#8 Renaissance Germany - Annihilation of Peasants

Five hundred years ago, a radical firebrand emerged to take Martin Luther's Reformation in a far more dangerous direction. While Luther preached spiritual reform, Thomas Müntzer demanded a heaven on earth, fusing scripture with revolution and arming the peasantry against the feudal lords.

On Putschcast, we trace this rivalry from the theological schism to the bloody Peasants' War of 1525. Was Müntzer a true revolutionary hero, as Friedrich Engels later claimed, or merely a ruthless demagogue? Joining us to walk through these violent events is Canadian college instructor and podcaster Eva Schubert, as we examine a legacy fiercely contested for half a millennium.

Find the Villains and Virgins history podcast here.

Find Thomas Muntzer's newly interpreted music, featured on the podcast, here.

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Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:00

Here. This time though, we travel far, far back in history, 500 years, and unlike the Moses episode, today's topic, there's actually quite a bit of evidence. There's lots of literature and um eyewitness accounts from those events 500 years ago. And at the center of those events, the peasant wars, is a man called Thomas Münzer. He lived in the late 15th, early 16th century. And David, when I suggested this topic uh a few months ago, how much did you actually know about it at the time?

SPEAKER_00 0:32

I had zero knowledge of this man and his contribution to history. Uh I actually misspelled his name googling him for the first time. So that shows you that I was completely naive of his um his influence.

SPEAKER_01 0:46

And in hindsight, because you have done a bit of research and I I gave you some homework too, do you think he's worth an episode on Putschcast?

SPEAKER_00 0:52

Most definitely. This is quite a significant episode, one that isn't uh well known when you do look at uh other people who have covered this topic. Comments suggest that it is. It's one of these hidden uh parts of history. People within Germany and probably um what used to be the GDR uh far more uh across his influence, uh, but otherwise outside of that part of the world, not many people will know who this man is and what he did.

SPEAKER_01 1:17

You just mentioned you haven't really heard about Thomas Münzer before. Other people have though, and I want you to tell me who wrote the following lines about Thomas Münzer. Münzer's political doctrine aimed at the immediate establishment of the kingdom of God of the prophesied millennium on earth. This was to be accomplished by the return of the church to its original state and the abolition of all institutions that conflicted with this. But by the kingdom of God, Münzer meant nothing else than a society in which there would be no class differences, no private property, no state authority independent of and foreign to the members of society.

SPEAKER_00 2:01

I don't think I can even take a wild guess at this. Can I ask which century this person wrote these words in?

SPEAKER_01 2:08

I thought there was a few words in there that gave that away.

SPEAKER_00 2:10

It's obviously quite modern, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:12

No private property, no state authority. Yeah, okay.

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Are we talking um Karl Marx?

SPEAKER_01 2:18

Very close, very close.

SPEAKER_00 2:19

Friedrich Engels.

SPEAKER_01 2:20

Friedrich Engels, that's the one. So uh he actually wrote a whole book about that topic that we're talking about today in 1850. Now, your history teacher, what happened just before 1850?

SPEAKER_00 2:32

Revolution in Europe.

SPEAKER_01 2:33

Correct. So every time there's a revolution, the name Thomas Münster seems to pop up again. And yeah, Friedrich Engels made him the martyr, the hero that he became later on, centuries after, in uh in the communist movement in particular. And having grown up in East Germany as I did, um, I was very, very familiar with the name. There was you know, schools named after him, streets named after him. Um we had him on our note. Every time we went shopping, I saw the face of Thomas Münzer in an effigy on the $5 mark note when you went shopping, which was worth something back then. When I spoke to you as a history teacher a few weeks ago, and you said you've never heard the name, it's like we cannot miss out on that. It's important that we get his word out there, whether you agree with it or not, to the rest of the world, especially English-speaking world.

SPEAKER_00 3:18

In my defense, which isn't really much of a defense, uh, I think history study is quite compartmentalized in tertiary institutions in Australia and especially the history that we teach as teachers as well. So it's great that I've been prodded into exploring more of um you know the interesting characters and the significant characters of European history.

SPEAKER_01 3:49

So, once again, welcome to Putschcast. We're talking about um Thomas Minzer today. He was sort of one of the key leaders of the peasant war. You don't know much about him, I just shared what I know about him, and uh I'm very glad that we have someone on the call who knows a lot more about him. Her name is Eva Schubert, she's the host of Villains and Virgins History Podcast, a podcast uh with a focus on violence, religion, and gripping stories. Hello there.

SPEAKER_05 4:15

Hello, Oliver. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to join you today.

SPEAKER_01 4:18

Violence, religion, and gripping stories. I think there are some parallels there to our podcast too.

SPEAKER_05 4:23

Absolutely, there are.

SPEAKER_01 4:25

Eva, I'm very glad to have you on the call. And we find out more about your background and your interest in the topic towards the end of this podcast. And uh, of course, we will tell people how to find you and your content, which is um is really, really insightful and so in-depth. Spend hours in front of my TV because we can not only hear you, we can see you and watch you, unlike Putschcast, which is just some guys in your headsets. So, but let's move on to um to our men of the day. Now, you're also from an English-speaking country. You're from you're from Canada, Eva. Do you remember when you first heard about Thomas Munzer?

