The Great German Peasants’ War

The Great Peasants’ War was premodern Europe’s largest popular rising. Early stirrings in the southwestern corner of what is now Germany in the summer of 1524 grew to affect vast parts of the Holy Roman Empire in the first half of 1525, before final confrontations in Austria brought the uprising to an end the following year. Well over 100,000 rebels mobilised in an attempt to force a new, more equitable order. The peasants sought a world built on Scripture, without exploitative lords. They organised in military bands, agreed sets of demands, attacked castles, monasteries, and fortified settlements, and took on the professional armies of the Swabian League as well as those of other mighty princes. And they achieved some startling successes – notably the surrender of Weinsberg town and castle on 16 April 1525 – before crushing defeats in battles fought in May and June. Writing in 1975, Peter Blickle, the war’s most influential interpreter, argued that the peasants’ aim was nothing less than a ‘Revolution of the Common Man’. In the end, however, military force triumphed over radical vision and tens of thousands paid with their lives.

‘Der pawr wirt witzig’

This eruption of anger and violence had deep roots: the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, a complex and fragmented polity stretching over much of central Europe, was familiar with protests. In the early 1500s a series of small ‘Bundschuh’ revolts – named after the typical peasant footwear – broke out along the Upper Rhine. The late medieval era had seen a process of communalisation in the Empire, enabling not only major cities – such as Nuremberg, which acquired extensive territory – but also village councils to run local affairs fairly independently. This ‘bottom-up’ development was rooted in the growth of self-determined economic production, after many feudal lords decided to rely on rent rather than cultivate their lands themselves. Soon, therefore, associations of town- and countryfolk were punching above their social weight, gaining both political and religious influence. This is what the reformist preacher Johann Eberlin von Günzburg referred to when he wrote of the peasants becoming ‘witzig’ (aware) in the early 1520s.

In response, many nobles sought to bolster their powers through harsher conditions of tenure, in which peasants became serfs tied to their land and were subjected to marriage restrictions as well as humiliating death duties, such as losing their most valuable animal or garment. That this took place in the aftermath of Martin Luther’s posting of his Ninety-Five Theses and the upheavals of the Reformation is significant: the timing of the Bauernkrieg – as the war was described while it was unfolding – tells us less about an immediate economic crisis or single trigger, and more about the potent fusion of religious fervour and longstanding social tensions brewing in the Holy Roman Empire.

Articles of war

A map of the Empire in the early 1520s reveals those areas that became embroiled in the war. Its origins can be found in lordships such as Stühlingen where, in June 1524, peasants raised the Fähnlein, a banner symbolising armed resistance, and appointed the mercenary Hans Müller as their captain. The rising spread to northeastern parts of the Swiss Confederation, then Upper Swabia, Württemberg, Franconia, the Palatinate, and Thuringia in southern and central Germany as well as the (today French) regions of Alsace and Lorraine the following year. Areas around Tyrol in Austria were not pacified until the summer of 1526.

Word of growing unrest spread with lightning speed, infecting more and more rural areas during the peak of the revolt in spring and early summer 1525. In the Allgäu (now part of Bavaria), for example, the peasants forged a ‘Christian Association’ sealed by a sworn oath in February, according to which they pledged to stand together and defend the Holy Gospel. Each Haufen, or armed band, nurtured particular local grudges – at Stühlingen it was rumoured that the countess had asked her subjects to collect snail shells as spindles to be used by lady courtiers – but there was much inter-regional communication, and much common ground.

That common ground was expressed most clearly in the Twelve Articles, a document sometimes considered an early statement of human rights. The Articles, drawn from numerous individual complaints, were compiled from late February 1525 and then deliberated by three peasant bands – from the Allgäu, Baltringen, and Lake Constance regions – which had gathered around Memmingen in Upper Swabia. The two contributors known by name were Sebastian Lotzer, a journeyman furrier and author of several fly-sheets promoting the Reformation, and Christoph Schappeler, an evangelical preacher in this imperial free city and a man who leaned towards Zwingli rather than Luther. The Articles cover matters of religion (demands for communal control over the election and dismissal of clergy as well as the administration of tithes), politics (no fresh state laws), and economic grievances (regarding access to natural resources and reduction of seigneurial obligations). They culminate in a breathtakingly radical rejection of human inequality. Considering that the son of God had died for all of mankind, Article Three asks, why should some of us be considered ‘aigen leüt’, serfs owned by other people? 

