Chapter 2. The German Peasant Wars

One of the great culminating points in the premodern uprisings of oppressed peoples has been broadly described as the “German Peasant War”, a sweeping conflict that exploded in central Europe early in the sixteenth century.

The war stemmed in part from economic problems that arose within the patchwork of principalities known as the Holy Roman Empire. As the empire began to fall apart, feudal domination intensified enormously, even as serfdom was declining elsewhere in Europe, and many of the ruling princes, lay and ecclesiastical, attempted to aggrandize themselves in their sovereign principalities at the expense of the peasantry. Whether owing to growing economic needs or in pursuit of greater power (the two are not mutually exclusive), lords and princes began to impose heavier and heavier burdens on the peasants by seizing their traditional common lands, increasing virtually all feudal exactions, and trying to restore serfdom among those who were already relatively free. The petty burdens that the upper classes placed on the lower can be judged by the sixty-two Articles of the Sttihlingen peasants, whose grievances and actions sparked the rebellion of 1525 in the Southwest. By adopting Roman law over German, the nobility were able to curtail freedoms that the peasants had enjoyed for centuries, and exact heavy penalties for infractions that would have been considered minor under traditional common or Germanic practices. Tempted by the new wares that growing European commerce made available to those who could afford them, temporal and ecclesiastical lords demanded more from the peasantry than they had in earlier times—and quite often, the fairly well-to-do peasants chafed more under these demands than the more downtrodden, who had been conditioned for generations to accept fatalistically their lot in life.

Serfdom, for its part, had become more brutal since the high Middle Ages. The medieval serf at least had a body of rights he could claim as well as duties he had to perform, and his lot was often softened by many generations of compromises between lord and underling. The common law of his quasi-tribal society and the religious precepts of the Church had served as countervailing forces to arbitrary manorial rule. With the decline of feudalism and the degeneration of the Church, however, serfdom began to approximate outright slavery, and arbitrary temporal power began to invade the most guarded realm of the peasant’s life. Now he was not only compelled to give more, indeed most, of his working time to the lord and pay increasing taxes, rents, and tithes, but he could be arbitrarily imprisoned, tortured, and in some cases even killed at the lord’s behest. To worsen their lot, the many peasants who were serfs or faced the prospect of enserfment suffered the loss of the common meadows on which they had pastured their domestic animals and the common woodlands from which they had gathered fuel and timber since time immemorial.

Overall, two very distinct ways of life confronted each other, and almost inevitably were destined to explode into open conflict. On the one side, there was the peasant economy, which was structured around subsistence farming with all its attendant uncertainties that obliged the food cultivator, as Tom Scott and Bob Scribner observe,

to rely on a wide range of activities other than mere arable farming in order to make ends meet. The creation of game reserves from common land and denial of access to forests cut the peasants off from what they regarded as a natural resource which they could justly exploit to supplement their purely agrarian incomes. Access to commons and waste land for grazing or the use of the forest to fatten swine or cattle on beechmast were considered vital for the maintenance of livestock, freeing as much land as possible for cultivation, just as grass and hay were indispensable for fodder.

On the other side, the distinctly rapacious nobility were enamored of the fine goods carried over the Alps by Italian merchants, and fired by ambitions to increase their land holdings. These nobles sought to extract what they could from the peasantry’s labor, with no regard for their ancestral responsibilities to the lower classes. They sought to plunder “this subsistence economy in many ways,” observe Scott and Scribner,

especially through their desire to maximize their own incomes and to take advantage of every opportunity offered by an expanding market. Forests were a rich natural resource which could be exploited by the sale or lease of timber or charcoaling rights, while staves and bark could be sold rather than allowed to the peasants as a traditional right. Traditional fishing waters could be leased or exploited for the lord’s own use, while common land could be enclosed and converted to arable. We may perceive in some areas virtually a conflict of two economic systems, a peasant subsistence economy with necessary links to local markets and that of feudal landlords aware of the entire range of market possibilities offered by economic conjuncture.[7]

In these circumstances, little more than a mere episode was required to turn peasant unrest into a general insurrection of revolutionary proportions.

THE BUNDSCHUH

There was no lack of unrest among the peasantry. The immediate precursor of the German Peasant War was a largely subterranean peasant movement known as the Bundschuh, whose name and symbol came from the peasant’s laced boot, in contrast to the nobleman’s fine Stiefel. Arising in German-speaking Alsace, the Bundschuh was probably sparked by a rise in the cost of living, but over time the peasants’ basic demands were widened to include ecclesiastical reforms such as reductions in clerical income, a limitation on the number of priests in a community, and an end to clerical courts. Its slogan “Nothing but God’s Justice” or “God’s Word,” referring to biblical precepts as a guide to the interactions between lord and underling, voiced the peasants’ desire for a radically new social order, one based on traditional common law rather than Roman contract law, and one that recognized the authority only of the emperor and the pope, not of lords and clergy. Regrettably, anti-Semitism was ubiquitous; Jews, who were obliged to be moneylenders because of clerical restrictions on their activities, were seen as exacting usurers. While some Bundschuh programs demanded a fixed interest rate of 5 percent, other members demanded the extermination of the Jews. When the Bundschuh called for the abolition of taxes, including tithes, and, remarkably, claimed the sole right to levy taxes for itself, the movement began to establish itself as an incipient dual power in opposition to existing princely authority. When it called for the election of pastors by congregations, its program began to resemble that of the radical English Puritans who, a century and a half later, would shake the foundations of established regal authority (which claimed to head the Anglican Church) with their demands for the election of ministers in England and on the North American continent.

What is remarkable about the Bundschuh is the high degree of organization it created between 1493 and 1517, and the tenacity of its membership, so unlike what is commonly imputed to peasant movements. Strictly speaking, the Bundschuh was a conspiracy: illegal, it had to be kept highly secret, and its members were bonded by oaths, ceremonies, and commitments to punish any treachery. Even Friedrich Engels expressed his admiration for the movement,

which overcame the obstacles to a more centralized organization in spite of the fact that they were scattered over the countryside, and ... after numberless dispersions, defeats, executions of leaders, they renewed their conspiracies over and over again, until an opportunity came for a mass upheaval.[8]

In 1493, certain Bundschuh leaders daringly planned to take over the city of Schletstadt and its nearby monasteries during Easter week, expropriate the wealth of the city’s rich, and proceed to do the same in the rest of Alsace. The plan somehow became known to the authorities, and many of the leaders were arrested and tortured. Still others were driven out of the area with their hands or fingers brutally amputated. Yet despite the failure of the Alsace movement, the Bundschuh did not disappear; it lingered on in the hidden life of the peasantry and resurfaced continually for the next thirty years in various parts of southern Germany. By the early 1500s, its members in Speyer had broadened its program considerably to include the abolition of serfdom, the confiscation of monastic and Church-owned estates and their redivision among the people, and a Germany united under the shaky imperial crown.