SPEAKER_05 4:59

You know, it's funny because I didn't know about Thomas Munzer until I began reading about the peasant rebellion. And I began reading about the peasant rebellion when I was doing a deeper dive on the Protestant Reformation. And the Reformation is a subject that was very familiar to me. I knew all the big names, you know, Martin Luther, Zwingli, uh, Hoss, uh, Whecliffe, you know, all these guys. I, you know, I grew up with it. I was extremely familiar with the broad outlines of what happened and who some of the major thinkers were. But uh one of the things that kept coming up in the in the margins of things I would read about Martin Luther would be, oh, and then there was that position he took on the peasants' war. You know, he kind of threw the peasants under the bus. And this whole thing about this peasants' war, it would sort of come up and it would get a a comment in passing, but it happened enough times that I became very curious. Well, what is this peasants' war? And and what's the position that Martin Luther took that didn't really redound to his everlasting credit? And so when I began to dig into that, Thomas Munzer was all over it. And he emerges really as almost like Martin Luther's nemesis. They begin as close friends and they end up radically diverging and just spitting all kinds of insults at each other and representing wildly diverging paths for the nascent Protestant Reformation. And Martin Luther gets all the press, and Munzer doesn't, but that's because history is written by the victors. And Martin Luther was on the winning side. And so his version is what we have, and the version that was represented by Thomas Munzer and his thought, and this whole amazing story of the peasants' rebellion has been very much sort of buried.

SPEAKER_01 6:51

And this is probably why you've never heard about him. Exactly. Let's uh let's get this name out of the annals into the 21st century. Over to you, Eva. What time did this man live in? And what time did the peasant wars take place in?

SPEAKER_05 7:04

So, what's really interesting, I think, in order to appreciate the story that unfolds here, is to recognize what the social structure looks like across Western Europe at this time. And I'm going to make some broad statements about Western Europe because our story unfolds in the Holy Roman Empire in what is now modern-day Germany. But in the case of social organization, it has enormous similarities with what you'd see in France and in England and you know, and in Spain, and so on. We're at this point where the medieval period is on the wane and the Renaissance and early modern is entered the stage. And it's sort of like that moment where the moon is still in the sky, but the sun is coming up. You can see them both at the same time. And so what you've got from the medieval period is an intensely hierarchical structure for society, and it's basically got two pyramids. There's the pyramid of the state, which has their local king or ruler at the apex, and the pyramid of the state is supported by a very feudal nobility system. So you have, you know, earls and dukes and barons and so on. These are noble families that hold their land at the king's pleasure, and in exchange for that, they swear allegiance or loyalty to the king, and then they hold these pieces of land or estates. And those estates are worked by everyday people, by peasants or serfs, as you know, we can quibble about who's a peasant and who's a serf. And that has to do with some rules that apply to how freely you can move. But really, people who are doing the agricultural labor on which society is based, the people that bring in the crops that feed everybody, the everyday ordinary people, the vast majority of the population is going to be living on these lands that are owned by nobles at the pleasure of the king, and they're going to have to pay rent to the lord who owns the estate. And that payment could be uh in labor, and sometimes it was in goods and and or it was in crops. There are many ways you can pay, but you have to pay. That's the pyramid of the state, and it has its judicial systems and it has its taxation systems and all that. But what is not well appreciated is that there was a parallel pyramid, which was the pyramid of the church, and it was every bit as organized and hierarchical, and and it has its own taxation system and judicial system, the same way that the state did. So at the top of the church pyramid is the Pope in Western Europe, and he has his archbishops and bishops, and they all have their sections of land that are allocated to them, and they're also in charge of the church taxation system, which was the tithe, which is 10%. And so people have to pay this tithe to their local community church or priest, and it goes up the chain to the bishop in charge of that diocese, and from there upwards through that territory's tax collection system, and sections of it are siphoned back to Rome itself, which is how you get amazing buildings like St. Peter's Basilica and so on. So there's a regular taxation system the church has, the tithe. It's not optional, everyone has to pay it. And then there are additional revenue generating activities that are going on. And some of these are what arouse the ire of monks who turn into reformers and lead the Protestant Reformation. And some of these additional revenue generating activities are things like indulgences, where you can purchase a spiritual pardon for something bad that you have done, or to get rid of some of the penalty that you would owe once you die for the sins you've committed. And there's good news, you can even purchase indulgences for relatives of yours who are dead and who are already suffering and paying the price for some of the bad things they've done in purgatory. So the medieval Christian version of purgatory is like you die, and very few people go straight to heaven. I mean, some saints do, but most people are gonna go, if they don't go straight to hell because they were very bad, they're gonna go to this middle place called purgatory, where you spend some period of time paying off your moral debts. And it looks a lot like hell in terms of the suffering and the, you know, the flames and this sort of thing. It's a very unpleasant place. Uh, but once you've been sufficiently purged and your moral debt is paid off, then you can ascend to heaven. So there's a lot of concern about how much time the average Christian would be spending in purgatory, and this indulgence purchase was a way to reduce that time or to help your suffering relative who was already there.

SPEAKER_01 11:53

So you would leave the mother-in-law there, but you get your favorite cousin out. That was sort of the idea.

SPEAKER_05 11:58

Precisely, yes.

SPEAKER_03 12:08

I live in God, I live in God.

SPEAKER_05 12:14

You have your place in the world, and the medieval view of the world is that the order of things is divinely ordained. So you are in the place you're in because that is how God wills it, and the guy who's king over there is king because that is how God wills it. And messing with that order is a terrifying thing, and it's a very serious offense. So I think that an appreciation of just how intensely hierarchical so when Martin Luther comes on, he really overturns the whole apple cart in ways that he didn't entirely perhaps foresee.

SPEAKER_01 12:47

Which is what I love about history. It's not just dates and names and you know biographies, but it's also diving into someone's mindset from 500 years ago. And especially again, the people, the peasants were talking about highly uneducated people. They were just on the planet to work the fields 12, 14 hour days or whatever. I have, you know, maybe one day off if they're lucky and sometimes have a holy day. I assume most of them were illiterate. Uh, I assume most of them, you know, um didn't understand the word the priest was talking about because everything was done in Latin at the time. And I think even in Germany, it was no common German either at the time. This is all results of Luther and and people that followed him. So at the time, someone from the north wouldn't have understood someone from the south, let alone east-west. So you know, you traveled a few villages and then they almost spoke a different language to where you came from. And I think people actually believed everything we just talked about. I think people believed in purgatory. That was real for them. That was their real existence. So if the priest said, pay this, or your beloved child that died early will end up in hell, people did that. They probably sold the last cow to do so.

