Albert Frederick Pollard

“ Its pervading principle was that of popular election; each village was to choose a gentleman as its magistrate; two hundred chief places were to select a knight for their bailiff; each ten bailiwicks were to be organised under a city, and each ten cities under a Duke or Prince. One of the Princes was to be elected King, but he, like every subordinate officer, was to be guided by an elected Council. In this scheme town was throughout subordinate to country; half the members of the Councils were to be peasants and half nobles, and agriculture was pronounced the noblest means of sustenance. ”

“ Equality was an essential condition of the new order of things. Nobles like the counts of Hohenlohe and Henneberg, who swore through fear the oath imposed by the rebels, were required to dismantle their castles, to live in houses like peasants and burghers, to eat the same food and wear the same dress; they were even forbidden to ride on horseback, because it raised them above their fellows. ”

“ Schappeler, Zwingli's friend, had been preaching at Memmingen on the iniquity of tithes, and if he did not actually pen the famous Twelve Articles there formulated, they were at least drawn up under his inspiration and that of his colleague Lotzer. They embody ideas of wider import than are likely to have occurred to bands of peasants concerned with specific local grievances; and throughout the movement it is obvious that, while the peasants supplied the physical force and their hardships the real motive, the intellectual inspiration came from the radical element in the towns. ”

“ On May 27 Leonard von Eck, the Bavarian chancellor, reports that Duke Anthony of Lorraine alone had already destroyed twenty thousand peasants in Elsass; and for the whole of Germany a moderate estimate puts the number of victims at a hundred thousand. The only consideration that restrained the victors appears to have been the fear that, unless they held their hand, they would have no one left to render them service. "If all the peasants are killed," wrote Margrave George to his brother Casimir, "where shall we get other peasants to make provision for us?" ”

“ The peasants had no constitutional means wherewith to attain their ends, and there is no reason to suppose that they would have resorted to force unless force had been prepared to resist them; if, as Luther maintained, it was the Christian's duty to tolerate worldly ills, it was incumbent on Christian Princes as well as on Christian peasants; and if, as he said, the Peasants' Revolt was a punishment divinely ordained for the Princes, what right had they to resist? ”

“ The discontent of the peasantry in Germany, as in other countries of Europe, had been a painfully obvious fact for more than a generation, and since 1490 it had broken out in revolts in Elsass, in the Netherlands, in Württemberg, at Kempten, at Bruchsal, and in Hungary. ”

“ When habit is broken, reason and passion are called into play, and it would be hard to say which is more fatal to human institutions. The Reformation had by an appeal to reason and passion destroyed the habit of unreasoning obedience to the Papacy, and less venerable institutions inevitably felt the shock. ”

“ In its religious aspect the Peasants' Revolt was an appeal of the poor and oppressed to " divine justice " against the oppressor. They had eagerly applied to their lords the biblical anathemas against the rich, and interpreted the beatitudes as a promise of redress for the wrongs of the poor. They were naturally unconvinced by Luther's declarations that the Gospel only guaranteed a spiritual and not a temporal emancipation, and that spiritual liberty was the only kind of freedom to which they had a right. ”

“ But nowhere do the cities appear to have taken an active part against the revolution, for they all felt that the Princes threatened them as much as they did the peasants. Waldshut and Memmingen from the first were friendly; Zurich rendered active assistance; and there was a prevalent fear that the towns of Switzerland and Swabia would unite in support of the movement. The strength shown by the peasants exercised a powerful influence over the intramural struggles of commune and Council, and in many of the smaller towns and cities the commune gained the upper hand. ”

“ Some of these grievances, especially those against the Church, were common to rich and poor alike, but socialistic and communistic ideas naturally tended to divide every town and city into two parties, and the struggle resolved itself into one between the commune, representing the poor, and the Council, representing the well-to-do. This contest was fought out in most of the towns in Germany; and its result determined the amount of sympathy with which each individual town regarded the peasants' cause. ”

“ Münzer's strength lay in the peasants outside, and, when Philip of Hesse with the Dukes of Brunswick and Saxony advanced to crush the revolt, he established his camp at Frankenhausen, some miles from Mühlhausen, while Pfeiffer remained within the city.
Divisions were also rife in the other insurgent bands; the more statesmanlike of the leaders endeavoured to restrain the peasants' excesses and to secure co-operation from other classes, while the extremists, either following the bent of their nature or deliberately counting on the effects of terror, had recourse to violent measures. ”

“ Truchsess had every reason to be satisfied with this result, for from all sides appeals were pouring in for help. In the Hegau Radolfzell was besieged; to the south-east the cardinal archbishop of Salzburg, Matthew Lang, was soon shut up in his castle by his subjects of the city and neighbouring country, while the Archduke Ferdinand himself would not venture outside the walls of Innsbruck. Forty thousand peasants had risen in the Vorarlberg; Tyrol was in ferment from end to end; and in Styria Dietrichstein's Bohemian troops could not save him from defeat at the hands of the peasants. ”

“ Besides these economic causes, the growing influence of Roman law affected the peasant even more than it had done the barons. By it, said the Emperor Maximilian, the poor man either got no justice at all against the rich, or it was so sharp and fine-pointed that it availed him nothing. ”

