for some months defied the Austrian government. Gaismayr inflicted two reverses upon the forces sent to relieve Radstadt, but was unable permanently to resist the increasing contingents despatched against him by the Swabian League and the Austrian government. In July he was compelled to raise the siege, and fled to Italy, where he was murdered in 1528 by two Spaniards, who received for their deed the price put by the government on Gaismayr's head.
The Austrian duchies were one of the few districts in which the revolt resulted in an amelioration of the lot of the peasants. Margrave Philip of Baden, whose humanity was recognised on all sides, pursued a similar policy, and the Landgrave of Hesse also made some concessions. But as a rule the suppression of the movement was marked by appalling atrocities. On May 27 Leonard von Eck, the Bavarian chancellor, reports that Duke Anthony of Lorraine alone had already destroyed twenty thousand peasants in Elsass; and for the whole of Germany a moderate estimate puts the number of victims at a hundred thousand. The only consideration that restrained the victors appears to have been the fear that, unless they held their hand, they would have no one left to render them service. "If all the peasants are killed," wrote Margrave George to his brother Casimir, "where shall we get other peasants to make provision for us?" Casimir stood in need of the exhortation; at Kitzingen, near Würzburg, he put out the eyes of fifty-nine townsfolk, and forbad the rest under severe penalties to offer them medical or other assistance. When the massacre of eighteen knights at Weinsberg is adduced as proof that the peasants were savages, one may well ask what stage of civilisation had been reached by German Princes.
The effects of this failure to deal with the peasants' grievances except by methods of brutal oppression cannot be estimated with any exactitude; but its effects were no doubt enduring and disastrous. The Diet of Augsburg in 1525 attempted to mitigate the ferocity of the lords towards their subjects, but the effort did not produce much result, and to the end of the eighteenth century the German peasantry remained the most wretched in Europe. Serfdom lingered there longer than in any other civilised country save Russia, and the mass of the people were effectively shut out from the sphere of political action. The beginnings of democracy were crushed in the cities; the knights and then the peasants were beaten down. And onjy the territorial power of the Princes profited. The misery of the mass of her people must be reckoned as one of the causes of the national weakness and intellectual sterility which marked Germany during the latter part of the sixteenth century. The religious lead which she had given to Europe passed into other hands, and the literary awakening which preceded and accompanied the Reformation was followed by slumbers at least as profound as those which had gone before.
The difficulty of assigning reasons for the failure of the revolt itself
