Some historical events possess such enduring power that they continue to haunt our imagination and fears centuries later. The German Peasants’ War, brutally suppressed in May 1525, is one such event. Involving at least a hundred thousand people—probably many more—it was, as British-Australian historian Lyndal Roper observed, “the greatest popular uprising in western Europe before the French Revolution.” The rebellion spread from what is today southern Germany across Austria, Switzerland, France, and Hungary. The peasants’ famous Twelve Articles—formally titled “The Just and Fundamental Articles of All the Peasantry and Tenants of Spiritual and Temporal Powers by Whom They Think Themselves Oppressed”—demanded nothing less than ”Freyheit“ (Freedom).
