Peasant Fires

The Drummer of Niklashausen

Richard Wunderli

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 1992
• ISBN:
  9780253016898
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European Medieval History
• Index: History

"... lively and intellectually stimulating... " —Speculum

"Wunderli... has lucidly reconstructed a controversial conflict in 15th-century south-central Germany.... this engaging narrative takes off from Hans Behem—the peasant who claimed to see the Virgin and gained followers until crushed by the established church—to explore larger forces at work in Germany on the eve of the Reformation... Wunderli also attempts to sort out the violent conflict that ensued and Hans's subsequent trial. His scrupulousness and sensitivity make for a small but valuable book." —Publishers Weekly

"Fascinating and well written, this is highly recommended for academic and larger public libraries."—Library Journal

"Richard Wunderli... deftly tells the story in Peasant Fires, finding in it a foreshadowing of peasant uprisings in the 16th century."—New York Times Book Review

"... a stimulating read... an engaging synthesis."—Central European History

In 1476, an illiterate German street musician had a vision of the Virgin Mary and began to preach a radical social message that attracted thousands of followers—and antagonized the church. The drummer was burned at the stake. This swiftly moving narrative of his rise and fall paints a vivid portrait of 15th-century German society as it raises important questions about the craft of history.

"A gem of a book.... It has a plot, good guys and bad buys, it opens up a 'strange' world, and it is exceptionally well written." —Thomas W. Robisheaux

IV

Walpurgisnacht

Easter Sunday was followed by the seven weeks of Easter that led to Pentecost (the seventh Sunday) and a celebration of the descent of the Holy Spirit on the apostles after the resurrection of Christ. In 1476, Pentecost fell on June 2. Between Easter and Pentecost were many other celebrations and feast days. In Germany, for example, was celebrated the Feast of St. Walburga, or Walpurgisnacht, on April 30, the eve of May Day. Walburga was an eighth-century Anglo-Saxon nun and missionary to Franconia, particularly to Bischofsheim on the Tauber, just south of Niklashausen. Her bones were “translated” (that is, moved) on April 30—which became her feast day—sometime during the 870s to Eichstütt, where her brother Willibald had Walpurgisnacht been bishop. Ever since then an oily liquid has oozed out of the rock on which her tomb rests, and has been renowned among pilgrims for its great healing power. St. Walburga was revered not only in the Tauber Valley and Franconia but also throughout much of Germany as a protectress against plague and hunger. From its inception, her feast day (or rather night) was bound to the old pagan holiday of May Day (May 1) that celebrated the beginning of summer and the expulsion of witches.

On Walpurgisnacht in 1476 great peasant bonfires were lit yet again, but this time to drive away witches, screaming unheard and unseen through the cool night air. It was an emotionally mixed feast day: joyful, hopeful against disease and famine, yet portentous with witches and the threat of a summer season of pestilence and hunger. It heralds for us the ominous onset of the pilgrimage to Niklashausen, where pilgrims hoped to find the healing balm of Hans Behem.

Shortly after Walpurgisnacht, in early May 1476, large groups of people began to congregate in the small village of Niklashausen, called there by the peasant shepherd, Hans Behem. From the beginning, people witnessed his miraculous powers: during the first days of May, God lifted his wrath from Germany and sent warm winds to melt the deep snows that had piled in drifts over frozen fields. Hans’ prayers to the Virgin had eased God’s anger. Word spread rapidly throughout Germany—by what means we do not know—about the miraculous vision and powers of Hans, the “holy youth.” From far and wide, “the common folk” (das gemeyn folck as chroniclers called them) came to Niklashausen. They traveled alone, in small groups, but most often in great “troops” (chroniclers were at a loss for any other word), and they carried great banners and gigantic candles that only three or four men could lift.

“All Germany seemed to be in commotion,” wrote Georg Widman many years later in his dramatic account of the pilgrimage. Stableboys left their horses, taking the bridles with them, he said; reapers left their reaping, carrying their scythes; women ceased haying in the middle of their fields, and came to Niklashausen with their rakes; wives left their husbands, husbands left their wives, children left their parents. Common people from all over central and south Germany—from Saxony, the Rhineland, Hesse, Thuringia, Swabia, Bavaria, and, of course, Franconia—simply dropped what they were doing and went to Niklashausen.

