Mid-June, 1525

Just a few weeks after Waldshut pastor Balthasar Hubmaier had led hundreds of the city’s residents in adult baptism, the city became enmeshed in one of the most intense peasant militia movements of the Peasants’ Revolt. Since early 1524, other governing officials in the Black Forest region suspected Hubmaier of being a secret organizational mastermind for peasants who sought to defy their feudal obligations.¹ Though Hubmaier always claimed that he taught obedience to political authorities, these suspicions grew stronger by early 1525 when the Waldshut town council decided to support both Hubmaier’s far-reaching religious reforms and a peasant militia in the region, which had taken on the name of the Helle Haufen (“Bright Band”) under the leadership of Hans Müller of nearby Bulgenbach.²

Müller won admiration from friends and foes alike for his oratorical skills, articulating the peasants’ sense of oppression as well as their hopes to create a more Christian commonwealth. He frequently merged his economic agenda with religious language, claiming that his band of peasants were seeking to forge a political order based on “Christian love.” Most likely under the influence of Hubmaier, he even organized an alliance, named the “Christian Union of the Black Forest,” for south German peasant bands and supportive town governments. He envisioned it operating with the discipline of a “secular ban” that called upon the townspeople of a joining town to treat those who opposed the alliance (or failed to render the support agreed upon when they entered the union) as excommunicates: they were to “hold and practice no communion of any kind with those who refuse and oppose admittance to this Christian union…by eating, drinking, bathing, milling, baking, ploughing, reaping…or by buying from or selling to them.”³ The ban seemed to be an adaptation of practices that would be used for church discipline of errant members. Now, the Union hoped to apply them to civic communities to instill support for the peasants’ notion of a “common Christian weal.”⁴

But Müller was more a man of the battlefield than of the governing chambers, and in May 1525 he mobilized his “Bright Band” to go on a remarkable journey through the Black Forest to conquer the main towns and monasteries that were remaining hostile to the peasants’ cause. After taking the large city of Freiburg on the western edge of the Black Forest with surprising efficiency, Müller felt empowered; he planned to lead his troops back across the Black Forest to the east to help a different peasant band that was struggling to lay a siege on the Habsburg-run city of Radolfzell, situated on the edge of Lake Constance. But because peasant bands often experienced high rates of flux, as some members peeled off after engagements to head home for farming needs, Müller wanted first to recruit more footsoldiers from towns that had pledged their support to the peasants. Waldshut was one such town that lay near Müller’s route. In mid-June, he pressured Waldshut to supply able-bodied men to assist the siege on Radolfzell.

Hubmaier had formed no scruples, in principle, about his rebaptized parishioners bearing the sword or pledging allegiance to an ally through an oath. He and the town council lent their support to the Christian Union efforts. But two newly-baptized residents’ responses to the town’s call to arms bear evidence that the pacifist principles of the Grebel circle in Zurich–apparent in their letter admonishing Thomas Müntzer in 1524 to forego the sword–also had influence among some recent converts in Waldshut.

For instance, a furrier named Jakob Gross objected to joining the siege of Radolfszell. Although Gross had been baptized by Hubmaier, he had been converted to Anabaptist convictions after conversations with Conrad Grebel (when Grebel had visited the Waldshut area earlier in the spring). Gross’ objection is an indication that Grebel’s literalist readings of Christians’ ethical obligations still included abstinence from violence—even in the name of social and religious reform—in 1525. Another convert named Ulrich Teck objected to joining the siege, as well.⁵

Likely due to Hubmaier’s and the town councilors’ desire to live up to the agreement of the “Christian Union” and implement its “secular ban,” Waldshut forced these objectors to leave the city. Expelled from his home town, Gross would go on to be a major evangelist for Anabaptism in the countryside of the cantons of Zurich and Aargau, as well as in Strasbourg and Augsburg. He first preached alongside Grebel in the Grüningen region of Zurich during the summer of 1525.⁶ Upon his own expulsion, Teck made his way to Zurich and cultivated Anabaptist relationships there; he next appears in sources when he was expelled from the canton of Zurich in November 1525 along with Michael Sattler.⁷ When Gross was eventually arrested by the Strasbourg city government and gave his testimony to the Strasbourg Council, he explained that his refusal to join the siege at Radolfzell was a matter of Christian conviction; he would not take up arms with the intention to kill others. On the other hand, he said, he was willing to take his turn as a town watchman, with his weapon in hand, or to serve his city by helping to build fortifications, since he believed the purposes of those civic services were to prevent war rather than wage it.⁸

The Christian Union’s attempted siege of Radolfzell, meanwhile, would prove unsuccessful. Outmatched by the Swabian League and the Habsburgs’ Austrian forces, Hans Müller abandoned the effort on July 2 and was soon captured by the Austrians. After forty days of imprisonment and torture, he met his death by execution. With the Habsburgs gaining the upper hand, the leaders of Waldshut knew they would be targets for recriminations for lending support to the rebelling peasants. Hubmaier’s remaining days in Waldshut were numbered.

About This Series

This post is part of a series entitled “The Reformation at 500: Timeline of the Free-Church Movement.” Click here for more information on this series.

Featured image courtesy of the Wick’sche Sammlung, ca. 1575, Zentralbibliothek Zurich, Ms. F 23, fol. 294.

1. See Hugo von Hohenlandenberg to the Outer Austrian Government in Ensisheim (Feb. 20, 1524), in The German Peasants’ War: A History in Documents, eds. Tom Scott and Bob Scribner (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1991). 100-01. ↩︎
2. Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War (New York: Basic Books, 2025), 29-31. ↩︎
3. See “Articles of the Oath of the Christian Union,” (Early March 1525) and “The Letter of Articles of the Black Forest Peasants” (before May 8, 1525), in German Peasants’ War, 135-37; Roper, Summer of Fire and Blod 29, 331-32. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Alejandro Zorzin, “Reformation Publishing and Anabaptist Propaganda: Two Contrasting Communication Strategies for the Spread of the Anabaptist Message in the Early Days of the Swiss Brethren,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 82 (2008): 512-13, quoting Jakob Gross, Hearing before the Strasbourg Council (Strasbourg, late 1526/early 1527), in Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer: Stadt Straβburg, 1522-1532, ed. Manfred Krebs and Hans Georg Rott (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1959), 63-64. ↩︎
6. C. Arnold Snyder, “The Birth and Evolution of Swiss Anabaptism, 1520-30)” Mennonite Quarterly Review 80 (2006): 600-01; Christian Neff, “Gross, Jakob (16th century),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1956), at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Gross,_Jakob_(16th_century)&oldid=145343. ↩︎
7. Samuel Geiser, “Teck, Ulrich (16th century),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1959), at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Teck,_Ulrich_(16th_century)&oldid=145782. ↩︎
8. Torsten Bergsten. Balthasar Hubmaier, Anabaptist Theologian and Martyr, ed. W. R. Estep Jr. (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1978), 244-45, citing Jakob Gross, Hearing before the Strasbourg Council (Strasbourg, late 1526/early 1527), in Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer: Stadt Straβburg, 1522-1532, ed. Manfred Krebs and Hans Georg Rott (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1959), 63-64. ↩︎