Martin Luther, serfdom and the German Peasants’ War

Lyndal Roper, Regius Professor of History at Oxford University is on excellent form to talk me through the German Peasant's War of 1524-25. Things I learned:

- take Martin Luther seriously (but not literally)

- monasteries feed the poor and needy (particularly when they are armed and extremely determined)

- the scale of the revolt was off the charts, nothing like it until the French Revolution

- the East German State celebrated its revolutionary past with a mural of the war which needs to be on everyone's 'must see' list (only to collapse a few months later!

All in all this is a terrific and thought provoking episode. The role of Luther in all this surprised me greatly. 

Lyndal's book Summer of Fire and Blood is here.

If you enjoy the conversation then please follow the show, share it with a friend and leave a review!

Chapters

• 0:00 Setting The Stage: Luther And 1520s Germany
• 4:50 What “Peasant” Meant Across Regions
• 11:05 Markets, Theology, And Talk Of Freedom
• 16:45 Patchwork Power And Grinding Obligations
• 21:45 From Lawsuits To Oaths Of Brotherhood
• 26:20 Gathering Grievances And Twelve Articles
• 32:05 Münzer’s Rhetoric And Reassessment
• 38:20 Why Monasteries Became Targets
• 42:55 Weinsberg And The Shock Of Violence
• 46:20 Luther’s Backlash Against The Uprising
• 50:20 Massacres, Punishments, And Memory
• 56:20 Towns Caught Between Armies
• 1:00:30 Leaders’ Fates And Voices Preserved
• 1:04:10 Competing Legacies: Luther And Münzer

Transcript

Russell: 0:03

Hello and welcome to Subject Change with me, Russell Hogg. My guest today is Professor Lindell Roper. Lindell is Regius Professor of History at Oxford University and is an expert on early modern European history. In particular, she's well known for her works on Martin Luther and on witch hunts. But today we're going to talk about the Peasants War, which was a rebellion that broke out in Germany in 1524 on an absolutely massive scale. And there's really nothing like it in Europe until you get to the French Revolution. Anyway, this rebellion is the subject of Lindell's book, Summer of Fire and Blood, which is an absolute terrific read, and uh and I thoroughly recommend it. And uh and actually it's not just me that recommends it, because my guest in uh in the previous episode uh just uh just a few days ago was Peter Marshall. And uh without any prompting from me whatsoever, he brought it up uh and said that it's absolutely terrific uh read and that I definitely ought to be uh to be looking at it. So uh so there you go. Uh anyway, uh welcome Lindell to the podcast.

SPEAKER_01: 1:14

Thanks very much, Russell. I don't know whether you can blush on a podcast, but I'm certainly blushing. Um prose from Peter Marshall is is um that means a lot. He's uh an absolutely marvelous historian.

Russell: 1:27

Okay, so so as I say, we're going to be talking about the Peasants' War, but but there is a figure who who, to my mind at least, seems to loom over the whole affair, uh, you know, both before uh and even during and after it, and that is Martin Luther. And so uh I imagine that some of the listeners at least could do with a refresher on on who Martin Luther was and and what his ideas were. So could you maybe uh maybe just uh give us uh give us uh give us a bit of an introduction there, please.

SPEAKER_01: 2:00

Yes, certainly. And um it's interesting when when I really what made me write this book about the peasants' war was that I knew that the chapter on the peasants' war in the biography of Luther that I wrote really was the worst chapter in the whole thing because when I wrote it, I knew it wasn't satisfactory, but I also knew that if I got involved in trying to understand the peasants' war, I would never finish the biography. But I knew that I had to think about it, and it's fascinated me ever since I was a student. So, why is Luther important to understanding all of this? Well, back in 1517, as I'm sure we'll all remember, Luther put up the 95 Theses, and that's what people usually say started the Reformation. But at that point, Luther isn't setting out a full theology. That didn't come for a few years. And in 1520, he writes three treatises which really set out a very radical program of critique of the church. And that includes things like attacking monasticism, attacking saints' cults and pilgrimages, pointing out that there's no need for why the clergy have to be celibate, starting to question monasticism, a whole range of targets that he opens up. And one of those treatises that he does is called The Freedom of a Christian. And if you haven't read any Luther and you just want to read one thing, I think that's the thing I'd say go and read. It's not like many of his other writings, because Luther can be a quite aggressive sort of polemicist. Uh, and in this piece, which is really quite short, it's only 30, 40 pages, he writes in a much more lyrical tone, and he starts with this wonderful paradox where he talks about a Christian is lord of all, and then he says, but a Christian is subject to all. So a Christian is both a lord and a servant. So how is this possible? And then the rest of the treatise sets out the resolution of this paradox and it talks about freedom. Well, freedom is quite a word to use, and it was an absolutely incendiary word to use in 1520, because when you raise the issue of freedom, for peasants that immediately means freedom from serfdom, and that's the way that they understood it.

Russell: 4:49

So that's a bit about Luther and and how his ideas are forming at that time. But this is the peasants' war that we're talking about. So so that leads on to the obvious question, which is what do we mean when we say peasant?

