also infringed upon, and the lay princes understood how to exploit the people’s
hatred also
in this direction. Thus we have seen how the Abbot of Fulda was relegated from a feudal
lord of Philipp of Hesse to the position of his vassal. Thus the city of Kempten forced the
ecclesiastical prince to sell to it for a trifle a series of precious privileges which he enjoyed
in the city.
The
nobility had also suffered considerably. Most of its castles were destroyed, and a
number of its most respected families were ruined and could find means of subsistence
only in the service of the princes. Its powerlessness in relation to the peasants was proven.
It had been beaten everywhere and forced to surrender. Only the armies of the princes had
saved it. The nobility was bound more and more to lose its significance as a free estate
under the empire and to fall under the dominion of the princes.
Nor did the
cities generally gain any advantages from the Peasant War. The rule of the
honourables was almost everywhere reestablished with new force,
and the opposition of
the middle-class remained broken for a long time. Old patrician routine thus dragged on,
hampering commerce and industry in every way, up to the French Revolution. Moreover,
the cities were made responsible by the princes for the momentary successes which the
middle-class or plebeian parties had achieved within their confines during the struggle.
Cities which had previously belonged to the princes were forced to pay heavy indemnities,
robbed of their privileges, and made subject to the avaricious willfulness of the princes
(Frankenhausen, Arnstadt, Schmalkalden, Wurzburg, etc.), cities of the empire were
incorporated into territories of the princes (Muehlhausen), or they were at least placed
under moral dependence on the princes
of the adjoining territory, as was the case with
many imperial cities in Franconia.
The sole gainers under these conditions were the
princes. We have seen at the
beginning of our exposition that low development of industry, commerce and agriculture
made the centralisation of the Germans into a
nation impossible, that it allowed only local
and provincial centralisation, and that the princes, representing centralisation within
disruption, were the only class to profit from every change in
the existing social and
political conditions. The state of development of Germany in those days was so low and at
the same time so different in various provinces, that along with lay principalities there
could still exist ecclesiastical sovereignties, city republics, and sovereign counts and
barons. Simultaneously, however, this development was continually, though slowly and
feebly, pressing towards provincial centralisation, towards subjugating
all imperial estates
under the princes. It is due to this that only the princes could gain by the ending of the
Peasant War. This happened in reality. They gained not only relatively, through the
weakening of their opponents, the clergy, the nobility and the cities, but also absolutely
The Peasant War in Germany
– 87 –
through the prizes of war which they collected. The church estates were secularised in their
favour; part of the nobility, fully or partly ruined, was obliged
gradually to place itself in
their vassalage; the indemnities of the cities and peasantry swelled their treasuries, which,
with the abolition of so many city privileges, had now obtained a much more extended
field for financial operations.
The decentralisation of Germany, the widening and strengthening of which was the
chief result of the war, was at the same time the cause of its failure.
We have seen that Germany was split not only into numberless independent provinces
almost totally foreign to each other, but that in every one of these provinces the nation was
divided into various strata of estates and parts of estates. Besides princes and priests we
find nobility and
peasants in the countryside; patricians, middle-class and plebeians in the
cities. At best, these classes were indifferent to each other’s interests if not in actual
conflict. Above all these complicated interests there still were the interests of the empire
and the pope. We have seen that, with great difficulty, imperfectly, and differing in various
localities, these various interests finally formed three great groups. We have seen that in
spite of this grouping, achieved
with so much labour, every estate opposed the line
indicated by circumstances for the national development, every estate conducting the
movement of its own accord, coming into conflict not only with the conservatives but also
with the rest of the opposition estates. Failure was, therefore, inevitable. This was the fate
of the nobility in Sickingen’s uprising, the fate of the peasants in the Peasant War, of the
middle-class in their tame Reformation. This was the fate even of the peasants and
plebeians who in most localities of Germany could not unite
for common action and stood
in each other’s way. We have also seen the causes of this split in the class struggle and the
resultant defeat of the middle-class movement.
How local and provincial decentralisation and the resultant local and provincial
narrow-mindedness ruined the whole movement, how neither middle-class nor peasantry
nor plebeians could unite for concerted national action; how the peasants of every province
acted only for themselves, as a rule refusing aid to the insurgent peasants of the
neighbouring region, and therefore being annihilated in individual battles one after another
by armies which in most cases counted hardly one-tenth of the total number of the
insurgent masses – all this must be quite clear to the reader from this presentation. The
armistices and the agreements concluded by individual groups with their enemies also
constituted acts of betrayal
of the common cause, and the grouping of the various troops
not according to the greater or smaller community of their own actions, the only possible
grouping, but according to the community of the special adversary to whom they
succumbed, is striking proof of the degree of the mutual alienation of the peasants in
The Peasant War in Germany
– 88 –