SUMMER OF FIRE AND BLOOD

History of a great peasant uprising during the heart of the Reformation.

The German Peasants’ War of 1525, writes Roper, “was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution.” As the Oxford historian recounts, the uprising was fueled by Martin Luther’s concurrent revolt against the Catholic Church, although its roots as a movement of resistance against feudalism began far earlier. In the end, Luther’s call for freedom did not extend to the poor, and the theologian sided with the lords in a season of repression that ended with the deaths of as many as 100,000 peasants. That the Reformation was entwined with the Peasants’ War was in large measure because the Catholic Church was itself a feudal power, with estates that demanded free labor and shares of the harvest on the part of a peasantry already beset by low crop yields during the Little Ice Age. The revolt led to the collapse of monastic political power in many parts of Germany. In some instances the equerry sided with the peasantry, but the lords were naturally in a better position to fund and field armies to crush the revolt. Crushed the revolt soon was, though not without results: Feudalism effectively ended in Germany, while “after the war, the Reformation and the resultant secularisation, dissolution, and simple closure of so many monasteries and convents accomplished one of the greatest transfers of land and property ever seen in the German region.” As Roper writes in her worthy rejoinder to Norman Cohn’s classic Pursuit of the Millennium, whereas in England most clerical wealth landed in the hands of the nobility, in Germany it “increased the power of the state,” as manifested in the founding of schools and universities, social service agencies, and the like.

Capably recounting a forgotten episode in European history, Roper’s book is full of lessons for modern readers.