ABSTRACT
Before the birth of human rights in the eighteenth century, European society recognized as self-evident that there were basic inequalities at law between different groups of people and their dependants, according to wealth, birth and profession. Even so, early modern social structures were not rigid and caste-like, but movement within them was individual and erratic: one can talk of cumulative effects but not of rational changes. This applies above all to the sociology of the 1520s in Germany. The 1520s appeared as the great divide for large sections of the west German lower nobility with the abortive knights' revolt of Sickingen and Hutten. It was the end of the road for sections of the common people in market town and village with the abortive peasants' revolt, especially for the adherents of Thomas Müntzer. Only in the Austrian and Alpine lands did the tradition of peasant revolt for better conditions continue unabated until well into the nineteenth century. In the rest of the German lands 1525 was the end of a century and more of rural violence against the law and order of ruling princes and municipalities. For the clergy also it formed a great divide. Where it went Protestant, the clerical profession changed its social status: the way was opened for commoners with university degrees. The nobility moved out of the best clerical jobs because a Protestant church system made them the lackeys of ruler or town council, rather than granting them the status and freedom enjoyed by clerics in the old medieval and Catholic German system. Thus the Protestant clergy of the German states became a government department of trained commoners in the service of the prince or municipality. In the Catholic German states the situation remained more complicated and more favourable to the nobility. The ecclesiastical states retained their aristocratic government, with cathedral chapters and bishops drawn from the German high and low nobility still in charge of their own politics. In the Catholic dynastic territories the papal hierarchy was still available to arbitrate for the clergy with the ruling prince. In practice, the clergy increasingly had the worst of the arrangement, as for example in counterreformation Bavaria. But such dynastic control of the Catholic clergy was only one aspect of the early modern German Catholic system. The links with Rome remained: the freedoms of many of the German ecclesiastical states such as Cologne, Münster, Würzburg and Fulda remained to tempt Catholic nobles into the Catholic church because of the power and wealth they would enjoy. All this was closed to the Protestant noble: in the seventeenth century increasingly he had to turn to military, diplomatic and general administrative service with ruling princes. The Protestant church generally remained beneath his dignity.
