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1524-1525Reputable source · 2 sourcesWell documented

The German Peasants' War Ends in Mass Slaughter

The largest popular uprising in Europe before the French Revolution is crushed by noble armies

On the timeline · around 1524-1525 · Printing, Reformation, and the Thirty Years WarPrinting, Reformation, and the Thirty Years WarThe German Peasants' War Ends in Mass Slaughter14751500152515501575

Quick facts

Duration
1524-1525
Region
Southern and central German-speaking lands
Estimated deaths
Approximately 100,000
Key document
The Twelve Articles (peasant demands)

What happened

Beginning in the summer and fall of 1524, peasants across the southern German-speaking lands rose up against the noble landowning class, driven by heavy feudal dues, the absence of legal rights for serfs, and a hope, fed partly by Luther's own religious reform movement, that a broader social transformation might be possible. The rebellion spread across a broad swath of the Holy Roman Empire before noble armies, far better armed and organized than the peasant bands, crushed it in 1525 after a series of engagements that were often massacres rather than battles. An estimated 100,000 peasants and lower-class fighters were killed in the fighting and its aftermath, with additional deaths from starvation after farmland was destroyed.

Why it matters

The war's defeat entrenched the power of the German territorial nobility for generations and showed how far the Reformation's religious argument for individual conscience would not extend to a matching argument for social and economic equality; Luther himself denounced the rebelling peasants. The scale of the killing, roughly 100,000 dead in a population far smaller than modern Germany's, made it the bloodiest internal conflict in German lands before the Thirty Years War a century later.

How we know

The war is documented through surviving peasant grievance documents, chiefly the Twelve Articles that summarized the rebels' demands, and through contemporary chronicles and correspondence from both noble and peasant sides.

Sources

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