German Culture Past and Present Part 5

Hutten, it would appear, attempted to enter into negotiations for the co-operation of the towns and of the peasants. So far as can be seen, Stra.s.sburg and one or two other Imperial cities returned favourable answers; but the precise measure of Hutten's success cannot be ascertained, owing to the fact that all the doc.u.ments relating to the matter perished in the destruction of Sickingen's Castle of Ebernburg.

It should be premised that on August 13th, previous to this declaration of war, a "Brotherly Convention" had been signed by a number of the knights, by which Sickingen was appointed their captain, and they bound themselves to submit to no jurisdiction save their own, and pledged themselves to mutual aid in war in case of hostilities against any one of their number. Through this "Treaty of Landau,"

Sickingen had it in his power to a.s.semble a considerable force at a moment's notice. Consequently, a few days after the issue of the above manifesto, on August 27, 1522, Sickingen was able to start from the Castle of Ebernburg with an army of 5,000 foot and 1,500 knights, besides artillery, in the full confidence that he was about to destroy the position of the Palatine prince-prelate and raise himself without delay to the chief power on the Rhine.

By an effective piece of audacity, that of sporting the Imperial flag and the Burgundian cross, Franz spread abroad the idea that he was acting on behalf of the Emperor, then absent in Spain; and this largely contributed to the result that his army speedily rose to 5,000 knights and 10,000 footmen. The Imperial Diet at Nurnberg now intervened, and ordered Sickingen to cease the operations he had already begun, threatening him with the ban of the empire and a fine of 2,000 marks if he did not obey. To this summons Franz sent a characteristically impudent reply, and light-heartedly continued the campaign, regardless of the warning which an astrologer had given him some time previously, that the year 1522 or 1523 would probably be fatal to him. It is evident that this campaign, begun so late in the year, was regarded by Sickingen and the other leaders as merely a preliminary canter to a larger and more widespread movement the following spring, since on this occasion the Swabian and Franconian knighthood do not appear to have been even invited to take part in it.

After an easy progress, during which several trifling places, the most important being St. Wendel, were taken, Franz with his army arrived on September 8th before the gates of Trier. He had hoped to capture the town by surprise, and was indeed not without some expectation of co-operation and help from the citizens themselves. On his arrival he shot letters within the walls summoning the inhabitants to take his part against their tyrant; but either through the unwillingness of the burghers to act with knights, or through the vigilance of the Archbishop, they were without effect. The gates remained closed; and in answer to Sickingen's summons to surrender, Richard replied that he would find him in the city if he could get inside. In the meantime Sickingen's friends had signally failed in their attempts to obtain supplies and reinforcements for him, in the main owing to the energetic action of some of the higher n.o.bles. The Archbishop of Trier showed himself as much a soldier as a Churchman; and after a week's siege, during which Sickingen made five a.s.saults on the city, his powder ran out, and he was forced to retire. He at once made his way back to Ebernburg, where he intended to pa.s.s the winter, since he saw that it was useless to continue the campaign, with his own army diminis.h.i.+ng and the hoped-for supplies not appearing, whilst the forces of his antagonists augmented daily. In his stronghold of Ebernburg he could rely on being secure from all attack until he was able to again take the field on the offensive, as he antic.i.p.ated doing in the spring.

In spite of the obvious failure of the autumnal campaign, the cause of the knighthood did not by any means look irretrievably desperate, since there was always the possibility of successful recruitments the following spring. Ulrich von Hutten was doing his utmost in Wurtemberg and Switzerland to sc.r.a.pe together men and money, though up to this time without much success, while other emissaries of Sickingen were working with the same object in Breisgau and other parts of Southern Germany. Relying on these expected reinforcements, Franz was confident of victory when he should again take the field, and in the meantime he felt himself quite secure in one or other of his strong places, which had recently undergone extensive repairs and seemed to be impregnable.

In this antic.i.p.ation he was deceived, for he had not reckoned with the new and more potent weapons of attack which were replacing the battering-ram and other mediaeval besieging appliances. Franz retired to his strong castle of the Landstuhl to await the onslaught of the princes which followed in the spring. After heavy bombardment Sickingen was mortally wounded on May 6th, and the place was immediately surrendered. The next day the princes entered the castle, where, in an underground chamber, their enemy lay dying.

