The Criminalization of Peasant Resistance in the Holy Roman Empire: Toward a History of the Emergence of High Treason in Germany

Abstract

The emperor and the imperial estates brought about the criminalization of resistance by subjects in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in the first three decades of the sixteenth century. The formal conclusion of this development was marked by the penal ordinance of 1532 of Emperor Charles V, which stated in article 127: Whoever incites dangerous, illegal, and malicious rebellion of the common people against authorities in a territory or city shall, according to the circumstances of his misdoings, be punished with decapitation or flogging and shall, in all cases, be exiled from the territory or city in which he incited rebellion. ,,l To be sure, in this general formulation this ordinance was intended to apply to any rebellion against authority and therefore applied equally to the subjects of princely as well as urban authorities. But a reconstruction of the history of this article shows clearly that it was primarily peasant resistance that had led to the criminalization of resistance. That resistance could become a criminal matter can be attributed to two long-standing developments in the late Middle Ages. First, there was the epidemic spread of resistance and its increasingly focused demands leading up to the revolution of 1525. Second, there was increasing sensitivity in the Empire to the need for an overarching peace, which found clear expression in the 1495 imperial peace. The orders regulating civil peace issued by diets from 1495 onward were apparently unable to deal with peasant unrest and revolts. This failure can be attributed equally to the character of the unrest and to the intentions of regulations themselves. In late medieval society peasant resistance was accepted. This can be seen in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, on the one hand, in