As in Alsace, a plan for a major insurrection to take over the town of Bruchsal was aborted, this time betrayed by a priest to whom one of the members had naively confessed the plan. The alerted authorities, acting under a harsh decree of the Emperor Maximilian, extinguished what resistance they encountered. But the majority of the Bundschuh members were never discovered by the authorities, and the movement continued to exist in different forms and under different names. In Swabia, in the Duchy of Württemberg, it changed its name from Bundschuh to Poor Conrad, a name borrowed from that of an innocuous Catholic peasant fraternity. In the upper Rhine region. Joss Fritz, a former soldier and veteran of the Alsace conspiracy succeeded in uniting the peasants with knights, dissident clerics, and urban plebeians in a complex conspiracy, which spread back to Alsace and into Baden and WUrttemberg. Although a plot to take the town of Freiburg was betrayed and repressed once again, most of the movement members escaped. Shortly thereafter, a congress of Poor Conrad in the Duchy of Württemberg led to an uprising in 1514, which received widespread support owing to the famine conditions in the area. Together, peasants and town plebeians succeeded in taking three Swabian towns; indeed, they even managed to get their representatives seated in the Württemberg diet, which convened at Stuttgart. But the treacherous Duke Ulrich ordered the representatives of the middle classes to meet in an alternative diet in Tubingen without the peasants. The diet dutifully passed a law against the uprising, and the duke gathered troops to disperse the peasant militia. Although stern, the duke’s treatment of the “rebels” was not particularly brutal; but he completely ignored the peasant demands and strengthened the laws against all peasant gatherings in the duchy. Although the main leaders of Poor Conrad again escaped, attempts to revive the Bundschuh in the Black Forest region were effectively suppressed by the authorities. Joss Fritz, who had lived a nearly charmed life through three abortive insurrections, fled to Switzerland, where he apparently died.

Well before the climactic years of the peasant war in Germany, a mass rebellion exploded in Switzerland, Hungary, and Slovenia between 1513 and 1515. In Hungary, a relatively benign monarch had initiated agrarian reforms that the feudal lords bitterly resented, and as soon as they regained their authority over the Crown, the reforms were flagrantly annulled. Thereupon, Gyorgy D6sza, a knight who had earned a distinguished reputation as a military commander and had organized a popular, mainly peasant militia to fight Turkish invaders, proceeded in 1514 to throw these well-disciplined forces against the nobility, opening a full-scale peasant war. D6sza proclaimed a republic, abolishing the monarchy and the privileges of the nobility, and once again, as with Etienne Marcel in Paris two centuries earlier, Hungary stood at a decisive social juncture in which history seemed to hold its breath.

In fact, this peasant uprising even gained the wavering support of the urban middle class. But when the peasants burned manors and castles, the ever-fearful bourgeoisie became alarmed and, fearing too militant a peasant revolt, deserted the peasant cause and threw their support over to the nobles, on whose behalf John Zapdlyai, the future king of Hungary, had raised a substantial army. Notwithstanding the persistent belief that all peasant insurrections are chaotic, moblike affairs, Ddsza’s well-disciplined, superbly organized, and highly committed army fought valiantly and stubbornly, but Zapolyai’s combined force of urban burghers and rural nobles ruthlessly crushed it at Temesvar. With this military victory, the Hungarian nobility assembled in a diet and proclaimed serfdom as a permanent condition, essentially freezing the history of their country for centuries to come.

THE REFORMATION

In the German-speaking areas of the Holy Roman Empire, many ideological factors—the Reformation and its radical offspring—came into play that seemed to challenge the authority of the ruling elites and that gave a strong cultural edge to the peasants’ economic demands.

The Reformation was greatly fueled by the complex interplay of political and social forces that emerged in the closing years of the Middle Ages. By the sixteenth century, a broad intellectual and popular movement, supported by the emerging European monarchs, stood opposed to a thoroughly corrupt and decadent Church. In England, Henry VIII had severed his country’s ties with Rome completely, while France and Spain, for their part, had gained the right to appoint their own bishops, a right that initially belonged to the Vatican. Under these conditions the Church seemed like a useless, self-perpetuating artifact that froze vast landholdings from wider social accessibility, accumulated an incalculably large treasure that the rising national economies of Europe sorely needed, and supported a swollen hierarchy of ecclesiastical and bureaucratic parasites who made no productive contribution to the material well-being of society. At the same time, abbots and bishops, many of whom were also princely landowners, tried to exact increasing revenues from the peasants as zealously as the lay princes.

Thus, it was not only the emerging bourgeoisie who opposed the Church, whose system of charities blocked off what could have been a reserve labor force for capitalists to exploit; rather, reformation had become a pressing need for almost all strata of society: manorial lords as well as peasants, monarchs as well as nobles, urban patricians as well as plebeians, indeed everyone except the desperately poor who lived on Church handouts. Even feudal lords viewed the Church as an immense drain on their resources and dreamed of expropriating monastic lands and ecclesiastical wealth.

Reformation was in the air—but what kind of reformation would it be? The various demands for reform were vaguely divided along conflicting class lines until the Great Peasant War sorted them into clearly definable positions. The reformers essentially differed according to whether changes would serve nationalism against Catholic universalism, the temporal powers against the ecclesiastical ones, the wealthy against the poor, the princes against the peasants—or the peasants against the oppressive nobility generally.

LUTHER AND THE SWABIAN LEAGUE

In 1517, while the ever-active Joss Fritz was engaging in the last episode of his rebellious life in the Black Forest region, Martin Luther posted his famous ninety-five theses on the castle church door of Wittenberg, challenging papal hierarchy and moving Christian precept away from a faith structured around the Catholic Church to a faith based on personal belief. As a doctrine, Lutheranism was markedly subjective; it emphasized the inner light of faith over the outer reality of deeds and rituals. Although Luther’s criticisms of indulgences, of papal authority over temporal German rulers, and of the widespread corruption in Rome were not strikingly innovative—they had, in fact, already been voiced by many clerics throughout the Holy Roman Empire and elsewhere—his attack came at a very strategic time, when virtually all strata of German society were alienated from Rome for a host of material, spiritual, and political reasons.

