Dissent from below: Anabaptists, peasants and the tithe

The radicals and the council

The civic Reformation depended on the council’s control of its pace, a control that was challenged from two directions in 1525. The first challenge came from within Zwingli’s own circle. A group of younger men had studied with Zwingli and pressed for a church of committed believers, separate from the civic community. Among them were the former monk Jörg Blaurock, Konrad Grebel, the son of the councillor Jakob Grebel, and Felix Manz, the son of a canon of the Grossmünster. They rejected the baptism of infants as unscriptural. Their break with Zwingli had become visible at the second disputation of October 1523, when Zwingli accepted the council’s decision to postpone the abolition of the Mass. On 17 January 1525 the council held a hearing on infant baptism, decided against the radicals and ordered that all children be baptised. Four days later, on 21 January 1525, the group met in a house in the city and performed the first adult baptisms, the founding act of the Anabaptist movement.¹

The council’s response was a matter of public order. The Anabaptists refused the civic oath, refused military service and, in the eyes of the authorities, threatened to dissolve the unity of the civic and religious community on which the whole Zurich settlement rested.² Because some of them also questioned the payment of tithes and interest, the council feared that their teaching would give religious cover to the refusal of dues that was spreading in the countryside. After imprisonments, disputations and banishments, the council in 1526 made the teaching of rebaptism a capital offence. On 5 January 1527 Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat, the first Anabaptist executed by a Reformed authority. Further executions followed, among them that of the preacher Konrad Winkler on 20 January 1530 and of two men in March 1532, before a milder policy was adopted in 1533.³ In 2004 the Reformed Church of the canton of Zurich formally acknowledged that the persecution had been, in its present conviction, a betrayal of the Gospel, and placed a memorial plaque at the site of the executions on the Limmat.

The Anabaptist episode belongs in a book on the financial centre for two reasons. First, it shows the limits of the civic Reformation. The council was willing to change doctrine, worship and the ownership of property, but it would not tolerate a religious community outside its authority, still less one that refused the oath on which contracts, offices and courts depended. Since the civic oath was the legal glue of the guild city, a refusal to swear amounted to a refusal of the whole legal order. Secondly, the Anabaptists who were expelled from Zurich carried their skills and their communal discipline elsewhere, to Moravia, the Palatinate, the Netherlands and eventually North America, while the Zurich territory lost a group of committed and often skilled people. The pattern of religious exclusion and emigration, which Zurich reversed in 1555 when it admitted the Protestant refugees from Locarno (Chapter B.V), is a reminder that the openness of a financial centre to people of different convictions was a hard-won achievement of later centuries.

The peasants and the tithe

The second challenge came from the countryside. In the spring of 1525, as the great Peasants’ War spread through southern Germany, the rural communities of the Zurich territory presented their own demands. They wanted to elect their own pastors, to be freed from serfdom (Leibeigenschaft) and to stop paying tithes, justifying these demands with the Gospel that the Zurich preachers had taught them.⁴ The argument was logical. If Scripture was the only rule, and if the church’s ownership of tithes and rents had no foundation in the New Testament, why should the peasants continue to pay? The flight of the abbot of Rüti in April 1525 and the gatherings of peasants around the convent of Töss in the same months showed how quickly the question of doctrine could become a question of property.

Zwingli’s answer, developed in his writings of 1523 and 1524 and in his opinions for the council, drew a sharp line between divine and human justice. In Von göttlicher und menschlicher Gerechtigkeit (1523) he argued that the financial system of the church lacked a foundation in the New Testament. Tithes, rents and interest, however, had in his view become part of the order of human justice administered by the magistrate, who might regulate them while the individual was bound to pay them.⁵ The peasants had no right to withhold what they owed. The council, for its part, had the right, and indeed the duty, to see that the revenues were used for proper purposes and that abuses were corrected. Zwingli recommended the abolition of serfdom and was prepared to consider relief on some of the lesser dues.⁶ His teaching on interest and on the obligations arising from annuity contracts is examined in Chapter B.III.

The council followed this line. It consulted the rural communities, abolished serfdom in its territory and left the tithe and the ground rents in place. According to the account of the Reformed Church, the peasants appeared to be satisfied although their main aim had not been achieved. The protests subsided.⁷ Zurich thus avoided the bloody suppression that ended the Peasants’ War in Germany, at the cost of disappointing the rural hopes that the Reformation had raised. The economic effect was important. The tithes and rents that had belonged to the monasteries continued to be paid, now to the civic offices that administered the secularised property. The peasants’ obligations remained as they were, now owed to a new creditor. For the city, the Reformation was therefore a transfer of income streams from ecclesiastical to public ownership with the income streams themselves preserved. That preservation was the condition on which the new public finance of Zurich was built.

Notes

1. GAMEO, “Zürich (Switzerland)”, https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Z%C3%BCrich_(Switzerland), which identifies the second disputation of October 1523 as the point at which the break became apparent. James M. Stayer, “Zwingli, Huldrych (Ulrich)”, Mennonitisches Lexikon V, https://www.mennlex.de/doku.php?id=art:zwingli_huldrych_ulrich, for the hearing of 17 January and the baptisms of 21 January 1525; HLS, “Täufer”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011421/2012-08-14/, names Grebel, Manz, Blaurock, Johannes Brötli, Simon Stumpf and Wilhelm Reublin as the central figures of the Zurich circle. ↩
2. Reformierte Kirche Kanton Zürich, “Lange verfolgt, endlich versöhnt – 500 Jahre Täufer”, https://www.zhref.ch/kirche/ueber-uns/unsere-geschichten/lange-verfolgt-endlich-versoehnt-500-jahre-taeufer, on the refusal of the oath and of military service, the drowning of Manz on 5 January 1527 and the apology of 2004. ↩
3. Stayer, MennLex V, as above, on the threat of the death penalty from 1526. GAMEO, “Zürich (Switzerland)”, as above. ↩
4. Reformierte Kirche Kanton Zürich, Zwingli-Lexikon, “Bauern & Bauernkrieg” (Ch. Scheidegger, 9 February 2002), https://www.zhref.ch/themen/reformationsjubilaeum/allgemeine-informationen/huldrych-zwingli/zwingli-lexikon-von-a-bis-z-1/lexikon-b/bauern-bauernkrieg. ↩
5. Stayer, MennLex V, as above, on the argument of Von göttlicher und menschlicher Gerechtigkeit that the church’s financial system lacked New Testament justification but belonged to secular government. ↩
6. Reformierte Kirche Kanton Zürich, Zwingli-Lexikon, “Bauern & Bauernkrieg”, as above, according to which Zwingli proposed abolishing only the small tithe and recommended ending serfdom. ↩
7. Reformierte Kirche Kanton Zürich, Zwingli-Lexikon, “Bauern & Bauernkrieg”, as above. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of September 2025.