The peasant revolts, sporadic the Middle Ages through, had for the half-century preceding the Reformation been growing in frequency and importance, but it needed nevertheless the sudden impulse, the powerful jar given by a Luther in 1517, and the series of blows with which it was followed during the years immediately succeeding, to crystallize the mass of fluid discontent and social unrest in its various forms and give it definite direction.

The blow which was primarily struck in the region of speculative thought and ecclesiastical relations did not stop there in its effects.

The attack on the dominant theological system--at first merely on certain comparatively unessential outworks of that system--necessarily of its own force developed into an attack on the organization representing it, and on the economic basis of the latter.

The battle against ecclesiastical abuses, again, in its turn, focussed the ever-smouldering discontent with abuses in general; and this time, not in one district only, but simultaneously over the whole of Germany.
The movement inaugurated by Luther gave to the peasant groaning under the weight of baronial oppression, and the small handicraftsman suffering under his _Ehrbarkeit_, a rallying-point and a rallying cry.
In history there is no movement which starts up full grown from the brain of any one man, or even from the mind of any one generation of men, like Athene from the head of Zeus.

The historical epoch which marks the crisis of the given change is, after all, little beyond a prominent landmark--a parting of the ways--led up to by a long preparatory development.