§ 1. The continued spread of Lutheran Teaching.
The imperial edict issued against Luther at the Diet of Worms could
scarcely have been stronger than it was,(315) and yet, like many another
edict of Emperor and Diet, it was wholly ineffective. It could only be
enforced by the individual Estates, who for the most part showed great
reluctance to put it into operation. It was published in the territories
of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria, of the Elector of Brandenburg, of Duke
George of Saxony, and of the Dukes of Bavaria; but none of these princes,
except the Archduke and Duke George, seemed to care much for the old
religion. In most of the ecclesiastical States the authorities were afraid
of riots following the publication, and did nothing. Thus, in Bremen, we
are told that as late as December 1522 the people had never seen the
edict. The cities treated it as carelessly. The authorities in Nürnberg,
Ulm, Augsburg, and Strassburg posted it up publicly as an official
document, and took no further trouble. In Strassburg the printers went on
issuing Luther’s books and tracts as fast as their printing-presses could
produce them; and at Constance the populace drove the imperial
commissioners from the town when they came to publish the edict.
The action of the newly constituted _Reichsregiment_ was as indecisive.
When the disturbances broke out at Wittenberg, under Carlstadt and the
Zwickau Prophets, Duke George, by playing on the fears of a spread of
Hussitism, could get mandates issued to the Elector of Saxony and
neighbouring bishops to inquire into and crush the disorders; but after
Luther’s return and the restoration of tranquillity his pleadings were
ineffectual. It was in vain that he insisted that Luther’s presence in
Wittenberg was an insult to the Empire. He was told that the
_Reichsregiment_ was able to judge for itself what were insults, and that
when they saw them they would punish. Archduke Ferdinand, the President,
doubtless sympathised with Duke George, but he was powerless; the Elector
of Saxony had the greatest influence, and it was always exerted on the
side of Luther.
In January 1522 a new Pope had been chosen, who took the title of Adrian
VI. His election was a triumph for the party that confessed the urgent
need of reforms, and thought that they ought to be effected by the
hierarchy and from within the Church. Adrian was a pious man according to
his lights, one who felt deeply the corruption which was degrading the
Church. He believed that the revolt of Luther was a punishment sent by God
for the sins of the generation. He had been the tutor of Charles V., and
ascended the papal throne with the determination to reform corruptions,
and to begin his reforms by attacking the source of all—the Roman Curia.
But he was a Dominican monk, and had all the Dominican ideas about the
need of maintaining mediæval theology intact, and about the strict
maintenance of ecclesiastical discipline. He was as ignorant as his
predecessor of the state of matters in Germany, and regarded Luther as
another Mahomet, who was seducing men from the higher Christian life by
pandering to their fleshly appetites.
The _Reichsregiment_ met with the Diet at Nürnberg in 1522-1523, and to
this Diet the Pope sent, as nuncio, Francesco Chieregati, Bishop of
Terramo, in the kingdom of Naples. The nuncio was given lengthy
instructions, which set forth the Pope’s opinion of the corruptions in the
Church and his intention to cure them, but which demanded the delivery of
Luther into the hands of the Roman Curia, and the punishment of priests,
monks, and nuns who had broken their vows of celibacy.(316) Chieregati was
no sooner in Germany than he understood that it would be impossible for
him to get the Pope’s demand carried out, and he informed his master of
the state of matters. When he met the Diet and presented the papal
requests, he was practically answered that Germany had grievances against
Rome, and that they would need to be set right ere the Curia could expect
to get its behests fulfilled. They intimated that since the Pope had
admitted the corruptions in the Church, it was scarcely to be expected
that they should blame Luther for having pointed them out. They presented
the nuncio with a list of one hundred German grievances against the Roman
Curia;(317) and suggested that the most convenient way of settling them
would be for the Pope to make over immediately, for the public use of
Germany, the German _annates_,(318) and that a German Council should be
held on German soil, and within one of the larger German cities.