SPEAKER_05 13:53

Absolutely. Uh, it's it's an intensely religious environment. I I think that it's really hard to overestimate the incredible effect that religion had on people's lives. And it doesn't mean that they weren't people like like you or I. I mean, one of the wonderful things about reading someone like Chaucer, for example, who's writing a couple of centuries earlier in the 1300s, is that ordinary people are also criticizing the corruption and the lasciviousness of their local friars or priests who are busy preaching one thing and then, you know, rolling in the hay with the farmer's daughter, right? I mean, this happened all the time. And it wasn't as though people were blind to it. So you live in an intensely hierarchical society where you have all these duties and and you're worried about lots of things on the spiritual and and the physical or political front. But there's also a recognition of the fact that not everything that the that the summoner uh or the traveling friar tells you is necessarily so. And you still have people who are you know having all kinds of sex and making raunchy jokes. I mean, if you read Chaucer, this becomes really obvious.

SPEAKER_01 15:06

If I understand correctly, and that this is what um again, Luther didn't agree with was that you could pretty much buy those positions at times that many bishops weren't actually bishops in the sense of today, these were noblemen who wanted influence in a certain area or bought a monastery or you know had some favors or depth or whatever happened. And and you could just purchase those positions. Is that what happened? So the the authority, the spiritual authority just wasn't there for many people.

SPEAKER_05 15:38

You're quite right to point out that these benefices, or these, you know, to be a bishop was a highly desirable position that was often purchased. And there's even paintings that have been done. The exchange of money is depicted in the painting. There's this church official, and there's a nobleman and his young son, and the church official is kind of making a sign of blessing, and the nobleman is literally handing him a bag of cash, like underneath. And the idea here is that because of this transfer of money, this boy is going to become a bishop. Why does he want to become a bishop? Well, because the bishop was in charge of collecting the taxes for his area, and some portion of those tithe bunnies, the church taxes, he got to keep. And depending on how light-fingered he was, he might end up keeping quite a large amount of that. So there was an opportunity to become fairly wealthy. It was a lucrative position, and that's why noblemen were very eager to purchase it for their second or third sign.

SPEAKER_00 16:37

The fact that in uh the period that we're looking at, that there was this collective effort of challenging not only the um, I suppose the the social hierarchy at the time, but also um the teachings of the church, it is significant. So Luther and also Munzer as well, conceptually for a lot of people to take that step and be prepared to um yeah, fundamentally challenge the status quo, is super significant.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

And this is after what, maybe not a thousand years, but you know, hundreds and hundreds of years of stagnation and this this feudalism like you described before with the moon and the sun, you know, the this the moon is still quite there, the sun is just starting to rise. The darkness, obviously, the century before that, we're talking the bubonic plague. Europe was absolutely devastated, you know, entire parts of the continent were reduced to, I don't know, 10-20% of the population. Um, but now we've got this this uh time of not prosperity, but uh there was sort of boom times, weren't there? Like populations were growing, cities are starting to like city names that we still know today, a lot of cities go back to that that era.

SPEAKER_05 17:47

Yeah, I mean the the the rubonic plague was massive and it actually contributed. I've seen some historians write about the idea that disillusionment with the church, like on a massive scale, had a large contribution from the plague. Because, first of all, the plague did not distinguish between rich or poor. It did not distinguish between bishop and stable boy. So that was one thing. And the second thing was that in the wake of that, because of the population decimation, the church is very short-staffed. They really have this need to push people into positions of local parish priests or you know, friars or whatever. And these aren't necessarily people who've gone through the training that would normally be required. So that's one of the factors that kind of leads up to this reformation moment. And then there's the the Renaissance and the rediscovery of texts from the Greeks and Romans and this wave of humanist thinking. So there are other reformers like Erasmus, Desiderius Erasmus, who think that the church needs reform, but they want to do it from the inside.

SPEAKER_01 18:51

Aaron Powell, you just mentioned people um entering the church that might have not been as qualified as they were, let's say 100, 200 years before that. Now, the interesting thing about those two protagonists, and we do want to focus on Thomas Munzer, is they're both clergymen. So Martin Luther had a church background, and so did Thomas Münzer. Let's maybe talk about those two protagonists.

SPEAKER_05 19:11

Aaron Powell The funny thing about this, and I actually took a close look at their dates, they're not just contemporaries, I mean they're almost exact. Munzer is born in 1489 and Luther in 1483. So Munzer is just six years younger. And they have very parallel tracks. They both go to university and study theology. We know that Munzer at the very least had a Bachelor of Arts and very likely may have had a master's as well. So both of them are highly educated men. They know their theology, they know their scripture. They both embrace this idea that the church needs reform, that what's going on currently is not working, it's deeply corrupt, it needs to be changed in radical ways. Luther starts talking about this first, but Munzer is present at all the main. Major events that we give Luther all the credit for. For example, Munzer is present in 1517 in Wittenberg. He's part of the discussion with Luther that leads to Luther posting his famous 95 theses that so many people sort of pinpoint as the beginning of the Protestant Reformation. Munzer is part of the conversation in person. Munzer is present in a famous dissertation, kind of a public uh debate that Martin Luther and two other reformers have, and they face off against, I believe he's a Dominican theologian by the name of Johannes Eck. So Eck is representing the church establishment, the Catholic Church. And then Luther and these two other guys are presenting in public, in public debate, the reformist critique. Munzer is there for that debate as well. Just like Luther, Munzer marries an ex-nun, right? So they have this remarkably parallel track and not just in their intellectual development, but even in the places they were. They rubbed shoulders, uh, they knew each other.

SPEAKER_01 21:06

And that was so revolutionary, right? Again, for us, it's sort of like, okay, you leave the church, and then you at that time that would have been a death sentence if you're in the wrong state, challenging the church authority as it was, celibacy out the window, uh, and marrying a fellow nun as a church man, that was revolutionary in itself. And I think that just sent a signal to the wider community that anything is possible now. I think what exactly happened after that.

