Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen

St. Margaret was a popular saint in the later Middle Ages, known for her protection against illness and death, as well as of pregnant women. In Germany, her feast was celebrated on July 13. The evening before her feast, the bishop sent a retinue to the farmhouse outside of Niklashausen where Behem was staying with some of his loyalists. The knights arrested Behem and transported him to Würzburg where he was imprisoned. A member of the bishop’s household, Doctor Kilian von Bibra, authored a letter to the Nürnberg town council the following day indicating that they were preparing a case against Behem, who then disappears from the contemporaneous primary sources.

Behem’s pilgrims reacted angrily to the news of his arrest. By the day’s end, five “lesser knights” assumed leadership of the group, thereby reinstituting a semblance of “normal time of hierarchy and authority” (119). Now, they marched toward Würzburg to call for Behem’s release. Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of disgruntled peasants arrived at Bishop Rudolph’s castle, singing their anticlerical songs. Sources suggest that some of the peasants abandoned the group of their own volition after the bishop sent negotiators to reason with them, but others stayed to confront authorities. Soon, “Bishop Rudolph ordered the castle gunners to fire their cannons—but to aim over the heads of the people. He hoped that the terror of the bombardment would drive off the remaining pilgrims” (122). When they remained unscathed, the pilgrims concluded that the Virgin had protected them, and their belief encouraged them onward. The gunners then shot into the mob, killing, wounding, and dispersing many of them, some of whom the bishop’s knights captured.

The unrest was quelled quickly, but fears and rumors about more peasant violence persisted. The town council in Niklashausen, at Bishop Rudolph’s command, locked down the village. The bishop and other authorities then began a campaign to discredit Behem and his miracles. Indeed, those who composed the surviving sources “were forced to be skeptical, not of divine signs in general, but of these signs in particular. God had to be on the side of the rulers” (126). One surviving report provides insight into those held at Würzburg. While the bishop released most captives, he imprisoned Behem and two companions, including an eremitical Beghard who may have been mistaken for a Dominican monk in other accounts that claim he inspired Behem. The Beghard was eventually tried on charges of treason while authorities prosecuted Behem for heresy after torturing him to extract a guilty confession. The court condemned him to death by burning at the stake. Johann Trithemius, writing after the events, states that Behem’s ashes were tossed into the river to prevent his followers from treating him as a martyr. Trithemius concluded, “After this was done, the gathering of the people at Niklashausen came to an end” (137).

Behem’s execution did not immediately end the movement that centered on his prophetic visions. Indeed, some of his pilgrims collected the dirt from the spot where he had been executed and treated it as a sacred relic. The Archbishop of Mainz therefore censured the church in Niklashausen. He claimed that “because the common people chose to listen to [Behem], they were to be cut off from the shrine and indulgences of Niklashausen” (139). Pilgrims continued to flock to Niklashausen, despite these prohibitions. They now came not to the Virgin’s shrine but to the site of Behem’s death. He had become a martyr to them despite his critics’ efforts. The archbishop concluded that it was imperative to level Niklashausen’s church. It was destroyed in 1477, and “the peasant fires were finally extinguished” (140). Memories of the pilgrimage faded while chroniclers wrote disparaging accounts about Behem and his supporters. By 1518, one year after the Reformation dawned in Germany, it was safe to reestablish the church in Niklashausen.

Bishop Rudolph persisted in his reform program during the years after Behem’s death. To prevent similar events, and as part of his reforming agenda, the bishop increased religious education for the laity, which a Würzburg printing press made possible. The bishop worked to “harness their [the commoners’] outbursts of enthusiasm for pilgrimages and indulgences […]” and sought to “legitimize” popular sentiment (142). In fact, “he pointed out the shortcoming of the clergy for all to see” (143).

After the pilgrimage’s defeat, Behem becomes a shadowy figure. He does not appear in medieval sources again until 1493, in the Liber chronicarum. A woodcut appears in the text in conjunction with a brief description of Behem’s pilgrimage. This image, which shows a mendicant whispering in Behem’s ear, illustrates the rumor that circulated during (and after) Behem’s time—that a mysterious cleric manipulated him into preaching heresy. Other sources composed in the 1500s indicate this rumor’s triumph: “Hans Behem had changed from a clever rogue, responsible for the affair, to a simple-minded, helpless boob who was manipulated by renegade clergy” (146-47). The Beghard arrested alongside Behem has vanished from historical records.

While the German peasantry was ignorant of the specifics that led to its oppression, it did recognize that elites were responsible. Conditions worsened in the decades after Behem’s execution, and by 1525, German peasants revolted against the elites. Like Behem and his pilgrims, those who rebelled in this German Peasants’ War wanted access to communal property. Though the events of 1525 and Niklashausen are unrelated, “[b]oth tapped into and responded to a deeper level of social discontent of the German peasantry” (148).

While Behem’s story reveals serious social tension and fissures in late medieval German society, something binds together these seemingly antagonistic figures: Behem and his detractors “all acted out their lives in an illusory, enchanted world in which they saw only darkly the true, divine mainsprings of history” (149). Likewise, none fully understood “the great impersonal forces that drove their lives and their history” (150). The chapter ends with Wunderli’s assertion that we do not fully comprehend history as we live it. Like the people of medieval Europe, we occupy “an enchanted world” (150).