SPEAKER_01: 5:03

Well, we mean a whole bunch of things. And it's a very complex picture that we have to bear in mind because not all peasants are the same. So some peasants are serfs who are owned by the Lord, and in many areas of what was what we now call Germany, this was the case. So in the south of Germany, you have many areas where bodily serfdom predominates, and that means that you are owned by the Lord and you're not free. But not all peasants in South Germany are serfs in that sense. Some of them are free peasants, some of them have particular rights, and the rights that all the peasants have in different areas can be different. In other areas of what we now call Germany, in places like Turingia or Saxony, bodily serfdom no longer existed. But that didn't mean that peasants didn't suffer under their lords. They still had to pay a whole range of dues, and they also had to do labor services. In other areas of Germany, the whole thing turns on these labor services, and it's doing so and so many days duty for work for your lord, which is how serfdom runs. So it's a very complex institution, it's not just one thing, but you can also see that there are a host of points of grievance that can erupt, and that's what happened in 1524 and particularly in 1525.

Russell: 6:46

You sort of say that there's there's differences. Is this is this a difference that it's difference in North Germany to how it is in South Germany, or are there differences even at a more granular level?

SPEAKER_01: 6:58

The differences are incredibly granular, and they're to do with the very complex ways in which territories and lordships were built up. And many of these lords aren't nobles or individuals, some of them are, of course. Um, some of them can be convents and monasteries, they can be institutions. So, just to give you an example of how complicated this can be, you might have a convent, say, which has got one set of farms in one area, and then someone dies, leaves another farm to them, or they buy another farm, but it isn't adjoining the farms that they've got. So it would make sense for them to swap the new farm with, say, another monastery, which it's got territories that adjoin that, and swap it for something else that's nearer to them. And this is exactly what was happening in this period is people and institutions try to make coherent territories that they controlled. So if that happens, you then find that the village next door, the village that has just joined your territory, might have a whole history of different rights from your village. They might pay less, say, in the amounts that you have to pay from the orchard, from the fruit harvest. They might have special privileges about being out overnight. There might be a whole range of things that they do differently. And now, of course, from the monastery or convent point of view, you don't want everybody having different rights and privileges. You want to make them all the same.

SPEAKER_02: 8:43

Right.

SPEAKER_01: 8:44

So you might say, well, let's declare everyone a bodily serf that this convent or monastery owns. But for people who might have had a tradition of being free peasants and have just come in newly to this territory, that is a huge loss and it will make them absolutely furious. So, of course, they'll come into dispute with the Lord and the people next door, meanwhile, will feel it's unfair that they have special privileges. So the way that feudalism evolves, once it's put into an increasingly market-dominated economy, creates all kinds of tensions and inequalities. And so you have a very complicated patchwork of rights, privileges, and grievances, and you have peasants who are differently wealthy. If you're a a serf, it doesn't mean you can't be wealthy. Many of them were extremely rich. They could do well in farming. And peasants are, of course, engaged in the market, and women are engaged in the market too. It's women who take the cheese, poultry, and eggs to market and sell it. And of course, once you're in a town, you come across new ideas.

Russell: 10:10

So do you think that um that it's the peasants going to the markets? That's where they're hearing about Luther's ideas of of of freedom and uh well, and and are they interested in it as uh freedom in an economic sense, or are they interested in it because they're engaged in the religious question? What's what's their level of how how are they engaging with uh with Luther's ideas, do you think?

SPEAKER_01: 10:35

Well, I think that the economic and the religious, you just can't separate them because they're really I mean, life isn't like that, especially not in a profoundly religious age. So you can see how they come together in something like the sort of things that Luther is saying about the Eucharist, because as peasants see it, Christ bought our freedom with his blood, right? But what is it that lay people don't get in the Mass? What is it that they don't receive in the Eucharist? They only get the bread, they don't get the wine, and of course, the wine, the blood, that's what Christ bought our freedom with. And that's a really explosive idea. Once you add that theological insight to grievances about serfdom, you've got something very, very powerful, and that's how these sorts of things come together. That and just fury over the hypocrisy that many of these peasants felt uh they were seeing from the church. So, if I can give you an example of that, uh, one of the things that many lords insisted on was that if um someone was a an owned serf in their area, then they could only marry someone who was subject to the same lord, part of the same lordship. And you can see why from the monastery or convent's point of view, or from the secular lord's point of view, they want to ensure that they will have the next generation of workers, of peasants. They want to ensure that they'll remain on their land. And so if they marry into another lordship, the whole issue arises of, well, whose serfs are they then? Are they mine or are they somebody else's? And they want to preempt that by insisting that you marry someone from the same lordship. But what is the church saying about marriage? The church is saying marriage is a sacrament that consists solely in the free promise to marry of the couple and their physical union. You don't need your parents' permission to get married, you don't need to be married by a priest, that promise can happen anywhere. It's a free promise. So if you've got convents and monasteries saying you can only marry someone of the same lordship, that's undermining the whole principle of marriage as a sacrament. And so no wonder they felt furious and felt that this was hypocritical.

Russell: 13:20

And what else? Um Well, we've got peasants who are not serfs, but they still owe obligations, don't they? But but presumably serfs owe even more obligations. So what other obligations are there that are chafing away?

