The German Peasants' War: a revolution to bring Heaven to Earth

2025 marked the 500th anniversary of the peak of the German Peasants' War of 1524-26. In the course of the war, the oppressed masses in both the towns and the countryside rose up against the decaying feudal order. The defeat of the rebels in May-June 1525 would leave an indelible mark on the history of Germany, and of Europe as a whole.

[This article was originally published as part of issue 50 of In Defence of Marxism magazine – the quarterly theoretical magazine of the Revolutionary Communist International. Subscribe and get your copy here]

The Peasants’ War was a pivotal event in the Protestant Reformation, which Friedrich Engels counted as one of the most important stages in the struggle of the European bourgeoisie against feudalism, alongside the English Civil War (1642-51) and the French Revolution (1789-94). Indeed, he described the Reformation as the first bourgeois revolution in history.

What began as a conflict between Martin Luther – the German monk and professor of theology – and the Roman Catholic Church, sparked a revolutionary conflagration in early modern Europe. In the Netherlands, the Reformation actually brought the bourgeoisie to power, when the Protestant Calvinists won independence from their Catholic Spanish rulers and founded the Republic of the Seven United Provinces in 1581. However, almost six decades before this were the mass revolts in southern and central Germany, as well as Austria, Alsace and Switzerland.

The peasants decisively entered onto the stage of history. And as Engels wrote: “behind the peasant the revolutionary beginnings of the modern proletariat, already red flag in hand and with communism on its lips”.^[1]

As the movement developed, sections of the exploited went beyond the struggle against the church and began to attack the feudal system itself, with some preaching an early form of communism. The German Peasants' War thus anticipated future class struggles – between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat.

The oppressed began to take their fate into their own hands. They organised themselves, tested out programmes and methods, and drew radical conclusions from their experiences. Tens of thousands of mostly nameless heroes lost their lives in this struggle.

When the masses came onto the scene with their own demands, the Reformation in Germany split along class lines, between the propertied, and the propertyless. Luther and the urban bourgeoisie sided with the Protestant nobility. The latter in fact sided with the Catholic nobles, with whom they shared the same class interest, to brutally suppress the peasants and their allies. Thus, the first bourgeois revolution did not end with the seizure of power by the bourgeoisie.

Engels took a keen interest in the Reformation. In 1850, he published the pamphlet The Peasant War in Germany, in which he drew out the similarities between the historical revolution in Germany in 1525, and that of 1848-49. In the revolution of 1848, the bourgeoisie in Germany had once again made a pact with the nobility out of fear of the masses, instead of taking the fight against feudalism to its logical conclusion. Engels declared:

“Those classes and fractions of classes which everywhere betrayed 1848 and 1849, can be found in the role of traitors as early as 1525, though on a lower level of development.”^[2]

The work is a milestone in the development of Marxism. For the very first time, the method of historical materialism was applied to events of the distant past. A study of the Peasants’ War, and of Engels’ pamphlet, continue to offer important lessons to anyone seeking to understand Marxism and the class struggle.

A world in upheaval

Revolutions arise when the relations of production – such as between landlords and peasants, or slaves and slaveowners – inhibit the development of humanity’s productive forces, namely science, industry and technique. This contradiction was the driving force behind the Reformation and the Peasants' War. At that time, new, more productive capitalist relations were maturing. However, the feudal order stood in the way of their development. Society was at an impasse, of which growing sections of the population became painfully aware.

The Triumph of Death (c. 1562), Pieter Brueghel the Elder / Image: public domain

In the sixteenth century, Germany was a hierarchically organised feudal society, fragmented into the more than 300 small states of the Holy Roman Empire. Formally, the emperor stood at the head of this society. Unlike in England or France, however, there was hardly any central authority in the empire, since the level of economic development and the resulting interests of the various provinces were too far apart for centralisation.

The secular and ecclesiastical princes in the largest of the small German states profited from this. These high nobles expanded their territories into almost independent absolutist states, with standing armies and independent state bureaucracies. This enabled them to extend their power in relation to the emperor, as well as the middle and lower nobility and the cities.

This development had revolutionary consequences. Maintaining mercenaries and officials cost money. Even those who wanted to oppose the endeavours of the princes, or keep up with their pomp, had to find the money. For example, with the invention of gunpowder, firearms started to become the most important means of warfare. But only the richest could afford these weapons.

