In the early 16th century the Catholic Church was a major power
holding a third of Europe’s land, and having significant influence on all rulers
its power was unfathomable and most believed in its righteous divinity
Martin Luther, a priest, saw corruption in the Church, with his peers being lethargic in their duties and publicly scoffing at Biblical Doctrine.
Luther had the idea of ‘Sola Fide’ which was Latin for ‘only faith’.
His ideas brought him into conflict with the Church and in response Luther famously nailed his ’95 Theses’ against the door of the church on October 31st, 1517.
That or he mailed them to archbishop, we don’t know
but what we do know is that he certainly didn’t nail them to the archbishop.
This is how the Protestant Reformation began and Luther claimed that Church rituals were meaningless, their preaching false, and that priesthood was merely a manmade invention.
Luther was made to defend himself before the famously Habsburg-jawed, Holy Roman Emperor, Charles V.
Charles dismissed him as just a ‘single fryer’.
This pushed Luther to take the revolutionary step of mass printing the Bible in German
whereas it had previously only been available in Latin which only priests could read.
Now everyone could read the bible and come up with their own ideas and beliefs and no Catholic Church was going to tell them otherwise.
A new schism had occurred amongst western Christianity comparable to that of the East-West Schism of 1054.
You suddenly had Lutherans, Calvinists, Anabaptists, and more
not to mention these sects had their own sects
like Crypto-Calvinists, French Calvinists, it goes on and on.
Everyone one of these denominations thought they knew the one true way and that all others were going to hell
so you can see how the seeds of conflict had been laid.
In 1524, due to recent bad harvests in Wurttemberg, the serfs were on strike.
1,200 peasants gathered in protest and formed the ‘12 Articles’ and their arguments were quite similar in vein to those of Luther’s
claiming that serfdom was a man-made construct and was incompatible with the doctrine of the Bible.
Other demands/points in the ’12 Articles’ were that peasants should elect clergyman and that all of their taxes should be for public purposes and not for the Catholic Church
Luther of course supported them
wait sorry, I read that wrong
Luther condemned them and sided with the nobility, even saying the peasants should “killed like mad dogs.”
The peasants revolted in Wurzach, Leipheim, Memmingen
and even further off places like Forchheim and Mühlhausen
refusing to pay tax and attempting to destroy serfdom
In April, 1525 5,000 peasants dubbed the Leipheimer Haufen, which literally means the Leipheim Bunch
gathered near Leipheim to prepare their capture of Ulm.They grouped up with the local peasants which numbered 1,200.
They began to attack the city when Georg, Truchsess von Waldburg, known as the ‘Scourge of the Peasants’ entered with an army of 8,500 and 18 field guns.
Truchsess led the Swabian League; an established peacekeeping association of the Imperial estates, whose sole objective at the time was to strike down the peasant insurgency.
he peasants, upon witnessing the sheer size of his army, attempted an orderly retreat
but Truchsess set his cavalry upon the fleeing peasants.
This was known as the Battle of Leipheim, creative name, I know, and was a victory for Truchsess.
The war witnessed multiple massacres enacted from both sides.
One such massacre was the Weinsberg Massacre where in mid-April, peasants under the leadership of ‘Little’ Jack Rohrbach took ‘revenge’ against the nobility.
That was followed by the Massacre at Frankenhausen, in which on the 29th of April
the peasants rose up, but were intimidated by a force of 6,000 Landsknechts into a truce
which the Landsknechts immediately then broke and massacred the peasants, leading to the burning of Jack Rohrbach.
The peasants attempted to strike down Truchsess and his Swabian League, but always failed to defeat him
and embarrassingly in one battle, the Battle of Konigshofen which occurred on the 2nd of June, 1525, 500 peasants had feigned death to avoid being killed by his league.
The battle which had the greatest loss of life was the Battle of Böblingen on the 12th of May, 1525.
When the peasants discovered Truchsess had pitched camp at Rottenburg, they made their way towards him capturing the city of Herrenberg in their advance.
Due to the cavalry manoeuvrers of the Swabian League they were able to strike down anywhere from 2,000-9,000 of the peasants and retake the city.
With the exception of the Siege of Freiburg im Breisgau, largely all battles resulted in peasant defeats.
By the closing stages of the war the peasants had loss over 100,000 of their 300,000 men.
The rebellion had ultimately failed and separate peace treaties were made with the peasants, all quite harsh.
This war had been inspired by an earlier revolt, the Knights’ Revolt, of 1522, and just like that one had failed as well.
Truchsess was accredited the victory by the emperor and the Swabian League received much acclaim.
The German Peasants’ War or Revolt was the largest revolution in Europe prior to the French Revolution
and it was a turning point of the religious and political landscape of the West.
It was only the beginning of future wars based on the conflicts of Protestants and Catholics, and peasantry and nobility.
If you wish to see more about these wars, and more specifically the climax, check out my channel, Feature History, for the Thirty Years’ War.
I’d also like to thank Jabzy for hosting me on his channel and I hope you all enjoyed the video.