Revolution and Religious Reform in Germany and Switzerland

In the early years of his political career, then, Charles V was challenged in quick succession by revolts in both Iberia and Germany. At the other pole of his far-flung accumulation of political territory—in the Austrian Habsburg patrimonial domain and more generally in the diverse territories of the empire—the patterns of political contestation that Charles V faced were, at first blush, far more complex and confusing, and not only because German politics were infused by religious controversy and enthusiasm. The extreme segmentation of political authority in the German-Roman Empire—both geographically in hundreds of more or less self-regulating political units and constitutionally in the welter of overlapping and often competing hierarchies that characterized the governing institutions of the empire—preserved an immense variety of political spaces in which ordinary people could, and in fact did, initiate their own challenges to those who claimed authority over them.^[1] Not surprisingly, then, by comparison with the Comunero Revolt, the Revolution of 1525 in Germany was both more diffuse and, at bottom, less of a direct threat to Charles’s political sovereignty because it was most often directed at his political subordinates.^[2]

This “revolution of the common man,” as Peter Blickle has described it, was predicated on the creation of relatively loose and informal coalitions among locally mobilized peasant groups as well as artisans and common laborers on the fringes of southern Germany’s many cities and in the adjoining cantons of the Swiss Confederation. What brought them together in a common cause was the ideal of a community-based church demanding faithful preaching of the “pure gospel” and a “godly law” that applied to rulers and subjects alike (Blickle 1981, 1992). Though it is tempting, in retrospect, to emphasize the breadth of the coalitions, to highlight the enormous geographic spread of the insurrection, and even to speak of the whole complex of events in the singular form of the term “revolution,” it is important for our purposes to disaggregate this historical composite and to locate the political actions of ordinary people within their respective political spaces.

The basic, constituent unit of popular insurrection in sixteenth-century Europe, as many scholars have suggested, was the local community—whether that of the rural village or that of the chartered town—and the Revolution of 1525 was no exception (cf. Sabean 1976). As it happened, the German peasant mobilization began at Stühlingen in the Hegau in June 1524 when several hundred tenants of Count Siegmund von Lupfen rebelled against the exactions imposed by their lord. They chose as their leader a former mercenary, Hans Müller, and quickly worked out an alliance with the nearby town of Waldshut, where a popular preacher named Balthasar Hubmaier had galvanized opposition to the town’s more distant Austrian overlord. When these in turn allied with the city of Zürich, the authorities were forced to play for time while the peasants of Stühlingen, where it had all started, submitted their grievances formally to the Reichskammergericht (Imperial Chamber Court) for adjudication within the legal framework of the empire. Meanwhile, the rebel forces led by Müller forced the capitulation of Freiburg-im-Breisgau.^[3] Finally in 1525, following inconclusive talks between the rebels and the Austrian officials, the revolt burned itself out.

Similar scenarios—albeit often with more violent endings—were played out in Swabia, Franconia, Thuringia, and the Tyrol, as local resistance to lordly, princely, or imperial exactions aggregated under the leadership of skilled soldiers, urban artisans and lawyers, or popular preachers. The soldiers and their military skills were important to such movements because as local resistance fused into regional insurrection, the most likely response from established rulers was a military campaign.^[4] The artisans and lawyers were important because they helped to bridge the political and social gap between city and countryside. The preachers were important because their radical religious populism served powerfully to unite otherwise very diverse people in a common cause: the cause of “godly justice.” ^[5] Still, the most basic political interaction was between a variety of local rulers and their immediate subjects—rulers and subjects as various as the many fragments of sovereignty that dotted central and southern Germany, including many parts of modern-day Switzerland and Austria. The individual stories of the many popular actors in this complex drama converged on the theme of opposition to what were considered the illegitimate or excessive exactions of rulers. Undoubtedly the most common, but by the same token the least visible, form of this opposition was simple evasion, often by individuals but sometimes collectively in the form of rent strikes or refusals to pay the tithe. But in the previous hundred years, this basic dynamic had spilled over with increasing frequency into larger collective actions in the form of violent rebellions. In the first half of the fifteenth century there were seven such regional revolts; in the second half of the fifteenth century, fourteen. In the first twenty-five years of the sixteenth century, there were no less than eighteen (Blickle 1979).

In this sense, the scenario of 1524–1525 was well rehearsed; the claims, the claim makers, and the basic forms of claim making must at least have been familiar to those involved. What was truly unprecedented was the magnitude of the historical convergence: in all, hundreds of thousands of ordinary people served at one time or another in the “peasant” armies; as many as 130,000 may have died in the fighting or in the subsequent repression; virtually all areas of central and southern Germany, with the notable exception of Bavaria, were touched by the conflicts.^[6] We must be careful, however, neither to overestimate nor to underestimate the achievement of the rebels. The convergence of so many discrete rebel movements was far from complete. Though they clustered in a very concentrated period and shared many essential characteristics, the regional uprisings were not directly connected with one another; nor were they well integrated on a regional scale (in both Swabia and Franconia, for example, there were multiple armies under discrete leadership). Nevertheless, these popular mobilizations outstripped, for a time at least, the ability of established rulers to repress them—not only individual lords and princes, but even imperial aggregations like the Swabian League.

