The Reformation

Switzerland’s then biggest town, Basel, became a cultural centre as a result of the Council of Basel (1431–49), the foundation of its university (1460), and its printing industry, which attracted famed Renaissance scholar Desiderius Erasmus, whose Christian philosophy became the heart of humanism in Switzerland. One of Erasmus’s most eager pupils was Huldrych Zwingli, an influential theologian and a dynamic political leader whose new Protestant religious doctrines, paralleling to some extent those of Martin Luther, fueled the Swiss Reformation. Against what he viewed as the decadent Roman Catholic hierarchy, Zwingli favoured the return to the teachings of the Bible. While Luther strictly separated the spiritual and political realms, Zwingli emphasized that both the church and the state were subject to the law of Christ. In 1525 Zürich’s great council adopted his innovations: the Latin mass was replaced by a simple communion service; a German-language bible was introduced; the clergy were allowed to marry; the church’s land property was secularized and its jurisdiction heavily restricted; and images were destroyed or withdrawn from the churches. Although supported by many peasants, the Swiss Reformation was most of all a success of the lay urban burghers and their councils, which took control of the spiritual and material power of the church and restrained the peasants, who in vain asked for the complete abolition of the tithe during the unrest of 1525. It was also in the countryside that the Anabaptists (believers of adult baptism) won most followers; refusing military service and the civic oath, they were cruelly suppressed well into the 18th century.

Zürich’s model was soon followed by other Swiss towns, especially those ruled by guilds such as Sankt Gallen, Basel, Biel, Mulhouse, and Schaffhausen and, after a public disputation in 1528, by patrician Bern. Yet, despite the presence of humanist supporters of the Reformation, the equally patrician towns of Fribourg, Solothurn, Lucerne, and Zug remained Roman Catholic. The most fervent opposition to the new faith came from central Switzerland’s rural cantons, which already controlled the local Roman Catholic church and depended heavily on the mercenary system that Zwingli had severely criticized and that Zürich’s council consequently had forbidden. In some rural areas with little central authority, the choice of religious denomination was left to individual communes, the majority of which adopted Protestantism. This occurred in both Glarus and Appenzell, the latter splitting along confessional lines into two half cantons in 1597. In Graubünden, too, the communes had free choice of adherence, and a majority chose Protestantism, while the Valais, after temporary success of the Reformers, was completely re-Catholicized later in the 17th century. Military confrontation over confessional preferences became inevitable within the joint dependencies, resulting in the Kappel Wars. In 1529 Protestant troops from Zürich and Bern advanced on the five Catholic cantons of central Switzerland (Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Lucerne, and Zug), which had joined to form the Christian Union, but little fighting occurred in this first conflict, thanks to the compromise symbolized by the famous Kappeler Milchsuppe, a soup of milk and bread shared on the front by the two opposing armies. In the conflict’s aftermath, Zwingli insisted on and used economic pressure to achieve the Reformation of the whole Swiss Confederation. The Second Kappel War began in October 1531, when the five Roman Catholic cantons launched an unexpected attack on Zürich, winning the decisive Battle of Kappel, in which Zwingli, serving as chaplain for Zürich’s forces, was killed.

The second peace of Kappel confirmed the territorial status quo, which essentially remained unchanged until the demographic movements of the 19th century. The result was an irregular pattern of Protestant and Roman Catholic areas, cutting across the boundaries of language and physical geography, which is still in evidence today.

In the western, French-speaking part of Switzerland, the Reformation coincided with Bern’s expansion to the disadvantage of Savoy. In 1536 Protestant Bern conquered the Vaud and thus decisively backed the Reformation not only there but also in Neuchâtel and Geneva. Thanks to John Calvin, the latter became the spiritual centre of Europe’s Reformed churches while successfully resisting several attempts by Savoy to reduce the town under ducal power. A number of Reformation leaders in Switzerland (e.g., Calvin, Theodore Beza, and Guillaume Farel) were among the many Huguenot refugees from France; moreover, Italian and even Spanish Protestants also fled to Switzerland, heavily contributing to the economic and cultural development of the French-speaking Calvinist and German-speaking Zwinglian towns that united in two common confessions—the Consensus Tigurinus (1549) and the Second Helvetic Confession (1566). The Roman Catholic cantons responded by forming a special league, the Golden (or Borromean) League, in 1586 and establishing an alliance with Spain in 1586–87.