The book opens with the story of Hans Behem’s first vision, as Wunderli believes it may have happened. One evening in early April 1476, the young herder and serf saw a shining light emerge from the hills around the German village of Niklashausen. The light soon took the shape of the Virgin Mary, a Catholic saint to whom Behem was devoted and whose shrine in the village church he had visited. She spoke to Behem, telling him that the long, cold winter was due to God’s wrath: Humankind was too worldly and lacking in religious devotion, and clerical corruption was rampant; God willed that people destroy their possessions, or “vanities,” and embrace “voluntary poverty”; furthermore, clerics and secular lords would soon “lose their privileges and wealth and live like poor peasants” (3). The Virgin stated that because greed consumed clerics and because they abused peasants, God encouraged the commoners to revolt and murder these churchmen. It was Behem’s duty to preach this divine message to the people of the Tauber Valley in south-central Germany. This message was thus “a call to revolution and bloodshed” (4).

In reality, historians have little direct evidence of Behem’s lived experience or precisely what he preached.