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| German Peasants' War | |||||||
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| Belligerents | |||||||
| Peasant Army | Swabian League | ||||||
| Commanders | |||||||
| Thomas Muntzer | Georg, Truchsess von Waldburg | ||||||
| Strength | |||||||
| 300,000 | |||||||
| Casualties and losses | |||||||
| >100,000 | |||||||
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The German Peasants' War, or the Deutscher Bauernkrieg in German, was a wide-spread popular revolt in the German-speaking areas of Central Europe, 1524–1526. At its height in the spring and summer of 1525, the conflict involved an estimated 300,000 peasants: contemporary estimates put the dead at 100,000. It consisted, like the preceding Bundschuh movement and the Hussite Wars, of a series of both economic and religious revolts in which peasants, town-dwellers and nobles participated.
In mounting their insurrection, peasants faced several basic problems. The democratic nature of their organization complicated their military organization. They were further frustrated by lack of such important resources as artillery and cavalry. Their opposition, on the other hand, had experienced military leaders and deep pockets with which to fund military operations against them. Despite the obstacles, the German Peasants' War was Europe's largest and most widespread popular uprising prior to the French Revolution of 1789. It involved townspeople, rural dwellers and aristocrats; it incorporate rhetoric from the emerging religious reform movement, through which the peasants sought legitimation. The war broke out in separate insurrections, beginning in the southwestern part of what is now Germany and neighboring Alsace, and spread in subsequent insurrections to the central and eastern areas of Germany and present-day Austria. After the uprising in Germany was suppressed, it flared in several of the Swiss Cantons.
The German Peasants' War provided the basis of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx's concept of historical materialism. Marx and Engels attributed the peasant failure in 1524–1526, described in their monumental work, The Peasant War in Germany, to peasant conservativism; this led them to conclude that the revolution, when it occurred, would be led not by a peasant army but by an urban proletariat. Historians disagree on the nature of the revolt and its causes, whether it grew out of the emerging religious controversy centered on Martin Luther; whether a wealthy tier of peasants saw their own wealth and rights slipping away, and sought to re-inscribe them in the legal, social and religious fabric of society; or whether it was peasant resistance to the emergence of a modernizing, centralizing political state.
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When Jan Hus was executed, by order of the Council of Constance (6 July 1415), Bohemian and Moravian knights and nobles sent a protest to the Council of Constance on (2 September 1415), The protestatio Bohemorum condemned the execution of Hus in the strongest language. Sigismund, Holy Roman Emperor sent threatening letters to Bohemia declaring that he would soon drown all Wycliffites and Hussites and angered Hus's followers and the Bohemian and Moravian nobility. Almost immediately, local uprisings in Bohemia directed anger and frustration on the Church and insurgents drove many Catholic priests from their parishes. After the death of King Václav IV (en: Wenceslaus in English; de: Wenzel), fighting between the Hussites and the royal mercenaries destroyed much of Prague. In the course of the rioting, several magistrates were tossed out a window of the city hall in the First Defenestration of Prague. Jan Žižka, a Hussite leader, marched to southern Bohemia, and defeated the Catholics at the battle of Sudoměř (25 March 1420) in the first pitched battle of the Hussite wars. Employing the Wagenburg (Wagon fortress) defensive system, Hussites enticed enemy cavalry and infantry into battle. Sigismund engaged in three anti-Hussite campaigns; the Hussites responded with campaigns against Sigismund and his allies. Major battles occurred at Ústí nad Labem and Tachov, and Battle of Domažlice. The war lasted from 30 July 1419 – 30 May 1434; although it resulted in the defeat of the radical portion of the Hussite communities, the moderate Hussite organization remained intact.[1]
