Not a historian nor economist, but to my layman's mind, these revolts seem like a recurring phenomenon whenever long running economic cycles reach that point at which the aristocracy overreaches while trying to suppressing growing public sentiment against them, not unlike in Polybius' anacyclosis. But unlike Polybius' cycles, as technology improves, the likelihood of a successful reset at the end of a cycle, gradually diminishes with each cycle. I've recently started on Piketty's Capital, and he too alludes to the possibility that the post-industrial-revolution spiral into inequality could have continued uninterrupted into the 20th century and beyond, had it not been for the socioeconomic shock of the world war. Looking at the current trajectory of automation of intellectual labour and surveillance technology, I too am starting to worry that the odds of breaking the current cycle are slim.
Something else is going to happen this time, or really is happening already: people vote with their feet and stop having children.
On one hand wealth is being pooled into a smaller number of people, on the other it's becoming difficult to have anyone invested in working harder - and for good reason, as there's little payoff in that.
The Demographic Transition is modern but the age of family formation is actually used by historians to track how stressed the social contract is. Families have always been expensive and delaying them has always been a last resort for expense management.
Not an expert at all, so mostly a question. I have often heard the opposite, where large families are more common in less developed countries because having many children acts as insurance/social safety net for when parents become older and more frail. How does that relate?
For all societies before about 1870 at the very earliest, the reason for large families was the very high death rate: a typical woman could expect to get pregnant 10 times, lose five of them to miscarriage, lose two of the five live births before their first birthday, and another at some later point before adulthood. These families typically would be so close to the food margin that the rule of thumb was mothers expected to lose a tooth for every live birth- the baby and the mom would struggle for the same calcium. This is a serious deal, and the main reason for the large families- to survive all of that death.
And even the wealthiest families would still lose kids. In 1924 the 16 year old son of the President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge Jr, went out to play tennis against his brother. But he forgot to put on his socks. He got a blister, it popped, got infected, and he died. That was the world that humans lived in just a century ago, even the most powerful could expect to lose children before adulthood. And so they needed large families to ensure that some of them made it.
That's the Demographic Transition. It's real, but having a big family still requires a big up-front resource investment and the harder it is to secure that investment the longer it takes.
As theories go, that one makes little sense. At no point in human history has living in miserable conditions caused people to stop having children. And the evidence seems quite suggestive that people stop having children as their material conditions improve.
There isn't really a final word on the topic I'm aware of, but it looks like all the options available are out-competing having children rather than that people are avoiding families as some sort of revolt. People aren't generally willing to have kids if it means abandoning their efforts to achieve the most comfortable modern lifestyle that they can.
I know there are some criticisms of Capital in the 21st Century and Picketty himself, but the book changed how I see the world profoundly, I cannot recommend it highly enough to anybody interested in these topics. The audiobook is a good way to digest it for the average person.
The world war helped via wealth destruction and redistribution. Polybius' theory also has Arabic (Khaldun) and Chinese analogues. In China it looks like a 300-ish year cycle driven by wealth/land concentration and elite corruption which ends with peasant revolts, a power vacuum, peasants taking back their own land, and a new dynasty formed by rebels or invaders, after which the new elite slowly begins encroaching on the peasants and taking their land again.
The idea that wars, epidemics, and catastrophes lead to wealth redistribution is the thesis of "The Great Leveler" by Walter Schneidel: it's not an absolute rule (and as far as I remember, another book was published to criticise this one), but it seems to hold through a change in power dynamics, supply and demand of labour, and coordination between the previously oppressed classes.
If I generalize a bit: sometimes conditions change enough for the system as a whole to become unviable, but the entitled part of the population still tries their utmost to keep those entitlements.
Usually, it was a tiny elite, but nowadays, in the time of heavy pension systems, we might actually have succeeded in building an untenable system for a massive part of the population.
An episode of history I had never heard about. 100-300,000 peasants killed.