“ A like measure was meted out to the Burgomaster, Mühlhausen itself was deprived of its privileges as a free imperial city, and the revolt was easily suppressed at Erfurt and in other Thuringian districts.
The peasants had been crushed in the North, and they fared as ill in the South. Truchsess, after his truce with the Donauried, the Allgau, and the Lake contingents, had turned in the last week in April against the Black Forest bands, when he was ordered by the Swabian League to march to the relief of Württemberg, and so prevent a junction between the Franconian and Swabian rebels. ”

“ Still more attractive than the proposed equality of social standing was the suggested equality of worldly goods; and, though in the latter case the ideal no doubt was that of levelling up and not of levelling down, it was declared enough for any man to possess two thousand crowns. ”

“ Philip of Hesse, however, had none of the theological narrowness which characterised Luther and Melanchthon, and, in a less degree, even Zwingli; he was not so blind as the divines to the political necessities of the situation, and he managed to avert a breach for the time; it was due to him that Strassburg and Ulm, Nürnberg and Memmingen, and other towns added their weight to the protest against the decree of the Diet. Jacob Sturm of Strassburg and Tetzel of Nürnberg were, indeed, the most zealous champions of the Recess of 1526 during the debates of the Diet ”

“ It is not reason, it is not law, still less is it force; it is mainly custom and habit. Without a voluntary and unreasoning adherence to custom and deference to authority all society and all government would be impossible ”

“ The Lutherans had need of every recruit, for the reaction which crushed the peasants threatened to involve them in a similar ruin. Duke Anthony of Lorraine regarded the suppression of the revolt in the light of a crusade against Luther, and many a Gospel preacher was summarily executed on a charge of sedition for which there was slender ground. Catholic Princes felt that they would never be secure against a recurrence of rebellion until they had extirpated the root of the evil ”

“ The plea that the unanimous decision of 1526 could not be repealed by one party, though plausible enough as logic and in harmony with the particularism of the time, rested upon the unconstitutional assumption that the parties were independent of the Empire's authority; and it was not reasonable to expect any Diet to countenance so suicidal a theory.
A revolution is necessarily weak in its legal aspect, and must depend on its moral strength; and to revolution the Lutheran Princes in spite of themselves were now brought. They were driven back on to ground on which any revolution may be based ”

“ In his memoirs he represents his complicity in the revolt as the result of compulsion, but before there was any question of force he had given vent to such sentiments as that the knights suffered as much from the Princes' oppression as did the peasants, and his action was probably more voluntary than he afterwards cared to admit. The lower clergy, many of them drawn from the peasants, naturally sympathised with the class from which they sprang, and they had no cause to dislike a movement which aimed at a redistribution of the wealth of Princes and Bishops ”

“ Immediately after the Sack of Rome one of his agents had warned him of the danger lest England and France should establish patriarchates of their own; and a Pope of the universal Church under the control of Charles as master of Italy was too useful an instrument to be lightly abandoned, if for no other reason than that an insular Pope in England would grant the divorce of Henry VIII from Catharine of Aragon. The Emperor also wanted Catholic help to restore his brother-in-law, Christian II of Denmark, deposed by his Lutheran subjects; he desired papal recognition for Ferdinand's new kingdoms ”

“ The Diet of Augsburg in 1525 attempted to mitigate the ferocity of the lords towards their subjects, but the effort did not produce much result, and to the end of the eighteenth century the German peasantry remained the most wretched in Europe. Serfdom lingered there longer than in any other civilised country save Russia, and the mass of the people were effectively shut out from the sphere of political action. The beginnings of democracy were crushed in the cities; the knights and then the peasants were beaten down. ”

“ But the proposal of an Evangelical Brotherhood was accepted on March 7; and the Twelve Articles, founded apparently upon a memorial previously presented by the people of Memmingen to their town Council, were then drawn up. The preamble repudiated the idea that the insurgents' "new Gospel" implied the extirpation of spiritual and temporal authority; on the contrary, they quoted texts to show that its essence was love, peace, patience, and unity, and that the aim of the peasants was that all men should live in accord with its precepts. ”

“ No less heterogeneous than the factors of which the revolutionary horde was composed were the ideas and motives by which it was moved. There was many a private and local grudge as well as class and common grievances. In Salzburg the Archbishop had retained feudal privileges from which most German cities were free; in the Austrian duchies there was a German national feeling against the repressive rule of Ferdinand's Spanish ministers; religious persecution helped the revolt at Brixen, for Strauss and Urbanus Regius had there made many converts to Luther's Gospel ”

“ The peasants all over Germany were animated mainly by the desire to redress agrarian grievances, but hatred of prelatical wealth and privilege and of the voracious territorial power of Princes was a bond which united merchants and knights, peasants and artisans, in a common hostility. ”

“ In the Austrian territories and in Salzburg, however, the revolution continued active throughout the winter and following spring. Waldshut, which had risen against Ferdinand's religious persecution before the outbreak of the Peasants' War, held out until December 12, 1525. The revolt in Salzburg was indirectly encouraged by the jealousy existing between its Archbishop and the Dukes of Bavaria, and by a scheme which Ferdinand entertained of dividing the archbishop's lands between the two Dukes and himself. ”

“ Almanacks and astrologers predicted the storm with remarkable accuracy; indeed its mutterings had been heard for years, and in 1522 friends of the exiled Ulrich of Württemberg had discussed a plan for his restoration to the duchy by means of a peasant revolt. But the first step in the great movement was not due to Ulrich or to any other extraneous impulse. It was taken in June, 1524, on the estates of Count Siegmund von Lupfen at Stühlingen, some miles to the north-west of Schaffhausen. ”