This is a companion piece to Lyndal Roper’s article ‘Turbulence and the German Peasants’ War of 1524-26’ recently published Open Access in History Workshop Journal 100.
The research for this article started with a cycle ride from Mühlhausen to Bad Frankenhausen, probably not the way most academic publications begin. I was writing a history of the German Peasants’ War of 1524-26, the biggest uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. A massive revolt in terms of area, it covered parts of what are today five European countries: Germany, Alsace, Tyrol, Austria, and Switzerland. Somewhere between seventy and one hundred thousand people, nearly all of them rebels, were slaughtered, most of them in a period of little more than two or three months from April to June. It took place in the middle of the German Reformation and the peasants were inspired by the ideas of Martin Luther, as they called for freedom and the end of serfdom. Many former monks and radical preachers joined the peasants, including the revolutionary preacher Thomas Müntzer in Thuringia. But Luther did not support them and condemned the rebels in print as ‘mad dogs’. The Lutheran Reformation changed forever from a radical to a conservative movement that supported the authorities, and the bloodshed cowed the populace, who would not revolt again in such numbers for centuries.
I planned to retrace the route which the revolutionary preacher Thomas Müntzer took with his followers in May 1525, to the final battlefield outside the Thuringian town in the former communist East Germany. It was Friday, my train was late, and I got to the bike-shop only just before it closed. The bike-shop no longer sold just pushbikes, but motorbikes too; there wasn’t enough call for pushbikes these days. On the radio, the retirement of the hero East German cyclist and winner of the Tour de France, Jan Ullrich, was being announced, the lad from Rostock who was later disgraced for doping. It seemed like the end of an era.
I asked for a map of the route, but they had sold out. The path was comparatively new, part of an effort to encourage tourism in the region, but so far as I could see, not many cyclists had attempted it and there was little about it online. By this time all the shops were shut, and I knew none would be open until Monday as it was a holiday weekend. Oh well, I thought, I’ll just follow the signs.
Bike paths in Germany are fairly easy to spot, with green lettering and a bike logo. But they indicate the next village, not your destination, and if you don’t know the next village – and I didn’t – you will get lost. As I did, hopelessly, in the middle of a forest. I ended up cycling down a track that was little more than a line of rocks. Half-way down I met a woman walking up and asked her where the path would come out. Ah yes, she said; my daughter in law tried this bike-path, and she got lost too. But she assured me, I would eventually come out at Sondershausen, and from there I knew the way.
The bike I had been sold stood up to the battering. The next day I cycled on to Frankenhausen, and then I understood why I had needed to make the trip. You cycle up a fairly relentless ascent, and come out high on the battlefield, the top of which was flattened to build the memorial to the Peasants’ War. This houses the biggest painting in the world, fourteen metres high, 123 meters long, by the East German artist Werner Tübke, and it is a masterpiece. From the battlefield itself you can see for miles. Tübke includes the landscape in his painting, so that it celebrates the land for which the peasants fought, as well as evoking the reds, browns and whites and the extraordinary characters of the period, as if Breughel himself had sat down and painted a pastiche of the entire sixteenth century corpus of northern art. The memorial, likely the greatest investment the German communist regime ever made in its own history, was opened in September 1989, just weeks before it fell.
From cycling the route, I learnt what it took to make that journey by horse or cart – or by foot, as most will have done – from Mühlhausen to Frankenhausen. I learnt how they would have stuck mostly to the valleys. I passed the convents, castles and monasteries (now ruined) they captured and looted. I saw how they must have passed through the gates of the town of Frankenhausen and climbed up, past the salt pans, to the battlefield, and sensed how exhilarating it would have been to stand up there, to see the land for which they were fighting, and to meet the thousands of others who would have joined them from all over what are now Thuringia and Saxony. No wonder they sang ‘Come Holy Ghost’ together before battle began – what must the sound of those massed male voices have been like? And how must they have felt when a rainbow appeared around the sun, as if the rainbow on Müntzer’s banner had come to life? No wonder they were certain that God was on their side. But they were no match for the lords. At least six thousand peasants were killed in that battle.
But the battle at Frankenhausen in mid-May 1525 was only one part of the Peasants’ War; there were at least a dozen other major battles. So, when I spotted a bicycle tour going from Strasbourg in Alsace down to Konstanz on Lake Constance (a distance of over 600 kilometres over two weeks) I determined to do it. This really taught me the sheer scale of the War, which I could not have otherwise imagined. It taught me the lie of the land, the difference between the charming Alsatian towns lying close together and their vineyards, the unforgettable volcanic landscape around Kaiserstuhl, the high upland path down to Freiburg on which the peasant leader Hans Müller took his men, and the low-lying fertile area around Lake Constance. It taught me that the Peasants’ War was about movement. Revolutions, I realised, are made up of numbers of people moving, in ways the authorities can’t prevent or control.
The other source of this article comes from the opposite side of the world, in Australia. In 2019 I had gone home to attend a conference organised by Joy Damousi, Sue Broomhall and Ivan Marusic, in Adelaide, right by the Botanic Gardens. The idea was to bring engineers and humanities together by discussing ‘turbulence’, a concept of interest to both groups, and to prepare a major grant application. I would also get the chance to see again the beautiful Moreton bay fig trees, over 150 years old, that I remembered as a child, and which still appear in my dreams. As to the conference, I was sceptical. What could I possibly learn from fluid dynamics?
But on the very first day, I nearly fell off my chair. The Peasants’ War famously has no name. It was universally known at the time not as a war, not even as an uprising, but just as ‘the Aufruhr’. That word meant ‘turbulence’. Suddenly I understood why contemporaries referred to this massive event in this way – it was a word that did not demonise the rebels, and which captured something distinctive about their experience of being part of a revolution. Turbulence fascinates engineers because it is unpredictable, because it mixes particles of different kinds, and because its patterns are beautiful.
Ever since then, I’ve tried to think about the Peasants’ War as my historian colleagues and as the engineers inspired me to understand it: as a vast turbulent motion of thousands of particles, of individual people; unpredictable and yet patterned in its flow. Their mixing obliterated differences of class, origin and gender, creating a tidal wave that swept across a vast area and destroyed so many monasteries, convents and castles, and toppled – at least for a time – the towers of lordship.