The practical result of this fencing at the Diet of 1522, repeated in
1523, was that the progress of the Lutheran movement was not checked. How
deeply the people of Germany had drunk in the teaching of Luther may be
learnt from the letters of the nuncio to the Curia, and from those of the
Archduke Ferdinand to the Emperor. Both use the same expression, that
“among a thousand men scarcely one could be found untainted by Lutheran
teaching.”
Adrian VI. died suddenly after a few months’ reign, and the next Pope,
Clement VII., a Medici and completely under the influence of the French
king, belonged to the old unreforming party, whose only desire was to
maintain all the corrupting privileges of the Roman Curia. He selected and
sent to Germany, as his nuncio, Lorenzo Campeggio, one of the ablest of
Italian diplomatists, to negotiate with the _Reichsregiment_ and the Diet
which met at Speyer in 1524.
Campeggio, like his predecessor, found that the German Nation was
determinedly hostile to Rome. When he made his official entry into
Augsburg, and raised his hands to give the usual benediction to the crowds
of people, they received the blessing with open derision. He was so
impressed with their attitude, that when he reached Nürnberg he doffed his
official robes and entered the town as quietly as possible; indeed he
received a message from the authorities asking him “to avoid making the
sign of the cross, or using the benediction, seeing how matters then
stood.” The presence of the Legate seemed to increase the anti-papal zeal
of the people. The Pope was openly spoken of as Antichrist. Planitz, the
energetic commissary of the Elector of Saxony, reckoned that nearly four
thousand people in the city partook of the Sacrament of the Supper in both
kinds, and informs us that among them were members of the
_Reichsregiment_, and Isabella, Queen of Sweden, the sister of the
Emperor.
Yet the experienced Italian diplomatist thought that he could discern
signs more favourable to his master than the previous Diet had exhibited.
The _Reichsregiment_, which had hitherto shielded the Lutheran movement,
had lost the confidence of many classes of people, and was tottering to
its fall. It had showed itself unable to enforce the Lands-Peace. It was
the princes who had defeated the rising of the Free Nobles under Franz von
Sickingen; it was the Swabian League, an association always devoted to the
House of Austria, that had crushed the Franconian robber nobles; and both
princes and League were irritated at the attempts of the _Reichsregiment_,
which had endeavoured to rob them of the fruits of their successes. The
cities had been made to bear all the taxation needed to support the
central government, and the system of monopolies arising from combinations
among the great commercial houses had been threatened. The cities and the
capitalists had made a secret agreement with the Emperor, and von Hannart
had been sent by the Emperor from Spain to the Diet of 1524 to work along
with the towns for the overthrow of the central government. The Diet
itself had passed a vote of no confidence in the government. In these
troubled waters a crafty fisher might win some success.
His success was more apparent than real. The Diet of 1524 did not
absolutely refuse to enforce the Edict of Worms against Luther and his
followers; they promised to execute it “as well as they were able, and as
far as was possible,” and the cities had made it plain that the
enforcement was impossible. They renewed their demand for a General
Council to meet in a suitable German town to settle the affairs of the
Church in Germany, and again declared that meanwhile nothing should be
preached contrary to the Word of God and the Holy Gospel. They went
further, and practically resolved that a National Council, to deliberate
on the condition of the Church in Germany, should meet at Speyer in
November and make an interim settlement of its ecclesiastical affairs, to
last until the meeting of a General Council. It is true that, owing to the
exertions of the nuncio and of von Hannart, the phrase National Synod was
omitted, and the meeting was to be one of the Estates of Germany at which
the councillors and learned divines of the various princes were to
formulate all the disputed points, and to consider anew the grievances of
the German nation against the Papacy; but neither the nuncio nor von
Hannart deceived themselves as to the real meaning of the resolution. “It
will be a National Council for Germany,” said Hannart in his report.
Nothing could be more alarming to the Pope. There was always a possibility
of managing a General Council; but a German National Synod, including a
large number of lay representatives, meeting in a German town,
foreshadowed an independent National German Church which would insist on
separation from the Roman See. The Pope wrote to Henry VIII. of England
asking him to harass the German merchants; he induced the Emperor to
forbid the proposed meeting of the German States; and, what was more
important, he instructed his nuncio to take steps secretly to form a
league of German princes who were still favourable to maintaining the
mediæval Church with its doctrines, ceremonies, and usages. This
inaugurated the religious divisions of Germany.
