German Peasants' War

Dr. Eleanor Janega is joined by historians Andy Drummond and Professor Lyndal Roper to explore the dramatic events of the German Peasants' War, exactly 500 years ago. Together they cover the thrilling narratives of rebellion, heroism, and tragedy as thousands of peasants rose up against their suppressors. Monasteries became targets of their anger and their overflowing stores were pillaged to feed the peasant army. Eleanor discusses the key historical figures, the socio-economic pressures that led to widespread revolt, and the brutal battles that ensued. Gone Medieval is presented by Dr. Eleanor Janega. Edited and produced by Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music used is courtesy of Epidemic Sounds. Gone Medieval is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Matt Lewis?

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• 1:17Speaker 02

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• 2:51Eleanor Janega?

  Hello, I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and welcome to Gone Medieval from History Hit, the podcast that delves into the greatest millennium in human history. We uncover the greatest mysteries, the gobsmacking details, and the latest groundbreaking research, from the Vikings to the Normans, from kings to pokes to the Crusades. We delve into the rebellions, plots, and murders that tell us who we really were, and how we got here.

• 3:25Eleanor Janega?

  500 years ago, the largest rebellion Europe had ever seen, and would see until the French Revolution, began in the German lands.

• 3:36Eleanor Janega?

  There, peasants reacted to new impositions on their traditional way of life. The nobility increasingly were reconsidering how they would run their local economies. New industries like mining were taking off, and they now wanted to use their forests for making charcoal, as opposed to allowing their peasants to use it for firewood. Further, they also increasingly wanted their peasants to be "their peasants", and were consolidating land holdings under themselves, shattering old ideas of the land being held together.

• 4:10Eleanor Janega?

  Meanwhile, a theological revolution was underway.

• 4:14Eleanor Janega?

  The Czechs had already thrown off the sovereignty of the church in the previous century, and their German-speaking neighbors were now getting around to doing the same.

• 4:22Eleanor Janega?

  Inspired by the possibility of a new and more equitable Christian world, preachers and peasants in the south and east of Germany rose up, and were subsequently brutally repressed, both physically and intellectually.

• 4:37Eleanor Janega?

  I'm Dr. Eleanor Yanaga, and today on Gone Medieval from History Hit, I'm joined by Lyndal Roper, the author of Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War, and Andy Drummond, the author of Thomas Münzer: The Life and Times of an Early German Revolutionary, to discuss, you guessed it, the German Peasants' War. We'll talk about whether this is the rupture that closes the Middle Ages, and why we're so often keen to forget both it and its legacy.

• 5:13Eleanor Janega?

  Lyndal and Andy, welcome to Gone Medieval.

• 5:17Speaker 05

  Thank you. Great to be here.

• 5:18Eleanor Janega?

  I'm so excited to have you on because we're going to talk about one of my favorite things today, which is the Peasants' War. For our listeners who might not have a great grounding in this, I think we kind of have to start before the war itself, because this isn't something that just comes out of nowhere. So Lyndal, can you give us a potted history of what's happening on a social level in the German lands at this kind of point, the beginning of the 16th century?

• 5:46Speaker 05

  Well, you've got an economy which is changing. And it's changing because there is more trade, and what you have is a move away from a subsistence economy to something where you have mining even more. You need a whole lot of charcoal to fuel the furnaces so that you can separate the ore out. You have the development of mills that are also drawing metal. You have the development of crops like flax, which are for textile production in a big way. And you have a lot of weaving, which is done by groups of people. They're still trying to use a household workshop system,

• 6:29Speaker 05

  but that's starting to go a bit by the board as you have a putting out system starting to develop. So all this means that you have, in a feudal society, a lot of things starting to change and to become much more monetized and connected with long-distance trade. So that's one thing that's happening. The other absolutely major thing that happens is the explosion of print. And this is really important because that's what makes Luther's Reformation possible. But it's also what makes the peasants' war possible. Both of those things are happening and it was just an extraordinarily exciting time,

• 7:14Speaker 05

  I would say, where people are starting to question all kinds of things about religion.

• 7:19Eleanor Janega?

  Absolutely. I mean, and speaking of religion, Andy, what are the average people on the ground in the German lands thinking this time? Because, you know, if you're me and you spend all of your time thinking about Bohemia, the neighbors next door have had full-scale religious revolution already at this point in time, which includes like toppling lords, taking over castles, the whole nine yards, you know, and they have been hanging out doing this since last century. But you also, of course, have these new German ways of looking at this as well. You know, isn't this something that an average peasant would know about or be involved in?

