German Peasants' War

Summary

Podcast Summary: Not Just the Tudors – German Peasants' War

Episode Title: German Peasants' War
Release Date: February 17, 2025
Host: Professor Suzannah Lipscomb
Guest: Professor Lyndall Roper, Regis Chair at the University of Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy, and author of Summer of Fire and the German Peasants War

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1. Introduction

Professor Susannah Lipscomb opens the episode by introducing the German Peasants' War of 1524-25, emphasizing its scale and significance comparable to events like the French Revolution and World War I. She highlights the movement's aim to dismantle feudal structures and reshape society based on Reformation ideals. Professor Lipscomb welcomes Professor Lyndall Roper, an esteemed historian, to delve into the intricacies of this tumultuous period.

2. Historical Context and Preceding Revolts

[05:11] Professor Lyndall Roper:
"There had been revolts in the German speaking lands before, but we're also finding out we know a lot less about these revolts than we once thought and that they may not have been as extensive as we originally believed."

Roper explains that while earlier revolts like the Poor Conrad and Bunchu Revolts existed, they were predominantly localized and swiftly suppressed, lacking the widespread impact of the 1524-25 uprising. The German Peasants' War marked a significant escalation in both scale and intensity.

3. Personal Serfdom and Peasant Exploitation

[06:57] Professor Lyndall Roper:
"What personal serfdom meant for women... marriage was a humiliation, controlled by lords who dictated whom peasants could marry, enforcing restrictions that felt akin to slavery."

Roper discusses the oppressive nature of personal serfdom, particularly its impact on women. Lords exerted control over peasants' personal lives, restricting marriages and movement, thereby deepening the exploitation and humiliation faced by the peasant class.

4. Conflicting Views of Land and Resources

[11:21] Professor Lyndall Roper:
"For the lords, the rural landscape is a place of pleasure... whereas for peasants, the land is deeply local and integral to their history and livelihood."

Roper contrasts the differing perspectives on land between lords and peasants. While lords viewed land as a domain for leisure activities like hunting, peasants saw it as essential to their sustenance and cultural identity, leading to conflicts over resource control.

5. Influence of Reformation Ideas

[13:30] Professor Lyndall Roper:
"I think up to that point, it was really remarkably good-humored... but it is this action when suddenly it was the peasants who were killing lords, that really seems to have frightened the lords and made them realize that some kind of serious counterattack really was called for."

Roper elaborates on how Reformation ideas, particularly those advocated by Martin Luther, played a pivotal role in inspiring the peasants' quest for freedom and social restructuring. The complex interplay of religious reform and socio-economic grievances fueled the movement's momentum.

6. The Twelve Articles: Grievances Grounded in Religion

[21:46] Professor Lyndall Roper:
"The 12 articles are a brilliant piece of work... they group those complaints and make them a coherent whole."

Roper highlights the importance of the Twelve Articles, which systematically articulated the peasants' grievances by grounding them in biblical references. This strategic compilation unified diverse local complaints into a coherent and persuasive manifesto, facilitating widespread mobilization.

7. Mobilization: Organization and Resource Acquisition

[25:07] Professor Lyndall Roper:
"Peasants are doing exactly that, using the Bible to back up what they say... the message of the Reformation at this point is really multifarious."

The episode delves into how the peasants organized themselves by swearing oaths of brotherhood, forming large contingents that could collectively challenge noble authority. Plundering monasteries and convents provided essential resources, such as food, weapons, and funds, sustaining their armies and expanding their reach across regions.

8. The Turning Point: Weinsberg and Rising Violence

[37:14] Professor Lyndall Roper:
"The action when suddenly it was the peasants who were killing lords... mark a turning point."

Roper identifies the battle at Weinsberg as a pivotal moment where peasants began actively attacking and killing lords, inciting fear among the nobility and prompting more aggressive suppression efforts. This shift marked an escalation in the conflict's brutality and underscored the movement's serious threat to the established order.

9. Martin Luther's Response and the Role of the Princes

[38:29] Professor Lyndall Roper:
"Luther is very clear that he does not support the peasants... he's on the side of the princes and on the side of the lords."

Roper details Martin Luther's stance during the Peasants' War. Despite initial ideological influences, Luther condemned the rebellion, advocating for the authority of secular rulers and denouncing violent uprisings. This position aligned him with the princes, highlighting a significant divergence between reformist and peasant aspirations.

10. The Defeat of the Peasants' War

[48:26] Professor Lyndall Roper:
"The peasants failed because they were up against a society which they couldn't in the end militarily control... the logic of their situation which in the end makes it difficult for them to win."

Roper analyzes the factors leading to the peasants' defeat, citing the superior military organization and resources of the nobility, tactical disadvantages in battles, and the inability to sustain their movement indefinitely. The lack of consistent alliances and the exhaustion of plunderable resources further undermined their efforts.

11. Long-term Effects and Legacy

[52:35] Professor Lyndall Roper:
"I think the Peasants' War can offer an example of a kind of democratic tradition in Germany... local groups reclaiming the peasants war for what they want to say about Germany and about democratic traditions."

