500 Years of the Peasants' War: The Massacre Under the Rainbow

It wasn't a battle, it was a bloodbath. The rebels had barricaded themselves in a wagon fort on the hill north of the Thuringian town of Frankenhausen. But the peasants were powerless against the attack of the princes' combined armies, their artillery, cavalry, and mercenaries. The Battle of Frankenhausen, 500 years ago on May 15, 1525, marked the beginning of the end of the largest peasant uprising in Central Europe, the bloody suppression of a movement steeped in deep faith that strove for community and freedom—and which culminated in mass murder.

Around 8,000 rebellious farmers and miners had gathered above Frankenhausen. They had brought at least 15 cannons up the mountain and carried scythes, sickles, flails, and pitchforks. The miners were armed with spears, halberds, and short sabers.

May 10, 2025, Thuringia, Bad Frankenhausen: Visitors view the Peasants' War panorama by the painter Werner Tübke in the state exhibition "The Course of the World" at the Panorama Museum. In the second part of the state exhibition, which opened today, the Peasants' War panorama by the painter Werner Tübke is juxtaposed with the historical models that served as his motifs and embedded in the eras of humanism, the Renaissance, and the Reformation. Photo: Michael Reichel/dpa - ATTENTION: For editorial use only in connection with current reporting +++ dpa-Bildfunk +++

Source: Michael Reichel/dpa

The rebels carried the rainbow flag as a symbol of their connection with God and Christ. Five Latin and eight German words were written beneath the rainbow: "verbum domini maneat in etternum" ("The word of the Lord abides forever") and "This is the sign of the eternal covenant of God."

Opposing them stood the assembled armies of the princes: the Hessian-Brunswick army under Landgrave Philip of Hesse, the Saxon troops under Duke George, the soldiers of the Thuringian nobles, and the delegations of Mainz and Brandenburg. They had issued an ultimatum to the peasants: the rebels were to hand over their leader, the theologian and preacher Thomas Müntzer.

Then, the peasants believed, heaven sent a sign. A rainbow appeared, circling the sun! They were certain: the "hour of the Messiah" had come; they saw the halo, a circular refraction of light on ice crystals, as support for their cause. They rejected Müntzer's extradition and gathered in a circle to listen to his sermon. The attack by the princely armies caught them completely unprepared.

"The wagon fort offered no cover and could not be defended against the artillery," writes historian Lyndal Roper of the carnage that followed. "Experienced soldiers mowed down the peasants as they fled down the slope toward Frankenhausen, and the cavalry hacked them to pieces. Blood ran down a depression on the escape route to the town—it's still called the 'Blood Channel' today."

Some peasants hid in the city's sewers, where they were tracked down by marauding soldiers. Perhaps 7,000 people were slaughtered that day, Roper estimates, and another 300 were executed the following day. Only six soldiers on the princes' side are said to have died. Thomas Müntzer was found in the city after the battle, hiding in a bed as a "sick poor man." He was captured, tortured in Heldrungen Castle, and beheaded on the scaffold in Mühlhausen on May 27.

Bad Frankenhausen was not the only place where the authorities took gruesome revenge on the rebellious rural population in the spring of 1525. Just one day later, 500 kilometers away in Alsace, 3,000 people burned to death in the village of Lupstein. They had fled to the village to escape the advancing troops of Anton II of Lorraine. The soldiers set fire to the village. Another day later, Anton's mercenary troops massacred the fighting peasants and innocent townspeople in nearby Sauverne. They plundered the village, raped the women, and hanged the leaders of the Alsatian peasant mob.

Historian Lyndal Roper

Source: Isha Photography

"The peasants' defeat was so absolute and total that there wasn't another uprising of this magnitude for centuries," says Lyndal Roper in an interview with RedaktionsNetzwerk Deutschland (RND). "Between 70,000 and 100,000 people died in 1525 – within two months. That wasn't a war, nor a civil war; it was a massacre. Because not very many people died on the side of the lords."

George III of Waldburg-Zeil, for example, distinguished himself with particular cruelty—his rigorous actions against the insurgents earned him the nickname "Bauernjörg." He had prisoners chained to a tree and roasted alive—a punishment that was often imitated.

Roper explains why the "peasant mobs" had no chance against the mercenaries: "The peasants had too few cavalry of their own and too little experience. They were unable to oppose an attack by a mounted army. They always set up these wagon forts and were then in a defensive position. But the moment the first shots are fired, it very often happens that some panic and flee. And then they are simply hunted down. That's why the death toll is so high."

What kind of uprising was it that ended with the massacres in May? What drove the peasants – and why should it still concern us today? In 1524/1525, a movement spread from Alsace through Baden, Swabia, Franconia, and Thuringia, drawing its strength from Luther's ideas and yet being resolutely opposed by him. Its manifestations varied greatly locally and regionally, yet it reached a common denominator – beginning with the resolution of a peasant assembly not to ridicule delegates from distant regions because of their dialect or traditional dress. Their demands stemmed from everyday life, revolving around access to resources such as firewood and pastureland, but based them on religion, thus achieving a universal dimension. Their ideas of freedom in community were often naive from today's perspective, yet remain revolutionary.

Lyndal Roper spent nine years working on her brilliant comprehensive account of the Peasants' War (For Freedom. The Peasants' War of 1525, S. Fischer, 669 pages, 36 euros). The 68-year-old Australian teaches in Oxford, has spoken flawless German since a study visit to Tübingen in 1979, and, at the latest since her 2017 biography of Luther, has been a fixture as an interpreter of the revolutionary upheavals on the continent 500 years ago. For her book, she adapted to the pace of the roving peasants, exploring the sites of the uprising on foot or by bike. "You get to know a landscape best when you feel it in your legs," she writes. And she also mentions the shock that ran through her limbs when she came face to face with the skulls and bones of the peasants she had written about who had been killed in an ossuary next to the rebuilt church in Lupstein.