The feudal mode of production was based on the exploitation of the peasantry, originally through the payment of goods in kind, such as the tithe – a tax of 10 per cent of annual production, paid to the clergy – and the performance of unpaid labour on the landlords’ estates, the so-called ‘Frondienst’. These forms of exploitation were used to support the nobility, the clergy and the rulers in the cities. The peasants, on the other hand, lived off the food they grew for themselves in addition to working for their lords.

There were different degrees of exploitation. Serfs in Germany were almost slaves of their landowners, with hardly any rights. There were also bondsmen who enjoyed some personal liberties, but still had to provide labour for their landlord; and free tenant farmers, who only had to pay rent. However, the ever-increasing need of the ruling class for money created an enormous pressure towards the disenfranchisement and intensified exploitation of the peasantry as a whole.

By the end of the fifteenth century, the conditions for the peasantry had become intolerable. The landlords squeezed the peasants to the absolute limit. They invented countless new taxes and services, forbade emigration, restricted the use of common land in the villages, and even threw bondsmen and free peasants into prison to force them into serfdom. Here the landlords could subject peasants to the most brutal of tortures with impunity.

Forms of the lords’ ‘justice’ ranged from ear clipping, nose cutting, eye gouging, stretching on the rack, the chopping of fingers and hands; to death by beheading, ‘breaking on the wheel’, hot irons, and ‘quartering’. When death at last released the peasant from his earthly torment, the surviving dependents had to hand over a large part of their inheritance to their landlord.

At the same time, the rulers restructured the judicial system in their favour. Previously, in many places, aldermen from the village community conducted trials themselves and according to local customary law. Now the lords employed professional lawyers and codified the law – naturally in accordance with their own exploitative interests.

Bourgeois development

In order to make money from the surplus squeezed out of the peasants, the lords had to sell it in the form of commodities. This primarily benefited the cities and their bourgeoisie. Trade and manufacturing capitalism sprouted there. Whilst the medieval guild trades were still dominant, the first beginnings of wage labour were already developing. For example, in the form of the so-called ‘putting-out’ system, which was particularly widespread in the textile industry. Or in mining, which flourished in what is now the regions of Thuringia and Saxony.

Holy Roman Empire around 1400 / Image: public domain

The increasing extraction of precious metals had far-reaching consequences – and not just because gold and silver satisfied the growing demand for money. As Karl Kautsky explained in his book, Communism in Central Europe in the Time of the Reformation, mining also boosted the production of goods in the countryside, in addition to the cities where the metals were processed. Food was needed to supply the miners. Wood was needed for the shafts, railway tracks and the burning of ores.

In The Peasant War in Germany, Engels wrote that Germany's national production could not keep pace with the upswing in other countries. But in a letter to Kautsky in 1889, in which he praised his analyses of the relevance of mining, he fundamentally changed his assessment:

“I realised clearly [...] the extent to which gold and silver production in Germany [...] provided the final impulse which, between 1470 and 1530, put Germany in the lead economically in Europe, thereby making her the focal point of the first bourgeois revolution, in the religious guise of the so-called Reformation. The final impulse in the sense that the guild crafts and the commission trade reached a relatively advanced stage of development, thus turning the scales in Germany's favour rather than in that of Italy, France or England.”^[3]

German entrepreneurial families such as the Fuggers and Welsers were among the most powerful in the world. They concentrated enormous wealth in their hands, which they lent to the church, emperors and princes. Because of these business relationships, however, they were closely linked to the feudal rulers and enjoyed certain privileges. This favouring of individual factions divided the bourgeoisie.

The big bourgeoisie, or ‘patricians’, also concentrated power in their hands through their monopoly control of the city councils. The small and middle bourgeoisie demanded a share in this political power. The urban labourers and the poor had no civil rights and were therefore excluded from any form of representation. The patricians were therefore opposed by a bourgeois opposition and a revolutionary-plebeian opposition of the exploited.

Shackles of progress

Sixteenth-century society in the Holy Roman Empire was a “highly complicated mass with the most varied requirements crossing each other in different directions”.^[4] Nevertheless, many classes came into conflict with the old order, albeit for different reasons.