As someone who reads a lot about the early history of religion, the most interesting part of this for me was the role of Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism: "In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, Luther condemned the violence as the devil's work and called for the aristocrats to put down the rebels like mad dogs". My study of history of Christianity had left Protestantism relatively unscathed up to now. Well, no longer.
‘Q’ by the pseudonymous ‘Luther Blissett’ is a great historical fiction book about the period that really gets into what was happening in Europe in the 16th century. The Peasants’ War isn’t even the half of it. European Christian history is brutal.
Bonus fact: some believe that the ‘Q’ of ‘Q’ is the inspiration for the naming of the pseudonymous ‘Q’ of Q-Anon fame :-| Don’t let that put you off the book though; its politics are not the same!
> Let everyone be subject to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established. The authorities that exist have been established by God. Consequently, whoever rebels against the authority is rebelling against what God has instituted, and those who do so will bring judgment on themselves. For rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended. For the one in authority is God’s servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for rulers do not bear the sword for no reason. They are God’s servants, agents of wrath to bring punishment on the wrongdoer. Therefore, it is necessary to submit to the authorities, not only because of possible punishment but also as a matter of conscience.
Romans 13. Is it any surprise that such a religion has consistently, throughout the centuries, been on the side of the rich and powerful, of the lords and emperors, the reactionaries of all stripes?
Ours is a religion of submission to God, literally calling upon us to "pick up your cross daily." Which is, to die to yourself in submitting to God's will.
Various books of the Bible were written to very specific peoples at specific times, but at the same time, to all Christians everywhere. It takes wisdom to discern to which group does an instruction apply, and when?
This isn't to say that under no circumstances can you break the law; consider Christians in countries where Christianity is unlawful, they consistently break the law and defy the government because submission to God supersedes submission to government.
This passage specifically establishes that building a "Christian Caliphate" is not a goal of Christianity nor should it be a goal of any individual Christian. In general, the government is an institution put in place by God. The general principle is that God is sovereign, so by resorting to violence to assert yourself and your rights you are in no small way asserting your own will over His.
Books have been written on this, so I'll stop here. If you're interested, you can to much deeper on this.
I just wanted to clarify the drive-by theology indicating Christians are somehow "siding" with the "elite" is a very poor understanding of the scripture and ignores basically all of history.
However, the argument here is not that Christians side with the elite, but that the Church does. The Church has sided with the powerful again and again over the centuries, to great effect for its own wealth, going against what was objectively (ie not only by today's standards) morally right, and very much against scripture.
Your own argument that submission to God supersedes submission to government is one that the Church, as an institution, rarely abides by. By any reasonable reading of his sayings, Jesus would have preached against oppression of the poor, slavery, war, politically-convenient massacres, even the selling of indulgences. From the 4th century on, the Church has been part and parcel of oppression in all its forms, at enormous benefit to itself, and often against what the oppressed wished.
The changes that the Church made to early Christianity (centralisation, violent standardisation of beliefs, empowerment of the clergy) might have been sincere, but the continuing plight of the poor while the Church became one of the richest and most powerful institution in this part of the world is difficult to see as an an unfortunate coincidence.
If the Church is happy to call for the killing of peasants while at the same time initiating and celebrating massacres during the Crusades (a period of a Christian caliphate), among many many examples, it's only right that the institution be seen as an oppressor that has not much in common with Jesus or Christians.
Again, I'm not talking about Christians, or even individual priests, but the institution itself. I think Jesus had beautiful ideas, but it's difficult to know anything about history and not despise the Church.
> I just wanted to clarify the drive-by theology indicating Christians are somehow "siding" with the "elite" is a very poor understanding of the scripture and ignores basically all of history.
This is a factually incorrect statement. There have been many times where Christianity and the State have aligned for mutual benefit. Ignoring that would be ignoring history!
Just a few examples:
- The Constantinian Shift (4th Century AD): When Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity (313 AD) and Emperor Theodosius I made it the official Roman state religion (380 AD), the Church transformed from a persecuted minority into an institutional ally of imperial power (Source: Eusebius, "Life of Constantine"; Peter Brown, "Through the Eye of a Needle").