• 7:56Speaker 06

  I think that there was a lot going on towards the end of the 15th century and into the 16th in terms of the way that intellectuals in particular viewed history, viewed their place in history, viewed their relationship with, as you say, people like the Bohemians and so on. Whether that filtered down to the peasantry is hard to say because the peasantry would still be in the group of the church to a large extent. Any knowledge that they had of the outside world would be filtered through the spectacles of the church, if you like, which didn't stop, obviously, the peasantry from having occasional outbursts.

• 8:40Speaker 06

  There's a famous one in 1476. There were various ones during the early part of the first decade of the 16th century into the second decade. So the peasants were rebellious. They were restless. But those who led the peasants were, generally speaking, over religious persuasion. I suppose that's a legacy of the Middle Ages. But my argument would be there was difficulty in that period to be revolutionary, rebellious and so on, without actually primarily attacking the church in some shape or form. Anything that the peasants were doing had certainly a religious flavour to it.

• 9:21Speaker 06

  But arguably, it took Martin Luther, I hate myself for saying this, but it took Martin Luther to actually prod them over the line, as it were, and then start taking the reform of religion seriously as part of their campaign for justice.

• 9:39Eleanor Janega?

  I mean, I suppose there's so much reform going on at this time more generally, you know, and when we're in the German lands, we're in the Holy Roman Empire. And it's so difficult, you know, I've started you off by asking questions about society and religion as though we can ever disentangle the two things, right? Because we're also in this situation where we've got Charles V on the Holy Roman Imperial throne, and he's wielding a whole lot of power across Europe. He's in charge of Spain as well as the Holy Roman Empire. And we've got a situation where there's kind of some power grabs happening in terms of the local princes and things back in Germany. It's not so much that the cat is away, it's just that the cat has an absolutely huge amount

• 10:24Eleanor Janega?

  of property to be looking at and doesn't know what's going on. But Lyndall, could you tell us a little bit about the political circumstances for the nobility at the time?

• 10:35Speaker 05

  I think you're absolutely right. What's going on here is that you have a clerical elite, if you like, you have bishops, you have abbots, you have all these monastic officials who belong very often to exactly the same princely families, so that you've got an integrated elite. Whereas Andy says, when you attack the church, if you start attacking monasticism, and if you attack abbots and bishops, you are also attacking the same set of families who are in power and who are the rulers. And I think that's why this attack becomes so explosive.

• 11:20Speaker 05

  But what's so interesting about the nobility at this point is that there isn't just one type of nobility. It's a very complicated social group. You have some nobles who rule territories and who have huge resources. But then you often have tiny little pocket handkerchief nobles. And very often what happens is political power, and I think this is really hard for us to get our heads around. Political power is shared. So for example, in Munsfeld, you've got a group of three counts who rule the place. It's not just one. And in Saxony too, you get sovereignty being divided and shared within the family.

• 12:04Speaker 05

  It is very much a family thing, political power. But then lower down in the same nobility, you get people who really are trying to make a living, basically off feuding and robbing. And they go for whoever offers them the most money. And that group, I think, is absolutely fascinating in the peasants' war. And it also offers some of the most technicolor characters, like Goetz von Bellishingen, who is the knight with the iron fist because he had an iron prosthesis, which he had in place of his hand. So Goetz von Bellishingen is always recognizable. And it's these people who often go over to the peasants.

• 12:48Speaker 05

  And that is quite extraordinary and quite a feature of the whole thing. Goetz himself seems to have said, I'm on the other side, I'm a noble. And they said, no, Goetz, we want you to be our leader. And he described how they clapped him on the back. And so he was forced to be a peasant leader. Of course, you can't believe anything that Goetz von Bellishingen said. He wrote it all down in his nineties. And in any case, there's always another story underneath the story that Goetz von Bellishingen tells.

• 13:18Eleanor Janega?

  There's a similar kind of situation happening with the clergy as well, isn't there, Andy? Because again, just as you were saying, Lyndall, you have higher ups who are a member of the princely and noble classes. It's not going to be the Bishop of Salzburg that's going to go off about things. But then you also have this kind of divide in terms of where clergy are stationed and who they might choose to support as well. You know, Luther wants Protestantism, obviously. I don't know if you've heard that. He is very much a kind of urban guy who's hanging out in the cities. And not all clergy who are advocating for reform want the same thing, right?

