Kappel: war, defeat and the limits of the civic Reformation

Alliances and the First Kappel War

Between 1525 and 1531 Zwingli’s influence extended into foreign policy. Zurich, isolated in the Confederation and threatened with exclusion from the Diet, sought allies among the other Reformed towns. Between 1527 and 1530 it concluded a series of Burgrechte, the “Christian civic alliances”, with Constance, Bern, St. Gallen and other cities, which the HLS presents as the means by which Zurich escaped its isolation. Bern, Basel and Schaffhausen adopted the Reformation in 1528 and 1529. The five Catholic cantons of central Switzerland, Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden and Zug, formed their own “Christian Union” and allied themselves with King Ferdinand of Austria, the Habsburg brother of Charles V. The conflicts focused on the common lordships ruled jointly by several cantons, where the question of which religion should prevail had no clear legal answer, and on the abbey of St. Gallen, which Zurich regarded as within its sphere of protection.¹

In June 1529 Zurich went to war. Its troops advanced to Kappel on the border with Zug, where they faced the Catholic forces, but before a battle could be fought, mediators from the neutral cantons negotiated a peace. The episode gave rise to the most beloved legend of Swiss political culture, the Kappeler Milchsuppe: soldiers from both camps were said to have eaten together from a large pot of milk and bread set on the border, each side dipping from its own territory.² The First Peace of Kappel of 26 June 1529 favoured the Reformed side. Communities in the common lordships could adopt the Reformation by majority vote. The five cantons’ alliance with Ferdinand was annulled, with the arbitrators tearing up the alliance document in the camp at two in the morning. The five cantons also had to pay war costs, later set by the arbitrators at 2,500 crowns. The Catholic cantons refused to pay until Zurich imposed a grain embargo on 12 September 1529, after which they paid in instalments in the autumn of 1530.³

The use of the grain embargo deserves emphasis. The central Swiss cantons depended on grain from the Zurich market and from the Swabian lands beyond it, which reached them through Zurich territory. Control of this supply was an economic weapon, and Zurich used it to enforce a financial obligation under a peace treaty. It is an early example of what would today be called economic sanctions.

The blockade and the Second Kappel War

The peace of 1529 did not settle the underlying conflict. Zurich and Zwingli interpreted it as a licence to promote the Reformation in the common lordships and pressed the Catholic cantons to allow evangelical preaching in their own territories as well. In May 1531 Zurich and Bern imposed a blockade on grain and salt against the five cantons in an attempt to force them to accept such preaching. The blockade hurt the population of the mountain cantons without producing the political result intended. Instead, it drove them to war. On 11 October 1531 an army of the five cantons, some seven thousand men, attacked at Kappel. Zurich had mobilised slowly and only about two thousand of its men were on the field. They were routed. About five hundred fell, among them Zwingli, who had accompanied the troops as field chaplain, and whose body was burned by the victors as that of a heretic. A second defeat followed at the Gubel near Menzingen, where a Reformed force was surprised in a night attack on 24 October and lost some six hundred men.⁴ Among the dead of Kappel was Eberhard von Reischach, the husband of the last abbess of the Fraumünster.

The strategy that led to Kappel has been criticised since the sixteenth century. The use of the grain supply as a lever of religious policy transformed an economic dependence into a cause of war. It also exposed the limits of Zurich’s power: the city had the market and the money, but it lacked the military cohesion and the political support in its own countryside to fight a war of religion against determined opponents. Many rural subjects had little enthusiasm for a war that seemed to serve the ambitions of the city and its preachers.

