Chapter 7: The Reformation as Revolution

In the spring of 1525, a furrier named Sebastian Lotzer sat in the Imperial Free City of Memmingen, in Upper Swabia, and turned twenty-five villages' worth of grievances into twelve articles.

The villages surrounding Memmingen had been petitioning for months — complaints about serfdom, land use restrictions, forest rights, church tithes. Lotzer synthesised them. Christoph Schappeler, the town's leading Protestant minister, supplied the theological scaffolding — grounding each demand in Scripture. On March 6, about fifty representatives of the Upper Swabian peasant groups met in Memmingen to agree on a common stance. Nine days later, they adopted the Twelve Articles and the Bundesordnung — the Federal Order.

Within two months, over twenty-five thousand copies had been printed. It was the largest print run of a political document in European history to that date. And its demands were not abstract.

Article 1: each community chooses its own minister. Article 2: the grain tithe is acceptable, but the livestock tithe is not — "the Lord God created cattle for the free use of man." Article 3: the abolition of serfdom, and the argument is theological — "Christ has delivered and redeemed us all, without exception, by the shedding of his precious blood, the lowly as well as the great. Accordingly it is consistent with Scripture that we should be free." Article 4: the right to hunt game and fish in open waterways. Article 5: the right to gather firewood from forests the nobility had enclosed. Articles 6 and 7: limits on labour obligations. Article 8: fair rents. Article 9: consistent legal punishments — no more invented penalties. Article 10: restoration of common lands appropriated by lords. Article 11: abolition of the death tax extracted from widows and orphans. Article 12: a remarkable self-limiting clause — if any of these demands could be shown to be contrary to Scripture, the peasants would withdraw it.

Read the list carefully. These are not the inchoate demands of an enraged mob. They are specific, referenced, and grounded in a constitutional logic. The peasants were not asking for the overthrow of all authority. They were asking for the enforcement of principles that their own rulers claimed to believe. They were holding the system to its own stated coherence — and the system was failing the test.

The theological logic was borrowed directly from Luther, and Luther knew it.

Sola scriptura — Scripture alone — was Luther's weapon against the papal hierarchy. But the peasants took that weapon and aimed it at a different target. If Scripture is the sole authority in matters of faith, why not also in matters of governance? If all Christians are equal before God — Luther's "priesthood of all believers" — then on what scriptural basis does serfdom rest? If the congregation, not the hierarchy, holds spiritual authority, then why should communities not elect their own leaders?

Luther had opened a door. The peasants walked through it. And Luther slammed it shut.

His initial response — Admonition to Peace, published in April 1525 — was sympathetic. He castigated the rulers for exploiting those God had entrusted to their care. But he firmly rejected violence. Christians must suffer injustice rather than rebel. Romans 13: "Let every person be subject to the governing authorities."

Then came Weinsberg. On April 25, 1525, rebels killed Count Ludwig von Helfenstein and his escorts by forcing them to run a gauntlet of pikes. Reports of peasant atrocities multiplied. Hecklers disrupted Luther's sermons. Within days, he wrote the text that would define his legacy among common people for centuries.

"Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants" — composed between May 4 and 6 — is among the most violent things Luther ever put on paper. The peasants had broken their oath of obedience and "forfeited body and soul." They were "highwaymen and murderers." The princes should "smite, strangle, and stab, secretly or openly, for nothing can be more poisonous, hurtful, or devilish than a rebel." Anyone who died fighting the peasants died a martyr's death.

The pamphlet found a ready audience among the princes. The war that followed was not a war. It was a slaughter. At its height, three hundred thousand peasant insurgents had taken the field across Swabia, Franconia, and Thuringia — the largest popular uprising Europe would see before 1789. By its end, an estimated one hundred thousand were dead. At Boblingen, the Swabian League lost perhaps forty soldiers. The peasants lost three thousand. At Frankenhausen, the princes' forces suffered six casualties, two of them merely wounded. The insurgents lost six thousand.

The peasants felt Luther's reversal as betrayal. They were right to. He had given them the tools — the hermeneutical principle, the egalitarian theology, the contempt for institutional corruption — and then condemned them for using those tools to demand what the tools logically implied.