With support from the princes, urban classes, and peasants, Luther’s aims evolved from mere reform of the existing Church into outright rebellion against it, indeed toward the establishment of a national church that was akin in many respects to the Church of England that his contemporary, Henry VIII, had created. In his 1520 Address to the Christian Nobility of the German Nation, Luther struck a blow for a total break with Rome, demanding the creation of a uniquely German clergy with its own bishops. Such writings whetted the appetite of German nobles of all levels for Church-owned lands. At the same time Luther’s tenor had certain remarkably democratic features, such as an appeal to faith rather than obedience to ecclesiastical hierarchies, and his language was redolent of an apostolic Christianity that resonated deeply with peasant and plebeian aspirations for communal autonomy. Pamphlet after pamphlet written by Luther and his supporters fed the aspirations for a better life of peasants and serfs, who were chafing under increasingly severe feudal exactions, the growth of princely power, and exploitation by wealthy monastic orders and bishops.

Nor was the peasantry the only social group to feel itself threatened by the appetites of the ruling princes and the Church; the lesser nobility in the Holy Roman Empire also suffered a major erosion of its power at the expense of the dynastic territorial princes who ruled the major principalities of Germany. As the authority of the princes increased, the authority of the nobility diminished, producing unrest among the barons and knights. Given the opportunity, the lesser nobles correspondingly sought to create a “democracy of nobles”—of the lesser nobility—that would reunite the empire largely under their control, and thereby enhance their own power over the agrarian economy. These aspirations profoundly affected the status of free peasants, whom the nobles planned to enserf, as well as serfs, whose burdens would be increased, and the rural poor generally, who would suffer the loss of common lands that traditionally belonged to peasant villages.

Perhaps more so than any other stratum, the nobles wanted a German Church that would end the power of the landed monasteries and clerical princes, the secularization of clerical states and estates, and ultimately the elimination of princely power. In 1522, Ulrich von Hutten tried to use an old league of Rhenish, Swabian, and Franconian nobles—the Swabian League—to promote these aims by force of arms. Hutten amassed a noble army that could be directed not only against the Church but also against the territorial princes, and with Franz von Sickingen as its military commander, the League’s forces attempted to stage a coup against the clerical states, particularly the electorarchbishop of Trier.

The attempt failed. By itself, the nobility were not strong enough to prevail militarily against the princes. Not only were the princes too powerful, but neither the peasants nor the townspeople were willing to make common cause with the lesser nobles in a plan to increase their power; indeed, the peasants sought to abolish all the privileges of the nobility, higher or lower. Instead of calling for the abolition of serfdom to gain peasant support, Hutten merely declaimed against Rome as the source of all the ills of the time. The forces of the Swabian League were defeated at Trier, where Sickingen was killed. Hutten, who fled, died shortly after. Thereafter the nobility’s power was definitively broken, and the nobles were forced to submit to the princes, under whose protection and leadership the lesser nobles were to remain for centuries. Indeed, by the mid-1520s, as the empire fragmented, the princes were clearly ascendant. Even the urban patricians became largely dependent upon them, as did Luther, who wedded himself to this realignment of the German upper classes. Accordingly, the Lutheran Church lost whatever social and political independence of the ruling classes it had had, and the democratic tenor in Luther’s own writings waned ominously, the writings becoming more oligarchical and committed to the authority of the temporal rulers.

Although it is tempting to see Luther’s emphasis on “inwardness” and his own sharply etched personality as expressions of “bourgeois individuality,” he was hardly the bearer of ideological trappings for an emerging individualistic German bourgeoisie against a corporate feudal society. In fact, quite the opposite is true. In contrast to the Calvinist aspect of the Reformation, Lutheranism did little to favor bourgeois interests in Europe; indeed, for Germany, it marked a decided setback. The Reformation in Germany largely provided an ideological patina for landlordism, not for commerce, and for the princes, not for the burgher class, which supported it more out of fear of the peasants’ war and the peasants’ plebeian allies in the towns of central Europe than out of any profound religious convictions of their own.

In fact, Luther, by allying himself with the agrarian princely and urban patrician elements in German-speaking areas, rather than the burghers, furthered the fragmentation of the empire into many kingdoms, princelings, dukedoms, and imperial cities, which, far from fostering a bourgeois development, essentially obstructed it. Lutheran “inwardness” essentially became a gospel of quietism and obedience that was anything but compatible with the aggressive egotism characteristic of the bourgeois spirit, and its political effects were to favor Germany’s dismemberment in opposition to any attempts to unify the empire or produce a nation-state.

In favoring submission to temporal power, Lutheran Protestantism conformed completely with the interests of the German princes and later with the Scandinavian monarchs, who were to eagerly adopt it to strengthen their own sovereignty. Although the Lutheran Church made far more doctrinal and liturgical changes than did the Anglican Church established by Henry VIII (which largely subordinated Roman Catholic doctrine to the monarchy), Lutheran clerics eventually were reduced to mere bureaucratic supports of German princes and Scandinavian kings. As D. Riazanov observes, “Lutheranism became the religion of the economically backward countries. It spread in northern and western Germany, Denmark and Sweden, where the princes, bishops and the landlords became the protectors of the Lutheran Church.”[9]

The transformation that was taking place in Lutheranism notwithstanding, the peasants still identified with the early apostolic tone of Luther, whose appeals to faith and the Bible seemed to legitimate their demands for a more egalitarian society. In reality, they were following in the wake of the radical Reformation clerics who voiced the quasi-mystical millenarianism that they erroneously associated with Luther’s name and teachings. Chafing under feudal exactions, the peasants saw the Reformation, particularly as voiced by mystical clerics such as Balthasar Hubmaier and Thomas Miinzer, as a return to the old egalitarian ideas advanced in Acts and in preachings directly ascribed to Jesus. It was in this highly charged ideological as well as economic and social environment that from the early 1500s the various local rebellions and general unrest collected into the climactic struggles that came to be known as the Peasant War, particularly in the fateful years of 1524 and 1525.

