Daily Life During The Reformation (3 page)

Luther burning the Papal Bull of
excommunication with vignettes of Luther’s life and portraits of other
reformers including Hus, Savonarola, Wycliffe, Melanchton, Gustav Adolf, and
Bernard of Saxe-Weimer. Lithograph. H. Schile, c. 1874.

EDICT OF WORMS

In April 1521, Charles V was persuaded by the Elector
Frederick III, to allow Luther to defend his writings at the Diet of Worms.
Bearing a safe conduct pass, Luther was escorted to the city by Franz von
Sickingen, a German knight. Traveling in a small covered wagon, Luther arrived
at Worms on April 16, 1521, where he was greeted heartily by many of the town’s
people. Luther was escorted to the Bishop’s palace where, as the crowds
gathered, he was requested to recant. The following day he stated that unless
he was convinced by scripture, he did not accept the authority of the popes and
councils. He would recant nothing. Luther was dismissed but not arrested
because of his letter of safe conduct that allowed him 21 days to reach home.

Both the Church and the emperor had failed to convince
Luther to disavow his teachings at Worms. The princes who supported him hoped
that forthcoming events would significantly weaken the political and economic
power of Rome over Germany.

After Luther departed, Charles V imposed an imperial act
making Luther an outlaw; he could be killed on sight by anyone without danger
of punishment.

On the journey home, Elector Friedrich III had Luther
whisked away by his soldiers to his secluded Wartburg castle, to guarantee
Luther’s safety and to allow him to disappear for awhile. Rumors about his
death spread. Meanwhile, colleagues who favored the new beliefs began to
organize. While Luther remained at Wartburg Castle, Andreas Karlstadt, a
reformer in Wittenberg who had won over the city council to his views,
performed the first reformed Communion service on Christmas Day 1521. He did
not elevate the Eucharist during Communion, he wore secular clothing during the
service, and he made no references to sacrifice from the traditional Mass. He
spoke aloud, rather than whispering the words of Communion in German rather
than Latin. Rejecting confession as a prerequisite for Communion, he allowed
the communicants to take the bread and wine themselves instead of it being
given to them. In January 1522, the Wittenberg city council authorized the
removal of imagery from churches, affirming the changes introduced by
Karlstadt. Roman Catholic efforts to eliminate the new preachers of the
Reformation were unsuccessful and within two years after the Edict of Worms, it
was widely recognized that the movement for reform was too strong to be
suppressed. Luther returned to Wittenberg the first week of March 1522, where
his teachings aroused popular protests among Catholics that threatened to
undermine law and order. Luther detested civil disobedience and managed to
control the course of reform in Wittenberg.

The new Pope, Adrian VI, sent his nuncio to the Nurnberg
Diet of 1522 to insist that the Edict of Worms be executed and action be taken
promptly against Luther. This demand was coupled with a promise of thorough
reform in the Roman hierarchy and admitted the partial guilt of the Vatican in
the decline of the Church.

After the Edict of Worms, the inducement to reform turned
from simply a religious struggle into both legal and political conflicts, and
reformers themselves had their large egos and petty jealousies. Luther fell out
with Karlstadt for a time and started to campaign against him, denying his
right to publish and preach without Luther’s authorization.

Crucial decisions about who would preach in local churches,
Catholic or reformer, were now often made in the city councils or higher
echelons of secular government. By 1523, various influential reformers appeared
on the scene such as Thomas Munzer, an itinerant preacher, Ulrich Zwingli in
Zurich, and Martin Bucer in Strassburg, all advocating more radical reforms of
Church and society.

Although the Catholic Church prohibited common people from
reading the Bible, biblical phrases and ideas stuck in their minds after
attending evangelical sermons and listening to religious ideas that were
considered heretical. The overworked and heavily taxed laborers of the cities,
small farmers, landless peasants, impoverished journeymen, beggars, the
debt-ridden small masters, the impecunious knights, and the unemployed
mercenary soldiers all responded to Luther’s criticism of the authority of the
Roman Church and found consolation and incentive to action in the notion of
divine justice available to everyone.