Formed in 1487, this alliance of German princes included dukes and nobles who belonged to the Company of the Shield of St. George, several of the Free Imperial Cities and several towns of the region, including Ulm, Esslingen, Reutlingen, Überlingen, Lindau, Nordlingen, Memmingen, Ravensburg, Gmünd, Biberach, Dinkelsbühl, Pfullendorf, Kempten, Kaufbeuren, Isny, Leutkirch, Giengen, Wangen, and Aalen. In the months immediately following its initial formation, Augsburg, Heilbronn, Wimpfen, Donauwörth, Weil der Stadt, and Bofingen also joined, and, later, the Bavarian territories of the House of Wittelsbach, the territories of the Duchy of Württemberg, and lower Austria.[2]
The Swabian League fielded an army commanded by Georg, Truchsess von Waldburg, later known as Bauernjörg for his role in the suppression of the revolt. He was also known as the scourge of the peasants. (25 January 1488 – 29 May 1531),[3] The league headquarters was based in Ulm, and command was exercised through a war council which decided the size and contingents of troops to be levied from each member. Depending on their size and capability, members contributed a specific number of mounted knights and foot soldiers, called a contingent, to the League's army. The Bishop of Augsburg, for example, had to contribute 10 horse (10 mounted men), and 62 foot soldiers, which would be the equivalent of a half-company. A standing contingent of close to 200 horse and 1000 foot, however, could not deal with the size of the disturbance. By 1525, the uprisings in the Black Forest, the Breisgau, Hegau, Sundgau, and Alsace alone required a substantial muster of 3,000 foot and 300 horse.[4]
Foot soldiers were drawn from the ranks of the Landknechts. These were mercenary soldiers, usually paid a monthly wage of four guilders, organized into regiments, called Haufen, and companies, of 120-300 men, called Fähnlein, or little flag, which differentiated the companies from one another. Each company, in turn, was composed of smaller units, a squad of 10-12 men, known as Rotte. The Landsknecht clothed, armed and fed themselves, and were accompanied by a sizable train of sutlers, bakers, washerwomen, prostitutes, and sundry individuals with occupations needed in a military community. The trains, or Tross, were sometimes larger than the fighting force, but their presence required organization and discipline. Landsknechts maintained their own structure, called the Gemein, or community assembly, which was symbolized by a ring. The Gemein had its own officer, known as the Schultheiss, and an officer called the Provost, who policed the ranks and maintained order.[5]
The League relied on the heavy armored cavalry of the nobility for the bulk of its strength; the League had both a heavy cavalry force, and a light cavalry, known as the Rennfahne, which acted as a vanguard, or advanced guard. Typically, the Rehnnfahne were the second and third sons of poor knights, the lower and sometimes impoverished nobility with small land-holdings, or, in the case of second and third sons, no inheritance or social role. These men could often be found roaming the countryside, looking for work, or, short of finding it, engaging in highway robbery.[6]
To be effective, however, the cavalry needed to be mobile, and needed to oppose a force not heavily armed with pikes.
The peasant armies were organized in bands, called Haufen, similar to the Landsknecht units. Each Hauf was organized into Unterhaufen, or Fähnlein and Rotten. The bands varied in size, depending on the numbers of insurgents available to join a force in a single locality; unlike the Landsknecht Haufen, the peasant Haufen united peasants by territory, whereas the Haufen of the Landsknecht drew men from a variety of territories. Some bands could number about 4,000; others, such as the peasant force at Frankenhausen, could gather 8,000. The Alsatian peasants who took to the field at the Battle of Zabern numbered 18,000.[7]
Haufen were formed from companies: typically 500 men per company, subdivided by platoons of 10–15 peasants. Like the Landsknechts, the peasant bands used similar titles: Oberster Feldhauptmann, or supreme commander, similar to a colonel, and Lieutenants, or Leutinger. Each company was commanded by a captain and had its own Fähnrich, or ensign who, naturally, carried the company's standard (its ensign). The companies also had a sergeant or Feldweibel, and squadron leaders called Rottmeister, or masters of the Rotte. Officers were usually elected, particularly the supreme commander and the Leutinger. [8]
