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The relationship between the Protestant Reformation and the Peasants' War has long been a subject of debate. A traditional understanding in this matter is that the Peasants' Revolt stemmed from Martin Luther's doctrine of spiritual freedom and the application of his ideas as religious justification for social and political upheaval.
The Reformation, also known as the Protestant Reformation and the European Reformation, [1] was a major theological movement in Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the papacy and the authority of the Catholic Church.
Not only were there divisions between traditionalists and reformers, but Protestants themselves were divided between establishment reformers who held Lutheran beliefs and radicals who held Anabaptist and Sacramentarian views. [102] Reports of dissension from every part of England reached Cromwell daily—developments he tried to hide from the King.
The Radical Reformation represented a response to perceived corruption both in the Catholic Church and in the expanding Magisterial Protestant movement led by Martin Luther and many others. Beginning in Germany and Switzerland in the 16th century, the Radical Reformation gave birth to many radical Protestant groups throughout Europe.
Luther's pamphlets against the Church and the hierarchy, often worded with "liberal" phraseology, led many peasants to believe he would support an attack on the upper classes in general. [102] Revolts broke out in Franconia , Swabia , and Thuringia in 1524, even drawing support from disaffected nobles, many of whom were in debt.
Richard II of England meets the rebels of the Peasants' Revolt. Popular revolts in late medieval Europe were uprisings and rebellions by peasants in the countryside, or the burgess in towns, against nobles, abbots and kings during the upheavals between 1300 and 1500, part of a larger "Crisis of the Late Middle Ages".
The Magisterial Reformers believed that secular authority should be followed where it did not clash with biblical commands. An early example of this was seen in the Peasant’s Rebellion of 1525, towards which Luther was originally sympathetic, but which he later strongly condemned. [8] [9]
The peasants had made extensive use of this weapon against the forces of the princes, the nobility, and the clergy. Now Luther turned the same weapon against the peasants, extracting from the Bible a veritable hymn to the authorities ordained by God—a feat hardly exceeded by any lackey of absolute monarchy.