Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen

“I have used the story of Hans Behem, the Drummer of Niklashausen, to expose some of the greatest historical forces, both material and mental, that shaped much of Germany on the eve of the Reformation.”

Behem’s story illustrates larger social and intellectual forces at work in late medieval Germany. Wunderli uses this microhistory to highlight peasant unrest over economic conditions and anticlerical sentiment. This tension predates the dawning of the Protestant Reformation, which began less than fifty years after the Catholic Church executed Behem as a heretic.

“At certain periods during the year or at certain places, people could come especially close to that sacred other-realm. These were the feast days, or holy days, that were dedicated to specific saints or to Christ.”

Medieval life revolved around the Church’s liturgical calendar, which includes a variety of holy days venerating particular saints. These feast days allowed people of all classes to draw closer to the divine while living in the world, and they were one of many forms of ritual that deeply embedded a sense of the sacred in everyday life.

“Indeed, the Virgin was more than a saint. She occupied a position in heaven only slightly lower than the Godhood itself. During the Middle Ages her hold on popular imagination intensified, and popular passion for her burned for her ever brighter until she dominated fifteenth-century religious sensibilities.”

The Virgin Mary, as the mother of Jesus Christ, was especially revered in the late Middle Ages due to her proximity to God. As such, she was a popular saint to whom people often prayed during times of duress. Behem’s preaching appealed to many pilgrims, since he claimed that his message came from the Virgin and thus directly from God.

“The world of fantasy justice in late medieval Europe was reenacted ritually several times per year during festival time.”

During certain liturgical periods, like Carnival, medieval people upended traditional power structures. Costumed peasants mocked the nobility and the clergy, acting out their fantasies in which elites received their just punishment. This enactment, as an outlet for peasant frustrations, stymied more serious unrest. Behem, however, challenged social hierarchies outside of this controlled time, thereby making him, and the pilgrims who flocked to him, dangerous in the elite’s eyes.

“Festivals especially show the interdependence of popular (folk) culture and official (elite) culture. By the late Middle Ages, that is, by the fifteenth century in Germany, every festival of the year still bore marks of that symbiosis of two cultures: every festival has two parts to it, folk and elite, but the two celebrations often seemed to be in opposition […] Now was the time for copious drinking, eating, and laughter, unlike anything in everyday life and in opposition to the solemn church ceremonies.”

Wunderli notes the tension between folk and elite culture—between levity and sobriety—during religious festivals. While these liturgical periods inverted the social order, they were also inherently elite ritual events that relied on the clergy’s role in performing sacred rituals. However, the revelry of these festivals could not exist without their juxtaposition against the official and somber celebrations.

“Folk fantasy condemned powerful authorities to hell, just as in their sermons preachers regularly condemned the powerless to hell.”

During the festival of Carnival, medieval peasants mocked elites, including clerics, whom they critiqued and sentenced to eternal torment in an inversion of reality. During regular time, the clergy regulated the lives of the commoners by criticizing their behavior and preaching that they would experience the eternal torments of hell for their misdeeds.

“Carnival humor in 1476 must have been bitter and biting.”

Wunderli speculates that peasants’ criticism of the clergy and nobility in and around Niklashausen during 1476 was especially harsh due to a difficult winter. Peasants had to pay various rents and dues to elites, in the form of crop surplus, before they could sustain themselves and their families. The harsh winter created tension that strained social relations.

“There are variations to peasant life, of course, in time and place, but the precariousness of peasant life seems to remain a constant. At best, economic victories of peasants, such as a good harvest, bring small gains. Economic defeats may be fatal.”

Peasants in medieval society were often small farmers. These people already lived with minimal subsistence, and a year of poor crop yields could be devastating for a peasantry who would then be unable to pay their rents and other dues owed to elites. The lack of surplus crops condemned a peasant family to financial ruin and starvation.

“[…] German peasants were caught in a terrible balancing act: balancing demands of their own subsistence against demands of powerful lords.”

Constant economic strife cast a shadow over peasant lives in late medieval Europe. Peasant farmers needed to produce enough harvest to support their households while also growing enough to fulfill their financial obligations to the noble and clerical landowners. Always, their lords’ needs took precedence over their own, which stoked class resentment.

“A common image of peasants—apart from being social bumpkins—was that they were shrewd bargainers, willing to quibble for hours over farthings. Behind the stereotype were people who lived on the edge of financial ruin and who were acutely sensitive to the slightest fluctuation in market prices that could give them a slight profit—or could lead to ruin and starvation.”

The stereotype of the constantly haggling peasant is grounded in the historical reality of the peasantry’s precarity. Peasants were most attuned and subjected to economic fluctuations and thus acted accordingly in their daily lives.

“Strip the riches from the world. Find truth in poverty. Make a bonfire of the vanities.”

Behem was not an outlier in the late Middle Ages. Other devout people called for a rejection of worldly luxuries and a return to apostolic poverty. This sentiment led to the formation of new monastic orders, like the Franciscan and Dominican friars, as well as lay movements, like the Beguines and Beghards of the Low Countries. Some burned material goods, or “vanities,” as an act of their religious devotion.

“Hans Behem, the Carnival drummer, had carried with him to Niklashausen the upside-down social world of Carnival and the Lenten message of self-denial and salvation through poverty.”

Though Behem ultimately rejected the revelry and worldliness of Carnival in which he once participated, he embraced its social inversion and carried it into the liturgical season of Lent. The unacknowledged backdrop to all this outward ceremony was the politics of class tension: Wunderli connects Lent to a sanctified celebration of poverty, which redeemed and dignified the experience of privation.

