Early years
Early years The plain statement that Ulrich Zwingli was born at Wildhaus, Switzerland on i January 1484, conceals as much as it states. Royalty apart, it is relatively seldom that a birthday can be so surely stated as this, for in the fifteenth and later centuries evidence of date of birth was hard to come by; in some cases a good deal of guesswork is involved. In Zwingli's case however, that New Year's Day, 1 January, was his birthday, and that this was in 1484 can be demonstrated from adequate documentary evidence.1
Almost the most unusual thing about the early years of life in the middle ages was survival; most mothers had many children, relatively few of whom grew up. Many were born and died, leaving almost no trace of their existence. The perils of babyhood over, the chief risk was plague and epidemic, less virulently dangerous, obviously, in small villages, but constantly anticipated. When they survived, most children grew up at home with their parents, very much in the open air, and were treated with natural affection combined with a good deal of conventional neglect. Farmyard life was normal, even for city dwellers, and these were relatively few.
Parentage, of course, mattered enormously, place of birth rather less, at a time when defined frontiers were almost unknown and even political allegiance was often uncertain. Nowhere in the small civilised world of western Europe was this more apparent than in Switzerland. This predominantly German-speaking area was as difficult to define as the Low
Countries or the Indies, and no one was much concerned that this should be so, in an age when areas of territorial uncertainty were nor unusual.
That 'the Swiss' inhabited part of the Holy Roman Empire was obvious, and if the young Zwingli had a sovereign temporal lord this was the Emperor Frederick III, followed in 1493 by Maximilian I. This, however, was very far from meaning that the Habsburgs ruled in Switzerland, and the extent of their property south of the Rhine and any rights deriving from it were matters of considerable debate. Memories of former hostility, the 1 For a discussion see Farner, Zwingli I, 68-9, 11, 309 n. 23; ZWA 11, 74-5. Zwingli himself used the spelling Huldrych which may be preferable.
ZWINGLI existence of undefined frontiers and unresolved claims to jurisdiction, had led to fighting in 1499, followed by a tacit acceptance of the Rhine as a frontier south of which the imperial writ did not run.
The rulers of western Europe were by now well aware that groups of German-speaking peoples formed a Swiss Confederation, a working alliance or league of communities which had been forced into cooperation by the necessities of existence and of which there were parallels elsewhere.
The men of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden had some two centuries previously learnt to agree among themselves about pasture for the cattle which provided for their bare existence, and about defence of their persons and possessions against external interference. At first ignored as insignificant, then attacked by their Habsburg overlords as recalcitrant subjects who would not render service or accept jurisdiction, they later became respected because of their proved ability to defeat on their own ground the hitherto almost invincible mailed horseman. In learning self-defence, they learned aggression as well; the direct north-south route between Germany and Italy lay over the St Gotthard once the Devil's bridge had been constructed in the thirteenth century. The control of this passage was of obvious strategic importance and gave the people of central Switzerland a base for, and an incentive to, further expansion.
Larger communities watched and profited, so that Lucerne, Glarus, Zug, Zurich and Berne, with their subjects, allies and friends, joined the original nucleus to form a coherent and self-confident grouping, which demonstrated its efficiency at Morgarten (1315), Sempach (1386) and Nafels (1388). Very poor, simple, rough and self-confident, the Swiss of the later middle ages lived in a bewildering world of local, disorganised semi-anarchy. They are best thought of as forming small, often isolated, independent communities which were reluctantly compelled by circumstances to enter into intermittent ceremonial and formal relationship with one another. Some were primitive democracies where everyone knew that members of the greater families would be chosen to manage affairs; others were growing city-states dominating their own countryside and controlled by nobles or organised craftsmen. Great variety, singular complexity and underlying similarity were distinctive features of this society of very diverse elements. The most obvious characteristic, which explains so much, was poverty. The ideal countryside of the fifteenth century was flat and well watered by navigable rivers leading to the sea. Switzerland was the opposite of this, although to think in terms of'the Alps', or of an entirely mountainous terrain, is a well-known misapprehension. Mountains were deserts in the middle ages, but even on the lower ground the soil was poor, relatively little grain could be grown, salt for the animals and iron for the primitive tools had to be brought in from outside, and the
Early years livelihood which was gained, mainly from pastures which were adequate for little more than half the year, was very thin.
Whenever an insult was hurled at a Swiss, it was about a cow; this useful animal was to them all that the pig and the goat were elsewhere. In these
Swiss valleys it was not possible for a large, or even an increasing, population to live off the land, and starvation was all too close to the resourceful men who scraped a bare existence on a monotonous diet of milk soup and cheese. Horses were relatively few and expensive; men travelled great distances on foot to keep up with their scraggy herds. Poverty and population pressure inevitably led to local rivalries for the better pieces of fertile land and to the search for an easier way of life. The struggle for existence bred a race of strong, virile men who had learnt to make and keep agreements with one another, to work and fight together and to respect their territorial integrity and differing institutions. By the mid-fifteenth century, it had become apparent that fighting, relentlessly cruel, with hand-weapons, bows, knives, long spears and the battle-axe in its many forms, could bring employment as well as security. There was always a large element of organised robbery about medieval warfare: then and much later, armies stole in order to keep alive, and their leaders hoped to secure land, loot and ransoms. In the early fifteenth century, the Emperors had notoriously ceased to exercise effective authority even in Germany, while
France and England were engaged in the debilitating hostilities of the Hundred Years War combined with great uncertainty at home. After the return of the Popes to Rome and the end of the Great Schism, a state system had developed in Renaissance Italy in which mercenary armies played a notorious part. Orderly detachments of determined and disciplined men could achieve much, and governments were both able and willing to pay for their services. To be hired as a mercenary was normal in this age when armies had ceased to be feudal and had not yet become national. There was no German nation, and the professional hired soldiers of Europe were to be predominantly German-speaking for a very long while.
If Swiss land-hunger was to be satisfied, it must be at the expense of their immediate neighbours, the principalities of the north Italian plain, the Free County and Duchy of Burgundy, the Duchy of Savoy and the districts of the valley of the Rhine. To well-armed marauders, each of these offered temptation; there was loot to be carried off, and there might be opportunities for annexation of fertile farm land. In the 1470s, during the lifetime of Ulrich's father, Charles the Rash, Duke of Burgundy, potentially the most powerful prince in western Europe, had failed disastrously in his attempt to make the Swiss his subjects, chiefly because of the local resistance organised so effectively by Berne, and encouraged by Louis XI of France.
ZWINGLI The Burgundian war marks a real turning point in Swiss history. The inhabitants of central Switzerland saw portable wealth unknown before.