He was so near his end that he could scarcely distinguish his three arch-enemies one from the other. "My dear lord," he said to the Count Palatine, his feudal superior, "I had not thought that I should end thus," taking off his cap and giving him his hand. "What has impelled thee, Franz," asked the Archbishop of Trier, "that thou hast so laid waste and harmed me and my poor people?" "Of that it were too long to speak," answered Sickingen, "but I have done nought without cause. I go now to stand before a greater Lord." Here it is worthy of remark that the princes treated Franz with all the knightliness and courtesy which were customary between social equals in the days of chivalry, addressing him at most rather as a rebellious child than as an insurgent subject. The Prince of Hesse was about to give utterance to a reproach, but he was interrupted by the Count Palatine, who told him that he must not quarrel with a dying man. The Count's chamberlain said some sympathetic words to Franz, who replied to him: "My dear chamberlain, it matters little about me. It is not I who am the c.o.c.k round which they are dancing." When the princes had withdrawn, his chaplain asked him if he would confess; but Franz replied: "I have confessed to G.o.d in my heart," whereupon the chaplain gave him absolution; and as he went to fetch the host "the last of the knights"

pa.s.sed quietly away, alone and abandoned. It is related by Spalatin that after his death some peasants and domestics placed his body in an old armour-chest, in which they had to double the head on to the knees. The chest was then let down by a rope from the rocky eminence on which stands the now ruined castle, and was buried beneath a small chapel in the village below.

The scene we have just described in the castle vault meant not merely the tragedy of a hero's death, nor merely the destruction of a faction or party, it meant the end of an epoch. With Sickingen's death one of the most salient and picturesque elements in the mediaeval life of Central Europe received its death-blow. The knighthood as a distinct factor in the polity of Europe henceforth existed no more.

Spalatin relates that on the death of Sickingen the princely party antic.i.p.ated as easy a victory over the religious revolt as they had achieved over the knighthood. "The mock Emperor is dead," so the phrase went, "and the mock Pope will soon be dead also." Hutten, already an exile in Switzerland, did not many months survive his patron and leader, Sickingen. The role which Erasmus played in this miserable tragedy was only what was to be expected from the moral cowardice which seemed ingrained in the character of the great Humanist leader. Erasmus had already begun to fight shy of the Reformation movement, from which he was about to separate himself definitely. He seized the present opportunity to quarrel with Hutten; and to Hutten's somewhat bitter attacks on him in consequence he replied with ferocity in his _Spongia Erasmi adversus aspergines Hutteni_.

Hutten had had to fly from Basel to Mulhausen and thence to Zurich, in the last stages of syphilitic disease. He was kindly received by the reformer, Zwingli of Zurich, who advised him to try the waters of Pfeffers, and gave him letters of recommendation to the abbot of that place. He returned, in no wise benefited, to Zurich, when Zwingli again befriended the sick knight, and sent him to a friend of his, the "reformed" pastor of the little island of "Ufenau," at the other end of the lake, where after a few weeks' suffering he died in abject dest.i.tution, leaving, it is said, nothing behind him but his pen. The disease from which Hutten suffered the greater part of his life, at that time a comparatively new importation and much more formidable even than nowadays, may well have contributed to an irascibility of temper and to a certain recklessness which the typical free-lance of the Reformation in its early period exhibited. Hutten was never a theologian, and the Reformation seems to have attracted him mainly from its political side as implying the a.s.sertion of the dawning feeling of German nationality as against the hated enemies of freedom of thought and the new light, the clerical satellites of the Roman see. He was a true son of his time, in his vices no less than in his virtues; and no one will deny his partiality for "wine, women, and play." There is reason, indeed, to believe that the latter at times during his later career provided his sole means of subsistence.