If Luther's revolution was the one that flinched, Thomas Muntzer's was the one that did not.

Muntzer had started as Luther's follower and become his opposite. The divide was epistemological. Luther held to the text — sola scriptura, the written word as the sole channel of divine truth. Muntzer held to the experience — what he called the "inner Word," God speaking directly to the believer "in the deeps of the soul through the revelation of God." He did not reject Scripture, but he insisted it was insufficient without the living voice. "The word of the living God," he wrote, "is nothing but Christ, the Logos that is incarnate in the human heart" — a formulation drawn from Dominican mysticism and deliberately opposed to Luther's textual grounding.

The political consequence was immediate. Luther's model enabled institutional religion: a shared text, trained interpreters, a stable source of authority. Muntzer's model enabled charismatic authority: whoever claims the strongest revelation leads. Luther accused Muntzer of opening the door to chaos — if anyone can claim God speaks to them directly, there is no shared standard of truth. Muntzer accused Luther of replacing one form of dead authority with another — the static written text for the corrupt papal hierarchy. Both were right about the other's danger. Neither could see his own.

In July 1524, Muntzer preached before Duke John of Saxony at Allstedt — the famous Sermon to the Princes, structured as a new Daniel interpreting dreams for the powerful. He called on the princes to join the divinely ordained revolution against the godless. When they refused, he concluded they were among the godless themselves, and the common people would have to act alone. Scholars identify this sermon as the moment apocalyptic thought shifted from passive waiting to active engagement — from expecting God to intervene to insisting that the elect must be God's instruments. The theological implication was radical: human agency is required for divine justice.

At Frankenhausen, on May 15, 1525, Muntzer led eight thousand peasants, armed with scythes and flails, against the professional forces of Philip of Hesse and Duke George of Saxony. A rainbow appeared during the battle — Muntzer had used a rainbow as his banner and told his followers it was a sign from God. The rainbow did not save them. Between three and ten thousand insurgents died. Six of the princes' soldiers were wounded. Muntzer was captured in a cellar, tortured for information, beheaded, and his head displayed on a pole.

Luther's two-kingdoms doctrine became the dominant Protestant political theology: God rules the world through two separate governments, spiritual and temporal. The spiritual kingdom is Christ's domain; the temporal kingdom belongs to princes and magistrates. Obedience to temporal authority is a religious duty. The architecture that resulted was clear: reformation of the church, preservation of the state. New theology, same power structure.

Across the Rhine and the Alps, other reformers were building different architectures entirely.

In Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli merged church and state into one body: "The Christian man is nothing else but a faithful and good citizen and the Christian city nothing other than the Christian church." The magistrate enforced religious reform; the church legitimised civic governance. It was the closest thing to a theocratic republic that mainstream Protestantism produced — and it worked, within limits, until the Anabaptists proposed a more radical principle: the total separation of the believers' church from the institutions of government. The dispute between Zwingli and the Anabaptists was not theological decoration. It was a fundamental governance question that remains unresolved: should faith and power be united, separated, or held in tension?

In Geneva, John Calvin created the Consistory — five pastors and twelve lay elders who met every Thursday to exercise church discipline. Calvin was more careful than Luther or Zwingli to separate church from state: both the rulers of the church and the civil magistrates were directly responsible to God, but they did not rule over each other. The result was a system of parallel authorities — what later political theorists would recognise as an early form of the separation of powers. Calvin's system of governance by elected elders became the template for presbyterianism — and, through that lineage, one of the tributaries feeding into representative government.

In the Netherlands, the Dutch Revolt produced the most forward-looking governance innovation of the era. The Act of Abjuration of 1581 articulated, for the first time in European law, a contractual theory of sovereignty: "The people were not created by God for the sake of the prince, but rather the prince was established for the sake of the subjects, without which he would not be a prince." When the prince governs tyrannically, the people may lawfully depose him. Thomas Jefferson would draw on its structure and arguments nearly two centuries later.

