still less stringent, and seem to have moved against the Anabaptists only when their numbers became so great as to alarm the authorities. Indeed, these cities became the chief refuge of the Anabaptists in the storm of persecution that raged against them after 1529. In the Catholic States they were pursued with implacable severity, and one chronicler (Sebastian Franck, d. 1542) estimates that two thousand or more were put to death at this time. In the Palatinate the persecution was not less severe than in the Catholic States, for three hundred and fifty are said to have perished there.

Cornelius, though writing as a Roman Catholic, yet also as a conscientious historian, thus sums up the results of these persecutions:

In Tyrol and Görz, the number of the executions in the year 1531 already reached one thousand; in Ensisheim, six hundred. At Linz, seventy-three were killed in six weeks. Duke William, of Bavaria, surpassing all others, issued the fearful decree to behead those who recanted, to burn those who refused to recant. Throughout the greater part of upper Germany the persecutions raged like a wild chase. The blood of these poor people flowed like water; so that they cried to the Lord for help. But hundreds of them, of all ages and both sexes, suffered the pangs of torture without a murmur, despised to buy their lives by recantation, and went to the place of execution joyful and singing Psalms.1

Some of the recent apologists for these cruelties have said that there was at least a partial justification for such wholesale executions in the suspicion that the Anabaptists were not merely heretics, but traitors-revolutionists, advocates of sedition, as dangerous to the State as to religion. It is perhaps a sufficient answer to this plea to remark that none of the contemporary documents bring this charge against the Anabaptists. In the preambles of the various decrees issued against them, in the statement 1" Geschichte des Münsterischen Aufruhrs,” Vol. II., p. 57 seq.

of their offenses nothing is found but their errors in religious faith and practice. If they were suspected of being politically dangerous up to 1529, it is remarkable that no trace of such suspicion should appear in any official action taken against them. It may be properly added that up to this time neither the acts nor the teachings of the Anabaptists afforded a plausible pretext for the State to treat them as seditious.

CHAPTER XII

THE OUTBREAK OF FANATICISM

ERSECUTION and oppression have a tendency to develop manifestations of fanatical zeal in the oppressed and persecuted. History affords many instances of this principle, and nowhere perhaps is its working better illustrated than in Germany in the sixteenth century. The movement that we call the Reformation was a complex series of phenomena, social, political, and religious; and hardly had Luther begun his labors as a religious reformer, when another group of men began to agitate for far-reaching social reforms. These were the spokesmen of the peasants, the most miserable class of the German people.

The condition of the peasantry of Germany was rapidly changing for the worse during the sixteenth century. This was owing to the complete social revolution then in progress which we call the decay of feudalism. Many causes had been at work to disintegrate the feudal system, but none had been so powerful as the invention of gunpowder. The day when foot-soldiers of the peasant class were armed with muskets was the day of doom for feudalism. The old superiority of the armored knight was gone; battles were no longer contests of cavalry; once more infantry came to the front. As the man with the hoe, the peasant was still despised; as the man with the gun he compelled respect.

The political and social supremacy of the nobles had rested on their military power. So long as the armored knight was able to contend single-handed against a score

and even a hundred ill-armed peasants in leather jerkins, so long he was powerful both to punish and to protect. The weak instinctively seek the protection of the strong, even when a high price must be paid for the favor, for it is better to give a part to one's overlord than to lose. all to another. The nobility had been tolerated and even upheld because they were necessary to society. They had been permitted to usurp much power, social privilege, wealth, that in nowise belonged to them. But the tacit condition on which these usurpations were condoned was that the nobility should discharge their functions as protectors of social institutions, as preservers of peace and order.

In the sixteenth century the power of the nobility was broken. The knight ceased to be supreme in arms, and as his political and social privileges depended on his military prowess, he must now prepare himself to part with these. This fact he could not and would not see. He was no student of social science, he had no philosophy of history, but he had the usual share of human selfishness, and the disposition to hold on at all hazards to his possessions. The increase of royal power on the one hand, and on the other his own growing poverty, began to pinch him sorely. The rise of the merchant class, the increase of manufactures and commerce, had done away with the old system of barter, and introduced the use of money. Of money the knight had little, of wants he and his household had an increasing number. It was natural that he should turn to his only resource, the peasants who tilled his soil, and try to wring from them the sums that he needed. Thus began new and continually increasing exactions from the peasants, until their condition became intolerable. Discontent became everywhere rife, and frequent insurrections showed that a violent social revolution was imminent.