Methodology & Sources

How many convents and monasteries were attacked during the German Peasants’ War? Both contemporary chroniclers and modern historians have given various answers to the question. Building upon their work, the Visualising the Destruction of Convents and Monasteries in the German Peasants’ War project set out to produce a comprehensive list of religious institutions affected by the Peasants’ War and to map them, using a combination of painstaking archival and library research with the latest in digital humanities techniques.

Listing institutions extant during the Peasants’ War

To answer the question of how many monasteries and convents were affected by the Peasants’ War, it was first necessary to determine how many of these monastic institutions existed in the years 1524 to 1526, and where they were located.

The volumes Orden und Klöster and the Germania Sacra ‘Klösterdatenbank’ website provided the core of our list. Marjorie (Beth) Plummer of the University of Arizona generously shared her own database of convents and monasteries in the Holy Roman Empire, which was cross-checked against our list.

Especially important to differentiating institutions from one another – and eventually tying them to attacks mentioned in our written sources – was the ‘Klösterdatenbank’ information on the patron saints associated with each institution. We further used the unique Germania Sacra identification number (GS-ID) to differentiate between institutions; however, not all institutions identified as having been in the Peasants’ War area (see below) have a GS-ID.

Delineating the Peasants’ War area

Having produced a list of approximately 3000 monastic institutions known to be extant in the Peasants’ War era, it was necessary to narrow our search for affected institutions to the area in which the War took place. Using various publicly accessible maps of the Peasants’ War area created by different researchers and institutions, we narrowed our search list to approximately 1200 institutions in an area extending over a large part (more than a third) of present-day Germany, eastern France, northern Switzerland and parts of Austria. These institutions were assigned an ‘a’ (for ‘area’) in our database.

It became apparent through this process that some areas were neglected in the sources and that the lists did not include – according to our estimate – 15% of the affected monasteries we would subsequently find.

Identifying affected institutions

Numerous sources – archival, printed, and online – were consulted to identify affected institutions. Source collections by Felician Geß, Franz Baumann and Günther Franz were invaluable, as were the multi-volume series Germania Sacra and Germania Benedictina. Lists of institutions provided by German federal states, such as Klöster und Stifte in Rheinland-Pfalz and Klöster in Baden-Württemberg, were also helpful. We also consulted the Munich Digitisation Centre and Archivportal-D for primary archival materials, as well as for later (mainly 19^th-century) printed sources.

Comparing our list of affected institutions with previous attempts to quantify the extent of the Peasants’ War proved instructive. For example, Peter Harer's work Eigentliche warhafftige beshreibung des Bauernkriegs, an early chronicle from an eyewitness which was first printed exactly 100 years later in 1625, only mentions a limited number of attacks, mainly located in the Palatinate or near its borders. Heinrich Bensen’s 1849 list of attacks on monasteries in the Mainfranken region contains only a quarter of what we eventually found.

When contemporary chroniclers such as Martin Chronthal and Lorenz Fries produced material on individual cities, we had to approach the matter cautiously to precisely identify which religious institution they meant. For cities like Bamberg, Rothenburg ob der Tauber and Würzburg, which each had between five and 20 religious institutions, it was a real challenge to distinguish the different houses and orders.

We chose to mark as ‘affected’ only those institutions for which a clear source was found – eschewing broad claims (whether by contemporary or later historians) that ‘all’ institutions in a given area were attacked. Nevertheless, the more sources we investigated, the more our list of affected institutions increased.

A digest of sources used to identify affected institutions will be available for download here. These are organised by institution, and give relevant excerpts of source material for each.

Defining the ‘effects’ of the Peasants’ War

Based on a review of our sources, we defined three categories of effects of the Peasants’ War, and coded each affected institution accordingly in our database. These categories are:

Flight/threat – Institutions where the religious were threatened by peasant bands, and/or fled elsewhere for safety.
Inventorisation – Institutions that chose (or were forced) to produce an inventory of their goods, whether to obtain the protection of another entity (such as a town), or as a result of lodging a claim for damages following the War.
Physical attacks – Institutions undergoing physical damage (e.g., burning, looting) by peasants during the War.

It will be seen that these categories are not mutually exclusive. Some institutions were affected in all three ways, and others suffered either one effect or some combination thereof.

Considering the full range of effects of the Peasants’ War is important to us because it is only then that we can appreciate the extraordinary impact which the revolt had on the monastic landscape.

Mapping the institutions

Mapping the institutions is the heart of our project. Viewing institutions in their geographical context allows trends and anomalies to be identified that are not readily apparent simply from considering written sources.

‘Klosterdatenbank’ provided the bulk of the geo-coordinates necessary for mapping institutions identified in our database as either affected or located inside the Peasants’ War area. The rest of the coordinates were sourced either from online sources such as Google Earth, or from colleagues providing precise geolocation data of institutions they had worked on.

Thinking ahead about how others might use the data in future research provided some insight into how to prepare the data for entry into our mapping software, ArcGIS. A map searchable by location is now available on the project website. Maps with additional functionality – such as the ability to filter by order or the way in which an institution was affected – are planned.

Several rounds of refining the presentation and accuracy of the resulting map followed. We are grateful to several colleagues for reviewing early drafts of our map and giving feedback on its usability and accuracy. Any remaining infelicities are, naturally, ours. We encourage readers to report any such errors using our feedback form.