After the battles of Grandson (1476), Morat (1476) and Nancy (1477), the Swiss forces were recognised as invincible on their chosen ground. In self-defence, the Confederation could send into the field at least 10,000 incomparable soldiers, and self-defence might easily imply attack. It was difficult to differentiate between security, seen as keeping open the supply route over the St Gotthard, and aggression south of the Alps, and in any case such notions meant little at that time. What was certain was that any band of thirty or more armed men from Schwyz or Lucerne could at any time after 1450 obtain regular and well-rewarded employment with the Pope, the King of France, the Duke of Savoy or of Milan. Killing fellow men was profitable, bloodshed paid, and participation in war became an industry that could secure a favourable Swiss balance of payments.
Of much of this the inhabitants of Wildhaus, whose centre for marketing and justice was St Gall, forty difficult miles to the north-east, were only vaguely aware. Such consciousness of a wider world as penetrated to this remote village was likely to be chiefly of the land across the Rhine ruled by the Austrian Habsburgs. Their immediate western neighbours were
Glarus, Schwyz, Zug and Zurich, for whom the appeal of mercenary service was less strong than elsewhere since the demand for it came more from the west and south than from the east and north. The pull of the west was only beginning. Basle and Schaffhausen were not accepted as members of the Confederation until 1501,1 and Zurich was interested mainly in trade with Baden and Wiirttemberg. The city of St Gall was seeking for independence from the Prince Abbot who ruled the wide monastic estates and was himself a member of the Imperial Diet and a prelate of the Empire. He was, however, only an ally {Zugewandt) of the Swiss Confederation. Toggenburg, Zwingli's much-loved homeland, had only comparatively recently come under the abbot's control and his connection with the Toggenburgers, of whom Zwingli was emphatically one,2 was of recent date. In 1436, after the death without direct heir of Frederick VII, last of the hereditary counts of Toggenburg, Zurich had been prominent among the claimants for the inheritance. This claim was unacceptable to the other partners in the Confederation; war followed, and after some twenty years of struggle Zurich had been forced to relinquish its claims.
Thus, the county of Toggenburg was secured by the abbey of St Gall, which, in 1451, entered into a perpetual alliance {Burgund Landrecht) with Zurich, Lucerne, Schwyz and Glarus.3 Toggenburg itself, however,
1 Handbuch i, 346-7.
2 Z 1, 166, 578.
3 EA 2, 864-6.
Early years had a separate pact (Landrecht) of its own, renewed in 1469, with Schwyz and Glarus only, and was not, like the remainder of the abbot's territory, under the protection of the other two states.1 The free imperial city of St Gall was a separate entity, and one of growing importance. Abbot and city were thus reckoned as allies, fellows (socii) or associates (Zugewandte) of the Confederates but not part of the Confederation. Even Glarus, although accepted as a full member (Orf), was in a slightly inferior position as far as external relations were concerned.
It was also partly as a result of the Toggenburg dispute that relations between the Confederation and its immediate neighbours were complicated by the collective occupation and administration of the areas which came to be known as 'Mandated Territories' (gemeine Herrschaften).
These included the districts round Lugano, Locarno and Bellinzona, Thurgau, Sargans, Rheintal, Baden, Bremgarten, Mellingen, and the 'Freie Aemter' west of Zurich.2 There were also Protected Districts
{Schirmorte) like Rapperswil and Engelberg, completely self-governing but restricted in external relations. In addition, there were subject territories {Untertanengebiete) like the Bernese Oberland, over which city states like Zurich and Berne exercised complete control.3
Thus in modern terms Ulrich Zwingli was 'Swiss' only by naturalisation after he became a full citizen of Zurich in 1521; in his early youth he had been brought up outside the Old Confederation, the Thirteen States in many ways so parallel to, yet so different from, the Thirteen Colonies of another century and a New World. The Zwingli family were well aware of the Abbey of St Gall, whose abbot had legal jurisdiction in Wildhaus and, in the last instance, rights of life and death over his subjects. Monastic officials administered the customary law of the county with its feudal undertones and local applicability. Beyond, in theory, lay the imperial courts to which an appeal might perhaps be tried but was unlikely to have any direct effect, the rights of the former Imperial vicar {Reichsvogt) being vested in the abbot.4 The latter used the services of local agents like the Ammann of Wildhaus to administer his land; these agents, anxious to secure the maximum local autonomy, could also appeal for support from the Protecting powers, Schwyz, Glarus, Lucerne and Zurich, and thus
1 Oechsli 2, 97.
2 Oechsli /, 2o8ff. The correct rendering of Swiss terms into English has always been a difficulty: technical terms are seldom easily transferred into another language. Ort, for example, becomes * canton', but for the sixteenth century the use of'state' is more meaningful. Some of the conventional translations of gemeine Herrschaften (common lordships), eidgenossische
Vogteien (federal bailiwicks), Freie Aemter (free offices), Leutpriester (people's priest), are not very meaningful or successful. * Mandated territories' and 'stipendiary priest' may convey the meaning a little better. See below, 45 n 3.
3 Swiss constitutional history abounds in exceptions and qualifications which any summary must overlook.
4 Naf, Vadian, I, 53-63 esp. 55.
ZWINGLI play off Abbot and Confederation against one another. The Toggenburgers were understandably concerned to emphasise their status as allies of the Eidgenossen, practically as Eidgenossen,1 to enhance their claims to independence. It was in this atmosphere of active local political discussion that Zwingli was reared.
The Benedictine Abbey of St Gall was one of the earliest founded in Switzerland, a notable example of monastic tradition across the ages, and wealthy from landed endowment originally derived from early Carolingian monarchs. Although some of this property had been alienated, the Abbot of St Gall, chosen by his fellow monks, was a remote but powerful figure to whom the villagers reluctantly made customary payments in service, cash or kind. The abbot from 1463 to 1491 was Ulrich Rosch, son of a baker from Wangen, domineering and aggressive, and much disliked locally.2 As allies and protectors of the abbey, Zurich, Glarus, Schwyz and Lucerne took it in turn to appoint a local resident agent or commissioner to reinforce security and to watch over their interests. This provided another link with the wider world. There was also the Bishop of Constance, to whose officers payments might have to be made, whether for the chrism which the bishop alone could consecrate, for absolution from graver sins, for release from excommunication incurred, for example, by non-payment of tithe, and many other incidents. The episcopal courts were constantly active. For the rest, the scanty inhabitants were secure in their remoteness and worked hard in the upland open air for a meagre livelihood.
