A Divided Switzerland: Reformation, Religion, and Survival
This chapter is where Switzerland almost falls apart. Somehow doesn’t though.
By 1520, the Confederacy looked strong. Thirteen cantons, a web of alliances, good treaties with France and the Habsburgs. Swiss mercenaries were feared across Europe. Then the Reformation hit, and for the next 200 years religion became the main source of conflict.
Zwingli lights the fire
Ulrich Zwingli was a priest from the Toggenburg region. Smart guy. Studied in Vienna and Basle. Served as a military chaplain during the Italian Wars, which made him hate mercenary service. In 1518 he became the main preacher in Zurich.
Like Luther in Germany, Zwingli started challenging the Catholic Church. He went further though. In 1522, a Zurich printer served his workers sausage during Lent. Broke the fasting rules. Zwingli preached that Christians were free from such regulations. The city council backed him.
Things moved fast after that. Zurich ended the Mass, removed images from churches, and took over poor relief and marriage courts. Other cities followed. Berne, the biggest canton by population, went Protestant in 1528. Basle and Schaffhausen too. Lucerne, Fribourg, and the central rural cantons stayed Catholic.
The Confederacy was now split in two.
Two wars at Kappel
Tensions kept rising. In 1529, Zurich declared war on the Catholic cantons. Troops from both sides gathered near the village of Kappel. Nobody actually wanted to fight though. Legend says the soldiers shared a soup of milk and bread from a pot placed on the line between the two camps. They signed a peace deal and went home.
Did not last. In 1531, Zurich and its allies banned grain sales to the five Catholic cantons. Schwyz declared war. This time there was real fighting. Zwingli himself died at the Battle of Kappel on October 11, 1531. Zurich lost badly.
The Second Kappel Peace of 1531 set the rules for the next century. Each canton could choose its own faith. Catholic cantons got better terms since they won. Messy, but it kept the Confederacy alive.
Calvin in Geneva
Meanwhile, Geneva was becoming a major center of Protestantism. Jean Calvin, a French scholar, arrived in the 1530s and spent the next thirty years building his vision of a Reformed church. He published the Christianae Religionis Institutio, which became the guide for Reformed theology across Europe.
Calvin and Bullinger (Zwingli’s successor in Zurich) eventually unified the Swiss Reformed church. Geneva became a gateway for Protestantism into France.
Surviving the Thirty Years War
The part that amazes me most. From 1618 to 1648, the Thirty Years War devastated the Holy Roman Empire. Germany lost maybe a third of its population. Switzerland stayed out of it.
Not because they agreed on anything. The Catholic and Protestant cantons still hated each other. They saw what happened to the Grisons though, where rival factions invited foreign armies in. Austrian and Milanese troops brought looting, plague, and misery through the 1620s. That was enough of a warning. The Swiss chose neutrality. Sold food and horses to both sides (very profitable). Kept foreign armies out. When Swedish troops marched through the Thurgau in 1633, it almost triggered another civil war, but cooler heads won.
At the Peace of Westphalia in 1648, Basle’s mayor Johann Rudolf Wettstein showed up to represent Switzerland. He got the treaty to confirm that Switzerland was essentially independent from the Empire. Not quite full sovereignty in legal terms, but close enough.
Internal conflicts after the war
Peace in Europe did not mean peace at home. The war years had created an economic boom. Swiss farmers took on debt to meet demand. When prices crashed in the early 1650s and cities devalued their coins, peasants revolted. The Swiss Peasants’ War of 1653 briefly united Catholic and Protestant peasants against their urban rulers. They even invoked William Tell, claiming they were the true heirs of Swiss liberty. The revolt was crushed, and leaders were punished harshly.
Then in 1656, religious tensions boiled over again. The First War of Villmergen was short. Zurich attacked, Berne tried to help but got beaten. Status quo held.
The final religious war came in 1712. This time the Protestant cities were better organized. Catholic forces were crushed at Villmergen with nearly 3,000 dead. The Fourth Landfrieden of 1712 finally gave Reformed cantons equal standing in the shared territories.
Why the Confederacy survived
The question the chapter keeps circling back to. How did a country split between two hostile religions hold together for 200 years?
Partly practical. The cantons shared condominiums (jointly ruled territories) that forced them to cooperate even when they wanted to break apart. Partly economic. Neutrality was profitable. Partly fear. Everyone could see what religious wars did to France, Germany, and the Grisons.
Also just the structure itself. No central authority meant no single point of failure. Each canton handled its own religion. The Diet was weak and slow, but it kept lines of communication open. The system was inefficient, but resilient.
By 1715, Switzerland was stable, sovereign, and recognized by Europe. The messy network of pacts and agreements was hard to describe, but it worked. Sometimes the ugly system that grew organically outperforms the clean design that looks good on paper.
This post is part of a series retelling A Concise History of Switzerland by Clive H. Church and Randolph C. Head (Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-521-14382-0). All facts and interpretations are drawn from the book.