Roper explores the enduring legacy of the Peasants' War, noting its influence on democratic movements and local memory in Germany. The trauma of the war left lasting marks on landscapes and cultural consciousness, inspiring subsequent movements like the Anabaptists and shaping modern democratic ideals within German society.

12. Conclusion

Professor Lipscomb wraps up the discussion by acknowledging Professor Roper's insightful exploration of the German Peasants' War, its complexities, and its profound impact on history. She thanks Professor Roper and invites listeners to tune into future episodes of Not Just the Tudors.

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Notable Quotes:

• Professor Lyndall Roper [05:11]:
  "There had been revolts in the German speaking lands before, but we're also finding out we know a lot less about these revolts than we once thought."

• Professor Lyndall Roper [06:57]:
  "What personal serfdom meant for women... marriage was a humiliation, controlled by lords who dictated whom peasants could marry."

• Professor Lyndall Roper [13:30]:
  "I think up to that point, it was really remarkably good-humored... but it is this action when suddenly it was the peasants who were killing lords, that really seems to have frightened the lords."

• Professor Lyndall Roper [21:46]:
  "The 12 articles are a brilliant piece of work... they group those complaints and make them a coherent whole."

• Professor Lyndall Roper [37:14]:
  "The action when suddenly it was the peasants who were killing lords... mark a turning point."

• Professor Lyndall Roper [38:29]:
  "Luther is very clear that he does not support the peasants... he's on the side of the princes and on the side of the lords."

• Professor Lyndall Roper [48:26]:
  "The peasants failed because they were up against a society which they couldn't in the end militarily control."

• Professor Lyndall Roper [52:35]:
  "I think the Peasants' War can offer an example of a kind of democratic tradition in Germany."

---

This comprehensive summary encapsulates the key discussions, insights, and conclusions from the podcast episode, providing a clear and engaging overview for those unfamiliar with the original content.

Transcript

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb. If you'd like Not Just the Tudors ad free to get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to historyhit with a historyhit subscription. You can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my own on Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, Brilliant Rivals, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com subscribe.

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Hello, I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and welcome to Not Just the Tudors From History Hit the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to samurais relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. By many it is the forgotten trauma of the 16th century, but intended to bring in a new world. It was a mass movement on the scale of The French Revolution and as deadly as World War I, often known as the German Peasants Revolt, Today's guest is emphatic that we should call it rather the peasants war of 1524-25. It was an extraordinary event that makes one reflect on what was dreamed of by ordinary people in the 16th century and what could have been. Peasants across vast swathes of modern day Germany, Switzerland and Austria rose up against their lords, both secular and religious lords, who had made them their personal serfs and exacted from them rents and dues, labour services and tithes that were onerous and exploitative. They gathered up their grievances and resentments and empowered by the message of freedom preached by the reformers and enriched by the resources of the monastic institutions they attacked, they gathered themselves into marching bands, determined to pull down every last scrap of lordly power. For three heady months in spring 1525, as my guest puts it, the peasants were in control and they began to put plans for a new future into action, a future in which society would be reshaped according to the gospel. It was not to be. The result was instead gullies running with blood. To explore the hopes and dreams of the peasants, the radical actions of spring 1525 and the bloody aftermath of that summer, I am delighted to be joined by Professor Lyndall Roper, the first woman to hold the Regis Chair at the University of Oxford, Fellow of the British Academy, and the author of acclaimed books, including a biography of Martin Luther, Witch Craze, about the witch trials in Germany. And now with a brilliant brand new study, Summer of Fire and the German Peasants War. I'm Professor Susannah Lipscomb and you're listening to Not Just the Tudors. Professor Roper, welcome to the podcast.

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

It's wonderful to be invited to come. I'm delighted to be here.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

I'm really excited to talk to you about this. So let's get going immediately. So we have this Extraordinary War of 1524, 25. Can you give us a sense of other examples of revolts and rebellions in the decades preceding, what their targets were? And what would it be about this moment, this action by the peasants, that would make it that much more serious?

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

There had been revolts in the German speaking lands before, but we're also finding out we know a lot less about these revolts than we once thought that we did, and that they may not have been as extensive as we originally believed. There were revolts in the 15th century which were to do with taxes and with ties, and they seem to have been largely localised and worked very much with conspiracies. So there are the poor Conrad revolts and there's the so called bunchu revolts. And bunshu is such a great name because it refers to a cheap form of peasants boot. It's the kind of boot that you can just take a piece of leather and then tie it directly onto your leg with little leather strings. And that's what a bunchu boot was. And it's a great pun because bunt means a union, a group of people who've joined together and tying on is what you do with that boot. So it's a lovely pun about the nature of peasant revolt. But those revolts were quite localized for the most part. They were uncovered before they got very far and they were nothing like the scale of what happened in 1524 and in particular in 1525.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It would also be really helpful to have a sense of the context of lordship at the time. So perhaps you could talk to me first of all about personal serfdom, especially what this meant for women, what it meant for our marriage. How close was it to slavery and in what other ways were peasants being exploited?

