successes, the Elector, who meanwhile had gathered troops, immediately broke his agreement with the peasants, attacked Bruchrain on May 23, captured and burned Malsch after vigorous resistance, pillaged a number of villages, and garrisoned Bruchsal.At the same time Truchsess attacked Eppingen and captured the chief of the local movement, Anton Eisenhut, whom the Elector immediately executed with a dozen other peasant leaders.Bruchrain and Kraichgau were thus subjugated and compelled to pay an indemnity of about 40,000 guilders.Both armies, that of Truchsess now reduced to 6,000 men in consequence of the preceding battles, and that of the Elector (6,500men), united and moved towards the Odenwald.
Word of the Boetlingen defeat spread terror everywhere among the insurgents.The free imperial cities which had come under the heavy hand of the peasants, sighed in relief.The city of Heilbronn was the first to take steps towards reconciliation with the Suabian Union.Heilbronn was the seat of the peasants' main office and that of the delegates of the various troops who deliberated over the proposals to be made to the emperor and the empire in the name of all the insurgent peasants.In these negotiations which were to lay down general rules for all of Germany, it again became apparent that none of the existing estates, including the peasants, was developed sufficiently to be able to reconstruct the whole of Germany according to its own viewpoint.It became obvious that to accomplish this, the support of the peasantry and particularly of the middle-class must be gained.In consequence, Wendel Hipler took over the conduct of the negotiations.Of all the leaders of the movement, Wendel Hipler bad the best understanding of the existing conditions.He was not a far-seeing revolutionary of Muenzer's type; he was not a representative of the peasants as were Metzler or Rohrbach; his many-sided experiences, his practical knowledge of the position of the various estates towards each other prevented him from representing one of the estates engaged in the movement in opposition to the other.just as Muenzer, a representative of the beginnings of the proletariat then outside of the existing official Organisation of society, was driven to the anticipation of communism, Wendel Hipler, the representative, as it were, of the average of all progressive elements of the nation, anticipated modern bourgeois society.The principles that he defended, the demands that he formulated, though not immediately possible, were the somewhat idealised, logical result of the dissolution of feudal society.In so far as the peasants agreed to propose laws for the whole empire, they were compelled to accept Hipler's principles and demands.Centralisation demanded by the peasants thus assumed, in Heilbronn, a definite form, which, however, was worlds away from the ideas of the peasants themselves on the subject.
Centralisation, for instance, was more clearly defined in the demands for the establishment of uniform coins, measures and weights, for the abolition of internal customs, etc., in demands, that is to say, which were much more in the interests of the city middle-class than in the interests of the peasants.Concessions made to the nobility were a certain approach to the modern system of redemption and aimed, finally, to transform feudal land ownership into bourgeois ownership.In a word, so far as the demands of the peasants were combined into a system of "imperial reform," they did not express the temporary demands of the peasants but became subordinate to the general interests of the middle-class as a whole.
While this reform of the empire was still being debated in Heilbronn, the author of the Declaration of the Twelve Articles, Hans Berlin, was already on his way to meet Truchsess, to negotiate in the name of the honourables, the middle-class and the citizenry on the surrender of the city.Reactionary movements within the city supported this betrayal, and Wendel Hipler was obliged to flee, as were the peasants.He went to Weinsberg where be attempted to assemble the remnants of the Wuerttemberg peasants and those few of the Gaildorf troops which could be mobilised.The approach of the Elector Palatine and of Truchsess, however, drove him out of there and he was compelled to go to Wuerzburg to cause the Gay Bright Troop to resume operations.
In the meantime, the armies of the Union and the Elector subdued the Neckar region, compelled the peasants to take a new oath, burned many villages, and stabbed or hanged all fleeing peasants that fell into their hands.
To avenge the execution of Helfenstein, Weinsberg was burned.
The troops that were assembled in front of Wuerzburg had in the meantime besieged Frauenberg.On May 15, before a gap was made by their fusillade, they bravely but unsuccessfully attempted to storm the fortress.