In the village of Wildhaus, where a few score families built themselves wooden shelters for their livestock and homes for their children, the Zwingli family was well known.3 Hard work, reasonable luck with herds and crops, and an occasional marriage alliance which was profitable to both sides in more ways than one, had brought financial competence and local influence. The father was well enough off to be able to hire occasional assistance, and was a successful farmer who, as Ammann or chief local magistrate, was expected to speak for the physical needs of the little community just as the parish priest would for its spiritual welfare. Life was rough and simple enough, but the boys and girls were not even on the borderline of poverty. There was always food and clothing available.
Family relationships were well known, cohesive and significant; from uncles and cousins help and sympathy could be confidently counted upon.
Among the Zwingli relations were some literate, educated men who understood Latin, had been to school, had taken holy orders and served as
1 ZWA XIII (1969), 19.
2 Naf, Vadian 1, 54-8. See below, 272.
3 The much-visited and illustrated house in which Zwingli may have been born is vouched for only by late and unreliable (but reasonable) tradition.
Early years secular priests or monks. It all helped the family prestige; it meant a certain amount of travelling about to visit them and contacts with the hierarchy of the church as well as with the local cattle-raisers.
Young Ulrich, the third of the family, turned out to be an unusually gifted boy, surpassing his numerous brothers and sisters1 who seem happily to have accepted the undoubted existence of his superior abilities.
We wish we knew more about them. Intellectual gifts meant a little less work on the farm for Ulrich and a little more attention to schooling. It was also apparent that the little boy had a good voice and an ear for music just at a time when choir boys were being sought for and appreciated. Everything, in fact, suggested an ecclesiastical career, and young Ulrich was sent to learn the rudiments of Latin from his clerical uncle, Bartholomew.2
There was no school in Wildhaus, but there was a small one at Wesen (Weesen) on the Lake of Walen, where his uncle was dean.
School teaching in the fifteenth century, at any rate north of the Alps, was remarkably stereotyped. The same basic need, to secure a working knowledge of Latin, produced the same results. Instruction was necessarily verbal and individual. Paper was, indeed, now becoming available, but it was expensive and not much easier to obtain than was parchment in a sheep-rearing community. In both cases a good deal of processing was necessary, and school books of any kind were rare. Hence memory had to be relied upon almost exclusively, and learning in its earlier stages consisted very largely of repetition of the teacher's words. All over western
Europe pedagogues were beating the elements of Latin grammar into their pupils as soon as these had learnt their letters. Declensions, conjugations, tenses, agreements, terminations, quantities and the rest were taught on traditional lines from the Ars Minor of Donatus, the Distichs of Cato and the hexameters of the Doctrinale of Alexander of Villa Dei, along with passages from the Breviary, Missal, Vulgate and Lives of the Saints.
Grammar was the basis of the liberal arts; trivium and quadrivium, the 1 Zwingli's brothers were Bartholomew, Claud, Henry, John (Hans), Wolfgang, Andrew and James. There were two sisters, Anna and Catherine, who became nuns at St Maria der
Engeln, Pfanneregg (near Wattwil), but later left the convent. One of them was married in Glarus. Ursula, wife of Liehnard Tremp of Berne, was almost certainly not, as is sometimes stated, a third sister. Andrew died in 1520 at Glarus, James died in 1517 as a student at Vienna. ZWA iv, 21-6; Z 1, 391. Farner, 1, 71-5.
2 Bullinger, Ref. 1, 6. Heinrich Bullinger, whose eldest daughter Anna married Zwingli's son
Ulrich, succeeded as chief pastor (Antistes, a word used only once by Zwingli) in 1531 and late in life wrote Historia oder Geschichten, so sich verlouffen in der Eydgnoschaft, insonders zu
Ziirych mit enderung der Religion, und anrichten Christenlicher Reformation, von dem Jar
Christi 1519 bis in das Jar 1532. He wrote from personal knowledge, assiduously collected local evidence and quoted original documents. He was naturally concerned above all to place his predecessor in as favourable a light as possible. There are a few obvious errors of fact and some significant omissions. A critical appraisal of the Reformationsgeschichte could be of great value.
ZWINGLI conventional grouping which came to mean what school and college examinations were to mean later, was something inescapable even if not always relevant. Grammar, dialectic, rhetoric; music, astronomy, arithmetic, geometry - the names never vary and were the foundation of the 'arts' courses at the university.
After learning to construe, parse and write simple sentences, Ulrich's contemporaries were expected to proceed to dialectic or logic, the arrangement of an argument or exposition in standard form; and to rhetoric, the embellishment of simple prose. The semi-mathematical disciplines of the quadrivium were supposed to be useful for reckoning dates, including
Easter, for grasping the movements of heavenly bodies and for understanding the notation of the cKoral services. Basically, however, for Zwingli to be put on the road to the university, a working knowledge of Latin, written and spoken, which he could hardly acquire at Weesen, was indispensable.
At the age of ten or under, Zwingli was transferred to the care of a distant relative, Gregory Biinzli, also from Weesen, who lived in the suburb of Basle, Kleinbasel, across the river.1 There, for two years, he received further and more regular schooling and saw something of the Carthusian monastery with its renowned library. Then, probably in 1496, the lad was moved to Berne, where the learned young Heinrich Wolfflin
(Lupulus, the little wolf) had the reputation of being the best schoolmaster south of Strassburg.2 He was also a musician who could not fail to notice the special talent of his new pupil; he was something of a humanist, and he had travelled to the orient. Environment may not seem influential at thirteen, and for the young Zwingli Wildhaus in the country was home.
But he was no longer a country boy; he was literate, and he was becoming acquainted with city life. Berne was to feature considerably in his later life, and it was well that he knew thus early something of its proud and turbulent background.3 This fortified walled city on the bend of the Aar, with less than 5000 inhabitants, was also at the extreme western boundary of the diocese of Constance, and its territory spilled over into the dioceses of Basle, Lausanne and Sion (Sitten).
From a consciously founded artificial new town built by Berthold of Zahringen in 1191, it had become a free imperial city, rough and small perhaps, but by consistent relentless pressure the centre of a powerful political group. Bit by bit the countryside had been dominated, and when the young Zwingli was there in 1496-8, the boundaries of Berne marched with those of Schwyz and Uri. Burgundy had been defeated, some of the Vaud already occupied, there were shared rights in Aargau, and to the south
1 ZWA xi, 317-18.
2 Z VII, 534 n. 10. He wrote some verses in praise of his former pupil after Zwingli's death.
3 See below Chapter 10.
Early years a moving frontier with Savoy. There were also strained relations with the chieftains of the valleys of Valais.
