Over the Alps: the journey and the reception in Zurich

Roveredo, the San Bernardino and the road north

The exiles did not initially intend to go to Zurich. Their first stop was Roveredo in the Mesolcina, a valley under the Grey Leagues where Beccaria had found refuge five years earlier and where the Reformed faith could be practised. According to one account the refugees, some 160 in number, had wished to settle among their co-religionists in Chiavenna, a Grisons dependency on the road between Lake Como and the Splügen. The ducal government of Milan, which controlled the approaches, prevented it, so that most of them went on to Zurich.¹ From the Mesolcina the road led over the San Bernardino pass into the Rheinwald and down the Hinterrhein to Chur, from where the travellers could reach Walenstadt, the Walensee and Lake Zurich. It was a route that the merchants among them knew well, since it formed one of the arteries of the transalpine trade between Lombardy and the Swiss plateau. Duno and about a hundred other Locarnesi set out on 3 March 1555 and took this road across the Mesolcina and the San Bernardino Pass.²

Taddeo Duno, who travelled with the main group, arrived in Zurich in May 1555, although another account dates the arrival to June.³ The Swiss National Museum preserves the memory of the exodus in later pictorial form: nineteenth-century images show the Protestant families of Locarno with their coats of arms, as well as the refugees crossing Lake Zurich in boats towards their new home.⁴ The image of the crossing of the lake, the final stage of a journey that led from one lake city to another, has become the emblem of the whole episode in Zurich’s historical memory.

A small city and a large act of charity

The Zurich that received the exiles was a small city. Around the middle of the sixteenth century it had roughly six thousand inhabitants and an economy that rested on crafts organised in guilds, on the market for the surrounding countryside and on transit trade.⁵ The guild constitution, whose origins in the Brun revolution of 1336 are discussed in Part A, reserved the practice of crafts and retail trade to guild members and gave the guilds a controlling share in the Small and Great Councils. The Reformation had added to this a strong sense of communal moral responsibility, embodied in the Almosenordnung of 1525 (see Chapter B.II), but it had also intensified the city’s concern about the poor and about foreigners who might become a burden on public relief.

The reception of the Locarnesi reflected both sides of this inheritance. The city admitted them as co-religionists persecuted for the Gospel, and prominent citizens took families into their homes. Barbara Muralto, for example, was first lodged with the family of Heinrich Engelhard, a pastor close to Bullinger.⁶ Bullinger himself acted as the protector of the community, as he did for other Italian exiles. The physicians among the newcomers soon found a place in the city’s life: Giovanni (Johannes) Muralto, a trained surgeon, worked alongside Conrad Gessner during the plague of 1564 and 1565 and served as city surgeon (Wundarzt) from 1566.⁷ Taddeo Duno practised as a physician in Zurich until his death in 1613, published a treatise De respiratione contra Galenum in 1588 and Epistolae medicinales in 1592, in which he investigated the connections between meteorological phenomena and the onset of disease, and translated historical, theological and mathematical works into Latin.⁸

Yet from the beginning the admission was conditional. The newcomers were received as Hintersassen, residents without civic rights, under the close watch of the guilds. Contemporary Zurich citizens feared that they would have to share limited work with foreign refugees, a concern that the modern city guides who retrace the Locarnesi’s footsteps still place at the centre of the story.⁹ As section III will show, the council moved within three years from hospitality to restriction, and many of the refugees drew their own conclusions by moving on to Basel.

The Italian church and Bernardino Ochino

The most visible institution of the exile community was its church. The Locarnesi were allowed to form an Italian-speaking congregation with its own services and its own pastor, for which the city engaged an Italian-speaking minister.¹⁰ Beccaria, who had led the exiles to Zurich, served the congregation as catechist and deacon but declined the office of pastor in favour of a far more famous figure, the former Capuchin general Bernardino Ochino.¹¹ Martino Muralto, the lawyer and elder of the community, travelled to Basel with Lelio Sozzini to recruit Ochino as pastor.¹²

Ochino’s career exemplified the drama of the Italian Reformation. Born in Siena in 1487, he had entered the Franciscan order as a young man, joined the Capuchins in 1534 and served as their vicar general from 1538 to 1542. Under the influence of Juan de Valdés he had become sympathetic to Protestant ideas. Summoned by the Inquisition in 1542, he fled to Geneva, where he served for three years as pastor of the Italian-speaking community, then moved to Augsburg until 1547 and afterwards to England with Pietro Martire Vermigli. From 1555 to 1563 he led the Zurich congregation of the Locarnese exiles.¹³ The appointment gave the small congregation a pastor of European reputation and made Zurich, for a few years, one of the main centres of Italian Protestantism north of the Alps. The congregation, with perhaps some 250 members, many of them from Locarno, became a meeting point for Italian exiles of widely differing theological views.¹⁴

That diversity became the congregation’s undoing. Mark Taplin’s study of the Italian reformers and the Zurich church shows how religious radicals within the Italian exile community threatened the stability of the Zwinglian settlement, and how the resulting doctrinal disputes led to the dissolution of Zurich’s Italian church in 1563.¹⁵ The immediate cause was Ochino’s last printed work, the Dialogi XXX, published in Basel early in 1563. The dialogues discussed central theological claims without drawing definitive conclusions, and Bullinger and the Zurich clergy read them as proof of the author’s heterodoxy. The twenty-first dialogue, on polygamy, became the official ground for his expulsion, although the examination of the book condemned the work as a whole. On 2 December 1563 Ochino was expelled from Zurich with four children, after which he went to Poland and died in 1564 at Slavkov in Moravia.¹⁶ Martino Muralto appealed to Bullinger on 30 November 1563 to intervene on Ochino’s behalf, without success.¹⁷