Nothing embodied this as much as the Catholic Church, which Engels described as the “great international centre of feudalism”:

“It surrounded feudal institutions with the halo of divine consecration. It had organised its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully one-third of the soil of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organisation, had to be destroyed.”^[5]

The pomposity of the bishops, abbots and their army of monks fuelled the hatred of the clergy among the nobility, the bourgeoisie and the exploited in town and country alike. The lucrative positions in the church were awarded by the pope, not the German nobility. They often went to foreigners. The clergy took money out of the pockets of the population through church taxes, the so-called sale of indulgences (i.e. the remission of the punishment of sins in exchange for money) or the sale of forged images of saints and relics. The high clergy were also landlords themselves. A significant proportion of the wealth went to Rome or its lackeys in this way.

The Catholic Church thus hindered the development of productive forces in the empire. At the same time, it increasingly lost the social functions it had performed in the past. The development of princely officialdom, the demands of rising trade and the invention of printing undermined its monopoly not only on reading and writing, but also on education and administration.

Nevertheless, religion was the ideological cornerstone of society. Engels explains:

“The dogmas of the church were at the same time political axioms, and Bible quotations had the validity of law in every court.”^[6]

The rulers used it to justify their position. For example, the pope crowned the emperor. Theology was used as the basis for the study and interpretation of philosophy, politics and justice.

Martin Luther

In the conditions of the time, it was inevitable that every social and political movement against feudalism first had to take on a theological form. Engels wrote:

“From the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, all the reformations and the ensuing struggles waged in the name of religion were, theoretically speaking, no more than repeated attempts by the bourgeoisie, the urban plebeians and the peasantry that rose in rebellion together with them, to adapt the old, theological world view to the changed economic conditions and position of the new class.”^[7]

The class content of the Reformation lay in the struggle over the interpretation of the Christian religion in favour of the rising bourgeoisie. However, due to the fierce reaction of the pope and the emperor to his criticism of the sale of indulgences, Luther became a symbolic figure against the old order and thus a centre of attraction not only for the bourgeoisie, but for all oppositional forces. In January 1521, Luther was expelled from the Catholic Church by a papal bull of excommunication, and in April of that year Emperor Charles V summoned him to the Diet of Worms, where he was called to answer for his heresy.

Luther had only argued for a reform of the sale of indulgences in his ‘95 Theses’ of 31 October 1517, and not for their complete abolition. He became more radical, however, as a result of his conflict with Rome, and through the sympathy he received from the people. As early as 1520, he preached armed rebellion against the Catholic Church:

“It seems to me that if the Romanists are so mad the only remedy remaining is for the emperor, the kings, and princes to gird themselves with force of arms to attack these pests of all the world and fight them, not with words, but with steel.”^[8]

Luther not only railed against the clergy, but later also against the emperor and those princes who had not joined him. Parts of the nobility also joined his side in order to enrich themselves with the church estates, and to break with the influence of both pope and emperor. As a result, not only many cities but also entire principalities became Protestant.

The imperial ban was imposed on Luther at the Diet of Worms. This meant that the reading and distribution of his writings was forbidden. Luther himself was considered outlawed. However, Elector Frederick of Saxony took Luther into his care at Wartburg Castle, where he worked on translating the Bible into German, among other things. This close connection with parts of the nobility makes it clear why Luther did not follow up his radical words with revolutionary deeds.

The masses

With the Reformation, society divided into three large camps, described by Engels as: “the reactionary or Catholic, the reformist middle-class or Lutheran, and the revolutionary”.^[9] However, it was only during the course of the Peasants' War that the division in the opposition to Catholicism came to the fore.

After all, the revolutionary elements also initially rallied to Luther. Engels noted how with his translation of the Bible, “in opposition to decaying feudal society, he held up the picture of another society which knew nothing of the ramified and artificial feudal hierarchy”.^[10]

Even though Luther was purely concerned with religious freedom, the exploited masses interpreted his writings, such as On the Freedom of a Christian, in a secular way. After all, the reformer had not only preached against the clergy, but also against the nobility. The oppressed thus took up the cause of freedom from feudal despotism, which they justified with Luther and the Bible.

Even before the Peasants' War, peasant uprisings such as the Bundschuh movement or the ‘Poor Conrad’ had become more frequent, but they remained localised. Conditions differed too much from place to place for them to coalesce into a general uprising. Their isolated conspiracies tended to be betrayed to the authorities, who persecuted those captured with the most brutal of tortures.