The hero of the Reformation, Luther, with whom Melanchthon may be a.s.sociated in this matter, could be no less pusillanimous on occasion than the hero of the New Learning, Erasmus. Luther undoubtedly saw in Sickingen's revolt a means of weakening the Catholic powers against which he had to fight, and at its inception he avowedly favoured the enterprise. In some of the reforming writings Luther is represented as the incarnation of Christian resignation and mildness, and as talking of twelve legions of angels and deprecating any appeal to force as unbefitting the character of an evangelical apostle. That such, however, was not his habitual att.i.tude is evident to all who are in the least degree acquainted with his real conduct and utterances. On one occasion he wrote: "If they (the priests) continue their mad ravings it seems to me that there would be no better method and medicine to stay them than that kings and princes did so with force, armed themselves and attacked these pernicious people who do poison all the world, and once for all did make an end of their doings with weapons, not with words. For even as we punish thieves with the sword, murderers with the rope, and heretics with fire, wherefore do we not lay hands on these pernicious teachers of d.a.m.nation, on popes, on cardinals, bishops, and the swarm of the Roman Sodom--yea, with every weapon which lieth within our reach, _and wherefore do we not wash our hands in their blood?_"[19]

It is, however, in a manifesto published in July 1522, just before Sickingen's attack on the Archbishop of Trier, for which enterprise it was doubtless intended as a justification, that Luther expresses himself in unmeasured terms against the "biggest wolves," the bishops, and calls upon "all dear children of G.o.d and all true Christians" to drive them out by force from the "sheep-stalls." In this pamphlet, ent.i.tled _Against the falsely called spiritual order of the Pope and the Bishops_, he says: "It were better that every bishop were murdered, every foundation or cloister rooted out, than that one soul should be destroyed, let alone that all souls should be lost for the sake of their worthless trumpery and idolatry. Of what use are they who thus live in l.u.s.t, nourished by the sweat and labour of others, and are a stumbling-block to the word of G.o.d? They fear bodily uproar and despise spiritual destruction. Are they wise and honest people? If they accepted G.o.d's word and sought the life of the soul, G.o.d would be with them, for He is a G.o.d of peace, and they need fear no uprising; but if they will not hear G.o.d's word, but rage and rave with bannings, burnings, killings, and every evil, what do they better deserve than a strong uprising which shall sweep them from the earth? _And we would smile did it happen._[20] As the heavenly wisdom saith: 'Ye have hated my chastis.e.m.e.nt and despised my doctrine; behold, I will also laugh at ye in your distress, and will mock ye when misfortune shall fall upon your heads.'" In the same doc.u.ment he denounces the bishops as an accursed race, as "thieves, robbers, and usurers." Swine, horses, stones, and wood were not so dest.i.tute of understanding as the German people under the sway of them and their Pope. The religious houses are similarly described as "brothels, low taverns, and murder dens," He winds up this doc.u.ment, which he calls his "bull," by proclaiming that "all who contribute body, goods, and honour that the rule of the bishops may be destroyed are G.o.d's dear children and true Christians, obeying G.o.d's command and fighting against the devil's order"; and, on the other hand, that "all who give the bishops a willing obedience are the devil's own servants, and fight against G.o.d's order and law."[21]

No sooner, however, did things begin to look bad with Sickingen than Luther promptly sought to disengage himself from all complicity or even sympathy with him and his losing cause. So early as December 19, 1522, he writes to his friend Wenzel Link: "Franz von Sickingen has begun war against the Palatine. It will be a very bad business."

(_Franciscus Sickingen Palatino bellum indixit, res pessima futura est._) His colleague, Melanchthon, a few days later, hastened to deprecate the insinuation that Luther had had any part or lot in initiating the revolt. "Franz von Sickingen," he wrote, "by his great ill-will injures the cause of Luther; and notwithstanding that he be entirely dissevered from him, nevertheless whenever he undertaketh war he wisheth to seem to act for the public benefit, and not for his own.

He doth even now pursue a most infamous course of plunder on the Rhine." In another letter he says: "I know how this tumult grieveth him (Luther),"[22] and this respecting the man who had shortly before written of the princes that their tyranny and haughtiness were no longer to be borne, alleging that G.o.d would not longer endure it, and that the common man even was becoming intelligent enough to deal with them by force if they did not mend their manners. A more telling example of the "don't-put-him-in-the-horse-pond" att.i.tude could scarcely be desired. That it was characteristic of the "great reformer" will be seen later on when we find him pursuing a similar policy anent the revolt of the peasants.