The Dutch Republic that emerged was genuinely novel: a confederation governed by a representative assembly, with provincial sovereignty, religious toleration written into its founding charter, and a political philosophy — commercial republicanism — in which commerce formed the mainstay of politics. It was oligarchic, not democratic. It preserved the class structure and launched a colonial project as ruthless as any European power's. But it changed how governance worked — collective decision-making, toleration as structural policy, the right of resistance as legal principle. Of all the Reformation's political children, the Dutch Republic came closest to redesigning the environment rather than merely replacing the operators.

And then there was Münster.

In February 1534, Anabaptist followers of the Dutch baker and prophet Jan Matthys seized control of the Westphalian city, expelled all non-Anabaptists, and declared it the New Jerusalem. Matthys instituted communal ownership of property, compulsory rebaptism, and a wave of iconoclasm. On Easter Sunday, he led a sortie of twelve followers against the besieging army, apparently believing himself the second Gideon. He was killed. His head was placed on a pole visible from the walls. His genitals were nailed to the city gate.

His successor, the twenty-five-year-old Jan van Leiden — a former tailor — proclaimed himself King David's heir, instituted compulsory polygamy (he took sixteen wives), abolished money, and imposed the death penalty for blasphemy, adultery, and disobedience. The siege lasted sixteen months. Starvation ravaged the city. When it fell, van Leiden and two associates were publicly tortured — their bodies torn with red-hot tongs for an hour — then executed. Their corpses were placed in iron cages and hung from the steeple of St. Lambert's Church.

The cages are still there. They survived the Second World War bombing, falling to the ground when the church was hit, barely scratched. They were rehung. At night, each cage is now softly lit from within, casting an eerie glow — one of the most haunting monuments in Germany, a five-hundred-year-old reminder of what happens when revolutionary certainty meets absolute power, and loses.

The Reformation's final cost was paid between 1618 and 1648.

The Thirty Years' War began as a religious conflict within the Holy Roman Empire and became a continental catastrophe. The demographic evidence is devastating: German-speaking lands experienced an overall population decline of thirty to forty percent. Mecklenburg, Pomerania, and Württemberg lost nearly half their people. Local records reveal that direct military action caused only three percent of civilian deaths. Bubonic plague killed sixty-four percent. Starvation killed twelve percent. The war destroyed not through combat but through the collapse of agriculture, the displacement of populations, and the epidemic diseases that followed armies and refugee columns. A 2023 study found that the war's effects on violent crime were still measurable in the late nineteenth century — over two hundred and fifty years later.

The Peace of Westphalia, which ended the war in 1648, is routinely credited with creating the modern state system. It did not. The word "sovereignty" does not appear in the treaties. There is no principle of non-interference — the treaties actually mandated religious toleration as an international responsibility. There is no system of independent nation-states — the treaties restructured the Holy Roman Empire, which continued to exist. As the political scientist Andreas Osiander has shown, the "Westphalian myth" was constructed from recycled seventeenth-century propaganda, taken up by nineteenth-century historians who found exactly what they needed.

But myths, once believed, become constitutive. The idea that Westphalia established sovereign equality — even though the treaties say no such thing — has shaped how states understand and justify their behaviour for centuries. The myth became real by being believed. This is, perhaps, the Reformation's most characteristic legacy: not the institutions it built but the stories it told about those institutions, stories that outlived the events and governed the future more powerfully than the treaties ever could.

The Reformation was the hinge. Before it, revolution looked backward — to a golden age, an apostolic purity, an ancestral right that had been violated. After it, revolution began to look forward — to designed constitutions, contractual sovereignty, new architectures of governance that had never existed before. The Twelve Articles still invoked Scripture as their authority. But the Bundesordnung envisioned a new federal order. The Act of Abjuration appealed to ancient privileges. But the Republic it justified was something genuinely new.

This is the chapter's structural role in the chronicle. The backward-looking instinct and the forward-looking instinct coexisted in the same generation, sometimes in the same document. What made the Reformation a revolution — rather than just another reform — was that it broke the monopoly. Once the principle was established that sacred institutions could be redesigned, the template for designed futures became available to everyone. Luther had not intended this. The peasants had understood it more clearly than he did. And the future would be built not by the reformers who flinched, but by the ones who followed the logic wherever it led.