether of political, social, or
religious nature, have got to be ordered according to the directions
of the 'Gospel' as the sole and exclusive source and standard of all
justice." The same writer maintains that there are three phases in the
development of this idea, according to which he would have the scheme
of historical investigation subdivided. In Upper Swabia, says he,
"Divine justice" found expression in the well-known "Twelve Articles,"
but here the notion of a political reformation was as good as absent.

In the second phase, the "Divine justice" idea began to be applied to
political conditions. In Tyrol and the Austrian dominions, he
observes, this political side manifested itself in local or, at best,
territorial patriotism. It was only in Franconia that all territorial
patriotism or "particularism" was shaken off and the idea of the unity
of the German peoples received as a political goal. The Franconian
influence gained over the Wuertembergers to a large extent, and the
plan of reform elaborated by Weigand and Hipler for the Heilbronn
Parliament was the most complete expression of this second phase of
the movement.

The third phase is represented by the rising in Thuringia, and
especially in its intellectual head, Thomas Muenzer. Here we have the
doctrine of "Divine justice" taking precedence of all else and
assuming the form of a thoroughgoing theocratic scheme, to be realized
by the German people.

This division Baumann is led to make with a view to the formulation of
a convenient scheme for a "codex" of documents relating to the
Peasants' War. It may be taken as, in the main, the best general
division that can be put forward, although, as we have seen, there are
places where, and times when, the practical demands of the movement
seem to have asserted themselves directly and spontaneously apart from
any theory whatever.

Of the fate of many of the most active leaders of the revolt we know
nothing. Several heads of the movement, according to a contemporary
writer, wandered about for a long time in misery, some of them indeed
seeking refuge with the Turks, who were still a standing menace to
Imperial Christendom. The popular preachers vanished also on the
suppression of the movement. The disastrous result of the Peasants'
War was prejudicial even to Luther's cause in South Germany. The
Catholic party reaped the advantage everywhere, evangelical preachers,
even, where not insurrectionists, being persecuted. Little
distinction, in fact, was made in most districts between an opponent
of the Catholic Church from Luther's standpoint and one from
Karlstadt's or Hubmayer's. Amongst seventy-one heretics arraigned
before the Austrian court at Ensisheim, only one was acquitted. The
others were broken on the wheel, burnt, or drowned.

There were some who were arrested ten or fifteen years later on
charges connected with the 1525 revolt. Treachery, of course, played a
large part, as it has done in all defeated movements, in ensuring the
fate of many of those who had been at all prominent. In fairness to
Luther, who otherwise played such a villainous role in connection with
the peasants' movement, the fact should be recorded that he sheltered
his old colleague, Karlstadt, for a short time in the Augustine
monastery at Wittenberg, after the latter's escape from Rothenburg.

Wendel Hipler continued for some time at liberty, and might probably
have escaped altogether had he not entered a protest against the
Counts of Hohenlohe for having seized a portion of his private fortune
that lay within their power. The result of his action might have been
foreseen. The Counts, on hearing of it, revenged themselves by
accusing him of having been a chief pillar of the rebellion. He had to
flee immediately, and, after wandering about for some time in a
disguise, one of the features of which is stated to have been a false
nose, he was seized on his way to the Reichstag which was being held
at Speier in 1526. Tenacious of his property to the last, he had hoped
to obtain restitution of his rights from the assembled estates of the
empire. Some months later he died in prison at Neustadt.

Of the victors, Truchsess and Frundsberg considered themselves badly
treated by the authorities whom they had served so well, and
Frundsberg even composed a lament on his neglect. This he loved to
hear sung to the accompaniment of the harp as he swilled down his red
wine. The cruel Markgraf Kasimir met a miserable death not long after
from dysentery, whilst Cardinal Matthaus Lang, the Archbishop of
Salzburg, ended his days insane.

Of the fate of other prominent men connected with the events
described, we have spoken in the course of the narrative.

The castles and religious houses, which were destroyed, as already
said, to the number of many hundreds, were in most cases not built up
again. The ruins of not a few of them are visible to this day. Their
owners often spent the sums relentlessly wrung out of the "common man"
as indemnity in the extravagances of a gay life in the free towns or
in dancing attendance at the Courts of the princes and the higher
nobles. The collapse of the revolt was indeed an important link in the
particular chain of events that was so rapidly destroying the
independent existence of the lower nobility as a separate status with
a definite political position, and transforming the face of society
generally. Life in the smaller castle, the knight's _burg_ or tower,
was already tending to become an anachronism. The Court of the prince,
lay or ecclesiastic, was attracting to itself all the elements of
nobility below it in the social hierarchy. The revolt of 1525 gave a
further edge to this development, the first act of which closed with
the collapse of the knights' rebellion and death of Sickingen in 1523.
The knight was becoming superfluous in the economy of the body
politic.

The rise of capitalism, the sudden development of the world-market,
the substitution of a money medium of exchange for direct barter--all
these new factors were doing their work. Obviously the great gainers
by the events of the momentous year were the representatives of the
centralizing principle. But the effective centralizing principle was
not represented by the Emperor, for he stood for what was after all
largely a sham centralism, because it was a centralism on a scale for
which the Germanic world was not ripe. Princes and margraves were
destined to be bearers of the _territorial_ centralization, the only
real one to which the German peoples were to attain for a long time to
come. Accordingly, just as the provincial _grand seigneur_ of France
became the courtier of the King at Paris or Versailles, so the
previously quasi-independent German knight or baron became the
courtier or hanger-on of the prince within or near whose territory his
hereditary manor was situate.

The eventful year 1525 was truly a landmark in German history in many
ways--the year of one of the most accredited exploits of Doctor
Faustus, the last mythical hero the progressive races have created;
the year in which Martin Luther, the ex-monk, capped his repudiation
of Catholicism and all its ways by marrying an ex-nun; the year of the
definite victory of Charles V. the German Emperor, over Francis I. the
French King, which meant the final assertion of the "Holy Roman
Empire" as being a national German institution; and last, but not
least, the year of the greatest and the most widespread popular
movement Central Europe had yet seen, and the last of the mediaeval
peasant risings on a large scale. The movement of the eventful year
did not, however, as many hoped and many feared, within any short time
rise up again from its ashes, after discomfiture had overtaken it. In
1526, it is true, the genius of Gaismayr succeeded in resuscitating
it, not without prospect of ultimate success, in the Tyrol and other
of the Austrian territories. In this year, moreover, in other outlying
districts, even outside German-speaking populations, the movement
flickered. Thus the traveller between the town of Bellinzona, in the
Swiss Canton of Ticino, and the Bernardino Pass, in Canton Graubuenden,
may see to-day an imposing ruin, situated on an eminence in the narrow
valley just above the small Italian-speaking town of Misox. This was
one of the ancestral strongholds of the family, well known in Italian
history, of the Trefuzios or Trevulzir, and was sacked by the
inhabitants of Misox and the neighbouring peasants in the summer of
1526, contemporaneously with Gaismayr's rising in the Tyrol. A
connection between the two events would be difficult to trace, but the
destruction of the castle of Misox, if not a purely spontaneous local
effervescence, looks like an afterglow of the great movement, such as
may well have happened in other secluded mountain valleys.

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