He was a leader of the German peasant and plebeian uprising of commonly known as the German Peasants' War. He then became a follower and acquaintance of Martin Luther, who recommended him for a post in Zwickau. His beliefs became increasingly spiritual and apocalyptic; by his arrival at Allstedt in he had completely broken with Luther. He was captured after the Battle of Frankenhausen , tortured and finally executed.
The legend that his father had been executed by the feudal authorities [ 4 ] is untrue. Both his parents were still alive in , his mother dying at around that time. Shortly after , the family moved to the neighbouring and slightly larger town of Quedlinburg , and it was as "Thomas Munczer de Quedlinburgk" that he enrolled at the University of Leipzig in He later enrolled in late at the Viadriana University of Frankfurt an der Oder.
Again, the university records are incomplete or missing. In May , he took up a post as priest in the town of Braunschweig Brunswick , where he was occupied on and off for the next few years. It was here that he began to question the practices of the Catholic Church, and to criticize, for example, the selling of indulgences. In letters of this time, he is already being addressed by friends as a "castigator of unrighteousness".
In the autumn of , he was in Wittenberg , met with Martin Luther , and became involved in the great discussions which preceded the posting of Luther's 95 Theses. He attended lectures at the university there, and was exposed to Luther's ideas as well as other ideas originating with the humanists , among whom was Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt , who later became a radical opponent of Luther. This was one of the high points of the early Reformation.
However, at the end of that year, he was still employed in a nunnery at Beuditz, near Weissenfels. He spent the entire winter studying works by the mystics, the humanists, and the church historians. Zwickau was in the middle of the important iron- and silver-mining area of the Erzgebirge , and was also home to a significant number of plebeians, primarily weavers.