The new boy was welcomed by Wolfflin, and seems to have liked the place and the people, in spite of an unfamiliar dialect. We know almost nothing of his studies there, but there is good testimony that a serious effort was made to persuade him to become a Friar Preacher. From the thirteenth century onwards the leaders of the Dominicans had constantly kept prominently in mind the need to recruit promising material while young: complaints of enticing or kidnapping boys had been heard often before. Choral services were also generally being developed in large collegiate churches like that of St Vincent's, Berne. For the Dominicans to secure an intelligent scholar who could sing well and had a real talent for music1 was an opportunity not to be missed.
It would not be an enclosed life in a secluded monastery cut off from the world that they offered, for the Dominicans lived by begging, preaching and hearing confessions in the towns, although by the sixteenth century they were popularly regarded as monks, Religious. They nearly succeeded in their attempts, and there is a distinct possibility that Ulrich was received as a novice. News of this was heard in Wildhaus by his parents and by his uncle with marked disapproval. They were not prepared to lose him to a Bernese friary of not very good reputation. If a church career was now resolved upon, it must be as a secular. The approach must be the normal one through a university, supported if possible by a benefice, then ordination and employment, maybe, as a chantry priest until a parochial cure of souls was available. And so Ulrich was recalled.
It is notable that we know so little about the young Zwingli; there are a few casual references implying normality, but no child psychologist has turned with profit to elaborate the scraps of information available into a convincing explanation of his later mental development.
None the less, the fourteen years between 1484 and 1498 cannot be left on one side as irrelevant: home, parentage, environment, upbringing, are too significant for that, and, in fact, reflections of these appear in the most unlikely places in Zwingli's writings. Relatively well-to-do parents and a stable home background; this he both received and provided for his own children when he lived in a considerable house in Zurich. He never lost his country accent and he wrote naturally in the vigorous Swiss-German of his native Toggenburg, disliked and despised by speakers of good high
German like Luther. In addition to the local dialect, Zwingli knew from 1 ZWAIV, 355-6. Zwingli became later a talented instrumentalist. He once said,' I know something of the lute and the fiddle, and this is useful in trying to put the children to sleep.'
Z v, 54-5; C. Garside, Zwingli and the Arts (New Haven, 1966), 9-10, 15, 68. H. Reimann,
'Huldrych Zwingli-der Musiker', Archiv fur Musikwissenschaft 17 (i960), 126-41 collects a number of references and discusses Zwingli's later rejection of musical services in church.
ZWINGLI the closest personal contact his people and their way of life. He often spoke of himself as a peasant or farmer, exaggerating, perhaps deliberately, his rough breeding and ancestry. He was well equipped to understand the needs and outlook of the 'common man'. There were few birds that he did not know by sight and by note, few animals whose feeding, breeding and characteristics he could not expound accurately and fully, few crops he could not identify at a glance, knowing whence the seed came, how it was sown and gathered. He could use earthly metaphors and comparisons with telling exactitude, and he loved the countryside. Again and again he alludes to the conventional virtues of the countryman - simplicity, honesty, fair dealing, hard work, rough fare and trusting faith. What he knew of the relatively narrow world of his boyhood he later applied to his countrymen as a whole. If the Swiss people would but be satisfied with their milk and cheese and not call for dainty victuals, delicate luxuries, elaborate clothes, ornaments, jewels, silks, tapestries, carriages, then they could stand alone. They did not, and should not, need foreign gold and the corrupting luxuries of France and Italy. Such patriotism - for Zwingli can truly be reckoned one of the first of Swiss patriots in the best sense of that overworked word - was comparatively rare. It was almost incomprehensible to the Italians, although Machiavelli might have understood.
All roads led to Rome, and the Pope of the eleven impressionable years between eight and nineteen was the Borgia Alexander VI (i 492-1503), whose son Cesare was ever ready to seduce Swiss soldiers to die for the consolidation of the Papal States. As a scholarly young man anxious to improve his knowledge of the external world by contact with travellers,
Zwingli can hardly have failed to hear something of the extravagant exhibitionism of the Renaissance Popes and of the drain of money and men southwards. There was danger that the Swiss soil might not be tilled and the hard labour of field and vineyard might be neglected if men left their homeland. Perhaps if he had lived in the harsh highlands of Unterwalden and if he had heard his brothers and sisters cry for bread, his feelings might have been different.
For Zwingli, it was the tightly-knit community of a Swiss valley where every man knew his neighbour, where cooperation was essential for survival and where the leadership of the more prosperous element was taken for granted, that formed the basis of society. Such was the Gemeinde, in ecclesiastical terms the parish, with priest, church and common worship; and this, too, was to be the basic unit of the Zwinglian religious organisation much later. Zwingli had, as we have seen, relatives among the Swiss clergy. The village church with its ceremonial, ornaments and obligations had been there all the time, and the boy absorbed all the usual Catholic dogma without, apparently, any difficulty or questioning. In some of the
Early years more remote townships usages, and even books, which reflected a much earlier tradition could be found, and later he remembered some of these.
In his neighbourhood, too, there were semi-hereditary ecclesiastical families of whom he saw something. Everyone knew that by paying an appreciable annual sum to the bishop's official at Constance, a priest might cohabit with his housekeeper and raise a family without further action being taken. Some might disapprove, but the whole issue aroused little feeling.
Church attendance was in practice compulsory; mass was said and heard regularly; the seven sacraments were known and available; confession, if infrequent, could not be omitted. The church as a building was the only place where the whole community could meet under cover, and there was no hesitation about using it, and also about maintaining, adorning and improving it.
There might be criticism of some practices; the payment of tithe was felt to be burdensome and possibly misapplied; the exactions of the archdeacon in the church court were unpopular; the resort to distant Constance for so many purposes connected with wills, contracts, oaths and matters matrimonial was disliked, but none of these things affected acceptance of not only the creeds but also transubstantiation, the resort to the shrines and relics of the saints, whose intercession on behalf of their devotees was expected, the elaborate ceremonial of the church services, pilgrimages and even payments for crusades or indulgences. Ulrich Zwingli grew up in a stable, conventional environment even if a New World was discovered when he was eight and French troops permanently altered the balance of power in Italy when he was twelve or thirteen.
In the autumn of 1498 'Udalricus Zwinglij de Glaris' paid over the money required to have his name so written in the matriculation roll of the University of Vienna. Against this entry in another hand is the one word exclusus, 'sent down'. That this refers to our Ulrich is reasonably certain, and from the brief notice some secure deductions can be drawn,1 while speculation naturally enough has been busy about the addition. Glarus, one of the Swiss states which protected and helped to administer his home, was a natural enough designation of place of origin, about which medieval
Registrars were properly curious but not unduly concerned.
