A People's History of the World: From the Stone Age to the New Millennium (25 page)

Calvin’s views likewise have been described as ‘a doctrine of popular obedience’. For it was ‘ordained by God’ that there should be a social order of rulers and ruled, and ‘because mankind was under original sin this order is necessarily one of repression’.
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This did not prevent their doctrines unleashing social struggles, however—struggles in which they had to take sides.

Luther, a friar turned professor who was part of the ‘humanist’ Renaissance across Europe, could convince individuals from that milieu. He was also able to win the protection of powerful figures like the elector
⁴⁷
of Saxony, Frederick, who had his own disputes with the church. But the real reason his teachings spread rapidly cross southern Germany in the 1520s was their appeal among the discontented social classes which Luther distrusted. Much the same applied to the spread of Calvin’s teachings in France a quarter of a century later.

Historians of the German Reformation today distinguish between different stages—an ‘urban (or burghers’) Reformation’, a ‘peasant Reformation’ and a ‘princes’ Reformation’.
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The urban Reformation swept through south German and Swiss cities after Luther became a public figure by defying the emperor at a famous assembly—the Diet—of the constituent parts of the empire at Worms in 1521. The cities were run by old established oligarchies, made up of the families of rich merchants and lesser aristocrats. These had dominated councils and senates for generations, even where there was some formal democratic structure. Many of the oligarchies had their own grievances against the church—for instance, because the clergy claimed immunity from taxation, forcing others to pay more—and were fearful of the powers of local princes. But they also had numerous ties to the existing social and religious order. They lived off feudal rents from land outside the cities, they looked for lucrative posts in the church for their sons, and they found ways to take a cut from the church’s tithes. So they were both attracted and repelled by the call for a ‘reformation’ of the church. Typically, they looked to piecemeal change, which would allow them to exercise greater control over the religious life of the town and the use of church funds without leading to any great upheaval.

But beneath this social layer were a mass of smaller traders and craftspeople—and sometimes priests, nuns and monks who came from artisan families—who were sick of paying for a priesthood which, all too often, was not even available to provide the religious consolations the church promised. It was their agitation which carried the Reformation to victory in city after city. In Erfurt ‘students and artisans’ took part in ‘assaults on the clergy’ and ‘the destruction of the canon’s house’ after Martin Luther passed through the town in 1521.
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In Basel the weavers demanded the gospel had to be grasped ‘not only with the spirit but also with the hands’, insisting ‘we should look out for fellow men with love and true faith’, diverting money spent on adorning churches to ‘the poor man who in winter lacks wood, candles and other necessities’.
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In Braunschweig, Hamburg, Hanover, Lemgo, Lübeck, Magdeburg, Mülhausen and Wismar committees of craftspeople and traders forced the towns’ ruling bodies to carry through religious changes.
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Wittenberg ‘was riven by conflict and overrun by image-breakers’ until the city authorities turned to Luther himself to implement an orderly change.
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In Strasbourg ‘the magistrates, pressed from below by the commune, were beginning to make changes in religious practice which were clearly illegal, at the same time hoping what someone—the emperor, the imperial
diet
, or a general council of the church—would relieve them from the mounting pressure for ever greater change’.
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In this way, ‘usually promoted from below, not by the city government but by the craft guilds’
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, two thirds of the imperial cities of Germany went over to the new religion. Luther ascribed the success of his doctrine to divine will. ‘The Word did it all,’ he wrote. ‘While I sat drinking beer with Philip and Amsdorf, God dealt the Papacy a mighty blow’.
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In fact it was class feeling at a time of endemic economic crisis that spurred the response to his teaching.

