December 5, 1525

If Anabaptists in Zurich were disappointed when Balthasar Hubmaier did not make it there to represent them at the disputation on baptism in November, they received more bad news from Waldshut one month later: the city that had been most supportive of Anabaptist reforms had capitulated to the Austrian Habsburgs’ army. Waldshut lay in an area that had been part of the Habsburg family’s ancestral lands, and with the peasant revolts happening earlier in the year, Archduke Ferdinand sent troops to shore up the authority of the local lords who were allied with the family. Understanding that Waldshut’s government had been giving support to the peasant militias, Ferdinand’s army captain had the city in his view for months. Before the troops moved in, Hubmaier called a farewell meeting for the people of the city and then fled. The local people who had embraced his reforms would have to readjust to a restoration of traditional Catholic worship and episcopal hierarchy.

In taking flight, Hubmaier had surely heard of the fate that one other evangelical pastor suffered when the Habsburg army reconquered the town of Griessen on November 4. Hubmaier had journeyed as far as Griessen in his attempt to go to Zurich to participate in the disputation it was hosting on baptism. But with the army’s advance there, he withdrew back to Waldshut. The troops knew Hubmaier was a top prize for them to capture. But in his absence, they targeted other evangelical pastors, such as Johannes Rebmann, whose eyes they gouged out in retaliation for his encouragement of the common people to challenge traditional authorities.¹ Hubmaier could anticipate no less severe treatment if he were to be captured.

Over the ensuing month, the Habsburgs’ troops moved ever closer to Waldshut. In the past, Waldshut might have been able to count on backup military support from Zurich, which had shown solidarity in foreign affairs with other cities and peasant groups undertaking ecclesiastical reforms that were similar to Zwingli’s. But Zwingli was in no mood to see Hubmaier as a reforming ally anymore, despite the theological credibility that Hubmaier’s support had lent to Zwingli’s early reform program. Throughout his reforms of 1524 and early 1525, Zwingli said that he believed Hubmaier was “the kind of man who would have always defended him wherever possible.”² But once Zwingli read Hubmaier’s book on baptism, he viewed Hubmaier as one of his most formidable foes. Even before he read the book, he had heard from other reformers, such as Oecolampadius in Basel, that the newly literate peasants were eagerly reading Hubmaier’s book. It seems to have been a major influence—alongside the evangelism of Grebel, Blaurock, Gross, and Teck—in generating strong interest in Anabaptism in the Grüningen region during the late summer and fall. Thus, Zwingli decided he needed to counter Hubmaier by name in his Answer to him before the November disputation. Regardless of their common concern to keep Ferdinand’s power in southern Germany at a minimum, the Zurich Council no longer viewed Waldshut as worthy of its support as an evangelical ally.³

On November 11, Ferdinand instructed his emissaries to approach the Waldshut Council with terms for peaceful surrender. Among the terms: Waldshut would turn over Hubmaier and four other citizens regarded as ringleaders of peasant unrest. With the offer for surrender, Ferdinand and his local ally, Count Rudolf von Sulz, calculated that they might be able to divide popular opinion about the costs of evangelical reform; the conservatives in the town who disliked the church reforms that Hubmaier had initiated might regain political clout if the people viewed their leadership as helping the town to avoid a deadly battle and the pillaging that would surely come with a military conquest. Indeed, dozens of citizens preferring Catholic traditions left the town thereafter to pledge their loyalty to Rudolf and Ferdinand. The mayor of Waldshut defected as well.⁴

But the majority of the townspeople still appeared to support their pastor and the reform-minded members of the city council. According to a report written for Ferdinand, the Waldshut councilors sent word that it was not willing to surrender their pastor unconditionally; rather, they asked for Hubmaier to be given a hearing to defend “what he had done” as the city’s clerical leader. On December 2 Ferdinand agreed to give Hubmaier safe passage to the University of Tübingen, where he would have a disputation with members of the theological faculty.⁵

But military movement eclipsed theological debate. Over the next two days, Ferdinand’s army approached the city. The Waldshut Council, fearing they had no more time for a negotiated settlement on religion, decided to fold. Hubmaier called a general meeting of the townspeople together at the city hall, where they were informed of the decision. Hubmaier and leading evangelical council members knew to flee the city before the troops were let in. They recommended that others who could not reconcile themselves with the reinstitution of the Roman church’s rituals also leave. One chronicler from a nearby town estimated that more than one hundred men left the city, many with wives and children.⁶

Hubmaier was now a fugitive. He would place his hopes for protection in Zurich—as the territory with the strongest commitment to far-reaching evangelical reform and the strongest stomach for resisting intimidation from imperial diplomats. There would surely be relations to patch up with Zwingli there. But as a man on the run, he knew he was in no position to be choosy.

The subordination of Waldshut to closer Habsburg oversight would also have implications for the town of Hallau, where many of the residents had become convinced Anabaptists after Hans Brötli had arrived there on his exile from Zollikon early in the year. Hallau had been under Waldshut’s protection. Now Brötli and others in the congregation there would see the suppression of their ministries, as well.⁷

With the fall of Waldshut, one model for Anabaptist reformation appeared to be closed—one comfortable with close cooperation with the state to initiate reforms and to gain a leading voice in shaping the civic and religious culture of a territory, but not interested in using governmental coercion to become the sole church in the territory. But the model, which Kirk MacGregor has aptly called a “free state church,” will get a second lease on life when Hubmaier finds a more welcoming refuge than Zurich was willing to provide.⁸

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: Judson Press, 1978), 266. ↩︎
2. Bergsten, 263. ↩︎
3. Ibid, 263-64; H. Wayne Pipkin & John H. Yoder, eds., Balthasar Hubmaier: Theologian of Anabaptism (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1989), 166-68. ↩︎
4. Ibid., 268. ↩︎
5. Ibid., 268-69. ↩︎
6. Ibid., 269. ↩︎
7. Christian Neff, “Brötli, Johannes (before 1494-1528),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1953), at: https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Br%C3%B6tli,_Johannes_(before_1494-1528). ↩︎
8. Kirk R. MacGregor, Hubmaier’s Death and the Threat of a Free State Church.” Church History and Religious Culture 91.3-4 (2011): 321-348. ↩︎