Early May, 1525

By the first week of May 1525, tens of thousands of peasants in southern Germany were in open revolt against their lords.  The various bands that they had formed during the winter and spring of 1525 rarely gained any concessions from the lords, and many of them now decided, with the warmer spring weather, to go on the move. Armed with farm tools and polearms as their weapons more often than rifles, they frequently looted monasteries—which were major land-holders throughout the Holy Roman Empire—as well as secular lords’ manorial houses.

On Saturday, April 29, the largest of the peasant uprisings began in Frankenhausen in Thuringia, not far from Luther’s home area.  The peasants succeeded at occupying the town hall and the castle of the local count. Thomas Müntzer, the reformist preacher who had been telling peasants that their spilled blood in battle—for the sake of the suffering and oppressed—would be Christ-like, started journeying from Mühlhausen with a band of peasants to join the rebels in Frankenhausen. Self-styled as the “Eternal League,” they marched under a rainbow flag, bearing “the sign of God’s everlasting covenant” and a reminder that the “word of the Lord remains forever,” as the flag’s motto noted. But several princes also routed their mercenary armies toward Frankenhausen to keep the rebellion from spreading. Both parties sensed a major confrontation was looming.

Another itinerant, named Hans Hut, also gravitated toward the action when he heard of the peasants’ uprising in Frankenhausen. Hut, who would later become a major evangelist of Anabaptism in southern Germany and Austria, had been earning his living as a travelling book salesman in Thuringia when he heard the news. But he was already an ardent supporter of Müntzer, and he likely wanted to be a part of the revolution where he believed God would mete out divine justice, as Müntzer had foretold. Hut had signed onto the Eternal League’s original covenant, which Müntzer organized in Mühlhausen in the Fall of 1524, and Müntzer went to Hut’s home town of  Bibra and visited Hut there one month later after the Mühlhausen authorities had expelled him. Hut then assisted Müntzer in getting one of his revolutionary tracts published by taking Müntzer’s manuscript to a printer in Nürnberg who was willing to print it. It was no small journey, but one that Hut likely combined with his book trade. Earlier in the Spring of 1525, Hut was himself expelled from his home town—under suspicion of following the new criticisms of infant baptism that were now circulating in central Germany: he had declined to have the last of his three children baptized. Now, reunited with Müntzer in Frankenhausen, Hut anticipated the imminent arrival of Christ’s final Judgment.¹

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. Johann Loserth, Robert Friedmann and Werner O. Packull. “Hut, Hans (d. 1527),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1956, 1987), at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Hut,_Hans_(d._1527)&oldid=168011.  The text by Müntzer that Hut conveyed was published in November 1524 as: An Explicit Exposé of the False Faith of the Faithless World (Nürnberg: Hans Hergot,1524), available at: https://www.andydrummond.net/muentzer/PDFs/explicit_exposure.pdf ↩︎