Early Years

Abstract

Thomas Müntzer’s early years are utterly obscure. Nothing is known of him until he went to study at the university of Frankfurt an der Oder in late 1512. There he was inscribed as ‘Thomas Muntczer Stolbergensis’. Upon that solitary fact hinges the reconstruction of his entire youth and early career. He was, by his own attestation, a native of the small town of Stolberg in the Harz mountains,¹ which lay in the diocese of Halberstadt on the western fringes of Saxony. Only a few miles to the east, in Eisleben, Martin Luther, subsequently his most vehement opponent, had been born in 1483. Unlike Luther’s, Muntze’s birthdate is unknown. Reckoning back from his first appointment as a chantry priest in Brunswick in 1514, we can estimate that he must have been born no later than 1491, since the lowest age for ordination was customarily twenty-four. 1489 has been most frequently suggested as his year of birth, since Müntzer is supposed to have studied in Leipzig from the winter semester of 1506 onwards, and that university’s statutes precluded admission to the bachelor of arts degree before the age of seventeen.