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

I thought a lot about slavery and I learned a lot from the literature on slavery, actually. And one of the things that that literature alerted me to was what you just mentioned, and that is what personal serfdom meant for women. Because what it means is that when you come to marry and choose a marriage partner, what the lords wanted to do was make sure that it would be to someone in the same jurisdict as you, because that was the way that they could secure the next generation. But if you married someone who was owned by a different lord, or who might be free, might be a person in a town, then all kinds of complications arose. Because who then has the right over your children? Who do those children belong to? Whose serfs are they? So what a lot of lords tried to do was to control who you married and to say that you couldn't marry someone who wasn't in the same lordship, or if you did, you had to pay a huge fine to compensate for the loss of potential future serfs. So this is quite a humiliating thing for people. It's said that by the early 16th century, personal serf didn't mean very much. You could still make a very good living as a farmer, even if you were technically owned by your landlord. But actually, I think that misses the kind of things that this meant about who you could marry and the humiliating nature of a lot of this. You couldn't leave your farm Perhaps overnight, in some areas, you had to get permission to go away. Overnight, you weren't fully free. And things like marriage, I think, really grated with people. And it must have felt particularly annoying if your landlord happened to be a monastery or an abbot, because these are people who are members of the Church and who are meant to be upholding the idea of the sacramentality of marriage. And the sacramentality of marriage means that marriage is a sacrament that just consists in the free exchange between the couple. So your parents can't forbid it, the law can't forbid it, it's up to the couple themselves to administer the sacrament to each other. It consists in the promise of marriage and sex, which makes it binding. So here we've got ecclesiastical figures saying you can't marry whoever you like, and they're the ones who are meant to be upholding the sacramentality of marriage. So I think that was a real issue. And I think also feudalism, by this point, was just very, very hard to get your head around because it covers so many little rights and obligations and things that you have to bear in mind. So they could reach from being forced by custom to do something that might strike you as completely irritating, like collecting berries at certain times of year and giving them to the lord, or it might involve doing transport duties for the Lord. And that might seem all right if you just have to take some peeks somewhere else, perhaps. But what about if you have to transport amounts of wood and you have to transport them a long way away? And all of this is happening as the economy is starting to change, and I think that's a big part of what's going on. You're starting to get the growth of trade, you're starting to get production that isn't just subsistence. So you have the development of flax crops and you have the development of mining. Mining uses a lot of wood. You need charcoal to smelt the ore. So all of these things mean that you've got a much more dynamic economy. And now the question of who controls the water, because water is a major power source and who controls the forests becomes a real issue and leads to a lot of tension between lords and serfs.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Yes. It seems from your work that many of the resentments and grievances of the peasants centered on this question of ecology of woods and meadows and water. Do you think this comes down to a fundamental difference in how the peasants and the lord saw the land?

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

Yes, I do. I think for the lords, if you think about what they're doing, what they're doing a Lot of the time is they're hunting. And so the hunting in this period involves getting a lot of beaters and covering quite a wide area and getting them to drive the animals into a central area where the lords then kill them. So it's a really labor intensive kind of thing, and it involves just going roughshod over crops. They're not really concerned about crops or grazing, they're just interested in hunting animals. And I think that that means that for them, the rural landscape is a place of pleasure often, and they are also able to go much greater distances more quickly because of the different kinds of horses that they have. Whereas for peasants, I think the land is connected with a whole lot of history. I think it's deeply local. I think they have a very close knowledge of all the features in their landscape. And they also have organizations that control how that landscape will be used. So in a lot of cases, they're engaged in strip farming, and you can't do strip farming unless you agree. So saints days are really important. Knowing when to do what in the agricultural year, knowing how to work together, and knowing what the history is, even of such things that don't look important, like bogs or the little corridors between fields that get you from one place to another, those are hugely important to peasants. And they know the history of them and who owned them and who had rights to do what.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

A crucial part of this story, necessary but not sufficient, is the tale of three reformers. Can we talk about the kind of Reformation ideas that played into the Peasants War, what role they really had, and the way in which we see divisions between those who are preaching reform?

