Luther was not the only reformer, and he could not control what others made of his ideas. In the Swiss city of Zurich, a priest named Huldrych Zwingli, born in 1484 and trained in humanist scholarship, began preaching straight through the Gospel of Matthew from the pulpit of the Great Minster in 1519. He insisted that he had reached his views by reading Scripture, not by reading Luther.

Zwingli's Zurich

The test case came in Lent of 1522, when friends of Zwingli ate sausages at the house of the printer Christoph Froschauer. The sausage affair of 1522 challenged the church's rules on fasting during Lent. Zwingli, who was present but did not eat, defended them in a sermon arguing that Scripture imposed no such rules. In 1523 the city council held public disputations, heard Zwingli and his opponents, and decided in favor of preaching from Scripture. Over the next two years Zurich removed images from churches, closed monasteries and in 1525 replaced the mass with a simple communion service. A pattern was set that spread through Swiss and south German cities: reform carried out by city councils, with civic and religious life closely joined.

Marburg and the Lord's Supper

Protestant princes hoped to unite the Saxon and Swiss reformers. In 1529 Philip of Hesse brought Luther and Zwingli together at his castle at Marburg. They agreed on fourteen of fifteen articles, but Luther and Zwingli split at Marburg over the meaning of the Lord's Supper. Luther insisted that Christ's body and blood are truly present in the bread and wine, pointing to the words "This is my body." Zwingli taught that the Supper is chiefly a memorial of Christ's death, in which "is" means "signifies" and Christ is present to the believer's faith. The failure kept Protestantism divided. Two years later Zwingli died on the battlefield at Kappel, serving as chaplain with Zurich's army against the Catholic Swiss cantons.

The Peasants' War

Ordinary people heard the call for reform as a call for justice on earth as well. In 1524 and 1525 peasants across southern and central Germany rose against lords and abbots. Their best-known program, the Twelve Articles of 1525, asked for the right of each community to choose its pastor, an end to serfdom, and fair limits on rents and labor service, citing Scripture throughout. Luther first urged both sides to compromise. When violence spread, Luther urged the princes to crush the rebelling peasants without mercy, in a pamphlet titled Against the Murderous and Thieving Hordes of Peasants. The princes' armies did so; tens of thousands of peasants died, and the radical preacher Thomas Müntzer was captured and executed in 1525. Luther's movement became, more firmly than before, a reformation led by princes and magistrates.

The Anabaptists

Some of Zwingli's own students concluded that he was moving too slowly and leaning too heavily on the city council. Reading the New Testament, they found no infant baptism. Anabaptists baptized only adults who freely confessed their faith, holding that the church should be a voluntary community of committed believers, not a whole society baptized at birth. In January 1525 Conrad Grebel baptized George Blaurock in a Zurich home, and the movement began. Their enemies called them Anabaptists, meaning "rebaptizers." Catholic and Protestant authorities alike treated them as a threat to social order, since the baptismal register was also the civic register. Felix Manz was drowned in Zurich in 1527, the first Anabaptist executed by a Protestant government.

That same year a gathering at Schleitheim adopted articles drafted largely by Michael Sattler, who was soon burned by Catholic authorities. The Schleitheim Confession of 1527 taught separation from the world and rejected the use of the sword and the swearing of oaths. Not every radical agreed. In 1534 and 1535 a group of apocalyptic Anabaptists took over the city of Münster, proclaimed a New Jerusalem, introduced polygamy and were crushed after a long siege. Münster became the standard smear against all Anabaptists for generations. Menno Simons, a former Catholic priest from Friesland, gathered scattered peaceful Anabaptists into the communities later called Mennonites. The Hutterites, who held property in common, and later the Amish also descend from this movement.

Worked example: a hearing in Zurich

Picture a Zurich magistrate in 1526 questioning a weaver who refused to bring his newborn daughter for baptism. The magistrate's case: baptism makes the child a Christian and a member of the community, the city is one Christian body, and a man who will not swear an oath cannot serve as a witness or pledge loyalty to the city's defense. The weaver's case: faith cannot be forced, the apostles baptized those who believed, and a true church gathers only those who choose to follow Christ. Each argues from the Bible. The magistrate sees anarchy; the weaver sees conscience. Many historians see in groups like his an early and costly argument for separating church membership from citizenship, a principle later built into ideas of religious liberty, though the Anabaptists themselves sought withdrawal from the state, not rights within it.