For a Luther biographer, studying the Peasants' War was inevitable. Without the Wittenberg reformer, the uprising of the rural population would have been unthinkable – and to conceal this, Luther later became one of their most radical enemies. In 1520, Luther wrote a short but powerful treatise entitled "On the Freedom of a Christian." His followers later argued that he meant spiritual freedom, but the peasants took this "incendiary phrase" literally. For them, freedom meant more. "The peasants demand freedom," says Roper, "freedom from corvée, freedom from serfdom, freedom to choose their own pastor. But they are less concerned with individual freedom than with the possibility of living together in freedom. The congregation is their central focus, incredibly important to them."

That's why the free election of the pastor is at the heart of their demands: The church holds the congregation together, and the congregation members decide who represents the church. The question of whether lay people may celebrate Holy Communion with bread alone or also with wine may seem like a mere detail from today's perspective. For the common people of the 16th century, it was central, because wine, as a symbol of Christ's blood, justifies the claim to freedom. The third and most important of the Memmingen Twelve Articles from March 1525 states: "...that Christ, by shedding all his precious blood, has redeemed and bought us free, both the Shepherd and the Most High, excluding no one. Therefore, it follows from Scripture that we are and want to be free."

The insurgents formed their own community, an all-male one. They left their villages together, leaving women and children behind. On their journey, they formed circles and swore brotherhood to one another. "Anyone could become a brother," says Roper. "Their tactic in very many cases was to try to get their own master to swear brotherhood. Then they thought they had won. From today's perspective, one might consider that naive and stupid. But one can also ask: How do you reconcile conflicting interests? This idea of ​​brotherhood is actually the notion that we are obligated to one another, that we are related to one another, and that we must somehow get along. Their goal was also to establish respect and a more humane way of dealing with one another."

The peasant world was characterized by extreme contradictions between rulers and ruled, but the concept of classes and class conflicts was alien to them. "We assume that there are classes, that society is determined by different interests, and that we have to somehow reconcile these different class interests," says Roper. "The peasants operated with a comparatively very naive notion of group membership."

This didn't stop Friedrich Engels from elevating Thomas Müntzer to the "most magnificent figure" of the Peasants' War, who led the "embryonic proletarian element." GDR historiography seized on this idea and made the Christian apocalyptic preacher Müntzer a champion of the workers' and peasants' state. On the Schlachtberg in Frankenhausen, the SED regime had a monumental building erected to house a panoramic painting. From a distance, it looks like an oversized smoke detector stuck to the hill instead of the ceiling. Leipzig painter Werner Tübke and his assistants spent eleven years creating the 14-meter-high and 120-meter-long circular painting, officially titled " Early Bourgeois Revolution in Germany."

Tübke outsmarted the SED leadership. His circular painting, with more than 3,000 figures, does not depict the linear progression of history toward the communist paradise. The panorama is oriented toward the changing seasons, demonstrating the eternal recurrence of the same. The failure of the uprising thus fits into a cycle of oppression and revolt. But the painter's sympathies are at least clearly depicted: only spring, with its battle scene under the rainbow, is bathed in bright light; the other seasons are depicted in somber colors. Freedom must be fought for again and again, the painting says.

Martin Luther and Thomas Müntzer both appear several times in Tübke's work—but the painter did not portray them as antagonists. While Müntzer is at the center of the battle scene under the rainbow, Luther is seen away from the battle at a well, surrounded by other great minds of the time. A few weeks before the Frankenhausen massacre, the reformer had written his infamous treatise " Against the Murderous and Robbish Hordes of the Farmers ," triggered by one of the few acts of bloodshed committed by peasant armies in April 1525. Luther demanded: " They should be smashed, strangled, and stabbed, secretly and publicly, whoever can, just as one should kill a mad dog ."

Why did the reformer call for violence so massively against those who relied on his teachings? Lyndal Roper offers three possible explanations. The first is—after all—a class conflict: "Luther comes from a completely different social class than the peasants," she says. "He comes from a fairly wealthy family. They ran mines, they dealt with officials and counts, and they had an interest in maintaining the existing order."

The second explanation is as much theological as it is personal: "Luther firmly believes that the existing order must not be overthrown or even questioned. And he has to defend himself against his Catholic opponents, who have always said that Luther's use of the word "freedom" and his questioning of the Church's authority would trigger a peasant revolt," the historian analyzes. "He had to show that he wasn't the one causing the unrest."

Third, there is a psychological element, Roper argues: "Luther is attacked by Thomas Müntzer—and in turn portrays him as a tool of the devil. Because the devil attacks him through the person of Müntzer, this is proof that Luther is on the side of Christ."

What remains after 500 years of the revolutionary community experience of hundreds of thousands? "The diversity of ideas and idealism," Roper says. It's difficult for us today to go back 500 years, she says. "You think you have no connection to the people of 500 years ago. I see it differently. I feel connected to them. They face some of the same problems as we do."

But in the half-millennium between the Peasants' War and today, we have industrialization, the American and French Revolutions' ideas about freedom and the individual, capitalism and Marxism, colonization and globalization. "So many major developments that have shaped our ways of thinking," Roper enumerates. "But if you go back to a society where all this hadn't started yet, you can see the problems from a different perspective."

And sometimes, abruptly and unexpectedly, the eras and their struggles converge: During the Thuringia Day parade in Gotha on the first weekend in May, a group dressed in peasant garb to commemorate the events of 500 years ago. They carried rainbow flags, not those of Thomas Müntzer, but the contemporary ones of the queer movement. Bystanders insulted them for this, and videos were shown on social media. They responded: "That's a flag of freedom."