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

That's a wonderful question. And it's something that has. Well, really, I guess working on the Peasants War has changed my view of the Reformation. I think that the Peasants War is really a religious movement. So it starts with the idea of freedom. And of course, back in 1520, Luther had written a pamphlet called the Freedom of a Christian. And that starts with this wonderful paradox that a Christian is Lord of all and a Christian is the servant of all. And it's that paradox that Luther then develops so beautifully in the course of that one treatise. And if you want to read one thing by Luther, I'd say read that. It's short, it's lyrical, it's not like his other works, but it had freedom in the title. And at this point, Luther's antagonists, his Catholic opponents were saying, if you go on like this, if you use words like this, there will be a peasant war, there'll be an Uprising. So Luther was very much playing with fire by using that word. And I think he was doing that deliberately because he could see that his ideas had secular consequences for how the world was organized, how society was organised. So I think that his ideas are very important to what's going on here. Luther is also famously criticizing the Gnosticism. He's saying you can't get to heaven by being a monk. So a lot of what is going on in the Peasants War is attacks on monasteries and convents. And you can see the whole thing as being a gigantic anti monastic movement. And that too is something that is first articulated by Luther. So we've got Luther on the one hand, who I think really does play an inspirational role, but he doesn't own his ideas. And I think that's one of the really fascinating things about moments of revolution. No one can own the ideas of a revolution. And ideas can change very, very fast. And I think if we're looking for the ideology of the German Peasants War, we're looking for the wrong kind of thing. I think it's the wrong way of thinking about it, because this is a movement of people who largely can't read and write, although some of them can. And it's a movement that involved many, many, many preachers. And those preachers all have slightly different ideas, slightly different talents, different things that interest them, different things that they stress. So the message of the Reformation at this point is really multifarious. And I think often we look back with a sort of denominational mindset and we're looking for the Lutherans, we're looking for the people who followed the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, the Zwinglians, and we're looking for those who followed Thomas Muntzer. But I don't think that those divisions were as clear at the time. It was clear that Luther and Menzel were opponents, but I don't think that it was then clear that Luther and Zwingli would fall out in the way that they later did over the issue of whether Christ really was present in the elements of bread and wine, in communion. All of that was to come later. And in part, I think it was radicalized by the Peasants War itself, but it doesn't predate it and it's not something that people are conscious of at the time.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Okay, let's pick up on some of these ideas about what they wanted in just a second. And let's get a sense of the chronology. We're in winter 15, 24 and 25. We're dealing with peasants. This is A revolt that is going to be closely linked to the seasons. Winter, as you write, is not a time to take on the lords, but it is quite a good time to sit and talk about your grievances. So what was happening in the winter of 1524, 25, I think that's when.

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

A lot of this really gets going. It's like in the French Revolution, when people have to write down their grievances. When they write them down in those call Yay, that's when they get radicalized. And I think something similar happens here. As people start to think about what it is that they're objecting to and start putting their particular grievances together, they start being angry and they start being able to put a whole series of things together. And when you have Reformation ideas coming along at the same time, I think that starts to be the framework in which they see all this, and they start to see it as coherent, as forming a whole. And I think that there are a couple of ideas that are really important here. Maybe ideas is the wrong word, but a couple of perceptions, convictions, maybe. So that I would talk about something that I term a peasant theology. And one of those ideas is that Christ has bought our freedom with his precious blood. And as they put it in the 12 articles, he has brought our freedom, the richest as the poorest. No one accepted. And so we are free. And as they put it and want to be free, I think that's just such a wonderful addition that they make there and here that links absolutely to Reformation ideas. Because Luther had advocated communion in both kinds. And that just means that instead of the clergy getting the wine of communion in the Mass, the lay folk should be able to have the wine as well, and not just the bread, as had been the case up until then. That's dynamite. Because if you say, well, the clergy have kept the wine from you, that's Christ's blood, that's what he bought our freedom with. So I think that that idea is really, really explosive and very, very powerful. And I think the other idea that's really important is a kind of creation theology, the understanding that God created the world for everyone and he created it free for human beings. It's a bit different from our idea about ecology now, where we would see plants and animals and the earth as having a value in their own right and not just there for humans to exploit. That's not how they're thinking about it. They think of the animals in the forest, the birds in the air, the fish in the ponds. They think of them as having been created by God free for all humans to use. And so they think the Lord shouldn't be able to say, you peasants can't hunt. You can't have access to the deer in the forest. That's reserved to us. They object to that idea. And they want to be able to use the products of the forest and also the water and the wood themselves, because God's created it for everyone.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

It's so fascinating, isn't it, because we are now so entrenched in a system of capitalism that this way of seeing the world is foreign to us. I accept that the wood just on the horizon over there that I want to walk in is owned by someone and I'm not allowed to. But the peasants are challenging that fundamental idea you mentioned. The 12 articles tell us what they are in broad brushstrokes. And one of the things that's often been said about the 12 articles is that religion is cloaking the actual economic thrust of these. What's your take on that?