After the fall of the Landstuhl all Sickingen's castles and most of those of his immediate allies and friends were of course taken, and the greater part of them destroyed. The knighthood was now to all intents and purposes politically helpless and economically at the door of bankruptcy, owing to the suddenly changed conditions of which we have spoken in the Introduction and elsewhere as supervening since the beginning of the century: the unparalleled rise in prices, concurrently with the growing extravagance, the decline of agriculture in many places, and the increasing burdens put upon the knights by their feudal superiors, and last, but not least, the increasing obstacles in the way of the successful pursuit of the profession of highway robbery. The majority of them, therefore, clung with relentless severity to the feudal dues of the peasants, which now const.i.tuted their main, and in many cases their only, source of revenue; and hence, abandoning the hope of independence, they threw in their lot with the authorities, the princes, lay and ecclesiastic, in the common object of both, that of reducing the insurgent peasants to complete subjection.

FOOTNOTES:

[19] Italics the present author's.

[20] Italics the present author's.

[21] _Sammtliche Werke_ vol. xxviii. pp. 142-201.

[22] _Corpus Reformatorum_, vol. i. pp. 598-9.

CHAPTER VII

GENERAL SIGNS OF RELIGIOUS AND SOCIAL REVOLT

Peasant revolts of a sporadic character are to be met with throughout the Middle Ages even in their halcyon days. Some of these, like the Jacquerie in France and the revolt a.s.sociated with the name of Wat Tyler in England, were of a serious and more or less extended character. But most of them were purely local and of no significance, apart from temporary and pa.s.sing circ.u.mstances. By the last quarter of the fifteenth century, however, peasant risings had become increasingly numerous and their avowed aims much more definite and far-reaching than, as a rule, were those of an earlier date. In saying this we are referring to those revolts which were directly initiated by the peasantry, the serfs, and the villeins of the time, and which had as their main object the direct amelioration of the peasant's lot.

Movements of a primarily religious character were, of course, of a somewhat different nature, but the tendency was increasingly, as we approach the period of the Reformation, for the two currents to merge one in the other. The echoes of the Hussite movement in Bavaria at the beginning of the century spread far and wide throughout Central Europe, and had by no means spent their force as the century drew towards its close.

From this time forward recurrent indications of social revolt with a strong religious colouring, or a religious revolt with a strong social colouring, became chronic in the Germanic lands and those adjacent thereto. As an example may be taken the movement of Hans Boheim, of Niklashausen, in the diocese of Wurzburg, in Franconia, in 1476, and which is regarded by some historians as the first of the movements leading directly up to those of the Lutheran Reformation. Hans claimed a divine mission for preaching the gospel to the common man. Hans preached asceticism and claimed Niklashausen as a place of pilgrimage for a new wors.h.i.+p of the Virgin. There was little in this to alarm the authorities till Hans announced that the Queen of Heaven had revealed to him that there was to be no lay or spiritual authority, but that all men should be brothers, earning their bread by the sweat of their brows, paying no more imposts or dues, holding land in common, and sharing alike in all things. The movement went on for some months, spreading rapidly in the neighbouring territories. At last Hans was seized by armed men while asleep and hurried to Wurzburg. The affair caused immense commotion, and by the Sunday following, it is stated, 34,000 armed peasants a.s.sembled at Niklashausen. Led by a decayed knight and his son, 16,000 of them marched to Wurzburg, demanding their prophet at the gate of the bishop's castle. By promises and cajolery, they were induced to disperse by the prince-bishop, who, as soon as he saw they were returning home in straggling parties, treacherously sent a body of his knights after them, killing some and taking others prisoners. Two of the ringleaders were beheaded outside the castle, and at the same time the prophet Hans Boheim was burnt to ashes. Thus ended a typical religio-social peasant revolt of the half-century preceding the great Reformation movement.

