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The Protestant Reformation in Switzerland was promoted initially by Huldrych Zwingli, who gained the support of the magistrate, Mark Reust, and the population of Zürich in the 1520s. It led to significant changes in civil life and state matters in Zürich and spread to several other cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy.
A distinctive feature of the Swiss Reformed churches in the Zwinglian tradition is their historically almost symbiotic link to the state (cantons), which is only loosening gradually in the present.
At the treaty of Westphalia, the independence of the Swiss Confederation was officially recognized. Above all, the Swiss reformed cantons, and especially the Republic of Geneva, became the refuge of persecuted Protestants, said to be 80,000 in number, who were mostly French Huguenots.
In the 16th century, Switzerland was swept by the ideas of the Protestant Reformation, and it became the world centre of the Protestant movement of Calvinism, to which a majority of the Swiss converted.
A brief battle settled the situation: Switzerland was now comprised of seven Catholic cantons (Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Lucerne, Zoug, Solothurn and Fribourg), with the majority at the Diet, and four reformed Protestant cantons (Zurich, Bern, Basle and Schaffhouse).
The so-called “Kappel wars” between a coalition of Protestant cantons led by Zurich and the Catholic cantons of central Switzerland were the first wars of religion in Europe. In the second Kappel...
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May 26, 2021 · In 1529, a Protestant missionary from Zürich was burned at the stake for preaching the Gospel in the Catholic Canton of Schwyz. Zürich stopped trading with Schwyz in protest. The Catholic Cantons declared war. In October 1531, 8,000 Catholic soldiers met 1,500 Protestant soldiers in battle at Kappel.