SPEAKER_01: 13:33

Oh, there are so many. And when the peasants in Stuhlingen came to list all their grievances, they had 62. That was just the beginning. Um, it's a whole range of things. Some of them, you look at them and you think, why would you risk your life over that? That's just ridiculous. But I think it's as if I think what you have to imagine is a a system of so many duties and obligations that it's just overwhelming. You feel hemmed in in every aspect of your life. So it can be things like that you have to do so and so many days service for the Lord. And he can demand it at any time. He can demand it when you're out getting the harvest in, and that's a hopeless time to have to go drop everything and do something for the Lord. He can demand that you do transport duties, and these transport duties, once you start getting a more developed economy, that can include transporting wood, long distances, being out overnight. So suddenly something that looked quite harmless becomes a major obligation. It can be things like the one that really uh is said to have started the whole peasants' war off was the demand that the women collect snail shells for the Countess of Lütfingen to wind yarn around for the noble ladies. A completely senseless demand. Whether that's a a myth or whether it's really true, we'll never know, but it is attested to by several chroniclers. It just doesn't appear in the Stuhlingen 62 complaints.

Russell: 15:14

So we're in Germany, and I and and I guess you know there's two sides to a war. We've got the peasants on the one hand, but I guess we've got everybody else on the other hand to some extent. So so Germany is such a confusing place, at least until Bismarck comes and sort of tidies everything up. So can you just explain a bit about how Germany is organized and the relationship between the lords and the senior lords and the different classes? You know, you know what? Make it all simple for us.

SPEAKER_01: 15:43

No, Russell, I can't. I think we I think we often approach this the wrong way around because we think from the 19th century and we look back and we think, well, you should have had an organized state with a single ruler. Uh that is one way of thinking about politics, but another way of thinking about it would be to think of a system where power is decentralized. And if you think about Germany now, it is a very decentralized place. It's the states that are really important, and local traditions mean a huge amount. It's not a single national state with a single national identity in any simple, straightforward way, or at least as soon as you scratch the surface, you realize that it's not. You realize that people in, I don't know, Franconia or Swabia, they can't stand the Bavarians and so forth and so on. So I think how how one can think about it is that power is decentralized and is very local and is fundamentally collective. So we think of territories as ruled by one person, but many of these territories were ruled by a collective. So even somewhere like Saxony, where you have an elector, and he's one of seven electors of the empire, you might think, oh, well, that's that's recognizable, there's a ruler. But actually, how that works is that he has his brother also involved in ruling the territory, and there are a whole lot of other little local uh nobles who also have power in this system, so that power is consultative and it's shared amongst many people, it's not just one person who has sole authority in many of these little areas, so you have a lot of independent political units. So you might have a convent or monastery being directly subject to the emperor, you have independent towns with their own councils, again, directly subject to the emperor, and then you might have territories where the local counts will be the rulers, but they'll have an overlord over them, and then you have a whole system of bureaucrats who are running this whole thing and who are somewhere between village people and the local ruler, and they occupy this very complicated position where they have to work away between the power over them and the peasants, and that whole system comes under enormous pressure in the peasants' war because what happens is that many of the local nobles, even some of the bureaucrats, go over to the peasant's side, and as that happens, the whole thing starts to crumble. A system that had looked really stable.

Russell: 19:02

I'm just thinking that um a system like that. I'm a lawyer, I'm thinking this is great.

SPEAKER_01: 19:08

Yes, lots of possibilities to earn money.

Russell: 19:13

Were there a lot of court cases? Was there a were were people in and out of courts trying to work out how the whole thing fitted together?

SPEAKER_01: 19:21

They were constantly, and the courts had competing jurisdictions. Of course they did. And what you find is that the peasants are very good at using courts, and indeed the whole peasants' war starts out with a series of local disputes which go up through the courts and which are running through the courts during the whole process of the peasants' war. It's just that the peasants realize that this is not going to get them anywhere, and they take direct action instead. And it's that switch that is so interesting, the point at which Which they start to say, we want a world that is run according to godly values, according to godly justice. And when they start wanting a much more fundamental change in society, and they get out of the local disputes between the landlord and their landlord and them, and they start seeing it as a much wider issue that involves peasants from districts far away from them marching together.

Russell: 20:32

I'd actually scribbled down the question that uh what was the inciting uh incident? And and I think you've answered that, although you I think you've also said that you're not completely sure that it ever happened. It does sound a little bit unlikely that uh that you know they decided, right, that's it, we're going to war, because well, I suppose these things, you know.

SPEAKER_01: 20:53

I think it's like a snowball. And I think the that there are local grievances which start coming together in the summer. And then it all starts to snowball in the early autumn as you have peasant groups in southern Germany and in on the borders of Switzerland starting to really take action. And when you also have in a little town called Walshut the reformer Banzer Hubmayer starting to really enthuse people with ideas about the gospel, um, the new Reformation ideas, and that plays a key role in how some of these groups then start together, start to come together and see it as a wider issue. But it's not really until 1525 that it starts taking on a much, much wider character. And I think the extent of it and the speed of it was a surprise to most people.

Russell: 21:59

You say the extent of it. I mean, what is it? What is actually happening in the initial stages? Are they are they attacking anyone? I mean, what's actually happening?

