Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants

Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants is a short, furious tract written by Martin Luther in May 1525 at the height of the German Peasants' War. Only weeks earlier, in his Admonition to Peace, Luther had answered the peasants' Twelve Articles by rebuking the princes for their greed and the peasants for dressing their grievances in the name of the gospel, and had urged both sides toward negotiation. Then he traveled through Thuringia and saw the revolt firsthand: castles and monasteries burned, nobles killed, and Thomas Müntzer preaching that the elect must take up the sword. Luther returned convinced that the moment for admonition had passed. This tract was first printed as an addendum to the Admonition, and it spread just as the princes' armies crushed the peasants at Frankenhausen and elsewhere, so that the work appeared to bless a slaughter already under way.

Luther's argument rests on three charges. First, the peasants have broken the oath of obedience they owe their rulers, and Romans 13 leaves no room for subjects to judge and punish the authorities God has set over them. Second, they are not petitioners but robbers and murderers, plundering and burning what is not theirs, and Christ's word that those who take the sword will perish by it applies to them. Third, and worst in Luther's eyes, they commit these crimes while calling themselves Christian brethren and claiming the gospel as their warrant, which he treats as blasphemy and the devil's own work. Behind the charges stands his distinction between the two kingdoms: the gospel frees the conscience before God but does not abolish serfdom, inequality, or the magistrate's sword, and to make Christian liberty a program for seizing fields and goods is to turn it into something carnal. From this he draws the conclusion that made the tract notorious, that a ruler should offer terms to those who were dragged into the revolt unwillingly, but against the rest should strike without hesitation, that a prince who dies suppressing rebellion dies a martyr, and that nothing is more poisonous or devilish than a rebel. He names Müntzer as the archdevil of the uprising.

The work has mattered ever since because it is the clearest instance of Luther's political theology under pressure, and because its reception shaped both the Reformation and its critics. Peasant sympathy for Luther collapsed; princes gained a theologian who had told them the sword was a work of love. Luther refused to retract it, and his Open Letter on the Harsh Book of the same summer defended every word. Readers have returned to it to ask what happens when a doctrine of obedience meets a people with real grievances, and whether the two-kingdoms framework can be separated from the brutality it licensed here.

Who should read this: those studying Luther's political thought, the Reformation's relation to social revolt, or the history of Christian arguments about resistance and obedience, and who are prepared to read a document of real cruelty with its context firmly in view. It is not devotional reading, and anyone seeking Luther the pastor or the hymn-writer should begin elsewhere.