Does history really have "turning points? The more deeply one looks into it, the less apt that metaphor seems. Human history is a long flow of events, accidents, and choices that could lead in different directions, but which are never entirely dictated by what came before and are uncertain in what future they may portend.
But, oh, are there moments when something epic seems to have come along!
Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War by Lyndal Roper, a senior Oxford historian revisits one such moment which, looking backward, we seem to periodically notice and then forget. In 1525, in the wake of Luther's destabilization of Western Christendom, in what is now modern Germany, peasants undertook to overturn feudal society and it looked for a moment as if their marching columns had succeeded.
The German Peasants' War was the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution. ... Peasants massed in armed bands in one region, then another, and rebellions would break out even in areas far away. At its height it involved well over a hundred thousand people, perhaps many more, who joined with the rebels to bring about a new world of Christian brotherhood. And for several months they won. Authority and rulership collapsed ... People even began to dream of a new order.
But this moment didn't last. ... The forces of the lords put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy thousand and a hundred thousand peasants. ...
Insofar as the revolt can be said to have had an intellectual inspiration, Martin Luther's Freedom of a Christian published in 1520 served, despite Luther's quick repudiation of these ungoverned rebels. But the peasants, with input from other reforming clergy, created their own manifesto.
For them, freedom mean ending serfdom ... the peasants themselves ... formulated their complaints. The Twelve Articles then became a document that the movement everywhere acknowledged, even when the rebels didn't know exactly what the articles contained, and even though many areas revised them to suit local circumstances. Soon they were printed using the new technology made possible by the invention of moveable type, and they spread all over Germany. You could pick them up and hold them in your hand, point to each demand and the biblical passages that proved their godliness.
... The passions and dreams that drove the movement can seem inchoate, naive, and contradictory. ... this was not a movement driven by the literate few. It was a mass struggle by individuals who risked and lost their lives to try to bring about a new world. ...
The vision that drove them was about humans' relationship to creation. They were angry that lords claimed ownership of natural resources-- the water, the common land, the woods and forests -- when these were God's creation, given to all. They were enraged that the lords had stolen their freedom and claimed to own them when, as Luther showed, Christ had bought us all with his precious blood,"thus the Bible proves that we are free and want to be free." They were incensed by the growing inequality they saw around them ... They wanted men to live as brothers, in mutual obligation, not as lords and serfs. Theirs was an unabashedly male ideal, nourished by bonding amongst the peasant fighters, though that doesn't mean that women didn't support it too. They wanted decisions to be made collectively and to manage natural resources in a way that would respect the environment that God had created. ...
... for most of the war, the peasants were nonviolent; they humiliated but did not kill their lords. They questioned the established order at just the moment when capitalism was expanding and when Europeans were encountering new worlds, but they did not necessarily want to destroy authority of all kinds. Yet the authorities destroyed them, obliterated their movement, and built the structures of the current world on its ashes.
Roper's account of the peasants' brief but unprecedented revolt is detailed and granular. This is fascinating narrative history which for an American needs to be read alongside maps.
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The peasants' war is a huge historical event which 1) tends to be dropped from most accounts of early modern European history because its implications remain unclear, except that 2) Friedrich Engels brought a tendentious explanation of it to the fore in the context of articulating 19th century socialist thinking.
Roper's conclusion is her contribution to this historiography, to the academic theories and debates about what sort of frame in which to put the eruption. Here are some of those points, quotations from the book unless bracketed:
• ... [the peasants] were angry at how the lords treated them, but explaining the revolt in economic terms is not enough. Many richer peasants and even burghers joined the revolt ... if anything, conditions might have been improving as peasants engaged in markets and a long period of economic upswing continued after the Black Death.
• ... the Reformation brought a religious transformation that did far more than legitimize or justify previous attacks on the abuses of feudalism; it brought a new vision of freedom, and of relations between human being as the environment. ... as some put it, all of us, rich and poor alike, are Christ's 'aigen,' his 'own', the same word as for serfs.
• ... Marching together or taking over monasteries and convents allowed peasants to experience together a life of plenitude, where there was enough meat for all and more wine and beer than you could drink, a life of comradeship and brotherhood, not of dour monastic asceticism. These were ideals for which people were willing to fight. ... All could subscribe to the Twelve Articles, even those who did not know its specific contents. ... The rebels hatred of princes and 'top dogs' was now sealed in blood and gone was any reverence for rulers.
• ... the movement was held together by male bonding ... it is hard to know whether women would have felt included in their men's demands though the revolt could not have succeeded without women's support in running the farms and gardens their menfolk had left.
• ... the peasants' failure to bring the large towns in ... the cities were simply too populous, rich, powerful and well-armed to be seriously threatened by a peasant army.
• ... [yet] the peasants flattened the towers of lordship and wiped out the sacred geography of pilgrimage and monasticism. ... the war permanently undermined the power of the lesser nobility ...
• ... the ideas and dreams that had been formed in the war did not disappear but lived on in Anabaptism and in many varieties of radical thought. ... The war's legacy of blood desacralized lordship ...
It's easy to think and feel that the present moment is another hinge point, a turning of some sort, what with climate change on top of the decay of Western capitalism and democracy. Maybe it is and maybe it isn't. But Roper's volume casts light on a time that felt and perhaps still appears to have been such a moment. I recommend it.