SPEAKER_01: 22:11

What happens is that uh you'll find in a village, people will come together and they will say, We have sworn an oath of brotherhood, and we are going to now come to you and offer you brotherhood and ask you to swear an oath with us. And if you don't come to us, then we will come to you. And there's a wonderful uh case in which the uh peasant leader adds, and you won't be laughing. So it's clear that it's done with some um some coercion, but then to get someone to swear an oath of brotherhood is it sounds it sounds lovely, it sounds naive, but actually it's a really big step because it means that you are breaking your feudal oath, and the penalty for that is chopping off two of your fingers with which you swore that oath, and that makes you unable to work.

Russell: 23:16

So sorry, hang on, hang on, I don't I don't understand. How is how is swearing an oath of brotherhood interfering with your feudal oath?

SPEAKER_01: 23:25

Because that puts the oath of loyalty and uh to your brothers above that to your feudal oath, to your lord. And the lords were very aware that this was a massive infringement, and as they can see the peasants forming, what you see them often do is call all the peasants together and say, Let's repeat that oath. You repeat your oath of loyalty to me, which they do, and then shortly after they go ahead and swear an oath of Brotherhood and the uh the lords in many cases are deeply shocked because they say we've always had good relations. How can this be that peasants who I thought loved me no longer seem to? So um that's how it proceeds in terms of how you got uh these people to mass together. How it works on the ground is that during the winter it seems that groups of peasants began to talk and discuss and meet with one another. We can know a bit about this, how this happened in the region around uh the in the regions around South Germany, for example, in Balthringen, we know that the peasants came together and they met on the Ried or the Moor, the sort of swampy ground. Uh, it's a really interesting place to choose. In other places, we know that they met on hills. And in the case of Balthringen, we know that they met several times, and it said they met every week. Some sources say Tuesday, some say Thursday, we'll never know which. But if it's an interesting place to choose because that is safe from horses, you can't have horses going into boggy ground. And the meetings grew bigger and bigger and bigger, and also you have peasants starting to come armed. And if you turn up armed and everybody else turns up armed, you get a sense of how well armed you are. And gradually what they're also doing is formulating grievances, and that's how the peasants' war often starts. Um, people will be asked, well, what are your grievances? But if you ask people what their grievances are, that's always a dangerous thing to do because then they think about them and then they formulate them. And we know that around about 300 or so grievances were formulated in the south. And then gradually, as the temperature starts to increase, by late February, peasants are forming groups, and then representatives of those groups met in Memmingen. Those grievances were all assembled, and out of those grievances they formulated the twelve articles.

Russell: 26:30

And you say that uh the peasants have their representatives, and are these representatives coming from the rank and file, or are sort of the more intellectual classes the preachers or whoever, are they sort of inserting themselves in and saying, you know, I'll lead, I'll lead you to the promised land, or whatever the whatever the right expression is?

SPEAKER_01: 26:53

It's a mixture. So some of them, uh in one case, we know Ulrich Schmidt was a smith from Zulmingen, just near Balthingen. We know sometimes they're local nobles, believe it or not, who want to put themselves as at the head of the peasants. Sometimes they are ordinary peasants, and we also know that many preachers got involved too, and they can be very helpful to the peasants because people who can read and write are very important in all of this because you need them to be able to write letters to communicate with other peasant bands.

Russell: 27:35

And you you mentioned the twelve articles, and you also mentioned earlier about Luther's work where he talks about freedom, but I seem to recall from your book there was something about that freedom for a peasant is is is quite a complicated idea because not only are they sort of enmeshed in this web of obligations, they don't necessarily want to they don't necessarily want to escape these obligations completely. You know, some of them are beneficial to them. So do you want to say just a little bit about this idea of sort of this qualified idea of freedom?

SPEAKER_01: 28:10

It's such an interesting idea. And the other thing I should say, Russell, is just how extraordinary this year has been for me as I've been going to Germany. I'd probably go, I don't know how many times I've been this year, but it's about every other week I'm in Germany and going to different local events. One of the things that is most interesting is how people think about freedom now and how they think about it differently in the former East Germany from how they think about it in the West. And I think one of those differences is because we live in a post-Enlightenment age, we tend to think of freedom as being about individual rights or about human rights. And I don't think that's how the peasants thought about freedom. For them, I think that freedom is much more collective. After all, they don't, even the way that objects and land is owned in this period is different. It's it's that you have the use rights of the land, and you have the use ability to use a resource is really important. And who owns it technically is almost secondary. The peasants say that they don't want no lords at all, or at first they say they don't want it um no lords at all. They they they have no problem with with lordship. What their problem is, is unfair lordship are unreasonable demands and the lack of Christian preaching, which they say they want, and freedom from serfdom. So that's how they understand freedom, and freedom from serfdom from being owned, that is really important to them.

Russell: 30:01

Okay, so I also want to bring in, and we kind of almost mentioned him, this guy Munzer, who I think is often seen as a key leader, but but in your book, I think you sort of slightly downplayed his his role. I don't know if that's right, but he was one of the uh the main preachers who was one of the leaders of the rebellion. Can we say a bit about him?

