An incitement to revolution

A review of The Time of the Harvest Has Come: Revolution, Reformation and the German Peasants’ War by Martin Empson (Bookmarks, 2025), £12

Five hundred years ago, tens of thousands of peasants took to the roads and marched across great swathes of south and central Germany. They formed armies both large and small, and laid waste to monasteries, abbeys and castles. They found support amongst the lower classes of the towns, and they struck existential fear into the ruling nobility of all the German lands. For several months on end, they threatened to overthrow feudalism and introduce an egalitarian society. This was the so-called Peasants’ War of 1525.

Despite this being one of the greatest European uprisings of common people against their rulers prior to the events of the French Revolution, it is one which is barely known outside Germany itself. Very few histories have brought it to the attention of the English-speaking world. Two notable exceptions from more than a century ago—are the 1850 book written by Friedrich Engels, The Peasant War in Germany (International Publishers; 2000) and The Peasants’ War (Russell & Russell; 1968) by sometime-socialist Ernest Belfort Bax in 1903. However, until now, the German peasants’ rebellion, extraordinary in its scope and ambition, rarely merits more than a footnote in most English-language histories; it is the religious Reformation, sparked off by Martin Luther, which grabs all the headlines. Yet, we must say this: the Reformation in Germany cannot ever be disentangled from the Peasants’ War in Germany.

Now we do have an excellent book that gives us a clear overview of the causes, the course, the defeat and the consequences of the uprising. Martin Empson begins by questioning whether the Peasants’ War was really ever a war, even though there were pitched battles (almost all ending in the rebels’ defeat). “To see the rising as simply a war,” he argues, “is to miss the way that social, religious, economic and political issues came together and contributed to the wider revolution”.1

In Germany, the beginning of the 16th century saw significant developments in the way in which manufacturing processes were organised. The upper echelons of the nobility were in the process of consolidating their lands and their wealth, assisted by bankers such as the Fuggers, who had a financial finger in every pie: their activities included lending money to the Papal enterprise in Rome and providing credit to the regional princes of Germany to enable them to put down the peasant rebellion. The mining and smelting industries, particularly in Saxony, were beginning to attract the investments of small-scale capitalists. “Society,” Empson explains, “was in transition. Capitalist processes and interests were developing within the old feudal economy, forcing change and transforming relations”.2 These developments began to drive major changes and deepen divisions in society. In some areas, feudal duties, such as forced labour, were being replaced by heavier taxation, because money was more convenient for the nobility; in other places, feudal burdens were being intensified, in order to extract the last possible beads of blood and sweat from the peasantry. Both of these approaches led to the economic load on ordinary men and women becoming intolerable. At the forefront of the exploitation was the Church itself, the owner of huge tracts of land and of the people tied to that land.

In among all this, not separately, but dialectically interwoven, social attitudes and ways of thinking were also changing. In part, fuelled by the invention of the printing press, intellectuals were beginning to share their questions about the past and present. In the religious sphere, age-old anti-clericalism began to take a firmer hold amongst the lower classes. From 1500 onwards, peasant organisations, such as the Bundschuh (Peasant’s Shoe) and the Arme Conrad (Poor Conrad), sprang up to channel the rage and resentment of the oppressed rural population, in a series of localised revolts directed most frequently against church institutions. Then, in 1517, Martin Luther made a very public declaration against the Papal Church. Luther demanded that a national German church be liberated from the insatiable financial clutch of Rome and, in one famous pamphlet, called for the Freedom of the Christian (1525). That one word “freedom” became a catchword for the discontented lower classes of Germany; it was the religious justification that permitted the peasantry to make their social and economic demands in 1525, sure in the knowledge that the Christian god would be on their side. It was a word that Luther himself, as he betrayed those same classes in 1525, came to regret using.

At the peak of the peasant uprising, one document above all others reflects this intertwining of religious certainty and social upheaval. This document, printed and distributed in thousands of copies across Germany, is known as The Twelve Articles (1525). As Empson writes:

The Twelve Articles remain inspiring and fascinating. They are an insight into the mind-set of the communities rising up against their rulers. Had they been implemented, it would have been transformative for Germany’s agrarian society, which is why they were opposed by the ruling class. The Peasants’ War, then, became a battle to implement these, and related, demands.3

These articles, reproduced in Empson’s book, demanded: the right of communities to choose their own pastors; the abolition of tithes, feudal services and serfdom; free access to water, woodland and common pasture; and the return of communal land taken into private ownership. Significantly, in the original printed editions, each demand was hedged around with quotations from the Bible, bolstering them with a divine authority. The very first article concerns the appointment of parish priests, while the final one states:

If one or more of the articles here set forth should not be in agreement with the word of God, as we think they are, such article we will willingly recede from when it is proved really to be against the word of God by a clear explanation of the Scripture.4

This was no early Communist Manifesto, no proto-proletarian political platform, but it contained enough demands to pose a huge threat to the feudal order, and with it, to the nascent economic relations introduced by early capitalism.