It has been the custom hitherto for men to hold us as their own property, which is pitiable enough, considering that Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, without exception, by the shedding of His precious blood, the lowly as well as the great. Accordingly, it is consistent with Scripture that we should be free and wish to be so.

The reference to Jesus’ passion in the main text and supporting passages from the Bible (added in the margins of some versions) point to Reformation impulses, prompting Luther – who had initially shown a degree of sympathy for rural hardship – to furiously dissociate himself from the rising in a tract which called for the extirpation of these ‘murderous hordes’. In Luther’s view, the notion of ‘freedom’ belonged exclusively to the spiritual sphere; secular rulers were divinely ordained to keep order on earth however they deemed necessary.

Despite this, following their adoption by the bands at Memmingen on 6 March, and their subsequent dissemination via the new medium of print, the Twelve Articles – and numerous related sets of demands – galvanised the rebellion and soon became its manifesto. It would have been fascinating to see how such a programme might have been implemented in areas falling under sustained peasant control.

And that prospect was by no means as unlikely as it may sound, for the establishment was caught by surprise. At the time of the war’s outbreak Emperor Charles V was busy fighting in the Italian Wars, winning an important victory against the French king Francis I at the Battle of Pavia on 24 February 1525. Over the following months hundreds if not thousands of monasteries (for example Weissenau in early March), castles (Rothenfels in early May), and cities (the episcopal residence of Würzburg on 9 May and Freiburg im Breisgau on 24 May) surrendered when besieged by the rebels. Religious houses suffered particularly fierce attacks – and consequences. Abbot Jakob Murer, who had initially engaged with the peasants’ grievances but ultimately fled when an armed band approached, captured the assault on his own Premonstratensian abbey in his famous Weissenau Chronicle. Yet rather than a mindless frenzy, Murer’s depiction of the sack suggests the deliberate targeting – and symbolic reclaiming – of particularly offensive privileges of monastic life: the excessive consumption of food (extracted from countryfolk via feudal dues) in the hall, copious accumulation of wine (replenished through tithe payments) in the cellar, and the monopolising of natural resources (declared off limits to subjects) in the fishponds.

Some of the peasants’ gains, especially the early ones in Upper Swabia, required relatively little force, but rebel anger could erupt into brutal violence, most notably at the so-called Weinsberg massacre of 16 April, where, according to one clergyman’s account, the Count of Helfenstein and other nobles ‘were driven through the lances [of the rebels] contrary to all the rules of war and afterwards dragged out naked and let lie there’. Only once the resources of the Swabian League – a political association of principalities and cities under the military command of Georg III, Truchseβ of Waldburg – had been bolstered by imperial troops returning across the Alps after Pavia did fortunes change in the southwest. Badly equipped bands of peasants with limited war experience stood little chance against the ranks of seasoned soldiers and mercenaries. The events in the various regional theatres unfolded and overlapped in bewildering patterns. One of the most prominent peasant coalitions – the millenarian movement led by the charismatic preacher Thomas Müntzer in Thuringia – succumbed to the joint forces of the princes of Hesse and Saxony at Frankenhausen on 14-15 May. Further and ultimately decisive military defeats in the German heartlands followed over the next few weeks, at Würzburg in early June and at Pfeddersheim (Palatinate) later that month. The casualties taken there, the subsequent executions of captives (including Müntzer himself), and other punitive postwar measures against rebel areas resulted in a massive loss of life.

Smashing the Host

All rebels had their own mix of motives for participating in the uprising. Some became intoxicated by the sheer excitement of the situation and the prospect of freedom; others were swept along by unexpected developments. Many may have simply been forced to take part. The sources also testify to the involvement of a sprinkling of aggrieved townspeople and miners, the latter especially in the Tyrol.

The issues driving one peasant can be found in the testimony provided by one Blesy Krieg during post-conflict interrogations held on 29 August 1527. Blesy had 

defected from his lordship to the peasants [and] entered the convent at Oberried, therein smashed the pyx containing the Host with a blacksmith’s hammer; carried the Host to the altar in a monstrance, which he then also smashed. 

Then, having ‘donned priest’s robes’, he 

took two images of the Virgin and addressed [a statue of] St William thus: ‘What sort of warrior are you? Look at the blows [we have struck]! If you haven’t enough, I’ll give you another.’ 

