7 - The Swiss Confederation in the Age of John Calvin

Summary

The Swiss Confederation remained an enigma for the Frenchman John Calvin, and with good reason.¹ This collection of territories was a unique and rather confusing political and cultural entity that had emerged piecemeal in the late Middle Ages. The very term Swiss, which makes sense to modern ears, hardly applied in the sixteenth century in a place where there was little sense of national identity.² Humanists had begun to valorize Helvetia, and the wars against the Habsburgs and the Burgundians had done much to incite forms of patriotism, but loyalties remained largely local. Huldrych Zwingli had embraced a sense of the Swiss as the elect people of God, and even the young Heinrich Bullinger wrote of his countrymen as the Israelites of the covenant. The reality, however, was much less harmonious. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the newly expanded Confederation (with the addition of Basel and Schaffhausen) was a collection of 13 members bound by a series of alliances but divided by internal tensions. Not least was the problem posed by Zurich, which during the previous century had made repeated, and unsuccessful, attempts to expand its hegemonic interests.³