He maintained his authority by imprisoning and killing those who doubted him, but was able to command enough support from the supposedly pacifist Anabaptists to keep the bishop and Catholic armies at bay for 18 months.
There was another outbreak of radical, lower-order Protestant violence in Müntzer in 1534–1535, in which the ruling bishop was deposed by Anabaptists, who then established their own “kingdom,” led by Jan of Leiden, who proclaimed himself the messiah. Yet it was unusual, in that Luther condemned the peasants and the war ended with the slaughter of peasants by both Lutheran and Catholic armies. In a sense, the Peasants’ War (as the resulting conflict was called) was the first of the post-Reformation wars of religion. Some of the peasants’ demands were socioeconomic, but all derived from the belief that the whole of human society, rather than just theology and the church, ought to be remade in accordance with biblical principles and the law of God. In 1524–1525 peasants rose in revolt across southern and western Germany, inflamed by the version of the Lutheran Reformation preached by Thomas Müntzer, who had been one of Martin Luther’s early followers but had been banished for his radicalism and militancy. The fourth article will briefly recount the history of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century wars against Islam, before the last article in the series examines the end of the era of wars of religion. 1 The next article will consider what conclusions and lessons can be drawn from the narrative that follows. This second in a five-part series of articles on Europe’s wars of religion tells the story of the confessional wars in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Christendom. The division between Protestant and Catholic caused or intensified numerous conflicts, resulting in some of the longest lasting, bloodiest, and most bitterly contested and destructive wars in history. Starting in the 1520s international relations between the rising European states were dominated by conflicts that were primarily or significantly religious in character: wars in central and southern Europe, between Christians and Muslims and, in central and northwestern Europe, confessional wars, the fruit of the Reformation.
This article is part two in a four part series. The Reformation and Wars of Religion David J.
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