Peasant Fires: The Drummer of Niklashausen

Germans celebrated the Feast of St. Walburga, or Walpurgisnacht, following Easter. They believed this saint offered protection from famine and plague, and the celebration of her feast coincided with May Day, the pre-Christian festival celebrating the transition from spring to summer. Once more, the peasantry celebrated with bonfires, but rather than ensuring fertility as they had during Carnival, these fires offered protection from witchcraft. Since they believed witches could cause crops to fail (and thus famine), Walburga’s feast was both “joyful” and “portentous with witches and the threat of a summer season of pestilence and hunger” (47).

Soon after Walpurgisnacht, Behem’s pilgrims flooded into Niklashausen, where they believed he performed divine miracles. Sources describe the peasant-pilgrims traveling in groups both small and large, some carrying banners, and coming from throughout Germany. Years later, Georg Widman noted that elites were fearful because these lesser folk sought no one’s permission to go, leaving behind their work obligations to their lords and acting outside of the Church’s authority. Elite angst was high because of previous peasant uprisings. The Count of Wertheim corresponded with the Archbishop of Mainz to make him aware of the events at Niklashausen and request that the Church examine the miracle claims. The count was not immediately alarmed, however, because the income Niklashausen generated from pilgrims who needed food and lodging benefitted him directly.

Several weeks after the pilgrimage began, the Church became aware that Behem was the cause. In a letter from the Archbishop of Mainz to the Bishop of Würzburg, the archbishop renounced Behem’s teachings as unorthodox and argued that authorities needed to stop him. The archbishop gave Bishop Rudolph in Würzburg official authority to deal with “the Youth.” Behem’s disruption to the accepted social order and the liturgical calendar alarmed authorities:

Normal time and festival time had always been separated by specific dates, ceremonies, and rituals throughout the year. Carnival ended on Shrove Tuesday; Lent ended at Easter. Now there was a confusion of time […]. Hans Behem, the Carnival drummer, had carried with him to Niklashausen the upside-down world of Carnival and the Lenten message of self-denial and salvation through poverty. For Hans, enchanted time did not end when it was supposed to, but continued into summer (50).

The pilgrimage to Niklashausen was part of a larger phenomenon in late medieval Germany in which peasants sought salvation in their current and future lives. Demographic growth in the region after 1450 increased pressure on available land and resources. Costs of living rose, and the potential for famine increased. After 1450, the population increased “enough to favor the lords and employers against peasants and wage workers” (53). Moreover, peasants “knew how their fathers and grandfathers lived, and knew that lords were demanding more now than before” (54). Behem therefore functioned as the mouthpiece for peasants, giving voice to their anger and using what he believed was God’s word to explain their agony.

Medieval thought ascribed moral or spiritual causes to natural phenomena. Illness, for example, was believed to be the result of moral failings, and so cures could be sought in the divine. Visiting the shrines dedicated to saints was one avenue of divine healing. In 15th-century Germany, previously insignificant sites like Niklashausen became sites of large popular pilgrimages. Indeed, pilgrimage was “an act of liberation” (61) for peasants that was outside of elite and clerical power. Like Carnival, pilgrimage had a socially equalizing effect and created communal bonds. Though short-lived, these events disconcerted the authorities because large congregations of peasants could lead to rebellions.

By the late Middle Ages, the Church generated a great deal of income from offering indulgences; an indulgence is the remission of the purgatorial penance that a person owes for sins already forgiven. In other words, even if a person is forgiven for their sins, Catholic theology still entails their penance (or purification) in purgatory—but an indulgence, granted by the Church, remits that penance. Indulgences could be earned in different ways, sometimes through a pilgrimage to an officially sanctioned site. According to the Church, the Pope was the figure who had the exclusive power to grant indulgences, pulled from an infinite “treasury of merits and good deeds” (63). Yet by the late medieval period, the papacy had “granted their remarkable powers not only to other officials of the church but to other places such as churches and shrines” (64). Churches with shrines that were officially sanctioned pilgrimage sites could profit greatly. Niklashausen was one such church, but the religious elites did not condone Behem’s pilgrimage because his leadership usurped the Pope’s authority. The surviving sources find his challenge to authority in God’s name irreverent and his call for a new social order an affront (71).