In the lengthy chronicles of the Protestant Reformation, the German Peasants’ War of 1524–1525 is often overshadowed by the doctrinal struggles of elite reformers, leaving the widespread social and economic unrest of the peasantry as little more than a footnote. In countless biographies of Martin Luther, the war is frequently treated as an inconvenient disruption, an episode acknowledged but rarely explored in depth, as in the 2003 film Luther. When examined more closely, it is typically framed as an ideological showdown for the soul of the Reformation, casting Luther, who denounced the rebels, and the radical Thomas Müntzer, who championed their cause, as theological adversaries locked in an existential struggle over Protestantism’s future. Yet despite being the largest popular revolt in Western Europe before the French Revolution, with as many as 100,000 dead, the 500th anniversary of its outbreak recently passed with scarcely any of recognition.
Lyndal Roper’s Summer of Fire and Blood: The German Peasants’ War challenges this long-standing tendency to sideline the German Peasants’ War. Instead, in the first English language popular history of the conflict in decades, the war comes to represent the Reformation’s highest hopes and unfulfilled promises, its radical potential and inherent limitations, its revolutionary energy, and the chaos it unleashed.
Though earlier revolts, such as the Bundschuh uprisings (1493–1517), the Drummer of Niklashausen movement (1476), and the Poor Conrad rebellion (1514), had blended religious, political, and economic unrest, they were fragmented and easily crushed. But in the fiery crucible of the Protestant Reformation, which birthed radicals like Thomas Müntzer, who called for violence, and iconoclasts like Andreas Karlstadt, who sought to obliterate the old order, the promise of Christian freedom took on revolutionary force. In short, apocalyptic fervor fused with festering social grievances, transforming discontent into a mass uprising of unprecedented scale.
While other works on the German Peasants’ War cast Luther and Müntzer as rival prophets, Roper downplays their conflict. This is not to say that they were unimportant, but Roper is far more interested in the peasants themselves and the broader religious and social dynamics that fueled the conflict. She argues that Müntzer’s leadership has been dramatically overstated, due in part to Frederick Engels’ attempts to portray him as a proto-communist revolutionary. More recent scholarship, particularly that of Thomas T. Müller, has demonstrated that Müntzer was not even the sole theologian of Mühlhausen or Allstedt, nor was he the singular inspiration behind the entire war. His influence, though significant, was often localized, and even some of his supposed allies, such as Andreas Karlstadt, distanced themselves from his radicalism. Müntzer’s eschatological vision and rhetoric of divine vengeance may have resonated with some rebels, but many of the leaders of the uprising formulated their demands independently of his influence.
Luther’s role in the German Peasants’ War, by contrast, is pivotal in Roper’s account, not individually but as a catalyst for ideas that transcended his control, shaping the theological and ideological terrain of the conflict. His 1520 treatise, The Freedom of a Christian, introduced the paradox of Christian liberty: “A Christian is a free lord of all things, subject to no one,” yet simultaneously “a perfectly dutiful servant of all, subject to everyone.” While Luther primarily meant this in a spiritual sense, his language of freiheit (freedom) resonated far beyond the theological sphere. For peasants bound by feudal constraints, his challenge to ecclesiastical authority implied a broader rejection of oppressive hierarchies, including the rule of landlords and noblemen. The Twelve Articles, one of the key documents of the Peasants’ War, explicitly invoked Christian freedom, demanding the abolition of serfdom, fairer rents, and the right for communities to elect their own pastors. As Roper notes, these demands did not originate from Luther yet were profoundly shaped by his rhetoric. The rebels’ rallying cry of “gospel, gospel, gospel” underscored that their grievances were not merely economic but rooted in a vision of divine justice.
Yet, Luther himself rejected these radical interpretations of his teachings.
While he initially expressed sympathy for the peasants’ grievances, particularly in his Admonition to Peace, he ultimately aligned with the ruling authorities. His infamous pamphlet Against the Robbing, Murdering Hordes of Peasants urged that the rebels be “smitten, slain, and stabbed” like mad dogs. This inflammatory rhetoric did more than condemn—it galvanized the princes, leading to brutal crackdowns such as the massacre at Frankenhausen. Even after the bloodshed, when friends like Johann Rühel and Hermann Mühlpfort implored him to moderate his stance, Luther remained unwavering, doubling down in An Open Letter on the Harsh Book Against the Peasants.
Luther’s support for the ruling elite was shaped by both theological conviction and personal alliances. His friendship with Georg Spalatin, advisor to Friedrich the Wise, ensured him protection and influence. While Friedrich advocated for negotiation, Luther urged his brother, Duke Johann, to take military action, leading to a decisive campaign alongside Philip of Hesse and the Swabian League. Luther also maintained close ties with the powerful Counts of Mansfeld, encouraging them to suppress peasant unrest and even commending one count for being the first to take up arms against the rebels. Theologically, Luther’s doctrine of the two kingdoms, drawn from Romans 13, argued that secular rulers were divinely appointed to maintain order, even through force, and that Christians were bound to obey them, regardless of their justice or tyranny.