Widman insinuated that the pilgrims were attracted by cheap wine from roadside taverns and the promiscuous sex in the barns and the fields where the pilgrims slept. His analysis may betray elitist, clerical fantasies and disdain for common folk, but he was correct about the type of people who became pilgrims. With few exceptions they were peasants and peasant-artisans. What was so frightening to authorities—those whom Widman spoke for—was that these people took to the road to Niklashausen and did not ask anybody’s permission, not from their landlords to leave work, not from their priests to go on a pilgrimage. Social rank and obligations just seemed to dissolve.

Secular and religious authorities in Mainz, Wertheim, and Würzburg soon learned of the spontaneous pilgrimage. All had some responsibility for the village of Niklashausen and its priest, and they were touchy about any mass gathering. Throughout Germany there had already been many sporadic popular uprisings against landlords and the clergy. Now, in May, a new popular movement had begun, a whirlwind of people was gathering in the Tauber Valley around the small village of Niklashausen, and the authorities were alarmed.

In late May or early June, several weeks after the pilgrimage had begun, Count Johann of Wertheim wrote to Archbishop Dieter to inform him of the pilgrimage. He had not yet heard of Hans Behem, but he had heard reports that many people had experienced visions and apparitions. What was actually happening and what it all meant, admitted the count, was a mystery. He asked in his letter that someone besides himself—someone with spiritual authority—investigate the extraordinary happenings in Niklashausen. If any “injustices” occurred, the count said, then he would act with force, but for the time being he preferred to do nothing. Why? Because, he Walpurgisnacht added, the pilgrimage—no matter how strange it was—had been very profitable for him and his subjects, who supplied food, shelter, and other goods to the swarm of pilgrims. The count concluded with the sanctimony of a chamber of commerce president: the pilgrimage, after all, did seem honorable because it was called in the name of the Virgin Mary, the Queen of Heaven.

By early June, a clearer picture of the pilgrimage had begun to take focus in the minds of authorities. Archbishop Dieter of Mainz now knew that a youthful layman named Hans Behem was at the center of all the commotion, and that Hans belonged to the diocese of Würzburg. On June 13, the archbishop wrote to the bishop of Würzburg, Rudolph von Sherenberg, to tell him that the Youth was the topic of conversation “far and wide and everywhere”; the common folk believed in his visions and now were flocking to Niklashausen to touch him, to hear him preach, and, yes, even to hear him foretell the future. “This pseudo-prophet,” as Archbishop Dieter called him, preached to the ignorant masses doctrines that were repugnant to the orthodox Catholic faith: what more could upset the little boat of the Divine Peter than these ill winds from Niklashausen?

Thus, Archbishop Dieter called for action. Hans must be stopped before he infected all of Germany. In turgid, bureaucratic Latin, the first official actions against Hans Behem were now ordered. Archbishop Dieter granted authority over the Niklashausen affair to the jurisdiction of Bishop Rudolph of Würzburg. Bishop Rudolph was ordered to crack down on the “pseudo-prophet,” to prohibit Hans from preaching, to inquire carefully into such errors promulgated by him, and to discover who his companions, associates, and followers were-and to root them out with his troops. No one was to preach without the bishop’s license. No one was to celebrate mass in the church of Niklashausen without the bishop’s permission. No one was to preach, speak, or act in any way that was against the canons of the church or that disturbed the peace. Archbishop Dieter fully realized that they were all caught in the forming vortex of an ominous mass movement. Where would it all end?

To a fifteenth-century German observer and political official, a rapidly formed pilgrimage such as the one in Niklashausen set off alarm bells. Time was out of joint: a boy shepherd had become a prophet; social rank disintegrated as the world became inside out, upside down; masses of people shed their goods (their “vanities”) to find the true poverty of Christ.

Normal time and festival time had always been separated by specific dates, ceremonies, and rituals throughout the year. Carnival ended on Shrove Tuesday, Lent ended at Easter. Now there was a confusion of time. The upside-down world of Carnival broke through the barriers of Lent, and Lent broke through the barriers of Easter and flowed into Pentecost. Hans Behem, the Carnival drummer, had carried with him to Niklashausen the upside-down social world of Carnival and the Lenten message of self-denial and salvation through poverty. For Hans, enchanted time did not end when it was supposed to, but continued into the summer. The heavens had opened up and had spoken through young Hans for weeks at a time that defied the church calendar.

Peasants by the thousands went to Niklashausen. They seem to have been driven like lemmings by mysterious forces. The pilgrimage to Niklashausen, however, was not a unique event, but rather part of a late fifteenth-century pattern in Germany of many spontaneous, frenetic pilgrimages. German peasants so desperately wanted . . . something . . . but what?

