Why did Martin Luther condemn the “hordes of peasants” fighting the war he helped inspire?
Religious reformer Martin Luther’s message of spiritual freedom helped ignite the German Peasants’ War of 1525. But before too long, Luther had turned against the very people who claimed to fight in his name
It was 1525, and springtime had arrived. Across Europe, news of the Reformation was spreading. Change was afoot.
And Germany was on fire.
Across the Holy Roman Empire, lowly peasants armed with farm tools and homemade banners rose against their lords. They stormed across the countryside, sacking monasteries and torching castles in the name of God.
The uprising would become known as the German Peasants’ War, and it was the largest popular rebellion in western Europe before the French Revolution.
It’s the topic of a 2025 book, Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants' War, by historian Lyndal Roper, who – in conversation on the HistoryExtra podcast – reflected on the conflict and the causes behind it. As she explains, at its heart lay the teachings of a man who never intended to start a war: Martin Luther, the Augustinian friar whose ideas had already shattered the authority of the medieval Church.
“The German Peasants’ War was a disaster. It was a traumatic event that happened in the very middle of the Reformation, in 1525. Martin Luther’s major writings are from 1520, and then this war happened,” says Roper. “I just think you can't understand the shape of the Reformation unless you think about [the Peasants’ War].
To many of his followers, as Roper notes, Luther was the prophet of spiritual and social freedom, the man who had insisted that all believers were equal before God. Yet when rebellion erupted under that banner, he denounced it in fury.
But what, precisely, was the connection between Luther’s teachings and the conflict? And why did Luther so strongly disavow the war after he had been the one to inspire it?
The Reformation and its revolutionary message
Martin Luther was a German theologian born in 1483 who would go on to become one of the most consequential figures in Christian history with his radical ideas about how the Church should be organised and the nature of its authority.
When, in 1517, he nailed his Ninety-Five Theses to the door of Wittenberg’s Castle Church, his aim was to challenge the Church’s sale of indulgences: payments for the remission of sin. But his challenge to the established order of the Church soon became something far greater, and his writings would go on to attack the foundations of papal power and priestly hierarchy.
Luther’s central doctrines (focusing on the idea of salvation by faith alone, the authority of Scripture over the Church, and the ‘priesthood of all believers’) struck directly at the medieval belief that grace flowed only through the Church and its clergy.
For many ordinary people, Luther’s ideas were explosive. If all believers stood equal before God, why did inequality persist in life? Why should priests and lords hold such power over those they called brothers and sisters in Christ?
Luther’s theological revolution gave voice to moral and social grievances that had long simmered in the rural countrysides of medieval Europe: grievances over rents, taxes, and the rights of lords to control common resources.
How the theology of communion became rebellion
But as Roper explains, it was the details of Luther’s thinking, as well as the broad strokes of his theology, that helped to ignite the conflict.
“There are two key theological ideas that lie behind the Peasants’ War. One of them is very technical, and it goes back to Martin Luther’s demand that laypeople should also have the wine of communion,” says Roper.
“In communion, usually what had happened was that laypeople got the ‘host’ in the form of the bread, but they didn’t get ‘blood’ in the form of the wine, because that was reserved to the clergy: that’s what set them apart.”
For the common people of the faith, Luther’s insistence that everyone should share both the bread and the wine was a profound symbol of equality. It was, in effect, a declaration that divine grace shouldn’t be monopolised by the clergy.
“So when Luther said that every layperson was also a priest, and every person ought to get full communion – as it was instituted by Christ himself – he was saying they should get the bread and they should get the wine.”
As Easter approached in 1525, a time of year when most Christians received communion, this idea – that the blood of Christ was meant for all – resonated deeply. For the clergy to deny the cup to peasants was to deny their God-given equality.
Luther’s theology of egality
The second theological spark, Roper notes, reached even further into everyday life.
“The other idea that I think was really important [in the justifications for the war] is the idea that God created the world: He created the fish in the water, the birds in the air, the beasts in the forest, the wood, the water. All these resources God created and therefore, they should be free for mankind.”
This was a notion emphasised within the Reformation’s teachings, but for centuries, peasants had faced mounting restrictions on what they could and couldn’t access. Lords claimed exclusive rights to hunt game, fish rivers and fell timber; resources that villagers had once shared.
Now, emboldened by the language of divine justice, they demanded them back.
Their grievances were formalised in the Twelve Articles, drafted as a manifesto of the war in early 1525. It was inspired by principles from Luther and the Reformation, and called for fair rents, freedom to fish and hunt, the right to choose pastors, and an end to serfdom.
“This is where I think we really need to rethink the Reformation,” says Roper, “because the ideas were Luther’s ideas: the idea that every community had the right to call its own pastor, that was what Luther had said early on, and that was demand number one from the peasants’.”
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The peasants’ Reformation
By the early months of 1525, entire regions of what is today southern and central Germany – Swabia, Franconia and Thuringia – were in open revolt.
The rebels spoke in biblical language, denouncing false priests and worldly greed. Roper explains that they declared: “The gospel must be preached by someone who just preaches the gospel,” rather than rich members of the clergy.
For a time, it worked, as peasant armies captured towns and castles.
“They were pretty much in charge for a couple of months,” Roper says. “That is an extraordinary success.”
But in all this conflict, where was Luther himself?
Why did Luther turn against the revolt?
As the revolt spread, it also grew more violent.
Luther, who had spent years urging obedience to God’s word, now saw his movement spinning into chaos.
“That Martin Luther didn’t support the peasants is really, in many ways, the tragedy of all of this. I think, at first, they thought that Luther would support what they were arguing for,” Roper explains.
Instead, Luther condemned them. In May 1525 he published his notorious pamphlet Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, urging princes to kill the rebels without mercy.
The reason for this disavowal? Luther had intended his Reformation to be a peaceful theological revolution, not a politically violent one, says Roper. He believed that order itself was divinely ordained, and that rebellion was a mortal sin. By defending authority and disavowing the conflict, he hoped to preserve the Reformation from being blamed for the chaos.
How the Reformation survived the bloodshed
Ultimately, as the rebellion faltered and the nobility took hold of the situation, the response was devastating.
Noble and princely forces, including professional mercenaries, crushed the peasant bands with a combination of cannon and cavalry. Peasants who sought refuge in churches were trapped and burned alive. The numbers were staggering: as many as 100,000 people were killed.
By autumn 1525, the rebellion was broken. Politically, the princes emerged stronger, tightening control over their territories.
But thanks in part to Luther’s calculated moves that Roper details in the HistoryExtra podcast, the Reformation survived. The movement went on to change how ordinary people lived their lives. It reshaped the language of worship, altered how people understood their own relationship to God, and brought faith and literacy into the hands of many ordinary men and women for the first time.
Lyndal Roper was speaking to Emily Briffett on the HistoryExtra podcast. Listen to the full conversation.
Authors
James Osborne is a digital content producer at HistoryExtra where he writes, researches, and edits articles, while also conducting the occasional interview