Empson’s review of the background, the causes and the inspirations to the uprising is clear and succinct. He is equally good on the chronology of how it all proceeded. This is no mean feat, given the many dozens of armed bands and—ranging from a few dozen up to 40,000 men—that marched around the countryside, seeking to implement their demands. Empson stresses that this was not simply a rural uprising: time and again, peasant bands went into the towns and persuaded the urban lower classes to join them. The large and important town of Stuttgart, for example, was captured by a peasant army working closely with Stuttgart’s own townspeople. Similar joint actions took place across Germany; frequently, townspeople took the opportunity presented by surrounding rural disturbance to push through their own agendas for reform, including radical and not-so-radical demands.

In Franconia, in central Germany, one contemporary chronicler, pen trembling with horror, described the course of events:

The peasants formed mobs and rallied from all the surrounding places, swarmed to the band like bees to the hive, and accepted the Articles at once. Under the pretence of defending and supporting the Word of God, they wanted to overturn all divine, human, and traditionally established laws, governments, ordinances, peaceful order, and unity.5

What is not for us to admire here?

These peasant armies had their own revolutionary discipline and their own democracy. This was vital for standing up to the mercenary armies of the regional lords, which, slowly but surely, put a bloody end to the uprising. The peasants were led by a number of brave individuals, almost exclusively men (although there were women in the armies, the overwhelming participants were male; the women largely stayed at home, to look after the smallholdings, the animals and the children). Here we had leaders such as Joss Fritz—who led several rebellions in the second decade of the 16th century—and Hans Müller of Bulgenbach, who successfully led an army of 12,000 men during the peak months of 1525. Perhaps the most famous leader was the radical preacher Thomas Müntzer. Indeed, Empson devotes a full chapter to this rather enigmatic man who broke with Luther in 1522, after he determined that Luther’s compromises with the Saxon state and its lords were a betrayal of the spiritual and social reforms that the early Reformation movement inspired. It is a quotation from Müntzer that stands at the start of this book. His words still resonate across the centuries:

What is the evil brew from which all usury, theft and robbery springs but the assumption of our lords and princes that all creatures are their property? The fish in the water, the birds in the air, the plants on the face of the earth—it all has to belong to them! To add insult to injury, they have God’s commandment proclaimed to the poor: God has commanded that you should not steal. But it avails them nothing. For while they do violence to everyone, flay and fleece the poor farm worker, tradesman and everything that breathes, yet should any of the latter commit the pettiest crime, he must hang… It is the lords themselves who make the poor man their enemy. If they refuse to do away with the causes of insurrection how can trouble be avoided in the long run? If saying that makes me an inciter to insurrection, so be it!6

You might be tempted to think that little has changed in 500 years.

Müntzer’s trajectory towards a resolutely revolutionary position was relatively short in duration, yet powerful in effect. In May 1525, on a hill above the town of Frankenhausen in central Germany, he provided the religious—and thus political—leadership to a 7,000-strong army of poorly-armed peasants, miners and townspeople. They faced up to a well-equipped professional army mustered by the princes of Saxony and Hesse. These princes included both Catholics and Lutherans, quite happy to set aside fundamental religious differences when it came to putting down a lower-class uprising. The rebels were defeated on that hill at Frankenhausen, and around 6,000 of them were massacred. By contrast, it is estimated that a mere six soldiers of the princes’ army died.

The outcome of the “war” was disastrous for the peasantry of Germany— and indeed for the Reformation. Luther himself showed his true colours at the height of the war, by calling on the nobility to “stab, smite, slay” the peasants: “If you die in doing it, good for you! A more blessed death can never be yours”.7 However, the princes needed little encouragement to smite and slay, and it is estimated that up to 100,000 peasants died across Germany over the course of the spring and summer of 1525. After each bloody defeat, ringleaders and participants in the uprising were hunted down and executed; and crippling fines were imposed on rural communities and on towns, as the nobility sought recompense for real or perceived damages to their property. Empson explains:

These punishments would have left the poorest in crisis. Some among the nobility were cautious, however, but not because they were concerned about the lower orders and their well-being, but, instead, as the Margrave Georg wrote to his brother Casimir, ‘if all the peasants are killed, where shall we get other peasants to make provision for us?’8

The cost would not only be measured in human terms and in money. Since 1521, the Reformation had been directed “from above”, after Luther had won the support of the Saxon princes. Now, as a result of these terrible defeats in several major battles across south and central Germany, and because of Luther’s callous disregard for the peasants’ cause, the religious Reformation effectively ceased in the countryside. It was only carried forward in the towns, and even there with far less enthusiasm than before.

