Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/331/en

The "free economic village communities" of the early modern era carry within themselves the germ for the shaping of social life into the future in the sense of the "Threefold Social Order." This blossoming of an independent, folk-rooted spirituality of social life in the village communities was laid out to inaugurate a grass-roots democratic development in Central Europe, similar to that which formed itself in Switzerland. The noblest figures of the age — among them Matthias Grünewald (1470–1528), Tilman Riemenschneider (1460–1531), Paracelsus (1493–1541) and many others — made common cause with the peasants. Against this, however, stood the retarding forces in Church and nobility. The conflict discharged itself in the Peasants' Wars of 1524 to 1525. What as a germinal, culture-renewing impulse could have placed itself at the side of the rising towns was drowned in blood. The Counter-Reformation did its part to stifle all further strivings for independence at the root. Roman law took up its dominion over the countryside as well. Land became, within the prevailing legal understanding, private-law property — and with that, by degrees, a purchasable commodity.