The firebrand preacher who put Martin Luther in the shade

‘Now tell us, you miserable wretched sack of maggots,’ wrote Thomas Müntzer, sounding like the love child of Owen Jones and Ian Paisley, ‘who made you into a prince over the people whom God redeemed with his own precious blood?’ The question Müntzer posed Count Albrecht of Mansfeld was, you’d think, rhetorical.

Like his contemporary Martin Luther, if less unremittingly scatological, the radical millenarian preacher wielded a sharp pen. Don’t forget Ezekiel’s prophecy, he wrote to Count Albrecht’s brother Ernst: ‘God would command the birds of the air to feast on the flesh of the princes and command the unthinking beasts to lap up the blood of the bigwigs.’ Only if, he added, Count Ernst admitted that God had given power to the common people would he be spared this deserved fate. ‘If you refuse, then we will not pay any attention to your lame, insipid mug. We will fight against you as an arch-enemy of the Christian faith. You know what to expect now.’

The time was May 1525 and Müntzer, the son of a coin-maker turned rabble-rousing revolutionary, was at the head of an 8,000-strong peasant army holed up in the Thuringian town of Frankenhausen. He was writing to the leaders of a makeshift alliance of Lutheran and Catholic princes and their lackeys, a force swollen by tooled-up Landsknechte (mercenaries). These last were no doubt fearsome warriors, but, if the illustration on page 257 of Andrew Drummond’s book is anything to go by, they were also flute-playing fancy Dans who accessorised slashed silk breeches with thigh garters and sported wide-brimmed hats appliquéd with fetching floral designs.

Yet it was this army who, within days of the foregoing letters being dispatched, would destroy the peasant rebels, capture Müntzer, torture him with thumbscrews and, after forcing a confession, put his 35-year-old head on a pole as a warning to others.

As he wrote these letters, though, Müntzer fancied his chances, not just because his enemies were dressed like dandy highwaymen, but because he had God on his side.