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[1525

concede the performance of other services pending a definite settlement which was to be reached at a congress at Heilbronn. By these concessions and the proposal that temporal Princes should be compensated out of the wealth of the clergy for their loss of feudal dues, Hipler and Weigant hoped to conciliate some at least of the Princes; and it was probably with this end in view that the main attack of the rebels was directed against the Bishop of Würzburg.

A violent opposition to these suggestions was offered by the extremists; their supporters were threatened with death, and Feuerbacher was deposed from the command of the Württemberg contingent. A like difficulty was experienced in the effort to induce military subordination. Believers in the equality of men held it as an axiom that no one was better than another, and they demanded that no military measures should be taken without the previous consent of the whole force. Rohrbach and his friends separated from the main body probably on account of the selection of Berlichingen as commander and of the moderate proposals of Hipler, and pursued an independent career of useless pillage. But while this violence disgusted many sympathisers with the movement, its immediate effect was to terrorise the Franconian nobles. Scores of them joined the Evangelical Brotherhood, and handed over their artillery and munitions of war. Count William of Henneberg followed their example, and the Abbots of Hersfeld and Fulda, the Bishops of Bamberg and Speier, the coadjutor of the Bishop of Würzburg, and Margrave Casimir of Brandenburg were compelled to sign the modified Twelve Articles, or to make similar concessions.

Nearly the whole of Franconia was now in the rebels' hands, and towards the end of April they began to concentrate on Würzburg, whose Bishop was also Duke of Franconia and the most powerful Prince in the circle. The city offered little resistance, and the Bishop fled to his castle on the neighbouring Frauenberg. This was an almost impregnable fortress; and the attempt to capture it locked up the greatest mass of the peasants' forces during the crucial month of the revolution. It might have been taken or induced to surrender but for defects in the organisation of the besieging army. There was little subordination to the leaders or unity in their councils. Some were in favour of offering terms, but Geyer opposed so lukewarm a measure. The peasants obtained a fresh accession of strength by the formal entry of Rothenburg into the Evangelical Brotherhood on May 14, but on the following night, during the absence of their ablest commanders, the besiegers made an attempt to storm the castle which was repulsed with considerable loss.

Irretrievable disasters were meanwhile overtaking the peasants in other quarters of Germany. On the day after the failure to storm the Frauenberg was fought the battle of Frankenhausen, which put an end to the revolt in Thuringia. The dominions of Philip of Hesse had been less affected by the movement than those of his neighbours, mainly

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because his government had been less oppressive; and, though there were disturbances, his readiness to make concessions soon pacified them, and he was able to come to the assistance of less fortunate Princes. Joining forces with the Dukes of Brunswick and Duke John of Saxony, who succeeded his brother Frederick as Elector of Saxony on May 5, Philip attacked Münzer at Frankenhausen on the 15th. According to Melanchthon, whose diatribe against Münzer has been usually accepted as the chief authority for the battle, the prophet guaranteed his followers immunity from the enemy's bullets, and they stood still singing hymns as the Princes' onslaught commenced. But their inaction seems also to have been due in part at least to the agitation of some of the insurgents for surrender. In any case there was scarcely a show of resistance; a brief cannonade demolished the line of waggons which they had, after the fashion of the Hussites, drawn up for their defence, and a few minutes later the whole force was in flight. Münzer himself was captured, and after torture and imprisonment wrote a letter, the genuineness of which has been doubted, admitting his errors and the justice of his condemnation to death. Pfeiffer and his party in Mühlhausen were now helpless, and their appeals to the Franconian insurgents, which fell upon deaf ears, would in any case have been unavailing. On the 24th Pfeiffer escaped from the city, which thereupon surrendered: he was overtaken near Eisenach, and met his inevitable fate with more courage than Münzer had shown. A like measure was meted out to the Burgomaster, Mühlhausen itself was deprived of its privileges as a free imperial city, and the revolt was easily suppressed at Erfurt and in other Thuringian districts.

