2. Europe’s Biggest Popular Revolt Before the 1789 French Revolution
The German Peasants’ War of 1524 – 1525 was Europe’s largest popular revolt prior to the French Revolution of 1789. For generations, peasants in Germany had experienced a steady curtailment of their ancient rights to fish, hunt, bear arms, or collect wood from common lands. In the meantime, their aristocratic overlords’ exactions grew ever more burdensome. The conflict was reportedly – and perhaps apocryphally – sparked by the Countess of Lupfen’s orders to her serfs to stop work on their fields in order to collect snail shells for her to use as thread spools. To neglect their fields and crops meant starvation, so the peasants took up arms.
Wherever and however the revolt began, shared and widespread grievances ensured that it spread quickly among the peasantry. The pent-up resentments also ensured that when the peasants finally turned to violence against their noble lords, they turned to violence in a big way. Atrocities abounded, and a noble or landlord who fell into the rebels’ clutches was in for rough treatment. Upper-class captives were often forced to run a gauntlet between rows of peasants who wielded clubs and whips. Bad as that was, it was considered to be at the milder end of the spectrum of the violence dished out by the peasants.