Long, lanky, eager boys were moving towards many university cities in 1498: the wandering scholar was a well-known phenomenon, and some, like Johann Butzbach2 and Thomas, John and Felix Platter,3 have left
1 ZWA11,466-71, XII, 167 n. 10.
2 Des Johannes Butzbach Wanderbiichlein. Chronika eines fahrenden Schillers... ubersetzt von
D. J. Becker (Leipzig, n.d., c. 1924). An English version is The Autobiography of Johannes
Butzbach, a wandering scholar of the fifteenth century, translated by R. F. Seybolt and P.
Monroe (Ann Arbor, 1933).
3 Thomas Platter (c. 1499-1582) was employed at the age of eight as a goat-herd in Valais. He became a wandering scholar, wrote an entertaining, if not entirely reliable, autobiography,
ZWINGLI moving accounts of their experiences. They travelled on foot but in company : no one would be foolish enough to move about alone across central
Europe, for he would be unlikely to get far without being relieved of his purse and clothes by robbers and outlaws. The potential student was treated as what he usually technically was, a cleric. From monastery to monastery, inn to inn, accompanied by someone who had moved over the ground previously, a boy begged or paid his way to the walls of the town which contained a studium generale.
These international institutions had multiplied fast in the second half of the fifteenth century; in Germany alone, Trier (1454), Greifswald (1456),
Freiburg (1456), Pressburg ^465), Basle (1460), Ingolstadt (1459), Mainz (1476), Tubingen (1477), Wittenberg (1502) and Frankfurt-on-the-Oder
(1506), indicated how the tide was running. The alternative to a German university was one of the older Italian studia where, in any case, the study of civil law was likely to predominate, or the mother University of Paris, where theology and scholastic philosophy flourished exceedingly. Paris was far distant, the French king talked of war with the Emperor, the German 'nation' at that university was falling in numbers and prestige.
A north Italian university, Pavia especially, had its attractions but scarcely offered advantages that would appeal to an intelligent country lad from Wildhaus who had no intention of joining the legal fraternity.
Vienna was a fine city, and the university founded there in 1365 by Rudolf IV stressed both in its statutes and its practice the philosophical studies of the Faculty of Arts.1 Thanks to the early recruitment from Paris of Heinrich von Langenstein, it was 'modern' in the technical sense, and some attention was paid to 'poetry', elegant Latinity, after Thomas
Ebendorfer of Haselbach (d. 1464) had been Rector.
Humanism, as represented by Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini, had made an early appearance there, and the cult of Ciceronianism was forwarded by George Peuerbach.2 Students could also meet Conrad Celtes (d. 1508), the exponent of the latest theories of the art of elegant expression and indefatigable producer of Latin verse. Celtes also appealed to a kind of incipient German nationalism; he edited the early dramatic effusions of the nun, Roswitha of Gandersheim, and was the first to draw attention to the Germania of Tacitus. One of his missions in life was the formation of was taught by Myconius and himself taught Greek in Basle as well as correcting proofs for the press. An English version appeared as The autobiography of Thomas Platteri a schoolmaster of the sixteenth century. Translated.. .by [Elizabeth Anne McCaul afterwards Finn]
(London, 1839). The standard edition is Thomas Platter, Lebensbeschreibung hg. v. Alfred
Hartmann (Basle, 1944). Cf. Thomas und Felix Platter. Zur Sittengeschichte des xvi. Jfahrhunderts bearb. v. H. Boos (Leipzig, 1878).
1 R. Kink, Geschichte der kaiser lichen Universitdt zu Wien, 2. Bde. (Vienna, 1854), with documents and statutes.
2 A. Lhotsky, Die Wiener Artistenfakultdt 1365-1497 (Vienna, 1965), 133-60.
Early years literary societies; he was chairman of the Sodalitas liter aria Danubiana, to which the young were much attracted, and where the plays of Terence and Plautus were produced to admiring if somewhat bewildered audiences.
A new approach to geography and mathematics had already been made by Johann Miiller of Konigsberg (Regiomontanus) and Johann Cuspinian.
There was a good university library,1 which admitted printed texts as early as 1474, and a printing press was in operation by 1492. These slightly unusual features should not disguise the fact that here was a perfectly normal university institution of its age, with the higher faculties of medicine, law and theology in full operation, with chancellor, conservator, rector, nations, proctors, privileges, endowments and degrees. It was normal also in the immorality, superstition and traditionalism which were surface features here, as elsewhere.
In Vienna the young Glarner almost certainly lodged, as possibly did his cousin, Joseph Forrer, in a small, cooperatively run student residence where he was obliged to keep regular hours and always speak Latin. Two close friends were his fellow-countrymen, Arbogast Strub2 and Joachim
Vadian.3 The latter, of almost exactly Zwingli's own age, came from a wealthy family of linen-merchants of St Gall. In later life, as humanist, geographer, medical practitioner, politician and religious reformer, he showed a breadth of interests and scholarship in which he was surpassed in Switzerland only by Erasmus and Zwingli himself. They all owed something to an Italian Franciscan humanist, Giovanni Ricuzzi Vellini from Padua, and they were all exposed to the scholasticism of the 'via antiqua', the 'realism' of Aquinas and Duns Scotus.4 Vienna was an exciting place.
Whether, or why, or for how long, Zwingli was rusticated from the University, or whether he left of his own accord, is uncertain. He returned in 1500 and re-matriculated.5 The Swabian war had intensified passions, and there may well have been a Swiss-German fracas, and some coolingoff period imposed as a result. There is much force in the argument that had there been any serious lapse Zwingli's later enemies would not have
1 Walter Pongratz, Geschichte der Universitdtsbibliothek (Studien zur Geschichte der Universitat Wien) Bd. 1 (Graz-Koln, 1965).
2 His promising career was cut short by his early death on 15 August 1510. Z VII, 5 n. 2; E.
Brandstatter, Arbogast Strub (St Gall, 1955), 14-22.
3 Naf, Vadian, supplemented by Vadian-Studien, Untersuchungen und Texte hg. v. W. Naf
(St Gall, 1945-); H. Ammann, Die Diesbach-Watt-Gesellschaft (St Gall, 1928); W. Naf, Die
Familie von Watt (St Gall, 1936).
4 C. Bonorand, Die Bedeutung der Universitdt Wien fur Humanismus und Reformation, insbesondere in der Ostschweiz, ZWA XII (1965), 162-80, and Aus Vadians Freundes-und Schiilerkreis in Wien (St Gall, 1965) where the university friendship of Zwingli and Vadian is shown to be inferential only; W. Koehler, Die Geisteswelt Ulrich Zwinglis (Gotha, 1920), 15-18. s Egli 4, 8-10.
