From a preeminent historian, the definitive history of the sixteenth-century uprising that revolutionized Europe. The German Peasants War was the greatest popular uprising in Western Europe before the French Revolution. In 1524 and 1525, it swept across Germany with astonishing speed as well over a hundred thousand people massed in armed bands to demand a new and more egalitarian order. The peasants took control of vast areas of southern and middle Germany, torching and plundering the monasteries, convents, and castles that stood in their way. But they proved no match for the forces of the lords, who put down the revolt by slaying somewhere between seventy and a hundred thousand peasants in just over two months. In Summer of Fire and Blood, the first history of the German Peasants War in a generation, historian Lyndal Roper exposes the far-reaching ramifications of this rebellion.