SPEAKER_01: 30:25

Well, he's such a fascinating figure, just an extraordinary, extraordinary theologian. And that's really also one of the issues that is so difficult to deal with today, because in East Germany he became the hero for the East German communist regime. So there are hundreds of streets named after Thomas Minzer, I think something like 600 in the former East German. Um, and his image, uh, we we will never know what he actually looked like, but what we think he looked like was on the five-mark note. And he was a really important figure for the East German regime, partly because he is the hero of Engels' history of the Peasants' War, and Engels is Marx's close co-worker. So for the East German regime, there is a history of the peasants' war already, written by Friedrich Engels, which shows Münzer as a revolutionary hero who is, in a sense, out of time. He's in the wrong period where he sees where history is heading, but the peasants don't quite see it. It's a it's a wonderful picture of Münzer, which, of course, for a historian, is also absolutely infuriating because everybody lives in their own time. So Munzer is now the figure about whom I think we really need to do a lot more thinking. He is absolutely central to the culture of memory in East Germany in the former communist area, because he is the person who they grew up with as the person who led the Peasants' War. But of course, we know he's only one leader amongst many, and one theologian amongst others. And so when I wrote my account of the Peasants' War, I was following a tendency that which has been to rethink Münzer and to try and see how important he actually was. And we know that even in Mulhausen, which was his major place of operation, even there he was only one amongst many other preachers. But since the book has come out, I have begun to think, and as I've read other books that came out too, and we all played down the role of Münzer, I think that has gone too far. And I think that what is needed is really a re-engagement with the work of Munzer. He is an extraordinary demagogue, and I I found him quite hard to read actually, because I found this all or nothing rhetoric and this strike uh pink-a-punk on the anvil of Nimrod, now is the time, this kind of rhetoric, or things like they will beseech you like children, but pay no attention to their cries. This sort of very hard line, um, very authoritarian, sounding like the Bible when you're not actually quoting the Bible. This authoritarian brook no objection. I found that very alienating and very hard to read, actually. And I found it quite shocking that Münzer had become a hero not only for the East German state, but also for the West German left in the uh 1970s and 80s. And I and I found that rather problematic. It's true, he's a theologian who can talk about the anger of those who are excluded from power and who have no rights, the anger of the poor and oppressed. He really gets that and articulates it in a way that Luther just doesn't. So it is a whole spectrum of Reformation thought that was there and that needs to be part of the story. It's just that I couldn't heroise it in the way that previous generations have because it's got a very toxic um legacy or can have unless you really uh take it apart and look at it carefully.

Russell: 34:58

Okay, so just moving on to how the how the rebellion proceeds. I mean, one thing they do like to do is attack the monasteries. They they attack castles, but but the one thing they they seem to love to do is to is to attack and loot monasteries. And when I was speaking to Peter Marshall, we were talking about the pilgrimage of grace in England, which is which is another rebellion which takes place in the north of England, I think only about ten years later. And there they're marching to protect the monasteries. They're saying, no, no, you know, Henry's Henry's dissolving the monasteries, this is outrageous. So so why do the peasants in Germany want to destroy the monasteries and the and the the peasants, I guess, I don't know if that's the right term in England, they want to preserve them. I'm I'm sort of totally confused.

SPEAKER_01: 35:46

It is really striking, and the intensity of this attack on convents and monasteries is is deeply shocking. We counted in the area of the peasants' war something like 1,260, 270 convents or monasteries. And of those, we have counted over 600, so it's just under 50% of them which were attacked. Now that's an absolutely astonishing figure, especially when you bear in mind that the those who are not attacked, uh, many of them are in towns which weren't involved in the peasants' war at all. So it is an extraordinary assault. And attack can include all kinds of different things. It can include being forced to leave your convent or monastery, it can be that you're forced to make an inventory. We might think being forced to make an inventory of your goods, what's wrong with that? What is wrong with that? Is that then the ruling authority knows what they can get by secularizing you, which is exactly what happened, and which you see in England. So um it can, in many cases, though, mean having everything plundered, maybe even burnt to the ground. And that's what happened in many of these convents and monasteries where there's now just a few stones left. Um, the monastery of Naundorf. All I found when I went there was basically some stones and the remnants of a of a window. And I know that my peasants picnicked in front of that monastery and they ate a ton of cheese. They probably had terrible indigestion afterwards.

Russell: 37:40

But I'm still not getting where where where is this you know violent hatred coming from?

SPEAKER_01: 37:45

Well, what had happened was that Luther had questioned the point of monasticism, and that had led to a real crisis of confidence and crisis of faith in the point of convents and monasteries altogether, with many monks and some quite a few nuns leaving their orders, leaving their monasteries, changing their professions and entering the world, as Luther himself was to go to do. So you've had that crisis, and the peasants now also feeling that there's no point to monasticism. And of course, some of the biggest and most well, most determined to insist on their rights, monasteries, uh lords, were monasteries and convents. So it's that those things coming together, and then if you think about what you do when you've got a gang of 1,000, then 2,000, 3,000 peasants, how do you supply a group of peasants when you can't take from the local peasantry, which is what a normal army would do, right? There are these monasteries and convents sitting in the landscape, and often they're outside towns, some of these big ones of the older orders, and they can be quite isolated. And so if you rock up there with 3,000 peasants and you demand to be admitted, they're going to open the gates, and once you're in, you get access to those cellars, all the provisions that they have, all the corn that you probably supplied, and all the cellars that have beer and wine. So um it is uh how the revolt really financed itself, I think, to a very large extent, and also through plunder of the convents and monasteries.

