Huldrych Zwingli
Huldrych Zwingli celebrated his first Mass in his hometown of Wildhaus on the 29th of September 1506, a young priest who, by his own admission, had studied little theology. Twenty-five years later he died on a battlefield near Kappel, one of roughly 500 casualties in a Zurich army crushed by a Catholic force nearly double its size. Between the altar and the battlefield lies the story of a Swiss farmer's son who tried to remake a church and a confederation at once.
He was born on the 1st of January 1484 in the Toggenburg valley, the third of eleven children. He learned Greek and Hebrew, kept a library of more than three hundred volumes, and could play the violin, harp, flute, dulcimer, and hunting horn. He preached his way through the entire New Testament from a pulpit in Zurich. Yet his name today is barely recognised, ranked behind Martin Luther and John Calvin as the so-called Third Man of the Reformation.
How does a papal pensioner become an enemy of the pope? Why did two sausages, eaten in a printer's workshop, mark the start of an entire religious movement? What separated this Swiss reformer so deeply from Luther that the two could agree on fourteen points and break apart on the fifteenth? And how did a man who believed the masses would accept a government guided by God's word end up dead, spear in the field, at the age of 47?
Thirteen cantons made up the Swiss Confederation in Zwingli's lifetime, along with affiliated areas and common lordships. Each canton was nearly independent, conducting its own domestic and foreign affairs and forming its own alliances inside and outside the Confederation. This patchwork of near-sovereign states would later fracture cleanly along religious lines.
The Old Zurich War of 1440-1446 had already shown how hunger for territory and resources could set canton against canton. Beyond the mountains, the picture was just as volatile. France loomed as the powerful neighbour whose relationship shaped Swiss foreign policy for centuries. The Confederation nominally belonged to the Holy Roman Empire, but a run of wars ending with the Swabian War in 1499 had left it independent in all but name.
The Duchy of Milan, the Duchy of Savoy, and the Papal States all competed and fought nearby, and the Confederation felt every consequence. Out of this turbulence grew the mercenary pension system, which became a bitter point of disagreement. Religious factions argued fiercely over sending young Swiss men to die in foreign wars, mostly to enrich the cantonal authorities. From the same soil rose a new sense of fatherland, the Latin patria reaching beyond a single canton, and the humanism of Erasmus, the prince of humanism, which had already taken root.
Pope Julius II honoured Zwingli with an annual pension, a reward for placing himself solidly on the side of the Roman See. He served as chaplain on several Italian campaigns, including the Battle of Novara in 1513. The young priest of Glarus, where soldiers were hired out as mercenaries, was a committed papal partisan.
The Swiss defeat at the Battle of Marignano changed everything. Sentiment in Glarus swung toward the French and away from the pope, and Zwingli, the papal man, found his position untenable. He retreated to Einsiedeln in the canton of Schwyz, by now convinced that mercenary service was immoral and that Swiss unity was essential to any future achievement.
His earliest surviving writings show this conviction in satire. The Ox, from 1510, and The Labyrinth, from 1516, attacked the mercenary system through allegory, presenting his countrymen as virtuous people trapped within a French, imperial, and papal triangle. At Einsiedeln he withdrew completely from politics for two years, perfecting his Greek, taking up Hebrew, and drawing on a library of more than three hundred classical, patristic, and scholastic works. He met Erasmus in Basel between August 1514 and May 1516, and that encounter steered him toward relative pacifism and a focus on preaching.
On the 1st of January 1519, Zwingli gave his first sermon at the Grossmünster in Zurich and broke with custom. Instead of basing the sermon on the appointed Gospel lesson for that Sunday, he began reading straight through the Gospel of Matthew, interpreting as he went. This method, called lectio continua, carried him through the book Sunday after Sunday, then through Acts, the New Testament epistles, and finally the Old Testament.
His theology revealed itself gradually through these sermons, and he did not spare names. Monks were accused of indolence and high living. In 1519 he rejected the veneration of saints, cast doubts on hellfire, asserted that unbaptised children were not damned, and questioned the power of excommunication. His sharpest blow landed on the claim that tithing was a divine institution, a stance that struck the immediate economic interests of the foundation that employed him.