- The Divine Right of Kings & Feudalism: Throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, Christian theology was used to legitimize monarchical power and feudal class structures. Rulers were viewed as ordained directly by God, making rebellion against political elites a sin (Source: Ernst Kantorowicz, "The King's Two Bodies").
- Martin Luther & The German Peasants' War (1524–1525): When German peasants revolted against feudal oppression using Protestant ideas, Martin Luther explicitly sided with the aristocracy, writing Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, urging nobles to suppress the uprising forcefully.
- Pro-Slavery Theology in the Antebellum South: Major American denominations split over slavery in the 1840s (e.g., the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845), with prominent theologians using Biblical texts to justify chattel slavery and protect the economic interests of the plantation elite (Source: Mark Noll, "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis").
I mean, see also Cromwell. There’s a natural tendency to try to sort historical conflicts into good and bad. The reformation and counter-reformation were very much bad v. bad. But they did ultimately produce change which was probably, on balance, good.
the protestants have a long history of violence, beginning with the persecution of the Anabaptists, the witch burning and even running concentration camps for the Nazis (KZ Kuhlen), they are not really unscathed
No religion is unscathed: joining with the powers that be and lagging behind every ethical development is the rule, for sure, but I had mistakenly believed that at least the founding had been devoid of the usual hypocrisies and blood. Alas.
“ After defeating the peasants and their town allies in 1525, the lords continued raising rents to the point that, by the 1570s, peasants were paying 60 to 80 percent of their harvest on rents and debt. This unsustainable amount meant that the farmers could not adequately feed themselves or their livestock, nor refertilize the soil. This led to declining grain yields, widespread malnutrition, and famines, which opened the door to the return of the plague. Social tensions grew at all levels of society, producing witch hunts and repeated outbreaks of war. The growing burden of war taxes and staggering debt loads further crippled the economy, ending in general collapse into the Thirty Years War. The Thirty Years War was the inescapable result of the defeat of the peasants in 1525. Farmers in England, meanwhile, won their freedom from serfdom, which allowed them to produce the growing agricultural surpluses that fueled England’s rise to world power.”
Proving again that a harmony of interests is better than domination.
Pentiment is a Peabody award winning video game that covers this period. It's terribly engaging and well written. I'd use the word "educational" but that might make it sound dry, which it is not.
i discovered this event by reading Sartre's play "The devil and the good lord" (Le diable et le bon dieu): not historical in any way, simply takes the uprising as context, but a masterpiece nonetheless.
This was not about religion but about constitution. Basically they were influenced more by the Magna Carta than by reformation. Anyway, nice to see people interested in how rights were aspired, lost and revived.
I know everything is told from a perspective, but I find the Marxist “aristocrat / bourgeois” lens rather tired and severely anachronistic. This is told as if Luther and the Magisterial Reformers were just “siding with the aristocracy” and didn’t have any other reasons for opposing a violent uprising on anarchy. The Reformers were trying to effect spiritual and theological change. But when the magistrate, who was supporting the Reformation, encountered radicals who used those ideas for violence and their own ambition, the Reformers had a conundrum. Carl Truman writes in his book “Luther in the Christian Life” (Crossway, 2015), ‘This latter concept, often known as “the priesthood of all believers” or “the general priesthood of all believers” was explosive in Luther’s day because it struck at the very structure of medieval piety. … The problem became acutely significant for the Reformers, and especially Luther, in 1525, with the Peasants’ War. At that time, radicals used Luther’s language of freedom as part of the rhetoric of rebellion, for understandable reasons. Such language resonates powerfully with the oppressed and disenfranchised in every age. The problem, of course, was that Luther was using such words in a manner that assumed their refraction through the cross. The same applied to the language of universal priesthood: the obvious democratizing tendency of the language was popular with those seeking more social equality. Yet the anarchy of the war placed Luther in an impossible position: he was no democratizing radical; he needed to reassure his secular lords that reformation did not mean revolution; and he needed to make sure that his teaching was clearly understood.’ The simple Marxist interpretation is rubbish — the situation was far more complicated than oppressor / oppressed.