The Twelve Articles leaflet from 1525 / Image: public domain

However, with his ideas and translation of the Bible, Luther provided the oppressed with the starting point of a unified ideological framework for their various demands and goals. On this basis, the uprising was able to spread in 1525.

The Peasants' War began as a local affair. In the summer of 1524, the peasants in Stühlingen in the Black Forest rose up. According to legend, Landgrave Sigismund II ordered his subjects to collect snail shells in the forest so that his wife could use them as spools for thread. This proved to be the straw, or shell, that broke the camel’s back. Armed, the peasants marched in front of their lord's castle to protest against this arbitrary labour and excessive taxes.

By April 1525, the uprising had spread. In southern Germany and Thuringia, as well as in parts of Saxony, Alsace, Switzerland and Austria, the peasants took up arms and refused to provide labour or taxes. In many places, they were joined by urban workers and the poor. In some areas the bourgeoisie and lower nobility also gave support to the peasants’ demands – often out of coercion or a calculation for power, but sometimes out of sincere sympathy.

The rebels invoked the higher, ‘divine’ law of the Bible, which they contrasted with the arbitrary abuses of their secular and clerical authorities. Ideas from the Reformation served as a link in the movement. In order to control the interpretation of Holy Scripture, the demand for the election of pastors by the congregation was widespread. Protestant scholars such as Luther and his followers were often asked to decide on the legitimacy of these matters.

Despite his earlier radicalism, Luther began to play a mediating role once the Peasants’ War began. Engels wrote:

“He resolutely attacked the governments. He said it was due to their oppression that the revolts had started, that not the peasants alone were against them, but God as well. On the other hand, he also said that the revolt was ungodly and against the Gospel. He advised both parties to yield, to reach a peaceful understanding.”^[11]

Luther shifted further to reaction, however, when the uprising spread to Protestant areas and became increasingly radicalised. A turning point was the so-called ‘Weinsberg Massacre’. On Easter Sunday, 17 April 1525, peasants stormed the castle of Count Ludwig von Helfenstein and took revenge for decades of oppression, exploitation and mistreatment. The count and his companions were executed.

Confronted with the revolutionary energy of the oppressed, which was also directed against his patrons, Luther forgot all his old enmities. Now he called on the authorities – whether Catholic or Protestant – to show no mercy to the rebels. His famous inflammatory pamphlet, Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, reads:

“They should be knocked to pieces, strangled and stabbed, secretly and openly, by everybody who can do it, just as one must kill a mad dog [...] Therefore, dear gentlemen, hearken here, save there, stab, knock, strangle them at will, and if thou diest, thou art blessed, no better death canst thou ever attain.”^[12]

Luther now denied not only the Peasants' War, but also any rebellion against the authorities, even though he had previously preached it himself. The reformer also turned the Bible against the movement. Engels explained that, with the gospel, Luther sanctioned the “princedom by the grace of God, passive resistance, even serfdom”.^[13] Engels spoke of a hymn of praise “to the authorities ordained by God – a feat hardly exceeded by any lackey of absolute monarchy”.^[14] The bourgeois camp around Luther had expressly opposed the uprising.

The Haufen

The Reformation conjured up spirits that terrified the propertied classes – both Catholic and Protestant. In the Peasants' War, the oppressed began to organise themselves, initially against their local landlords. The Haufen (‘mobs’), as the insurgents' military units were called, were democratic organisations at local or regional level. They elected captains as leaders who were accountable to the troops.

This type of democratic control made it possible to utilise the military training and experience of noblemen who had joined the uprising for the movement. For example, Götz von Berlichingen ‘of the Iron Hand’, an imperial knight immortalised in Goethe’s play of the same name, led the Neckartal-Odenwälder Haufen, and Florian Geyer led the Schwarzer Haufen.

In general, the Haufen also organised themselves nationally, for example in Upper Swabia to form the ‘Christian Association’. When it was founded in Memmingen at the beginning of March 1525, the democratic organisation of the resistance in the form of an elected leadership was laid down in the ‘Federal Order’:

“So from each group of this association a leader and four councillors shall be appointed and sent; they shall have authority to act together with other leaders and councillors as befits them, so that the congregation does not have to be together all the time.”^[15]

In April 1525, around 1,000 representatives of the Franconian Haufen adopted the ‘War Regulations’ at Ochsenfurt, which stated:

“The supreme captain of the field shall be chosen by the Common Bright Haufen to have authority over all the people, to whom everyone shall also be subject and obedient, but with the order that the same supreme captain of the field alone shall not determine anything nor act without the knowledge and will of the ordered captains and councillors, who are or will be ordered by the whole Haufen.”^[16]

Such democratic alliances were revolutionary in themselves. Temporarily, the insurgents in entire regions held their fate in their own hands. The peasants, workers and poor themselves were able to discuss their next steps. And where the feudal powers had been defeated, this self-organisation of the masses had the potential to replace the old administration.