Konrad Hofmann, one of the elderly canons who had supported Zwingli's election, complained about the sermons in a letter, but the opposition never grew large. When Bernhardin Sanson arrived at the gates of Zurich at the end of January 1519 selling a special indulgence for the building of St Peter's in Rome, the council refused him entry. Anxious to contain the fire Luther had started with his Ninety-five Theses on the 31st of October 1517, the Bishop of Constance withheld support, and Sanson was recalled.
On the first fasting Sunday of Lent, the 9th of March 1522, Zwingli and about a dozen others deliberately broke the fast by cutting and sharing two smoked sausages in Christoph Froschauer's workshop. The Wurstessen, later called the Affair of the Sausages, is considered the start of the Reformation in Switzerland. Zwingli defended the act in a sermon published on the 16th of April, arguing that no binding rule on food can be drawn from the Bible.
The diocese of Constance reacted at once, sending a delegation to Zurich, and the bishop repeated the traditional position on the 24th of May. Zwingli pressed further. On the 2nd of July he and humanist friends petitioned the bishop to abolish clerical celibacy. The matter was personal: he had secretly married a widow, Anna Reinhart, earlier that year, and their public wedding took place on the 2nd of April 1524, three months before their first child was born. They would have four children, Regula, William, Huldrych, and Anna.
The Zurich city council, not the bishop, became the real arbiter. On the 29th of January 1523 it convened the first Zurich disputation, drawing roughly six hundred participants, where Zwingli laid out his Sixty-seven Articles. The bishop's vicar general, Johannes Fabri, refused to debate high theology before laymen, and the council ruled that Zwingli could keep preaching. A second disputation that October drew about nine hundred people to weigh the removal of images and the nature of the Mass.
On Maundy Thursday, the 13th of April 1525, Zwingli celebrated communion under a new German liturgy, replacing the Mass. Wooden cups and plates avoided any outward show of formality, and the congregation sat at set tables to stress the meal aspect of the sacrament. There was no organ music and no singing, and Zwingli proposed limiting communion to four times a year so the sermon would remain the focus.
The removal of images came in stages. In early 1524 Candlemas went uncelebrated, robed processions ceased, and triptychs stayed covered after Lent. The council ordered the orderly removal of images within Zurich while letting rural congregations decide by majority vote. When the Bishop of Constance tried to defend the Mass and the veneration of images, Zurich severed all ties with the diocese.
Zwingli reached into the monasteries as well, accusing mendicant orders of hypocrisy and urging that their wealth fund care for the truly poor. Monasteries were turned toward hospitals and welfare institutions, and the council secularised church properties. Katharina von Zimmern handed the Fraumünster over to the city of Zurich in 1524. On the 19th of June 1525, Zwingli and Leo Jud opened a Latin school at the Grossmünster, the Prophezei, to retrain the clergy, and its teamwork left its mark on the Zurich Bible printed by Christoph Froschauer.
On the 21st of January 1525, in the house of Felix Manz's mother, Conrad Grebel and George Blaurock performed the first recorded Anabaptist adult baptisms. The radicals had come to believe Zwingli was conceding too much to the Zurich council, and they demanded the immediate establishment of a congregation of the faithful. They rejected infant baptism, which the council had ordered for all newborns on the 15th of August 1524.
The council and Zwingli held debate after debate, but no side would move. A public debate on the 17th of January 1525 went the council's way, and those refusing to baptise their children were ordered to leave Zurich. The radicals ignored it. The last debate on baptism, held in the Grossmünster from the 6th to the 8th of November, degenerated into an uproar, with each side shouting abuse at the other.
On the 7th of March 1526 the council released its harshest mandate: no one shall rebaptise another, under penalty of death. Felix Manz, who had sworn to leave Zurich and stop baptising, returned and continued the practice. He was executed on the 5th of January 1527, drowned in the Limmat, the first Anabaptist martyr. Three more followed before the rest fled or were expelled. Zwingli, technically, had nothing to do with the mandate, yet there is no sign he disapproved.
