How Did The Reformation Contribute To The German Peasants Revolt

In 1525, the German Peasants revolted against their lords and the clergy, but this was not the root of the conflict. From the ninth to fifteenth century, Germany was a feudal nation, meaning that it organized people into divided social classes where land ownership equated higher status. The two main social classes involved in the German Peasant War were landlords and peasants. The peasants labored on the lords’ land, working for them. The majority of peasants were obliged to lords; this arrangement was referred to as serfdom. In the 1500s, a social transformation began as feudalism began to diminish. At this same time, Martin Luther was publishing his 95 theses in 1517; attacking the Roman Catholic Church, which later kickstarted the Protestant Reformation. The Protestant
However, this is clearly not when they began facing maltreatment. This poses the question of what factors contributed to the Peasants’ revolt. Peasants already experienced oppression from both lords and the clergy prior to the Protestant Reformation, with these issues increasing as Germany became more socially disorganized. As the Protestant Reformation spread through Germany, it served as a catalyst for German peasants to revolt against authority. This is because the Reformation called attention to similar issues of social, religious, and economic oppression, which the peasants had long experienced. The decline of feudalism in Germany, led to abrupt social change in the early 1500s, putting Germany in a disorganized state. Changing a social system that had been present since the ninth century was difficult to adjust to. Henry Cohn discusses “the emerging political conflict between a well-established tradition of peasant self-government and the growing power of the German territorial states”. Areas of Germany with abrupt social change, like Upper Swabia and Francocia, are where the majority of the conflict from the Peasants’ War