We’re eating goose!

In​ 1524, astrologers warned of calamity in southern Germany: floods and failed harvests, sickness and war. The clergy would ‘drink the cup of bitterness’. But peasant disquiet was sufficiently visible to make planetary auguries redundant. When the serfs of Stühlingen rose up at midsummer, the catalyst was mundane: the countess of Lupfen had made them collect snail shells to use as thread bobbins at court. Rebellion spontaneously combusted on nearby estates. The nobility at Stühlingen received 62 complaints relating to abuses of their obligations and privileges, which, according to Lyndal Roper, amounted to ‘an indictment of an entire system’. The rebellion spread through the Black Forest to Upper Swabia, along the Rhine to Alsace and into Franconia. As Roper demonstrates in her absorbing account of the Peasants’ War, this outburst was more than a historical curiosity. The rebellion was an expression of a novel political sensibility and has informed every major European insurrection since; it can’t be understood without considering the rebels’ inner lives as well as their material circumstances.

Some peasants, mostly those on monastic estates, voiced religious grievances. Only three years had passed since Charles V, the Holy Roman Emperor, castigated Martin Luther at Worms for his 95 theses and other foundational texts of the Reformation. Although Luther shrank back to a more conservative position, his doctrine of the priesthood of all believers inspired radical clerics such as Thomas Müntzer to speak out against clerical abuses, winning popular support. In Luther’s university town of Wittenberg, the polemical Andreas Karlstadt advocated change far beyond anything Luther had intended. An elevated sense of communal peasant responsibility together with criticism of Church property rights can also be traced to Lutheran ideas, which, to their author’s frustration, mixed concepts of devotional liberty and economic liberty in a new and incendiary way.

There had been revolts in the German territories against taxes and tithes in the late 15th century, as there had been in England and France a century earlier. These generated ardent rhetoric about access to land and resources, inflected by grumbling anti-clericalism and backed by scriptural justification and mystical visions. Mocked as naive and inept, the so-called Bundschuh rebels – their emblem was a peasant’s shoe – learned about the efficacy of brotherly association, swearing oaths of loyalty and friendship which would influence the future uprising. But what made the war of 1524-25 so much more serious was the way that Lutheran ‘freedom’ undermined ecclesiastical authority and broadened disparate complaints in different regions into censure of the nature of lordship itself, specifically that it had become ‘un-Christian’.

In a tract of 1520, Luther had proposed that peasants were their own Christian lords with a duty of service to all other believers, thus redirecting the flow of obligation by ninety degrees. This wasn’t entirely outrageous: townsmen and even some lords sympathised, if not out of charity then self-interest, given that social discord threatened all order and prosperity. Serfdom was permitted by civil law but was at odds with the consensual social relations that had evolved from ancient usage. Furthermore, Roper writes, as earnest defenders of the gospel, ‘for this brief period, peasants were fashionable, individuals with points of view, not a faceless, animalistic mob.’ Economic conditions and seigneurial rights varied across jurisdictions, where some peasants were more affluent and powerful than others. This caused resentment, but more important was the economic upswing that followed the Black Death in the mid-14th century. Peasant assertiveness was born not of desperation but new-found political confidence: being better off made serfdom even less acceptable.

The homogenisation of feeling that fuelled the Peasants’ War was made possible by cheap print, which was also the cornerstone of the Reformation. In the spring of 1525, peasant bands in Upper Swabia adopted the Twelve Articles, a set of demands that covered such matters as appointing preachers, rights of common for grazing, hunting and fishing, and the unconscionable proliferation of laws and dictates by landlords. The document was a synthesis of complaints which had been around for some time but, couched in seductive prose and printed in 25,000 copies, it became a far-reaching manifesto, one that, like Luther’s bill post at Wittenberg, could be fixed to a church door by anyone with a hammer. With the Twelve Articles, the medium mattered almost as much as the message. ‘You could pick them up and hold them in your hand,’ Roper writes, ‘point to each demand and the biblical passages that proved their godliness.’ As with Protestant propaganda, the copies of this unlikely bill of rights were emblazoned with woodcuts showing peasants gathered in amity, flaunting symbols of resistance, shouldering pitchforks and pikes.

The message spread. Modest cohorts joined bigger groups, tributaries feeding a river of protest. Scores of marchers became an army of hundreds, then thousands, its momentum born of necessity as well as zeal: without supply lines, the peasants had to keep moving to feed themselves. Before they arrived at a town, a scribe would sometimes write ahead. Drawing on the Twelve Articles, and using the language of Christian love and the light of the gospel, these letters were nonetheless veiled threats: are you with us, brothers, or against? Town councils agonised, but the sight of a vast mob at the walls exerted its own persuasive force. Wise counsel usually prevailed. If the peasants were defeated, the records could always be adjusted to suggest that the authorities had surrendered only reluctantly.