• 13:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, the top brass in the church were the same people who were the top brass in society. The Archbishop of Mainz, for example, I think I'm right in thinking he was one of the several electors to the empire. And as you would expect, they were as corrupt as hell. They lived the life of Riley, much to the horror of people lower down in the church, certainly. They certainly weren't giving the church a good name. There was a very easy target for Luther in a way when he came along in 1517 with his 90 odd feezes. But lower down, as you say, there was actually a division between the urban clergy and the rural clergy. I think famously Andreas von Carlstadt, who was one of the leaders of

• 14:40Speaker 06

  the German Reformation in the early years, effectively refused point blank to go off to his parish, which is out in the sticks. So he appointed somebody else to be his stand-in to go out there and get up in the pulpit on a Sunday because Carlstadt wasn't having any other getting mud on his shoes or anything like that. The lower down you go in the church, the more likely the clergy were to sympathize with what Luther was saying up in the middle ranks, if you like. But also, if you were in the towns and cities, you were also more likely to be sympathetic to Luther. There was division everywhere, both vertically

• 15:20Speaker 06

  and horizontally, which made for a powder keg. So when Luther dropped the matching, you had to stand back and watch all horribly wrong in some instances because after he was spirited off to the Vatborg, things that went on in Wittenberg in his absence were absolutely horrifying. So he had to come back and sort it all out because people were doing things that he really did not want them to do radical.

• 15:46Eleanor Janega?

  And as you say, you know, this is a powder keg situation. So we've got political tumult. We are reappraising our relationship to cities, to finance, to religion. It's all up in the air. And then along comes a little apocryphal story that I'm going to make Lyndall tell, even though it's probably not real, but and then it all kicks off because someone needs snail shells.

• 16:13Eleanor Janega?

  Lyndall, can you tell us this story that is largely a myth about how the peasants war begins?

• 16:19Speaker 05

  Yeah, it is a myth, and yet it's a myth that a number of people retell, and it's a really powerful story. It's that the peasants were forced to hunt for snail shells so that the Countess Stullian could use these snail shells to wind her yarn around. Now, we don't know whether that is even possible. I can't imagine winding yarn around a snail shell. And it may also be that snail shells were actually used as a form of sound insulation. I think what's so interesting about that story is that it connects the grievances of the peasants war to women and to women asking more than they should, and this being seen as unfair.

• 17:03Speaker 05

  And it's about things that you're asked to do, feudal obligations that are absurd. And of course, with the Enlightenment, that's exactly the story that people wanted to tell. I'm not sure that is really what caused the peasants war. I don't think it's that there were a whole lot of grievances that caused it. Because it seems to me it doesn't make sense unless. You think about the kind of transformation that people can go through in a very short period of time when they change religious beliefs. And just to go back to what Andy was talking about, and Andreas Karlstadt, who loved having really fabulous clerical

• 17:46Speaker 05

  vestments, came back from Rome with these wonderful clothes. But then, it's the Reformation and the early 1520s and his experience of leading the Reformation in Wittenberg when Luther isn't there, that completely radicalizes him. And it's changed totally. He no longer dresses in all fine clothes, he wears peasant clothes and a peasant hat, so much so that when he goes to argue with Luther at Jena, Luther doesn't recognize him because he's wearing a peasant hat. And Karlstadt gives up academic titles, he says they just lead

• 18:28Speaker 05

  to envy and division. And what he does is then go back to Orlamunde, where he'd always paid someone to preach instead of him. And he does all that work. He leaves the university, he starts talking to the people in the congregation, he starts reading the Bible with them, and he starts getting them to do exegesis of scripture. And that is just a huge change. And it is an example of the way in which the Reformation can, and not just religion, but all kinds of ideas can radicalize people in a very short space of time when they have the vision of how the world could be different.

• 19:12Eleanor Janega?

  Oh, absolutely. And I mean, Andy, you've written a wonderful book on one of the more radical religious thinkers of the time, Münzer, who unfortunately is not a household name, and I kind of wish that he was. Can you tell us a little bit about his vision for the Reformation?