Russell: 39:55

So it seems to me like everything's been going very well for the Peasants. You know, they've been working their way through the monasteries. But then you have the Weinsburg massacres. And it seems to me that at that point the nature of the revolt changes. So do you want to just say a little bit about the Weinsburg uh massacre?

SPEAKER_01: 40:18

So Weinsburg is a a little town. And the strange thing is that when you go past it today on the train, it looks just like it did in the 16th century because we have a little sketch map of it. I couldn't believe it when I passed it on the train. That's exactly what you see. So the castle is on a hill, and the town is down below. And what happened was that a salt seller happened to be passing the castle, and he noticed that there was nobody there, and that the nobles were all down in town. The thing about castles is they're not much fun to hang out in. They're drafty, they're cold, and there's not a lot to do. So, not surprisingly, everybody was down in town. And so the peasants knew that they could easily capture the castle, which they did. And then as things went on, and as they went down into town and rounded up the nobles, they then forced them to run the gauntlet. And this is a terrible form of punishment where you're forced to go down the line of soldiers and they all attack you, and the peasants they all hit you. So in the end, it's a very humiliating death because you're just completely overwhelmed by all these people hitting you. So the peasants carry this out, and the nobles are deeply shocked. Another noble was falls or was pushed from the church tower and died. And as a result of this, 24 nobles and their followers were killed. This is a massive shock for the nobility who realize that this is not just a movement that's designed at uh curving the power of monasteries and convents. Many of them think curving the power of the church and monasteries and convents is no bad thing. Um, some of them even want to secularize. Some bishops uh who belong to these ruling families think they can really profit out of the situation by secularizing their rule and making it heritable. So suddenly they realize this is not the case and that it is a movement that's going to be directed against them. To be fair to the peasants, by this point they had suffered a huge defeat at the Battle of Leippine, where thousands had been killed, hundreds of people pushed into the Danube River where they drowned, as the chronicler says, like pigs. They had also had an encounter with some of the Lord's men, um, so uh near near Weinsberg. So for them, it's a response to the violence that has been meted out to them. But for those who are opposed to the peasants, this is proof that they are violent.

Russell: 43:24

And how is Luther reacting throughout the revolt? Because now he's seeing his good ideas put into practice as the uh as the peasants are finding out what freedom means. Is he happy? Is he unhappy? What's what's his attitude?

SPEAKER_01: 43:38

He is deeply opposed to the peasants' war. And interestingly enough, he takes a much more negative view of it than his own ruler does. Frederick the Wise, who is very ill by this point and who's on his deathbed, did not want to proceed against the peasants militarily. He wanted to negotiate. And indeed, he writes an extraordinary letter where he says, Well, if this is God's will and if he wants the peasants to win, what can we do? We have to accept it. Really extraordinary. And many other towns and rulers were trying to negotiate with the peasants, they didn't want to go to bloodshed. And Luther writes um uh an admonition to the peasants, and he it's a it's a tract that seems to be even-handed. It starts out by saying, Well, you lords, you haven't introduced the Reformation, um, and it's God's punishment on you because you're not behaving in a godly way, and you are, and the peasants um are are suffering. And then he turns to the peasants and he deals with the 12 articles, or so he says, but he really only deals with the first few, and he insists that serfdom is right, he doesn't accept any of their arguments, and then he just doesn't deal with the later articles at all, and he just condemns any form of uprising and rebellion. And then shortly afterwards, he wrote a much more rhetorically powerful writing against the robbing storming hordes of peasants. And that's the treatise for which he has become known in relation to the peasants' war, because it just says um stab them, kill them, um, uh, if you slay a peasant, it's a godly work because rebellion can never be justified.

Russell: 45:53

And do you think that's Luther trying to save the Reformation in the sense that if his reformation, if that's if that's a historical way to put it, is associated with rebellion like this, then then it is finished, or or is this something that you think is deeply and sincerely held?

SPEAKER_01: 46:14

I think it's deeply and sincerely held. I don't think Luther was ever a uh strategist in quite in quite that way. I think you couldn't have expected him to take any other line, because he is, after all, the son of a mine owner, and the circles in which he moves are that sort of the same level of upper bureaucracy below the rulers, but still very much aware of them and their interests. So I don't think it's surprising that he's on the side of the lords. It would have been really shocking if he'd been on the side of the peasants. But I think it is a deeply shocking uh treatise because of its violence and its extreme nature. He's saying it's a godly work to kill a peasant, and this is from the man who's rejected good works. Of course, he doesn't mean it quite in that sense. It is a rhetorical exaggeration, but it's still uh very shocking. And I think it came out of his utter horror of rebellion of of any kind.