THE SCOPE OF THE PEASANT WAR

The Peasant War “proper” (as it has been called by some historians) of 1524 and 1525 was not an easily delineable conflict. It began in different places much earlier than 1524 and extended well beyond 1525—reaching into Alsace and the Palatinate—and it can be said to mark the culmination of chronic uprisings and unrest that date back centuries before the 1500s. No one region fought the upper classes exclusively on its own; various troops tried to aid each other when they could, and as one was suppressed it provided recruits to peasant troops that were still in the field elsewhere. Aside from the chronic struggles in the late Middle Ages between peasants, urban plebeians, and their overlords, the war has a distinctive place in any chronicle of European revolutionary movements over the past five centuries.

But we can single out three distinct but interrelated conflicts, each of which differed regionally and temporally over a span of a year—which is not to deny the war’s long prelude and extended sequelae. The first of the wars centered in southwestern Germany, notably the Black Forest and Upper Swabia, directly adjacent to northern Switzerland and overlapping northeastern Austria. This conflict began in the late spring and early summer of 1524 and lasted well into the first half of 1525. In this area, as Scott and Scribner observe, the “balance sheet of the rebellion ... was rather untidy,” because, its many innovations notwithstanding, “it was lacking in political stamina or determination, and too easily drew back from realizing the implications of the political forms it had created.”[10]

The second of the wars broke out in Wllrttemburg and Franconia, in southcentral Germany, and got under way in mid-April 1525. In this region, urban communities played a major role, and the rebels were more radical in their goals and resolute in their sense of purpose. But this war did not last long. After a series of easy victories, it continued into the early summer, but began to decline rapidly when peasant troops failed to take the Marienberg fortress after a twoweek siege in late May and early June.

The third of the wars had its locus in east-central Germany, most famously in Thuringia (where Thomas Mlinzer created his celebrated Eternal League of God at MUhlhausen), reaching Hesse and extending into Saxony to the east, indeed as far as Bohemia. In this region the war began around the same time as the Württemberg-Franconian conflict and was essentially suppressed before the end of May 1525.

What initially ignited the first of the sweeping insurrections of peasants against lords seems almost a trivial provocation. On June 23,1524, the Countess of Lupfen-Stuhlingen in Hegau, in southwestern Württemberg, ordered her peasants to collect snails and strawberries for a banquet. In itself, the order was not unusual; but she issued it at a time of the year when the peasants were hastening to gather their hay. The Lake Constance area, in which Hegau was located, had already been highly radicalized, and her arrogant demand infuriated the peasants, who assembled together and drew up a list of sixty-two grievances that protested excessive taxes, forced labor, the seizure of common lands, the loss of traditional legal principles, and the arbitrary rule of the nobility. A thousand Stuhlingen tenants, bearing such arms as they could get, elected an extraordinarily gifted leader, the professional soldier or Landsknecht Hans Muller, as their captain, who organized them into a highly disciplined and effective force.

In August, this force marched southwest to Waldshut, a town on the Rhine about forty miles from Zurich. A well-chosen urban base for an insurrection, Waldshut had already been stirred up by radical reformers who had all but won over the citizenry against the temporal and clerical powers. The Rhenish town’s patricians were Lutherans, but its pastor was a radical Zwinglian and its plebeians had been influenced by the fiery preachings of Andreas Bodenstein of Carlstadt and by the incendiary cleric Thomas Milnzer, who was later to figure so prominently in the peasant uprising in Thuringia. The townspeople were sympathetic to the peasant forces and formed an alliance with them—in fact, even nearby Zurich gave them active assistance, including volunteers. At this time Waldshut was itself in revolt against its Austrian rulers, demanding the status of a free city, but the Austrians were much too occupied with imperial affairs in Italy to give any serious attention to a local revolt. As a result, Muller’s peasant forces succeeded in fully occupying Waldshut in October 1524, making it one of the centers of the peasant uprisings in southwest Germany.

The remnants of the Swabian League formed the sole military body in southern Germany on which the princes and nobility could rely, but with only 1,700 troops it lacked sufficient strength to overcome Muller’s peasant forces, which numbered 3,500 by October 1524. Accordingly, the nobles, as they had so often had done in the past and would continue to do in the future, offered truce negotiations to stall the peasants, while enlarging and arming their own forces. By conceding for a time to many of the peasants’ demands, they forestalled the possibility of a decisive peasant victory, which was clearly in the offing had the rebels attacked. The uprising in these early stages was still relatively peaceful. Old habits of servility held the peasants in tow: armed though they were, they behaved more like petitioners than the formidable insurrectionaries they could have been.

Nonetheless, the revolt subsequently swept through the rest of the Hegau region, much of the German-Swiss frontier area, and eastward into the Allgau region (in what is now southwestern Bavaria). Earlier German peasant revolts had always been fragmentary and limited, largely confined to reclaiming traditional rights for their particular area, which often were quite different from those of a nearby region. What gave the Peasant War a new cohesion was the peasants’ shared belief that they were supported by divine law against grasping bishops and abbots everywhere, and by their dream of a godly, egalitarian society. From the Black Forest region, the war raced toward the northeast like a huge tide, reaching Upper Swabia by the spring of 1525.

THE ARTICLES OF MEMMINGEN

In March 1525 representatives of the peasant bands in the southwest assembled in a general parliament at Memmingen, the principal town in Upper Swabia, to formulate a common program. The document they produced, “The Twelve Articles of the Peasants,” was permeated with Christian piety and sought to refute the idea, held by the horrified elites, that the peasants were teaching

that no one should obey but all should everywhere rise in revolt and rush together to reform or perhaps destroy altogether the authorities, both ecclesiastic and lay.... The articles below shall answer these godless and criminal faultfinders, and serve in the first place to remove the reproach from the word of God, and in the second place to give a Christian excuse for the disobedience or even the revolt of the entire Peasantry.[11]

But in the first of the twelve articles, the peasants claimed for themselves the right to “choose and appoint a pastor” and “the right to depose him should he conduct himself improperly.” This chosen pastor was to teach the peasants “the Gospel pure and simple, without any addition, doctrine or ordinance of man.” The demand was by no means a frivolous one. The right of a community to choose its pastor in a world where only the elite claimed this initiative was in itself a subversion of the established order of things: in fret, by implication, it not only challenged the professional clergy by strengthening the powers of the village commune, but threatened the civil hierarchy itself.

