Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants

Martin Luther wrote this piece while travelling in Thuringia, where the rising had spread; its first edition was printed together with the Admonition to Peace: A Reply to the Twelve Articles of the Peasants in Swabia. He charges the peasants with three sins: breaking their oath of obedience, robbery and rebellion, and covering both with the name of the gospel. A rebel, he writes, is outside the law, and anyone may kill him as one kills a mad dog. A Christian ruler should first pray and offer terms; if that fails he must use the sword, and those who die doing so die as martyrs.

The tract is cited here from Luther’s own text because friends as well as opponents blamed him for it at once, as his letters of May 1525 show. He answered them in an open letter on what he called the hard book against the peasants, which is printed after it in the same volume. The translator’s introduction dates the writing to the first days of May 1525 and its publication to before the middle of the month.