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

Well, the 12 articles are an absolute bestseller. We think probably about 25,000 copies were printed. That's an amazing number. And it means that everyone can pretty much fairly easily get hold of them, because you're usually about 20 kilometers away from a market town. So they're very simple. There are 12 of them, and I think it's no accident that there are 12, just like there are 12 apostles. And that gives them a certain kind of status, I think. And they are a brilliant piece of work. Alongside them, there are scriptural references which prove each point. This is a document which sets up peasant grievances and shows that they're all grounded in the Bible and can be proved scripturally. And if you think Luther, it appeared at Worms and says that the Bible is the only authority. And so here the peasants are doing exactly that, using the Bible to back up what they say. And they are a work of genius, I think, because if you read what have survived of some of these hundreds of local grievances, you think, oh, my goodness, how can anyone make sense of this? Someone's complaining about having to pick a certain kind of barbary. Someone else is complaining about not being treated nicely when they have to do work for the Lord. Someone else is complaining about something else. It just goes on and on and on. And you think, this is a mountain of little local complaints. How could this ever turn into a movement? But what the 12 articles do is it groups those complaints and makes them a coherent whole, and there isn't a complaint, really, that gets left out because they're all grouped within these 12 articles, which set out that the Lord can't demand stuff that's unreasonable, that peasants are willing to work for the Lord, but they want to be paid and they want to do it at seasonal times that work for them, not in the middle of harvest, not have to drop everything and run after what the Lord wants to do. They're all about mutuality, give and take, and about what's fair and what's not fair. And they're beautifully put together. And the first demand is that every congregation, every parish, and here's this wonderful word, geminder. And the Germander is a local peasant organization. It's the village organization, if you like. It is both the parish, it's the religious community, and it's the secular one. And they start with a demand that every parish, every community should have the right to call its own pastor and to hire him if he doesn't behave. And I think that is a really important demand, and it shows how central religion is to it, because it's being able to hear the clear word of God. And remember, this is a society where most people can't read and write. So we're not talking about a world where people want the right to read the Bible themselves. What they want is to hear the word of God preached by a Christian preacher, as they would put it.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So here we have this profoundly challenging worldview infused with Reformation ideas that's going to take on the very existing social structure. So what happened in the spring?

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

Well, what happens is that people start to gather, so you'll have one little local community coming together, and then what often happens is that they swear brotherhood. And swearing brotherhood might not seem very important after all, it's just words. But actually it is really important because it infringes the feudal oath, because you're swearing to one another, and that oath goes against the oath that you have sworn to your Lord. And the punishment for doing that is the loss of the fingers with which you swore, and those are the second and third fingers. So basically, it meant that you couldn't work if you got convicted of having sworn an oath of brotherhood. So people swear oaths of brotherhood to one another, and then they will go to the next village and they'll say, we've sworn an oath of brotherhood and we're coming to you and we want you to join with us. But if you don't want to join with us, then we will come to you. And as one of them put it, and you won't be laughing. There is an element of coercion in this. And sometimes we know that they put posts outside the houses of people who didn't swear. Often afterwards, what you have to say is, oh no, I was forced to swear to the peasants because if you want to get out of being punished, that's what you have to say. So it's very hard to know how much of it was coercion and how much of it was freely done. But I think it was pretty much probably freely done as it developed a momentum of its own as village after village came together. And you would have maybe 100 people gathering and then that would grow and you'd have a larger number until finally you get to about 6,000 or so. And then once you're a group like that, you have a huge power, which you didn't have before, because if 6,000 people turn up outside a monastery, that monastery is going to open the gates and let them in because they don't have a choice. And as they start gathering and moving, they're able to plunder convents and monasteries, they're able to supply themselves. And the whole thing takes on the dynamic of its own.

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[Professor Lyndall Roper]

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And so with this mass movement of people, this extraordinary number who have gathered, we see castles and monastic institutions. You say maybe a third of all of them, at least 405 religious houses are attacked and these attacks were violent and destructive. So what were these places, castles, monasteries, convents symbolizing to the peasants?

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

Well, in fact, we now know that there are even more than we thought. We've reached the total of well over 600 and it's at least 50%. And that's 50% where we know that the convents and monasteries were attacked. And that's absolutely extraordinary. And if you look at a map of that, you can see that it's just spreading over this whole region of the peasants war. It's particularly intense in places like Thuringen and Saxony, and often it's centered in towns where not every convent monastery will be attacked, but certainly people in those towns will have seen a covenant monastery being attacked and plundered. So it's a really amazing phenomenon which I don't think historians have understood properly. I think to understand what the Counter Reformation brings about, you have to see, really, that they were in many cases, working with pretty much a tabula rasa, because so many of these institutions had been really seriously attacked. In some cases, they are burnt to the ground. There's one wonderful case where Jecklein Robach refuses to allow the monastery of Marlboron to be burnt to the ground, because, as he says, it's so beautiful. So it's interesting how peasants react to all of this. They don't burn them all, but they do plunder, a lot of them. And they take food, they take wine and beer, or they consume it on the spot. One of the things they do is they fish out the monastic ponds. And you can see how furious they are that the monks have their own ponds where they have these wonderful fish which they can eat on fast days, whereas normal peasants are not even allowed to fish sometimes in their own local river. And that's a real issue, because it was believed that after childbirth, women needed to have fish to recover, and peasants couldn't get hold of the fish that they believed that their wives needed. So there are a lot of issues and a lot of anger behind these attacks on monasteries and convents. And we have to bear in mind that they are often local rulers, they're often territorial rulers, as well as being landlords. So you can see how this ruling caste of abbots, bishops and so forth are all interlinked with these leading families who are ruling territories. So it is one whole ruling class which they are attacking, as they're attacking convents and monasteries. Of course, many of the secular lords didn't realize that the attacks would turn to them too, and that their castles would be attacked, because that didn't seem to be the case to begin with. Some of them try to ride the storm and think that, oh, well, let's get our son to become a secular abbot, turn the whole thing into a secular territory, and then we'll keep it in the family forever. And that happened in many cases. We know that it happened, for instance, in the little county of Henneberg, where the local count tries to get his son, who is the sort of deputy bishop of Fulda, to get himself made into a secular ruler of the territory of Fulda. But he completely miscalculates.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