Reform or revolution?

As so often in history, the decisive question arose: reform or revolution? The Memmingen Christian Association also adopted the Twelve Articles in March 1525. It was the most widespread pamphlet of the Peasants' War.

From the title page of an anonymous pamphlet from May 1515 – the peasants are on the left, the nobles and prelates are on the right, and in the middle is a ‘wheel of fortune’, to which the papacy is bound / Image: public domain

Based on the oppressed masses’ interpretation of the Bible, the Twelve Articles attacked the foundations of feudalism. They stood for the abolition of the tithe, a reduction of the unpaid labour the serfs had to perform on their lords’ estates, and the restoration of old rights, for example the right to hunt, and the use of common land and forests. The election of pastors by the congregation was also included as a demand.

The reference to the Reformation and its function as a unifying element can be clearly seen in this most popular writing of the Peasants' War. The demands were justified by the ‘divine law’, which made the articles universally applicable.

However, in the third article, which is directed against serfdom as the most severe form of feudal exploitation, the compromising tone of the programme becomes clear. Although, according to the Bible, Jesus redeemed all people equally through his death on the cross, and therefore “we are free and willing”, the article states:

“Not that we would wish to be absolutely free and under no authority. God does not teach us that we should lead a disorderly life in the lusts of the flesh, but that we should love the Lord our God and our neighbour. [...] He has not commanded us not to obey the authorities, but rather that we should be humble, not only towards those in authority, but towards every one.”^[17]

The Twelve Articles expressed the masses’ hope of having a say through a compromise with the authorities, although their demands were directed against their basis of rule. The peasants were not a unified bloc. Some of them still had something to lose. In addition, the propertied bourgeoisie was also involved in formulating the demands. This was because the town of Memmingen had joined the Christian Association.

Even though the Twelve Articles were the programmatic starting point for many Haufen, the uprising often went beyond them in practice. The Weinsberg Massacre is just one example of how the Peasants' War could develop into a revolutionary war of annihilation against the authorities. Castles, palaces and monasteries were burnt to the ground in many places.

There were already radical factions among the insurgents at the beginning of the uprising. The ‘Letter of Articles’, which was written before the Twelve Articles, called for the rulers to be wiped out if they refused to join. Others came to revolutionary conclusions through practical experience with the intransigence and deceitfulness of their masters.

Overall, it was a dynamic situation: moderates and radicals switched between camps, while alliances between the blocs were forged and dissolved again. Local particularism and political inexperience made it difficult to unite the movement in the long term.

The rebels' horizons often ended with their own village or rural town. Traveling was dangerous, cost money and time, and was not even allowed for serfs. The masses mostly had no access to education or news. Further, it was primarily the local landlord who made life a living hell. If he offered concessions, the exploited often lowered their weapons and went home – only to be massacred afterwards.

Instead of realising that it was a matter of life and death, the rebels often refused to help what should have been their comrades-in-arms in the neighbouring village or town. In exchange for supposed concessions, they sometimes even participated in the suppression of the uprising. Added to this was the fragmentation of society into a multitude of classes and strata with different, often conflicting interests, which hindered lasting alliances even among the oppressed.

The Heilbronn Programme

In May 1525, however, an attempt was made to unite the uprising into a nationwide movement with a common programme. A peasant assembly was formed in the city of Heilbronn, where representatives of the various groups were sent to discuss their common demands.

The result of these negotiations, the so-called ‘Heilbronn Programme’, stood for a complete upheaval of feudal society in the wake of the Reformation. However, it was also characterised by the realisation that none of the estates were developed enough to carry out this revolution on their own. The programme therefore aimed to win over the nobility and bourgeoisie to the movement by making concessions.

