Great question! My focus is on the German Peasants' War of 1525, the largest peasant rebellion in European history at the time, so I can answer in that context. I am currently on mobile but I will expand and clarify on this once I can.
We often think of peasants as poor farmers yoked by rents and taxes. From that perspective, it's easy to assume that peasant rebellions happen after the peasantry is cornered by an oppressive upper class and has no recourse other than violence. That was the dominant perspective in the case of the German Peasants' War for a long time as well, but recent historiography has complicated things.
Hermann Rebel's scholarship in the 1980s and Govind P. Sreenivasan's on the early 2000s show that our stereotypical perspective about peasants won't work here. There was a huge lifestyle variety within the rural population that we would call the peasantry- the wealthiest among them had the ability to diversify investments into carpentry, masonry, and shipping to expand their wealth drastically. A poor peasant household may have 40 florins (enough to get by) while a wealthy one may have up to 10,000.^1 It becomes clear by looking at this disparity that things aren't so simple as the stereotype implies.
In the 1970s, David Sabean introduced a dichotomy between the Bauern and Seldner.^2 The former were those who owned leases on farms and made up the upper class of the peasantry. They reaped the rewards directly from their holdings. The latter were the subservient class of workers subject to the Bauern. They primarily made their living from wages. It was primarily the upper-class Bauern that drove the Peasants' War and we can discern this from the demand letters they wrote in 1525.
In short, and among many other things, peasants from all over southwestern Germany wrote their demands to the imperial overlords of the Holy Roman Empire in the hopes that the topmost authorities would intervene on behalf of the peasants against the lesser nobility.
They wanted common access to woods and rivers to fish, hunt and collect wood in
They wanted to abolish serfdom which was an especially rough condition for both classes of peasants
They wanted fewer seigneurial duties (one infamous story includes a countess demanding peasants abandon their farms during a holiday/crucial harvesting period to collect snail shells for her, and it was illegal to refuse)^3
The key point is that none of these were especially new - the peasants often justified their demands by bringing up the "old law" before these rules existed, but that state was long before the peasants' time and the product of cultural memory rather than real lived history.
Additionally, these demands primarily benefited the Bauern and only tangentially the Seldner. At best, the Seldner would incidentally benefit from some of these demands, and there are exactly zero demands that benefited the Seldner exclusively. This is not to say there was an outright hostile relationship between the Bauern and Seldner, just that the demands we have indicate that the war was one of Bauern ascendancy rather than Seldner oppression.
David Sabean sums it up best: "Rich men and poor men with dashed hopes rise in rebellion." The Bauern were unusually well-off at the time of the peasants war and we're trying to entrench themselves against the unusually-weak lesser nobility. The lesser nobility, in comparison, had been bombarded by a host of economic shifts with the emerging system of capitalism.
Sources:
^1 Hermann Rebel, Peasant Classes: The Bureaucratization of Property and Family Relations Under Early Habsburg Absolutism, 1511-1636, (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1983) xlv.
^2 David Sabean, “Family and Land Tenure: A Case Study of Conflict in the German Peasant War of 1525,” in The German Peasant War of 1525 - New Viewpoints, ed. Bob Scribner & Gerhard Benecke (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1979), 175.
^3 Valerius Anshelm, “The End of the Rebellion in the Black Forest,” in The German Peasants’ War: A History in Documents, ed. Scribner and Scott (Amherst: Humanity Books, 1991), 301.
Peter Blickle, The Revolution of 1525: The German Peasants’ War from a New Perspective (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), 165.
Govind P. Sreenivasan, The Peasants of Ottobeuren, 1487-1726: A Rural Society in Early Modern Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 50.
I can talk about some of the rebellions which took place in the late Imperial Chinese era, straddling the line between premodern, medieval Chinese history and early modern Chinese history. Perhaps some other folks can detail some other peasant rebellions in different locations or at different times.
