When Germany Waged War on Itself

The German Peasants’ War of 152425 is difficult to summarise neatly.

It was a brief and inglorious conflict that left Germans with few heroes to be celebrated in song and stone.

Most of the peasants who took part in the fighting likely didn’t see their struggle as a “war” at all, in fact, but rather had taken up arms in response to local grievances relating to lordly (and monastic) abuses of their traditional powers.

The document is sometimes venerated as a German take on Magna Carta , the authors were just as concerned with religious reform as they were with securing new political and economic rights.

The peasants’ demand that inheritance taxes be abolished was based on the claim that impoverishing widows and orphans would be a shameful slight upon God’s will.

The document foreshadows schism points that would mark the coming doctrinal battles between Protestants and Catholics .

In 1534 , a charismatic Anabaptist named Jan Matthys seized control of Münster , a city in North Rhine-Westphalia that he then presided over as a “ New Jerusalem ” He led a dozen of his most fanatic followers into a massacre against the city’s princely besiegers.

By the time princely troops finally captured the city and put John of Leiden to death, his movement had degenerated into little more than a violent doomsday sex cult.