SPEAKER_05 21:31

Well, this is really the interesting thing, uh what makes Luther's thought so revolutionary. So I want to maybe spend a minute talking about him because that Luncer takes what Luther says and he goes, You didn't go far enough. What Luther does that's interesting is he says perhaps his most radical idea is what he calls the priesthood of all believers. So this is a phrase that he's using to literally demolish the spiritual pyramid hierarchy. Because how the medieval structure had worked is that the Pope is in charge of determining doctrine and orthodoxy for Western Christianity, the Catholic Church. The Pope tells you what's orthodox and what isn't, what is correct teaching and what is not. Those people who have wrong beliefs and wrong practices, i.e. ones that fall outside of what the Pope has defined, they are heretics. And those people can be warned and told to repent, but if they don't, very frequently they were burned at the stake, as you were alluding to. But down the chain, the bishops and your local priests and so on, all of these are the representatives of the church closer to where you live. And they're in charge of sort of enforcing orthodoxy and ensuring that people are practicing the right sorts of you know religious uh activities and beliefs. What is so radical about Luther is that he says there's not a special category of religious insight that belongs to quote the priesthood, by which he means anyone in the institutional church, your local priest, the monk, the friar, the bishop, or the pope. So there's this whole idea of religious status and hierarchy, and you is the ordinary artisan, shoemaker, you know, farmer, you're down here. These people are all better than you spiritually. Luther says, no, this is nonsense. The priesthood of all believers basically says that any believer, any Christian can look at the text of the Bible and understand the meaning of God, God's word or the Bible, God's message for themselves. You do not need a pope or a bishop or a priest to tell you what it means, to interpret it for you. So in this way, he's basically taking like an axe to a tree, and he's saying, This whole thing you've built here that you've grown with the Pope at the top and all these layers, I want to demolish the whole thing. He says, Sola scriptura, we need just the believer with the scripture and their own mind, and they'll be able to just read it and see what God's will is. So you don't need a priest, you don't need anyone else. That is actually connected to the idea of why Luther wants to leave the monastery and he wants to marry nuns, because he's saying this whole idea of you know living in a in a monastic community is unnecessary because we don't have this hierarchy of spiritual merit. Ordinary people are every bit as close to God as anybody else.

SPEAKER_01 24:32

And you obey to the you know Ten Commandments, which most of the clergymen didn't do. So that's that I think uh you know, the hypocrisy that you've mentioned before, David, and and the monasteries being the big corporates of their time. Again, just to settle back, there was no big industry, anything. They were the main employers, they um, you know, they asked for taxes, they owned the land, so people weren't allowed to hunt because either the noblemen or the church owned every living creature in the forest, even though people were starving. And this was people's reality, right? And there was no social welfare system, there's just a village community, your family that you could rely on. Um, that made you feel like a lesser human being that you need this filter in order to talk to God, i.e., you need to go to your local church and speak to your church elder just to own up to the sins that you may have committed, and your bishop was much worse in real life. So this is the the radical idea. I can talk to God directly. Everyone can. Because Luther took down this old hierarchical structure of feudalism linked to the Roman Catholic Church with the Pope at the top. However, he had, which he needed, many local noblemen siding with him and then protecting him. The famous time he spent as Juncker Jörg at the Wartburg Castle, where he then translated the Bible into German to make it accessible to every person who can read, or at least to be read too in their own language, so not in Latin as it was until that time on um ancient Greek. That all sounds good and well to me, and it was revolutionary enough. But then when did Münzer come in?

SPEAKER_05 26:57

So Munzer basically says, you know, good job, Martin, for tackling this corrupt spiritual pyramid, but what about this other corrupt political pyramid over here? The other, the other pyramid, right? I mean, that's equally as oppressive. And we need to do something about that. As you point out, I mean, Luther was very much indebted to some German nobles, especially uh Elector Frederick of Saxony, who is very much responsible for preventing Martin Luther from ending up as barbecue on a stake, right? I mean, that's that's what would have happened to him if he'd been taken to Rome to stand trial for his heretical ideas. There's not much question about that. So Martin Luther is indebted to these guys, and also a feature of Martin Luther's theology, he wants to strengthen the political powers of the local state. He wants to say, actually, we want to put the power for church reform into the hands of your local noblemen. So, yes, he's demolishing the spiritual pyramid, but he's taking some of that authority and he wants to reinvest it into the hands of your local nobility and your political powers. That's Luther's position. Munzer is saying this has to stop because if we are, as you say, Martin Luther, all equal in the eyes of God, then by what right are we treated as animals and slaves in this political system? Why is it that our nobles can continuously squeeze us so that we're we're constantly in poverty and there's no way out and we can't even leave the land? I mean, these people were getting taxed when they wanted to get married. They were being taxed when they died, they were being taxed at regular times through the year, they were taxed by the church. If you needed firewood because you had to keep your family from freezing in the winter, that was a tax. If you wanted to take the grain that you yourself had grown on your lord's land, and you've given some to him, and then you had some you'd kept for your family for them to eat, but you need to fill that grain because you can't just eat it, you know, the way you picked it. Well, Al, you need to take it to the to the to turn it into flour. The landlord owns that mill and you're gonna pay him to mill the flour that you grew on that land.

SPEAKER_01 29:17

I think it's also important to say that you couldn't just peck up and leave, right? Like, oh, I don't like this, I go somewhere else. You just you weren't allowed to.

