Christoph Schappeler was the preacher at St. Martin's in Memmingen during the early 1500's, during the Protestant Reformation and the Peasants' War. He tended to side with the poor, causing the senate to regulate his sermons in 1516. However, by 1521 the climate had changed such that the senate was giving him support. When he was excommunicated in 1524, the senate refused to follow the bishop's order to have him banished.
It is believed that Schappeler and Sebastian Lotzer wrote The Twelve Articles: The Just and Fundamental Articles of All the Peasantry and Tenants of Spiritual and Temporal Powers by Whom They Think Themselves Oppressed in early 1525. Within two months of its initial publication in Memmingen, twenty-five thousand copies of the Twelve Articles had spread throughout Europe. The Twelve Articles was a religious petition that utilized Luther's ideas to appeal for peasants' rights.
When he was excommunicated in 1524, the senate refused to follow the bishop's order to have him banished.
It is believed that Schappeler and Sebastian Lotzer wrote The Twelve Articles: The Just and Fundamental Articles of All the Peasantry and Tenants of Spiritual and Temporal Powers by Whom They Think Themselves Oppressed in early 1525.
The writings of the Reformers were spread abroad, along with copies of the Scriptures, especially the New Testament; but the council could not be pre vailed upon to interfere, since the movement had caught hold of the imagination of the people.
Schappeler attracted not only an en thusiastic following in the town but also among the peasants of the surrounding country, who were op pressed with economic and legal grievances.
Moreover, the Swabian League, under the implacable Leonhard von Ech, refused all discussion, and in the confusion it took advantage of a long-cherished desire for an armed invasion of the imperial city, under pretense that Memmingen was the breeding-place of disturbance and Schappeler the chief agitator, to be visited with a bloody penalty.
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