§ 2. The beginnings of Division in Germany.
The Diet of Speyer (1524) may perhaps be taken as the beginning of the
separation of Germany into two opposite camps of Protestant and Roman
Catholic, although the real parting of the ways actually occurred after
the Peasants’ War. The overthrow, or at least discrediting of the
_Reichsregiment_, placed the management of everything, including the
settlement of the religious question, in the hands of the princes, none of
whom, with the exception of the Elector of Saxony, cared much for the idea
of nationality; while some of them, however anxious they were, or once had
been, for ecclesiastical reforms, were genuinely afraid of the “tumult”
which they believed might lurk behind any conspicuous changes in religious
usages. Duke George of Saxony, who was keenly alive to the corruptions in
the Church, dreaded above all things the beginnings of a Hussite movement
in Germany. He knew that an assiduous, penetrating, secret Hussite, or
rather Taborite propaganda had been going on in Germany for long. As early
as the Leipzig Disputation (1519), when John Eck had skilfully forced
Luther into the avowal that he approved of some things in the Hussite
revolt, Duke George was seen to put his arms akimbo, to wag his long
beard, and was heard to ejaculate, “God help us! The plague!” A fear of
Hussite revolution displays itself in his correspondence, and very notably
in his letters to Duke John of Saxony and to the Elector about the
disturbances in Wittenberg. It was a triumph for the Roman Curia when its
partisans, from Eck onwards, were able to fix the stigma of Hussitism on
the Lutheran movement; and the career of the Zwickau Prophets,
notwithstanding their suppression by Luther, was, to many, an indication
of what might lie behind the new preaching. When the Peasants’ War came in
1525, many of the earlier sympathisers with Luther saw in it an indication
of the dangers into which they fancied that Luther was leading Germany. It
is also to be noticed that many of the Humanists now began to desert the
Lutheran cause; his Augustinian theology made them think that he was bent
on creating a new Scholastic which seemed to them almost as bad as the
old, which they had been delighted to see him attack.
The Roman Curia was quick to take advantage of all these alarms. Its
efforts were so successful, that it was soon able to create a Roman
Catholic Party among the South German princes, and to secure its
steadfastness by promising a few concessions, and by permitting the
authorities to retain for the secular uses of their States about one-fifth
of the ecclesiastical revenues in each State. The leading States in this
Roman Catholic federation were Austria and Bavaria, and so long as Duke
George lived, Ducal Saxony in middle Germany. This naturally called forth
a distinctly Lutheran party, no longer national, which included the
Elector of Saxony, the Landgrave of Hesse, the Margraf of Brandenburg, his
brother Albert, and many others. Albert was at the head of the Teutonic
Order in East Prussia. He secularised his semi-ecclesiastical
principality, became the first Duke of Prussia, and his State from the
beginning adopted the evangelical faith.
It was not until the Peasants’ War was over that this division was clearly
manifested. The Reformation had spread in simple natural fashion, without
any attempt at concerted action, or any design to impose a new and uniform
order of public worship, or to make changes in ecclesiastical government.
Luther himself was not without hopes that the great ecclesiastical
principalities might become secular lordships, that the bishops would
assume the lead in ecclesiastical reform, and that there would be a great
National Church in Germany, with little external change—enough only to
permit the evangelical preaching and teaching. It is true that the Emperor
had shown clearly his position by sending martyrs to the stake in the
Netherlands, and that symptoms of division had begun to manifest
themselves during 1524, as we have seen. Still these things did not
prevent such an experienced statesman as the Elector of Saxony from
confidently expecting a peaceful and, so far as Germany was concerned, a
unanimous and hearty solution of the religious difficulties. The storm
burst suddenly which was to shatter these optimistic expectations, and to
change fundamentally the whole course of the Lutheran Reformation. This
was the Peasants’ War.