The democratic principle of the peasant army governed its organizing structure and the so-called ring, in which peasants gathered in a circle to debate tactics, troop movements, alliances, and the distribution of spoils, dominating the organization. Despite this democratic principle, there was a hierarchy and every peasant band had a supreme command and a marshal (Schultheiss), who maintained law and order. Each company also had lieutenants, captains and standard-bearers, a master gunner, a master of the wagon-fort, a master of the train (transportation), four watch masters, four sergeant majors to arrange the order of battle, a Weibel (sergeant) for each company, two quartermasters, farriers, quartermasters for the horses, a communications officer, and, importantly, a pillage master for each company.[9]
Peasants possessed an important resource, the skills to build and maintain field works. They also used the wagon-fort effectively, a tactic that had been mastered in the Hussite Wars of the previous century. Wagons would be chained together in a suitable defensive location. Cavalry and draft animals were laced in the center. Peasants dug ditches around the outer edge of the fort, and used timbers to close the gaps between and underneath the wagons. In the Hussite wars, artillery was usually placed in the center, on raised mounds of earth that allowed them to be fired over the wagons. Wagon forts could be erected quickly, and taken down quickly; they were relatively mobile, but they also had a drawback. They required a fairly large area of flat terrain, they were not the ideal offensive deployment, and they had been used 75 years earlier to great effect, when artillery was less sophisticated. By 1525, artillery had greater range and power.[10]
Peasants served in rotation, sometimes for one week in four, and returned to their villages after their service. They were replaced by another man. While the men were gone, other men absorbed the workload of the missing men. Ironically, this sometimes meant producing wealth or resources that supplied their opponents, such as in the Archbishopric of Salzburg, where men worked to extract silver, which was used to hire fresh contingents of Landsknechts for the Swabian League's army.[11]
Notably, however, the peasants lacked an essential element that the Swabian league had: cavalry. Certainly, some peasants arrived with horses, and any mounted troops that the peasants did have seem to have been used for reconnaissance. The lack of cavalry with which to protect their flanks, and with which to penetrate massed Landsknecht squares proved to be a long-term tactical and strategic problem.[12]
During the 1524 harvest, in Stühlingen, south of the Black Forest, the Countess of Lupfen ordered serfs to collect snail shells for use as thread spools. This was the final straw in a series of difficult harvests, and within days, 1,200 peasants had gathered, created a list o grievances, elected officers, and raised a banner. The disturbance spread quickly, and within a few weeks, most of southwestern Germany was in open revolt. The uprising stretched from the Black Forest, along the Rhine, to Lake Constance, into the Swabian highlands, along the upper Danube River, and into Bavaria.[13]
On 16 February 1525, 25 villages belonging to the city of Memmingen rebelled, demanding of the Memmingen magistrates (city council) improvements in their economic condition and the general political situation. Their complaints touched subjects like peonage, land use, easements on the woods and the commons as well as ecclesiastical requirements of service and payment.
The city set up a committee of villagers to discuss their issues, expecting to see a checklist of specific and trivial demands: for example, the payment of such and such for so and so's lost wood; the settlement of a boundary dispute relative to four measures of land between two villages; the re-establishment of fishing rights, or permission to release hogs in a wooded area; or release from trivial duties during peak labor seasons (harvest, sowing). Unexpectedly, the peasants delivered a uniform declaration that struck at the pillars of the peasant-magisterial relationship. Twelve articles clearly and consistently outlined their grievances. Many of those demands did subsequently not prevail in the city council. Historians have generally assumed that the articles of the ordines provinciales una congregati (the representatives of the communities) of Memmingen became the basis of discussion for the Twelve Articles agreed on by the Upper Swabian Peasants Confederation of 20 March 1525.