The second article duly acknowledged that Scripture obliged the peasants to pay a “just tithe” in grain to Church authorities, but this tithe, the peasants insisted, was now to be collected by an elected provost—“whomsoever the community may appoint”—thereby challenging a fundamental power of the nobles to choose village clerics. The proceeds were to be used to provide the chosen pastor and his family with “a decent and sufficient maintenance”, and nothing more. Beyond the amount needed for this maintenance, all funds collected from the tithe were to be distributed among the poor and used to “avoid laying any land tax on the poor.” The peasants refused to pay any additional “unseemly tithe that is of man’s invention,” whether it be “ecclesiastical or lay”—another gantlet that was thrown down to existing temporal and spiritual powers alike.

The third Memmingen article defined all obligations in purely personal terms and bluntly called for an end to serfdom, declaring:

It has been the custom hitherto for men to hold us as their own property, which is pitiable enough, considering that Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, without exception, by the shedding of His precious blood, the lowly as well as the great. Accordingly, it is consistent with Scripture that we should be free and wish to be so. Not that we would wish to be absolutely free and under no authority. God does not teach us that we should lead a disorderly life in the lusts of the flesh, but that we should love the Lord our God and our neighbor. We would gladly observe all this as God has commanded us in the celebration of the communion. He has not commanded us not to obey the authorities, but rather that we should be humble, not only towards those in authority, but towards everyone. We are thus ready to yield obedience according to God’s law to our elected and regular authorities in all proper things becoming to a Christian. We, therefore, take it for granted that you will release us from serfdom as true Christians, unless it should be shown us from the Gospel that we are serfs.

By radically invoking Scripture—“the Word of God”—against temporal authority this remarkable article was enormously provocative. Not only did it implicitly call the entire social order into dispute, it staked out a new claim for freedom of the individual, invoking Christian humility “toward everyone”—not merely toward one’s social superiors.

In the fourth through seventh articles the peasants went on to claim the right to hunt game, fish, gather wood, and possess their land, and the right to communal lands “without restriction,” which were to be administered “in a brotherly and Christian manner.” These demands were crucial; not only was their fulfillment economically necessary to sustain the village way of life but they presupposed a democratic right of all strata, particularly the peasants, to enjoy full access to the bounty of the natural world. They demanded freedom from the “excessive services” that were increasingly imposed upon them, and they asserted that the nobility “should no longer try to force more services or other dues from the peasant without payment, but permit the peasant to enjoy his holding in peace and quiet.” The eighth article called for rents to be fixed according to the capacity of the peasants to pay—a remarkable demand at any time, in which need rather than gain dictated economic behavior—and the ninth, that justice be rendered according to traditional common law rather than individualistic Roman law. The tenth article reiterated the demand for the return of common lands to the village communities:

we are aggrieved by the appropriation by individuals of meadows and fields which at one time belonged to a community. These we will take again into our own hands. It may, however, happen that the land was rightfully purchased. When, however, the land has unfortunately been purchased in this way, some brotherly arrangement should be made according to circumstances.

The eleventh article demanded the abolition of the inheritance taxes that burdened widows and orphans of deceased peasants—a particularly offensive levy by the nobles that often stripped peasant families of all their belongings— while the final one avowed that Scripture was the sole criterion by which the legitimacy of the claims in the document was to be judged.

The Twelve Articles of Memmingen thus essentially placed themselves under the protection of Christian precept, “the Word of God” or holy writ, indeed God himself. “The Word of God” became a major peasant slogan, challenging all temporal authority with that of Scripture. The peasants, in effect, were appealing to a power that they regarded as higher than that of their lords and princes— hence the revolutionary content of the phrase. Social life was to be lived according to tenets established by the Bible, not by ecclesiastical or lay authorities. Men were to hold power by election, not by birth, and deal with others according to law, not arbitrary judgment. Most of the personal and institutional intermediaries between God and man, even between society and community, were to be abolished, and people were to be regarded as neighbors, not as lord and lowly, or noble and serf. The authors of the articles thus viewed society essentially as a Christian fraternity, not as a social order based on rank and privilege. In closing the Articles, the peasants warned that they would expand the articles if it became necessary: “if more complaints are discovered which are based upon truth and the Scriptures and relate to offenses against God and our neighbor,” they were “determined to reserve the right to present these also.”

More articles in varying number emerged throughout the Peasant War, some even going beyond those adopted at Memmingen, including radical visions that struck at the very heart of hierarchical society. In Upper Swabia in February 1525, when tenants gathered at Sonthofen, they demanded the abolition of all feudal lords—a revolutionary demand that spread with the revolt. The “Twelve Articles” of the Alsace peasants called for the election not only of pastors but of all public officials, and completely repudiated the authority of the princes. In the Tyrol, a peasant parliament at Merano demanded that all authorities be chosen by the communities they administered. The peasants cited equality as a vital right and repeated a maxim of the English peasants a century and a half earlier, asking by what right the first noble had held the ordinary people in thrall.

Other articles raised during the war embodied ideals not only of social but of economic equality—equality that would be achieved by raising the condition of the peasant rather than diminishing that of the upper classes. A demand was raised that no one should possess more than two thousand crowns in wealth: a fairly sizable competence, to be sure, but an explicit restriction that flouted what the nobles regarded as a major right of any property owner. Utopistic visions called for the abolition of all capitalistic enterprises and for republican forms of government in which peasants and nobles would conjointly manage civil affairs, and demanded that the production of luxuries be suppressed in favor of goods that were meant to satisfy basic human needs.

The Peasant War, in effect, was as antibourgeois as it was antiaristocratic. Proposals were advanced during the course of the conflict not only to abolish tolls, dues, indirect taxes, and serfdom, but even to limit to some ten thousand crowns the amount of capital that merchants could make.[12] That such radical, indeed visionary, demands could have been made at peasant congresses and meetings—not only by radical clerics but by peasant leaders themselves—attests to the unusual nature of the insurgencies that swept over central Europe early in the sixteenth century.

ALLIES AND ENEMIES OF THE PEASANTS

To characterize the Peasant War exclusively as an agrarian movement would be a grave error, although the peasantry clearly provided the principal force and inspiration behind the upheaval. The peasant insurgents gained support from clerics, bureaucrats, officials of all kinds, knights, burghers, and even nobles, each stratum occupied with achieving the realization of its own particular interests. In nearly all the cities and towns that were in one way or another swept into the movement, the Peasant War produced a general social ferment, inducing riots in cities such as Strasbourg and popular attacks on the elite councils of Mainz, Cologne, and Ratisbon, and on clerical rulers in Bamberg and Speyer. Despite the peasants’ initially peaceable and Christian approach, the nobility, clerics, and many well-to-do burghers were hardly soothed by the rebels’ call for brotherliness but often panicked and took flight when the peasants assembled and marched upon their castles, convents and towns.