Krieg concluded his assault by taking a stick and beating the statue of St William over the head. Found guilty on a further ten charges including theft, gambling debts, extortion, grievous bodily harm, threatening behaviour, and attempted rape, Krieg was sentenced to death ‘on Thursday after St Bartholomew’s Day’.

Although any such ‘confession’ needs to be treated with caution, Blesy’s account highlights the extent of the religious fervour behind the peasants’ actions. Rather than a carnivalesque release of pressure, his behaviour at the priory reminds us of the influence of Luther’s explosive critique of the Church. Krieg mocked the Catholic mass and he taunted saints. In the late 1970s Henry Cohn identified anticlericalism as a major factor spurring the peasants. This should not be conflated with a lack of belief – rural Christians across the Empire were still donating huge sums for the cure of souls and prayers for the dead on the eve of the Reformation. But the rebels resented the ‘fat cat’ priests who exploited simple folk’s yearning for salvation. Many priests over-charged for ecclesiastical services (most notably when selling indulgences); others demanded excessive dues from their tenants (the Church owned vast swathes of land). The transgressions at Oberried described by Blesy are those of lay people who felt empowered, no longer in need of mediation by the clergy, and who had readily absorbed sentiments such as ‘the freedom of a Christian’ and ‘the priesthood of all believers’ picked up from Luther’s prewar writings.

In his early statements, Luther had granted parish congregations extensive powers, including the right to elect their own pastors. Yet he backpedalled once it became clear that they might choose the ‘wrong’ candidates, particularly those who accepted no authority beyond the Bible, rejected infant baptism as unscriptural, refused to obey secular rulers in matters of faith, and followed their own ‘inner light’. Smeared as Schwärmer (‘spiritualists’) or Anabaptists (‘re-baptisers’) by their opponents, proponents of such ideas threatened the regime of the mainstream reformers. Since Luther envisaged religious not worldly liberation, the baton of militant leadership soon passed to more radical figures. One of them was the fiery Müntzer, who – having been forced out of his initial Wittenberg base, where he had ruffled too many feathers – advocated for a much more holistic godly society, gaining followers who named themselves ‘prophets’ and challenging princes to recognise their responsibility to implement scriptural commands in the here and now. Müntzer believed that the godly had to take the sword in preparation for Christ’s second coming, which he and his flock saw as imminent. Having done exactly that at Frankenhausen, resulting in a devastating slaughter, Müntzer was captured and executed at Mühlhausen on 27 May. Neither the revolution nor the end of the world had materialised.

Memories of war

Despite its failure, the war had significant repercussions. Albrecht Dürer, the great Renaissance artist, contemplated (and sketched) a monument to the fallen peasant before his death in 1528. Beyond the military defeats and the brutality of the retributions – which included the burning of entire villages – the war scarred the Empire, rivalled in collective memory only by the devastations of the Thirty Years War in the early 1600s. Rural enthusiasm for the Reformation – built on the hope that the new religion might usher in a fairer Christian society – faded and the Empire’s towns and villages grew cautious not to rock the boat. The remaining Anabaptists drifted further away from the mainstream churches, some becoming drawn into another challenge to the system, the short-lived Kingdom of Münster in the mid-1530s. But the peasants’ actions did have some immediate consequences. Shocked by the sheer scale of the rising, princes and lords may have exercised more caution when dealing with their subjects in the decades after the war, for example by reducing death duties. In the highly autonomous Three Leagues of the Grisons in the Central Alps (protected by alliances with the Swiss), two sets of Articles passed at Ilanz in 1524 and 1526 echoed elements of the Twelve Articles agreed at Memmingen. Here, as Randolph C. Head has shown, a rural polity did succeed in institutionalising clergy elections by the parishioners while stripping the local bishop of his secular powers.

The movement also inspired radicals well beyond the early modern period. In 1850 Friedrich Engels published The Peasant War in Germany written, as he later stated, ‘while the impression of the counter-revolution just then completed was still fresh’. Engels argued that three centuries ‘have passed and many a thing has changed; still the Peasant War is not so far removed from our present struggle, and the opponents who have to be fought remain essentially the same’.