Catholic priests countered with the notion that God had
created the earthly hierarchy of classes from peasant to king, and it was
against His will to try and change it.

Gaining support in towns and cities in central Europe, the
Reformation reached remote villages where peasants had a difficult time knowing
whom to listen to and what to believe. They were told to give up fasting during
Lent, to abandon their saints and images, that their priests should marry, that
faith alone was sufficient to attain heaven, and that the idea of purgatory and
indulgences was a sham. They were now also told they could divorce from an
unhappy marriage and even remarry. Peasants’ lives were in turmoil. Listen to
the priest or the evangelists?

PEASANTS WAR

As in other parts of Europe, the peasants in the Holy Roman
Empire lived a miserable life supporting the Church and the nobility with their
toil, sweat, and taxes, while their restrictions were many.

They could not hunt or fish to supplement their meager diet
or collect firewood for warmth, as the land, the forest, and the game in it
were the property of the landowner. The peasant would be forced to watch his
crops destroyed by wild animals or by nobles hunting on horseback in his
fields. If he wished to marry, he needed the lord’s permission and would pay a
tax for the right. When the peasant died, the lord of the manor was entitled to
his best animals and tools. The justice system, staffed by clergy, wealthy
townsmen, and patricians would take the side of the upper classes when a
problem arose. There were complaints and rebellions in local areas, but to make
their strength felt, peasants needed to organize.

In the summer of 1524, peasants in southwestern Germany
participated in uprisings partly inspired by Luther’s pronouncements and
reforms. Concerned also with economic and political grievances, many refused to
pay their tithes. By the spring of 1525, the rebellion had spread into central Germany,
and supported by the reformer Munzer, they published a proclamation known as
the 12 Articles of the Peasants. (See Appendix III).

In the first, relatively nonviolent period of the uprising,
the grievances were directed more against the clergy, particularly monasteries
and cathedral chapters, than against the aristocracy. But soon political and
economic protests against serfdom, labor services, and landlords’ exploitation
of forests, waters, and common meadows would become linked with demands by villagers
to administer their own tithes and to choose pastors who would preach the Word
of God without manmade additions that benefited only the Church.

It had been a large ideological step for most peasants to
accept the ideas of the reformers, who questioned the authority of the Church.
It was not much further to go to challenge the power of landowners, both
secular and ecclesiastical. On one estate, it was said that the wife of a count
began a rebellion by insisting that their tenants gather wild strawberries for
her on a religious holiday.

United in large numbers and carrying the only weapons they
had— scythes, axes, pitchforks, hoes, and clubs—the peasants set up camps and
formed what they called the Christian Brotherhood. The leaders held a
parliament in the small town of Memmingen in March 1525. From here, notice of
their actions and demands were sent to the Catholic Swabian League and to the
emperor explaining that the action taken was in accordance with the gospel and
with divine justice. The league stalled for time while it amassed an army,
making promises it did not intend to keep, to consider peasant grievances.

By this time, the entire country around Ulm was in a state
of insurrection led by Hans Muller, a former soldier of fortune. A black, red,
and yellow flag was stitched together under which, on Saint Bartholomew’s Day,
August 24, 1524, 1,200 peasants marched to Waldshut under cover of a Church ale
that was being held in the town. They fraternized with the inhabitants of the
little town, and the first Evangelical Brotherhood came into existence. Members
were asked to contribute a coin weekly to facilitate the expenses of secret
dispatches that were distributed throughout Germany, inciting a general
uprising, their message stating there should be no lord other than the emperor
to whom proper tribute should be rendered, and all castles and monasteries
should be destroyed together with their charters and their jurisdictions.

The inevitable conflict occurred primarily in southern,
western, and central regions of the German lands, and affected, to a lesser
degree, Switzerland and Austria.

