The Peasant War and the Anabaptists

A year and half after Hutten’s death the great Peasant War broke out. The growing distress that had come over the peasant class with the transformation from a natural to a money economy had brought about a whole series of peasant uprisings, particularly in South Germany, from 1476 onwards. Among them were the peasant conspiracies that won historical fame under the names of ‘Bundschuh’ and ‘Poor Konrad’. However, they all remained locally limited and were soon suppressed. Only when the Reformation movement had stirred the nation to its depths did a peasant conspiracy succeed in covering the whole Empire, a conspiracy that was to break out on April 2, 1525.

Lassalle, who dramatized and exalted the story of the Knights, Hutten and Sickingen, accused the peasant revolution of being inwardly reactionary in its historical kernel, like the rebellion of the knights. But Lassalle overestimated the movement of the knights as much as he underestimated that of the peasants. The twelve articles in which the peasants brought together their demands lay entirely in the direction of historical progress. They demanded the election and recall of the clergy by the congregation, the abolition of serfdom and noble hunting and fishing rights, the limitation of excessive labour services and taxes, the restitution of the woods and pastures taken from individuals or communities, and the removal of arbitrary justice and administration. These demands were all completely right and just and above all they conformed to the prerequisites of the bourgeois period of history. What the German peasants demanded in 1525 was aimed fundamentally at the very things the French peasants achieved in 1789. In his critical assessment of the German Peasant War Lassalle permitted himself to be led astray by an excessively formal conception. He was only willing to recognize a real revolution where an old principle was replaced by a new one. Since he took possession of land to be a medieval principle and industry to be the principle of the new age, he incorrectly denied the Peasant War any revolutionary character because he thought it clung to the principle of land ownership and ignored industry.

The peasants managed to keep their great conspiracy secret. When they unexpectedly rose the ruling classes were so surprised that at first the peasants had, or seemed to have, good prospects. Even Luther, on April 16, advised an amicable settlement. Not the peasants, he said, but God himself, was in revolt against the blood-thirsty tyranny of the princes. What the peasants demanded in their twelve articles was, he said, mainly justifiable, and he advised a peaceful settlement on the basis of the articles. Now, if the bourgeois historians are right to say that Luther’s overwhelming personality made the Reformation, this intervention by Luther ought to have given the Peasant War a different turn. But in fact it did not have the slightest effect, and when the ruling classes had recovered from their first panic, when, that is to say, the princes rose powerfully to stifle the revolt in the blood of the peasants, Luther turned right round and published on May 6 his pamphlet ‘against the robbing and murdering peasants’, in which he urged the butchery of the peasants in the tones of the bloodthirstiest executioner. And yet it was empty boasting when he said that the blood of the peasants was on his head, for the princes, both Protestant and Catholic, needed no encouragement from him to carry out a cruel bloodbath amongst the peasants.

In contrast to Luther, Münzer stood bravely by the rebellious peasants. In Thuringia he was the heart and soul of the Peasant War. He had his headquarters in Mülhausen, which was then an imperial free town, and there set up a sort of communist community, which, however, did not last much over two months (almost exactly as long as the Paris Commune of 1871), from March 17 to May 25, 1525. When the army of the princes approached, Münzer went to Frankenhausen, where the Thuringian peasants had gathered in their masses, and here he suffered with them a terrible defeat. 8000 badly armed and undisciplined peasants, who had scarcely any artillery, were beaten by the same number of well-trained, well-armed soldiers with plenty of guns. Münzer himself was captured and executed after cruel torture. The claim that he died as a repentant sinner remains unproven and is only one of those slanderous libels that the paid hacks of the ruling class always direct against dead freedom-fighters.

As in Thuringia, the peasant armies were broken up with little effort by the armies of the princes in Franconia, Swabia, Alsace, the Black Forest and wherever they had risen. In fact the peasant movement did not fail because its demands were historically outdated but, on the contrary, because they were too early, because the national soil for them was missing, because there was not yet a German nation in the modern sense of the word. Individual towns did, it is true, join the peasants, but even they were only lukewarm and hesitant. The urban patricians showed themselves to be completely hostile. The guild burgesses had a similar policy to Luther. The urban plebeians were still far too underdeveloped as a class to support the peasants effectively. The knights were even less reliable than the towns. They mostly fought on the side of the princes or, if they did in the beginning stand by the peasants, they soon betrayed the uprising, like Gtz von Berlichingen. Only a few knights remained true to the rebels, like Florian Geyer, who was, next to Münzer, the most brilliant figure of the Peasant War.

