home Economy Books History of the world economy - Polyak GB

History of the world economy - Polyak GB

12.3. "Second edition" of serfdom

Economic Reasons for the Reformation and Peasant War

The Reformation was a mass popular movement, which was fundamentally anti-feudal in nature. In form it was a struggle against the Catholic Church, which was the largest landowner and the main ideological support of the feudal system. The Reformation, therefore, meant a speech against one of the economic foundations of feudalism. It is natural that Germany became the birthplace of the Reformation: it was a country that had already begun, but a delayed and difficult early capitalist development, a country that, due to its political fragmentation, suffered most from encroachments by the papal church. The Reformation contrasted the national statehood of the cosmopolitan organization of Catholicism.

In the last quarter of the 15th - beginning of the 16th centuries, in spite of the diversity of economic development and economic disunity, tangible elements of economic progress, due to the development of the market, were noted in the country. The successes of Germany in mining, glassmaking, textile production, in the field of building and printing, caused deserved admiration of contemporaries. The agrarian revolution that began in the second half of the 14th century continued in the village. And aimed at the approval of commodity sheep breeding, truck farming, gardening. True, the great geographical discoveries already predetermined the collapse of the Mediterranean trade, but until the middle of the XVI century. It has not yet affected the German economy.

At the same time, commodity-money relations, invading semi-patriarchal way of life, generated not only commercial and industrial entrepreneurship, but also modifications of traditional methods of exploitation. In many regions of Germany, the personal serfdom of the peasants is restored from the feudal lords. Meadows, forests and water bodies are withdrawn from communal use. Combining gross violence with legal and usurious tricks, the feudal lords seized communal lands, crushed them and immediately sold them in installments to the same robbed peasants. Peasants could be flogged for the fact that his beast wandered to the newly alienated pasture, to sentence to death for catching crayfish in the "gentleman's creek."

In the conditions of the disintegration of feudalism and the emergence of elements of early capitalism, the spiritual and secular feudal lords taxed cities with new taxes, leading to poverty the urban lower classes and causing serious damage to other layers, including entrepreneurial ones. Profits, received through the barely born early capitalist exploitation, went to duties and taxes. The towns were flooded with ruined and banished peasants, who could not accept the low-power handicrafts and manufactories.

From the XII century. The trade in indulgences began , which served as a means of enriching the clergy. However, the announcement by Pope Julius II (1505) of collecting donations for the construction of a new building of the Cathedral of St. Petra and the appearance in 1517 in Magdeburg of the papal subcommissioner and Brandenburg inquisitor Johann Tetzel, who organized the sale of indulgences according to the rules of profitable commerce, was the drop that filled the cup of patience.

The beginning of the Reformation is considered to be the speech of Martin Luther in Wittenberg in 1517 with 95 theses against indulgences. Luther himself, whom Marx called "the oldest German political economy," * believed that serfdom did not contradict the "sacred writings" and would later call upon the land rulers of sovereigns (at that time in Germany there were about a thousand) to hang insurgent peasants "like rabid Dogs ". Being an ideologist of a small businessman (burgher and peasant), Luther defended a patient and energetic master, who was stimulated by the market, but he was offended by larger and dexterous economic predators. It is Luther who will recall the long-forgotten saying from Paul's Second Letter to the Thessalonians: "He who does not work, let him not eat." Luther's speech against indulgences stirred all of Germany. Within the framework of the Reformation, the Great Peasant War (1524-1526) began, which became the response of the peasant masses to the intensification of feudal oppression.

* Marx K., Engels F. T.46, Part II. -FROM. 430.

There was no unity of the anti-Papal movement, which is confirmed by the presence of burgher-moderate, burgher-radical, noble and peasant-plebeian programs. Leader of the people's movement, Thomas Münzer, the author of the "Article Letter", who demanded the complete destruction of the masters and the coup in social relations, the establishment of democracy, put forward the most radical demands ahead of the time and possibilities of the insurgents. Münzer believed that "everything should be a common property".

A more moderate program of "12 articles" of Swabian-Black Forest peasants proposed to reduce corvée and obrok, to abolish personal dependence, to give the right to hunt and fish to peasants, to return communal lands taken away by the masters, to give each peasant community an elected priest, to liquidate a small church tithe, To spend on public needs and salary to the priest, to abolish posthumous selection.

A more moderate and bourgeois in content was the "Heilbronn program" of the peasants of Franconia, but it also demanded the liberation of the peasants from personal serfdom, the confiscation of church estates, the introduction of coin unity, measures and weight.

The peasant war was brutally suppressed. In a few weeks in May 1525 more than 100,000 peasants were killed in battles and massacres. Victory in the fierce struggle for the Reformation eventually managed to gain a burgher-princely Reformation, which used the immaturity of estate-class conflicts.

The defeat of the insurgents meant the victory of the seignorial reaction and the strengthening of serfdom. Secularized church lands passed to the princes. On the eastern lands, the manor grew and the corpses increased. In the west and south-west of the country, the small farms of the peasants were preserved, and over-exploitation prevailed. The situation of the peasant masses was aggravated by the Thirty Years' War (1618-1648). The ruined peasants themselves were compelled to seek protection from the landlords. F. Engels noted that after the Thirty Years' War, "a free peasant became as rare as a white crow."

In the XVII - XVIII centuries. Serfdom in Germany began to take particularly severe forms. The serfs attached themselves to the land, and not to the landowner, and moved with the land to the new master when buying, donating, testating, pledging land. The peasant could be lost in cards and sold, mortgaged and given away. In the XVIII century. Barnacle increased to five or six days a week; The peasant remained to work for himself only at night. Particularly difficult was the corvee in Prussia, where the foundations for the future Prussian way of capitalism were laid.

Questions for repetition

1. Explain why the rise of feudalism in Germany was slower than in other Western European countries.

2. Tell us about the formation of the main classes and estates of feudal Germany.

3. Describe the system of relations in Germany.

4. What were the main duties of serfs?

5. List the factors that contributed to the rise and subsequent fall of the Hansa.

6. Explain the causes and content of the onset of the agrarian revolution.

7. Tell us about the economic causes of the Reformation and the Peasants' War.

8. What are the reasons for the "second edition of serfdom"?