In 1491 the oppressed and plundered villeins of Kempten revolted, but the movement was quelled by the Emperor himself after a compromise. A great rising took place in Elsa.s.s (Alsace) in 1493 among the feudatories of the Bishop of Stra.s.sburg, with the usual object of freedom for the "common man," abolition of feudal exactions, Church reformation, etc. This movement is interesting, as having first received the name of the _Bundschuh_. It was decided that as the knight was distinguished by his spurs, so the peasant should have as his device the common shoe of his cla.s.s, laced from the ankle through to the knee by leathern thongs, and the banner whereon this emblem was depicted was accordingly made. The movement was, however, betrayed and mercilessly crushed by the neighbouring knighthood. A few years later a similar movement, also having the _Bundschuh_ for its device, took place in the regions of the Upper and Middle Rhine. This movement created a panic among all the privileged cla.s.ses, from the Emperor down to the knight. The situation was discussed in no less than three separate a.s.semblies of the States. It was, however, eventually suppressed for the time being. A few years later, in 1512, it again burst forth under the leaders.h.i.+p of an active adherent of the former movement, one Joss Fritz, in Baden, at the village of Lehen, near the town of Freiburg. The organization in this case, besides being widespread, was exceedingly good, and the movement was nearly successful when at the last moment it was betrayed. Even in Switzerland there were peasant risings in the early years of the sixteenth century. About the same time the duchy of Wurtemberg was convulsed by a movement which took the name of the "Poor Conrad." Its object was the freeing of the "common man" from feudal services and dues and the abolition of seignorial rights over the land, etc. But here again the movement was suppressed by Duke Ulrich and his knights.

Another rising took place in Baden in 1517. Three years previously, in 1514, occurred the great Hungarian peasant rebellion under George Daze. Under the able leaders.h.i.+p of the latter the peasants had some not inconsiderable initial successes, but this movement also, after some weeks, was cruelly suppressed. About the same time, too, occurred various insurrectionary peasant movements in the Styrian and Carinthian alpine districts. Similar movements to those referred to were also going on during those early years of the fifteenth century in other parts of Europe, but these, of course, do not concern us.

The deep-reaching importance and effective spread of such movements was infinitely greater in the Middle Ages than in modern times. The same phenomenon presents itself to-day in backward and semi-barbaric communities. At first sight one is inclined to think that there has been no period in the world's history when it was so easy to stir up a population as the present, with our newspapers, our telegraphs, our aeroplane, our postal arrangements, and our railways. But this is just one of those superficial notions that are not confirmed by history. We are similarly apt to think that there was no age in which travel was so widespread and formed so great a part of the education of mankind as at present. There could be no greater mistake. The true age of travelling was the close of the Middle Ages, or what is known as the Renaissance period. The man of learning, then just differentiated from the ecclesiastic, spent the greater part of his life in earning his intellectual wares from Court to Court and from University to University, just as the merchant personally carried his goods from city to city in an age in which commercial correspondence, bill-brokers, and the varied forms of modern business were but in embryo. It was then that travel really meant education, the acquirement of thorough and intimate knowledge of diverse manners and customs. Travel was then not a pastime, but a serious element in life.

In the same way the spread of a political or social movement was at least as rapid then as now, and far more penetrating. The methods were, of course, vastly different from the present; but the human material to be dealt with was far easier to mould, and kept its shape much more readily when moulded, than is the case nowadays. The appearance of a religious or political teacher in a village or small town of the Middle Ages was an event which keenly excited the interest of the inhabitants. It struck across the path of their daily life, leaving behind it a track hardly conceivable to-day. For one of the salient symptoms of the change which has taken place since that time is the disappearance of local centres of activity and the transference of the intensity of life to a few large towns. In the Middle Ages every town, small no less than large, was a more or less self-sufficing organism, intellectually and industrially, and was not essentially dependent on the outside world for its social sustenance.