The Second Peace of Kappel and its limits

The Second Peace of Kappel, concluded with Zurich on 16 November and sealed on 20 November 1531, with a separate treaty for Bern at Bremgarten on 24 November, reversed the gains of 1529. Each canton was to remain undisturbed in its faith within its own territory, and Zurich’s demand for evangelical preaching in the five cantons was rejected. In the common lordships, Reformed communities could return to the old faith and Catholic minorities received the right to worship and to form parishes, while the right to introduce the Reformation by majority vote disappeared. Zurich had to dissolve its new alliances, surrender its copy of the First Peace, repay the war costs it had received in 1530 and compensate Zug for churches damaged in the war.⁵ The abbey of St. Gallen was restored, which ended Zurich’s eastward expansion. Helmut Meyer concludes that the peace shaped the confessional map of Switzerland for centuries and that the resulting division impeded a common foreign policy and the internal development of the Confederation into the eighteenth century.⁶

Inside Zurich, the defeat produced a political reckoning. When the rural communities presented demands to the city, the council agreed to them in a treaty between the city and its countryside, known as the Kappelerbrief, which has been edited in the collection of Swiss legal sources.⁷ In substance the council promised to consult the countryside before undertaking wars or alliances and undertook that the preachers would confine themselves to the word of God and not meddle in worldly affairs. The political role that Zwingli had played, as adviser in the inner councils and architect of alliances, was not to be repeated. On 9 December 1531 the council called the twenty-seven-year-old Heinrich Bullinger, the former teacher at Kappel who had fled to Zurich from his native Bremgarten, to succeed Zwingli. Bullinger insisted on the freedom of the pulpit to admonish the authorities, but he accepted that the church would not direct policy. The HLS notes that his political influence was limited and that Zurich after 1531 took a defensive position in Confederate politics.⁸ He led the Zurich church for forty-four years. The settlement he negotiated with the council, a church that preached freely and left government to the council, lasted until the end of the Ancien Régime.

Notes

1. HLS, “Zurich (canton)”, “La Réforme et l’Eglise d’Etat” (Meinrad Suter), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/007381/2017-08-24/, on the “combourgeoisies chrétiennes” of 1527–1530. HLS, “Kappelerkriege” (Helmut Meyer), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D8903.php. ↩
2. HLS, “Kappelerkriege” (Helmut Meyer), as above; “Kappel Abbey”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kappel_Abbey, locating the pot on the cantonal border between Zurich and Zug. ↩
3. Zecherle, introduction to “Erster Kappeler Landfrieden (26. Juni 1529)”, Europäische Religionsfrieden Digital, http://diglib.hab.de/content.php?dir=edoc%2Fed000227&distype=optional&metsID=edoc_ed000227_erster_kappeler_landfriede_einleitung&xml=einleitungen%2Ferster_kappeler_landfriede_einleitung.xml&xsl=einleitungen%2Feinleitung.xsl. ↩
4. “Second War of Kappel”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_War_of_Kappel. HLS, “Kappelerkriege” (Helmut Meyer), as above, for the blockade of May 1531, the numbers, the losses, the burning of Zwingli’s body “als Ketzer” and the engagement at the Gubel. ↩
5. Andreas Zecherle, introduction to “Zweiter Kappeler Landfrieden (20./24. November 1531)”, Europäische Religionsfrieden Digital, https://diglib.hab.de/content.php?dir=edoc%2Fed000227&distype=optional&metsID=edoc_ed000227_zweiter_kappeler_landfriede_einleitung&xml=einleitungen%2Fzweiter_kappeler_landfriede_einleitung.xml&xsl=einleitungen%2Feinleitung.xsl. ↩
6. HLS, “Kappelerkriege” (Helmut Meyer), as above. ↩
7. The treaty is edited as “Vertrag zwischen Stadt und Landschaft Zürich (Kappelerbrief)” in the Sammlung Schweizerischer Rechtsquellen, ZH NF I/1/3, no. 151, https://rechtsquellen.sources-online.org/ZH_NF_I_1_3/SSRQ_ZH_NF_I_1_3_151. ↩
8. “Second War of Kappel”, Wikipedia, as above, on his flight to Zurich on 21 October 1531. HLS, “Bullinger, Heinrich”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D10443.php, for the call of 9 December 1531, Bullinger’s teaching at Kappel from 1523 to 1529 and his limited political influence. ↩

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.