Anabaptists

After the suppression of the commoners' resistance of 1525 and 1526, only the Anabaptists of the southern Germanic territories continued the defeated rebels' effort to carry out the concrete social commands of the divine law of the Bible. In fact, Anabaptist community of goods represented a pronounced radicalization of the Christian social objectives of the commoners of 1525. In north Germany , which had not experienced the Peasants' War, Anabaptist community of goods was experimented with in Munster during the years 1534-35. However, in Anabaptist Munster the continuing prominence of the governing estate worked against the biblical egalitarianism of community of goods as practised in the south, where the self-assertion of subjects against their masters continued from the Peasants' War into Anabaptism. The elitist distortion of Anabaptist community of goods in Munster indirectly confirms the importance of the egalitarian traditions of the Peasants' War for Anabaptist community of goods as it developed in the south.

In presenting the case for a significant connection between Anabaptism and the Peasants' War, this study does not attempt to identify the two movements with each other. Only a small minority of the participants in the Peasants' War became Anabaptists (and many early Anabaptists did not participate in the Peasants' War). Most of the rebellious commoners were adherents of the Reformation, but the theological differences over the Lord's Supper and baptism which defined the later confessional distinctions between the Lutheran, Reformed and Anabaptist positions were only beginning to take shape in 1524; and most of the commoners who resisted priests and rulers in 1525 were unaware of them. Early Anabaptism was a fringe phenomenon in a few regions of the Peasants' War.

The changes in Peasants' War research since 1972 are even more important for this interpretation of the connection between the Peasants' War and Anabaptist community of goods than is new research on Anabaptism. Historians of Anabaptism, it is true, have searched out the cases of Anabaptists and future Anabaptists who participated in the Peasants' War. Yet, if Gunther Franz still dominated Peasants' War studies as he did in the early 1970s, the connection between the Peasants' War and Anabaptism would seem a lot more tenuous than it now does.

Drawing primarily on court records, Clasen presented statistical evidence that in the late 1520s, when the number of Anabaptists was greatest, roughly two-thirds of the verifiable Anabaptists of known residence lived in cities and towns. From 1530 onward the balance of Anabaptist population gradually tipped towards villages and farms; but this was the result of the decimation of the town movement through persecution rather than of an absolute numerical increase of rural Anabaptists.

Franz's Peasants' War participants were primarily rural and militant and their objectives were social, economic and political, in other words, secular. Clasen's Anabaptists were primarily urban and nonresistant and their goals were the exclusively religious ones of withdrawn sectarians. Obviously there was no possible point of contact between such disparate movements. The actual specific cases of persons involved both in the Peasants' War and Anabaptism were necessarily random and qualitatively and quantitatively insignificant.