Salvation. They wanted salvation in their material and spiritual lives. German peasants were pushed about on the stage of history by powerful, impersonal forces—demography, economic trends, disease, and so forth—which they could never fully comprehend and could explain only by an appeal to the enchanted world. Hans Behem was their spokesman. His dreams and fantasies were their dreams and fantasies; his anger was theirs. That is why they listened to him. We must try to penetrate their physical and mental world if we are to make sense of the pilgrimage to Niklashausen and of Hans’ cry for material and spiritual salvation.

The Tauber Valley in the 1470s had much empty pastureland for Hans’ animals. We may guess that Hans saw daily the remains of old homesteads and fields that had long since been abandoned. Young forests now grew where arable fields used to be. Germany by 1476 was relatively empty, certainly when compared with Germany in the early fourteenth century.

Since the fourteenth century, great changes in the population of Germany (in fact, of all Europe) had taken place. The story of the Black Death coming to Europe during 1348–1350 is well known. What we must remind ourselves is that the disease flared up constantly for the next three and one-half centuries and periodically ravaged populations. The destinies of all people in late medieval Germany were determined by the blind reproduction of plague bacteria. For the first century of the disease, outbreaks were largely pandemic, devastating whole populations throughout Europe. After 1349, the population of Germany dropped drastically, leaving great empty lands. After about 1450, however, the plague tended to be less virulent and was largely confined to local outbreaks. It also became a disease more of towns and cities than of the countryside. After about 1450, population slowly began to increase. Germany still had much empty land, but a growing population in the countryside began to push relentlessly against available resources. Although disease and famine still stalked the lives of people, the forces of fertility were winning out at last against the forces of death.

The release of population pressure after 1349 had profound effects in the German countryside and towns. Much land suddenly became available and jobs for skilled labor opened in the towns. The great impersonal forces of history now favored workers and lesser peasants who worked for others—anybody who lived by wages. Rents fell, as lords tried desperately to entice peasants to take up holdings. Wages rose, as employers competed for labor. Food prices fell, as did the prices of commodities. For about a hundred years, between 1349 and c.l450, wealth was redistributed downward. High wages, low rents, low cost of living. A carpenter in Würzburg in 1387, for example, could purchase with his wages for one day 30 kilograms (or about 66 pounds) of grain. Nothing like this had happened before in medieval Europe and would not be repeated until the modem industrial, welfare state.

The benefits of the fall in population for skilled laborers was obvious. But for peasants it was a mixed picture. Prosperous peasants who had to hire workers, no doubt, suffered by paying high wages to produce grain in a falling market. Landless peasants who had only their labor to sell prospered—but only relative to their former condition. They were still poor peasants. For most peasants of the middling sort who farmed their own land, but under a lord, life may have only slightly improved. Their rents (however they might be calculated: in money, labor, or produce) fell, but so did the market price for their produce. The rise in wages might help them, but only if they hired themselves out for work beyond their own fields. The central economic issue of peasant lives was not wages but credit. The peasants needed to borrow to survive from sowing time to harvest, and their landlords were the natural lenders, and, therefore, their natural enemies.

Following the Black Death, peasants abandoned marginal land and moved either to prime, arable sites or to towns and cities where wages were high and opportunities great. Of course, hazards of disease were also greater in the towns and cities, which were little more than disease pits. Yet the peasants came. In the towns peasants saw their chance to escape the misery of peasant life—miserable even in favorable circumstances. Urban population numbers held fairly steady but only because of huge infusions of people from the countryside. And much of the countryside became empty. Before the plague there were about 170,000 settlements of varying sizes in Germany. By about 1450, around 40,000 of those settlements had disappeared. They were turned to pasture or to woods, and have since been kmown to German historians by the wonderfully desolate-sounding word Wüstungen, the wastelands of the lost villages of Germany.

Powerful economic forces had favored wage workers and peasants for a century, but, with the exception of those who fled to the towns, it did not change their rank in society. Lords remained lords, peasants remained peasants. At first lords lost heavily on their lands, but during the fifteenth century, they tried new strategies to make a profit with a minimum of labor. Some planted forests to harvest wood. Some changed their crops from labor-intensive cereal grains to grapes in wine vineyards that still fetched high prices on the market and required only seasonal labor. Others turned to raising stock, especially pigs, whose prices also remained high; animals required only empty land and the labor of a herdsman, perhaps a mere boy like Hans Behem.

