histofthought1

Protestants and Catholics 149published some revolutionary pamphlets. After wandering through southwesternGermany, Miintzer was invited back to Muhlhausen in February1525, where a revolutionary group had taken over.Thomas Miintzer and his allies proceeded to impose a communist regimeon the city of Muhlhausen. The monasteries were seized, and all propertywas decreed to be in common, and the consequence, as a contemporaryobserver noted, was that 'he so affected the folk that no one wanted to work' .The result was that the theory of communism and love quickly became inpractice an alibi for systemic theft:... when anyone needed food or clothing he went to a rich man and demanded it ofhim in Christ's name, for Christ had commanded that all should share with theneedy. And what was not given freely was taken by force. Many actedthus...Thomas [Mtintzer] instituted this brigandage and multiplied it every day. 14At that point, the great Peasants' War erupted throughout Germany, arebellion launched by the peasantry in favour of their local autonomy and inopposition to the new centralizing, high-tax, absolutist rule of the Germanprinces. Throughout Germany, the princes crushed the feebly armed peasantrywith great brutality, massacring about 100 000 peasants in the process.In Thuringia, the army of the princes confronted the peasants on 15 May witha great deal of artillery and 2 000 cavalry, luxuries denied to the peasantry.The landgrave of Hesse, commander of the princes' army, offered amnesty tothe peasants if they would hand over Miintzer and his immediate followers.The peasants were strongly tempted, but Miintzer, holding aloft his nakedsword, gave his last flaming speech, declaring that God had personally promisedhim victory; that he would catch all the enemy cannon-balls in thesleeves of his cloak; that God would protect them all. Just at the strategicmoment ofMiintzer's speech, a rainbow appeared in the heavens, and Miintzerhad previously adopted the rainbow as the symbol of his movement. To thecredulous and confused peasantry, this seemed a veritable sign from Heaven.Unfortunately, the sign didn't work, and the princes' army crushed the peasants,killing 5 000 while losing only half a dozen men. Miintzer himself fledand hid, but was captured a few days later, tortured into confession, and thenexecuted.Thomas Miintzer and his signs may have been defeated, and his body mayhave mouldered in the grave, but his soul kept marching on. Not only was hisspirit kept alive by followers in his own day, but also by Marxist historiansfrom Engels to the present day, who saw in this deluded mystic an epitome ofsocial revolution and the class struggle, and a forerunner of the chiliasticprophesies of the 'comlnunist stage' of the supposedly inevitable Marxianfuture.