Reformation in Zürich

It led to significant changes in civil life and state matters in Zürich and spread to several other cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy, and thus initiated the Reformation in Switzerland.

Those dominating Zürich supported, in the late European Middle Ages, the then popular mendicant orders by attributing them free plots in the suburbs.

Some local power was also held by the merchants, who had primarily secured the long distance trade outside the Old Swiss Confederacy.

Oswald Myconius, a close friend of Zwingli, was teaching Latin at the Fraumünster cathedral school to the women.

In January 1519 Ulrich Zwingli began at the Grossmünster church to put the Gospel into the center of the mass and to translate the Bible into the German language.

In his publications, he noted corruption in the ecclesiastical hierarchy, promoted clerical marriage, and attacked the use of images in places of worship.

The division between Zwingli and his more radical disciples became apparent in October 1523 on occasion of a disputation when the mass in fact was not changed in practice.

Felix Manz began to publish some of Andreas Karlstadt's writings, but the council had instructed Zwingli to reject infant baptism "until the matter could be resolved."

Katharina von Zimmern (1478-1547),[3] the last abbess of the Fraumünster Abbey and the formal mistress of the city republic of Zürich, supported the peaceful introduction of the reformation.

Maybe more importantly, the abolishment of the monasteries and their enormous property, buildings and estates, and primarily the income taxes by the cantonal farmers, were assigned to an according Amt, a bailiwick of the according administratively functions on behalf of the city's government (Rat), thus also the financial base was established to prosper and to survive the loss of the first generation reformers.

The weekday lectures (Lezgen or Lectiones, literally: lessons) were free of charge for the interested people in the urban and rural areas of the city republic Zürich, by well-learned men.

In addition to theological subjects and Classical languages, in 1541 the natural history department (Conrad Gessner) and in 1731 a political science chair (Johann Jakob Bodmer) were founded, and in 1782 the surgical institute to train medical doctors.