Great Deeds on a Small Scale
The Swiss cantons' victories over Charles the Bold of Burgundy (1477) strengthened their Confederation, deepened national feeling and gave them the strength to stand firm against the emperor Maximilian, who wished to bring Switzerland back into the Holy Roman Empire. After the Burgundian defeat, however, a quarrel over dividing the spoils almost brought civil war. At the Diet of Stans (1481) a hermit philosopher, Nicholas von der Flüe, whom the Swiss know as Brother Klaus, persuaded them to reconcile.
The Confederation grew as new cantons joined it: Fribourg and Solothurn in 1481, Basel and Schaffhausen in 1501, Appenzell in 1513. Thirteen cantons now made up the league. Their people spoke German, except in Fribourg and Bern, where French was also known. Together they formed a federal republic in which each member governed its own affairs while foreign affairs belonged to a common diet, whose delegates came equally from each canton. It was not a complete democracy, for some smaller communities, such as the subject territories, had no vote and were held by the cantons. Nor had Switzerland yet become a model of peace. Between 1500 and 1512 the cantons took advantage of Italy's disorder to add Bellinzona, Locarno, Lugano and other lands south of the Alps, and hired out their soldiers to foreign powers. After the Swiss defeat at Marignano (1515), the Confederation gave up expansion, took up neutrality, and, with the discipline of its stubborn peasants, shrewd craftsmen and wealthy merchants, built one of the most brilliant and advanced civilizations in history.
A Church Ripe for Change
The Swiss Church, like the Italian, was riddled with corruption. Even so, the humanists who gathered around Froben and Erasmus at Basel enjoyed freedom and protection. The age tolerated priests' concubines. One Swiss bishop charged his clergy four gulden for each child they fathered, and in one year collected 1,522 gulden (the book's figure). He complained that many priests frequented taverns, got drunk and gambled, but his complaint seems to have been that they did not pay him for the privilege.
Some cantons, Zurich above all, began to supervise the clergy and tax church property. The bishop of Constance claimed Zurich as his own and demanded that its citizens obey him and pay him tithes. But the pope was too absorbed in Italian politics to back his claim effectively. In 1510, in return for Geneva's soldiers, Julius II allowed the council of that city to take measures for reforming its convents, monasteries and public morals (the book's account). Thus seven years before Luther posted his theses at Wittenberg, the seed of Reformation was sown by the state's control over the Church at Zurich and Geneva. This opened the way for the union of Church and state, in various forms, under Zwingli and Calvin.
A Boyhood in the Mountains
A visit to the birthplace of Huldreich, or Ulrich, Zwingli proves once more that great men have been born in humble homes. The most logical and least fortunate of the religious reformers began life in a small cottage in the mountain village of Wildhaus, fifty miles southeast of Zurich, now in the canton of St. Gallen (January 1484). The historic cottage, with its low roof, rough timber walls, narrow windows, uneven plank floor, heavy wooden bed, table and bookshelf, speaks of surroundings that might have led a man to turn from the world and fix his heart on the next. His father was a senior village official and his mother the sister of a proud priest. Ulrich was the third of eight sons, who competed for the admiration of two sisters. From his youth fate seemed to arrange everything to bring him to the priesthood.
His uncle, parish priest in the neighboring village of Weesen, joined his parents in his upbringing. By introducing Zwingli to humanism he gave him a breadth of outlook that eventually set him apart from Luther and Calvin. At ten he was sent to a Latin school in Basel; at fourteen he entered a college in Bern headed by a scholar skilled in classical literature. From sixteen to eighteen he studied at the University of Vienna, then at the height of humanism under Conrad Celtis. In those years he relieved the strain of study by playing the lute, harp, violin, flute and dulcimer. At eighteen he returned to Basel and studied theology under Thomas Wyttenbach, who from 1508 spoke against the sale of indulgences, against clerical celibacy and against the Mass as Catholics celebrated it. At twenty-two, with his master's degree, he was ordained. He said his first Mass among relatives in his native Wildhaus, and with the hundred gulden collected there he bought the parish of Glarus, thirty kilometers away.
Priest, Scholar, Humanist
At Glarus he carried out his duties with zeal and did not give up study. To read the New Testament in the original he learned Greek. He read Homer, Pindar, Democritus, Plutarch, Cicero, Caesar, Livy, Seneca, Pliny the Younger and Tacitus with great interest, and wrote a commentary on the works of Lucian, the skeptical satirist. Zwingli corresponded with Pico della Mirandola and Erasmus. He called Erasmus "the foremost philosopher and theologian," visited him with respect (1515), and read a passage of his works every night before bed. Like Erasmus, he fought church corruption, bigotry, and the condemnation of philosophers and poets who admired ancient Greek and Roman culture. He said that joining Socrates and Seneca in the eternal world was more appealing to him than sharing in the fate of popes. His priesthood did not keep him from bodily indulgence; he had liaisons with women until his marriage (1514), which the Church seems to have overlooked (the book speaks bluntly; it is stated briefly here). Because he supported the papal court against the pro-French party in Glarus, the popes paid him fifty florins a year until 1520. In 1513 and 1515 he went to Italy as chaplain to Swiss mercenaries and urged the soldiers to support the pope, but after seeing the battles of Novara and Marignano, he turned against sending Swiss soldiers into foreign service.
In 1516 the French party won at Glarus and Zwingli had to leave. He took the parish of Einsiedeln in the canton of Schwyz. There, years before Luther's break with the Catholic Church, he began to preach Protestant ideas. In 1517 he declared that Christianity must rest on Scripture alone, and told his archbishop, Cardinal Matthäus Schinner, that Scripture gave no basis for the papacy. In August 1518 he attacked the sale of indulgences and urged the Benedictine monks to take down the tablet promising that a pilgrimage would bring forgiveness of sins, faults and penalties from the splendid shrines of the Virgin. On August 10, 1518 (the book's date), Zwingli went, on the invitation of the great church of Zurich, to that rich city as "people's priest."
The People's Priest of Zurich
Zwingli's character, temperament and mind had now matured. In sermons at his new post he expounded the whole New Testament except Revelation, which did not interest him; he was not as inspired as Luther by the hardships of monastic life (the book's phrase here is garbled and reconstructed from context). No portrait of him survives, but contemporaries describe him as handsome, warm-blooded, ruddy and gifted with a warm, pleasing voice that held people spellbound. He lacked Luther's eloquence and mastery of Scripture, but with plain and unadorned words he won all Zurich to his ideas. In his campaign against indulgences he had the support of his superiors. In August 1518 Bernardino Samson, a Franciscan friar from Milan, came to Switzerland to sell Pope Leo X's indulgences as Tetzel had in Germany. He sold indulgences written on parchment to the wealthy for a crown and cheaper ones on paper to the poor, and claimed that with a wave of his finger he freed the souls of the dead from the torment of hell. Zwingli, supported by the bishop of Constance, protested, and the pope, evidently having learned from events in Germany, recalled his envoy.
In 1519 plague killed a third of Zurich's people in six months. Zwingli stayed in the city throughout, tending the sick day and night until the disease nearly took his own life. When he recovered, the people of Zurich loved him more than anyone. Notables of distant cities, such as Pirckheimer and Dürer, congratulated him on his devoted service to the people of Zurich. In 1521 Zwingli was promoted to chief priest of the great church of Zurich, and with the influence and power he had gained he openly proclaimed the Reformation movement in Switzerland.