• 19:31Speaker 06

  Yeah, Minter was slightly younger than Luther. I think they were about six years apart when they were born. He started his career in the church in a fairly normal way, going to university, picking up a few degrees as one does, and then travelling through the institutions during the second decade of the 16th century. I think it's fair to say that Luther's interventions in 1517 did inspire Minter as well as plenty of other people. And between 1517, 1520, the very few pieces of evidence that we, biographical evidence that we have of Minter,

• 20:12Speaker 06

  indicates that he was a proud supporter of what Luther was trying to do. Nobody was called a Lutheran in those days, I should point out, but these two guys were certainly going along the same road. In 1519, Minter was in a town called Utterbog, where the local monks were complaining bitterly about Minter's take on, I think it was the tyrants and the whoremongers or something, who were actually the bishops. The monk was appalled by that. But when Minter finally got a more permanent job in the summer of 1520 in the town of Svikau, which was quite a large town in those days, it was actually, I think, slightly bigger than Leipzig in terms of

• 20:57Speaker 06

  population. And it was bang in the middle of the silver mining area. It had a huge weaving industry. It was a very rich town. Minter got a job there in one of the two main churches, and he met up there with a whole bunch of radicals, led by a man called Nicholas Stork. Their radicalism was inherited, so far as we know, from the Bohemians, whom we mentioned earlier, the Bohemian Tabarites. Together, but not necessarily as a team, but between Minter and Stork, they fairly stirred things up in Svikau.

• 21:36Speaker 06

  And while Münster believed he was carrying forward the reform movement, which he was, those in Wittenberg were not quite so sure about it. And there were one or two rather annoyed letters flitting between Wittenberg and Sfikau, telling Münster basically to calm down a bit, don't push things too far. Ultimately, he didn't calm down a bit and he actually got thrown out of town. But that was the point, I think. Coincidentally, he actually got thrown out of town, I think it was on the sixteenth of April, fifteen twenty one, which was precisely the day that Luther arrived in Worms to appear before the emperor to account for his dreadful heresies.

• 22:19Speaker 06

  So after Sfikau, Münster headed off to Bohemia and then eventually he got kicked out of Prague as well, but came back. But from that point onwards, I think he and Luther, certainly their paths diverged. And they never got on after that, it has to be said. I think the two of them had met in Wittenberg, fifteen seventeen, fifteen eighteen perhaps. But there were remarkably little correspondence between the two. Münster wrote to Luther a couple of times in letters that we have preserved. And I think I'm right in saying there are no letters preserved from Luther to Münster. Luther left it to his lieutenants to do the dirty work there, I think.

• 23:04Speaker 06

  But yeah, after fifteen twenty one, Münster was going down a more radical path than Luther. And I think, as I said earlier, when Luther came back from the Wartburg and started rowing back in some of the more radical things that Karlstadt had been up to, and Münster definitely saw that as a kind of betrayal of what the Reformation should be doing.

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• 25:15Speaker 01

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• 25:51Speaker 02

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• 26:19Speaker 03

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• 27:31Eleanor Janega?

  And this all then comes to a head. We get to 1524 and well, it's kicked off, hasn't it? The match is lit in a particularly violent way. You know, whether or not this has anything to do with snail shells, it certainly has something to do with people feeling as though a religious reorganization of society should lead to a reorganization of society more generally. I think that that would be a fair thing to say. This is difficult because I've kind of been dividing up the ways that we talk about German society at this time, as though I can in any way disentangle.

• 28:12Eleanor Janega?

  The religious from the social and we really see this, don't we, Lynda? When violence actually kicks off because we have peasants who are leading these kind of violent sorties, but they are both secular and religious targets for the violence. Yes?

• 28:30Speaker 05

  Well, I'm not sure I'd agree that the peasants are violent. It depends on what you mean by violent. Yes, they do attack property. Yes, they refuse to carry out their feudal obligations, but I wouldn't call that violent. For the most part, it's pretty nonviolent. And that's why when things do change in the spring, it's such a shock. So it mostly starts by groups of peasants gathering together. So they'll gather together in the local village. And it's really interesting, this, the word that is so important here is the geminder. The geminder is a German word that's ambiguous between your local parish.

• 29:11Speaker 05

  So it can be religious community, but it's also the village community, a secular community. And it's just the same word. And that's really important because the religious geminder and the secular geminder are the same thing. So how it often proceeds is that the geminder will meet and they'll swear brotherhood to each other. And swearing brotherhood, you might think, oh, that's just words. But to swear an oath of brotherhood is to infringe your feudal oath. And it was punished quite severely. The punishment for that would be the loss of the fingers with which you swore the oath. And if those fingers are chopped off, you can't work. So it's quite a step to make such an oath.