So by about 1450, the economic landscape of medieval Germany had altered considerably. Not as much grain was grown and more land was used to raise animals. Much land seemed empty, but empty only of people. Land was still occupied by animals and the rights of lords. Again during the fifteenth century famine was a specter of peasant life.

Lords were getting the upper hand by the 1450s, ‘60s and ‘70s, in part because of their strategies in a depleted labor market, in part because of the gradual recovery of population from the ravages of plague. Population grew after the mid-fifteenth century-slowly, to be sure, but enough to favor the lords and employers against peasants and wageworkers.

A chronicler from Erfurt in 1483 looked back with relief when he recorded that “within these twenty years there has not been any real pestilence; and seldom is there a couple but they have eight, nine, or ten children.” Peasants no doubt thanked St. Walburga for her help in staying the hand of God from bringing pestilence.

Those children may have been a blessing to a peasant couple, but they were a curse to the peasantry as a whole. Rising population meant a reversal of earlier trends. Prices remained depressed, but only relatively, for after about 1450, wages began to nose-dive. Whatever fragmentary evidence we have shows that laborers’ wages bought fewer and fewer goods. Our Würzburg carpenter may still have received the equivalent of 30 kilos of grain for a day’s wage in 1450, but each year thereafter he received less. Landlords reasserted their old rights over the peasantry, and demanded that labor services be done as they had been under the “old law.” Toils, taxes, and duties were imposed by all higher authorities.

Peasants after 1450 were still far better off than their ancestors in the early thirteenth century, but they did not know how their distant ancestors lived. They knew how their fathers and grandfathers lived, and knew that lords were demanding more now than before. They did not have the perspective to articulate what we can today, that powerful lords and princes in Germany were consolidating their territories; they were flexing their economic muscle against their subjects by imposing the “old laws” of tolls, taxes, duties, and labor services.

Peasant memories of “old laws” were different. Their immediate memories told them that their fathers did not have to pay these impositions. Their distant, mythical memories told them of a time “in the beginning” when there were no lords and everybody worked as equals. “When Adam plowed and Eve spun wool, who then was the lord?” was the peasant dictum throughout Europe.

From the mid-fifteenth century onward, bitterness in the German countryside deepened. Many peasant rebellions flared up especially in southern Germany during the second half of the fifteenth century and continued sporadically until the great conflagration of 1525.

It is in this general context of lords rebounding against peasants that Hans Behem preached, calling for a pilgrimage of peasants to Niklashausen. He, through the Virgin Mary, through God Himself, would explain to them why they suffered so.

Hans and the peasants who went to Niklashausen did not have the luxury of economic historians such as Wilhelm Abel explaining in brilliant detail the dynamics of population, wages, rents, and prices that push people about like puppets. A modern interpretation that explains the dynamics of history in terms of “impersonal forces,” as I have done, leads to fatalism—like peasant-thought—but a benign fatalism because nobody is responsible for misery (except blind bacteria) and nobody bears guilt. Fifteenth-century peasant explanations of the historical process also led to fatalism, but it was a vicious fatalism, because it led only to individual and collective guilt.

Medieval people were caught in a mental trap, one that ensured that they would feel anxiety, divine condemnation, and guilt. In order to comprehend how they thought, how they felt, about existence, we must mentally strip ourselves of those assumptions about the world that we most take for granted: our explanations of causation.

When we try to make sense of why things happen—anything, from the weather to economic inflation—we turn to a “natural” explanation, that is, we regard phenomena as consequences of orderly, rational laws of nature. Most of us do not need to explain things by turning to a supernatural force, such as a god who plays by arbitrary rules, or, at least, by rules known only to it.

The best educated of medieval people also argued that things happened by natural causation, but by “natural” they meant something different from our definition. Nature (hence that which is “natural”) for them was not something apart from a supernatural force, that is, God, but rather was under the control and guidance of that same force. The law of nature was for them simply the law of God: God does nothing contrary to the laws of nature—which would be our definition of a miracle—but is directly responsible for everything that happens in nature even if goes against normal expectations. Thus, for medieval intellectuals the miraculous and the normal tended to be the same thing: something merely seems a miracle b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Author’s Note
• I Enchanted Time
• II Carnival
• III Lent
• IV Walpurgisnacht
• V The Feast of Corpus Christi
• VI The Feast of the Visitation of Mary
• VII The Feast of St. Margaret
• VIII Historical Time
• Bibliography