general
character.

They asked in vain. The princes ridiculed the idea of a court in which
Luther should sit side by side with the archduke. Luther refused to
interfere. He admitted the oppression of the peasantry, severely
attacked the princes and nobility for their conduct, but deprecated the
excesses which the insurgents had already committed, and saw no safety
from worse evils except in putting down the peasantry with a strong
hand.

The rejection of the demands of the rebellious peasants was followed by
a frightful reign of license, political in the south, religious in the
north. Everywhere the people were in arms, destroying castles, burning
monasteries, and forcing numbers of the nobles to join them, under pain
of having their castles plundered and burned. The counts of Hohenlohe
were made to enter their ranks, and were told, "Brother Albert and
brother George, you are no longer lords but peasants, and we are the
lords of Hohenlohe." Other nobles were similarly treated. Various
Swabian nobles fled for safety, with their families and treasures, to
the city and castle of Weinsberg. The castle was stormed and taken, and
the nobles, seventy in number, were forced to run the gantlet between
two lines of men armed with spears, who stabbed them as they passed. It
was this deed that brought out a pamphlet from Luther, in which he
called on all the citizens of the empire to put down "the furious
peasantry, to strangle, to stab them, secretly and openly, as they can,
as one would kill a mad dog."

There was need for something to be done if Germany was to be saved from
a revolution. The numbers of the insurgents steadily increased. Many of
the cities were in league with them, several of the princes entered in
negotiation concerning their demands; in Thuringia the Anabaptists,
under the lead of a fanatical preacher named Thomas Muenzer, were in full
revolt; in Saxony, Hesse, and lower Germany the peasantry were in arms;
there was much reason to fear that the insurgents and fanatics would
join their forces and pour like a rushing torrent through the whole
empire, destroying all before them. Of the many peasant revolts which
the history of mediaevalism records this was the most threatening and
dangerous, and called for the most strenuous exertions to save the
institutions of Germany from a complete overthrow.

At the head of the main body of insurgents was a knight of notorious
character, the famed Goetz von Berlichingen