§ 3. The Peasants’ War.(319)
From one point of view this insurrection was simply the last, the most
extensive, and the most disastrous of those revolts which, we have already
seen, had been almost chronic in Germany during the later decades of the
fifteenth and in the beginning of the sixteenth century. All the social
and economic causes which produced them(320) were increasingly active in
1524-1525. It is easy to show, as many Lutheran Church historians have
done with elaborate care, that the Reformation under Luther had nothing in
common with the sudden and unexpected revolt,—as easy as to prove that
there was little in common between the “Spiritual Poverty” of Francis of
Assisi and the vulgar communism of the _Brethren and Sisters of the Free
Spirit_, between the doctrines of Wiclif and the gigantic labour strike
headed by Wat Tyler and Priest Ball, between the teaching of Huss and the
extreme Taborite fanatics. But the fact remains that the voice of Luther
awoke echoes whereof he never dreamt, and that its effects cannot be
measured by some changes in doctrine, or by a reformation in
ecclesiastical organisation. The times of the Reformation were ripe for
revolution, and the words of the bold preacher, coming when all men were
restless and most men were oppressed, appealing especially to those who
felt the burden heavy and the yoke galling, were followed by
far-resounding reverberations. Besides, Luther’s message was democratic.
It destroyed the aristocracy of the saints, it levelled the barriers
between the layman and the priest, it taught the equality of all men
before God, and the right of every man of faith to stand in God’s presence
whatever be his rank and condition of life. He had not confined himself to
preaching a new theology. His message was eminently practical. In his
_Appeal to __ the Nobility of the German Nation_, Luther had voiced all
the grievances of Germany, had touched upon almost all the open sores of
the time, and had foretold disasters not very far off.
Nor must it be forgotten that no great leader ever flung about wild words
in such a reckless way. Luther had the gift of strong smiting phrases, of
words which seemed to cleave to the very heart of things, of images which
lit up a subject with the vividness of a flash of lightning. He launched
tracts and pamphlets from the press about almost everything,—written for
the most part on the spur of the moment, and when the fire burned. His
words fell into souls full of the fermenting passions of the times. They
drank in with eagerness the thoughts that all men were equal before God,
and that there are divine commands about the brotherhood of mankind of
more importance than all human legislation. They refused to believe that
such golden ideas belonged to the realm of spiritual life alone, or that
the only prescriptions which denied the rights of the common man were the
decrees of the Roman Curia. The successful revolts of the Swiss peasants,
the wonderful victories of Zisca, the people’s leader, in the near
Bohemian lands, were illustrations, they thought, of how Luther’s
sledge-hammer words could be translated into corresponding deeds.
Other teachings besides Luther’s were listened to. Many of the Humanists,
professed disciples of Plato, expounded to friends or in their class-rooms
the communistic dreams of the _Republic_, and published _Utopias_ like the
brilliant sketch of the ideal commonwealth which came from the pen of
Thomas More. These speculations “of the Chair” were listened to by the
“wandering students,” and were retailed, with forcible illustrations, in a
way undreamt of by their scholarly authors, to audiences of artisans and
peasants who were more than ready to give them unexpected
applications.(321)
The influence of popular astrology must not be forgotten; for the
astrologists were powerful among all classes of society, in the palaces of
the princes, in the houses of the burghers, and at the peasant market
gatherings and church ales. In these days they were busy pointing out
heavenly portents, and foretelling calamities and popular risings.(322)
The missionaries of the movement belonged to all sorts and conditions of
men—poor priests sympathising with the grievances of their parishioners;
wandering monks who had deserted their convents, especially those
belonging to the Franciscan Order; poor students on their way from
University to University; artisans, travelling in German fashion from one
centre of their trade to another. They found their audiences on the
village greens under the lime trees, or in the public-houses in the lower
parts of the towns. They talked the rude language of the people, and
garnished their discourse with many a scriptural quotation. They read to
excited audiences small pamphlets and broadsides, printed in thick letters
on coarse paper, which discussed the burning questions of the day.