• 29:54Speaker 05

  And then how it works is that group will write a letter very often. And they do have people writing letters for them, acting as notaries. They'll write a letter to the next village and they'll say, we have sworn an oath of brotherhood. We would like you to come to us and swear brotherhood with us. And then there's one version of this in which the writer adds, and if you don't come, we will come to you and you won't be laughing.

• 30:26Speaker 05

  And quite often, there can be an element of threat in all of this. But then I think you even have to take that with a pinch of salt, because of course afterwards, of course, you say, I was forced, I had to swear in it, and so I did. Whereas what is so striking is that this whole movement spreads like wildfire, and I don't think it could have done that if it was all done by coercion. That's just not how it works, because you're asking people to take quite a risk. You have to have really strong coercion to make them override that risk, unless they really want to do it too. So as these groups get bigger and bigger, and that's what starts to happen, particularly once you get to early spring,

• 31:11Speaker 05

  they then start meeting, and then they start to march, and then they start turning up in front of convents and monasteries initially, and demanding that they be let in, and they want to take the supplies, they want to drink the wine and the beer. And very often, they then might burn the manuscripts, might burn the library. You can look at that and say, oh, it's just willful destruction, but I don't think it is. I think what historians haven't really understood is that the peasants' movement is a huge outpouring of anti-monastic feeling.

• 31:54Speaker 05

  I think that's what powers a lot of it. And these monasteries are really powerful institutions. If you travel around Germany today, you can see them because they stand out in the landscape. They're often outside towns, there are also many monasteries inside towns, but they're huge centres of wealth and also of learning.

• 32:18Speaker 05

  But Prit has just come in. We've got a new understanding of what religion should be. And that religious understanding condemns monasticism. Because monks are seen as practicing a kind of religion which is not about God's word. It's not about living according to God's word, being biblical. It's about prayer, exercise, celibacy, renunciation, and a whole way that you spend your day. And it's about these institutions having wealth and power. So although a lot of the initial reformation critique is directed against the mendicant orders, the Franciscans and those who beg, in fact, this movement is directed against the property.

• 33:02Speaker 05

  They go for these really rich monasteries and convents. And we've been able to work out that in the area of the Peasants' War, because no one had ever looked at how many institutions there were or what actually happened. And what we've been able to find out is really quite extraordinary because we found over 600 monasteries and convents that were attacked in some way or were harmed during the Peasants' War. And that is half of the total. And that just gives you a sense of how widespread and how powerful such a movement is. Because of course, if you get hold of monastic supplies, you can supply an army. If you get hold of monastic wealth,

• 33:45Speaker 05

  you can pay for the supplies that you might need at the next town without imposing on the local peasantry. And if you can get hold of a monastery like that of the Chetonic Knights, who happen to have arsenals, you've got hold of weapons as well. So I think that is a really important part of what happens.

• 34:05Eleanor Janega?

  So here we have the peasants. And it kicks off initially in the southwest of what is now Germany. And we have them sort of hitting monastic targets and taking things. And you know, and it must be said by force, but they are certainly doing that. How do secular leaders react to this? I can't say that they were just like, oh, that's fine, you know, let the peasants have a nice time and this will all die down eventually, right? They get upset to see this happening, no?

• 34:37Speaker 05

  Actually, what's surprising is how long it takes them to respond. Because you'd think, just put this revolt down. They had tried to do that the previous year in 1524, and they seemed to have succeeded. But they had a number of problems. One of the problems is that the main force that could have put down the revolt in the south was the Swabian League. And this was a league of a whole series of towns. It even included some religious figures, some abbots and bishops. And it was held together. It wasn't all that old, and it basically worked on compromise. And like any large organisation,

• 35:19Speaker 05

  if you want to put an army together, that's going to cost a lot of money. And it's very difficult to get agreement, to get that money and get the force organised. So they do eventually get the Swabian League and organise militarily. But that does take a while. And one of the issues is that many of the mercenaries who they could have used were in Italy, because the Italian wars were still continuing. And this gives a vacuum in which the peasants are able to succeed to begin with. So they're responding with a kind of delay and with some problems. While what you can also see is other towns really not wanting

• 36:03Speaker 05

  to get involved in a bloody kind of suppression of revolt. So some of the towns' representatives are quite worried about this. Nuremberg is not keen to proceed. And some of the rulers are worried too. And Friedrich of Saxony wanted to negotiate. And Friedrich of Saxony is Luther's ruler. It is very striking that he takes quite a different course to Luther. He writes some extraordinary letters to his brother in which he's just very resigned. And he says, if this is what God wants, and God wants the peasants to win, then there's nothing that we can do. They're quite extraordinary letters to read. And okay, he was on his deathbed.