For the East German historians and political leaders living in the socialist society that Engels and Marx had helped to inspire after the Second World War, anti-feudal peasant rebels – and especially a revolutionary such as Müntzer – had far greater appeal than Luther, whom they dismissed as a prince’s servant. In the German Democratic Republic, stamps and coins carried Müntzer’s portrait, while his birthplace Stolberg received the official designation ‘Thomas-Müntzer-Stadt’. The most remarkable manifestation of the DDR’s endorsement is Werner Tübke’s monumental 360-degree painting of the Thuringian rebels, Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany. Tübke’s panorama was commissioned by the Ministry of Culture in 1976 and took more than a decade to complete. Still housed in the gallery built specifically for it at Bad Frankenhausen, it opened to the public on 14 September 1989, just weeks before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

In historical scholarship, the long- and short-term causes of 1525 continue to be debated, the precise roles of the Reformation and socio-economic grievances being points of contention. From the mid-20th century, historians such as Günther Franz began to stress the political issue of encroachments by emerging territorial states, adding further levels of appropriation on top of seigneurial demands. For historians in the DDR, socio-economic conditions and class consciousness had not matured enough by 1525 to allow the overthrow of feudal lords by the expected group, the Bürgertum. In 1977 Max Steinmetz noted that city elites had welcomed the transfer of resources and power away from the Catholic Church in the early Reformation, but showed no intention to share such gains with humbler townsmen, never mind the rural population at large. Others, therefore, took the lead. At the same time, Peter Blickle proposed his seminal explanatory framework: a visionary remodelling of the Empire by the ‘gemeine Mann’ – an umbrella phrase for burghers and peasants – along communal principles of elected representatives, universal right to livelihood, and the priority of the common good over (noble) birthright and (clerical) privilege. His book, translated into English as The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants’ War from a New Perspective, formed part of a flurry of new research around the 450th anniversary of the rising, showcased in Robert W. Scribner and Gerhard Benecke’s The German Peasant War of 1525: New Viewpoints (1979). A collection of essays by authors from different national backgrounds, it featured ‘western’ as well as ‘eastern’, military as well as political, and social as well as religious approaches. Scholarly interest in the Bauernkreig then waned, not least because of the collapse of the DDR.

500 years on

This year’s quincentenary promises to reinvigorate the field, with commemorative events – including major exhibitions in Baden-Württemberg, Thuringia, and South Tyrol – and new publications. In an openly revisionist essay ‘Beyond the Heroic Narrative: Towards the Quincentenary of the Peasants’ War, 1525’ (2023), the leading early modernist Gerd Schwerhoff questioned heroic narratives such as Blickle’s: 

As enticing as it may be to regard the rebellious peasants collectively as precursors of modern emancipation movements, this narrowing of perspective runs the risk of missing key features of the historical events.

Those features include the fragmented and divided character of the movement, the forced involvement of many participants, and the lack of a universal vision.

For Schwerhoff, the war should be seen as ‘an open series of events or a process driven by situational dynamics’. Lyndal Roper’s Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War (2025) suggests, in contrast, that a peasant victory might have set the Empire onto a different path, towards a new kind of society guided by religiously inspired principles of brotherhood. Roper applies recent insights from the history of emotions to highlight previously neglected aspects of the experience of the war, such as seasonal factors and the thrill of exciting events shared with fellow rebels in unfamiliar places. Another new study, Der Bauernkrieg: Ein Medienereignis, by Göttingen’s Professor of Church History Thomas Kaufmann, interprets the war predominantly as a ‘media event’, suggesting that our perceptions of the uprising are shaped as much by the ideological preferences and idiosyncratic interpretations of commentators as they are by the actual events themselves. The extent to which such innovative yet contrasting approaches will reshape our perceptions remains to be seen; given the sheer scale of the resistance, to dismiss ‘heroic’ interpretations entirely would be going too far.

In retrospect, the German Bauernkrieg was neither the first, nor last, peasants’ war. But, like its predecessor in England in 1381 and a later Swiss manifestation in 1653, it belongs to history’s knife-edge moments, where – for a few brief weeks – turning the world upside down seemed entirely possible. What made 1525 so distinct compared to ‘typical’ premodern risings was its wide geographical spread over half of the Empire and its fusion of ‘bread and butter’ concerns with a religious ideology, as well as a captivating vision of a world without serfdom. Mindful of their status and privileges, there was only one way 16th-century lords could respond.

Beat Kümin is Professor of Early Modern European History at the University of Warwick. He is currently working on a history of the custom of tower capsule deposits in the German lands.