May 14-15, 1525

The armies of the Duke George of Saxony and Philip of Hesse closed in on Frankenhausen by May 14, with Thomas Müntzer and Hans Hut inside. That night, the peasants rebuffed the princes’ demand that they hand over Müntzer and disperse to avoid bloodshed. They would not abandon their pastor and ideological spokesman.

A count who arrived with the princes’ army recounted what happened the next morning in a letter to his son: “The peasants had drawn up their battle order before dawn on a high hill on the other side of the town; they had made a circle of wagons and had their good cannon with them. We marched into the open field on the other side. First they fired over the town almost as far as us, but hit nothing.”¹ Historians estimate there were six to seven thousand peasants assembled on the hill. The princes’ armies consisted of only twenty-five hundred foot soldiers and two thousand cavalry. The peasants had no cavalry and vastly inferior weapons. But they had hopes of divine aid, especially when a rainbow appeared in the sky over the approaching Hessian army. The rainbow was the sign that Müntzer’s Eternal League had adopted on its flag, referencing God’s covenant with Noah. It seemed to portend God would vindicate them in battle, just as Müntzer had been saying.

As Müntzer preached within the wagon-fortress, however, the mercenary armies took their positions around the hill without any hindrance from the peasants’ cannons. When they opened fire on the fortress, the peasants saw so many colleagues fall so quickly that the remaining men realized they would not survive in their ramshackle fortress. Most tried to run down the hill into the town. Many never made it, falling to the princes’ armies’ bullets or swords.² Hans Hut was one of the fortunate ones who made it back to the town. As he later told authorities, once he was captured two years later, he had joined the peasants on the hill but turned back to the town when the “shooting became too thick.”³

The cavalry and foot soldiers of the princes soon followed the peasants through the Frankenhausen gates, slaying every man they considered a belligerent. As the count who related the day to his son wrote, “We began to storm the town at once and conquered it speedily, and killed everyone caught there. Many of them were found in the drainage canal of the saltworks or else in the houses, and goodly numbers were not captured by the soldiers and horsemen until the evening, last night, and this morning, and their lives were spared.”⁴ Hut was among the latter group whose lives were spared. But as many as seven thousand peasant fighters and other Frankenhausen citizens were slaughtered that day. Meanwhile, the princes’ armies suffered fewer than a dozen casualties.

Most prized among the princes’ captors was Thomas Müntzer himself. After being handed over to the Count of Mansfeld, whom Müntzer had frequently condemned in sermons and pamphlets, the nobles would have him decapitated for his sedition before the end of the month. Coming just three days after three thousand peasants were killed in a surprise attack at the Battle of Böblingen, in Württemberg, the massacre at Frankenhausen caused peasants to realize that their bands were rarely going to win concessions from their lords. Increasingly, the militias found it harder to retain recruits, and peasant battles decreased over the course of the summer. Their calls for congregational control of pastoral appointments and reform of tithing requirements go largely unheeded, along with their economic grievances.⁵

Hut, meanwhile, made his way back to his home town of Bibra. Remarkably, Hut did not lay low. In Bibra, the parishioners had taken advantage of the upheaval of the prior months to elect their own pastor, choosing a peasant named Jörg Haug. In 1524, Haug had written a pamphlet on “The Beginning of the Christian Life,” which Haug gave Hut the opportunity to preach in Bibra in late May.⁶ Hut became more vocal in criticizing infant baptism, likely under the influence of Hans Denck, whom he met on his travels in Nürnberg. And he found among the villagers an eager audience for this teaching.⁷ But he also vocally defended the peasants’ political cause, fusing it with conviction that God would still intervene imminently to take vengeance upon the oppressors. Despite the many peasants who had already gone to deaths in recent battles, Hut still called for more to rise up and prepare to kill the authorities. “For the opportune time has arrived,” he claimed. “The power is in their hands.”⁸ It would require further travels for Hut to become averse to placing trust in the sword for church and social reforms.

Possibly unbeknownst to Hut, another central German was walking a similar path in May 1525: Melchior Rinck was also in Frankenhausen in the midst of the fighting, and he also managed to escape the carnage—despite serving as a captain or other leading position for the peasants there. Although he had been a classically-trained supporter of Luther’s evangelical reforms and obtained a pastoral post in the Saxon church near Eisenach, he also became a supporter of Thomas Müntzer. And initially after Müntzer’s execution, he also desired to carry on the cause. He even “boasted that God had spared him at Frankenhausen that he might carry out Müntzer’s plans more successfully and bring them to a happy end.”⁹ But, like Hut, within two years he would become more and more convinced of views that were akin to those developing among Swiss Anabaptists who did not expect God’s reign to come through political or military powers. Although his whereabouts after fleeing Frankenhausen are not known, he was associating closely with Hans Denck in Worms by 1527 and eventually settled in his home region near Hersfeld and Sorga in duchy of Hesse, where a significant Anabaptist congregation formed. Decades later, writings by Hutterites to the east and Dutch Mennonites to the west would both recognize their indebtedness to his leadership.¹⁰

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. Philip of Solms-Lich, Letter to Reinhard Solms-Lich (Frankenhausen, May 16, 1525), in The German Peasants’ War: A History in Documents, ed. Tom Scott and Bob Scribner (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International, 1992), No. 137. ↩︎
2. Ibid. ↩︎
3. 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. ↩︎
4. Philip of Solm-Lich, Letter to Reinhard, in The German Peasants’ War. ↩︎
5. On the German Peasants’ War, generally, see Lyndal Roper, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War (New York: Basic Books, 2025). ↩︎
6. George Huntston Williams, The Radical Reformation, 3rd ed. (Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press, 2000), 166; Robert Friedmann, “Haug, Jörg (16th century).” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1956), at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Haug,_J%C3%B6rg_(16th_century)&oldid=140963. ↩︎
7. Ibid; Loserth, et al., “Hut, Hans (d. 1527).” ↩︎
8. Quoted in Williams, The Radical Reformation, 167-68, citing Herbert Klassen, “The Life and Teachings of Hans Hut,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 33 (1959): 171-205, 267-304. ↩︎
9. Paul Schowalter, “Rinck, Melchior (1494-After 1545),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1959), at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Rinck,_Melchior_(1494-After_1545)&oldid=173828. ↩︎
10. Stuart Murray, “Rediscovering Melchior Rinck,” Mennonite Quarterly Review 95 (2021): 289-307, esp. 290, 297-99. ↩︎