The Ming dynasty (1368-1644) experienced a number of rebellions during its hold on power over China. As fate would have it, the dynasty was founded by a mass movement against the Yuan and it too would be felled by an inability to contain its own mass movements. The dynastic founder, Zhu Yuanzhang (Ming Taizu/the Hongwu Emperor), was an itinerant and semi-literate Buddhist monk before finding himself at the head of the some of the most powerful rebelling forces in late Yuan China. He had been born to extremely impoverished tenant farmers and had been 'donated' to a Buddhist monastery by his family as they could no longer afford to care for him. It would be fair to say that Zhu's background was very truly representative of the absolute poorest of China's agrarian class. In other periods of history, it was not necessarily the case that peasants would lead peasants. Zhu was one of only two Chinese emperors who truly came from the Chinese underclass (the other being Han Gaozu who re-unified China almost 1500 years before Zhu). Frederick Wakeman Jr. notes that often times, peasants were led by a variety of people, from disgruntled members of the gentry to monks, criminals, and traveling doctors.^(1)
Anyways, the rebellion that Zhu Yuanzhang joined at the end of the Yuan was the Red Turban movement, a disparate but mainly anti-Yuan movement. The causes for the revolt were plenty, but the short of it is that general governmental decay (factionalism, corruption, etc.), famine, epidemic disease, and even the Yuan's inability to properly control the Yellow River floods all contributed to generally miserable living conditions for large numbers of China's poorest. There were also religious elements stirring within some the Red Turbans. The White Lotus movement played a role in influencing some of the rebels and it is likely that Zhu, future Emperor of China, was at least influenced by their beliefs (it is believed that the dynastic name he chose, Ming 明, is a reference to the teachings of the White Lotus movement). These forms of general discontent are common to other instances of popular uprising or peasant movements in the final two dynasties. In the 1630s and 1640s, the Ming found itself embroiled in a number of conflicts both at the peripheries of the Chinese state, most notably against the Jurchen Later Jin (later Manchu Qing), and also in the internal provinces of the empire. Two of the largest and most well-known of the peasant revolts against the Ming were led by Zhang Xianzhong and Li Zicheng. Li Zicheng would eventually go on to capture Beijing and end the Ming dynasty, establishing his own, short-lived Shun dynasty before being supplanted by the Qing dynasty. These two late Ming peasant rebellions were also driven by calamities that had befallen the Chinese state, including famine, epidemic, governmental failure and neglect, demographic shifts, corruption, and increasingly burdensome financial straits.^(2) So in the light of increasingly difficult living conditions, it could said that some peasants/economically downtrodden individuals would feel that their choices were to either die a slow death or express their discontent at the state using less-than-peaceful methods. Indeed hardship was often in driver in many peasant uprisings throughout early modern Chinese history. Take for instance, the late Qing Guoyang uprising in 1898, fueled by economic decline and famine. Local chroniclers wrote the following about the unrest:
"... a Guoyang bandit by the name of Niu Shixiu led a rebellion of several thousand starving peasants. Eventually Niu was executed and his severed head displayed in the market town of Caoshiji."^(3)
"Guoyang bandits Niu and Liu set up five colored banners and assembled 30,000 starving peasants to revolt. Both bandits were executed."^(4)
Unfortunately, discerning the true nature and even the history of these Chinese rebellions becomes quite a tricky undertaking. By their very nature, peasant movements were often relatively illiterate movements even when compared to the general levels of literacy in late imperial China. Many records that we have of these movements are written by outside observers or by people who later joined the rebellion, as was the case for the Red Turbans. Even sympathetic reports regarding revolts were often wrong, especially if written by members of the ruling, literati class who often could not relate to or even understand the true circumstances which drove peasants to rebel. As such, it can be difficult for us in the present to pinpoint exactly who manned rebellion forces (was X rebel movement really all just peasants, or did the local elite/officials simply dismissively label all of the dirty, starving, shabby rebels as 'peasants'?) or what they did. Zhang Xianzhong's rebellion is a great example here. While it is definitely true that his armies were enormously destructive to Sichuan (even decades after his rebellion, Qing officials complain of fertile lands in the area with no people left alive to till the fields due to the depopulation of the area), some claims exaggerate his forces' destructiveness to such an extent that claimed casualty figures end up reaching several times the total late Ming population. Modern analyses are also hampered by the fact that the study of Chinese rebellions is often framed through the lens of class struggle in modern Chinese historiography (which is definitely valid for some rebellions but not necessarily sufficient to explain all of the multitude of rebellions experienced by the last imperial states) and the subject itself is an ever-evolving field in the West.