Russell: 47:32

The peasants, perhaps unsurprisingly, they're not military trained, militarily trained. And once the lords manage to get their troops together, and uh it takes them a bit longer than it might, because I think uh they've been busy uh causing all sorts of trouble in Italy. But once once their troops come back from Italy, it uh you know there's a few battles, but but it's pretty one-sided. And then and then after the battles are over, well, what happens next? Because I think that was you called your book Summer of Fire and Blood, and and I don't know which is is it the monasteries which are being set on fire, but but now we're into the into the period of blood, aren't we?

SPEAKER_01: 48:15

Yes, we are, and it's not that the peasants are not armed, they are well armed. Um, they do have pikes, they do have guns, they do have cannons, even. But what they don't have is the kind of training in military formation that will allow you to withstand a cavalry attack. And what they usually do is that they form a wagon castle, so they put the wagons with all the plunder on in a circle and they defend that. But that just doesn't work against the first um gunshot, musket shot, and cannon shot, and that often is enough to make peasants break ranks and run. And the trouble is that once you flee, you're a sitting dark for cavalry coming at you, and very often people get caught in things like the blood gully, as it's known in Funkenhausen, and that's a part of the battlefield, which is a sort of narrow corridor leading down into town, and you can just see people getting caught there are going to be slain in large numbers. Um, so it's more, they're not equal battles, they're much more like massacres. In some cases, the peasants are able to make a stand and able to put up quite a bit of resistance. That seems to have been the case in uh some battles in Alsace, but for the most part, it's just huge numbers of dead. And then come the period of punishment, and the punishments are um done with a kind of um punishment tours of executioners who go from town to town, they will call everyone together on the market square, make the ones to be executed stand in a ring. And of course, that's a mockery because the peasants always take counsel in the ring. That's their way of agreeing policy together in a democratic way. You form a ring, and you make the lords get off their horses when they enter the ring so that you're all on the same level. So executing people in the ring is quite a statement. And the extraordinary thing is that even when people in these towns knew that the executioner was coming, they didn't always leave. Of course, many of them did leave and did manage to get away, but not all of them. The more remarkable thing, I think, is the numbers of people who stayed. So the executions are really bloody and fear-inspiring. They happen not outside town, as is usual, but on the market square. So if you think of that place where peasants come to market to bring their wares, where they hear of new ideas in the center of town, the marketplace, that is polluted with the blood of the rebels.

Russell: 51:20

And what kind of numbers are we talking about in the in the punishment phase? Because I think I've read somewhere, and it seems almost a World War I sort of scale, you know, like a hundred thousand people are killed. Are they mainly killed in the battles or are they mainly killed in the punishment executions?

SPEAKER_01: 51:42

They're mainly killed in the battles. So uh we think we'll never know how many people died, but it'll be somewhere between 70 and 100,000 um people who were killed during the course of the war. Most of that will be in the battles. Um, it'll be in the hundreds of those who were executed because, and this is the terrible irony of it all. In many cases, it's the local lord who will intercede for a condemned peasant because it's his or her property, after all. That's what serfdom means. So we have cases where one woman who was a peasant leader, she's known as Margarita Venerin, the black court peasant, she is interceded for by her lord because she's his property. So what you notice is that it's very often townspeople who are the ones who are executed because nobody owns them. Huh.

Russell: 52:48

I thought the towns had by and large kept out of it. Have they have they been forced to join in or have they joined in with you know with with enthusiasm?

SPEAKER_01: 52:58

Well, that is one of the other fascinating things. Towns are caught in the middle, and often a peasant army will turn up outside a town and threaten it. And then if in the town you've got a group of people who are dissatisfied with the existing government, when they join with the peasants, you've got an explosive situation. And the towns where that seems to happen are ones that are not really big and rich, like Ulm or Augsburg or Nuremberg, because they can always hire mercenary soldiers to keep their populace down. It's towns where they're not so rich, where they're very um close to farming land, where there's a group of people within the town who sympathize with the peasants. They're the ones who sometimes push for the peasants to be let in. But those partnerships where you have a town swear brotherhood with the peasants, they do happen in several cases, but they're not always long-lasting because once the peasants have moved on, it's very hard to keep the town on the side of the peasants, especially if the people who sympathize with the peasants have gone off with the peasant armies.

Russell: 54:20

And I guess that you know the other people who there's no intercession for will be the leaders. Do any of the leaders get away? Does Munzer get away?

SPEAKER_01: 54:30

Munzer doesn't get away, no. And he is handed over to his enemy, Ernst of Mansfeld, who tortures him in his castle in Heldungen before he is finally taken to the camp of the princes and executed. And executed, interestingly, not in Müllhausen, but outside it, uh, in the woods. Uh I went to see the place um just a few months ago. Uh again. It's very hard to find. But as early as the mid-16th century, Luther was writing with fury about how a path had been worn to that spot because people were making pilgrimages to it. So we still know where it was that his head was put up on a spike. But some really did escape, and so Sebastian Lotze, who's responsible for putting the twelve articles together, Christoph Schapele, the preacher in Memmingen, he escaped. And Ulrich Schmidt, the peasant leader who was a smith from the little village of Zorningen, he escaped too, and they all got over the border to Zamballen in Switzerland, and there they were kind of interviewed by a guy called Johannes Kessler, and he used their stories as part of his chronicle. So it's like an early example of oral history, and we have what their voices were. He quotes what he says that they said, and of course it's a story, and of course, they can't know exactly what they said. But I find um the sections of that chronicle just so moving because it's one of the few times when you get close to what the peasant leaders might have thought they were doing and what they might have said.