SPEAKER_05 29:24

No, you weren't. And and penalties for for getting up and leaving if you were tied to that estate were severe. And so people feel trapped and they feel uh that they're being treated in ways that are deeply unfair. And they're taking Martin Luther's message of equality that we're all spiritually the same, and they're saying, well, that's great. If we're all equal humans in the eyes of God, then why are we living under this incredibly oppressive system? And so Munzer becomes the voice of the peasants, who many of whom are illiterate, but they are getting the Reformation message through traveling preachers. And Munzer himself was one of these guys. So Munster trained in theology. Munzer can read, he's very well versed, and he's going into local communities and he's preaching in their churches, and he's bringing these messages to ordinary people. And they're listening and they understand the implications of this, and they say, Well, you know, we need to make some major changes, and that is what leads to the peasant rebellion.

SPEAKER_04 30:28

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SPEAKER_00 31:02

In response to this, um I was reading that uh Luther then came out um staunchly in opposition to what uh Munzer had said. Would you consider this to be uh one of the catalysts for, I suppose, the development of uh the peasant revolt and Munzer's can contribution to it? The fact that he's being moved and then he's also You talked about the overlapping demands of the spiritual and feudal structures. This is where, you know, the legacy of the Bun Shu, the the peasants are actually becoming more radicalized and prepared to take action at least at a local level. Is this the point of coalescence between these two things?

SPEAKER_05 31:42

So Munzer wasn't alone in taking a more radical view of the type of social reform that he thinks is implied by the reform message. So Martin Luther is the big sort of megaphone of the church reform message. But he says, you know, and then Munzer and a bunch of other guys say, look, that's great, we agree with you, but if it goes there, why does it not also go over here and attack this other pyramid of political hierarchy? I'm I'm glad you brought up the the the Bun Shu because this was uh a variety of smaller earlier peasant uprisings, just in the last decade or two, before things really heat up in 1524 and explode in 1525, which is the year of the peasant war. This moment uh is where Martin Luther says, wait a second, I don't like where this Munzer is going, and that this guy needs to be sanctioned, you know, like we really have to uh we got we gotta watch what what he's doing. And it's where Munzer begins to reposition himself as the voice of the downtrodden and make it really a people's religion. The peasants' war is it's an uprising that is very much grassroots. It it starts in one place, there's been existing sort of lower level uprisings, this Bun Shu things we were talking about in the previous decade. And then it's sort of like this massive bonfire that starts in one place, it catches light over there in that village, there's rumors that it's happening farther down south, there are these separate sort of pockets, and that's both a sign of how widespread the discontent is, but it's also very difficult to have central organization and coordination as well. Muncer is sort of the person who's most involved in trying to do that because there is a meeting of a bunch of these more regional peasant groups, and they come up with this one document, the 12 articles, which they're going to use to basically appeal to the Swabian League, quasi-political organization involving nobles and church churchmen and cities. And the Bunchu rebellions and other kind of low smaller peasant uprisings have sometimes had some success taking their grievances uh in terms of extortionate taxes with their local lord to the Swabian League and getting some redress. Because the Swabian League is like a club and your landlord is a member of that club. So if that club has a committee meeting and says, hey, Duke so-and-so, maybe you should tone it down a little bit, uh, you know, with uh taxing of your peasants, that they might actually get some concessions. So because there'd been this pre-existing context, Thomas Munzer helps draft these 12 articles. That's really the best document we have that articulates the demands of the peasant rebellion of 1525.

SPEAKER_01 34:48

Early on, you mentioned 1517 as the absolute sort of universally agreed starting point of the Reformation. Martin Luther, and as we've learned, supported by Thomas Münzer, Aaron Wittenberg, 95 Theses, and then it takes off from there. Within eight years?

SPEAKER_05 35:07

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 35:08

Within eight years, Münzer's radicalized himself so much. Um he went to a town called Memmingen, and they came up. Is it a counter-declaration, or do you think it is in addition to the 95 theses?

SPEAKER_05 35:23

The articles are something that the peasants are using to to articulate what they want from the Swabian League and from their landlords. And it gives us the rationale of why they thought they were justified in making these demands. So when Munzer is writing this down, he's sort of providing the intellectual heft. He's articulating the rationale for this radical demand that peasants should be treated like human beings as opposed to just economic engines. And the the fingerprints of Martin Luther and the reform message are absolutely all over these articles. But he's now taken what Martin Luther said in the 95 Theses, and he's applying it to demands for specific economic and social reforms. And that's a place that Luther was not willing to go.

SPEAKER_01 36:12

Now, David, uh leading up to today, you have actually looked those up because I didn't know much about them either. Maybe you have to hear them all. Can you read out one or two for us just to get an idea a feel for it, what they were demanding in there?

SPEAKER_00 36:24

Uh, the first one relating to electing or and opposing their own pastors, that's a degree of agency which people um hadn't wouldn't ever have had before. And and again, like you mentioned, we have we've people who are not really fit for purpose as pastors in local areas. That's significant.

SPEAKER_01 36:41

And it also shows you again the importance of the clergy that it was the most pressing issue for them was can we please choose our own pastor?

SPEAKER_00 36:47

Yeah, um the second one, paying only the tithe, clearly outlined in the Old Testament, and uh small tithes we will not pay at all. So those are the ones that are are levied beyond um what's outlined in the Bible often by uh landlords themselves or other ones, is that correct?

SPEAKER_05 37:06

Yeah, that second article on tithing is really interesting because you know the the tithe is basically like this fixed tax, and there's an amount of that tithe collected that's used to support your local priest, but then whatever is gathered in excess of what is necessary to support that priest could be collected and used by other people higher up the chain. Like you could own the tithe. If you were the landlord or the monastery or something, like the landowner of that land, there's tithe that's being collected from the people who work the land. That's like a church tax. A portion of that you're gonna have to use to run your local priest, but what happens to the rest, right? So people higher up the chain are appropriating that money and using it. And the peasants are saying, listen, we don't have a problem with our tithe being used to support our local priest, or rather, as we would prefer, our pastor, because the word pastor is a reform word, right? So we're saying we don't want a Catholic priest in our communities. We want a reformed pastor who's going to teach the gospel, by which they mean what you know, what Martin Luther is saying. And any money that is collected from our tithe that is more than what is needed to support the pastor should go back into our community to support the poor.