There's a wonderful passage where you describe what it might have been like for these peasants going into a monastery and seeing those ponds full of fish and their barrels of wine and their feather beds, and this extraordinary life that's so different from the one they're leading. I suppose there's also, though, a question of practicality. How do you feed thousands of marching peasants? What are the resources that are underpinning this movement?

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

I think the resources that are underpinning it. And again, I think it's something that we didn't realize. I think the resources are what they got from plundering convents and monasteries. That's how they supplied their armies. Sometimes the abbots realized it in advance. So when the Black Forest peasants were coming over the horizon, some of the local abbots sent out and gave them eight oxen to kind of buy them off and get the peasants to roast those eight oxen, keep them fed for a few days, and keep them away from the monastery and plundering it. So different habits, different monasteries, try to reach different solutions. But really that's how the peasants war progresses, by using monasteries to supply the troops and also sometimes raiding the church furnishings so that they would take the gold and silver that would be found in the vessels used for the mass, or if it was a pilgrimage destination, as many of these monasteries were, there would be a lot of gold and silver and jeweled objects. They took also the clerical vestments and cut off the pearls and used them, tried to sell them, sold the cloth. So all of these were resources which could be turned into cash, and that money could be used to buy weapons and also to pay for making, say, in towns, enough bread to feed a whole army. And the bigger the armies, the more the movement grows, the harder, of course, it is to supply them. And the longer it goes on, the fewer monasteries and convents are left to plunder. And that, I think, is also part of the dynamic of how the peasants war goes on and how it comes to an end.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And the peasant armies are taking things and destroying things, but they're also engaging in certain instances in brutality towards people. And perhaps one of the most marked examples is forcing knights and pages to run the gauntlet at Weinsberg in April 1525. Was this a turning point, do you think?

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

I think it was a turning point. I think up to that point, it was really remarkably good humored. The whole peasants war, it didn't involve many attacks on people, although it did involve attacks on the peasants and killing of some of the peasants by the lords. But it was this action when suddenly it was the peasants who were killing lords, that really seems to have frightened the lords and made them realize that some kind of serious counter attack really was called for. So I think it does mark A turning point, because what is really quite surprising about the Peasants War is how remarkably non violent they were for a very long period of time. And even after the Weinsburg massacre, there's not a lot of killing of the lords. There's a lot of threats, a lot of sexual threats too, which certainly would have made the lords feel jumpy. But there isn't a lot of bloodshed that the peasants are doing, really. And I think that's very important to bear in mind. When they have pitched battles, though, the situation becomes very, very different.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And what famously was Martin Luther's response?

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

Do you think he betrayed them after the Wensburg massacre? But also in the first pamphlet that he wrote, when he received the 12 articles and was asked to comment on them, Luther is very clear that he does not support the peasants. So in his first treatise on it, where he's discussing the 12 articles, he sets himself up as being the man of the fair judge. He is taking the role, I think, of a kind of prophet figure, where he first of all sets out what the lords are doing wrong and why it is that the peasants are rebelling against them. And what they are doing in particular that is so wrong is that they're not introducing the Reformation. So after a long passage dealing with that and seeming to attack the princes quite rhetorically, powerfully, he then moves to attacking the peasants. But I don't think it really is as uneven handed as it appears, because it's very clear that for Luther, engaging in revolt of any kind is totally out of the question. You can't resist secular authority. And he'd already argued that. And I think he's not really betraying the peasants, because if you look at Luther's own social background, he came from a mine owner's family. He was part of this kind of small town, elite university educated on his mother's side. They were bureaucrats with legal training. And it was of course, legal training that he was meant to get so that he could defend the family's mine interests. So it's not really surprising that he's on the side of the princes and on the side of the lords. What is perhaps more surprising is that the lords themselves don't want to take action against the peasants. And Luther's own ruler, Frederick the Wise, is very careful to try to negotiate. He's really fatalistic. In his last correspondence, it's really quite extraordinary to read. He was on his deathbed and he writes to his brother and he says things like, well, if this is what God wants to happen, what can we do. He doesn't say, we've got a arm, we've got a kill and fight and stab those peasants as if they were mad dogs. Which is the kind of thing that Luther is saying, far from it. And he's not the only one. Towns also want to negotiate, they don't want to proceed with force.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

So princes and lords saw that the peasants were starting to get violent and certain amongst them refused to take it lying down, including the young Philip of Hesse. By 14 May, we have around 8,000 peasants gathered outside Frankenhausen and the lords are commanding an army of a similar size, but 2,500 or 3,000 of them are on horse. Now, with that sort of advantage for the nobles, was there any possible outcome except mass slaughter of the peasants at this battle under others?

