The Güntherite Wars

Around 1519, the Monastic Knights of the Teutonic Order started to lose their grip on their sprawling Baltic empire. In the early 1520s, that grip was lost for good; by the late 1520s, it was lost forever, in the first revolution of modern European history. This is the blog entry for that revolution.

Before the Revolt

If this sounds vague, it's because the exact details of what went on are really contingent on how the Knights fared in the 1400s - about which I know relatively little.

Did they suffer a cataclysmic defeat on par with Tannenberg? Where do they stand vis-a-vis Poland, Lithuania, and Ruthenia? In relation to Pleskovy, Great Novgorod, and the (by then already underway) irresistible rise of mighty Tver? What is its relationship to the Papal States, to the Holy Roman Empire, to... itself?

What I do know is that the Monastic States aren't going to survive terribly long, for at least a few reasons:

• Even though the Hanseatic League is declining, the ongoing trends of the world are towards moneyed urban populations being powerful at the expense of the bishops, the landlords and the nobility. All three of which the eastern Baltic has in abundance. (And while historiography thus far seems to play up the peasant involvement in the Güntherite Wars, Günther himself was from Rostock, a Hansa city, and left to his own devices, the town laws that rise as the Ordenstaat falls are probably gonna have big Lübsch fingerprints.)
• There are pronounced ethnic conflicts, too. The serfs and peasantry are overwhelmingly locals, speaking Baltic (in the west) or Finno-Ugric (in the east) languages; they're going to resent the High German-speaking monastic overlords.
• IRL, the Monastic States saw way too much fighting for me to assume they're going to do better this time around. Especially given that their fall is kinda relevant to the plot.

The Güntherite Wars are rather like the Hussite Wars in that respect: the religious aspects of it are inextricably tied up to the much more worldly ones. (They're also rather like the Hussite Wars in that the schismatics from the Roman Catholic Church are led by one of the few generals in Andalusada who never, ever, loses a single engagement.)

The Sansingers

So, that aside, let's start with what I do know: in 1523, Terra Mariana has a peasant uprising. Against all odds, it boils over.

• The Sansing. IRL, Renaissance Germany gave rise to the scythe sword (High German Sensenschwert.) Once the revolt gets underway, a great number of peasants convert their scythes thusly; the conversion becomes locally known as the Sansing. It becomes so closely associated with the rebels that they simply become known as "the Sansingers."
• The white cross on black. The heraldry of the Teutonic Knights was a black cross on a white shield; to easily distinguish themselves, the vast mass of the rebels (who being peasants weren't armigerous themselves) inverted it.

It goes without saying, of course, that as a rebellion against a Church state and a Papal vassal, the Church comes down extraordinarily hard against the sansingers. At the same time, quite independently of them (and without the knowledge of the sansingers, most of whom are illiterate and speak languages that don't even have orthographies yet), the Church is coming down extaordinarily hard against someone else.

The decisive moment when the sansingers stop being yet another revolt, and become something truly new under the sun, comes the next year, when the paths of those two anathematized parties converge.

Günther, and after

By 1524-5, the rebellion has spread across most of the Monastic States. Poland is probably getting anxious (they are Catholic, and peasant rebellions tend to infest you when they last too long), and Europe's genuinely not sure how things are going to play out. Into this mess comes a man in his late 30s/early 40s, armed with a black habit, literacy, the courage of his convictions, a rosary, and not much else.

He's fleeing here mostly because it's outside the Holy Roman Empire, whose laws can't touch him across its border. And because one of his sympathizers owned a ship that was sailing in that direction. And, let's be honest, because there aren't many places in Christendom where Rome was less sympathized with. He meets a few people [who?]. And they hit it off. Things go from there, to epic effect. The question is, where?

And on that note, I'm not entirely certain. Just as the Güntherite Wars begin in obscurity, so too (at present) do they end, because they involve so many contingent factors that as yet I simply can't say.

Oh, I could talk about some of the details.

• Any of a dozen reductions of castles I can't, as yet, name. (The iconic Lutheran battle hymn was Ein fest' Burg, paraphrasing Psalm 46; the Güntherite equivalent riffs instead on Matthew 7:24-7, "Castles built on sand foundations..." It's important to remember that the Monastic Knights relied heavily on their defensive strongholds - and the Güntherites, during the course of the wars, never found a castle they couldn't knock down.)
• The life and times of their Jan Zizka stand-in [who?]. (In the absence of Hussite Wars, the infantry revolution may have been slower in coming, which means that I have more to think about across the board for everything else.)
• The publication of the Günther Bible, and the international drama that comes when it becomes a bestseller.
• The complex relationship with all the aforementioned neighbors at the top, and how the unstoppable Livonian military juggernaut either fights them to a standstill or lays them to their knees.
• The spread of Güntheritism out of the region, in particular north to Scandinavia.

But the plain truth is that I don't know the details of these things too much. On which note, dear reader, I bring this work in progress to an end and declare it a stub.