Fourteen of the fifteen Marburg Articles found agreement when Luther and Zwingli met in early October 1529, but the fifteenth split them for good. Both men agreed the bread of the Supper was a sign. For Luther, the body of Christ was present in, with, and under that sign. For Zwingli, sign and thing signified were separated by the width between heaven and earth, since Christ had ascended and could not be in two places at once. Credere est edere, he said: to believe is to eat. Departing in tears, Zwingli cried that there were no people on earth with whom he would rather be at one than the Wittenbergers.
The Confederation, meanwhile, was arming. Five Catholic cantons, Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, and Zug, had formed the Five States to resist the Reformation, while Bern, Basel, and the reformed cities drew together in the Christian Civic Union. The First Kappel War of 1529 was averted at the last moment when Hans Aebli, a relative of Zwingli, pleaded for an armistice. The settlement disappointed Zwingli and marked his decline in political influence, since Bern would not insist on unhindered preaching or an end to the pension system.
In May 1531 Zurich reluctantly imposed a food blockade on the Catholic cantons, but it failed, and Bern moved to withdraw it that October. On the 9th of October 1531 the Five States declared war on Zurich in a surprise move. Two days later, 3,500 poorly deployed Zurich men met a force nearly twice their size near Kappel. The battle lasted less than an hour. Zwingli, who counted himself first a soldier of Christ, fell among the dead.
The Zurich council chose Heinrich Bullinger as his successor in December 1531, and Bullinger defended Zwingli as a prophet and a martyr. It was Bullinger, with John Calvin, who produced the Consensus Tigurinus of 1549, and Calvin's doctrine of a real spiritual presence, not Zwingli's, that the Reformed Churches finally adopted. The Swiss Reformed churches still count Zwingli as their founder, the man whose first sermon broke from the Sunday Gospel lesson and never went back.
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Common questions
Who was Huldrych Zwingli and what did he do?
Huldrych Zwingli, born on the 1st of January 1484 in Wildhaus, was a Swiss Christian theologian, musician, and leader of the Reformation in Switzerland. As people's priest of the Grossmünster in Zurich from 1519, he preached church reform, replaced the Mass with a new communion liturgy in 1525, and is counted as the founder of the Swiss Reformed churches.
How did Huldrych Zwingli die?
Huldrych Zwingli died on the 11th of October 1531 on the battlefield near Kappel during the Second Kappel War, at the age of 47. He was among the roughly 500 casualties in a Zurich army of 3,500 men that met a Five States force nearly double its size, in a battle that lasted less than one hour.
What was the Affair of the Sausages and why did it matter to Zwingli?
The Affair of the Sausages took place on the 9th of March 1522, when Zwingli and about a dozen others deliberately broke the Lenten fast by sharing two smoked sausages in Christoph Froschauer's workshop. The event, known as the Wurstessen, is considered the start of the Reformation in Switzerland, and Zwingli defended it in a sermon published on the 16th of April 1522.
Why did Zwingli and Martin Luther disagree at the Marburg Colloquy?
Zwingli and Luther agreed on fourteen of the fifteen Marburg Articles in early October 1529 but split over the presence of Christ in the eucharist. Luther held that Christ's body was present in, with, and under the bread, while Zwingli argued that Christ had ascended to heaven and the Supper was a memorial, saying credere est edere, to believe is to eat.
What was Zwingli's conflict with the Anabaptists in Zurich?
Zwingli clashed with the Anabaptists led by Conrad Grebel, who rejected infant baptism and performed the first recorded adult baptisms on the 21st of January 1525. After the Zurich council issued a mandate on the 7th of March 1526 making rebaptism punishable by death, Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat on the 5th of January 1527 as the first Anabaptist martyr.
How is Huldrych Zwingli connected to music?
Zwingli enjoyed music and could play the violin, harp, flute, dulcimer, and hunting horn, and his enemies mocked him as the evangelical lute-player and fifer. Three of his songs survive, including the Pestlied, an adaptation of Psalm 65, and the Kappeler Lied, yet he eliminated instrumental music from church worship because he believed God had not commanded it.
Why is Zwingli called the Third Man of the Reformation?
Zwingli is often called, after Martin Luther and John Calvin, the Third Man of the Reformation. Although his name is not widely recognised and the Reformed Churches ultimately adopted Calvin's view of the eucharist rather than his own, his legacy lives on in the confessions, liturgy, and church orders of the Reformed churches of today.
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