The revolt began unexpectedly, and without any pre-concerted preparation
or formulation of demands, in June 1524, when a thousand peasants
belonging to the estate of Count Sigismund of Lupfen rose in rebellion
against their lord at Stühlingen, a few miles to the north-west of
Schaffhausen, and put themselves under the leadership of Hans Müller, an
old landsknecht. Müller led his peasants, one of them carrying a flag
blazoned with the imperial colours of red, black, and yellow, to the
little town of Waldshut, about half-way between Schaffhausen and Basel.
The people of the town fraternised with the peasants, and the formidable
“Evangelical Brotherhood” was either formed then or the roots of it were
planted. The news spread fast, east and west. The peasants of the
districts round about the Lake of Constance—in the Allgau, the Klettgau,
the Hegau, and Villingen—rose in rebellion. The revolt spread northwards
into Lower Swabia, and the peasants of Leiphen, led by Jacob Wehe, were
joined by some of the troops of Truchsess, the general of the Swabian
League. The peasants of Salzburg, Styria, and the Tyrol rose. These three
eastern risings had most staying power in them. The Salzburg peasants
besieged the Cardinal Archbishop in his castle; they were not reduced till
the spring of 1526, and only after having extorted concessions from their
over-lords. The Tyrolese peasants, under their wise leader, Michael
Gaismeyer, shut up Archduke Ferdinand in Innsbruck, and in the end gained
substantial concessions. The rising in Styria was a very strong one; it
lasted till 1526, and was eventually put down by bringing Bohemian troops
into the country. From Swabia the flames of insurrection spread into
Franconia, where a portion of the insurgents were led by an escaped
criminal, the notorious Jäklein Rohrbach. It was this band which
perpetrated the wanton massacre of Weinsberg, the one outstanding atrocity
of the insurrection. The band and the deed were repudiated by the rest of
the insurgents. Thomas Münzer, who, banished from Zwickau and then from
Alstedt, had settled in Mühlhausen, his heart aflame with the wrongs of
the commonalty, preached insurrection to the peasants in Thüringen. He
issued fiery proclamations:
“Arise! Fight the battle of the Lord! On! On! On! The wicked
tremble when they hear of you. On! On! On! Be pitiless although
Esau gives you fair words (Gen. xxxiii.). Heed not the groans of
the godless; they will beg, weep, and entreat you for pity like
children. Show them no mercy, as God commanded to Moses (Deut.
vii.), and as He has revealed the same to us. Rouse up the towns
and the villages; above all, rouse the miners.... On! On! On!
while the fire is burning let not the blood cool on your swords!
Smite pinke-pank on the anvil of Nimrod! Overturn their towers to
the foundation: while one of them lives you will not be free from
the fear of man. While they reign over you it is of no use to
speak of the fear of God. On! while it is day! God is with you.”
The words were meant to rouse the miners of Mansfeld. They failed in their
original intention, but they sent bands of armed insurgents through
Thüringen and the Harz, and within fourteen days about forty convents and
monasteries were destroyed, and the inmates (many of them poor women with
no homes to return to) were sent adrift.
The revolt spread like a conflagration, one province catching fire from
another, until in the early spring months of 1525 almost all Germany was
in uproar. The only districts which escaped were Bavaria in the south,
Hesse, and the north and north-east provinces. The insurgents were not
peasants only. The poorer population of many of the towns fraternised with
the insurgents, and compelled the civic authorities to admit them within
their walls.
§ 4. The Twelve Articles.
Statements of grievances were published which, naturally, bore a strong
resemblance to those issued in the earlier social uprisings. The
countrymen complained of the continuous appropriation of the woodlands by
the proprietors, and that they were not allowed to fish in the streams or
to kill game in their fields. They denounced the proprietors’ practice of
compelling his peasants to do all manner of unstipulated service for him
without payment—to repair his roads, to assist at his hunts, to draw his
fish-ponds. They said that their crops were ruined by game which they were
not allowed to kill, and by hunters in pursuit of game; that the landlord
led his streams across their meadow land, and deprived them of water for
irrigation. They protested against arbitrary punishments, unknown to the
old consuetudinary village law-courts (_Haingerichte_).
