Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 2.djvu/213

 Hand-he had lost one hand in battle-came from the same class. In his memoirs he represents his complicity in the revolt as the result of compulsion, but before there was any question of force he had given vent to such sentiments as that the knights suffered as much from the Princes' oppression as did the peasants, and his action was probably more voluntary than he afterwards cared to admit. The lower clergy, many of them drawn from the peasants, naturally sympathised with the class from which they sprang, and they had no cause to dislike a movement which aimed at a redistribution of the wealth of Princes and Bishops; in some cases all the inmates of a monastery except the abbot willingly joined the insurgents. Some of the leaders were respectable innkeepers like Matern Feuerbacher, but others were roysterers such as Jäcklein Rohrbach, and among their followers were many recruits from the criminal classes. These baser elements often thrust aside the better, and by their violence brought odium upon the whole movement. The peasants had indeed contemplated the use of force from the beginning, and those who refused to join the Evangelical Brotherhood were to be put under a ban, or in modern phraseology, subjected to a boycott; but the burning of castles and monasteries seems first to have been adopted in retaliation for Truchsess' destruction of peasants' dwellings, and for the most part the insurgents' misdeeds arose from a natural inability to resist the temptations of seigneurial fishponds and wine-cellars.

No less heterogeneous than the factors of which the revolutionary horde was composed were the ideas and motives by which it was moved. There was many a private and local grudge as well as class and common grievances. In Salzburg the Archbishop had retained feudal privileges from which most German cities were free; in the Austrian duchies there was a German national feeling against the repressive rule of Ferdinand's Spanish ministers; religious persecution helped the revolt at Brixen, for Strauss and Urbanus Regius had there made many converts to Luther's Gospel; others complained of the tyranny of mine-owners like the Fuggers and other capitalist rings; and in not a few districts the rising assumed the character of a Judenhetze. The peasants all over Germany were animated mainly by the desire to redress agrarian grievances, but hatred of prelatical wealth and privilege and of the voracious territorial power of Princes was a bond which united merchants and knights, peasants and artisans, in a common hostility.

Gradually, too, the development of the movement led to the production of various manifestoes or rather crude suggestions for the establishment of a new political and social organisation. Some of them were foreshadowed in a scheme put forward by Eberlin in 1521, which may not, however, have been more seriously intended than Sir Thomas More's Utopia. Its pervading principle was that of popular election; each village was to choose a gentleman as its magistrate; two hundred chief places were to select a knight for their bailiff; each ten bailiwicks