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In the summer of 1524, peasants - as well as serfs - of Stühlingen drafted a list of grievances against the lords in their region. Their list contained 62 individual complaints, complaining of how lords and authorities would take stolen property when they apprehended or punished a thief, instead of returning it to its owner, about how peasants would be forced to attend court when a capital crime was tried, about how lords controlled marriages and inheritance, how they were forced to labor and to fight military campaigns, their desire to appoint their own clergy and local officials, and the erosion of their ancient rights. This list was aimed at the count of Stühlingen, and once delivered, the peasants simply, and peaceably, ceased work.
Work stoppages were a common tool in the peasant-resistance toolbox, a simple act that needed little coordination or leadership structure or strategy, it was just a way to encourage the authorities to sit up and pay attention. It was something closer to a sit-in strike or a work walkout than a rebellion. The initial actions in Stühlingen had precedent, and while they were counted as the first stirrings of peasant rebellion in what became the German Peasant War, or the Revolution of 1525 (depending on your favorite theoretical flavor), they were hardly indicative of something so far-reaching, ambitious, and violent. They were also not the only stirrings of rebellion that took place in the summer of 1524. Over the course of the winter and into the next summer, the Stühlingen peasant protest would spread across the territories of the Holy Roman Empire, and would begin to take on a more organized military flavor. Protests would turn violent, either in their bloody repression or their preemptive coups against the wealthy and powerful. By the end of the summer, what started as a peaceful work stoppage over largely religious and conservative causes would have boiled over into a vast violent rebellion and would be brutally and bloodily crushed.
So what took the peaceable work stoppage of a group of peasants and serfs in Stühlingen to the largest mass peasant uprising in Europe prior to the French Revolution? How did grievances as petty and common as the ability to marry outside the community encourage massive armed hosts of peasants to challenge the power of the emperor, and the Swabian league, and the princely territorial dukes from the Alsace all the way to Bohemia?
Preludes: The Drummer of Niklashausen and Poor Conrad
The peasants at Stühlingen were not doing anything new. Drawing up lists or articles of grievance against unfair labor conditions were a common aspect of town and village life. Protest against corrupt local officials or priests are practically a universal rural experience, and rural laborers and townsmen had shown time and again that small acts of resistance - mostly peaceful work stoppages or targeted payment stoppage of tithes, taxes, dues or coerced labor - functioned as gentle course-corrections in a system that otherwise went largely unchallenged. Resort to arms was much rarer than peaceful resistance, and brutal violent reaction from authorities was much rarer than coming to some kind of agreement.
But something more was on the horizon, even in the 1480s. Changes in the rural production economy, the change in the customary system of rents, and the increasing attention to the daily life of peasants and serfs from local lords continually disrupted what were believed to be ancient customs. Economic pressure on small landholders, the class of poor knights and petty landlords, meant that taxes and tithes were increasingly collected only in cash, instead of kind. Small landholders needed liquidity and pushed their credit to its limits, and that burden fell heavily on rural agricultural laborers and rural craftworkers.
Despite the economic straits, elements of which were manifest by the mid 15th century, a great deal of peasant unrest was due to religious beliefs and custom, and appeals to a universal divine law were ubiquitous to these small and rather common acts of resistance.
