The German Protestant reformer Thomas Münzer (1489-1525) was associated with the "radical" Reformation, in the early stages of which his revolutionary social views placed him at the head of the Peasants' Rebellion.

Thomas Münzer was born at Stolberg in Saxony. He read widely and became a secular priest, first in Frohse and later in a convent in Beuditz. After meeting Martin Luther at Leipzig in 1519, Münzer experienced a religious crisis in which his doubt as to God's existence was resolved into a concept of the decline of the Church, the spiritual unity of all true believers, and his own conviction that he was an especially chosen instrument of God to purge the world of ecclesiastical abuses. His appointment to the town of Zwickau in 1520 brought him into contact with the socially radical Zwickau prophets, and Münzer began proclaiming his vision...