The decline of feudalism, moreover, had created a sizable plebeian element of relatively unskilled people who lived at the mercy of the patricians and local bourgeois. These urban plebeians, far from fearing the peasants, often saw themselves as their natural allies and gave the rebels their earnest support. Although beggars were easily bought off by the established authorities with food and drink, they too organized into bands or “kingdoms” and played a very helpful role as they roamed the roads, forming a communication system for the peasants. The middling burghers, for their part, who were often ensnared in battles with urban patricians, dealt with the peasants opportunistically, often supporting them in order to intimidate the patricians, a support which the burghers easily withdrew, betraying the peasants after they achieved their own ends—or when they feared plebeian uprisings in their own towns.

Generally, however, the peasant demands resonated with the poorer classes in the towns and cities, the unskilled workers and poor artisans. Indeed, as the Peasant War swept across Germany, the peasantry brought many smoldering urban grievances to the surface and virtually turned their movement into a national revolution. Throughout southwestern and central Germany, towns and cities tended to divide into two groupings in response to the upheaval: those that spoke for the poor, or the “commune,” and the ruling councils and well-todo. In any given town, sympathy for the peasant cause depended upon which held the upper hand. The merchant class was generally weakest in the smaller towns and strongest in the larger ones, and it was in these small towns peripheral to the centers of the emerging bourgeoisie that “communes” were organized, either as citizens’ assemblies or as crowds, exhibiting great sympathy for the peasant cause. Aid came to the peasants from Heilbronn, Wurzburg, and Rothenburg, while in Frankfurt the “commune” took over the elite council and swore a covenant of allegiance to support the peasants. The Frankfurt movement drew up articles affirming their traditional rights, which the city’s council accepted and which cities as far to the north as Munster and Osnabruck used as a model for their own “social contract.”

Despite its seemingly fragmentary character, the Peasant War did not lack well-organized political institutions. “A parliamentary constitution was developed in larger territories by estates of peasants, burghers, and miners,” observes Peter Bliclde.

While retaining the institutional framework... territorial estates were replaced by countrysides ( Landschaften ), which in 1525 meant both the representative assembly and all the rebels in each territory. Autonomous village, mining, market and urban communes chose representatives by election for the provincial diet, which in turn appointed a representative government (committee), which carried out the business of government with the territorial lord.[13]

More traditionally, the villagers made their decision by forming “a ring” or holding “a commune” that congregated under an oak tree,

in a churchyard, sometimes in a field, or even at an ancient site for the administration of justice ( Malstatt ), and was usually summoned by ringing the storm-bells to indicate that a communal assembly had been called. In theory the village commune was an assembly of equals engaged in nonhierarchical political activity, signifying that all its members were mutually dependent on the support and assistance of their fellow villagers. Demands for the restoration of village autonomy and the protection of communal rights and privileges reflected this fundamental peasant political consciousness, which supplied the lifeblood of the peasant rebellion.[14]

The Peasant War was actually a “revolution of the common man,” Blickle argues. “Godly law and the Gospel [were] carried from the towns into the countryside by the preachers,” he avers, although religion cannot be separated from the economic tinder that fed the conflagration that swept over the revolutionary areas.

The limited coincidence of interests between peasants and burghers, in the shape of similar agrarian problems (farming towns), tax burdens (military levy, pallium), or encroachments on communal autonomy by territorial lords (there was an identity of interests with the miners), was strengthened by a common yearning for a more just, more Christian world.[15]

Religious zealotry gave a deep ideological dimension to class antagonisms in combating the long-hated privileged rulers and their ideologues. In central Germany alone, an estimated forty monasteries and castles were destroyed, and many cities, whether out of complicity or fear, opened their gates to the peasant armies. “The Word of God” became a rallying cry for various heterogeneous elements—professional soldiers, artisans, and plebeians—who rose with the peasants, in part as a religious expression of the rebels’ cause. Some sympathetic well-to-do burgher elements found the various Protestant tendencies useful as banners under which to unite peasants and plebeians who shared their hatred of the high clerics and nobles—at least, before betraying them. So effective was radical Protestantism as a banner that some canny leaders of the princes’ cause, such as the knight Gotz von Sickingen, a veteran of the earlier nobles’ revolt, did not hesitate to use it as a means to draw erstwhile allies of the peasants to the princes’ side.

Some princes used the war for opportunistic ends as well. The same Duke of Württemberg whom the Poor Conrad movement had fought so bitterly several years before adopted the name “Utz the Peasant” and tried to enlist peasants in order to regain control of his duchy. Knights who had been displaced by wealthy landed nobles and were now footloose were only too eager to join conflicts that held out the promise of real estate and a manorial way of life. Forming their own leagues or freebooting companies, they roamed the countryside seeking their fortunes and freely looting both sides alike for whatever wealth they could acquire. Although the knights were notoriously unreliable, as individuals and in groups they fitfully allied with the peasants, taught them the arts of war, and left behind a memory of social chivalry that German poets were to romanticize centuries later.

THE PEASANT TROOPS

Faced with the rising peasant tide, the Swabian League, now led by Truchsess Georg von Waldburg, continued its policy of delay. It still lacked sufficient troops to suppress the peasants. In one great delaying tactic, the “Twelve Articles” were actually submitted for arbitration to a commission that included Luther, his acolyte Philip Melancthon, and a representative of the princes and the emperor. Even though none of the commission’s members were peasants, basic interests were clearly at war between the nobles and peasants, and no appeals to brotherly love could possibly reconcile them.

Between February, when negotiations began, and the end of April 1525, the revolt spread until it ignited nearly all of southwestern Germany, notably the Black Forest and Upper Swabia. If only because of the perfidy and arrogance of the nobility, violence was inevitable between the peasantry and their rulers. Indeed, once the peasants decided to abandon the peaceful approach they initially had adopted, they organized themselves into formidable armies (bunderi) or “troops,” as they have been called, that were more than “mobs” of farmers poorly armed with scythes and bludgeons; in quite a few cases, they were equipped with firearms, cannon, and even some cavalry. Although these military forces were usually aided by professional military men, the Landsknechten, they were highly democratic in character, as was often the case with the militias of the era. Officers were elected by their units, and military plans were often made by the armed community, perhaps as “rings,” as a whole.