In general the whole movement was ruined by the local and provincial disunity and the resulting local and provincial limitation. In every area the peasants acted on their own, refused aid to the fellow members of their class in the neighbouring provinces, and were wiped out one after the other in individual battles and fights by armies which for the most part did not number one tenth of the whole mass of the insurgents. One of the princes’ main weapons was the basest treachery which could only succeed because the peasants had sunk too far into wretchedness after centuries of serfdom to see through obvious trickery and deception. The princes lured the peasant hordes with glittering promises, then, when the peasants, credulously trusting these promises, laid their weapons down in order to go home, slaughtered them in their unarmed masses. The blood of the peasants flowed in rivers on German soil. According to the lowest estimates a hundred thousand peasants either fell in the war or were executed afterwards.

And yet, in the long run, this fearful defeat did not worsen the position of the peasant class. They had been squeezed so dry before the war that there was nothing left to take. It is true that many prosperous middle peasants were ruined, many bondsmen were forced down into serfdom, great stretches of common land were confiscated and a great number were made vagabonds or urban plebeians by the destruction of their homes and the laying waste of their fields. But war and destruction were everyday occurrences in those times, and, in general, the peasant class was already too low to suffer a lasting aggravation of their position.

The clergy, the nobility and the towns suffered severely from the peasant war. Monasteries and religious foundations were burnt down and the clergy’s valuables were plundered or melted down. Many of the nobility’s castles were sacked. They had proved incapable of opposing the peasants on their own. Since they had been saved by the princely armies, they fell more and more under the domination of the princes. Because of the half-hearted support the towns had shown for the peasants, the victorious princes levied fines from them and robbed them of their privileges.

Thus only the princes had any real advantages from the peasant war. They seized the property of the Church; a greater or a lesser part of the nobility had to recognize their authority, and the fines from the towns flowed into their coffers. Apart from the secular principalities there were still, it is true, ecclesiastical rulers, town republics, and sovereign Counts and Lords. But in general historical development in Germany was driving towards provincial centralization and the subordination of all the other estates of the empire by the princes.

An epilogue to the peasant war was the bloody persecution and extermination of the Anabaptists. They shared Münzer’s communist views but differed from him by not approving of a policy of violence and by being completely peaceful in outlook. But if they did not want to rebel with arms against the state, they still wanted to have as little to do with it as they did with the Church. They had their name from the fact that they rejected the baptism the church carries out on new born children. They demanded re-baptism or rather adult baptism, to which only an adult capable of thinking for himself should be subjected. What has today become a religious quirk was once a revolutionary programme, before which the ruling classes trembled.

Since the Anabaptists were of a peaceful disposition they did not share Münzer’s fate, but their peaceful disposition did not prevent Catholic or Protestant princes from declaring a bloody open season on them. Even the impotent imperial authority took part in this unworthy persecution. In 1529 the Imperial Diet of Speyer imposed death by burning as the penalty for Anabaptism. All over Germany flames sprang up round the stakes at which the imprisoned Anabaptists suffered a heroic martyrdom. Thus they were exterminated in Germany or driven over the frontier, and finally the Anabaptists in the Netherlands realised that they would have to fight back with the same methods that were being used to persecute them, that is with weapons. Jan Mathys, a baker in Haarlem, and Johann Bockelson, a tailor in Leyden, were the heads of this Anabaptist tendency. In the old Catholic town of Münster, a main centre of the Roman Church in North West Germany, they found a place to arm the opposition against their brothers’ persecutors. The town was involved in a violent struggle with its Bishop, whom the burgesses could not get rid of without the help of the town plebeians, so that the latter had a great deal of power. The Anabaptist movement succeeded, completely legally, in taking over all the positions in the town government and put up such a stubborn and spirited opposition to the Bishop’s attacks that finally the whole empire had to be called upon to break it. The town was reduced by hunger only after a fifteen-month siege, and on the terrible morrow of its brave defence the Christian Bishop celebrated his victory. But what one bourgeois historian after the other has been repeating for the last four hundred years, that the Anabaptist regime in Münster was a dissolute orgy of inhuman cruelty and bestial lust – that is impudent invention and bare-faced lies.