• 36:48Speaker 05

  But it's an attitude which isn't unique, and I think...

• 36:54Speaker 05

  Gives you an insight into the extent to which the peasants' war made rulers unsure of their position, unsure that they were acting in the right way. And I think it led to something of a crisis of self-confidence. So it does take quite a while for the princes to organize and to put together military force. And it really takes Philip of Hesse to get things going, along with his father-in-law, Georg of Saxony. And that's an interesting coalition because Philip is more inclined towards Luther and to the new evangelical ideas. And Georg is a really strong Catholic conservative.

• 37:39Speaker 05

  It's an interesting alliance, which is then broadened.

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• 38:24Speaker 03

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• 39:09Speaker 03

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• 39:36Eleanor Janega?

  And that's quite an interesting point, right? Because I think that there's a tendency to look especially at the princes and counts at this point in time as being completely split down religious lines. You know, we say, okay, well, you're either a part of the Swabian League or you are pro-imperial and very Catholic. But here we see some members of the nobility coalescing around their position in society, effectively. And not so much religious differences.

• 40:05Speaker 05

  And if I can just add, I think one of the things that is so interesting about this period is it's before. There are these clear confessional divisions. It's not clear exactly which way Philip of Tessa is going to go. It's clear he's interested in the new ideas, but it's not clear which direction he's going to take. Is he going to follow Swingley? Or is he going to be a conventional Lutheran? And that's because these divisions don't yet exist. And they're starting to develop during the course of the Peasants' War and become clearer, partly as a result.

• 40:39Eleanor Janega?

  And you mentioned here, Lyndall, the fact that there are different ways of looking at confessionalization at the time. So, you know, Andy, obviously there are different reactions to what the peasants are up to in the religious sphere. Yes, I mean, you've got Munster, who's like, I'm going to go learn from the peasants and we're all starting a rebellion and this is going to be fantastic. You have the church who are understandably horrified because they're like, hey, that was my wine. But then you also have Luther, who comes down really hard against the peasants, right?

• 41:12Speaker 06

  He does, although it takes him some time to get there. After Tzvikau, he hung around Germany in various places for a couple of years. And then he turns up in a small town called Alstetten. Just a strange sort of place. It's a tiny wee place, a smallville in a way. But there were all kinds of things going on there. And Münzer was able, over a period of eighteen months, to develop the reformation as he saw it should be developed. One of the very first things he did, just rather odd to our eyes, was to translate the church service, the mass, into German. And also turn the preacher around to face the congregation, which was absolutely disgusting.

• 41:56Speaker 06

  But he went through that eighteen months, initially introducing the religious forms. But then coming more and more into conflict with the Catholic lords and nobility who surrounded Alstetten in terms of land. So he was almost dragged into the conflict by that. The Catholic lords, particularly Ernst of Mansfeld, didn't really help matters by forbidding their people to go to Alstetten to listen to Münzer. That was a red rag to a bull as far as Münzer was concerned. But it also exacerbated the conflict by making it not just a religious conflict, it actually made it a social conflict.

• 42:40Speaker 06

  And actually, not just Ernst of Mansfeld, but there was another couple of lords in that area, who used force, used their soldiers to prevent people from going to Alstetten. Actually, in several cases, injuring them with swords and spears. So the escalation took place during 1524. By the time it all came to a head eventually in August of 1524, and yet again, Münzer was obliged to leave Alstetten. This time at the behest of the pro-Lutheran Duke Johann and Prince Friedrich of Saxony. He went over to Mühlehausen, which was already a

• 43:21Speaker 06

  Lotbed of religious dissent and social insurrection. After that, he went to Nurnberg to have something printed. And then he went off to southwest Germany, beyond anywhere he'd ever been before. And he went there because he'd heard that the peasants were in an uprising. Up until a certain point, maybe about fifty years ago, historians largely thought Münzer went off to southwest Germany in order to spread the rebellion. I think he actually went off there to find out what rebellion was like on the ground. I think he wanted to learn from the peasants.

• 44:02Speaker 06

  He had, after all, been largely in an urban environment for most of his life. He'd never really met a peasant to any degree, a few in Alstetten admittedly, but he went off to southwest Germany and got himself involved in the uprising. He was there for a couple of months and when he came back, he and a colleague in Milhause, Heinrich Pfeiffer, basically got down to it. They started to organise the uprising in Hüringia in Saxony. Münzer stopped writing pamphlets at that point as well. He obviously thought it's gone beyond that.

