Mid-April, 1526

April 10 was Easter Sunday in 1526, and it was during Holy Week beforehand that Zurich’s leading clergy prepared for Hubmaier’s departure from their canton.  On April 6, he received release from his prison cell in the Wellenburg tower after he reiterated his willingness to recant from his position on baptism and to discontinue relations with other Anabaptists. One week later, he performed the tasks of public recantation that he failed to do properly back in December.  The Zurich Council now required him to give an oral retraction of his doctrines of baptism in the two most prominent churches in the city—the Grossmünster and Fraumünster—as well as in a parish church in Gossau, a town in the Grüningen district of the canton where Grebel and other Anabaptist evangelists had cultivated a strong following. The location of this third recantation was surely designed to demoralize the rural adherents of Anabaptism here, where Hubmaier’s tract on baptism had been circulating. Hubmaier completed the city recantations by April 15 and was taken to Gossau a few days afterward to complete the third.¹ 

Upon winning a pledge from Hubmaier never to enter Zurich’s territory again, Zurich officers then followed through on Zwingli’s proposal to convey Hubmaier secretly out of the canton’s territory. They took him northward, but they did not place him into Habsburg territory surrounding Waldshut, where Hubmaier was a “wanted” man. Instead, they delivered him to the city of Konstanz (Constance), which was a “free imperial city” with its own governance. The town council there had begun to adopt evangelical reforms largely aligned with Zwinglian positions. But they were willing to provide Hubmaier refuge in order to take him off of Zurich’s hands. This act of coordination was a testament that reforming town councilors and pastors in the early years of the evangelical movement typically viewed each other as sufficiently on the “same team” that they protected each other from Catholic rulers; since they were trying to work out their visions of what church reform should look like in these very years, many of them, like Konstanz’s reformed clergy, were willing to give time for men whom they did not entirely agree with—like Hubmaier—to form and re-form their views through debate.  

Konstanz’s leading evangelical cleric, Ambrosius Blaurer, empathized with Zwingli’s exasperation with the Anabaptists, but he believed unity should be achieved by continuing efforts at indoctrination, and banishment of dissidents when teaching and discussion failed.  He did not agree with the increasing harshness of Zurich’s corporal punishments for Anabaptists.² Perhaps he hoped that Hubmaier would eventually align himself with his own visions of reform after enjoying the hospitality of Konstanz’s clergy. Moreover, since Konstanz was hosting a large contingent of evangelicals who had fled Waldshut when it fell to the Habsburgs, he likely hoped Hubmaier would lead them into alignment with the church in Konstanz, despite their earlier embrace of rebaptism.

But Blaurer and other clergymen apparently soon got the impression that Hubmaier was not malleable to the Reformed consensus emerging among them and the Konstanz city council: he did not sound like the person who had admitted error about his teaching on baptism just a few days earlier. One of them reported back to Zwingli some of the comments that Hubmaier made in Konstanz about his time in Zurich. Zwingli reflected his feelings about what he learned in a letter that he wrote to a follower a few months later: “with how great generosity we treated the fellow and with what treachery he responded.  For as soon as he reached Constance he so calumniated me before the ministers of the Word and boasted of his victory that I do not know but he turned some of them against me.” Zwingli considered Hubmaier to be a man in search of social prominence, something he could gain if he could find a secure city where he could be the leading reformer as he was in Waldshut. “I see in him…nothing more than an immoderate thirst for money and notoriety,” Zwingli wrote, predicting that Hubmaier would keep journeying on till he found the leadership he craved. “May the Omnipotent extinguish by celestial dew this desire for glory which glows in the hearts of some!”³ 

In any case, the Konstanz clergy did not get a good enough impression of Hubmaier to conclude that his presence would have a unifying effect upon their reform program. By the start of May, he moved onward—toward Augsburg⁴—in search of a territory whose rulers would want him to lead their reformation. Surprisingly, he would find one by summertime, presenting Anabaptism with the opportunity, for the first time, to be privileged as a state church. That opportunity would, in turn, present Anabaptists with a great test of doctrine about whether the church the apostles founded was always meant to be a free church or not.

About This Series

This post is part of a series entitled “The Reformation at 500: Timeline of the Free-Church Movement.” Click here for more information on this series.

Featured image courtesy of the Wick’sche Sammlung, ca. 1575, Zentralbibliothek Zurich, Ms. F 23, fol. 294.

1. Torsten Bergsten. Balthasar Hubmaier: Anabaptist Theologian and Martyr, ed. W. R. Estep Jr. (Valley Forge, PA: Judson Press, 1978), 308. ↩︎
2. Christian Hege, “Blaurer, Ambrosius (1492-1564),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1953), at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Blaurer,_Ambrosius_(1492-1564)&oldid=143963. ↩︎
3. Ulrich Zwingli to Peter Gynoraeus (Zurich, Aug. 31, 1526), in Huldreich Zwingli: The Reformer of German Switzerland, 1484-1531, 2nd ed. rev., ed. Samuel Macauley Jackson (New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1903), 250. ↩︎
4. Bergsten, 309. ↩︎