In this sense, the programme demanded the overcoming of the economic fragmentation of the Holy Roman Empire by establishing the unity of coinage, weights and measures, and the abolition of customs duties. This would have meant the creation of a national market, which would have primarily benefited the bourgeoisie.

Concessions were made to the nobility. The serfs and bondsmen were not simply to be set free, but were to make redemption payments to landlords by way of compensation. Engels pointed out that this “aimed, finally, to transform feudal land ownership into bourgeois ownership”.^[18]

The Heilbronn Programme thus anticipated the liberation of the peasants in France in the 1790s, which was then similarly realised in the rest of continental Europe in the nineteenth century. This would have been the best solution for the development of capitalism. Unable to afford their ‘redemption’, most peasants would either have had to mortgage their land at usurious rates, or would have lost it altogether, creating a larger class of ‘free’, propertyless labourers, fit for capitalist exploitation.

Georg, Truchsess von Waldburg, a commander in the Swabian League Army who played a leading role in crushing the peasants / Image: public domain

However, the Heilbronn Programme was not implemented. Threatened by the alliance of the peasants with the revolutionary-plebeian faction, the bourgeois opposition and the patricians in the cities often moved closer together again. Most of the towns that had joined the uprising or remained neutral now opposed it.

Meanwhile, the feudal counter-revolution increasingly gained the upper hand. Protestant and Catholic princes recognised their common class interest and took united action against the uprising.

In southern Germany, the insurgents suffered decisive defeats. The Heilbronn delegates had to flee to escape the reaction. Meanwhile, the Swabian League – a military alliance of the southern German authorities – assembled a powerful mercenary army to put down the uprising. The necessary finances were provided by the Fugger and Welser families, who stood firmly on the side of the nobility.

Under the leadership of Georg Truchsess von Waldburg, the counter-revolution cut a swathe of destruction through the region. On 4 April 1525, thousands of rebels were killed in the Battle of Leipheim. With the Treaty of Weingarten of 17 April 1525, most of the Upper Swabian Haufen ended the fighting in return for the promise that they would henceforth be allowed to convene a court of arbitration in disputes with the rulers. They received no concessions with regard to taxes and labour.

In the Battle of Böblingen on 12 May 1525, the Swabian League defeated a 12,000-strong union of Haufen. Meanwhile, attempts to storm the Marienberg fortress in Würzburg failed. With the defeat at Königshofen on 2 June 1525, the Peasants' War in southern Germany was over.

Thomas Müntzer

The rebels were also defeated in what is now Thuringia. A coalition between the Protestant Landgrave Philip of Hesse and the Catholic Duke Georg of Saxony defeated them in the Battle of Frankenhausen on 15 May 1525. Mercenaries and horsemen faced off against peasants armed mainly with tools. Despite this, the counter-revolution resorted to a ruse: they agreed a truce, which they broke. As a result, the rebels suffered at least 6,000 casualties, while only six mercenaries from the princes’ army died.

Thuringia had been a stronghold of the radicals. In Mühlhausen, the plebeian opposition had overthrown the old patrician town council in March 1525 and transferred the government to the newly elected ‘Eternal Council’, in which the communist preacher Thomas Müntzer played an important role.

As a reformed priest, Müntzer was initially a supporter of Luther. He was even appointed by him as the first Protestant preacher in Zwickau in 1520. As Engels explains:

“He did not, however, preach quiet debate and peaceful progress, as Luther had begun to do at that time, but he continued the early violent preachments of Luther, appealing to the princes of Saxony and the people to rise in arms.”^[19]

An example of this was at Allstedt Castle, where he delivered the revolutionary ‘Sermon to the Princes’ to John of Saxony and his son John Frederick on 13 July 1524. Müntzer railed:

“We must destroy those who stand in the way of God’s revelation, we must do it mercilessly, as Hezekiah, Cyrus, Josiah, Daniel and Elias destroyed the priests of Baal, else the Christian Church will never come back to its origins. We must uproot the weeds in God's vineyard at the time when the crops are ripe. God said in the Fifth Book of Moses, 7, 'Thou shalt not show mercy unto the Idolators, but ye shall break down their altars, dash in pieces their graven images and burn them with fire that I shall not be wroth at you’.”^[20]

In his ‘Letter to the Princes of Saxony, Concerning the Rebellious Spirit’, Luther now publicly turned against his former supporter and called on the authorities to take action against the revolutionary. It was at this point at the latest that a rift occurred between the two.

