From Wildhaus to the Grossmünster

Toggenburg origins and humanist formation

Zwingli was born on 1 January 1484 in Wildhaus, a village high in the Toggenburg valley, then a territory of the prince-abbot of St. Gallen. His father, also named Ulrich, was a farmer who held the office of Ammann, the elected head of the local community, while his mother was Margaretha Bruggmann. At the age of five the boy was sent to his uncle Bartholomäus, dean at Weesen on the Walensee, before attending Latin schools in Basel and Bern from 1494. He matriculated at the University of Vienna in 1498 and at the University of Basel in 1502, where he became bachelor of arts in 1504 and master of arts in 1506.¹ The background matters for what followed. Zwingli came from the rural upper stratum of a self-governing Alpine community, the same milieu that furnished the Confederation with its magistrates and its mercenary captains. From childhood he knew that the office of a village headman rested on election and on the consent of householders. He also knew that the young men of the valleys went to war in Italy for pay.

His education placed him in the circle of Swiss humanism at the moment when that movement was at its most confident. Basel was then the centre of scholarly printing in the Upper Rhine, the city where Erasmus of Rotterdam would publish his Greek New Testament a decade later. Zwingli met Erasmus in person in the spring of 1516 and corresponded with the leading Swiss humanists, among them the St. Gallen physician and later reformer Joachim Vadian and the Glarus scholar Heinrich Loriti, called Glarean.² From the humanists he took the programme of a return to the sources, ad fontes, and the conviction that the text of Scripture, read in its original languages, should be the measure of doctrine and practice. He taught himself Greek while serving as a parish priest, and later Hebrew. Philological before it was theological, the method would give the Zurich Reformation its characteristic emphasis on the careful exposition of the biblical text and, through the Prophezei of 1525, its first institution of higher learning.

Glarus, Marignano and Einsiedeln

In 1506 Zwingli was ordained priest by Bishop Hugo of Hohenlandenberg in the cathedral of Constance and took up the parish of Glarus, where he remained for a decade. Glarus was a rural canton whose economy depended heavily on the export of cattle and on the export of men. As parish priest, Zwingli accompanied the Glarus contingents on the Italian campaigns of the Confederates as their field chaplain, in 1513 to Novara and in 1515 to Marignano. The defeat of 13–14 September 1515 at Marignano, south-east of Milan, where the Confederate army was broken by the French artillery and cavalry of Francis I, has been discussed in Part A as the end of the Confederation’s career as an independent great power in northern Italy. For Zwingli it was also a personal experience of the battlefield, to which his biographers have consistently traced his later hostility to mercenary service. The HLS article speaks of his “radical rejection of the mercenary system, shaped by his own experiences on the battlefield”.³

The same experience had a financial side that later polemics preferred to forget. Zwingli was at this stage a supporter of the papal party in Confederate politics, which favoured the alliance with Pope Leo X and opposed the French. From 1515 to 1520 he drew a papal pension.⁴ The amount is usually given as fifty florins a year, a sum that would have exceeded the cash income of many rural benefices.⁵ Zwingli thus knew the pension system from the inside: he had been, in a modest way, one of the clients whom foreign powers paid to keep a Confederate community well disposed. When he later denounced pensions as the corruption of the Confederation, he spoke as a former recipient who had given the money up, a biographical fact that gave his preaching weight in a society where almost every leading family had taken such payments at one time or another.

The pro-French party gained the upper hand in Glarus after Marignano, and Zwingli’s position there became uncomfortable. In 1516 he moved to the Benedictine abbey of Einsiedeln in the canton of Schwyz as people’s priest, serving the great pilgrimage shrine of the Black Madonna, and remained there until the end of 1518. At Einsiedeln he preached against the excesses of the trade in indulgences.⁶ The pilgrimage economy of Einsiedeln, with its offerings, masses for the dead, votive gifts and indulgences, showed him at close quarters how piety was converted into revenue. This lesson in the political economy of the late medieval church prepared the ground for the later Zurich decision to treat church property as a public trust to be redirected.

The call to Zurich, 1518–1519

The position of people’s priest (Leutpriester) at the Grossmünster was a post of the collegiate chapter of canons, but in a city whose council had long supervised ecclesiastical affairs the choice was politically sensitive. Zwingli owed his election to a combination of scholarly reputation, a network of humanist friends in Zurich and the known fact that he had turned against the mercenary system. The Zurich tourist authority still presents his opposition to mercenary service, shared with the city government, as one of the reasons for his appointment.⁷ Zurich had its own reasons to be receptive. The city had lost many men in the Italian wars, while its governing families were divided between those who drew French money and those who drew papal or imperial money. A preacher who attacked the whole system could appeal to the citizens who bore the costs and received none of the rewards.

