7 - Threat of revolt

Summary

To the modern observer looking back on the decades around 1580, the patterns of lordly and princely dominance, of paternalistic rule and deference, appear much more settled than they in fact were. Only with hindsight can one see in this period the decisive turning point that it most assuredly was: a watershed when South Germany's lords and princes established secure patterns of dominance over their villagers that would last well into the eighteenth century. Determined and zealous princes had clearly seized the initiative to broaden their authority over their domains and subjects, to use new power to impose order where disorder appeared to reign. That these feudal lords, their secretaries, pastors, and stewards sometimes justified these measures with the passionate rhetoric of religious reform or with time–honored appeals to their villagers' devotion to custom or justice did not matter. The effect was the same. The autonomy of the village commune had been broken. Willingly or not, the descendants of villagers who had fought in 1525 for the freedom of their rural communes were forced to weaken their corporate ties and redirect their loyalties to the territorial state.

But for contemporaries, especially those who knew the circumstances of the small German states well, lord–peasant relationships appeared very much unsettled in these years, even more unsettled than in the two or three decades after 1525.