This was especially the case in Central Europe, where communication was much more imperfect and dangerous than in Italy, France, or England. In a society without newspapers, without easy communication with the rest of the world, where the vast majority could neither read nor write, where books were rare and costly, and accessible only to the privileged few, a new idea bursting upon one of these communities was eagerly welcomed, discussed in the council chamber of the town, in the hall of the castle, in the refectory of the monastery, at the social board of the burgess, in the workroom, and, did it but touch his interests, in the hut of the peasant. It was canva.s.sed, too, at church festivals (_Kirchweihe_), the only regular occasion on which the inhabitants of various localities came together. In the absence of all other distraction, men thought it out in all the bearings which their limited intellectual horizon permitted. If calculated in any way to appeal to them it soon struck root, and became a part of their very nature, a matter for which, if occasion were, they were prepared to sacrifice goods, liberty, and even life itself. In the present day a new idea is comparatively slow in taking root. Amid the myriad distractions of modern life, perpetually chasing one another, there is no time for any one thought, however wide-reaching in its bearings, to take a firm hold. In order that it should do so in the _modern mind_, it must be again and again borne in upon this not always too receptive intellectual substance. People require to read of it day after day in their newspapers, or to hear it preached from countless platforms, before any serious effect is created. In the simple life of former ages it was not so.

The mode of transmitting intelligence, especially such as was connected with the stirring up of political and religious movements, was in those days of a nature of which we have now little conception.

The sort of thing in vogue then may be compared to the methods adopted in India to prepare the Mutiny of 1857, when the mysterious cake was pa.s.sed from village to village, signifying that the moment had come for the outbreak. The sense of _esprit de corps_ and of that kind of honour most intimately a.s.sociated with it, it must also be remembered, was infinitely keener in ruder states of society than under a high civilization. The growth of civilization, as implying the disruption of the groups in which the individual is merged under more primitive conditions, and his isolation as an autonomous unit having vague and very elastic moral duties to his "country" or to mankind at large, but none towards any definite and proximate social whole, necessarily destroys that communal spirit which prevails in the former case. This is one of the striking truths which the history of these peasant risings ill.u.s.trates in various ways and brings vividly home to us.

CHAPTER VIII

THE GREAT RISING OF THE PEASANTS AND THE ANABAPTIST MOVEMENT[23]

The year following the collapse of Franz Sickingen's rebellion saw the first mutterings of the great movement known as the Peasants' War, the most extensive and important of all the popular insurrections of the Middle Ages, which, as we have seen in a previous chapter, had been led up to during the previous half-century by numerous sporadic movements throughout Central Europe having like aims.

The first actual outbreak of the Peasants' War took place in August 1524, in the Black Forest, in the village of Stuhlingen, from an apparently trivial cause. It spread rapidly throughout the surrounding districts, having found a leader in a former soldier of fortune, Hans Muller by name. The so-called Evangelical Brotherhood sprang into existence. On the new movement becoming threatening it was opposed by the Swabian League, a body in the interests of the Germanic Federation, its princes, and cities, whose function it was to preserve public tranquillity and enforce the Imperial decrees. The peasant army was armed with the rudest weapons, including pitchforks, scythes, and axes; but nothing decisive of a military character took place this year. Meanwhile the work of agitation was carried on far and wide throughout the South German territories. Preachers of discontent among the peasantry and the former towns were everywhere agitating and organizing with a view to a general rising in the ensuing spring.

Negotiations were carried on throughout the winter with n.o.bles and the authorities without important results. A diversion in favour of the peasants was caused by Duke Ulrich of Wurtemberg favouring the peasants' cause, which he hoped to use as a shoeing-horn to his own plans for recovering his ancestral domains, from which he had been driven on the grounds of a family quarrel under the ban of the empire in 1519. He now established himself in his stronghold of Hohentwiel, in Wurtemberg, on the Swiss frontier. By February or the beginning of March peasant bands were organizing throughout Southern Germany.

Early in March a so-called Peasants' Parliament was held at Memmingen, a small Swabian town, at which the princ.i.p.al charter of the movement, the so-called "Twelve Articles," was adopted. This important doc.u.ment has a strong religious colouring, the political and economic demands of the peasants being led up to and justified by Biblical quotations.