• 44:44Speaker 06

  He was still busily writing letters and insulting the nobility, which he did very well, has to be said. But he actually came to open rebellion probably within three months of his death. So sort of February, March of fifteen twenty five. He's to be found translating his religious radicalism into political radicalism and taking up the cause of the peasantry at that point.

• 45:12Eleanor Janega?

  Yeah, a direct quote from Luther himself about the peasants who are, you know, they're just trying to get drunk for free, which I think we can all appreciate. But he says that they must be sliced, choked, stabbed secretly and publicly by those who can, like one must kill a rabid dog.

• 45:31Eleanor Janega?

  Which are not exactly the words of a man of God, in my estimation, essentially, but he kind of gets his wish, doesn't he, Linda? I mean, it takes a while for the machinery of those who fight to swing into gear, but it eventually does, yes?

• 45:50Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I think that's why what Andy's saying is so important, because I think often it's treated as though Luther by accident published this stuff and it happened to arrive after the battle where many peasants had been killed and that was just unfortunate. No, his role is, as Andy says, really very important because he's taking a slightly different line from that of his own ruler, and he really wants the peasants to be put down. And even the earlier writings too, that seem to be even-handed are absolutely not. It's clear he thinks that the peasants have got to be put down militarily and with force. So he does play a role in the peasants' war, but of course the peasants' war is much, much

• 46:34Speaker 05

  bigger than Luther or even than Münster. And there were a series of terrible battles, probably ten, twelve, not just the battle at Frankenhausen, in which Münster was involved. So what is a very unequal struggle, because the peasants are not able to cope with cavalry, and what they typically do is put their wagons together. I'm sure you know that from the Bohemian case, it's the same military strategy. You put them together and then you mount a defence off, and you call it a wagon castle. But that just doesn't work against an attack of cavalry, because as soon as the shock of the cavalry comes, peasants are not able

• 47:16Speaker 05

  to stand their ground in the way that you need to. They can't use formation tactics, they just run away, and then they're just sitting ducks for the stabbing of the lords. It's no accident that Luther uses those terms, smite, stab, slay. That is exactly what this involved. It was an extremely bloody business. And not many soldiers on the lord's side seem to have died, but thousands died on the peasant's side. We'll never know how many, but it's somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand. Certainly at the time, people estimated a hundred thousand because South Germany alive.

• 48:00Speaker 05

  So it is an absolute bloodbath.

• 48:04Eleanor Janega?

  Andy, you know, Lindell's mentioned it now, but can you tell us a little bit about one of the particularly bloody battles where this all sort of shakes out?

• 48:15Speaker 06

  This is the so-called Battle of Frankenhausen, a battle conjures up visions of people fighting back and forth and back and forth. It was actually a rout at Frankenhausen. The rebels, the peasants and the townspeople of Jyringia gathered at this place called Frankenhausen and decided that's where they were going to put up a stance against the princes of Saxony and also Philip of Hesse. They had an army there, all something like six or seven thousand men, barely a horse amongst them, and very poorly armed. Münster himself arrived there

• 48:55Speaker 06

  with about a hundred men from the town of Mühlenhausen, which lies about thirty, forty miles south of Frankenhausen. He arrived there a couple of days before this battle. He was in an interesting position. His detractors liked to think that he was the leader of this army, but he was only in a sense. He certainly wasn't the military leader, but Münster was effectively, it's a bit of an anachronism, but he was the political leader of the peasantry. He was the one who wrote the letters to a couple of the counts of Münster, basically trying to goad them into a preemptive battle before everybody else arrived. Unfortunately, he didn't succeed. But he took his place in this army. The peasant army decided the

• 49:40Speaker 06

  best place for them would be at the top of the hill just outside Frankenhausen. And there they waited for Duke Georg's troops to arrive from the east and Philip of Hesse's troops to arrive from southwest. And on the day of the battle, there was a bit of to-ing and fro-ing. I think the peasants took one look at the army arranged against them, which was packed with cavalry and well armed inventory and loads of artillery. Took one look at them and thought we should perhaps have some kind of truce here. So they wrote to the princes, asking for truce.

