Historians call it the Bauernkrieg or German Peasants’ War, but to people at the time it was simply the Aufruhr (‘the turmoil’). Through the second half of 1524 and into the summer of 1525, rebellion on an unprecedented scale swept across swathes of southern and central Germany. There is no real earlier point of comparison, and Europe would see no equivalent outbreak of popular fury prior to the French Revolution.

In the end, the rebels were comprehensively defeated by their masters, the German princes and ecclesiastical lords; as many as a hundred thousand peasants may have been killed in a succession of one-sided battles and the pitiless retribution that followed. And yet, as Lyndal Roper argues in this hugely impressive study – the first comprehensive account of the events to appear in a generation – the uproar of 1524–5 fully deserves the designation ‘revolution’. In one sense, the rebels achieved none of their aims; in another, nothing was ever the same again.

A history of the Peasants’ War poses significant challenges. The rebels rose in local and regional bands with limited coordination and no overall leader, so there are myriad stories to be told. Although various written demands were produced by literate spokesmen – most famously, the Twelve Articles drawn up at Memmingen in Swabia – the voices of the participants are mostly lost, and their concerns and motivations have to be inferred from actions or by reading against the grain of hostile accounts. 

Roper succeeds magnificently in conveying a sense of the scope and grandeur of the war and in delving into events without ever losing the narrative thread. The text is elegantly arranged into four parts, mapping the rise and fall of the rebel wave through autumn, winter, spring and summer. Within each section, thematically focused chapters discuss peasant attitudes to a range of themes: the soil and its cultivation, the exercise and abuse of lordship, the transformative role of religion and the powerful hold of gendered beliefs. 

The book’s numerous pictures are more than illustrations; Roper is particularly good at decoding contemporary iconography and drawing meanings from visual evidence. It helps, too, that she has first-hand knowledge of the terrain in which the rebellion played out. While writing the book, Roper visited most of the sites she mentions and cycled hundreds of kilometres along the routes the rebels marched.

There was no single cause of the Peasants’ War. It was not a desperate response to immiseration: during the preceding years, harvests had been good and economic conditions were actually improving. Rather, there was an intensification of bitterness about the burdens of ‘lordship’. The system of personal serfdom was patchily enforced, but peasants remained subject to innumerable financial exactions and petty humiliations: taxes on marriage; intrusive demands for the best ox or best gown at a man or woman’s death; tithe payments to wealthy and negligent monasteries; restrictions on access to woodland and waterways; a requirement to use their lords’ mills and bakeries, and to supply their ravenous hunting dogs with meat.

Peasant grievances were not new. What invested them with revolutionary power and turned specific and localised complaints into an attempted overthrow of the social order was the recently acquired conviction that oppressive lordship was contrary to the law of God. Historians have long recognised a connection between the Peasants’ War and the religious movement kick-started by Martin Luther. But they have often been inclined to regard the relationship with the Reformation as fortuitous or tangential: the peasants, they have argued, applied a spiritual veneer to essentially social and economic demands and fundamentally ‘misunderstood’ Luther’s doctrine.

Such treatment of religion as separable from other aspects of lived experience is based on an anachronistically modern way of seeing the world, and Roper is having none of it. She insists that, from the outset, the rebels’ sense of injustice was infused with a coherent theological vision: they asserted a common right to enjoy the gifts of God’s creation and rejected serfdom as incompatible with the emancipatory shedding of Christ’s blood. This vision was amplified by the many clergymen involved in the rising but not invented by them. Roper recognises the role played by the apocalyptic preacher Thomas Müntzer, but thinks his influence has been exaggerated.

Luther, holding Müntzer liable as sole author of the calamity, was horrified by the rebellion and did himself little credit by urging the princes to slaughter without compunction. The peasants themselves, as Roper points out, were for the most part non-violent, humiliating but rarely murdering their masters. Yet without Luther’s inflammatory teaching about Christian ‘freedom’, Roper suggests, the Peasants’ War could never have taken place. 

The virulence with which Luther and other evangelical preachers attacked monasticism was especially significant, desacralising in the eyes of the rural populace a key prop of the established religious order. Monasteries and nunneries became a particular focus of resentment: well over five hundred were attacked in the course of the war. Plundered supplies from religious houses did much to keep rebel forces in the field. According to Roper, the peripatetic peasant armies constituted ‘a kind of vast antipilgrimage, opposed to shrines, relics, monasteries, and saints’.

The Peasants’ War was not only produced by the Reformation. It profoundly shaped it too, not least by clearing the ground for Lutheran princes to secularise monastic property. The defeat of the uprising steered reform in more conservative directions: radical voices were silenced and talk of ‘freedom’ was stalled. Catholics accused Luther of causing the commotion, yet he managed to shake off blame, aligning the emergent Lutheran churches with unquestioning obedience to political authority – a development with baleful 20th-century consequences.

Roper’s ‘heroes’ are the ordinary peasants, but she is attuned to the moral complexity of their position. The rebellion produced no bloody pogroms, but anti-Semitism was a recurrent feature of its rhetoric. At the movement’s heart was an egalitarian theology of ‘brotherhood’, stressing mutual obligation and shared inheritance of creation. But it was also explicitly masculine. Women were excluded from the movement’s rituals and leadership structures, and Roper points to a dark streak of misogyny that underpinned rebel attitudes towards nuns. The lords, meanwhile, interpreted the events of 1524–5 as an insufferable assault on their own concepts of manliness. The approach Roper takes – a constant of her scholarly career – helps us to see gender not as a specialised subtopic but as an interpretative lens of universal utility.

Wisely, Roper reserves her survey of earlier scholarship for the book’s conclusion. It involves an illuminating discussion of how the Peasants’ War was a political football in divided Germany, and a sharp critique of Marxist and neo-Marxist historians for failing to understand the importance of rural ecology and the peasantry’s revolutionary potential.

Roper finds meaningful messages for our own time in the peasants’ collectivist understanding of freedom and their insistence that the gifts of God’s creation – water, woods, meadows and livestock – were communal resources not to be exploited for individual gain. A more pessimistic lesson, one she chooses not to draw, might be that social and economic injustices can give rise to angry, tear-it-all-down forms of populism.

There are, by Roper’s own admission, questions about the events of 1524–5 that her book leaves unanswered: their role in shaping the development of Anabaptism, for example, and the reasons why much of the north and west of Germany remained unaffected. Nonetheless, this is as good a history of the German Peasants’ War as anyone has a right to hope for. I found it in equal measures riveting and revelatory – a masterclass in how to make first-rate historical research both enjoyably accessible and provocatively relevant.