SPEAKER_00 38:28

Well, a lot of them seem to stem from it's like biblical literalism to challenge the feudal structures and the exploitation that these people are suffering. So the first one is releasing people from serfdom, and they say we should be humble on not only to those in authority but towards everyone. So there's a kind of a a collective spirit there. And then four and five are to do with um access to waterways and woods as well. And you were talking about um how they were uh they could be punished um for inadvertently accessing those and and hunting or or um fishing in those those areas. And then uh number six, uh an end to accept excessive services. Services not a service they receive. No, services that move beyond the word of God in terms of what they're asked to do for um those in power, um, or their the lords or the noblemen in uh above them. And the final one I highlighted was uh, and this is quoted from the translation that I read if articles should be uh conceded to be unjust, not reflected in the word of God, they shall be dead and null and without force. So they are really drawing the line here and saying if it isn't there, if it's not something that we can read and interpret ourselves, then we do not feel that we need to obey or abide by those uh demands. I think that final one brings it all together for me.

SPEAKER_05 39:48

Aaron Ross Powell The finger marks of the Reformation are so deeply embedded here because it's about where does authority come from?

SPEAKER_00 39:57

And then in March 1525, they almost Double down with the federal ordinance, which is also which is challenging nobles who do not respect or recognize um the twelve articles. And they're they're then pressuring town councils. So the I suppose the the courage that they've taken from this is actually um evident uh in this act, and this seems like a precursor for the direct action that they then take um in what you would call the yeah, the peasant wars.

SPEAKER_05 40:28

So there are sort of these two halves of the peasant war. There's the first phase where they're coming up with these demands, these these 12 articles, and then they've got the federal ordinance where they're trying to put pressure with a boycott and a strike on churches, where they're trying to put pressure on cities, church landowners, and noble landowners to give them what they want. And then there's this moment where everything changes, and that moment is in Easter of 1525, and it's called the Weinsburg Massacre.

SPEAKER_04 41:03

Putchcast. Follow us on Facebook or Instagram to find out about the latest coup coming your way.

SPEAKER_01 41:12

You're listening to Putschcast, and in the studio with me is uh David Shields and also Eva Schubert's live online. We've just learned that the Reformation started by Martin Luther had a key moment in 1517 when the 95 theses were declared. Thomas Minzer was present on many other occasions as well. He then took Luther's message to the next level. He focused on equality and really didn't distinguish between noblemen or the peasants on the street. We also, I think, want to stress that the peasantry back then, I think it's way past the 90% mark. So it's not like today where we think it's 10-20% of the population. This is the vast, vast majority in Europe at the time. And they took to the quill. They've had the 12 articles from Memmingen. There was good intent, there was room for dialogue. Yes, there was pressure on the nobility to respond to the demands from the peasantry led by Thomas Münzer. However, today's topic is the peasant wars. It has the word war in it. We've just learned about the Weinsberg massacre, which I think can be seen as a trigger moment. Eva, what happened in Weinsburg?

SPEAKER_05 42:23

It absolutely is a trigger moment. And so what happens is you have peasant agitators moving across the landscape. They're traveling from one town and village to another. They're gathering support. And then you have noblemen like this particular count in Weinsburg, who's really focused on keeping this out of his area, making sure that none of the peasants who work on his land get involved with this, you know, this uprising. And so he's trying to exert some pressure to prevent that from happening. There's a clash that happens. So the peasant group that's moving through his territory ends up coming into the city. The count decides to try and uh respond with force. Eventually he's captured, and the peasants send away the count's wife and his young child. They kind of put them in a in a cart and they send them off to the next village. So they're not going to touch them. But this particular count is notorious for being violent and rapacious. And he's done that sort of on the way in. He's been cutting down peasants who he even suspects of being involved with this rebellion. He just comes in with some knights, and you know, it makes you wonder how does he select these people? Does he just ride through the fields and see some guys and decide to hack them to death? I mean, what was enough to be grounds for him to be suspicious is hard to know. But he certainly had gathered an enormous amount of resentment, not just in recent days, but in the years before. They basically decide that they are going to execute him and some of his uh servants and and uh other guys who are wielding swords alongside him. They force them to run the gauntlet and they all get uh stabbed to death. This is a moment that really kind of happens just under the direction of the one guy, a guy named Little Jack, who's sort of the leader of that particular peasant band, and he makes the decision to execute these people, and it's almost immediately seen as a terrible mistake. A lot of the other peasants who are involved in this rebellion, and not even just peasants, but merchants and people in cities who'd kind of supported it, they now see this as having taken a turn and they're going, oh no. Similarly, for nobles, up until this moment, the idea that the peasants are agitating for something or other wasn't something they hadn't seen before. This was on a much larger scale, but they'd seen the Bunchu uprisings and they kind of thought, oh well, you know, we're gonna have to stamp, stamp on some peasants and pacify these people, but it's not a major disaster. But at this moment, when this count is is executed right outside his own castle, now every single nobleman is up in arms, going, We have to crush these people decisively. They now see it as an existential threat to the entire pyramid, and they're not going to tolerate it. That's where things are going to get grim. And that is a moment when the Swabian League playing some kind of negotiating role between the peasant leaders and the landowners basically shuts down.

SPEAKER_01 45:41

So there was um utter raw brutality in response to years and years of oppression, obviously, by this um this lynch mob, I would say, led by little Jack in Weinsberg. And that was the perfect propaganda coup for the nobility to then in future always refer to this shock and awe moment that if you follow Münster and his teachings, you get anarchy. If you side with Luther, yes, there's reform. We still can break away from Rome. However, there's some sort of structure, order, and we will remain in power.

SPEAKER_05 46:19

That's pretty much exactly it, yes.

SPEAKER_01 46:20

And so this is now early 25? Is this when that happened? Easter of 1525, April. And things unraveled, unfolded very quickly after that. What is the timeline following that massacre?

