You Can’t Trust Elites. Just Ask a 500-Year-Old German Peasant.

SUMMER OF FIRE AND BLOOD: The German Peasants’ War, by Lyndal Roper

The German Peasants’ War was the greatest social explosion in Europe before the French Revolution. As Lyndal Roper explains in “Summer of Fire and Blood,” her engrossing new history of the upheaval, “It all began with snails.”

In 1524, in the small town of Stühlingen, on the southeastern edge of the Black Forest, the Countess of Lupfen demanded that her peasants gather snail shells for the ladies at court to use as bobbins to spool their thread. On top of all their other duties, this was a burden too far. More than a thousand peasants refused to undertake the additional mindless labor.

Within months, they had a list of 62 grievances. Across the southern German-speaking lands, other groups of peasants followed suit. They were fed up with obeying restrictions on taking wood out of forests and fish out of ponds; watching their fields get ravaged by aristocratic hunting parties; and paying nonsensical and onerous taxes, death duties and marriage fees to lords who, as their own wealth increased dramatically, offered their serfs little in return besides lives on a short leash.

There had been countless peasant uprisings in Europe before. What made the revolts of the 1520s different, Roper explains, was that the peasants were freshly emboldened by the early shocks of the Reformation. Just four years before the revolts started ramping up, the renegade monk Martin Luther published “On the Freedom of a Christian.” Luther later insisted that he was interested only in religious freedom, but his work suggested to the serfs that the lords’ ownership of their bodies was a theological travesty; Christ had already bought every human soul with his blood. Sacking monasteries and castles became easier when peasants could believe they had God — and some very clever people — on their side.

Snail shells aside, no general calamity triggered the unrest. Population levels had bounced back since the Black Death and the price of agricultural goods was rising. The lives of German serfs had probably gotten a little worse in recent seasons, Roper writes, “but even more importantly, peasants felt they were worse because they were becoming less submissive.”

With the treasure they seized, the peasants were able to provision their armies and overwhelm all but the most impregnable strongholds. The alliances they forged with miners in towns were just as important, as was the support from the knights and lords from the lower nobility who sensed opportunities of their own in concessions from the great princes and the plundering of ecclesiastical properties.