As the peasant movement spread, Truchsess, the commanding
general of the Swabian League, gathered forces and kept the enemy under
surveillance, sometimes negotiating, sometimes threatening. But as winter
approached, little was done on either side. The peasant bands sacked some
monasteries while Austrian authorities at Ensisheim, in Alsace, the seat of
Habsburg power in the west, gathered forces, burned homesteads and seized
livestock. As peasant momentum grew, nobles deserted their castles for towns
whose loyalty and defensive walls offered more personal safety. As many as 300
clergy, some of them disguised and with the tonsure covered, fled to Uberlingen,
a safe haven, on Lake Constanz.

On January 20, an informal meeting took place between
Truchsess and representatives of the Austrian Habsburg power on the one side
and delegates from the disaffected population on the other. Truchsess succeeded
in convincing some of those present to go home. Others mistrusted his promises.
Even while their farms and villages were going to ruin, they refused to
disperse and return to the old oppressive system.

On February 14, having gathered a large mercenary force,
Truchsess sent the peasant bands an ultimatum, accompanied with the threat to
pursue them without mercy if they failed to accept his conditions. The whole of
central Europe now anticipated a bloody struggle. By the beginning of April,
war raged throughout Germany.

The preacher, Thomas Munzer, believed like Martin Luther
that the last judgment was imminent. A popular preacher, agitator, and
self-appointed leader in the peasants’ revolt, Munzer had preached a sermon on
July 13, 1524, at Allstedt, in which he asserted that the last days were at
hand. He saw the first signs of God’s final judgment in the peasants’ war. For
him, these rebellious subjects were God’s elect carrying out His plan of apocalyptic
judgment.

The Massacre of Weinsberg

With vengeance on their minds on Easter Day, April 16,
1525, peasants camped at Neckarsulm on the River Neckar north of Stuttgart,
learned that Count Ludwig von Helfenstein, governor of Weinsberg, along with his
nobles, had left his castle and gone down into the town to persuade the
citizens of Weinsberg not to join the peasant hordes, promising immediate death
to all rebellious peasants who fell into his hands.

Those camped at Neckarsulm made haste to the vulnerable
castle. Scaling the walls, they captured the countess and her children,
plundered the castle, and then appeared before the town. To the count’s dismay,
the townspeople supported the attackers and opened the gates. The peasants
seized the count, the nobles, and a cavalry unit. A nobleman called down from
the church tower begging for mercy and offered them money. The rebels shot him.
Then they marched the count and his retinue to a nearby field where they formed
a circle around them. The count offered to give them a barrel of money if they
would let him live, but he and 23 others were slaughtered and left lying naked
on the ground. The peasants set the castle on fire and then marched off to
Wurzburg.

Lack of communication and coordination between peasant
forces in north, central, and southern Germany, however, and pitched battles
with trained imperial soldiers cost them the war and a rapid collapse of the
movement. Most battles were one-sided slaughters. The defeat of rebel forces in
May, 1525, marked a major victory of the status quo.

Results of the
Peasants’ War

The war was a disaster for the farmers and villagers of
Germany. About 100,000 were killed, and large numbers were left homeless.
Disease and famine abounded. Bandits ranged the roads and forests, and beggars
crowded into the larger cities. Orphans, the sick, and the elderly were severed
from the normal charities. Many froze or starved to death in the vast forests
where numbers of them had vainly sought shelter. Rural artisans, miners,
foresters, bakers—everyone suffered. Intense resistance extended mainly from
late January to early June 1525, mostly in upper Swabia, the upper Rhine,
Franconia, Wurttemberg, Alsace, Thuringia, and the Tyrol. The rebel groups
numbered about 300,000 at their high point. Luther wrote two responses
concerning the Twelve Articles. In the first, he expressed sympathy for the
peasants and in the second, with his sense of civil order, he denounced them.