The peasants had been crushed in the North, and they fared as ill in the South. Truchsess, after his truce with the Donauried, the Allgau, and the Lake contingents, had turned in the last week in April against the Black Forest bands, when he was ordered by the Swabian League to march to the relief of Württemberg, and so prevent a junction between the Franconian and Swabian rebels. On May 12 he came upon the peasants strongly entrenched on marshy ground near Böblingen. By means of an understanding with some of the leading burghers the gates of the town were opened, and Truchsess was enabled to plant artillery on the castle walls, whence it commanded the peasants' entrenchments. Compelled thus to come out into the open, they were cut to pieces by cavalry, though, with a courage which the peasants had not hitherto displayed, the Württemberg band prolonged its resistance for nearly four hours. Weinsberg next fell into Truchsess' hands and was burned to the ground, and Rohrbach was slowly roasted to death.

Truchsess' approach spread consternation in the camp at Würzburg. After the failure to storm the Frauenberg, Götz von Berlichingen deserted the peasants' cause, and about a fourth of his men returned to their homes. The remainder were detached from the camp at Würzburg

190

Suppression of the rebellion

[1525-6

to intercept Truchsess; they met him on June 2 at Königshofen and suffered a defeat almost as disastrous as that at Böblingen. Truchsess next fell upon Florian Geyer and his "Black Band," who made a stubborn defence at Ingolstadt, but were outnumbered and most of them slain. Geyer escaped for the time, but met his death by fair means or foul shortly afterwards at the hands of Wilhelm von Grumbach. Truchsess could now march on Würzburg without fear of molestation; the outskirts were reached on June 5, and the leaders of the old city Council entered into communication with the approaching enemy. They conceded practically all the reactionary demands, but represented to the citizens that they had made the best terms they could; and on June 8 Truchsess and the Princes rode into the city without opposition.

The surrender of Würzburg carried with it the relief of the hardpressed castle of Frauenberg, and, the neck of the rebellion being thus broken, its life in other parts gradually flickered out. Rothenburg was captured by Margrave Casimir on June 28, but Carlstadt and several other revolutionary leaders escaped. Memmingen was taken by stratagem, and few of the cities showed any disposition to resist. The movement in Elsass had been suppressed by Duke Anthony of Lorraine with the help of foreign mercenaries before the end of May, and by July the only districts in which large forces of the peasants remained in arms were the Allgau, Salzburg, and Ferdinand's duchies. Truchsess, having crushed the revolt in Franconia, returned to complete the work which had been interrupted in Upper Swabia. With the aid of George von Frundsberg, who had returned from Italy, and by means of treachery in the peasants' ranks, he dispersed two of the Allgau bands on July 22, and compelled a third to surrender on the banks of the Luibas. A week before Count Felix von Werdenberg had defeated the Hegau contingent at Hilzingen, relieved Radolfzell, and beheaded Hans Müller of Bulgenbach.

In the Austrian territories and in Salzburg, however, the revolution continued active throughout the winter and following spring. Waldshut, which had risen against Ferdinand's religious persecution before the outbreak of the Peasants' War, held out until December 12, 1525. The revolt in Salzburg was indirectly encouraged by the jealousy existing between its Archbishop and the Dukes of Bavaria, and by a scheme which Ferdinand entertained of dividing the archbishop's lands between the two Dukes and himself. The Archduke had in June, 1525, temporarily pacified the Tyrolese peasantry by promising a complete amnesty and granting some substantial redress of their agrarian, and even of their ecclesiastical, grievances. But Michael Gaismayr and others, who aimed at a political revolution, were not satisfied, and Gaismayr fled to Switzerland, where he received promises of support from Francis I and other enemies of the Habsburgs. Early in 1526 he returned to the attack and in May laid siege to Radstadt. At Schladming, some fifteen miles to the east of Radstadt, the peasants defeated Dietrichstein and

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for some months defied the Austrian government. Gaismayr inflicted two reverses upon the forces sent to relieve Radstadt, but was unable permanently to resist the increasing contingents despatched against him by the Swabian League and the Austrian government. In July he was compelled to raise the siege, and fled to Italy, where he was murdered in 1528 by two Spaniards, who received for their deed the price put by the government on Gaismayr's head.