Zwingli’s first year in Zurich was overshadowed by the plague, which struck the city in 1519. Zwingli fell ill in the autumn and, after his recovery, recorded the experience in a hymn known as the Pestlied, a prayer of surrender to God’s will that became one of the classic texts of Reformed piety. In April 1521 he was appointed a canon of the Grossmünster, which gave him a seat in the chapter and a secure income.⁸ By then he had renounced the papal pension. He had also begun to shape Zurich’s foreign policy by his preaching, and within a year he would become the public defender of a group of citizens who had broken the Lenten fast in the house of a printer.

The city in which Zwingli now worked was small by European standards, a town of perhaps five thousand inhabitants within its walls, but it ruled a territory of rural bailiwicks that stretched from the Rhine to the Albis and from the Töss to the lake.⁹ It was governed under the guild constitution described in Chapter A.II. The Small Council (Kleiner Rat) of fifty members, organised in two half-yearly sections under two burgomasters who alternated in office, conducted day-to-day government. The Great Council (Grosser Rat) had some 212 members, including the Small Council, the twelve representatives of each of the twelve craft guilds and the eighteen of the Constaffel. It decided the most important questions and was addressed in formal documents as “Räte und Burger”.¹⁰ Every decisive step of the Reformation would be taken by one or both of these bodies. The pastor preached and advised, but the decisions lay with the councils.

Notes

1. HLS, “Zwingli, Huldrych” (Christian Moser), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/010447/2014-03-04/, for parents, the uncle at Weesen, the schools in Basel and Bern and the university dates. ↩
2. HLS, “Zwingli, Huldrych” (Christian Moser), as above, noting the contacts with Vadian and Glarean during the Glarus years and the personal meeting with Erasmus in spring 1516. ↩
3. HLS, “Zwingli, Huldrych” (Christian Moser), as above, for the Glarus years and the campaigns of 1513 and 1515, and for the quotation: “Von grosser Bedeutung war Zwinglis radikale, von eigenen Erfahrungen auf dem Schlachtfeld geprägte Ablehnung des Solddienstwesens.” Kuhn, NDB 28 (2024), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz26927.html, states that Zwingli was with the Glarus troops “certainly in 1515” and preached before the battle. ↩
4. HLS, “Zwingli, Huldrych” (Christian Moser), as above: “der damals noch papsttreue Zwingli, der 1515–1520 auch eine päpstliche Pension erhielt”. Kuhn, NDB 28 (2024), as above, speaks of “eine hohe Jahrespension” that Zwingli gave up around 1520. ↩
5. “Huldrych Zwingli”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huldrych_Zwingli, on “eine[r] stattlichen päpstlichen Pension von 50 Gulden”; Sanderson Beck, “Zwingli, Calvin, and the Swiss”, https://san.beck.org/9-2-ZwingliCalvin&Swiss.html, gives “fifty florins a year” and states that before the end of 1520 Zwingli declined further instalments. ↩
6. HLS, “Zwingli, Huldrych” (Christian Moser), as above; Kuhn, NDB 28 (2024), as above, dates the Einsiedeln period from autumn 1515 or 1516 to the end of 1518 and sees it as the time in which his reforming thought took shape. ↩
7. Zürich Tourismus, “Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) – Zurich’s First Reformer”, https://www.zuerich.com/en/huldrych-zwingli, stating that both Zwingli and the Zurich government opposed mercenary service and that this contributed to his appointment. ↩
8. HLS, “Zwingli, Huldrych” (Christian Moser), as above, noting that Zwingli survived the plague in autumn 1519 and wrote the Pestlied. Kuhn, NDB 28 (2024), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz26927.html, dating the appointment as Chorherr to 29 April 1521. ↩
9. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, population table, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/, giving about 5,700 inhabitants in 1408, 4,750 in 1467 and 5,100 in 1529; see Chapter A.I. ↩
10. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000 (Zurich 2000), concept and editing Meinrad Suter, https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/politik-staat/recherche-im-staatsarchiv/z%C3%BCrcher-geschichte/zh_verfassungsgeschichte.pdf, section on the council constitution after 1489. ↩

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.