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The Peasants’ War (1524–25) is one of the outstanding events in German history. L. Ranke called it the greatest natural event of the German state. It was also a turning point in the historical process, according to K. Marx and F. Engels. It has thus attracted the attention of many generations of students of history. 1. Course After a first outbreak of fighting in Hegau (near the German Black Forest) in the summer of 1524, the war began in earnest in January 1525 in Upper Swabia. Peasants from various estates and territories assembled by the thousands …

[German Version] I. Character and Name 1. The Peasants’ War began in the summer of 1524 between Basel and Lake Constance as peasants formed a paramilitary mob reacting to harassing demands by the authorities. It spread to Upper Swabia, then rapidly broadened because of the “Twelve Articles of the Upper Swabian Peasants,” written in March 1525 and running to 28 printings in two months. It was accompanied by the storming of castles of the nobility and the occupation of monasteries. By May 1525, the upris…

Landschaft (German, “territoriality”) in the Holy Roman Empire was a correlate of political authority, the term being attested in this sense from the 14th century until the abolition of the Empire in 1806. The  Landschaft was corporative in character, and as such it denoted the totality of the  Landstände (“territorial estates”) of a territory immediate to the Empire. Additionally, where a territory lacked nobility and clergy as estates of the realm, Landschaft could also denote the representatives (Representation) of subjects, in this case those in towns and…

1. TerminologyThe term “manorialism” (also, “seigneurialism”; German: Grundherrschaft) designates the medieval economic system that was based on individual units of land known as “manors” or “seigneuries,” each of which was subject to a “lord of the manor” or “seigneur” (German:  Grundherr). Modern medieval historians view the rise of manorialism in the early Middle Ages as a key factor in the peculiar development of Europe. Its effective organization of labor, which combined seigneurial self-sufficiency (“Salic patrimony”) centered o…

1. DefinitionThe term  communalism was developed in the early 1980s as a scholarly term referring to a particular form of political order [2], triggering a critical debate …

1. Cultural phenomenonAs a cultural phenomenon, the landscape is a complex “integral system” [2. 14], in which looking at, depicting, and feeling the landscape are as important as its design and ecology (see below, 2.). Landscape in the early modern period (the word “landscape” itself was originally borrowed into English from Dutch  landschap in its artistic sense, extending to the wider sense in the 19th century; Landscape painting) was closely related to the concepts of garden and nature, which together reflect two different ideas and str…

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1. BegriffIn der Ausbildung der G. (engl. seign(i)ory) im frühen MA sieht die heutige Mediävistik einen »Schlüsselfaktor« für die Sonderentwicklung Europas. Die G. setzte aufgrun…

1. DefinitionK. wurde als wiss. Ordnungsbegriff in den frühen 1980er Jahren entwickelt [2]; daran entzündete sich eine kritische Debatte [5], die zu seiner Europäisierung und Etablierung in der Geschichtswissenschaft führte [4]. Der Begriff K. dient zur Charakterisierung der durch Gemeinden/Kommunen geprägten Lebenswelt im Alten Europa; die latinisierende Form präzisiert das semantisch weite Feld von »Gemeinde« im Deutschen, indem sie an lat. communitas (»Gemeinschaft«) als Unterfall von universitas (»Gesamtheit«) anschließt. K. in di…