Sacred To

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Switzerland gathers three cities that between them built and spread the Reformed tradition of the Reformation, from open confrontation with the old church to the exiles who carried its discipline abroad.

Zurich came first: Huldrych Zwingli, appointed to the Grossmunster in 1519, led the earliest Reformed reformation, stripping images and organs from the churches and replacing the mass with a memorial supper. Public disputations held before the city council in 1523 made the council itself the arbiter of doctrine, a pattern that shaped Reformed relations with the state ever after, and the radicals who broke with Zwingli over infant baptism formed the first Anabaptist congregation in the city in 1525, and were persecuted there for it.

Geneva became the working model of the same movement after John Calvin settled there in 1536. The Ecclesiastical Ordinances, the Consistory that enforced them and the Academy that trained ministers together made the city a school of doctrine and discipline whose exiles carried it back to Scotland, France, the Netherlands and England; John Knox called it the most perfect school of Christ since the apostles. The execution of Michael Servetus in 1553 for denying the Trinity remains the hardest fact in the same record.

Basel hosted an older argument first, the Council of Basel from 1431 to 1449, which asserted conciliar authority over the pope and split into rival factions, then became a center of Reformation era printing where Erasmus spent his final years, dying there in 1536. In the nineteenth century the Basel Mission carried Protestant missionaries across Africa and Asia, extending the city's religious reach far beyond Switzerland.