Uprising of the Nobility W hile the fourth Union Shoe Organisation was being suppressed in the Black Forest, Luther, in Wittenberg, gave the signal to a movement which was destined to draw all the estates into its torrent, and to shake the whole empire.The theses of this Augustinian from Thuringia had the effect of lightning in a powder magazine.The manifold and contradictory strivings of the knights and the middle-class, the peasants and the plebeians, the princes craving for sovereignty, the lower clergy, secretly playing at mysticism and the learned writer's opposition of a satirical and burlesque nature, found in Luther's theses a common expression around which they grouped themselves with astounding rapidity.This alliance of all the opposing elements, though formed overnight and of brief duration, suddenly revealed the enormous power of the movement, and gave it further impetus.
But this very rapid growth of the movement was also destined to develop the seeds of discord which were hidden in it.It was destined to tear asunder at least those portions of the aroused mass which, by their very situation in life, were directly opposed to each other, and to put them in their normal state of mutual hostility.Already in the first years of the Reformation, the assembling of the heterogeneous mass of the opposition around two central points became a fact.Nobility and middle-class grouped themselves unconditionally around Luther.Peasants and plebeians, yet failing to see in Luther a direct enemy, formed a separate revolutionary party of the opposition.This was nothing new, since now the movement bad become much more general, much broader in scope and deeper than it was in the pre-Luther times, which necessarily brought about a sharp antagonism and an open struggle between the two parties.This direct opposition soon became apparent.Luther and Muenzer, fighting in the press and in the pulpit, were as much opposed to each other as were the armies of princes, knights and cities (consisting, as they did, mainly of Lutherans or of forces at least inclined towards Lutherism), and the hordes of peasants and plebeians routed by those armies.
The divergence of interests of the various elements accepting the Reformation became apparent even before the Peasant War in the attempt of the nobility to realise its demands as against the princes and the clergy.
The situation of the German nobility at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century has been depicted above.The nobility was losing its independence to the ever-increasing power of the lay and clerical princes.It realised that in the same degree as it was going down as a group in society, the power of the empire was going down as well, dissolving itself into a number of sovereign principalities.The collapse of the nobility coincided, in its own opinion, with the collapse of the German nation.Added to it was the fact that the nobility, especially that section of it which was under the empire, by virtue of its military occupation and its attitude towards the princes, directly represented the empire and the imperial power.The nobility was the most national of the estates, and it knew that the stronger were the imperial power and the unity of Germany, and the weaker and less numerous the princes, the more powerful would the nobility become.It was for that reason that the knighthood was generally dissatisfied with the pitiful political situation of Germany, with the powerlessness of the empire in foreign affairs, which increased in the same degree as, by inheritance, the court was adding to the empire one province after the other, with the intrigues of foreign powers inside of Germany and with the plottings of German princes with foreign countries against the power of the empire.
It was for that reason, also, that the demands of the nobility instantly assumed the form of a demand for the reform of the empire, the victims of which were to be the princes and the higher clergy.Ulrich of Hutten, the theoretician of the German nobility, undertook to formulate this demand in combination with Franz von Sickingen, its military and diplomatic representative.
The reform of the empire as demanded by the nobility was conceived by Hutten in a very radical spirit and expressed very clearly.Hutten demanded nothing else than the elimination of all princes, the secularisation of all church principalities and estates, and the restoration of a democracy of the nobility headed by a monarchy -- a form of government reminiscent of the heyday of the late Polish republic.Hutten and Sickingen believed that the empire would again become united, free and powerful, should the rule of the nobility, a predominantly military class, be reestablished, the princes, the elements of disintegration, removed, the power of the priests annihilated, and Germany tom away from under the dominance of the Roman Church.
Founded on serfdom this democracy of the nobility, the prototype of which could be found in Poland and, in the empires conquered by the Germanic tribes, at least in their first centuries, is one of the most primitive forms of society, and its normal course of development is to become an extensive feudal hierarchy, which was a considerable advance.