SPEAKER_05 46:34

By September of 1525, it's all over. So we're looking at a period from April, from the spring of 1525 to September, which is the war part of the peasants' war. There are a number of battles. I mean, one of the biggest ones was the Battle of Frankenhausen in May 1525, which many people think was kind of the moment that breaks the back of this movement. One of the problems with it is that these are localized groups. And so you'll get a band of peasant rebels that are interested in defending their region, but it's really hard to coordinate all these bands together as one big group in the manner of an army. And these are not trained fighters. These are guys who are much more accustomed to handling plowshares than they are swords, and they're much more concerned about their own sort of regional, you know, landowners and things. They're not seeing this as a military campaign. The nobles, on the other hand, are trained fighters and they can hire Lance Connect, who are professional, you know, soldiers. And they do see it as a military campaign. They do see it as a shock and awe kind of time when we're just going to roll over these people and absolutely crush everybody. And they do this with ruthless efficiency, not just in battles like Frankenhausen, but even afterwards, even after the last sort of battle in September when the rebels sue for peace, there are months of retributive killings that nobles are orchestrating, going into communities and just executing uh men there that they think were involved, and in the process, beggaring their families and having a massive, massive impact on economic production. We can write even counting the number of women and children who died from starvation as a result of this. But one historian puts the numbers of peasant casualties at something like 100,000. Now, it's always difficult to get exact body counts. So these should be regarded as estimates at best. But just a massive, massive casualty rate for male peasants in in these areas of Germany.

SPEAKER_01 48:42

Because we're not talking countries with millions and millions of people, right? This this is not today's population. This would have been a really significant percentage of the local population. And leading up to today, I just went on Google Maps, and I probably recommend to our listeners to do the same. And I just Googled um, because I wanted to get an idea of the scale as well, just Google Peasant Wars 1525 map and put that into a Google image. And there's some books that come up with maps, and it is all over, like all the way from northern Italy through modern-day Germany, as far as some parts of Bohemia, even across the French border. So we're talking most of Central Europe was affected by this, and there were many, many battles. Like you said, it started off with skirmishes and then becoming all-out battles. And some of them have very stereotypical German names, like you just mentioned. That wasn't a Frankenstein, that was Frankenhausen. And this is, I think, where Thomas Münzer pops up again. What happened in Frankenhausen?

SPEAKER_05 49:41

So the Battle of Frankenhausen, it's this heartbreaking scene. So you have these peasants who've built themselves a barricade with, you know, whatever implements and objects they can find. And there's several thousand of them. And they're going to be facing off against a highly organized army of Lance Connect. These guys are professionals, they fight for a living, they have the best uh armor and the best weapons, and they maneuver with discipline. I mean, or is there everyday business? These guys are professionals, and you're going to face off against a bunch of farmers. I think that at the Battle of Frankenhausen, the grand total of like the number of casualties from the noble side, the Lans Connect side, was less than 200 people. It's it's a tiny amount. The peasants are in the thousands. It's an absolute route. I mean, the Lans Connect are charging through, there's bodies everywhere. Before it had started, you've got this image of Thomas Munzer. He's praying with these people and he's saying, you know, the Lord is on our side. We've seen his rainbow in the sky. Literally, he's talking literally about a rainbow for the last few days. It's a sign that, you know, God is with us, and this is the moment when the Lord is going to intervene and he's going to help us change things because the time is right. And, you know, we fight with God. God is with us. And so, with that in your mind, you know, ideas in the Bible about uh people facing off in ancient Egypt against armies and somehow triumphing because God fought with them, you know, that there are precedents for this idea that even though you're hopelessly outnumbered and outclassed, that you could somehow succeed if God was with you. And so that's what they believe. And Munzner has actually a white uh banner with a rainbow painted on it, and this slogan in German that he has underneath it, which expresses their views. And of course, the minute that the battle begins, it's just an absolute butchery. And so pretty soon there are you know people with their arms blown off, people lie, you know, bleeding out, there's screaming, there's moaning, and there's just scattering. Peasants break and scatter, and they're ridden down relentlessly.

SPEAKER_01 51:46

Mowed down like grass and the weaponry, you've mentioned it before, but they had a scythe, they might have had a pitchfork, uh, some clubbers, like we're not talking swords and and uh rifles, muskets. This was again like you mentioned before with the sun and the moon. Yes, there were still knights in the battle, but they also had cannons at that time. So they had artillery shooting at a bunch of farmers um hiding behind a couple of carts and uh um and waiting for God to come and help. God didn't come and numbers again, God knows where they come from, but I think 7,000 or so survived. But one person who survived, Thomas Munzer.

SPEAKER_05 52:26

Yes, so Thomas Munzer ends up fleeing, as I think anybody with any sense of self-preservation would, uh, once it became clear how this was going. I mean, however brave you think you are, if you were in a if if if you have no formation around you, if if if everyone is is scattering and you're saying, I'm not going to scatter, I'm going to go forward, you're just going to be mowed down. And that will become very obvious to you very quickly, right? You'd be very clear what happens. So once you've got that cut and run moment in a battle, uh, if you want to live, you'd better do the same. And so Thomas Munster does. And he flees into a farmhouse uh nearby and he's tracked down there. And he's basically hiding. Um, he's just trying to escape with his life, but he's clutching a bunch of papers, which are, you know, his writings and writings associated with the rebellion, and these papers identify him. So he's dragged back, he's taken prisoner, he goes into captivity at the local nobleman's uh dungeon, and of course they torture him. But he does have an interview uh near the beginning of this period with some of the nobles in the area because they sit down and they're like, What is going on here? How did all this happen? What is it you want? And who are you? And like, how did this mess all break open? And Wunser, he knows what's going to happen to him, but he's completely unrepentant in this interview. And he basically says, Well, we are all equal in the eyes of God, and this is what this is about, and and your oppression and what you've been doing needs to stop. And of course, they torture him relentlessly and they force him to kind of officially recant his ideas, and then they execute him with, you know, they cut off his head and they put it on display as an example to others. It ends very painfully for Munzer, but his own theology said that it was impossible to really find God outside of suffering. And unlike Luther, who said that God could be found by reading the text, Munzer had this radical idea of the living experience of God as God is felt in the individual human heart, which is in addition to what he called reading the dead word. So Luther was very much a scripturalist, and this is a reason why you know Protestant Christians are sort of obsessed with memorizing Bible verses and just opening the Bible and pulling a random verse out and quoting it at you, because Luther's idea of spiritual authority is all in the text. Munzer's other radical idea is that God speaks into human hearts directly, and that there's what has been said in the word already, but there's also what is in your own heart as part of your direct experience, your unmediated relationship with the divine, and that it's impossible to have that without suffering.