The nearest comparator the rebels would have had to the marches of the Peasants’ War was pilgrimage to a monastery to revere a holy relic. The difference in 1524 was that along with the marchers’ giddy sense of liberation went the urge to sack and loot and destroy for the hell of it. The peasants found themselves drunk on lawlessness, and often just drunk. The religious houses and baronial castles they stormed were fabulously opulent. At Eberbach in the Rheingau they came across a barrel containing a hundred tuns – 100,000 litres – of wine and managed to drink two-thirds of it (so the story goes). Thirsty work, pillaging. And after the monotony of gruel, they enjoyed savouries and sweetmeats grabbed from well-stocked kitchens. ‘We’re eating goose!’ was the battle cry in Alsace. After the war ended, the abbot of Weissenau in Swabia commissioned a pictorial narrative of peasants boozing, puking, scrapping and thieving. In the pen and ink drawings, a rebel leader makes himself comfortable in the abbot’s seat like a self-appointed lord of misrule, while the monks flee to Ravensburg with whatever they can carry. Beneath this mayhem lay epicurean delight. ‘It must have been sensational to enter these enclosed communities,’ Roper suggests, ‘to find their warm heating ovens, feather beds, down pillows, libraries, jewelled chalices and massive stores of food.’

And there were riches. Swabian peasants broke into Burg Liebenthann, a monastic fortress, and seized a small fortune. They stole the abbot’s bed (having first removed the sleeping abbot) then razed his home to the ground. After the town council at Heilbronn sacrificed its monasteries to save its skin, peasants discovered nine sacks of gold in the bell tower of the Teutonic Order. Other nickable wealth was tied up in livestock. The counts of Ebeleben in Thuringia itemised their losses: 482 sheep, 66 cows, 72 pigs, 120 geese, 300 hens as well as a quantity of feather pillows on which peasant heads rested that night. Rebels relaxing in an alehouse in Frankenhain arranged the removal of grain and other foodstuffs from the local castle, which was then set on fire. Such stories multiplied across the territories. A third of all monastic institutions were attacked; in Thuringia and Saxony, it was more like half. Interiors were wrecked, furniture splintered, coffers emptied, cellars drained and libraries torched. Nuns and priests were ridiculed and assaulted. In the region of Würzburg and Bamberg more than fifty monasteries and nearly three hundred castles were destroyed. Castles were particularly hated, Roper writes, because they ‘wrote lordship into the landscape’.

Posterity has tended to agree with Luther, who insisted that the insurgents had mistaken his idea of spiritual liberty for political liberty. But perhaps the mistake is ours. A peasant’s understanding of the gospel was embedded in an instinctive sense of fairness and harmony with nature. Just as Christ intended for all men to share in his sacrifice, commemorated in bread and wine, so all men should share in the bounties of God’s creation – and not be meanly denied by monks, priests and grasping noblemen. This thinking was streaked with nostalgia; like so many protests of early modern ‘rioters’, the privileges listed in the Twelve Articles were largely conservative, an appeal to social superiors to keep their side of the bargain. These were not proto-republican rights for the individual: they were collective customs, part of a prelapsarian vision in which people were free to enjoy the fruits of the fields and forests, the rivers and the air. But in the spring of 1525 the peasants made war on their masters, forcing them into humiliating – and unforgivable – postures of dependency.

Swathes of territory came under the control of ragtag regiments. Everywhere they went, knights and noblemen, governors and bureaucrats simply caved in. Yet keeping hold of its gains was a problem for an army in perpetual motion. And although lordly resistance, which itself depended on feudalism, was slow to materialise, by April the tide in some regions was turning. Near Leipheim, a town on the Danube, four thousand peasants were cut down, drowned or taken prisoner by the mounted knights of the Swabian League. On Good Friday, peasants at Wurzach, forty miles south of Leipheim, were also defeated, the survivors hiding in trees or frantically banging on the town gates. This slaughter offended knightly virtue, and the well-trained warriors’ insistence that the peasants had fought ‘manfully’ was a feint to make yokels who ran away seem more like worthy adversaries.

The peasants didn’t even pretend to be chivalrous. On Easter Sunday, at Weinsberg, 24 captured knights were made to run the gauntlet – a corridor of lethally stabbing lances. This and other atrocities ended the carnivalesque mood and altered the course of the war. Humorous inversions were funny or salutary only when (as with the appointment of boy bishops) they could be safely reversed, and now there was no going back. Worse, it was hard for peasants to preach Christian brotherhood with so much blood on their hands. The scale of their reverses may even have suggested a loss of heavenly favour. At Fulda on 3 May, fifteen hundred peasants were driven into a ditch to die. Within days, ten times that many failed to take the castle at Würzburg, even under the charismatic leadership of Florian Geyer, a nobleman, and Götz von Berlichingen, a pious knight with a prosthetic iron hand, both of whom had thrown in their lot with the peasants. In other areas, notably around Strasbourg, in the Tyrolean Alps and the collieries of Saxony, the peasants remained in the ascendant, though by now the brutalising effects of civil war were plain to see.