• 50:19Speaker 06

  They wrote back almost immediately, saying, we'll think about that, just as long as you hand over Münster to us. And that's actually quite an interesting demand, given that he wasn't really the leader, but he was the one they wanted. So the rebels then got round in a circle to debate this demand. But before they'd even taken a decision on it, the princes who had given them a couple of hours to think about it, basically attacked straight away. So while they were debating the offer, the princes attacked. And within literally minutes, the whole thing was over. The peasants could not put up any resistance against cavalry or the artillery. Most of them began to flee down the hill towards Frankenhausen.

• 51:04Speaker 06

  The luckier ones fled into the forest area to the north and escaped. And Münster himself escaped down into Frankenhausen, but was there handed over to the princes for interrogation, torture and ultimately execution. So it wasn't much of a battle. The feeling is that around 6,000 rebels died, either at the top of the hill, fleeing down the hill or in mopping up operations afterwards. And it is thought that only five or six of the nobles' army died. So it was an extraordinary event. In my eyes, it still wasn't a battle, it was a massacre.

• 51:46Eleanor Janega?

  So here I've dragged you onto a medieval history podcast in order to talk about the peasants rebellion. And, you know, obviously it's because it's the 500 year anniversary. But also for me, I just very much feel as though this is kind of the last gasp of medievalism for me, I suppose. You know, I think that you can go either way in terms of thinking of when the medieval period ends and the early modern period begins.

• 52:13Eleanor Janega?

  But what sort of happens is that this has kind of determined how the modern period shakes out in terms of what Protestant movements are and Lutheranism is. You know, if you look at Münster and someone like that, had this succeeded at all, we might be looking at a really different state of play in terms of how we think about Protestantism and things like this. And I just think that this is a real sliding doors moment that determines the modern period. So I mean, do you think that I'm just justifying my own research interests or rely on to something here?

• 52:46Speaker 05

  I think there has been a real failure to incorporate it into the history of the Reformation, and I think that has completely distorted our view of the Reformation. I like to think of the Reformation as being a sort of a doughnut event with a huge hole in the middle, and that hole is the Peasants' War. And without the Peasants' War, you can't understand the shape of the Reformation, because it's the hole that makes the doughnut shape. Once you know how many people died, you just think about the Reformation thereafter, in the years that followed, in a different way, because this was a group of people who'd

• 53:24Speaker 05

  been through a really traumatic experience. And they've also seen a society that seemed to be stable go over to the peasants incredibly fast. So I think it makes the reformers and those in power much more aware about how brittle their hold on power is. So I think that's something that explains some of the politics in the years that follow. Also, it explains why the Reformation doesn't become a popular rural movement. And historians say, oh, it's so strange, the Reformation didn't succeed in the countryside. But they've

• 54:09Speaker 05

  forgotten that what peasants have witnessed is a huge interest in Reformation ideas, people putting everything at risk to fight for what they believed in, to fight for God's Word, to fight for freedom, and they'd been defeated. No wonder the Reformation message didn't mean anything to them. And I think we need to really take that on board. So yes, I think the failure to think about the peasants' war is a real problem in our understanding of the historiography. But it's only now, I think, it's only really in English language historiography,

• 54:52Speaker 05

  after the war that the peasants' war has disappeared. I think if you look at a longer wave of historiography, and in particular if you look at German historiography, I think the peasants' war is absolutely fascinating because it is at the absolute heart of the differences between the former East Germany and the former West Germany. And that's why I'm so excited to be in Berlin at the moment as the election campaign unfolds, because I do think that you can see the legacies of the peasants' war at work in it.

• 55:27Eleanor Janega?

  Well, this has been an absolute delight, completely fascinating. Lyndal and Andy, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me about one of my very favourite things today.

• 55:37Speaker 06

  Thank you very much for having us.

• 55:39Speaker 05

  Thank you, Lyndal.

• 55:40Eleanor Janega?

  Thanks so much to Lyndal and Andy once again for joining me, and thank you for listening to Gone Medieval from History Hit. If you are interested in this topic, why not check out our past episode on the Holy Roman Empire, where I explain exactly how you get a political system that underpins the peasants' wars. Remember, you can enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original TV documentaries that are released weekly, and ad-free podcasts by signing up at historyhit.com/subscription. You can follow Gone Medieval on Spotify, where you can leave us comments and suggestions, or wherever you get your podcasts, and tell all your friends and family that you've gone medieval. Until next time.

• 56:37Speaker 01

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• 57:11Speaker 03

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• 57:53Speaker 03

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