They formulated their demands for justice in various series of articles,
all of which had common features, but contained some striking differences.
Some dwelt more on the grievances of the peasants, others voiced the
demands of the working classes of the towns, others again contained traces
of the political aspirations of the more educated leaders of the movement.
Almost all protest that they ask for nothing contrary to the requirements
of just authority, whether civil or ecclesiastical, nor to the gospel of
Christ. The peasants declared that each village community should be at
liberty to choose its own pastor, and to dismiss him if he proved to be
unsatisfactory; that while they were willing to pay the great tithes
(_i.e._ a tenth of the produce of the crops), the lesser tithes (_i.e._ a
tenth of the eggs, lambs, foals, etc.) should no longer be exacted; that
these great tithes should be reserved to pay the village priest’s stipend,
and that what remained over should go to support the poor; that, since God
had made all men free, serfdom should be abolished; and that, while they
were willing to obey lawful authority, peasants ought not to be called on
to submit to the arbitrary commands of their landlords. They insisted that
they had a right to fish in the streams (not in fish-ponds), to kill game
and wild birds, for these were public property. They demanded that the
woodlands, meadows, and ploughlands which had once belonged to the village
community, but which had been appropriated by the landlords, should be
restored. They insisted that arbitrary services of every kind should be
abolished, and that whatever services, beyond the old feudal dues, were
demanded, should be paid for in wages. They called for the abolition of
the usage whereby the landlord was permitted, in the name of death-duty,
to seize on the most valuable chattel of the deceased tenant; and for the
creation of impartial courts of justice in the country districts. They
concluded by asking that all their demands should be tested by the word of
God, and that if any of them should be found to be opposed to its
teaching, it should be rejected.(323)
The townspeople asked that all class privileges should be abolished in
civic and ecclesiastical appointments; that the administration of justice
in the town’s courts should be improved; that the local taxation should be
readjusted; that all the inhabitants should be permitted to vote for the
election of the councillors; and that better provision should be made for
the care of the poor. Some of the more ambitious manifestoes contained
demands for a thorough reconstruction of the entire administration of the
Empire, on a scheme which involved the overthrow of all feudal courts of
justice, and contemplated a series of imperial judicatories, rising from
revived Communal Courts to a central Imperial Court of Appeal for the
whole Empire. Some manifestoes demanded a unification of the coinage,
weights, and measures throughout the Empire; a confiscation of
ecclesiastical endowments for the purpose of lessening taxation, and for
the redemption of feudal dues; a uniform rate of taxes and customs duties;
restraint to be placed on the operations of the great capitalists; the
regulation of commerce and trade by law; and the admission of
representatives from all classes in the community into the public
administration. In every case the Emperor was regarded as the Lord
Paramount. There were also declarations of the sovereignty of the people,
made in such a way as to suggest that the writings of Marsilius of Padua
had been studied by some of the leaders among the insurgents. The most
famous of all these declarations was the Twelve Articles. The document was
adopted by delegates from several of the insurrectionary bands, which met
at Memmingen in Upper Swabia, to unite upon a common basis of action. If
not actually drafted by Schappeler, a friend of Zwingli, the articles were
probably inspired by him. These Twelve Articles gave something like unity
to the movement; although it must be remembered that documents bearing the
title do not always agree. The main thought with the peasant was to secure
a fair share of the land, security of tenure, and diminution of feudal
servitudes; and the idea of the artisan was to obtain full civic
privileges and an adequate representation of his class on the city
council.
§ 5. The Suppression of the Revolt.
During the earlier months of 1525 the rising carried everything before it.
Many of the smaller towns made common cause with the peasants; indeed, it
was feared that all the towns of Swabia might unite in supporting the
movement. Prominent nobles were forced to join the “Evangelical
Brotherhood” which had been formally constituted at Memmingen (March 7th).