Müntzer fired back in December 1524 in the ‘Highly Caused Protective Speech’, in which he insulted Luther as “that easy living flesh of Wittenberg”,^[21] among other things. He denounced the hypocrisy of the prince's servant as he covered up the exploitative lords with the Bible for his own personal purposes.

Müntzer wanted to eradicate the root of exploitation and oppression with his vision of reformation. This led him to communist conclusions, which Engels described as follows:

“By the kingdom of God, Müntzer understood nothing else than a state of society without class differences, without private property, and without superimposed state powers opposed to the members of society. All existing authorities, as far as they did not submit and join the revolution, he taught, must be overthrown, all work and all property must be shared in common, and complete equality must be introduced. In his conception, a union of the people was to be organised to realise this programme, not only throughout Germany, but throughout entire Christendom. Princes and nobles were to be invited to join, and should they refuse, the union was to overthrow or kill them, with arms in hand.”^[22]

When the Peasants' War began in southern Germany, Müntzer felt the time was ripe for revolution. He travelled through the region, where he influenced the radical elements with his ideas. In Engels’ assessment of the role of the communist agitator:

Illustration of Thomas Müntzer by Romeyn de Hooghe, 1701 / Image: public domain

“There is no doubt that this propaganda trip of Müntzer's added much to the organisation of the people's party [the forces of the oppressed masses], to a clear formulation of its demands and to the final general outbreak of the insurrection in April, 1525”.^[23]

Müntzer returned to Thuringia during the power struggles in the Mühlhausen city council. The patricians were successfully overthrown. However, the implementation of a communist programme was out of the question. The measures of the new Eternal Council did not go beyond the framework of a bourgeois-democratic republic. Engels declared:

“The worst thing that can befall a leader of an extreme party is to be compelled to take over a government in an epoch when the movement is not yet ripe for the domination of the class which he represents and for the realisation of the measures which that domination would imply. What he can do depends not upon his will but upon the sharpness of the clash of interests between the various classes, and upon the degree of development of the material means of existence, the relations of production and means of communication upon which the clash of interests of the classes is based every time. [...] Thus he necessarily finds himself in a dilemma. What he can do is in contrast to all his actions as hitherto practised, to all his principles and to the present interests of his party, what he ought to do cannot be achieved. In a word, he is compelled to represent not his party or his class, but the class for whom conditions are ripe for domination.”^[24]

It was no coincidence that Müntzer enjoyed greater influence in Thuringia. The region's mining industry and textile production, which flourished in Mühlhausen, already employed wage labourers who owned nothing but their ability to work. However, the majority of the opposition were still self-employed craftsmen and farmers. According to Engels, the communist programme was “less a compilation of the demands of the then existing plebeians than a genius’s anticipation of the conditions for the emancipation of the proletarian element that had just begun to develop among the plebeians”,^[25] and thus had only a narrow social basis.

Nevertheless, Müntzer set about making Mühlhausen the centre of the uprising for the entire empire. He was in active dialogue with the insurgents in southern Germany. As the counter-revolution approached Thuringia, he tried to mobilise the people of Mühlhausen and other towns to defeat the reaction together with the peasants near Frankenhausen. However, he was only followed by 300 men from Mühlhausen.

After the devastating defeat, on 27 May 1525, Müntzer was captured and severely tortured. He was beheaded outside the gates of Mühlhausen; his body impaled and his head put on a stake. The town itself was taken by the princely troops, lost its former privileges and had to pay heavy fines. Other supporters of the Eternal Council were also executed by the reaction.

Storming heaven

In the spring of 1526, the last bastion of the Peasants' War fell in Salzburg, Austria. Like every ruling class in history, the princes unleashed an orgy of violent retribution against their defeated subjects. In total, the feudal counter-revolution murdered between 75,000 and 100,000 rebels.

The standard of living of the masses did not in fact fall after the defeat in the Peasants' War, but this had nothing to do with the clemency of the lords. Even before the outbreak of the uprising, they were already living at a subsistence level; they could not fall any further.

