With the redoubtable Goetz at their head the insurgents poured onward, spreading terror before them, leaving ruin behind them.  Castles and monasteries were destroyed, until throughout Thuringia, Franconia, Swabia, and along the Rhine as far as Lorraine the homes of lords and clergy were destroyed, and a universal scene of smoking ruins replaced the formerly stately architectural piles.

We cannot go further into the details of this notable outbreak.  The revolt of the southern peasantry was at length brought to an end by an army collected by the Swabian league, and headed by George Truchsess of Waldburg.  Had they marched against him in force he could not have withstood their onset.  But they occupied themselves in sieges, disregarding the advice of their leaders, and permitted themselves to be attacked and beaten in detail.  Seeing that all was at an end, Goetz von Berlichingen secretly fled from their ranks and took refuge in his castle.  Many of the bodies of peasantry dispersed.  Others made head against the troops and were beaten with great slaughter.  All was at an end.

Truchsess held a terrible court of justice in the city of Wuerzburg, in which his jester Hans acted as executioner, and struck off the heads of numbers of the prisoners, the bloody work being attended with laughter and jests, which added doubly to its horror.  All who acknowledged that they had read the Bible, or even that they knew how to read and write, were instantly beheaded.  The priest of Schipf, a gouty old man who had vigorously opposed the peasants, had himself carried by four of his men to Truchsess to receive thanks for his services.  Hans, fancying that he was one of the rebels, slipped up behind him, and in an instant his head was rolling on the floor.

“I seriously reproved my good Hans for his untoward jest,” was the easy comment of Truchsess upon this circumstance.

Throughout Germany similar slaughter of the peasantry and wholesale executions took place.  In many places the reprisal took the dimensions of a massacre, and it is said that by the end of the frightful struggle more than a hundred thousand of the peasants had been slain.  As for its political results, the survivors were reduced to a deeper state of servitude than before.  Thus ended a great struggle which had only needed an able leader to make it a success and to free the people from feudal bonds.  It ended like all the peasant outbreaks, in defeat and renewed oppression.  As for the robber chief Goetz, while he is said by several historians to have received a sentence of life imprisonment, Menzel states that he was retained in prison for two years only.

In Thuringia, as we have said, the revolt was a religious one, it being controlled by Thomas Muenzer, a fanatical Anabaptist.  He pretended that he had the gift of receiving divine revelations, and claimed to be better able to reveal Christian truth than Luther.  God had created the earth, he said, for believers, all government should be regulated by the Bible and revelation, and there was no need of princes, priests, or nobles.  The distinction between rich and poor was unchristian, since in God’s kingdom all should be alike.  Nicholas Storch, one of Muenzer’s preachers, surrounded himself with twelve apostles and seventy-two disciples, and claimed that an angel brought him divine messages.