Nevertheless, the ruling councils and senates were usually able to implement sufficient change to placate the agitation from below: ‘Once the council had decreed evangelical teaching, had abolished the mass and absorbed the clergy into the citizen body, it seemed only natural to move decision making about the city church’s life from the streets into the council chamber’.
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The Peasant War

Late in 1524 a second, much more violent movement erupted. Known as the ‘Peasant War’ (and among some historians today as the ‘revolution of the common man’) it has been described as ‘the most important mass uprising of pre-modern Europe’.
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There had been a succession of local rural revolts across southern Germany in the previous half century. Now news of the religious turmoil in the towns, often spread by craftspeople in the burgeoning rural industries, served as a focus for the bitterness at years of deepening insecurity and stimulated a revolt that was both religious and social.

Impromptu armies of thousands, even tens of thousands, carried the movement from one area to another as it swept through southern and central regions of the empire, sacking monasteries, assaulting castles and attempting to win over towns.
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The feudal lords and bishops were taken by surprise and often tried to placate the rebels through local negotiations, while begging the great princes to come to their aid. The town oligarchies were at a loss to know what to do. On the one hand, they had their own grievances against rural lords, bishops and monasteries, and were under pressure from the poorer citizens of the towns to join the revolt. On the other, they were usually made up of men who owned land under threat from the revolt. Terrified, they generally stood aside from the revolt, hoping somehow to negotiate a peace.
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The rebels did manage to take some cities, however, and to swing others to their side. In Salzburg ‘miners, mining entrepreneurs and peasants joined’ the uprising.
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‘In Heilbronn the city magistrates, under pressure from the burghers and “especially the women” had to open the gates to the rebels’ who occupied all the convents and clerical establishments.
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In these ways the rebels took control of such towns as Memmingen, Kaufbeuren, Weinberg, Bermatingen, Neustadt, Stuttgart and Mülhausen.

Everywhere the rebels drew up lists of grievances, often combining these into local and regional programmes. One of the lists, comprising 12 points drawn up by the peasants of the Memmingen region with the help of a sympathetic artisan and a rebel priest, emerged almost as a national manifesto of the revolt as it was reprinted again and again.
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It began with the religious demands most important to the mass of people—the right of local communities to appoint their own pastors and to decide how to use tithes. But it went on to take up other demands vital for the peasants’ livelihoods—the abolition of serfdom, the abolition of various fees payable to the lords, an end to encroachment on common land, an end to lordly bans on the peasants’ hunting, fishing and wood-gathering, and an end to arbitrary justice.

This was not a
revolutionary
programme. It assumed that the nobility and the princes could be persuaded to accept the peasants’ case. Certainly at the beginning of the movement, most of its participants seemed to believe that things would be all right if only they could force the lords to reform their ways. ‘On the whole, the peasants were inclined to accept the nobility, provided it was willing to submit to their communal associations, the bands or the Christian Unions [of the rebels]’.
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The conservative historian G R Elton recounts, ‘On the whole the peasantry…behaved with extraordinary restraint’.
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From the opposite standpoint, Frederick Engels noted, ‘They showed remarkable lack of determination in points relating to the attitude…towards the nobility and the governments. Such determination as was shown emerged only in the course of the war, after the peasants experienced the behaviour of their enemies’.
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The ‘moderation’ of the peasants repeatedly led them to believe those who claimed there could be an amicable settlement of their differences with the lords.

Yet the most elementary demands of the peasants represented a challenge to the whole basis on which the princes and the nobility had ruled in the past. In their religious language the peasants were saying there was now a higher law than that enacted by the courts. As one village meeting put it, ‘No one but God, our creator…shall have bondsmen’.
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‘Godly law’ which represented peasant interests was to replace the ‘venerable law’ which subjected them to the lords and the church.

