German Peasants' War (1525)

Abstract

AbstractThe German Peasants' War of 1525 was the culmination of a series of late medieval revolts, called “Poor Conrad” orBundschuhs(Franz 1965:1–91). The Peasants' War combined the ardent anti‐clericalism of the previous uprisings with the zeal for the evangelical movement of the early years of the Reformation. The Peasants' War was the largest popular revolt in European history before the French Revolution (Sreenivasan 2001:30). The rebellion encompassed central and southern Germany, south of Magdeburg, except for ducal Bavaria, and included part of the present‐day Czech Republic, Alsace in present‐day France, parts of Switzerland, western Austria, and the south Tyrol in present‐day Italy (Scott and Scribner 1991). The most important document produced by the Peasants' War was the Twelve Articles, written by the furrier and lay preacher Sebastian Lotzer in Memmingen on the basis of three hundred articles produced by peasants of the Baltringen Band in Swabia. The Memmingen preacher Christoph Schappeler wrote the preamble and supplied some of the biblical references in the margins. The Twelve Articles called for, among other things: the abolition of serfdom, an end to servile, unpaid labor, the right of each community to pick their own pastor and to control the tithe paid to the pastor, the freedom of poor people to be able to gather firewood in the forests, a restoration of the right to catch fish in flowing streams, and an end to the death tax paid by serfs when a member of the family died (Scott and Scribner 1991: 252–257).