"The revolt failed because of intense opposition from the aristocracy, who slaughtered up to 100,000 of the 300,000 poorly armed peasants and farmers."
Quite a slaughter. Today we also have indirect slaughter - billionaires versus the rest of the world.
The medieval days, though, were quite tragic because those peons and farmers were factually slaves, depending on the area (there were a few with less restrictions for a while, but ultimately it was slavery). Some of those wars were briefly won by the peons, but in just about any case where they had some victory, lateron they had a huge defeat. Even those who survived were either later executed, or lost their wealth because those who fought for the aristocrats were often rewarded with possessions of others here. In some european countries there is still "nobility". They still have unfair wealth. They should give that to the people.
Crazy how obscure episodes of world history land randomly on the front page - how does it even happen?
I grew up in Germany but I don’t think we covered this in history class - maybe I forgot about it, the whole medieval period is mostly a blur for me now
I'm not using this to post religious flamebait, and to anyone thinking I'm attacking their faith: this is not my intent, and I'm for sure not singling out Christianity.
I find history fascinating, especially the history of religion, and my views on it are in line with my contributions and discussions on HN about authoritarianism, surveillance, oppression, etc.. It's unfortunate that wanting to give some visibility to a little known episode of history and then engaging in debate about a passion of mine is seen by you as disingenuous.
On one hand wealth is being pooled into a smaller number of people, on the other it's becoming difficult to have anyone invested in working harder - and for good reason, as there's little payoff in that.
And even the wealthiest families would still lose kids. In 1924 the 16 year old son of the President of the United States, Calvin Coolidge Jr, went out to play tennis against his brother. But he forgot to put on his socks. He got a blister, it popped, got infected, and he died. That was the world that humans lived in just a century ago, even the most powerful could expect to lose children before adulthood. And so they needed large families to ensure that some of them made it.
There isn't really a final word on the topic I'm aware of, but it looks like all the options available are out-competing having children rather than that people are avoiding families as some sort of revolt. People aren't generally willing to have kids if it means abandoning their efforts to achieve the most comfortable modern lifestyle that they can.
With their reproductive organs more likely.
Usually, it was a tiny elite, but nowadays, in the time of heavy pension systems, we might actually have succeeded in building an untenable system for a massive part of the population.
As someone who reads a lot about the early history of religion, the most interesting part of this for me was the role of Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism: "In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, Luther condemned the violence as the devil's work and called for the aristocrats to put down the rebels like mad dogs". My study of history of Christianity had left Protestantism relatively unscathed up to now. Well, no longer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(novel)
https://www.alibris.com/Q-Luther-Blissett-pse/book/5481947
Bonus fact: some believe that the ‘Q’ of ‘Q’ is the inspiration for the naming of the pseudonymous ‘Q’ of Q-Anon fame :-| Don’t let that put you off the book though; its politics are not the same!
https://www.contretemps.eu/geneve-temps-calvin-theocratie-di...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Ribbon
Romans 13. Is it any surprise that such a religion has consistently, throughout the centuries, been on the side of the rich and powerful, of the lords and emperors, the reactionaries of all stripes?
Various books of the Bible were written to very specific peoples at specific times, but at the same time, to all Christians everywhere. It takes wisdom to discern to which group does an instruction apply, and when?
This isn't to say that under no circumstances can you break the law; consider Christians in countries where Christianity is unlawful, they consistently break the law and defy the government because submission to God supersedes submission to government.
This passage specifically establishes that building a "Christian Caliphate" is not a goal of Christianity nor should it be a goal of any individual Christian. In general, the government is an institution put in place by God. The general principle is that God is sovereign, so by resorting to violence to assert yourself and your rights you are in no small way asserting your own will over His.
Books have been written on this, so I'll stop here. If you're interested, you can to much deeper on this.
I just wanted to clarify the drive-by theology indicating Christians are somehow "siding" with the "elite" is a very poor understanding of the scripture and ignores basically all of history.