On 4 April 1525, 5,000 peasants, the Leipheimer Haufen (literally: the Leipheim Bunch) gathered near Leipheim to rise against the city of Ulm. A band of five companies, plus approximately 25 citizens of Leipheim, assumed positions to the west of the town. League reconnaissance reported to the Truchsess that the peasants were well-armed. They had powder and shot for their cannon, and they were 3,000-4,000 strong. They also had an advantageous position on the east bank of the Biber On the left stood a wood, and on their right, a stream and marshland; behind them, they had erected a wagon fortress, and they were armed with Hook guns and some ight artillery pieces.[14]
As he had done in earlier encounters with the peasants, the Truchsess negotiated while he continued to move his troops into advantageous positions. Keepdsing the bulk of his army facing Leipheim, he dispatched detachments of horse from Hesse and Ulm across the Danube to Elchingen. The detached troops encountered a separate group of 1,200 peasants engaged in local requisitions, and entered into a lively combat, dispersing them and taking 250 prisoners. At the same time, Truchsess broke off his negotiations, and received a volley of fire from the main group of peasants. He dispatched a guard of light horse and a small group of foot soldiers against the fortified peasant position. This was followed by his main force; when the peasants saw the size of his main force—his entire force was 1,500 horse, 7,000 foot, and 18 field guns—they began an orderly retreat. Of the 4,000 or so peasants who had manned the fortified position, 2,000 were able to reach the town of Leipheim itself, taking their wounded with them in carts. Others sought to escape across the Danube, and 400 drowned there. The Truchsess' horse units cut down an additional 500. This was the first decisive battle of the war.[15]
An element of the conflict drew on resentment toward some of the nobility. The peasants of Odenwald had already taken the Cistercian Monastery at Schöntal, and were joined by peasant bands from Limburg and Hohenlohe. A large band of peasants from the Neckar valley, under the leadership of Jack Rohrbach, joined them and from Neckarsulm, this expanded band, called the Bright Band (in German, Heller Haufen), marched to the town of Weinsberg, where the Duke of Helfenstein had his seat.[16] Here, the peasants achieved a major victory, in which they were aided by the duke's own subjects. The peasants assaulted and captured his castle; most of his own soldiers were on duty in Italy, and he had little protection. Having taken the Duke as their prisoner, the peasants took their revenge a step further: They forced the Duke, and approximately 70 other nobles who had taken refuge with him, to run the gauntlet of pikes, a popular form of execution among the Landsknechts. Rohrbach ordered the band's piper to play during the running of the gauntlet. The Duke died horribly.[17]
This was too much for many of the peasant leaders of other bands; Rohrbach's actions were repudiated, he was deposed, and replaced by a knight, Götz von Berlichingen, who was subsequently elected as supreme commander of the band. At the end of April, the band marched to Amorbach, joined on the way by some radical Odenwald peasants out for Berlichingen's blood. Berlichingen had been involved in the suppression of the Poor Conrad uprising 10 years earlier, and these peasants had a long memory. In the course of their march, they burned down the Wildenburg castle, a contravention of the Articles of war to which the band had agreed.[18]
The massacre at Weinsberg was also too much for Luther to tolerate; this is the deed that drew his ire, in Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants in which he castigated peasants for unspeakable crimes, not only for the murder of the nobles at Weingarten, but also for the impertinence of their revolt.[19]
At Königshofen, on 2 June 1525, the peasant commanders Wendel Hipfler and Georg Metzler had set camp outside of town. Upon identifying two squadrons of League and Alliance horse approach on each flank, now recognized as a dangerous Truchsess strategy, they redeployed the wagon-fort and guns to the hill above the town. Having learned by now how to protect themselves from a mounted assault, peasants assembled in four massed ranks behind their cannon, but in front of their wagon-fort, intended to protect them from a rear attack. The peasant gunnery fired a salvo at the League advanced horse, which attacked them on the left. The Truchsess' infantry made a frontal assault, but without waiting for his foot soldiers to engage, he also ordered an attack on the peasants from the rear. As the knights hit the rear ranks, panic erupted among the peasants. Hipler and Metzler fled with the master gunners. Two thousand reached the nearby woods, where they re-assembled and mounted some resistance to the League horsemen. In the chaos that followed, the peasants and the mounted knights and infantry conducted a pitched battle and by nightfall, only 600 peasants remained. The Truchsess ordered his army to search the battlefield, and the soldiers discovered approximately 500 peasants who had feigned death. The battle is also called the Battle of the Turmberg, for a watch-tower on the field.[20]
The German Peasants' War provided the basis of Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx's concept of historical materialism. Marx and Engels attributed the peasant failure in 1524–1526, described in their monumental work, The Peasant War in Germany, to peasant conservativism; this led them to conclude that the revolution, when it occurred, would be led not by a peasant army but by an urban proletariat.