In this regard, we cannot but be impressed by the leaders of the movements, often of relatively humble origin themselves, who organized massive armies within the narrow limitations of an agrarian society. Because so many were active in agriculture, the soldiers in the rebel armies often were allowed to serve for only short periods, so that each would in turn be able to tend to his own crops at regular intervals.^[7] Besides fielding massive armies, the movements’ leaders frequently brought together deliberative “peasant” assemblies, negotiated informal alliances with other rebels across existing territorial boundaries, and produced manifestos like that of the peasants of Swabia. From some three hundred grievance lists, the authors of the Twelve Articles not only distilled a common list of grievances regarding the disposition of common resources, the collection of tithes, and the imposition of unpaid labor services, they also articulated a vision of the future that could inspire and unite very diverse people across a broad terrain. In a “godly” society, indeed, ordinary people would be both personally “free” (see article 3, quoted above) and collectively in charge of their religious welfare (see article 1 by which the local community asserts the right to choose its own pastor); rulers, meanwhile, would be clearly limited by the precepts of divine justice.^[8] The “Revolution” of 1525 may in this regard be considered the most dramatic example of the way in which the sixteenth-century Reformation provided ordinary Europeans with, to borrow Euan Cameron’s expression, “their first lessons in political commitment to a universal ideology” (1991: 422).

Still, on the face of it, this broad challenge to the political and religious establishment was, like the Comunero Revolt, a failure: in the immediate sense that the many armies of the various movements either gave up without a fight or were soundly defeated in lopsided battles; and in the larger sense that the leaders of the movement were, on the whole, unable to institutionalize their radical religious reforms and to realize their populist visions of a more egalitarian “godly” society. In the absence of major defections from the ranks of the political elites or significant outside support, this massive popular mobilization gave way to the firm consolidation of elite control in the German countryside (see fig. 2b). This is not to say, however, that the peasant uprisings in southern and central Germany were completely unsuccessful. As recent research has shown, in some areas the movements achieved both specific concessions with regard to some of their immediate demands and long-term reforms of the political and judicial systems. In the long run, the judicial changes in particular had far-reaching implications for the interactions of rulers and subjects within the fragmented jurisdictions of the German Empire because they legitimated the formal appeal of popular grievances to imperial authorities (Schulze 1984; Trossbach 1987).

The failure of the Revolution of 1525 to dislodge the established political order within the empire was also, of course, relative to the boundaries of the empire itself. Just beyond the effective reach of imperial authorities—in the complex jurisdictions of the Swiss Confederation—the process of religious reformation intersected with the process of revolutionary conflict in a rather different sense that opened greater opportunities for the success of religious reformations in the countryside (Peyer 1978; Blickle 1992; Gordon 1992; Greyerz 1994). There the Oath Confederation (Eidgenossenschaft) of just three forested mountain districts or cantons had first been formed as a common defense against feudal domination already in the late thirteenth century, and it went through several phases of crisis and expansion before its armed citizens, in one of their most heroic moments, defeated the formidable armies of Emperor Maximilian I in 1499 and thereby seemed to secure their de facto independence and the principle of communal self-governance for the foreseeable future. Within the diverse territories of the confederation, then, the more or less accomplished fact of revolution ensured that rural communities stood in a rather different relationship to the political process of religious reformation (Bonjour, Offler, and Potter 1952; Luck 1985).

In the large city-state cantons of Zürich and Bern, for example, municipal authorities formally adopted Protestant worship in the 1520s and began actively promoting the reformation of religion in their rural hinterlands as well. In the smaller core cantons of Luzern, Uri, Schwytz, and Unterwalden, by contrast, Protestantism made few inroads, and local authorities stalwartly defended the established religious order (cf. Blickle 1992: 167). In several remarkable situations, however, the question of religious orientation—the choice for or against the new evangelical preaching and experimentation in worship—was left to individual rural communities within a canton. In 1528, the city-state of Bern, as part of the process of introducing Protestant worship, conducted a systematic consultation (Ämterbefragung) of the rural population which, as expected by its organizers, produced a handsome majority—though by no means unanimous consent—for the Reformation. Meanwhile, in the rural cantons of Appenzell and Glarus, Landesgemeinden (general meetings of all full citizens) decided that each individual community should have the right to choose for or against the religious reforms; in both cases, the subsequent decision-making process left the cantons religiously divided (Fischer, Schläpfer, and Stark 1964; Wick 1982). A similar pattern of religious division as a consequence of local decision making emerged to the southeast of the confederation in Graubünen (Blickle 1992; Head 1997). But what is particularly instructive about these Swiss examples is that when an essentially completed process of political revolution gave them the truly extraordinary opportunity to choose either for or against the Reformation, they did both: The various rural communities of Switzerland chose both for and against the project of religious reform and not necessarily one or the other.