“For the best educated, then, a miracle was merely the higher law of God. A miracle was “natural,” that is, it was still a law of nature, but one that humans did not understand. A miracle, therefore, was God revealing himself in nature.”

In contrast to the modern imagination, medieval Christianity situated the miraculous within the natural. The Body of Christ, as they saw themselves, did not question the veracity of miracles; they only sought the source—the particular human conduit for a universal divine reality. For medieval people, any phenomenon’s ultimate causation was God, as opposed to a scientific explanation in the modern sense.

“The medieval mentality of guilt and longing for salvation led directly to the pilgrimage trail.”

When a person was sick, the medieval Church encouraged their pilgrimage to holy shrines because, so many believed, illness was a manifestation of moral failing; God was the source of atonement and thus physical recovery. Tradition held that people could access divine grace by visiting saints’ holy shrines, since saints were thought to have unique intimacy with God and, therefore, could petition more effectively for His merciful healing. These saints were thus intercessors between humans and the divine.

“At a holy shrine, in the holy light, pilgrims were consciously ‘leveled’ in rank and status: pilgrims simplified their dress and behavior; titles of rank disappeared; pilgrims called each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister.’ They shared a profound sense of community […]”

Pilgrimage sites diminished medieval social distinctions. According to Christianity, all were equal in God’s eyes, despite class or other factors. Christians belonged to a community of believers that ideally provided support for all. Behem’s call to pilgrimage and his belief in an imminent new social order drew on existing ideas about the equalizing nature of Christianity, particularly as that equalizing occurred in the pilgrimage experience.

“In the eyes of the authorities, the Drummer was a dangerous player of foolish music, leading his followers into a crazy, egalitarian dance that promised only social chaos.”

Though Behem rejected his past as a Carnival musician, his critics harnessed the elitist stigma to attack him as an ignorant preacher of faulty theology. His claim that the Virgin appeared to him—and, subsequently, his claim that social disruption was God’s will—directly threatened the power of the clergy and lay nobility who extracted labor and wealth from the peasants. Such peasants, drawn to Behem’s “egalitarian” religious message, would no longer be such a reliable source of passive, exploitative profit for the elite.

“Thus the social function of reform was to compel powerful men of the elite to define and categorize people according to a standard of the Good Christian: sober, earnest, and pious.”

Church reformers like Bishop Rudolph von Sherenberg wanted to both cleanse the Church of clerical corruption and encourage Christians to reject worldly “vanities” that catered to the flesh. Reform reinforced a rigid definition of Christian morality: “Good Christians” engaged in neither festival revelry nor worldly pleasures like dancing, singing, and imbibing; rather, they participated in somber religious occasions and embraced pious living.

“To his followers, Hans Behem was not the Drummer. He was ‘the prophet,’ ‘the Holy Youth,’ ‘Our Good Tidings of Joy.’”

While Behem’s persecutors used his history as a Carnival musician to defame him and delegitimize his claims, those who followed him cared little about this history. They believed he was a divine prophet whose message was truly heaven-sent. The elite’s weaponization of Behem’s lowly history evinced a proclivity for manipulating theology with classist motivations.

“When we hear him [Behem], we hear the peasants of Germany speak.”

Extant primary sources often obscure Behem’s voice—but when they provide direct glimpses of the German peasant and prophet, they offer insight into not only the mind of the man but the man himself. Behem is a symbol of the German peasantry. His ministry reflects their frustrations and speaks to the drudgery of their existence as they struggled to survive in the face of exploitation at the hands of wealthy religious and secular elites.

“Hans, I think, spoke to peasant fantasies when he preached his social gospel that the waters and the woods belonged to everybody; and that the rich should be stripped of their wealth ‘so that we all have enough’ […]; and that ‘the time will come when princes and lords must work for a daily wage’ […]”

Behem told his followers they were the catalysts for a God-given age of social equality. Peasants and elites would live alongside one another as equals; elites would be forced to work just like the commoners; and they would share land and its resources. This fantasy was a reversal of the peasantry’s current circumstances in which they lived and worked on elite-owned lands and struggled to survive due to nature’s whims and their financial obligations.

“Only during the fifteenth century, for example, did the doctrine of purgatory take hold in parts of France. We should not be surprised if it were still a novelty in fifteenth-century rural Germany.”

Behem’s teachings were controversial for multiple reasons, including his attack on the doctrine of purgatory. Because of the concept’s “novelty,” Behem’s attack on purgatory’s legitimacy was acceptable to the pilgrims who came to Niklashausen to hear his sermons. This, of course, spelled trouble for any clergy profiting from fraudulent indulgences: No purgatory means no need for indulgence.

“I think that Hans revealed to us his deep peasant suspicion of the words and language of the powerful—who, in fact, really did control people’s lives through their words in their law courts, in their written proclamations that were inaccessible to the illiterate, and in their unintelligible Latin religious formulae.”

Behem’s preaching discredited the words and power of secular and religious elites. Those words had little meaning to his followers’ spiritual lives, though they did impact temporal life through the medieval religious and secular laws. Behem suggested their authority was grounded in meaningless rhetoric; in contrast, divine authority (as he claimed for his mystical visions), was unassailable.

“They were to leave their women and children at home, and the men were to come armed with weapons. This was a call to arms. The Drummer—no, the Blessed Virgin—cried out for revolution on the Feast of St. Margaret.”

Authority figures were set to arrest and charge Behem in early July 1476. As tensions mounted, Behem encouraged his followers to come to Niklashausen again for the Feast of St. Margaret on July 13. This time, Behem called for revolt against clerical and secular elites.