The course of the social revolution over such a wide expanse, the mobilizing of peasant troops at various centers, their crisscrossing and merging over large territories, their victories, and finally their defeats—all is too complex a story to tell briefly. Nearly two-thirds of present-day Germany was directly involved in this sweeping conflict at some time or another, and its effects were felt as far north as Gdansk, on the Baltic, and may have reverberated into the Slavic East. At least a dozen individual peasant troops gained prominence as the conflict unfolded—which should not diminish the importance of the many other troops that operated on a smaller scale in their localities. The revolution’s impact—its mistakes as well as its possibilities—can best be understood by singling out the activities of the major troops when the revolt was at its height.

As previously indicated, the earliest was the Hegau Troop, which had occupied Waldshut in October 1524 under the command of the Landsknecht Hans Muller, after the Stiihlingen affair. In February, a peasant insurrection in Upper Swabia produced the Baltringen Troop, which raised a revolutionary red flag and reached ten to twelve thousand men, making it one of the largest of the peasant forces in the field. During the same month, the Upper Allgau Troop of about seven thousand was formed at Schusser, and at Bermatingen, near Lake Constance, Eitel Hans formed the Lake Troop. Early in March, a Lower Allgau Troop of some seven thousand peasants established a camp near Wurzach. The Lake, Allgau, and Baltringer Troops together formed a Christian Union, whose common basis was the Twelve Articles, spreading the revolt across most of southern Germany. The Leipheim Troop was formed in the Danube area, so that at the beginning of March roughly six peasant armies were operating in Swabia, consisting of thirty to forty thousand armed insurgents—an overwhelming force by comparison with the much fewer numbers commanded by the ruthless Truchsess.

Individually, the peasant armies rarely exceeded seven thousand men, and they were often on the move, generally fighting independently of one another as they crisscrossed southern Germany. Altogether, they created an impressive record of destroying monasteries and castles. In major battles, the troops often came to each other’s assistance, and from time to time they held peasant congresses or convocations, usually at Heilbronn, on the Neckar River. Like Waldshut, Heilbronn became the political center for the peasant armies in Swabia and later Franconia.

In area after area and town after town, the war expanded. It swept northward to the upper reaches of Coburg in mid-April, reaching Saxony by the end of the month, and broadened out in the southeast to sweep into the Tyrol, Attergau, and parts of Austria by the beginning of May. In Salzburg the archbishop holed himself up in his castle in fear of his parishioners, and at Innsbruck, the Archduke Ferdinand refused to leave the city lest he be attacked by the peasants and their sympathizers in the city’s environs. Freiburg, too, capitulated to the peasants when the city opened its gates to them on May 24 1525.

Many clerics played a major role in the Peasant Wars, but not even a cursory summary of them can ignore the figure of Thomas Miinzer, who looms large in nearly all histories of the conflict, especially in Thuringia. An iconoclastic antagonist of Luther who sought to overthrow the social order and establish a godly society in its stead, Miinzer acquired an honored place in Marxist iconography owing particularly to the tribute that Friedrich Engels paid him as an Anabaptist advocate of communism—a view, in fact, that may have been extracted from him by torture. Perhaps far more influential in Thuringia, however, was the radical pastor of Mtlhlhausen, Heinrich Pfeiffer, who together with Miinzer dislodged the Miihlhausen town council in early 1525, replacing it with an “eternal council” that was to be a harbinger of the imminent coming of Christ and the earthly Kingdom of God. In May, the landgrave, Philip of Hesse, after a brief attack on Miihlhausen, offered to negotiate with the city and again used the time when peasants were considering his peace offer to redeploy his artillery effectively, slaughtering the hapless peasants in droves. Rather than die in battle, Miinzer tried to escape in disguise but was caught; at their hearing Pfeiffer remained stalwart, but Miinzer recanted his millenarian beliefs and took Catholic communion, which did not prevent both men from being beheaded.

At around the same time Martin Luther replied to the Twelve Articles of Memmingen in An Admonition to Peace: A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants of Swabia, which urged the peasants to be peaceful. A few weeks later, however, after the peasants’ “sedition” against the princes became “clear” to him—which was all the more irritating to him because they were “seditious” in the name of ideals that had an affinity with his own—Luther issued his infamous tirade Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants, savagely denouncing their movement and aligning himself with the princes.

MILITARY EVENTS

Had the peasant armies in southwestern Germany attacked the Swabian League at the outset of the war, they would certainly have inflicted a devastating defeat on the princes and nobles and thrashed Truchsess Georg, the infamous hangman of the Peasant War. But the overly trusting and charitable Baltringen, Allgau, and Lake Troops concluded an armistice with the Truchsess, who continued all the while to gather new forces to throw against the peasants. The nobility, for their part, with arrogant disregard for the peasants’ concerns, were temperamentally incapable of achieving even a semblance of the Christian brotherhood that the peasant articles so earnestly voiced.

Irrespective of the truce arrangements, the revolt spread into Franconia and to the border of Thuringia, where the peasants formed a seventh major force, the Bildhausen Troop, which demanded that the Empire be restructured to be run by a peasants’ parliament. Additionally, various peasant columns collected at Schoenthal to form an eighth major peasant army, the Gay Troop, a wellequipped force of some eight thousand men with cannons and three thousand guns. It was from this force that the Franconian knight Florian Geyer gathered his Black Host, a highly trained, well-disciplined, and select troop recruited mainly from peasant infantries and one that acted more resolutely and bravely than most of the other detachments. Although from a strictly military viewpoint Geyer was one of the most astute of the peasant leaders, he was also a welleducated man who had joined with the peasants out of a genuine belief in the rightness of their cause. Honorable and courageous, devoted to the movement, this remarkable man would die with his weapons in hand.

Still another ninth Franconian army, the Gay Bright Troop, was formed under the command of the knight G6tz von Berlichingen, while in Limpurg, the tenth, the Gaildorf or Common Gay Troop, a violent and very unreliable force, ultimately disbanded after alienating much of the population. The Wunnenstein Troop, commanded by Matern Feuerbacher, formed an eleventh major peasant army. Feuerbacher, an innkeeper, was noted for the moderateness of his political views, but he gained considerable respect for his military and organizational abilities. The twelfth troop, the Gay Christian Troop, was formed at Stuttgart. Additionally, many local groups were formed throughout southern Germany and often joined the larger troops or withdrew from them as occasion arose.