They all turn on the customary grievances of the time. The "Twelve Articles" remain throughout the chief Bill of Rights of the South German peasantry, though there were other versions of the latter current in certain districts. What was said before concerning the local sporadic movements which had been going en for a generation previously applies equally to the great uprising of 1525. The rapidity with which the ideas represented by the movement, and in consequence the movement itself, spread, is marvellous. By the middle of April it was computed that no less than 300,000 peasants, besides necessitous townsfolk, were armed and in open rebellion. On the side of the n.o.bles no adequate force was ready to meet the emergency. In every direction were to be seen flaming castles and monasteries. On all sides were bodies of armed countryfolk, organized in military fas.h.i.+on, dictating their will to the countryside and the small towns, whilst disaffection was beginning to show itself in a threatening manner among the popular elements of not a few important cities. A slight success gained by the Swabian League at the Upper Swabian village of Leipheim in the second week of April did not improve matters. In Easter week, 1525, it looked indeed as if the "Twelve Articles" at least would become realized, if not the Christian Commonwealth dreamed of by the religious sectaries established throughout the length and breadth of Germany. Princes, lords, and ecclesiastical dignitaries were being compelled far and wide to save their lives, after their property was probably already confiscated, by swearing allegiance to the Christian League or Brotherhood of the peasants and by countersigning the "Twelve Articles" and other demands of their refractory villeins and serfs. So threatening was the situation that the Archduke Ferdinand began himself to yield, in so far as to enter into negotiations with the insurgents. In many cases the leaders and chief men of the bands were got up in brilliant costume. We read of purple mantles and scarlet birettas with ostrich plumes as the costume of the leaders, of a suite of men in scarlet dress, of a vanguard of ten heralds, gorgeously attired. As Lamprecht justly observes (_Deutsche Geschichte_, vol. v. p. 343): "The peasant revolts were, in general, less in the nature of campaigns, or even of an uninterrupted series of minor military operations, than of a slow process of mobilization, interrupted and accompanied by continual negotiations with lords and princes--a mobilization which was rendered possible by the standing right of a.s.sembly and of carrying arms possessed by the peasants." The smaller towns everywhere opened their gates without resistance to the peasants, between whom and the poorer inhabitants an understanding commonly existed. The bands waxed fat with plunder of castles and religious houses, and did full justice to the contents of the rich monastic wine-cellars.

Early in April occurred one of the most notable incidents. It was at the little town of Weinsberg, near the free town of Heilbronn, in Wurtemberg. The town, which was occupied by a body of knights and men-at-arms, was attacked on Easter Sunday by the peasant bands, foremost among them being the "black troop" of that knightly champion of the peasant cause, Florian Geyer. It was followed by a peasant contingent, led by one Jacklein Rohrbach, whose consuming pa.s.sion was hatred of the ruling cla.s.ses. The knights within the town were under the leaders.h.i.+p of Count von Helfenstein. The entry of Rohrbach's company into Weinsberg was the signal for a ma.s.sacre of the knightly host. Some were taken prisoners for the moment, including Helfenstein himself, but these were ma.s.sacred next morning in the meadow outside the town by "Jacklein," as he was called. The events at Weinsberg produced in the first instance a horror and consternation which was speedily followed by a l.u.s.t for vengeance on the part of the privileged orders.

In Franconia and Middle Germany the peasant movement went on apace. In Franconia one of its chief seats was the considerable town of Rothenburg, on the Tauber. The episcopal city of Wurzburg was also entered and occupied by the peasant bands in coalition with the discontented elements of the town. The sacking of churches and throwing open of religious houses characterized proceedings here as elsewhere. The locking up of a large peasant host in Wurzburg was undoubtedly a source of great weakness to the movement. In the east, in the Tyrol and Salzburg, there were similar risings to those farther west. In the latter case the prince-bishop was the obnoxious oppressor.

The most interesting of the local movements was, however, in many respects that of Thomas Munzer in the town of Mulhausen, in Thuringia.

Thomas Munzer is, perhaps, the best known of all the names in the peasants' revolt. In addition to the ultra-Protestantism of his theological views, Munzer had as his object the establishment of a communistic Christian Commonwealth. He started a practical exemplification of this among his own followers in the town itself.

