Geneva's influence rested on people passing through it. Religious refugees arrived in thousands from France, Italy, Spain, England and Scotland, some fleeing persecution and others coming to learn, and the city's printing presses turned out Bibles, psalters and polemic for export. The English exiles produced the Geneva Bible, whose verse numbering, readable type and pointed marginal notes made it the household Bible of English Protestantism for two generations, carried to Scotland and to New England.
The Academy opened in 1559 under Theodore Beza and trained ministers who went back to serve congregations in France and the Netherlands at considerable risk. John Knox, who had preached to the English congregation in the city, called it the most perfect school of Christ since the days of the apostles, a phrase that has followed Geneva ever since.
The hardest fact in the same record is Michael Servetus. A Spanish physician who denied the Trinity and rejected infant baptism, and who had corresponded with Calvin and sent him an annotated copy of his own book, he escaped the Catholic inquisition at Vienne and passed through Geneva, where he was recognised at a sermon, arrested, tried by the city council and burned in October 1553 with his book chained to him. Calvin pressed the prosecution and asked, unsuccessfully, that he be beheaded instead. The execution was approved by other Protestant cities at the time, and it drew from Sebastian Castellio the reply that to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine but simply to kill a man. Geneva put up a monument of expiation in 1903.