Yet, every revolution and every uprising leaves a lasting trace for others to follow. Out of the ruins of the peasants’ attempt to gain their freedom, there arose scattered green shoots of positivity. In 1525-6, over the Alps in the Tyrol, for instance, another peasant uprising took place, inspired by, but entirely independent of the German one. Michael Gaismair, who led the uprising, is something of a neglected figure in history; Engels only devotes two pages to him. As someone who at one point stated that “you should root out and expunge all godless men who persecute the Word of God, burden the common man, and hinder the common good”, Gaismair certainly deserves greater recognition, which Empson has now provided.9

Meanwhile, back in Germany, religious radicalism, with aims similar to those championed by Müntzer, was preserved by small groups known as the Anabaptists. One branch of the Anabaptist movement spread up the valley of the Rhine and into the Netherlands, and from there re-entered Northern Germany in the town of Münster. Empson devotes a full chapter to the quite extraordinary “Kingdom of Münster”, where the Anabaptists took control of the town, establishing a “community of goods” to share out wealth and awaiting the Millenium. For such clear criminality against God’s own socio-economic order, they were subjected to a 15-month siege by the troops of the local bishop. Lower-class people from the Netherlands flocked to join this new egalitarian community, although most were stopped en route by authorities desperate to stem any spread of progressive ideas. The isolation of the rebels, along with the sheer impossibility of achieving their goal of an equal society within feudal Europe, impelled the desperate leaders inside Münster to abandon egalitarianism. Instead, they established a viciously repressive theocratic state; eventually the town was stormed by the besiegers. The surviving citizens, starving and without any prospect of rescue or relief, were brutally punished.

Empson’s chapters on the war, on Müntzer, on Gaismair and on Münster are all clear and concise. They provide a readable and instructive update to the book Engels wrote 175 years ago. Moreover, his analysis of how we are to understand this sadly neglected historical event is thought-provoking. In the post-war period, historical research into the events of 1525 was largely led by historians in the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Here, a new spin was placed on events, encouraged by a Stalinist regime anxious to prove its legitimacy: the “socialist” GDR needed its own revolutionary history. So, while the researches and publications of these historians were based on historical fact and provided a welcome counter-balance to 425 years of bourgeois hostility to the Peasants’ War and Müntzer, a new authorised view emerged: the war was part of something termed the “early Bourgeois revolution”. Empson skilfully punctures that view, partly with the help of Engels himself. Although Engels certainly stated that the “Reformation was a bourgeois movement”, nowhere did he go so far as to imagine that this was anything more than an early battle in the “long fight of the bourgeoisie against feudalism.” Indeed, Empson points out that “The smashing of the rebels in 1525, and the continuation, and renewal, of serfdom afterward only strengthened the position of the feudal rulers, delaying Germany’s further economic development, and eventually leading to stagnation”.10

We should not regard the 1525 uprising(s) as some interesting events taking place an unimaginably long time ago. Many of the causes for the revolt are still here, now, as they were in 1525: the theft of common land, the destruction of the environment for private gain, the economic serfdom of millions of workers across the globe. Of course, a corrupt and venal Church is no longer to worry about; but we do have the tech oligarchs, the social media capitalists, whose only concern is profit at the expense of the mental, physical and political well-being of countless individuals. The example of people such as Müntzer and Gaismair is clear: we must face them and fight for equality. In 2025, in a Germany mired in political crisis, there is some interest in what happened five centuries ago (unwelcome here is the interest of the far-right Alternative for Germany, which claims that Müntzer would have voted for them). Across Germany, celebrations and commemorations have been prepared well in advance. Yet, in the English-speaking world, only a very small number of books and articles have so far appeared. Empson’s work, exploring the causes and events of that massive lower-class rebellion, is both highly readable and instructive. It is one you must read.

Andrew Drummond is an author of several histories and novels; his biography of Thomas Müntzer is published by Verso (2024).

Notes