They asked in vain.  The princes ridiculed the idea of a court in which Luther should sit side by side with the archduke.  Luther refused to interfere.  He admitted the oppression of the peasantry, severely attacked the princes and nobility for their conduct, but deprecated the excesses which the insurgents had already committed, and saw no safety from worse evils except in putting down the peasantry with a strong hand.

The rejection of the demands of the rebellious peasants was followed by a frightful reign of license, political in the south, religious in the north.  Everywhere the people were in arms, destroying castles, burning monasteries, and forcing numbers of the nobles to join them, under pain of having their castles plundered and burned.  The counts of Hohenlohe were made to enter their ranks, and were told, “Brother Albert and brother George, you are no longer lords but peasants, and we are the lords of Hohenlohe.”  Other nobles were similarly treated.  Various Swabian nobles fled for safety, with their families and treasures, to the city and castle of Weinsberg.  The castle was stormed and taken, and the nobles, seventy in number, were forced to run the gantlet between two lines of men armed with spears, who stabbed them as they passed.  It was this deed that brought out a pamphlet from Luther, in which he called on all the citizens of the empire to put down “the furious peasantry, to strangle, to stab them, secretly and openly, as they can, as one would kill a mad dog.”

There was need for something to be done if Germany was to be saved from a revolution.  The numbers of the insurgents steadily increased.  Many of the cities were in league with them, several of the princes entered in negotiation concerning their demands; in Thuringia the Anabaptists, under the lead of a fanatical preacher named Thomas Muenzer, were in full revolt; in Saxony, Hesse, and lower Germany the peasantry were in arms; there was much reason to fear that the insurgents and fanatics would join their forces and pour like a rushing torrent through the whole empire, destroying all before them.  Of the many peasant revolts which the history of mediaevalism records this was the most threatening and dangerous, and called for the most strenuous exertions to save the institutions of Germany from a complete overthrow.

At the head of the main body of insurgents was a knight of notorious character, the famed Goetz von Berlichingen,—­Goetz with the Iron Hand, as he is named,—­a robber baron whose history had been one of feud and contest, and of the plunder alike of armed foes and unarmed travellers.  Goethe has honored him by making him the hero of a drama, and the peasantry sought to honor him by making him the leader of their march of destruction.  This worthy had lost his hand during youth, and replaced it with a hand of iron.  He was bold, daring, and unscrupulous, but scarcely fitted for generalship, his knowledge of war being confined to the tactics of highway robbery.  Nor can it be said that his leadership of the peasants was voluntary.  He was as much their prisoner as their general, his service being an enforced one.