Summer of the Common Man: The German Peasants' War, 1524-1526

In the summer of 1524, so the story goes, a countess in the Black Forest ordered her tenants to leave their harvest and gather snail shells for her household's thread. Within a year, some three hundred thousand men were under arms across the Holy Roman Empire. Monasteries and castles burned from Alsace to Thuringia, and the largest popular uprising in Europe before the French Revolution had begun.The Summer of the Common Man tells the full story of the German Peasants' War. Peasants, miners and townspeople, inspired by the Reformation, demanded freedom from serfdom, the return of their forests and streams, and the right to govern themselves under the law of God. The narrative follows them from the village assemblies of Upper Swabia to the guildhall at Memmingen, where the Twelve Articles were written, and from the gauntlet of pikes at Weinsberg to the hill at Frankenhausen, where Thomas Müntzer's followers sang hymns as the princes' cannon opened fire. Along the way it confronts Martin Luther's notorious call to smite and slay the rebels, and the repression that killed up to a hundred thousand people.This is a vivid, deeply researched account of the common man's first great attempt to imagine a just society, and of the princes who crushed it with cavalry and gallows.