Peasant uprising in Tyrol – not just divine, but earthly justice

Among historians, the German peasant wars are considered the “revolution of the little man”. But there was neither a central event nor a revolution. In various regions, first north, then also south of the Alps, in Thuringia, Upper Swabia, Württemberg, Franconia and on the Upper Rhine, later also in Tyrol and Salzburg, farmers, supported by dissatisfied towns, rose against the exploitative privileged stands. The uprisings quickly failed, also because the rebels had no clear ideas to overthrow the traditional system. Tyrol was an exception. The farmers only rose there when the Thuringian uprising collapsed with the battle near Frankenhausen and the execution of Thomas Müntzers.

The uprising began in the Prince -Bishopric of Brixen, on May 9, 1525, around noon. Peter Passler’s execution was planned for this time. At the end of a long legal dispute, the employee Fischer and Freie Bauer landed on the top block in Brixen. His employer, Prince -Bishop Sebastian Sprenz, had deprived him of catching rights for reasons that were not to be clarified today. Passler made resistance, until he became the lawless. He dived, committed a number of minor crimes, was caught and sentenced to death in a process with a predictable end.

We know about this legal dispute by Michael Gaismair. As a writer in the law firm with the Causa Passler, he made copies of the entire correspondence. Gaismair was a sprout of a Sterzinger mountain farmer. His father had already made the leap into the honorary of the town below the Brenner by taking over some lucrative offices and undertakings in mining. The son also made a career, which was only possible in the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period, with unexpected economic advancement opportunities for free farmers and citizens. Gaismair ran through all the stands: as a mine writer in Schwaz, he helped against poor working conditions protesting miners to set up a petition; As a secretary, later officer under Leonhard von Völs, governor at the Etsch and Tyrol’s highest official, he gained valuable political and military experiences. The position with Bishop Sprez, on the other hand, brought a career snap: Gaismair, still under Völs, had his own pocket – under noble a cavalier offense, for someone from one of the lower classes a reason for termination. Gaismair lost rank and post. In the Sprenz writing room, he was nothing more than a qualified assistant.

Whether from resentment because of his own fate or out of compassion for the unjustly treated Passler: on May 9, 1525, Gaismair changed sides. He informed the bishop that Brixen citizens and farmers had literally torn down from the scaffold in a hand prank and now collected their symptoms against the prince -bishop’s rule on a meadow in front of the city and had already elected a leader. Its name: Michael Gaismair.

On that dramatic May 9, 1525, all the princely bishop’s civil servants from Brixen fled. Gaismair pushed into the vacuum that was opened. He took over, initially with the back of the sovereign Ferdinand – the Archduke was just right to the bredouil of his noble and clerical competition – the government business in Brixen. Previously, Gaismair had filled his cash register with an attack and the subsequent general looting of the rich Neustift Neustift. He was now even able to entertain a mercenary force. This was not the financially clumsy Ferdinand. Deeply in debt with his main money, the Fugger trading company, he could not even entertain an army. The country servants who had jumped in earlier conflicts were in use to suppress the peasant riots north of the Alps.

Only when they were depressed could Ferdinand take the initiative. He called for Brixen. Gaismair obeyed. Ferdinand attracted him to his residence city and had him stuck. However, Gaismair managed to escape. His continued Renitenz put him outside the law, similar to Passler before. Gaismair left Tyrol. From the Swiss exile he hoped to continue the fight. In doing so, he went on two tracks. In Graubünden, he initially wrote a theoretical concept that should be based on all of his future actions. His constitutional draft – title: “This is the regional order, says Michel Gaismair Gmacht has a Republic of Tyrol in the 1526th year”. There was already such a form of government in Switzerland. However, Gaismair not only strived for a society free of stands in which no “distinction between people, that is, one of the others, or rather neither the other,”, but a community of the same, in which it should be more difficult and fair than in all other countries.

Gaismair’s planned peasant republic was far ahead of her time. Apart from the English Revolution, the draft remained the most progressive in Europe for centuries. Even currently, Gaismair’s model can be read as a criticism of a globalized economic order based on market economy principles based on individual profit struts.

In Gaismair’s program, basic and human rights flow for the first time before these terms were available. Social justice instead of stately privileges, grassroots democratic representation instead of elitist hierarchies, equality before the law instead of constant privileges, cooperative management instead of (early) capitalist exploitation, guarantee of personal freedom instead of dependency and external determination are further cornerstones. Gaismair’s work is all the more remarkable than it came from a self -taught. There may have been helpers, but they are not guaranteed and not listed anywhere. As a template, Gaismair was only available to the Bible, as Luther had translated it. Gaismair, to whom the institutional church was an abomination, saw God as the highest authority, “we should trust in it, then he is very truthful and nobody cheats”. During, according to the reverse, the church did not take the truth so precisely.

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Unlike Luther, who did not want to have interpreted his theses politically, Gaismair derived worldly justice from the divine. Mining, previously national shelf, should be nationalized, all the property is in the hands of the farmers. Everyone was only allowed to own as much as he or she could build on her own work. There should be no unproductive property. Country that was not built up would flow into the needy to the village community. Gaismair wanted an independent, self -sufficient state. The credo of its economy, translated into modern terms, was: no debt, no budget cleaning through credit, no negative trade balance, no profit skills by companies, cartels or oligopolis, no reduction in economic performance due to unproductive property.

Throughout the winter of 1525/26, Gaismair had written on his state regulations. After the snow melting, he planned an attack on Tyrol. In addition, he had collected new fighters in Switzerland, including many, as he fled from the Prince’s Biocese of Brixen. The first goal was the heavily fortified glurn, at the transition from Graubünden to Tyrolean Vinschgau. But the plan was revealed that Gaismair blew the attack.

A new place of use was offered in the same spring. In the Salzburg region, farmers, miners and townspeople rose against their clerical rule, embodied by the Princely Bishop Matthäus Lang. After the conquest of several mountain passes, the insurgents besieged the Radstadt fortress. Peter Passler, who had been submerged after his liberation, came to their aid and had occasionally stayed in the nearby Republic of Venice. He too had gathered a handsome group of resistance.

Gaismair led his people from west to east through all of Tyrol, overcame some alpine passes and appeared in front of Radstadt at the end of May 1526. Gasismair was still able to win the first battle against the country servants that are no longer bound in southern Germany. However, his strength soon went out. Radstadt could not be conquered. The Landsknechtshen were filled with fresh forces. In the end, Gaismair and Passler gave way to superiority and with their remaining faithful, over 1000 in number, to Venice.

Gaismair and Passler entered the service of the lagoon republic and from there continued the fight against Ferdinand and the established old order again. They were unable to reinforce the uprising in Tyrol or elsewhere. Passler died in mid -October 1527 in the Friuli Venzone through the hand of a murderous murderer. After a unsuccessful attempt to recruit new fighters in Switzerland and leading them against Tyrol, Gaismair returned to the Padua area. There, on Venetian territory, Gaismair fell victim to a murder attack staged by Innsbruck and expressly approved by Ferdinand on April 15, 1532.

Ralf Höller recently appeared »The Peasant Wars 1525/26. From the fight against oppression to the dream of a republic «(Verlag Kohlhammer, 266 p., Br., 27 €).