Princes, like the Cardinal Elector of Mainz and the Bishop of Würzburg,
had to come to terms with the insurgents. Germany had been denuded of
soldiers, drafted to take part in the Italian wars of Charles V. The
ruling powers engaged the insurgents in negotiations simply for the
purpose of gaining time, as was afterwards seen. But the rising had no
solidity in it, nor did it produce, save in the Tyrol, any leader capable
of effectually controlling his followers and of giving practical result to
their efforts. The insurgents became demoralised after their first
successes, and the whole movement had begun to show signs of dissolution
before the princes had recovered from their terror. Philip of Hesse aided
the Elector of Saxony (John, for Frederick had died during the
insurrection) to crush Münzer at Frankenhausen (May 15th, 1525), the town
of Mühlhausen was taken, and deprived of its privileges as an imperial
city, and the revolt was crushed in North Germany.
George Truchsess, the general of the Swabian League, his army strengthened
by mercenaries returning to Germany after the battle of Pavia, mastered
the bands in Swabia and in Franconia. The Elsass revolt was suppressed
with great ferocity by Duke Anthony of Lorraine. None of the German
princes showed any consideration or mercy to their revolting subjects save
the old Elector Frederick and Philip of Hesse. The former, on his
death-bed, besought his brother to deal leniently with the misguided
people; Philip’s peasantry had fewer matters to complain of than had those
of any other province, the Landgrave discussed their grievances with them,
and made concessions which effectually prevented any revolt. Everywhere
else, save in the Tyrol, the revolt was crushed with merciless severity,
and between 100,000 and 150,000 of the insurgents perished on the field or
elsewhere. The insurrection maintained itself in the Tyrol, in Salzburg,
and in Styria until the spring of 1526; in all other districts of Germany
the insurgents were crushed before the close of 1525. No attempt was made
to cure the ills which led to the rising. The oppression of the peasantry
was intensified. The last vestiges of local self-government were
destroyed, and the unfortunate people were doomed for generations to exist
in the lowest degradation. The year 1525 was one of the saddest in the
annals of the German Fatherland.
The Peasants’ War had a profound, lasting, and disastrous effect on the
Reformation movement in Germany. It affected Luther personally, and that
in a way which could not fail to react upon the cause which he
conspicuously led. It checked the spread of the Reformation throughout the
whole of Germany. It threw the guidance of the movement into the hands of
the evangelical princes, and destroyed the hope that it might give birth
to a reformed National German Church.
§ 6. Luther and the Peasants’ War.
The effect of the rising upon Luther’s own character and future conduct
was too important for us to entirely pass over his personal relations to
the peasants and their revolt. He was a peasant’s son. “My father, my
grandfather, my forebears, were all genuine peasants,” he was accustomed
to say. He had seen and pitied the oppression of the peasant class, and
had denounced it in his own trenchant fashion. He had reproved the greed
of the landlords, when he said that if the peasant’s land produced as many
coins as ears of corn, the profit would go to the landlord only. He had
publicly expressed his approval of many of the proposals in the Twelve
Articles long before they had been formulated and adopted at Memmingen in
March 1525, and had advocated a return to the old communal laws or usages
of Germany. He formally declared his agreement with the substance of the
Twelve Articles after they had become the “charter” of the revolt. But
Luther, rightly or wrongly, held that no real good could come from armed
insurrection. He believed with all the tenacity of his nature, that while
there might be two roads to reform, the way of peace, and the way of war,
the pathway of peace was the only one which would lead to lasting benefit.
After the storm burst he risked his life over and over again in visits he
paid to the disaffected districts, to warn the people of the dangers they
were running. After Münzer’s attempt to rouse the miners of Mansfeld, and
carry fire and sword into the district where his parents were living,
Luther made one last attempt to bring the misguided people to a more
reasonable course. He made a preaching tour through the disaffected
districts. He went west from Eisleben to Stolberg (April 21st, 1525);
thence to Nordhausen, where Münzer’s sympathisers rang the bells to drown
his voice; south to Erfurt (April 28th); north again to the fertile valley
of the Golden Aue and to Wallhausen (May 1st); south again to Weimar (May
3rd), where news reached him that his Elector was dying, and that he had
expressed the wish to see him,—a message which reached him too late. It
was on this journey, or shortly after his return to Wittenberg (May 6th),
that Luther wrote his vehement tract, _Against the murdering, thieving
hordes of Peasants_. He wrote it while his mind was full of Münzer’s calls
to slaughter, when the danger was at its height, with all the sights and
sounds of destruction and turmoil in eye and ear, while it still hung in
the balance whether the insurgent bands might not carry all before them.