However, the consequences of the defeat went beyond the toll of blood it took. According to Engels:

“From that moment the struggle degenerated into a fight between the local princes and the central power, and ended by blotting out Germany, for two hundred years, from the politically active nations of Europe.”^[26]

The Reformation had mobilised all the forces that opposed the feudal order. The objective task was to overcome the shackles that were holding back the rise of capitalism. The destruction of the Catholic Church would have been a significant step in this direction. But the bourgeoisie was not strong enough to impose its programme on the movement. In the face of the revolutionary fervour of the exploited masses, the bourgeois oppositional camp around Luther sided with the princes, who mercilessly crushed the uprisings.

However, this cemented the fragmentation of the empire. The Reformation developed into a struggle between the Protestant princes against the emperor and the Catholic princes. The devastation caused by the subsequent religious wars – culminating in the Thirty Years' War – plunged the empire even deeper into backwardness.

A copy from Jacob Murer’s Chronicle of the Peasant War (1525), depicting the escape of the abbot and monks from Weissenau Abbey / Image: public domain

This is why Engels spoke of the Peasants' War as a turning point in Germany's history. From Europe’s most progressive nation, it sank to the lower ranks. Even in 1848, the German bourgeoisie lacked the strength to assert itself against the princes without recoiling in fear of the young proletariat. Ultimately, it was the working class that swept away the feudal remnants in Germany with the revolution of 1918-19.

However, Luther's Reformation provided an important impetus for the struggle of the rising bourgeoisie internationally. In Switzerland, the Netherlands and England, Protestants brought feudalism to its knees. They mobilised the masses for the ‘Kingdom of God’, and created the kingdom of the bourgeoisie.

Today, many historians deny that the Reformation and the Peasants' War were a revolution. It is said that the peasants were largely concerned with their local demands, not with overcoming the system. They merely wanted their old rights back, which the authorities were increasingly curtailing. But these wise ladies and gentlemen neglect the fact that the loss of these rights, and the local sufferings of the peasantry, were all linked to the crisis of feudalism.

Müntzer and his comrades wanted a revolution against this dying system. They even called for the abolition of class society. This was impossible in the conditions of the sixteenth century. However, capitalism has created the material conditions for communism. Today, unlike in the sixteenth century, the vast majority are wage labourers who have nothing to lose but their chains.

Like feudalism at the time of the Peasants' War, the capitalist system is now at an impasse. Once again, the ruling class alone is standing in the way of progress; once again, the crisis is being passed on to the shoulders of the exploited. But the working class creates all of society's wealth. This gives them the power to bring Müntzer's struggle to an end and at last bring heaven to earth.

References

^[1] F Engels, ‘Notes and fragments from the history of science’, Dialectics of Nature, Wellred Books, 2012, pg196

^[2] F Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, George Allen & Unwin, 1927, pg 33

^[3] F Engels, ‘Engels to K Kautsky’, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 48, Lawrence and Wishart, 2010, pg 376

^[4] F Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, George Allen & Unwin, 1927, pg 49

^[5] F Engels, ‘Socialism: Utopian and Scientific – Special Introduction to the English Edition of 1892’, Marx Engels Selected Works, Vol. 3, Progress Publishers, 1973, pg 103

^[6] F Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, George Allen & Unwin, 1927, pg 52

^[7] F Engels, ‘Lawyers’ Socialism’, Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 26, Lawrence & Wishart, 1990, pg 598

^[8] Quoted in R H Bainton, Here I Stand: A Life of Martin Luther, Abingdon Press, 1995, pg 149

^[9] F Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, George Allen & Unwin, 1927, pg 50

^[10] ibid., pg 62

^[11] ibid., pg 60-61

^[12] Quoted in ibid., pg 61

^[13] ibid., pg 62

^[14] ibid.

^[15] ‘Die Bundesordnung der oberschwäbischen Bauernhaufen’, Dokumente aus dem Bauernkrieg, Reclam, 1983, pg 88, our translation

^[16] ‘Die Kriegsordnung der fränkischen Bauern zu Ochsenfurt’, Dokumente aus dem Bauernkrieg, Reclam, 1983, pg 115, our translation

^[17] F Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, George Allen & Unwin, 1927, pg 160

^[18] ibid., pg 123

^[19] ibid., pg 64

^[20] Quoted in ibid., pg 65

^[21] Quoted in ibid., pg 68

^[22] ibid., pg 67

^[23] ibid., pg 72

^[24] ibid., pg 135

^[25] ibid., pg 66

^[26] F. Engels, ‘Introduction to the English edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific’, Marx & Engels Collected Works, Volume 27, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1990, pg 290