PZI
ZWINGLI failed to give it publicity, nor would he have matriculated for a second time in 1500, even if he did not stay long.
There is no documentary evidence about the young man's movements in 1500-1; from insignificant passing remarks of later years, it is possible, but rather unlikely, that he visited Paris, Cologne and Tubingen.1 He certainly continued his studies before moving to the most convenient and obvious university of one born in the diocese of Constance, Basle. Here, during the rectorate of Johannes Wentz (May-October 1502), 'Udalricus
Zwingling de Liechtensteig' matriculated, paying the usual six shillings.2
How he supported himself during these years is a matter of conjecture; later in life he reminisced a little about begging for lodging and being refused,3 and there is better evidence that he earned some money by teaching
Latin at the school attached to St Martin's Church, Basle.
At eighteen his real life began within the walls of the ' incomparable Basle', imperial city, seat of a bishop and centre of a patrician-ruled state which only in the previous year had decided to cast in its lot for all time with the Swiss Confederation. It can scarcely have been strange territory; he had been there as a boy, among his earlier teachers had been the Basle graduate, Gregory Biinzli, and its renown was considerable. There had been a General Council of the church there within living memory before the University of Basle had opened its doors to 122 members in April 1460.
There were many and obvious advantages in founding the first, and for long the only, Swiss university in Basle. Communications, most obviously by water along the river Rhine, were easy; there was the security provided by the city walls, there were wealthy citizens and powerful gilds; there was a cathedral, collegiate churches, hospitals, monasteries and mendicant establishments. The university, as it were, added another dimension to the already pullulating clerical population there. There were grammar schools
(for boys of course) attached to St Peter's Cathedral and to St Leonhard's, and there was an intelligent and sometimes literate citizenry. There were libraries at the cathedral and in the Charterhouse across the river, as well as manuscripts owned privately. There were also scribes and illuminators who prepared the ground for the printers who could find the indispensable paper on the spot, since the first paper mill had started work in Kleinbasel in 1440.4 There were block-cutters, book-binders, painters of saints,
1 ZWA HI, 414-17; Koehler, Buck, 14; F. Biisser, Die Erforschung der Reformation in der deutschen Schweiz. NZZ 7 November 1971, No. 519 p. 53.
2 H. G. Wackernagel, Die Matrikel der Universitdt Basel, 1. Bd. (Basle, 1951), 266.
3 On his way home via Innsbruck and Lindau in the winter of 1502, but this probably meant little more than might failure to 'thumb a lift' to a twentieth-century counterpart. The episode was recorded in a note, now lost, in the margin of his copy of Josephus. Koehler,
NZZ No. 2145, 4 December 1938; Farner 1, 184; Koehler, Zwingli, 19.
4 Wackernagel, Basel 11, 2, 604.
Early years calendars and cards; and Mainz, the cradle of printing, was conveniently situated down the river. It was from there, probably, that Berthold Ruppel had brought the new art before 1467, and this was to bring scholarship with it. The early printers were their own publishers and correctors; at Basle they had what they needed - men with capital, a good distribution centre and specialists at the university who could help to ensure accurate texts.
The presence, among others, of John Heynlin, Sebastian Brant and the expert in Hebrew, John Reuchlin, was invaluable to Froben, who became a citizen in 1490 and printed in 1491. He was followed by the brothers
Petri and the cultivated Amerbach family of scholar-printers. Printing was to be to the glory of God, the spread of knowledge of the kingdom of heaven and the regeneration of Christendom, as well as a new, profitmaking enterprise.
When Zwingli reached Basle, the university with the usual four faculties was small but securely founded, the printing presses were active, and the name of Erasmus was already known within the city which was to be the chief centre of his future activities. In later years it was Erasmus who was to be the most influential of living scholars for Zwingli, and it was the printing press which was to make the reputation and to extend the fame of both. In Switzerland, as in Germany, the press was to be indispensable for publicity as well as for accurate and speedy duplication.
The curriculum at Basle in 1500 was still dominated by 'the master of those who know', Aristotle. Aquinas had shown how the Aristotelian texts could be reconciled with scriptural revelation, and out of this synthesis came 'scholasticism'. The study of the liberal arts, obligatory upon all before proceeding to law, medicine or theology, had become almost exclusively an exercise in logic, culminating in the verbal dexterities of 'quodlibet' and 'determination'. The relations of faith and knowledge, authority and reason, dogma and opinion, certainty, inference and deduction, were never allowed to be far from the mind of the medieval student.
Discussions still went on over the unending problem of the nature of 'universals', of the relationship of facts and words, of realities and abstractions. Thus had developed in the arts faculties the dichotomy of realists and nominalists, Thomists and Occamists, later even fancifully aligned with Latins and Teutons. The new University of Basle certainly could not escape the prevailing passion for argumentation and taking sides.
The modern 'way' was that of the Nominalists, the ancient that of the Realists, and there was no third 'way' yet of reconciliation.1
1 G. Ritter, Studien zur Spdtscholastik 11: Via antiqua und via moderna auf den deutschen
Universitdten des XV. Jahrhunderts (Sitzungsberichte der Heidelberger Akademie der
Wissenschaften, philosophisch-historische Klasse) (Heidelberg, 1922).
2-2
ZWINGLI Basle was a border city between France and Germany and a border university between realist and modernist. Each school of thought, it was arranged, might be represented by four professors, and thus the path of progress through the philosophical faculty to the highest of all, that of theology, could be by either school of teaching. At first it seemed as if the nominalist influences, deriving from the University of Erfurt (which was so powerfully to influence Luther) might predominate. This was prevented by the arrival of a man who combined conviction with exposition and personality with great ability, John Heynlin von Stein1 (de Lapide), who had studied at Louvain, Tubingen and Paris and secured a permanent place for his ideas within the recognised curriculum. His eloquent sermons were long remembered, and his excellent library went first to the Carthusians and later to the University. He was supported and followed by others - Geiler of Kaisersberg, Christopher of Utenheim, Matthias of Gengenbach, Sebastian Brant, among them, while John Reuchlin became a leading representative of the nominalists.
The young Zwingli may have picked up from his Vienna days some comprehension of at any rate the existence of such schools of thought, just as a student of a later age would know of a Marxist or Whig interpretation of history without being able fully to define either. To some extent the considerations involved in these debates about universals were to endure throughout his life. What was 'substance' ? What was 'reality' ? What was the meaning of' real' ? What lay behind words and names ? Was nominalism basic to Lutheranism, realism to Zwinglianism ?2 At any rate both sides of a fundamental division of opinion could be heard at Basle. Further, in addition to the commonplace disputes of the schoolmen there was the new learning of the humanists confronting the old learning of scholasticism.
