Calvin passed through Geneva in 1536 meaning to stay a night and was confronted by the reformer Guillaume Farel, who told him that God would curse his studies if he preferred them to the work in hand. He stayed, was expelled two years later after a quarrel with the council, spent three years at Strasbourg, and was recalled in 1541.
What he built on returning is the model the Reformed churches exported. The Ecclesiastical Ordinances of 1541 established four offices, pastors, doctors, elders and deacons, and a consistory of ministers and lay elders which met weekly to examine the conduct of the city's inhabitants. Its records survive and show it handling quarrels, drunkenness, absence from sermons and domestic violence, more often with admonition than with punishment. The Academy, founded in 1559, trained ministers who went back into France, Scotland, the Netherlands and beyond, and it is the mechanism by which one small city shaped a continent's Protestantism.
The case that has attached itself to his name is that of Michael Servetus, an antitrinitarian physician already condemned by the Catholic authorities in France, who came to Geneva in 1553, was recognised, tried by the civil magistrates and burned. Calvin pressed the prosecution and asked, unsuccessfully, that the sentence be beheading rather than burning. Most of Protestant Europe approved the execution at the time; Sebastian Castellio attacked it, and his reply, that to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine but to kill a man, is the beginning of the modern argument for toleration. The atlas records the facts and the responses to them.