Up to the beginning of May the insurrection had carried everything before it. Truchsess and his men of the Swabian League had proved themselves unable to cope with it. Matters now changed. Knights, men-at-arms, and free-lances were returning from the Italian campaign of Charles V after the battle of Pavia. Everywhere the revolt met with disaster. The Mulhausen insurgents were destroyed at Frankenhausen by forces of the Count of Hesse, of the Duke of Brunswick, and of the Duke of Saxony. This was on May 15th. Three days before the defeat at Frankenhausen, on May 12th, a decisive defeat was inflicted on the peasants by the forces of the Swabian League, under Truchsess, at Boblingen, in Wurtemberg. Savage ferocity signalized the treatment of the defeated peasants by the soldiery of the n.o.bles. Jacklein Rohrbach was roasted alive. Truchsess with his soldiery then hurried north and inflicted a heavy defeat on the Franconian peasant contingents at Konigshaven, on the Tauber. These three defeats, following one another in little more than a fortnight, broke the back of the whole movement in Germany proper. In Elsa.s.s and Lorraine the insurrection was crushed by the hired troops and the Duke of Lorraine; eastward, on the little river Luibas. In the Austrian territories, under the able leaders.h.i.+p of Michael Gaismayr, one of the lesser n.o.bility, it continued for some months longer, and the fear of Gaismayr, who, it should be said, was the only man of really constructive genius the movement had produced, maintained itself with the privileged cla.s.ses till his murder in the autumn of 1528, at the instance of the Bishop of Brixen.

The great peasant insurrection in Germany failed through want of a well-thought-out plan and tactics, and, above all, through a want of cohesion among the various peasant forces operating in different sections of the country, between which no regular communications were kept up. The att.i.tude of Martin Luther towards the peasants and their cause was base in the extreme. His action was mainly embodied in two doc.u.ments, of which the first was issued about the middle of April, and the second a month later. The difference in tone between them is sufficiently striking. In the first, which bore the t.i.tle, "An Exhortation to Peace on the Twelve Articles of the Peasantry in Swabia," Luther sits on the fence, admonis.h.i.+ng both parties of what he deemed their shortcomings. He was naturally pleased with those articles that demanded the free preaching of the Gospel and abused the Catholic clergy, and was not indisposed to a.s.sent to many of the economic demands. In fact, the doc.u.ment strikes one as distinctly more favourable to the insurgents than to their opponents.

"We have," he wrote, "no one to thank for this mischief and sedition, save ye princes and lords, in especial ye blind bishops and mad priests and monks, who up to this day remain obstinate and do not cease to rage and rave against the holy Gospel, albeit ye know that it is righteous, and that ye may not gainsay it. Moreover, in your worldly regiment, ye do naught otherwise than flay and extort tribute, that ye may satisfy your pomp and vanity, till the poor, common man cannot, and may not, bear with it longer. The sword is on your neck.

Ye think ye sit so strongly in your seats, that none may cast you from them. Such presumption and obstinate pride will twist your necks, as ye will see." And again: "G.o.d hath made it thus that they cannot, and will not, longer bear with your raging. If ye do it not of your free will, so shall ye be made to do it by way of violence and undoing."

Once more: "It is not peasants, my dear lords, who have set themselves up against you. G.o.d Himself it is who setteth Himself against you to chastise your evil-doing."

He counsels the princes and lords to make peace with their peasants, observing with reference to the "Twelve Articles" that some of them are so just and righteous that before G.o.d and the world their worthiness is manifested, making good the words of the psalm that they heap contempt upon the heads of the princes. Whilst he warns the peasants against sedition and rebellion, and criticizes some of the Articles as going beyond the justification of Holy Writ, and whilst he makes side-hits at "the prophets of murder and the spirits of confusion which had found their way among them," the general impression given by the pamphlet is, as already said, one of unmistakable friendliness to the peasants and hostility to the lords.

The manifesto may be summed up in the following terms: Both sides are, strictly speaking, in the wrong, but the princes and lords have provoked the "common man" by their unjust exactions and oppressions; the peasants, on their side, have gone too far in many of their demands, notably in the refusal to pay t.i.thes, and most of all in the notion of abolis.h.i.+ng villeinage, which Luther declares to be "straightway contrary to the Gospel and thievish." The great sin of the princes remains, however, that of having thrown stumbling-blocks in the way of the Gospel--_bien entendu_ the Gospel according to Luther--and the main virtue of the peasants was their claim to have this Gospel preached. It can scarcely be doubted that the ambiguous tone of Luther's rescript was interpreted by the rebellious peasants to their advantage and served to stimulate, rather than to check, the insurrection.