The Austrian duchies were one of the few districts in which the revolt resulted in an amelioration of the lot of the peasants. Margrave Philip of Baden, whose humanity was recognised on all sides, pursued a similar policy, and the Landgrave of Hesse also made some concessions. But as a rule the suppression of the movement was marked by appalling atrocities. On May 27 Leonard von Eck, the Bavarian chancellor, reports that Duke Anthony of Lorraine alone had already destroyed twenty thousand peasants in Elsass; and for the whole of Germany a moderate estimate puts the number of victims at a hundred thousand. The only consideration that restrained the victors appears to have been the fear that, unless they held their hand, they would have no one left to render them service. "If all the peasants are killed," wrote Margrave George to his brother Casimir, "where shall we get other peasants to make provision for us?" Casimir stood in need of the exhortation; at Kitzingen, near Würzburg, he put out the eyes of fifty-nine townsfolk, and forbade the rest under severe penalties to offer them medical or other assistance. When the massacre of eighteen knights at Weinsberg is adduced as proof that the peasants were savages, one may well ask what stage of civilisation had been reached by German Princes.

The effects of this failure to deal with the peasants' grievances except by methods of brutal oppression cannot be estimated with any exactitude; but its effects were no doubt enduring and disastrous. The Diet of Augsburg in 1525 attempted to mitigate the ferocity of the lords towards their subjects, but the effort did not produce much result, and to the end of the eighteenth century the German peasantry remained the most wretched in Europe. Serfdom lingered there longer than in any other civilised country save Russia, and the mass of the people. were effectively shut out from the sphere of political action. The beginnings of democracy were crushed in the cities; the knights and then the peasants were beaten down. And only the territorial power of the Princes profited. The misery of the mass of her people must be reckoned as one of the causes of the national weakness and intellectual sterility which marked Germany during the latter part of the sixteenth century. The religious lead which she had given to Europe passed into other hands, and the literary awakening which preceded and accompanied the Reformation was followed by slumbers at least as profound as those which had gone before.

The difficulty of assigning reasons for the failure of the revolt itself

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Character and effects of the Peasants' Revolt

is enhanced by that of determining how far it was really a revolutionary movement and how far reactionary. Was it the last and greatest of the medieval peasant revolts, or was it a premature birth of modern democracy? It was probably a combination of both. The hardships of the peasants and town proletariate were undoubtedly aggravated by the economic revolution, the substitution of a world-market for local markets, the consequent growth of capitalism and of the relative poverty of the poorest classes; and, in so far as they saw no remedy except in a return to the worn-out medieval system, their objects were reactionary, and would have failed ultimately, even if they had achieved a temporary success. On the other hand, the ideas which their leaders developed during the course of the movement, such as the abolition of serfdom, the participation of peasants in politics, the universal application of the principle of election, were undeniably revolutionary and premature. Many of these ideas have been since successfully put into practice, but in 1525 the classes which formulated them had not acquired the faculties necessary for the proper exercise of political power; and the movement was an abortion.

The effect of its suppression upon the religious development of Germany was none the less disastrous. In its religious aspect the Peasants' Revolt was an appeal of the poor and oppressed to "divine justice" against the oppressor. They had eagerly applied to their lords the biblical anathemas against the rich, and interpreted the beatitudes as a promise of redress for the wrongs of the poor. They were naturally unconvinced by Luther's declarations that the Gospel only guaranteed a spiritual and not a temporal emancipation, and that spiritual liberty was the only kind of freedom to which they had a right. They felt that such a doctrine might suit Luther and his knightly and bourgeois supporters, who already enjoyed an excessive temporal franchise, but that in certain depths of material misery the cultivation of spiritual and moral welfare was impossible. It was a counsel of perfection to advise them to be content with spiritual solace when they complained that they could not feed their bodies. They did not regard poverty as compatible with the "divine justice" to which they appealed; and when their appeal was met by the slaughter of a hundred thousand of their numbers their faith in the new Gospel received a fatal blow. Their aspirations, which had been so vividly expressed in the popular literature of the last five years, were turned into despair, and they relapsed into a state of mind which was not far removed from materialistic atheism. Who knows, they asked, what God is, or whether there is a God? And the minor questions at issue between Luther and the Pope they viewed with profound indifference.

Such was the result of the Peasants' Revolt and of Luther's intervention. His conduct will always remain a matter of controversy, because its interpretation depends not so much upon what he said or