Basle offered access to this as well.
Two figures had been seen in the Basle streets while the theologians of Eugenius IV were conducting the debates of the oecumenical council Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini and Poggio Bracciolini. One of the many qualities which secured the papacy for Aeneas was the elegance of his
Latinity, ability to use a language recognisably similar to that of the age of 1 M. Hossfeld, Johannes Heynlin aus Stein. BasZG, Bd. 6 (1907), 309-356; Bd. 7 (1908),
79-219, 235-431.
2 Zwingli, who read and annotated Duns Scotus' Commentary on the Sentences of Peter
Lombard (Quaestiones super quatuor libris sententiarum (Venice, 1503) very carefully, was a man of the via antiqua, well acquainted with Aquinas. Essentially Aristotelian in outlook, he was later often regarded as a rationalist because he was not prepared, as the 'modernists' were, to despise reason and to see the wisdom of God as necessarily incomprehensible to the human intellect. One conviction remained with him as a result of his philosophical training at Basle - a material thing could not have, induce or bring about, an intellectual or spiritual operation. Luther's different nominalist and 'modernist' training at Erfurt accounts in some degree for later differences.
Early years Virgil and Cicero. Poggio dredged Europe for new classical texts and helped to give the learned world something new to bite upon. Clerics and business men from Basle could hardly avoid visits to Italy, where, too, the sons of some of the wealthy patricians had studied, and both learnt something of the ferment in Rome, Florence and Pavia. They trusted their new university to be 'with' the newest thought, and among the handful of lecturers who were there from the beginning was one whose appointment was 'in poetryeV In 1464, that 'most elegant professor of Poetry', Peter
Luder, the peripatetic exponent of versification from Heidelberg, had expounded classical literature in the intervals of acting as medical adviser to the city. Although there was no professor of Greek until 1538,2 Luder was succeeded by others who found some hearers for lectures on 'eloquence' in the new cult of Ciceronian Latinity. There was Sebastian Brant (14581521), who saw no incongruity in combining attention to style with lectures on civil law. He is indeed remembered chiefly for a rather slight piece of satire, the Ship of Fools, which caught the imagination of the age and was translated into Latin by Locher and illustrated with woodcuts by Diirer.
If his other verse contributions were mediocre in the extreme, he was still a precursor of better exponents in the future.
Although there was no place for the study of Greek within the lectureframework of the fifteenth-century university, even here supply was followed by demand. John Reuchlin of Pfortzheim (1455-1522), who matriculated in 1474, had already shown singular linguistic aptitude, and at eighteen had started learning Greek at Paris from fellow students who had themselves picked up a little there from Gregory of Tiferno. He now discovered, living in Basle, a Greek, Andronicus Kontoblatas, otherwise unknown, who offered the equivalent of' extra mural' classes in classical
Greek, perhaps to only two pupils, one of whom was Wessel Gansfort.3
Good Ciceronian Latin, active versification, rudimentary Greek, the cult of the ancient world - through these, the University of Basle was tinged, we may say, with the Renaissance earlier than any other German seat of learning. Even the study of law was affected, and with some special emphasis on civil law went a renewed contact with Italian scholars, for whom
Rome meant the centre of classical learning and memories.
Here, from 1502 to 1506, Zwingli learnt his Aristotelian texts, repeated exercises, argued and 'distinguished' in scholastic fashion with a small number of fellow scholars and teachers. He also understood that the round earth was the centre of the universe. Around it circled the stars in primum mobile and above this the heaven, coelum empireum, where Christ sat at the right hand of God 1 E. Bonjour, Die Universitdt Basel von den Anfdngen bis zur Gegenwart (Basle, i960), 95.
2 Bonjour, Universitdt, 124.
3 Bonjour, Universitdt, 97.
ZWINGLI God to remove his wayes from human sense, Plac'd Heav'n from Earth so farr, that earthly sight,
If it presume, might erre in things too high, And no advantage gaine.
Later in life, like many another of his generation, he made fun of the narrow, twisted and conventional learning of the schools. He rightly scorned the slavish adherence to prescribed authority, the needless logic, the meaningless struggles about the implications of words and phrases, the readiness to propose subjects for debate and to answer any put forward by others. The aim was triumph according to the rules of the logical game, not increase of knowledge or attention to truth. All this, of course, was in Latin. Any successful inceptor in arts had a verbal fluency in this language, which he spoke as well as wrote. It was scarcely necessary for a scholar to know anything else. To the Basle student the French language was a closed book.
While he laughed at the ' sophisterey'* of his university training, Zwingli was later to make good use of it. The milestones along the road to the Reformation in Switzerland were marked by the public debates which invariably preceded action. For such exercises, a good memory, quick perception, lucidity of explanation and above all the ability to point out the inadequacies of the other side were invaluable assets. And these were just the qualities that the years in the faculty of Arts at Basle taught the rapidly maturing young man. He was much attracted by what he heard of the scholarship of John Heynlin, and he learnt something from John
Gebwiler1 (c. 1450-1530) from Colmar. More influential was Thomas Wittenbach2 of Biel (1472-1526) who came to Basle from Tubingen in 1505. The breadth of his knowledge and the unusual grace of his diction evidently fascinated his younger hearers. His lectures in the Faculty of Theology on the New Testament, and particularly on the Epistle to the Romans, were striking, but there can be no certainty that Zwingli, whose biblical knowledge was then sketchy, heard them.
Among Zwingli's contemporaries were Conrad Schmid from Kiissnacht,3 Caspar Grossmann (Megander) and probably Conrad Grebel.
There was also John Dignauer, who invited him to his 'promotion' feast in 1514 and who later became preacher at Winterthur and Kilchberg.4
From Alsace came Leo Keller (1482-1542) better known as Leo Jud. He was of Jewish extraction, the son of a catholic priest and intended
1 Wackernagel, Matrikel i, 78-9.
2 Z v, 718-20, viii, 84-9. Little certain is known of him.
3 ZWA 11, 65-73.
4 Z vii, 30 n. 1; Wackernagel, Matrikel 1, 262; K. M. Sieber, Die Universitdt Basel and die
Eidgenossenschaft 1460 bis 1529 (Basle, i960), 71.