However, the argument here is not that Christians side with the elite, but that the Church does. The Church has sided with the powerful again and again over the centuries, to great effect for its own wealth, going against what was objectively (ie not only by today's standards) morally right, and very much against scripture.
Your own argument that submission to God supersedes submission to government is one that the Church, as an institution, rarely abides by. By any reasonable reading of his sayings, Jesus would have preached against oppression of the poor, slavery, war, politically-convenient massacres, even the selling of indulgences. From the 4th century on, the Church has been part and parcel of oppression in all its forms, at enormous benefit to itself, and often against what the oppressed wished.
The changes that the Church made to early Christianity (centralisation, violent standardisation of beliefs, empowerment of the clergy) might have been sincere, but the continuing plight of the poor while the Church became one of the richest and most powerful institution in this part of the world is difficult to see as an an unfortunate coincidence.
If the Church is happy to call for the killing of peasants while at the same time initiating and celebrating massacres during the Crusades (a period of a Christian caliphate), among many many examples, it's only right that the institution be seen as an oppressor that has not much in common with Jesus or Christians.
Again, I'm not talking about Christians, or even individual priests, but the institution itself. I think Jesus had beautiful ideas, but it's difficult to know anything about history and not despise the Church.
This is a factually incorrect statement. There have been many times where Christianity and the State have aligned for mutual benefit. Ignoring that would be ignoring history!
Just a few examples:
- The Constantinian Shift (4th Century AD): When Emperor Constantine legalized Christianity (313 AD) and Emperor Theodosius I made it the official Roman state religion (380 AD), the Church transformed from a persecuted minority into an institutional ally of imperial power (Source: Eusebius, "Life of Constantine"; Peter Brown, "Through the Eye of a Needle").
- The Divine Right of Kings & Feudalism: Throughout the Middle Ages and Early Modern period, Christian theology was used to legitimize monarchical power and feudal class structures. Rulers were viewed as ordained directly by God, making rebellion against political elites a sin (Source: Ernst Kantorowicz, "The King's Two Bodies").
- Martin Luther & The German Peasants' War (1524–1525): When German peasants revolted against feudal oppression using Protestant ideas, Martin Luther explicitly sided with the aristocracy, writing Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, urging nobles to suppress the uprising forcefully.
- Pro-Slavery Theology in the Antebellum South: Major American denominations split over slavery in the 1840s (e.g., the founding of the Southern Baptist Convention in 1845), with prominent theologians using Biblical texts to justify chattel slavery and protect the economic interests of the plantation elite (Source: Mark Noll, "The Civil War as a Theological Crisis").
- Currently in the US, the Federal Government and Christianity have strong alignment, to the point where pastors in churches advocate for politicians openly now. https://abcnews.com/Politics/meet-pastors-support-donald-tru...
Edit: Why TF was this flagged??
With Jan Žižka they also had arguably one of the best commanders in history, up there with Alexander and Hanibal
Proving again that a harmony of interests is better than domination.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_M%C3%BCntzer
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(novel)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasant_republic
Notably Handeln and the communes of the Swiss Cantons are considered to have "survived" into 19th C.
Quite a slaughter. Today we also have indirect slaughter - billionaires versus the rest of the world.
The medieval days, though, were quite tragic because those peons and farmers were factually slaves, depending on the area (there were a few with less restrictions for a while, but ultimately it was slavery). Some of those wars were briefly won by the peons, but in just about any case where they had some victory, lateron they had a huge defeat. Even those who survived were either later executed, or lost their wealth because those who fought for the aristocrats were often rewarded with possessions of others here. In some european countries there is still "nobility". They still have unfair wealth. They should give that to the people.
I grew up in Germany but I don’t think we covered this in history class - maybe I forgot about it, the whole medieval period is mostly a blur for me now
I find history fascinating, especially the history of religion, and my views on it are in line with my contributions and discussions on HN about authoritarianism, surveillance, oppression, etc.. It's unfortunate that wanting to give some visibility to a little known episode of history and then engaging in debate about a passion of mine is seen by you as disingenuous.