In 1525, the German artist Albrecht Dürer designed a monument with farm animals lying at the base of a pillar made up of hoes, pitchforks, a keg of butter, a milk jug and other everyday items of rural life. Atop the pillar sits a peasant in a Christ-like position with a sword plunged in his back. The monument was never built, but the design can be interpreted as Dürer’s caustic verdict on the authorities’ savage response to the Peasants’ War that convulsed large parts of Germany in 1524-25.
This mass uprising holds an unusual place in European history. It was the biggest of its kind in western Europe before the 1789 French revolution, yet it remains unfamiliar to most people outside Germany. It was more than a formless outburst of rural rage, but no single leader or organised group controlled it. The ideas to which it gave birth belong to an age before the 17th-century rebellions in the British Isles and Catalonia, with their more modern-sounding theories of political liberty and constitutional government.
After 1945, the efforts of modern historians to make sense of the Peasants’ War were complicated by ideological battles between West German liberals and East German communists. For easterners, it was a sort of “early bourgeois revolution” — a rigid Marxist line that vastly overstated the relevance of class-based analysis to 16th-century German society. For their part, westerners read too much of the present into the past by emphasising the supposed “human rights” aspects of the peasants’ cause.
In Summer of Fire and Blood, Lyndal Roper has written a balanced, comprehensive survey of the uprising, gripping in its narrative and perceptive in its assessments, making it easily the most accessible study in English for a general readership. The Regius professor of history at Oxford university, Roper is a specialist on 16th-century Germany, with studies of Martin Luther and the witch craze of that era under her belt.
Correctly, she places religion at the heart of her story. The Peasants’ War was “the giant trauma” at the centre of the Reformation, which had started less than a decade earlier, she writes. “And the war, in turn, cannot be understood if it has been severed from the heady atmosphere of religious excitement in which it took place.”
The war was extraordinarily destructive of lives and property. Fired up by the Reformation’s ideas about divinely ordained social justice, the peasants — at first in south-western Germany, then further afield — took their revenge on oppressive landowners and reduced hundreds of monasteries and castles to ashes and rubble. As the forces of law and order regained the upper hand, they annihilated the peasants’ ragtag armies, slaughtering perhaps 80,000-100,000 people in a matter of weeks, Roper estimates.
There was a certain strain of antisemitism to the rebellion. For some radicals, “preaching the gospel was inseparable from attacking the injustice of charging interest and fleecing the poor” — something for which monks and Jews were blamed. However, Roper points out that the attacks on usury and property did not degenerate into antisemitic pogroms.
The uprising also had a millenarian dimension — the belief, held by mystical rebels such as Thomas Müntzer, that the end of the world was imminent. Roper tends to play down this important aspect of the Peasants’ War in favour of more detailed discussion of the main document of social grievances that emerged from the rebellion — the so-called Twelve Articles. Among other complaints, this denounced lords’ ownership of peasants, insisted on a community’s right to choose its own pastor, demanded fair access to forests and called for the abolition of death taxes and tithes on animals.
Such social radicalism went way too far for Luther, who wrote what Roper calls an “infamous” anti-rebel tract, Against the Robbing, Murdering Hordes of Peasants. Luther took the view that there were slaves in the Old Testament, so to abolish serfdom would be to deprive lords of what was rightfully theirs. Luther grasped that the survival of his less extreme version of the Reformation required that the authorities should not associate his new religious ideas with calls to upend the social order.
What were the lasting consequences of the Peasants’ War? The most obvious was the destruction and closure of numerous monasteries and convents, which “accomplished one of the greatest transfers of land and property ever seen in the German region”, Roper says. Crucially, however, whereas the English Reformation put monastic wealth in the hands of the nobility and gentry, the German beneficiaries were secular rulers.
Roper contends that the Peasants’ War repays study because it indicates the more radical road of social change that the Reformation could have taken. However, her meticulous reconstruction of the rebellion makes clear that such a turn of events was never likely. Ultimately, the old social order was reinforced. The peasants were ruthlessly put back in their place and the winners were the German states and their bureaucracies.
Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War by Lyndal Roper Basic Books, £30/$35, 544 pages
Tony Barber is the FT’s European comment editor