Beyond Marx and Engels interpretation of the Peasant War, historians disagree on the nature of the revolt and its causes, whether it grew out of the emerging religious controversy centered on Martin Luther; whether a wealthy tier of peasants saw their own wealth and rights slipping away, and sought to re-inscribe them in the legal, social and religious fabric of society; or whether it was peasant resistance to the emergence of a modernizing, centralizing political state.
Historians have tended to toward categorizing the German peasant war in two ways, either as an expression of economic problems, or as a theological/political statement against the constraints of feudal society.[21] Since the 1930s, Günter Franz’s work on the peasant war dominated interpretations of the uprising, challenged mainly (until recently) only by an economic interpretation informed by analysis of economic data of harvests, wages, and general financial conditions of the participants. Franz understood the Peasants’ War as a political struggle in which any social and economic aspects played a minor role. Key to Franz’s interpretation is the understanding that peasants had benefited from the economic recovery of the early 16th century and that their grievances, as expressed in such documents as the Twelve Articles, had little or no basis in the economic reality of the time. He interpreted the uprising’s causes as essentially political, and secondarily economic: the assertions by princely landlords of control over the peasantry through new taxes and the modification of old ones, and the creation of servitude backed up by princely law. For Franz, the peasant uprisings of 1525 were a political conflict between “revolting peasants” and princes in which the peasants were horribly crushed and disappeared from view for centuries. Research on the German peasants’ war has benefited from the interest of social and cultural historian, who challenged the long-held assumptions about German peasants and the authoritarian tradition in Germany.
Subsequent research hypothesizes alternatives. Peasant resistance occurred in two forms. The first, spontaneous (or popular) and localized revolt, drew on traditional liberties and old law for legitimacy. In this way, it could be explained as a conservative and traditional effort to recover lost ground. The second saw the conflict as an organized inter-regional revolt that claimed its legitimacy from divine law, and found its ideological basis from the Reformation. Historians, particularly those studying local histories of southwestern German territories have refuted both Franz’s view of the origins of the war, and the Marxist view of the course of the war, and both views on the outcome and consequences. One of the most important has been Peter Blickle’s emphasis on communalism as a factor. Although Blickle agrees with Franz and the Marxists in that he sees a crisis of feudalism in the latter Middle Ages in southern Germany. This has political and social and economic features and originated in efforts by peasants and their landlords to cope with long term climate, technological, labor, and crop changes during the 15th century, particularly the extended agrarian crisis and its drawn out recovery. For Blickle, the possibility of peasant rebellion is contingent upon the existence of a parliamentary tradition in southwestern Germany and the coincidence of a tier of individuals with significant political, social and economic interest in agricultural production and distribution. These individuals had had a great deal to lose.
This view, which asserts the uprising grew out of the participation of groups within the agricultural system in the economic recovery, has in turn been challenged by Scribner, Stalmetz and Bernecke. They assert that Blickle’s analysis of the peasant economic recovery is based on dubious form of the Malthusian principle, and that the peasant economic recovery was significantly limited, both regionally, and by the depth to which it extended into peasant ranks. A few peasants had participated in the recovery in a few areas, but as a group, participation was spotty and regional, and did not extend to the greater portion of the agricultural workforce. Blickle and his students have modified their ideas about peasant wealth. A variety of local studies by Blickle, his students, and others, show that peasants did participate in the economic recovery, but the participation was not as broadly based as initially thought.
The course of the war also demonstrates the importance of a congruence of events: the new liberation ideology, the appearance within peasant ranks of charismatic and military-trained men like Munzer and Gaisman, a set of grievances with specific economic and social origins, a challenged, although not fatally weakened, set of political relationships, and a communal tradition of political and social discourse. The traditional take Franz offers on the slaughter of peasants in the final battles, and the execution of the leaders, suggests a total failure on the part of the peasants to achieve their goals: the peasants disappeared, then, from historical discussion for centuries. Yet the new studies of localities and studies examining social relationships through the lens of gender and class shows that peasants were able to recover, or even in some cases expand many of their rights and traditional liberties, to negotiate these in writing, and force their lords to guarantee them. If many of the more radical demands were not met, this is not unusual, as Blickle and others have pointed out.
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