On 12 May, four thousand peasants were killed at Böblingen in Württemberg. The next day, a massacre of noble and clerical prisoners – ‘divine justice’, according to Müntzer, who led the Thuringian peasants responsible – was followed by a crushing defeat at Frankenhausen and the deaths of thousands of men whose blood ran along a gulley, still known as the Blutrinne. Müntzer was captured and, after a fiery exchange of scriptural justifications with Philip of Hesse, tortured and executed.

By June the peasants had all but lost in Franconia, Swabia and Alsace. Then the Swabian League scattered five thousand rebels near Würzburg, ending the war and commencing an orgy of mopping-up and retribution that chroniclers blenched to describe. Ritualised executions righted the social order. In mass beheadings, the condemned were arranged in circles to mimic and mock their huddled conspiracies. Sixty-two citizens of Kitzingen were blinded by the Margrave of Brandenburg-Kulmbach so that those who had not seen him as their lord ‘should see him no more’. Mindful not to destroy their own workforce, however, the lords mostly settled for fines and the reswearing of feudal oaths, renouncing fraternity with a raised index finger of obedience.

Much of the trauma of the war went unrecorded, but traces can be found. On 7 June, Albrecht Dürer had a disturbing dream in which lumpy columns of rain descended near Nuremberg; Roper believes it must have been connected to disturbances in his world. Dürer designed a war memorial, never built, which depicted a peasant with a knife in his back. The following year, a fountain showing a peasant rolling around drunk was built in Mainz, a sardonic reference to those who had helped themselves to the 100,000-litre barrel of wine at Eberbach. A story circulated that it had been blessed by the devil, lampooning the spiritual egalitarianism to which the peasants had laid claim. Positive images of blood and wine, communion and belonging, were flipped to serve the resurgent status quo and establish a lasting public memory of the wickedness of rebellion.

Interpretations of the Peasants’ War in later centuries have been no less tendentious. It was the greatest mass revolt in Europe before the French Revolution; some 100,000 people died. Roper’s book is the first major re-evaluation for forty years, and the first since German re-unification. A divided Germany led to different interpretations of the war. The West celebrated the Twelve Articles as a blueprint of social democracy and cheered on communitarianism (but forgot to mention women); the East studied the rebellion in the spirit of Marxism, and lionised Müntzer as a progenitor of revolutionary socialism. The Czech text of Müntzer’s Prague Manifesto of 1521 was given to Stalin as a birthday present. The Nazis, too, found their heroes, naming Waffen-SS divisions after Geyer and Berlichingen, elites united with blood-and-soil plebs.

Roper has risen above the weaponised historiography. A decade ago, she wrote a superb biography of Luther, another contentious subject of postwar German history, whose (successful) Reformation has tended to push the (failed) Peasants’ War to the sidelines.* Here she sets out to refocus attention on the war and to see it in its own right. She follows Marxian tradition in conceiving of rebellious peasants not as a mob but as a union of thinking individuals able to imagine utopian futures. Naturally it suited the winners who wrote their history to present the German peasants as frenzied barbarians. Yet rehabilitation has its limits. Only through the prisms of 1789 and 1917 do they look like programmatic revolutionaries. Peasants spoke of brotherhood not class, Roper insists, craving not dominion over a new world, just dignity and justice in the one they had. It’s easier to impose modern definitions of religion and politics, economy and ecology, law and custom, onto the past than to grasp contemporary meanings. Distinctions alien to premodern culture so completely shape our outlook that we are scarcely aware of them. It’s for this reason, perhaps, that Roper reconstructs beliefs from deeds rather than words. Irruptions of print notwithstanding, communication was more oral than literate, and focusing on language can misrepresent that. Describing actions is Roper’s more sensitive way to appreciate 16th-century mentalities.

She also restores emotions, not just what Marx called the ‘ecstasy’ of revolt among those happy rebels, singing and joking and waving flags, but quotidian feelings. It’s easy to imagine not only watching one of these crowds of rebels marching along the highway but throwing down hoes and sickles to join it. There were friends to be made, backs to be slapped and songs to be sung, accompanied by pipe and drum. Men wore colour – fabrics picked up along the way – and held banners high in the breeze. If the rebels met a lord, he might be invited literally to get off his high horse and be called ‘brother’. ‘Walking,’ Roper writes, ‘was a great equaliser.’ The peasants’ political ideas, like their theological ideas, were sunk into the foundations of daily life, implicit and inarticulate until threatened. They knew what they meant by freedom.