Russell: 56:33

This is typical cynical behavior from uh from an historian trying to trying to make some money from his book. I might have guessed it.

SPEAKER_01: 56:43

Oh no, this is a work of entertainment that he he he read it. Um he he wrote it for reading on the Sabbath just to entertain. And I think it's fascinating that he should have he normally does just little stories, but when it comes to the peasants' war, he breaks with that and he writes a really long narrative, including all of this. I just love to think that there was an oral historian there who thought, even though he didn't support the war, he thought, I need to get the stories from these people. I've got to get them down.

Russell: 57:18

That's rather different from the Sunday school reading that I remember. Yes. Anyway, um, so you've got this strange thing. You've got you've got the peasants' war, which I guess is seen by many as sort of a hero has a heroic rising. And I'm kind of fast forwarding now to the uh to the 20th and 21st century. And I gather there's this there's this huge, what's the word I'm looking for? This this huge panorama somewhere in Germany, sort of uh showing the events of the war. But then you've got the other great hero of Germany, which is Luther. And the two are in complete distinction. And some people even blame Luther for sort of being so in support of the authorities that uh that he's seen as sort of making it uh more likely that people will not stand up to the Nazis because the idea is that you should always support the secular authorities. So, so particularly in Germany, you know, how are these two bits of history, these these Luther and the Peasants' War, how how do they resolve that tension?

SPEAKER_01: 58:26

Well, I think the answer to that is that that tension is not resolved. You're absolutely right, Russell. What you often see is a competition between the two of them. So in Stolberg, I remember seeing a Luther Oak, um, and yet the place is otherwise Münzer's birthplace, and Münzer is celebrated everywhere. Or I can cross the ruins of another convent, and then just round the corner there's a Luther Oak. Ah, that it's just Münzer and Luther often cheek by jowl in the former East Germany, as if they're still shouting at one another. This is what I have found absolutely fascinating because it's such a complex and difficult history, um, post-war Germany. And of course, that goes back to Nazi Germany too. So you have these two different states after the war, East German and West German. And East Germany is trying to establish itself as a state that's independent with its own cultural history and its own legitimacy, and it changes how it does that. But at one point it tries to do it through Münzer, and that remains a really important part of the way it understands itself because it can say, well, we go back to Thomas Münzer and the idea of revolution, this leader out of time who understood where history was headed. He's our hero, and that proves that we are a state with our own revolutionary tradition. We have had we had nothing to do with the Nazis. We were the Nazis' opponents, we got expelled, and therefore we are not to blame for what happened under the Nazis. We're a revolutionary state, and to celebrate that they uh decided after 1975, where which is when they had this massive 450th birthday bash for the peasants of war, they commissioned the artist Downer Tubka to create the biggest painting in the world. It is 14 meters high, 123 meters long, and to house it in this huge monumental building, they blew the top off the battlefield of Frankenhausen to flatten that bit so they could put this gigantic thing up. And you can see it from absolutely everywhere in the region. The locals call it the elephant's toilet. So Vanetupke was a fantastic artist, a really wonderful painter who was collected by the West as well, by the non-communist part of Germany. Their national gallery bought the original designs that he did for this massive painting. So imagine this huge thing in the elephant's toilet, this vast, vast work. It's like a temple, and as you go up the stairs to it, the stairs are gold, the um banister is gold, and the stair rail, rather, you go up and the lights are all off, there's no speaking allowed in the area, and you sit there on the dark, in the dark, on a little stool with no back, and you hear the description of the work, or you just look and you're overwhelmed by the thing. So it took oh 12 years to make. There were hundreds of people. No, I'm exaggerating, there were 12 other artists who worked on it as well. And when was it opened? September 1989, just weeks before the whole East German regime finally fell.

Russell: 1:02:36

Gosh. Well, okay, well, I think uh I think uh along with the East German uh state, I think we'll uh that's where we'll end today's uh podcast.

SPEAKER_01: 1:02:49

But Russell, I just have to add, although you you can't help laughing at that being the outcome, I challenge anyone to go to the panorama and not be moved by it. Every time I've taken students there, even ones who said they didn't want to see it, when they actually went in, they were just really overwhelmed by the power of this extraordinary artwork. It really is a masterpiece. And so if you haven't seen it, I strongly advise you to go and have a look.

Russell: 1:03:26

I was going to ask if it's any good, and I'm I'm really pleased to hear that uh that it is. Uh, the only other panorama I know, uh, because they used to be very popular back in the uh in the 1800s, the only other one I know of is uh is in The Hague, and that's just uh that's just uh a seaside scene, but it's absolutely terrific. So if you're ever visiting The Hague and you haven't seen and you haven't seen the panorama uh again, I I I strongly recommend it. Anyway, so um so East Germany is finished and and I guess so is our podcast. So anyway, thank you, thank you very much indeed.

SPEAKER_01: 1:04:04

Thank you, Russell. That was great fun.