Lyndal Roper

Five hundred years ago this week, the rebels of the German Peasants’ War, or Bauernkrieg, were defeated in a series of battles. Somewhere between 70,000 and 100,000 peasants were killed. Everywhere in Germany this event is being commemorated. There are TV programmes, an opera, magazines, plays, readings and art works. Even places with barely a walk-on part in the Peasants’ War are doing something: Pfeddersheim in Baden is hosting a summer wine festival with medieval market to remember a battle in which thousands died in a place now known as Bluthohl (‘blood hollow’).

Plague struck Wittenberg in August 1527, ten years after Luther posted – or didn’t post; historians disagree – the 95 Theses on the door of the castle church, and two years after the Peasants’ War of 1525, when thousands of peasants were slain after they revolted against their lords. Luther had backed the authorities in putting down the revolt with massive bloodshed. Earlier in 1527, Luther had undergone a major physical and emotional collapse, and found himself unable to write or read for some months. Then, just as he was starting to recover, plague broke out in the town.