In this terrible pamphlet Luther hounded on the princes to crush the
rising. It is this pamphlet, all extenuating circumstances being taken
into account, which must ever remain an ineffaceable stain on his noble
life and career.(324)
As for himself, the Peasants’ War imprinted in him a deep distrust of all
who had any connection with the rising. He had not forgotten Carlstadt’s
action at Wittenberg in 1521-1522, and when Carlstadt was found attempting
to preach the insurrection in Franconia and Swabia, Luther never forgave
him. His deep-rooted and unquenchable suspicion of Zwingli may be traced
back to his discovery that friends of the Zurich Reformer had been at
Memmingen, had aided the revolutionary delegates to draft the Twelve
Articles, and had induced them to shelter themselves under the shield of a
religious Reformation. What is perhaps more important, the Peasants’ War
gave to Luther a deep and abiding distrust of the “common man” which was
altogether lacking in the earlier stages of his career, which made him
prevent every effort to give anything like a democratic ecclesiastical
organisation to the Evangelical Church, and which led him to bind his
Reformation in the chains of secular control to the extent of regarding
the secular authority as possessing a quasi-episcopal function.(325) It is
probably true that he saved the Reformation in Germany by cutting it loose
from the revolutionary movement; but the wrench left marks on his own
character as well as on that of the movement he headed. Luther’s enemies
were quick to make capital out of his relations with the peasants, and
Einser compared him to Pilate, who washed his hands after betraying Jesus
to the Jews.
§ 7. Germany divided into two separate Camps.
The insurrection, altogether apart from its personal effects on Luther,
had a profound influence on the whole of the German Reformation. Some
princes who had hitherto favoured the Romanist side were confirmed in
their opposition; others who had hesitated, definitely abandoned the cause
of Reform. For both, it seemed that a social revolution of a desperate
kind lay behind the Protestant Reformation. Many an innocent preacher of
the new faith perished in the disturbances—sought out and slain by the
princes as an instigator of the rebellion. Duke Anthony of Lorraine, for
example, in his suppression of the revolt in Elsass, made no concealment
of his belief that evangelical preachers were the cause of the rising, and
butchered them without mercy when he could discover them. The Curia found
that the Peasants’ War was an admirable text to preach from when they
insisted that Luther was another Huss, and that the movement which he led
was a revival of the ecclesiastical and social communism of the extreme
Hussites (Taborites); that all who attacked the Church of Rome were
engaged in attempting to destroy the bases of society. It was after the
Peasants’ War that the Roman Catholic League of princes grew strong in
numbers and in cohesion.
The result of the war also showed that the one strong political element in
Germany was the princedom. The _Reichsregiment_, which still preserved a
precarious existence, had shown that it had no power to cope with the
disturbances, and its attempts at mediation had been treated with
contempt. From this year, 1525, the political destiny of the land was
distinctly seen to be definitely shaping for territorial centralisation
round the greater princes and nobles. It was inevitable that the
conservative religious Reformation should follow the lines of political
growth, with the result that there could not be a National Evangelical
Church of Germany. It could only find outcome in territorial Churches
under the rule and protection of those princes who from motives of
religion and conscience had adopted the principles which Luther preached.
The more radical religious movement broke up into fragments, and
reappeared in the guise of the maligned and persecuted Anabaptists,—a name
which embraced a very wide variety of religious opinions,—some of whom
appropriated to themselves the aspirations of the social revolution which
had been crushed by the princes. The conservative and Lutheran Reformation
found its main elements of strength in the middle classes of Germany;
while the Anabaptists had their largest following among the artisans and
working men of the towns.
The terrors of the time separated Germany into two hostile camps—the one
accepting and the other rejecting the ecclesiastical Reformation, which
ceased to be a national movement in any real sense of the word.