Читать книгу History of the Reformation - Thomas M. Lindsay - Страница 38

Table of Contents

In the widespread social revolt which broke out in Elsass in 1493, the peasants were supported by the towns; demands were made for the abolition of the imperial and the ecclesiastical courts of justice, for the reduction of ecclesiastical property, for the plundering of Jews who had been fattening upon usury, and for the curbing of the power of the priests. The Germans had a proverb, “The poor man must tie his shoes with string,” and the “tied shoe” (Bundschuh), the poor man's shoe, became the emblem of this and subsequent social revolts, while their motto was, “Only what is just before God.” This rebellion, which was prematurely betrayed, did not lack prominent leaders. One of them was Hans Ulman, the burgomeister of Schlettstadt, who died on the scaffold affirming the justice of the demands which he and his companions had made, and predicting their future triumph.

In 1501 the peasants of Kempten and the neighbouring districts again rose in rebellion, and were again joined by the poorer townspeople. In the year following, 1502, a revolt was planned having for its headquarters the village of Untergrombach, near Speyer; it spread into Elsass, along the Neckar and down the Rhine. The Bundschuh banner was again unfurled. It was made of blue silk, with a white cross, the emblem of Switzerland, in the centre. It was adorned with a picture of the crucified Christ, a Bundschuh on the one side, and a kneeling peasant on the other. The motto was again, “Only what is just before God.” Every associate promised to repeat five times a day the Lord's Prayer and the Ave Maria. The patron saints were declared to be the Blessed Virgin and St. John. The movement was strongly anti-clerical. The leaders taught that there could be no deliverance from oppression until the priests were driven from the land, and until the property of the nobles and the priests was confiscated and their power broken. Tithes, feudal exactions of all kinds, and all social inequalities were denounced; water, forest and pasture lands were declared to be the common property of all. The leaders recognised the rule of the Emperor as over-lord, but denounced all intermediate jurisdictions. The plan was to raise the peasants and the townspeople throughout all Germany, and to call upon the Swiss to aid them in winning their deliverance from oppression. The revolt was put down with savage cruelty; most of the leaders were quartered. Many escaped to Switzerland, and lay hid among the Alpine valleys.

One of these was Joss Fritz, who had been a soldier (landsknecht)—a man with many qualities of leadership. He had tenacity of purpose, great powers of organisation, and gifts of persuasion. He vowed to restore the Bundschuh League. He remained years in hiding in Switzerland, maturing his plans. Then he returned secretly to his own people. He seems to have secured an appointment as forester to a nobleman whose lands lay near the town of Freiburg in the Breisgau; and there, in the small village of Lehen, he began to weave together again the broken threads of the Bundschuh League. He mingled with the poorer people in the taverns, at church ales, on the village greens on festival days. He spoke of the justice of God and the wickedness of the world. He expounded the old principles of the Bundschuh with some few variations. Indiscriminate hatred of priests seems to have been abandoned. Most of the village priests were peasants, and suffered, like them, from overbearing superiors. The parish priest of Lehen became a strong supporter of the Bundschuh, and told his parishioners that all its ideas could be proved from the word of God. Joss Fritz won over to his side the “gilds” of beggars, strolling musicians, all kinds of vagrants who could be useful. They carried his messages, summoned the people to his meetings in quiet spaces in the woods, and were active assistants. At these meetings Joss Fritz and his lieutenant Jerome, a journeyman baker, expounded the Scriptures “under the guidance of the Holy Spirit simply,” and proved all the demands of the Bundschuh from the word of God.

When the country seemed almost ripe for the rising, Joss Fritz resolved to prepare the banner as secretly as possible. It was easy to get the blue silk and sew the white cross on its ground; the difficulty was to find an artist sympathetic enough to paint the emblems, and courageous enough to keep the secret. The banner was at last painted. The crucified Christ in the centre, a peasant kneeling in prayer on the one side and the Bundschuh on the other, the figures of the Virgin Mary and St. John, and the pictures of the Pope and the Emperor. The motto, “O Lord, help the righteous,” was added, and the banner with its striking symbolism was complete. The League had the old programme with some alterations:—no masters but God, the Pope, and the Emperor, no usury, all debts to be cancelled, and the clauses mentioned above. The leaders boasted that their league extended as far as the city of Köln (Cologne), and that the Swiss would march at their head. But the secret leaked out before the date planned for the general rising; and the revolt was mercilessly stamped out (1512–1513). Its leader escaped with the Bundschuh banner wound round his body under his clothes. In four years he was back again at his work (1517). In a very short time his agents, the “gild” of beggars, wandering minstrels, poor priests, pilgrims to local shrines, pardon-sellers, begging friars, and even lepers, had leagued the peasantry and the poorer artisans in the towns in one vast conspiracy which permeated the entire district between the Vosges and the Black Forest, including the whole of Baden and Elsass. The plot was again betrayed before the plans of the leaders were matured, and the partial risings were easily put down; but when the authorities set themselves to make careful investigations, they were aghast at the extent of the movement. The peasants of the country districts and the populace of the towns had been bound together to avenge common wrongs. The means of secret communication had been furnished by country innkeepers, old landsknechts, pedlars, parish priests, as well as by the vagrants above mentioned; and the names of some of the subordinate leaders—“long” John, “crooked” Peter, “old” Kuntz—show the classes from which they were drawn. It was discovered that the populace of Weisenburg had come to an agreement with the people of Hagenau (both towns were in Elsass) to slay the civic councillors and judges and all the inhabitants of noble descent, to refuse payment of all imperial and ecclesiastical dues, and that the Swiss had promised to come to their assistance.

One might almost say that between the years 1503 and 1517 the social revolution was permanently established in the southern districts of the Empire, from Elsass in the west to Carinthia and the Steiermarck in the east. It is needless to describe the risings in detail. They were not purely peasant rebellions, for the townspeople were almost always involved; but they all displayed that mingling of communist ideas and religious enthusiasm of which the Bundschuh banner had become the emblem, and which may be traced back to the movement under Hans Böhm as its German source, and perhaps to the earlier propaganda of the Hussite revolutionaries or Taborites. The later decades of the fifteenth and the earlier years of the sixteenth century were a time of permanent social unrest.