Despite the often extreme demands advanced by various peasant articles and radical clerics, the military aims of the peasants were very diffuse. They lacked a competent, accountable leadership, making do primarily with radical clerics and disaffected knights as military strategists. To have achieved even their more modest demands, they would have had to crush the Swabian League and its supporters completely. Indeed, they would have had to behave with a harshness comparable to that which the League inflicted upon them during and after their defeat. But in the absence of any coordinating, much less governing, power, each of the peasant armies often functioned very much on its own, with a degree of decentralization and often a wavering morale that imparted a decisive advantage to the gathering forces of the Swabian League.

In early April 1525, when the Leipheim Troop, under the leadership of the radical cleric Jacob Wehe, attacked the city of Leipheim, the Truchsess went into action. He crushed the troop and beheaded Wehe—a harbinger of defeats that the peasant armies were to suffer in May and June. On April 15, the Truchsess came face to face with a formidable peasant force, the Lake Constance army, before Weingarten, which could easily have routed him and decisively crushed the Swabian League; but he prudently negotiated a peace treaty with his plainly superior opponents, after which the rebels disbanded. This crucial, indeed decisive failure by the peasants would lead to their ultimate defeat. Still another major failure by the peasants occurred at Boblingen in May, when Feuerbacher ably deployed his united peasants and his cannon in a way that left the Truchsess confused and incapable of action. But once again the peasants were seduced into a truce, while the Truchsess shrewdly redeployed his forces to his own advantage. On May 12, while the truce was still in effect, the League suddenly attacked the peasants, who were guilelessly at their ease, and completely shattered them, ruthlessly hunting down and slaughtering those who were fleeing from his cavalry.

Not only did the Weingarten treaty and Bdblingen defeat eliminate the entire Wurttemberg insurrection, it demoralized all the insurgent forces, throwing them on the defensive and instilling new vigor in the nobility. The Swabian League’s cavalry, which was rightly regarded after its victories as a terrifying killing machine, was absolutely merciless in its treatment of wounded and captive peasants. The well-to-do citizens of Heilbronn surrendered the city to the Truchsess, while Geyer’s Black Host was decimated in a vain attack on Frauenberg, the nearly invincible castle of the Duke of Franconia, who was also the Bishop of WUrzburg and had become the primary target of the insurgents’ offensive in that area. As summer drew near, the dlan of the peasant armies gave way to demoralization. The Gay Bright Troop, during negotiations with the Truchsess, gradually melted away, and its treacherous commander, G5tz von Berlichingen (later immortalized in Goethe’s eponymous drama), seeing that the fortunes of the peasant cause had taken a turn for the worse, went over to the Swabian League, claiming to have always been a captive of the peasants. In a maneuver at Krautheim, the Truchsess enveloped eight thousand peasants who were equipped with thirty-two cannon and bloodily “dispersed” them—more properly, slaughtered them. In June 1525 at the village of Sulzdorf, League forces moved against Florian Geyer, who had combined the remaining six hundred men of his Black Host with other peasant forces. The Truchsess easily defeated this small peasant army. After an unrelenting five-day pursuit by the League’s cavalry, Geyer and his few men were cornered and perished in battle.

The remaining peasant armies were defeated one after another. Rottenburg fell to a patrician counterrevolution, as did Strasbourg and Frankfurt. In the Palatinate, a massacre of the peasants at Pfeddersheim on May 23 and the capture of Weifienburg on July 7 left only two peasant armies intact in southern Germany: the Hegau-Black Forest and Allgau Troops. The Peasant War now turned on itself. The Lake Troop, which had earlier come to terms with its nobility with the Treaty of Weingarten, was now brought into service against its own brethren in the Hegau Troop. The same Hans Muller who had played so important a role at the outset of the war now encouraged the Hegau Troop to disperse. Muller himself had joined the nobles and later ended his days in Switzerland. Engagements now were marked by further treasonable defections, and by agreements to honor peasant demands that were followed by betrayals of truces. On December 6, after several engagements, agreements, and betrayals, the last insurgent Black Forest troops and their allies surrendered the last peasant stronghold, Waldshut, to the nobles.

The failure of the peasant troops to attack the Truchsess at Weingarten cost them an extraordinary number of lives in the months that followed, both in Franconia and in Thuringia. For every noble’s life that was lost, ten to fifty peasants were killed, a terrible ratio that the ruling classes were only too eager to inflict on the peasantry but that the long-servile peasantry were not prepared to claim from the nobility. After each defeat not only were the peasants brutally hunted down, but their villages were razed, their livestock slaughtered, their women and children driven homeless into the open, and their leaders brutally tortured. The number of rebels killed during the conflict in Swabia and Franconia reached such appalling proportions that the nobility ultimately had to desist lest they lose their workforce.

The outcome of the conflict over the long run was disastrous. Political life of southern and central Germany was set back for centuries, not only because of the ruthless determination of the ruling classes but also in no small measure as a result of the peasants’ own naivete and Christian humility. The princes achieved the absolute power they sought, while none of the peasants’ demands were met. To be sure, the peasant war continued in Germany for a century in the form of limited and sporadic uprisings, but the Thirty Years War of 1618–48 reduced the country to ruins and wiped out an estimated one-third of its population, ending all hope of a new social dispensation for generations.

In assessing why the Peasant War failed, at least militarily, Scott and Scribner pithily observe that while there

were disparities in military experience and equipment [which favored the nobles], these were often compensated for [by the peasants] by shrewd tactics. Political failure, miscalculation, loss of nerve, and divided or inadequate leadership complicated the military equation, so that it cannot be claimed that the peasants were defeated simply because of their military inadequacy. The mischief of historical accident played more than a passing role, in that the conditions for success never ripened simultaneously throughout the various areas of revolt, or did not do so in ways that impelled any lasting domino effect, so vital for success. Just as the Franconian rebellion began to pick up impetus, the Upper Swabian rebellion ran out of steam and only revived after the challenge of the central German and Franconian movements was decisively blunted.[16]

In any case, the defeat of the peasants and the steady erosion of their democratic village communes foreclosed the possibility of a populist confederal German nation. It was not until the nineteenth century that the German states, duchies, and cities were to be unified into a single nation—and then mainly by Prussian militarists and the Hohenzollern dynasty, who created the authoritarian tradition that the German people were to inherit into the century that followed.