The lordly class was incapable of making concessions that would undermine its own class position. At the same time as pretending to offer concessions, the lords began mobilising mercenary armies. In April 1525 these began to go into action. As Elton admits:

Luther was horrified by the rebellion. At first, like the urban oligarchies, he was critical of the lords for provoking discontent. But once the peasant armies began to make serious gains he threw in his lot 100 percent with the lords. He wrote a tract, ‘Against the Murdering, Thieving Hordes of the Peasants’, which urged the lords to take the most extreme forms of vengeance against the rebels: ‘They must be knocked to pieces, strangled and stabbed, covertly and overtly, by everyone who can, just as one must kill a mad dog’.
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He wrote that the princes should ‘not stay your hand…Exterminate, slay, let whoever has power use it’.
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In a letter he insisted, ‘Better the death of all the peasants than of princes and magistrates’.
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He was not alone:

In fact there were Protestant preachers who threw themselves into support for the uprising. The best known was Thomas Müntzer. A successful university-trained cleric, he sided with Luther in his first conflicts with the pope and the emperor. But within three or four years he was criticising Luther for making concessions. Increasingly his own writings and preaching began to go beyond religious matters to challenge the oppression of the mass of people. The fulfilment of Christianity came to mean for him the revolutionary transformation of the world:

Such words earned Müntzer the wrath of the authorities, and he spent much of 1524 in hiding, moving through the country setting up small, secret groups of supporters. Luther urged the princes to take action against him. Even today, many mainstream historians treat him as a virtual lunatic. For Elton, he was ‘the demonic genius of the early Reformation’, ‘an unrestrained fanatic’ and ‘a dangerous lunatic’.
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But the only ‘lunatic’ thing about Müntzer was that he used the biblical language common to almost all thinkers of his time not to support class rule but to struggle against it.

When the revolt broke, Müntzer made his way to Mülhausen, in the mining region of Thuringia. There he threw himself into working with radical sections of the burghers, led by the ex-monk Pfeiffer, to defend the town as a bastion of the revolution. He was captured, tortured on the rack and beheaded at the age of 28 after the insurgent army was defeated at Frankenhausen by the Lutheran Prince of Hesse and the Catholic Duke of Saxony.

The crushing of the revolt had enormous implications for the whole of German society. It strengthened the position of the great princes immensely. The lesser knights, who had resented the princes’ growing strength and dreamed of subordinating them to a united imperial Germany, had sometimes taken up arms over the religious question, even showing sympathies with the first stages of the revolt.
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Now they embraced the princes as the guarantors of the continued exploitation of the peasantry. Likewise, the urban oligarchies, after vacillating initially, saw in the princes their ultimate protection against rebellion. Even the lesser burghers had little difficulty in reconciling themselves to the victors over a revolt they had been too cowardly to support.

But in accepting the new, enhanced power of the princes, the urban upper and middle classes were also accepting that their interests would not dictate the future pattern of German society. The crisis which developed as elements of capitalism grew within feudalism had led to a revolutionary upsurge. But the revolt was crushed, just as the revolts of the previous period of great crisis, in the 14th century, had been crushed across Europe. The urban middle classes, even while embracing the new religious ideology of Protestantism, were not prepared to use it to rally the most exploited classes in an onslaught on the old order. So the peasants were smashed and the urban middle classes left powerless in the face of the growing power of the princes.

German Protestantism was one victim of this cowardice. Lutheranism, by urging the princes on, made itself their historic prisoner. Luther’s original doctrines had undermined the hold of the church over its parishioners by arguing their equality in worship. But the Lutherans’ fear of revolt led them to reintroduce the old discipline. As one of Luther’s closest collaborators, Melanchthon, wrote in the aftermath of 1525, ‘It is necessary for such wild and uncouth people as the Germans to have less freedom than they have now’.
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It was the princes who would administer such discipline. Lutheranism became a double weapon for them after the defeat of the rebellion. On the one hand they could wave it against the Catholic emperor who sought to encroach on their power, and on the other use it to keep an ideological hold on the classes they exploited. So it was that a religion which had arisen in reaction to the crisis of German feudalism became the official faith in areas of north and east Germany where peasants were forced back into serfdom—just as Christianity itself had developed as a reaction to the crisis of the Roman Empire, only to turn into the ideology of that empire. Meanwhile, the peasants of southern and central Germany no longer saw any reason to embrace a Protestantism which had lined up with the oppressors in 1525.