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

No, I don't think there was. And that's the outcome you see time and again. It's really tragic. It's not that the peasants were without arms, we know that they actually had quite good arms in some cases. Sometimes they were able to get control of whole armories, and since some monasteries had armories, especially the Teutonic Knights, they were able to arm themselves with quite well when they managed to get hold of them. Or they could use the money that they had from monasteries and convents to buy arms. And we know that they did, and that they even seem to have been active on the markets for paying for the German mercenary soldiers to fight with them. So it's not that they didn't have military resources, they did. Some of the peasants had been mercenaries themselves, so they understood how those armies worked, they knew how to create military structures, and they did that. How they often seem to have fought is to create a circle of wagons and then defend that circle so that they fought in that quite defensive kind of way. But once their positions are smashed by these mountain knights, what usually happens is that people just flee. They're not able to deal with cavalry in the way that you would later find with formations of pike. They're not able to do that. That does require a lot of training to do that. And what typically happens is very soon after a battle begins, the peasants flee and scatter. And it's as they flee that this mass slaughter happens, because they're running downhill, they can't get down fast enough, and the lords are riding faster and they can attack them from above and they get stuck. Sometimes they flee to forests because they realize that the cavalry can't get in the forest. But there are terrible scenes. There's a battle of Lightheim, where we know that they get basically forced into a bog and many of them drown in the river. So they are scenes of real mass slaughter. And it's not just Frankenhausen, which is the battle which Thomas Muntzer is involved in. There are at least a dozen of these battles, all involving armies of anywhere between 3 and 6, 7000 peasants with massive numbers of casualties. Foreign.

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[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

And it also wasn't only in battle that the peasants were slain. The vengeance wreaked by the lords that you describe in your book was awful. And I don't want to press you to give gory examples, but perhaps you can say something about the retribution and the sheer scale of the atrocities and slaughter there.

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

The kind of atrocity that happens in times of war where it's very bad is in Alsace, where it seems that the language that the mercenaries spoke was more like French, it wasn't German, and so they couldn't understand the peasants against whom they were fighting. And I think that helped to encourage them not to see their antagonists as human. And there, there are a lot of accounts of rape and just really, really terrible things going on. There are also tours of retribution, really, which happen after the war is over. And it's hard to understand, but in many cases people seem to have not fled but to have just remained until the local sort of retribution tour reached their area and they found themselves forced to line up on the market square where executions would be carried out. And this is also very Unusual, because usually executions happen outside the town. They don't pollute the town itself with an execution, but they're very careful to ensure that it is outside the city walls. But in this case, the executions are typically carried out on the marketplace. And of course that's where the peasants come to sell their wares. And they are done in front of crowds. People are forced to stand in rings, like a kind of mock version of how the peasants themselves took counsel, and then they are executed, sometimes standing. We also have accounts of people who I particularly like. The guy who says, oh, I've seen enough of this, I'm off home. And he manages to run into the crowd, so he avoids being executed. There's a kind of grisly humor in some of this. But punishments, gruesome and grisly as they are, are also quite limited because the lords know that it doesn't make sense to kill their own workforce. And it's quite striking that it's more often townsfolk who are executed, because of course it doesn't matter. The lords don't own them and they're not concerned about them. They are concerned about their own peasants because they need to continue to have a workforce.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

In the end, then why do you think the peasants failed? Does it boil down to cavalry?

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

I think the peasants failed because they were up against a society which they couldn't in the end militarily control. Once the mercenaries come back from Italy, and part of this story is that they're involved in the Italian wars and so they're not present at the time when they could at first be used to put down the revolt. That's part of why they succeeded to begin with. I think that the kind of completely new understanding of secular authority, what they would have needed to work out and do, and the alliances that they would have needed to maintain with the towns, I'm not sure that would have been possible. They do manage to create alliances with the towns in many, many cases, but they tend to be short lived. So as in Heilbronn, for example, they make an alliance with the town of Heilbronn, but once they've moved off, Heilbronn sees which way the wind is blowing and it moves away from its alliance with the peasants. The same happens in a whole series of towns which have joined with the peasants, sometimes because of force. So I don't think that coalition could have been kept going. I also think that they had a fundamental problem to do with what it means to fight a pitch battle. If you're a bunch of peasants Because I think the problem is once you reach a certain size, you have to do something, you have to take on the lords, because the expectation that people have that something is going to happen has got to be met. And if you don't do anything, they're all just going to go back home. So there's a fundamental logic to this, which means that once you get beyond a certain size, you then can't keep on easily supplying your troops. And you've got to do something, you've got to face a battle. As soon as you get drawn into a battle like that, you're likely to lose. And as it goes on, there are fewer resources that you can draw and because there are fewer convents and monasteries left. So I think that it's the logic of their situation which in the end makes it difficult for them to win. And that's to do with the fact that really it's only a guerrilla war, which might have had an ongoing chance of success, but a guerrilla war is also one where you don't take power in the end. So I think that it was doomed to fail, really, once the lords were able to organize themselves and once they were able to pay for an organized armed force. But what it does also show, I think, is how easy it was for the peasants to push a whole society and shatter it. Because it isn't just the peasants who get involved in this. It's also a whole lot of knights and a whole lot of bureaucrats, all part of these princely organizations and courts. And in these local areas, what you see is that they very often go over to the peasants. And I think what you see is not only how fragile this whole ruling structure was, just as the church and monasticism turns out to be much, much more fragile than I think we otherwise would have realized. It's also that you find many, many people willing to say things like they understand why the peasants are angry. They can see that the peasants have been exploited. And I think there's a real sense of doubt about the justification of the existing order. And I think that is probably one of the most powerful legacies of the peasants war to end.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Then can you give me, Lyndall, some sense of what you think the long term effects of the peasants war were? And if we can identify any ongoing legacy or significance of it today, I.