The end of the separate Italian church in 1563 is an important moment in the history of the refugees’ integration, although it is rarely placed in an economic context. With the congregation dissolved, the Locarnesi lost an institution that had given them a collective voice and a meeting place, and were drawn into the German-speaking parishes of the city. The painful experience coincided with renewed pressure from the guilds, which complained in these years that the Locarnesi pushed their grown children into marriages and into various trades.¹⁸ In the long run, however, the absorption of the exiles into the city’s ordinary church life removed one of the obstacles to their acceptance. The families that stayed became Zurich Reformed in every respect. By the eighteenth century the Orelli could supply six Protestant ministers to the Zurich church.¹⁹ The contrast with Geneva, where the Italian church, for which Ochino himself had preached in the early 1540s, survived as a separate institution for a long period, is instructive and is taken up in section VI.²⁰

Notes

1. Wikipedia (German), “Reformation und Gegenreformation in der Schweiz” (cited above). Chiavenna, like the Valtellina, was a subject territory of the Three Leagues from 1512 until 1797 and sheltered a significant Italian Reformed congregation. ↩
2. Wikipedia (English), “Taddeo Duno”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taddeo_Duno: “On 3 March 1555, Duno and about a hundred other Locarnesi left the city, crossing the Mesolcina valley and the San Bernardino Pass.” The date of departure is also given by Reformation Cities of Europe, “Locarno”, https://reformation-cities.org/cities/locarno/ (“Am 3. März 1555 brach die Hälfte der Bevölkerung Locarnos auf ins Exil”). ↩
3. HLS, Italian edition, Crivelli, “Duno, Taddeo” (cited above); Community of Protestant Churches in Europe, “Reformation Cities of Europe: Locarno” (cited above). ↩
4. Swiss National Museum, blog, “The Protestants of Locarno” (cited above). ↩
5. Lebendige Traditionen der Schweiz (Federal Office of Culture), “Zürcher Seidenindustrie”, dossier on the canton of Zurich’s living traditions, https://www.lebendige-traditionen.ch/dam/tradition/de/dokumente/tradition/zh/zuercher_seidenindustrie.pdf.download.pdf/zuercher_seidenindustrie.pdf. ↩
6. Wikipedia (English), “Barbara Muralto” (cited above). ↩
7. Wikipedia (English), “Johannes Muralt”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johannes_Muralt, citing C. Keller-Escher (1911) and H. Schulthess (1944). ↩
8. HLS, Italian edition, Crivelli, “Duno, Taddeo” (cited above). ↩
9. Hutzl-Ronge, “Locarner Glaubensflüchtlinge & die Reformation in Zürich”, city tour description, http://www.hutzl-ronge.ch/cms/stadtfuehrungen/stadtfuehrung-locarner-reformation-zuerich. ↩
10. Hutzl-Ronge, “Locarner Glaubensflüchtlinge & die Reformation in Zürich” (cited above). ↩
11. Wikipedia (German), “Giovanni Beccaria (Reformator)” (cited above). Beccaria later returned to preach in the Misox in 1559, was banished in 1561 in the course of the Counter-Reformation, and from 1571 until his death in 1580 was Reformed pastor at Bondo in the Bergell. ↩
12. Wikipedia (English), “Martino Muralto” (cited above). The article dates the journey to 1553, which is presumably an error for 1555. ↩
13. HLS, Italian edition, Emidio Campi, “Ochino, Bernardino”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/010775/. ↩
14. Wikipedia (English), “Martino Muralto” (cited above), relying on Mark Taplin, The Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, c. 1540–1620 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003). ↩
15. Routledge, publisher’s description and table of contents of Mark Taplin, The Italian Reformers and the Zurich Church, c.1540–1620, https://www.routledge.com/The-Italian-Reformers-and-the-Zurich-Church-c1540-1620/Taplin/p/book/9780754609780. The chapters include “The Locarnese exiles and Zurich’s Italian church” and “The Ochino affair and its aftermath”. ↩
16. Luca Baschera, “Bernardino Ochino (1487–1564). 1. Leben”, contribution to a reference work, University of Tübingen repository, https://ub01.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/bitstream/handle/10900/169578/Baschera_037.pdf. The HLS article by Campi (cited above) observes that the accusation of anti-Trinitarianism may have been unfounded. ↩
17. Wikipedia (English), “Martino Muralto” (cited above). ↩
18. Leo Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge für die deutsche Schweiz”, Zwingliana (1958), https://zwingliana.ch/article/view/7070 (digitised text consulted at https://silo.tips/download/die-wirtschaftliche-bedeutung-der-tessiner-glaubensflchtlinge-fr-die-deutsche-sc). Weisz’s study, which draws extensively on the decisions of the Zurich councils, remains the most detailed account of the refugees’ economic activity and is used repeatedly in this chapter. ↩
19. Martha von Castelberg Stiftung, “Familie von Orelli” (cited above). ↩
20. Ligonier Ministries, “Confessing Like It’s 1559: Italians in Geneva” (Stephen Nichols, 5 Minutes in Church History), https://learn.ligonier.org/podcasts/5-minutes-in-church-history-with-stephen-nichols/confessing-like-its-1559-italians-in-geneva: “Ochino went to Geneva in 1542, and for the next four years, he pastored a congregation of Italian refugees there”, and in 1557 Ragnoni was appointed pastor of the Italian church. Its continued existence decades later is shown by Francesco Turrettini “joining the Italian Reformed Church on December 19, 1575”: Wikipedia (English), “Francesco Turrettini”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francesco_Turrettini. ↩

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