Even so, Roper resists the tendency to make the German Peasants’ War another chapter in Luther’s life story. Luther’s ideas were undeniably influential, but the driving forces were the aspirations and agency of the peasants themselves. Rather than portraying the peasants as a faceless mass, Roper describes a diverse coalition of farmers, townsfolk, and even minor nobles. Though the primary sources are limited, Roper skillfully recovers glimpses of their vision for a new order.
The Taubertal peasants, for example, demanded an end to noble privileges, the abolition of castles and fortifications, and the elimination of feudal dues. Similarly, the Black Forest band called for those living in castles, monasteries, and clerical institutions to abandon their privileged dwellings and join the ‘Christian union,’ a radical vision of economic and social restructuring inspired by both scripture and lived experience. Even in urban areas, aspirations for reform surfaced. The burghers of Frankfurt proposed channeling church revenues into a common fund for the poor, while rebels in Erfurt demanded the revival of the university. These scattered yet compelling glimpses reveal the German Peasants’ War as more than just a reaction to economic hardship or a descent into chaos and violence. Rather, it was an organized, deliberate, and theologically driven movement, rooted in the hope of reshaping both the social and religious order.
As Roper summarizes, “This was a movement, not a drama of Great Men.”
With lines such as these, it is easy to see that Roper’s sympathies align with the peasants. She depicts them as idealists “incensed by… inequality” and yearning for a world where “men… live as brothers,” yet her commitment to telling their story sometimes veers into romanticism. Roper also directly addresses (and repeatedly remarks on) the near exclusion of women in contemporary accounts, arguing that the revolt’s ethos was “an unabashedly male ideal.” She highlights how women were nearly absent from visual depictions of the war, and how the revolt’s language, centered on “brotherhood,” reinforced patriarchal values. Even where women did participate, their roles were largely omitted, a reality compounded by the fact that they were barred from swearing oaths, bearing arms, or taking part in councils. Still, Roper skillfully weaves them into the narrative by highlighting their presence on the margins. In one particularly lively example, a band of Mühlhausen townswomen once chased off a priest with knives, demanding an evangelical preacher. While Roper avoids direct speculation, her framing suggests that women’s exclusion reinforced the movement’s limitations, particularly its reliance on male fraternity and militarized resistance, which may have foreclosed more sustainable or less violent strategies. Though she stops short of claiming a female-informed movement would have fared better, one senses she believes it might have.
In the final section, Roper offers an excellent brief historiographical survey of the German Peasants’ War, tracing its scholarly reception from Wilhelm Zimmermann’s monumental three-volume study (1841–1843) to the 2017 commemorations of the 500th anniversary of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses. Since Engels’s The Peasant War in Germany (1850), she notes, the conflict has occupied a “highly contested position in relation to German national identity and to political ideology left and right.” Nazi Germany mythologized the war as a nationalist epic, depicting an idealized, militaristic peasantry, while the Soviet Union reframed Müntzer as a proto-communist revolutionary, an image cemented in Werner Tübke’s artwork and even featured on the East German 5-mark banknote.
Marxist historians, particularly in the German Democratic Republic, treated the war as a case study in revolutionary failure, analyzing its shortcomings to extract strategic lessons for future socialist movements. Lutheran historiography, by contrast, often sought to excuse or downplay Luther’s vitriolic denunciation of the peasants and has resisted framing the Peasants’ War as an authentic expression of the Protestant Reformation in Germany. Even in 2017, the 500th anniversary of the Reformation largely ignored the war, reflecting its unsettled and often uncomfortable place in historical memory. As Roper observes, fascist, communist, and Marxist ideologies have each appropriated the war to serve their own historical narratives, underscoring its lasting political malleability. For her, “this highly politicized historiography” is precisely why the German Peasants’ War has remained “so difficult to approach” over the past forty years.
But in Roper’s telling, the German Peasants’ War was more than a political or class struggle, it was a seismic religious reckoning that laid bare the vulnerabilities of both Protestantism and Catholicism. Protestantism, hailed as a movement of spiritual renewal, was swiftly condemned as a force of chaos and division, while Catholicism, the bastion of tradition, stood accused of corruption and oppression. Charges that still echo in today’s theological debates. The rebellion was not just a crisis of the past but a crucible of competing visions for faith, authority, and reform. As Roper reveals, the upheaval of the 16th century serves as a striking testament to the unintended consequences of religious transformation, reminding us that the tensions between change and continuity, freedom and order, remain as urgent now as they were then.