Early years at first to be a student of medicine. He was ordained, succeeded Zwingli at Einsiedeln and followed him to Zurich in 1519.1 Either while he was in residence or shortly after, Zwingli came into contact with the humanist group in Basle which included Beatus Rhenanus,2 Heinrich Loriti,3
Conrad Pellican,4 Conrad Zwick and Caspar Hedio.5
With Thomas Wittenbach Zwingli may have discussed the nature of the authority of the Pope and validity of indulgences, but the evidence for this is flimsy; later in life, certainly, Zwingli believed he owed much to these conversations.6 There is also some likelihood that Wittenbach first suggested to Zwingli that he must learn Greek if he would read the New
Testament and the church Fathers in the original. Again, it can have been no more than a passing suggestion. Zwingli was indeed disappointed with the logic-chopping that accompanied his Aristotelian studies, and his knowledge of the two 'ways' of university thought left him working things out for himself, but even in 1506 he had not seriously applied himself to any biblical, still less patristic, studies, and for these latter, Augustine and Jerome in particular, there was much yet to be read and assimilated in Latin.7
1 Z 1, 529, v, 718-20, VII, 119-20, x, 201-9; ZWA 11, 161-6, 198-208. The biography by C.
Pestalozzi, Leo Judd(Elberfeld, i860), needs revision; and L. Weisz, Leo Jud, Ulrich Zwinglis
Kampfgenosse 1482-1542 (Zurich, 1942), adds little to it.
2 Beat Bild (1485-1547) from Schlettstadt where his library remains. He actively assisted
Amerbach and Froben in their publishing activities and corresponded with Erasmus. Allen
II, 60-1; Briefwechsel des Beatus Rhenanus hg. v. A. Horawitz u. K. Hartfelder (Leipzig,
1886).
3 1488-1563. Known from his birthplace, Mollis, in Glarus, as Glarean. He was M.A. (Cologne)
1510, crowned 'poet' by Maximilian 1512, taught in Basle, Paris and Freiburg and was one of Zwingli's earliest correspondents. His best known publication was the versified Helvetiae
Descriptio (1511, 1515), geographical and historical, highly 'patriotic' in its implications. His knowledge of the classics matched Zwingli's. Glarean remained a Catholic. Allen 11, 279;
Z VII, 1.
4 1478-1556. Franciscan and Hebrew scholar. He assisted Froben in 1516, was professor of theology at Basle in 1523, taught Hebrew at Zurich from 1526, married, and published Bible commentaries. ZWA 11 (1908), 193-8; Allen vi, 207-8.
5 1494-1552. M. A. Freiburg 1516. He was impressed by Zwingli's preaching at Einsiedeln, came to Basle in 1517 and taught theology there from 1519. He later moved to Strassburg.
Z VII, 213; Wackernagel, Matrikel 1, 332.
6 1472-1526, Farner, I, 230-3; Z vm, 84 n. 1; Z v, 718-20; ADB (44), 434-6; H. Tiirler,
'Dr. Thomas Wyttenbach 1472-1526', Bieler Jahrbuch 1927 (Biel, 1927) 107-29 esp. 113-15.
Wackernagel Basel 111, 320. Wittenbach later became the reformer of Biel.
7 There existed across the river, connected somewhat irregularly with the Carthusian monastery, a Basle Literary Society (Sodalitas Literaria Basiliensis), a private association which included John Heynlin, John Ulrich Surgant and the printers Froben and Amerbach. Little is known of its meetings, but that Zwingli was present is more than probable. Surgant was best known for his book of advice to preachers Manuale Curatorum, frequently reprinted
(e.g. at Basle in 1502). He set out the faults the successful preacher will avoid, stressed the importance of the sermon and urged the need for instruction in faith, the avoidance of sin, preparation for death, and personal devotion.
ZWINGLI The introductory Greek grammar that was then available in Basle was the Erotemata, which had been printed in 1478, and, with his thoughts already towards the fashionable humanism, it may have been in his hands.1
Zwingli was 'baccalaureus' on 18 September 1504, and early in 1506 was 'promoted' master of arts. His path was now open to the study of theology,2 the queen of the sciences. For law or medicine he manifestly had no inclination. He was now 22, a mature man by the standards of his age.
How he had been able to support himself for the previous seven or eight years is unknown: he was the only scholar in a family of ten or eleven; his brothers remained farmers, his two sisters became nuns (which required a dowry for each), so that parental help, while assuredly willingly available, cannot have been his sole support. He received a small sum charged on to St Peter's, Basle,3 in addition to payments for teaching Latin; there are slight hints of begging, to which the age attached no stigma; and he had some pupils. At any rate, he paid his way, and almost immediately after being admitted to the society of the masters, just before the earliest canonical age, he sought ordination at the hands of the Bishop of Constance.
It was all perfectly normal and understandable: there was at least one clerical uncle to encourage his nephew, and the priesthood was almost the only career open for a master of arts. There were no seminaries at the beginning of the sixteenth century; the bishop's delegate assured himself that the baptised male applicant knew sufficient Latin and could repeat and understand the creeds, and was competent to say mass, hear confessions and perform the ceremonial duties to which he had in any case been accustomed all his life. Apart from the very youthful and transitory flirtation with the Bernese Dominican fathers, there was for Zwingli no suggestion of entering a cloister. The church almost alone provided a career and an income by which one with scholarly inclinations could hope to pursue his studies.
What was decisively fortunate was that Johann Stucki, the incumbent at Glarus, had died, and the benefice was available for Zwingli. Somewhat unusually, it was the local custom that the people of Glarus, which meant the leading males of the parish, could put forward the name of an accept1 Zwingli claimed in 1523 that he had started to learn Greek 'ten years ago' (Z 11, 147 and note 2), but the reckoning need not be taken too precisely. J. F. G. Goeters, Zwinglis Werdegang ah Erasmianer (Reformation und Humanismus. Robert Stupperich zum 65. Geburtstag.
Witten, 1969), 261.
2 Bullinger Ref. 1, 7 says explicitly that after he became master of arts he turned to theology; and F. Blanke, Zwinglis Theologiestudium (Theologische Blatter, 15. Jg. (Leipzig, 1936) coll.
94-5), notes that he could have studied in the Faculty of Theology for one term (cf. Z v,
719 n. 2), and have attended lectures on the Sentences of Peter Lombard.
3 Z vii, 12 n. 3.
Early years able rector.1 In practice, apparently, the matter was arranged through a kind of broker or intermediary (known in England as 'chopchirche'). It was almost a business transaction and for everyone concerned a perfectly normal start on an ecclesiastical career.
1 The right of the Glarus Gemeinde to choose a priest was asserted by J. M. Schuler, Geschichte des Landes Glarus (Zurich, 1836), 139, on inadequate evidence. Stumpf 2, 11, 187 clearly implies a local choice. Zwingli's 'supplication' to Julius II (4 September 1506) is printed in
ZSK 51 (1957), 34-5.