Occasionally, they grew into larger acts of open rebellion and revolt. In the early spring of 1476, during the season of Lent, when a harsh winter was still gripping the land tightly, a young serf named Hans Beham (or Böhm), while tending to a flock of sheep, Hans claimed to have seen a glowing ball of light in the sky approach him. As it grew closer, he made out details; a female figure, a radiant face, long, flowing robes. The Virgin Mary. She told him that the long winter was punishment for the people's vanity, and Hans was chosen to spread her words to all who would listen, to surrender their worldly possessions and reject avarice, greed, and vanities.
Hans was a good preacher, despite having no experience. He was a serf, working flocks of sheep that didn't belong to him, often sleeping out in the fields with little or no shelter. During Carnival and other festival seasons, he earned a pittance as a drummer, playing at fairs and feasts as he could. But his simple message struck a chord, and by early summer towns around Württemburg were hosting enormous bonfires, into which the common folk threw their vanities, their worldly, costly possessions that had taken them so far from God. The little Drummer became an embodied point of pilgrimage, and people descended on the village of Nicklashausen by the tens of thousands to hear him preach.
In 1514 Johan Trithemius wrote an account of the early movement, emphasizing the frightening size of the sudden pilgrimages:
In the aforesaid year of 1476 in East Franconia in the diocese of Würzburg there took place a gathering of the people from all over Germany to see a certain man by the name of Hans of Nicklashausen, a peasant, an extremely ignorant half-wit, and herdsman of pigs.
... So many people came daily in troops to hear this pitiable little fool that it has been recorded that often in one day there were ten thousand people, another day twenty thousand, and even sometimes thirty thousand converged on the village of Niklashausen to hear him... he preached newfangled beliefs against the clergy and princes which he imagined had been revealed to him visibly and sensibly by the Most Blessed Virgin Mary in a field where he was herding pigs.
... Truly, what could a layman find more desirable than to see the clergy and priests immediately stripped of all privileges and liberties, and denied their collection of tithes, rents, and the proceeds of the holy altar? So, the little fool stirred up laymen and laywomen to come from all over Germany to Niklashausen. The people seemed to be directed there only by the sermons of this little idiot and his claim that peasants would become free and the clergy placed in servitude.
Trithemius got the kernel of concern held by the authorities. Beham was not simply a lay preacher, he was a dangerous agent of social unrest, a leveler, who would see the world order toppled on its head. And he clearly had power, and allure. Owing perhaps to common popular stories of shepherds and holy visions and popular Carnival-time folk rituals which encouraged a sense of topsy-turvy, of a world literally turned upside down, his preaching found a social resonance that frightened those with authority and emboldened those without.
In response, the Bishop of Würzburg had begun collecting evidence of heresy, gathering witness statements attesting to the murderous desires of the peasant host, attested most often in the form of a song, allegedly, which went thus:
Oh God in Heaven, on you we call,
Help us seize our priests and kill them all.
One eyewitness claimed to have seen a group of peasants threaten to kill priests in the cathedral at Eichstätt. By early July, the bishop had a list of 19 attested acts, sermons, or heretical statements made by the Drummer, who very shortly after encouraged his followers to leave behind their women and children, and to take up arms and march to Niklashausen. Perhaps tipped off by spies or informants within the pilgrim bands, the bishop ordered his arrest, and before this armed host could take to the roads, a group of knights seized him from the farmhouse in which he was sleeping. This didn't immediately stop the march, and, now leaderless, groups of peasants roamed the countryside, culminating in at least one attempt to storm the Frauenberg, a nearby castle. They were driven away, but many witnesses claimed that the miraculous appearance of the Virgin Mary protected the peasants from the first fire of the castle's gun. Though few other violent acts followed, tension remained. Beham was tried soon after his arrest, and executed for heresy on July 19th, 1476.
In this example, we have a rather simple, narratively satisfying course of events: a witness to a miracle began preaching, touching off a popular movement that soon exploded in size and expanded in scope from a reassertion of humility and simplicity, to a possible armed rebellion against clerical and secular authority. Beham remained a touchstone to the fears of the clergy and nobility in peasant revolts, and fear-mongering pamphlets and other writings were continually published until they were eclipsed by the events of 1524-25.