SPEAKER_01 55:44

We're talking about what was left. So the revolt was crushed, the peasants didn't stand a chance. Yes. Let's talk about the memory that people still have of him, him as a historical figure, but also as an inspiration to many, many people following him in the centuries after. And we did start this episode by you remember who the quote was by? Friedrich Engels. Friedrich Engels, who in 1850 wrote about Thomas Münzer. And I've also mentioned that, especially in East Germany, he played a very important role and he was part of the government propaganda as someone who maybe led the first-class struggle against the oppressors and paid with his life for it. And so did most of his fellow countrymen who supported him against an authority that he didn't choose to be under. That then led to Thomas Münzer having his own renaissance almost uh 450 years later.

SPEAKER_05 56:39

Munzer represents a different route that the Reformation could have taken. And while the bulk of it went the way of Luther, and you had Luther and Calvin and these guys, there was a smaller route that followed the same one that Munzer was on. And he was associated with a group called the Anabaptists, who had another very explosive episode in a German town called Munster, not to be confused with Thomas Munzer. Inside the Anabaptists themselves, there was a bifurcation between those who thought that violence was necessary to reform the social order, and Munzer was in that category, and those who said, no, we need to be pacifists. And so Menno Siemens takes this pacifist view from the Anabaptist tradition, and he says, we're not going to use violence. Menno is the father of the Mennonites, also of the Hutterites. There's this stream of Protestant thinking that Thomas Munzer was part of and that bifurcated in this way, and the non-violent version of it is the one that sort of continued down to this day. Perhaps Thomas Munzer's most famous quote, although it may have been extracted from under torture, is the idea that he wanted us a society where everything was held in common, where, you know, people took care of each other, where there wasn't this incredible hierarchy. And fascinatingly enough, there's a Hutterite statement of faith, which sounds like a quote right out of Marx, because I couldn't believe it when I read this. But in the Hutterite confession of faith, it says, from each according to his ability to each according to his needs. Now I don't know if Marx was quoting the Hutterites or if the Hutterites were quoting Marx, because I don't know the date of this particular Hutterite confession. But what we can say is that there's an alignment ideologically on this point. And that's why, of course, Engels was such a fan of Thomas Munzer.

SPEAKER_01 58:33

David, you're a history teacher, and when we do have spare time, we usually do the what if conversations. What influence do you think he did have on people that followed him, such as Rob Speer, Marx, Lenin, and others?

SPEAKER_00 58:47

Well, in a modern context, uh looking at some of the anti-imperialist and also the Marxist concept of history, we can see through the way that the GDR has lionized him and taken him as a sort of standard bearer, whereas the West had Martin Luther. Um I think he's a he's a powerful figure of um fighting what what you can consider to be oppression, whether it be um political or social or or religious. So again, as someone I did not know anything about him, I am kind of ashamed now that that is the case considering all of the um the influence you could probably post to some of the uh the other big um thinkers and um revolutionaries and movements of the last couple of hundred years. And it speaks there are a number of recent academic works which have been published um exploring him as well. So it shows that his legacy is still very much alive.

SPEAKER_01 59:40

Yeah, and I think it's not the last we've heard about him. I'm sure in a hundred years someone else will do a whatever space podcast it will be. But also his name might pop up again in a different context because we're talking about it because 500 years, that's a big anniversary, obviously, this year. I also found a quote, and this one I liked it because it takes it away from the community. Lens a little bit. And that's why I thought it was interesting because that's been done to death and you know him as an inspiration to communism. But so this one says if Thomas Münzer was the revolutionary's fiery soul, then the town of Memmingen was its brain. While Münzer preached apocalyptic justice in Memmingen, something unprecedented happened. The peasants formed a parliament and drafted a constitution. This document, the famous twelve articles, was arguably the first written list of human rights and political demands in modern European history. So I think that it goes way beyond communism. That is just the societies we all want to live in in the democratic order. And it's just that idea of equality that your human right is as valuable as mine, no matter what your profession or status in society is. And I think maybe that's something valuable we can take away from the story of Thomas Münzer. I did promise our listeners to give you an insight on where you can find out more about Eva's work. Eva, thank you very much, first of all, for making time on a late Friday for you. Where does your interest stem from in history? Why are you so passionate about it? And where can people find out more?

SPEAKER_05 1:01:18

Oh my goodness. History is a passion that runs through my entire life. But that's maybe a story for another day. However, you can get more history stories from me on Villains and Virgins Podcast. There is a video version that you can find on YouTube, or you can get it wherever you stream audio. And I've done a five-part series on the Protestant Reformation. So if you want to know all about that in terms of context, that's one of the things you can check out. But it's a podcast that does focus on stories that I think have deep human interest and intellectual significance. And I try to keep it very, very lively. So you can find all of that on Villains and Virgins Podcast.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:24

The album is called Thomas Münzer, Deutsche Evangelische Messe and Deutsches Kirchenamt, with many of his writings recorded in 2025. Now over to you, Eva. Thank you so much for the last hour. This was so insightful. Your passion is incredible about the topic.