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

Think that in the short term what you got was a massive trauma that couldn't be spoken about. So I've been very interested in trying to see ways in which that might have been expressed. And it comes up in the fact that the blood gully at Falkenhausen is something that people still know about today. No one's forgotten that it's still in the landscape and we know where it is, and there's another one at Petersheim. And there are a whole host of marks in the landscape which are connected with the Peasants War, and that people even, like all groups now, still support and celebrate and create local monuments about. So I think it comes out in local memory, in topography. It also finds expression in the Anabaptist and Spiritualist or radical movements which start to flourish after the Peasants War and which pick up some of those ideas. And interestingly, the Anabaptists just talk about brotherhood. They talk about sisterhood too. And they're very big on greeting sisters and using the language of sisterhood as well as of brotherhood. And I think that's maybe to do with having learned from the dangers of brotherhood in the Peasants War. So I think you can see the legacy there. I think it also comes out in the failure of the Reformation to take root in rural areas, because this was not a message afterwards that peasants wanted to relate to. So I think you can see it in what happens with the Reformation later, where it doesn't seem to have really become very solidly entrenched in the countryside, but is seen as something that's imposed from above. Not surprisingly, I think we'll also have to rethink how we understand the Counter Reformation in the light of the extent of this anti monasticism. I think it comes out too in peasants continuing to take their lords to court, continuing to object to all these dues and impositions, and continuing not to regard personal serfdom as okay. I think it comes out there, and I think in the longer term it has been used in many interesting and different ways in the former East Germany and in the former West Germany. And one of the things that I find so absolutely fascinating now, as there's a German election campaign and as we see very great differences in the electoral behavior of the areas that were part of the former East Germany and the areas that were part of the former West Germany, I've asked myself a lot, how do the legacies of the PENS war play out in all of this? And I think they are very important. And I'd see this in two ways. I think that the Peasants War can offer an example of a kind of democratic tradition in Germany. And I will be very interested to see what happens over the coming months as you start getting lots of local groups celebrating their Peasants War. And this is Starting to happen. I've been to a wonderful rehearsal of a Peasants War opera and there'll be lots of events like this. There will be reenactments in Harpurun, reenactment of the Wolfeinsburg massacre, local groups reclaiming the peasants war for what they want to say about Germany and about democratic traditions. And I think we'll also see some interesting reflections on Thomas Munzer. I expected to really love reading Thomas Munzer, but I found him actually impossible to read because I found him a very demagogic writer. And I think having read Victor Klemperer on the language of Nazism, I found his rhetoric really impossible to stomach. And I had a quite allergic reaction to it. And I think it will be very interesting to see if there's a reinterpretation of Muncah. I'm being very negative about Muncah. He also has many wonderful qualities. He is a mystic. He does have an understanding of the situation of the poor and dispossessed and he's able to articulate that like nobody else. But I think it is a very interestingly fractured inheritance which will be discussed in the coming year. So I think the Peasants War is a really live and current issue. And I'm loving being in Germany at the moment to see what people make of it. And this will be a very different celebration. Whereas the 500 years of Luther were very much directed from above and there was a lot of state money, these are very different celebrations because they'll mostly come from below. And I think that will be very fascinating to see what happens.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Well, Professor Lyndall Roper on this, the 500th anniversary of the German Peasants War. Thank you for such a clear and erudite guide to it, to this trauma, to the way in which it has profoundly influenced the development of German speaking states and remains thought provoking today. Thank you for your time.

[Professor Lyndall Roper]

Thank you.

[Professor Susannah Lipscomb]

Thanks for listening to Not Just the Tudors and to my researcher Alice Smith and my producer Rob Weinberg. And do join me, Professor Susannah Lipscomb next time for another episode of Not Just the Tudors. From history hit.

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