An episode of history I had never heard about. 100-300,000 peasants killed.

As someone who reads a lot about the early history of religion, the most interesting part of this for me was the role of Martin Luther, the founder of Protestantism: "In Against the Murderous, Thieving Hordes of Peasants, Luther condemned the violence as the devil's work and called for the aristocrats to put down the rebels like mad dogs". My study of history of Christianity had left Protestantism relatively unscathed up to now. Well, no longer.

Historical context:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peasant_republic

Notably Handeln and the communes of the Swiss Cantons are considered to have "survived" into 19th C.

Thomas Müntzer is one of the unsung heroes of this revolt, unfortunately very little is left of him, most biographies take about 100 pages or less

The peasants’ war happened over and over again in Chinese history among the gaps of dynasties. That’s a result of autocracy.

If anyone’s interested about this period of time (and the Anabaptist revolution) a great novel: Q by Luther Blisset

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Q_(novel)

Not a historian nor economist, but to my layman's mind, these revolts seem like a recurring phenomenon whenever long running economic cycles reach that point at which the aristocracy overreaches while trying to suppressing growing public sentiment against them, not unlike in Polybius' anacyclosis. But unlike Polybius' cycles, as technology improves, the likelihood of a successful reset at the end of a cycle, gradually diminishes with each cycle. I've recently started on Piketty's Capital, and he too alludes to the possibility that the post-industrial-revolution spiral into inequality could have continued uninterrupted into the 20th century and beyond, had it not been for the socioeconomic shock of the world war. Looking at the current trajectory of automation of intellectual labour and surveillance technology, I too am starting to worry that the odds of breaking the current cycle are slim.