ntism of his
theological views, Muenzer had as his object the establishment of a
communistic Christian Commonwealth. He started a practical
exemplification of this among his own followers in the town itself.

Up to the beginning of May the insurrection had carried everything
before it. Truchsess and his men of the Swabian League had proved
themselves unable to cope with it. Matters now changed. Knights,
men-at-arms, and free-lances were returning from the Italian campaign
of Charles V after the battle of Pavia. Everywhere the revolt met with
disaster. The Muelhausen insurgents were destroyed at Frankenhausen by
forces of the Count of Hesse, of the Duke of Brunswick, and of the
Duke of Saxony. This was on May 15th. Three days before the defeat at
Frankenhausen, on May 12th, a decisive defeat was inflicted on the
peasants by the forces of the Swabian League, under Truchsess, at
Boeblingen, in Wuertemberg. Savage ferocity signalized the treatment of
the defeated peasants by the soldiery of the nobles. Jaecklein Rohrbach
was roasted alive. Truchsess with his soldiery then hurried north and
inflicted a heavy defeat on the Franconian peasant contingents at
Koenigshaven, on the Tauber. These three defeats, following one
another in little more than a fortnight, broke the back of the whole
movement in Germany proper. In Elsass and Lorraine the insurrection
was crushed by the hired troops and the Duke of Lorraine; eastward, on
the little river Luibas. In the Austrian territories, under the able
leadership of Michael Gaismayr, one of the lesser nobility, it
continued for some months longer, and the fear of Gaismayr, who, it
should be said, was the only man of really constructive genius the
movement had produced, maintained itself with the privileged classes
till his murder in the autumn of 1528, at the instance of the Bishop
of Brixen.

The great peasant insurrection in Germany failed through want of a
well-thought-out plan and tactics, and, above all, through a want of
cohesion among the various peasant forces operating in different
sections of the country, between which no regular communications were
kept up. The attitude of Martin Luther towards the peasants and their
cause was base in the extreme. His action was mainly embodied in two
documents, of which the first was issued about the middle of April,
and the second a month later. The difference in tone between them is
sufficiently striking. In the first, which bore the titl