July 18, 1525

On July 18, 1525, the mayor and city council of Chur, in the eastern Swiss canton of Graubünden, sent a letter to the town council of Zurich with some surprising news: “We have for some time had among us a man named Felix Mantz.” He had “caused much opposition and discord among our people,” they wrote, with his “corner preaching” and the rebaptisms that he had carried out. They noted that they had ordered him to leave their city earlier in the summer, but he nevertheless returned and “behaved as before, despite a public summons and prohibition,” which they had publicly announced in the churches. They therefore had Mantz arrested, and now, after holding him in custody for several days, they were informing the council of Zurich that they were sending him home: “Since we consider him to be a stubborn and defiant person, we have now released him from imprisonment and sent him to you, to whom he belongs and from where he came, with a friendly request that you detain him and keep him with you, so that we may be rid of him and our people may remain more peaceful.”¹

The Chur government’s response to traveling Anabaptist evangelists like Mantz would become very typical among the Swiss cantons and territories in the Holy Roman Empire: expel them and transport them back to the jurisdictions where they had come from. Indeed, the transportation of Mantz to Zurich enacted a kind of reversal of the journey that George Blaurock made in March, when Zurich expelled him and conveyed him to Chur, where he had lived before his residence in Zurich.

The Chur authorities had actually captured both Blaurock and Mantz, but they kept Blaurock in their own prison while sending Mantz home. The Zurich government ended up keeping him in prison until October 1525. Blaurock, on the other hand, soon escaped from the Chur prison, thanks to the help of several friends from outside, and promptly journeyed northward to begin preaching in the Appenzell region, near St. Gall.²

Two months after Blaurock’s transportation to Chur in March, Mantz journeyed there to join him in preaching in the Graubünden region. Earlier in the spring, once he had gained his release from imprisonment with many of the Zollikon Anabaptists, Mantz began moving around Grüningen, the home region of Conrad Grebel, likely working in coordination with Grebel to spread their teachings among the villagers there. But by late May, he joined up with Blaurock in Graubünden instead. It was soon after this time that Grebel had journeyed to Waldshut³ and was joined by Waldshut convert Jakob Gross in evangelizing in Grüningen. Grebel also found a ready assistant in Marx Bosshart, a native of Zollikon, until he (unlike Grebel) responded to a summons from the Zurich Council and was promptly arrested on July 11.⁴ Perhaps these men had strategized that Gross and Bosshart would be a sufficient pair to help Grebel focus on preaching in Grüningen, while Blaurock could use Mantz’s help in the Graubünden.

Simultaneously, then, these men who were once eager debaters of the Scriptures in urban center of Zurich were now all traveling as itinerant preachers in the woods and valleys of the mountainous Swiss countryside. The German term that the Chur council used for itinerant preaching indicated how ordained parish church clergymen and government authorities viewed their activity: they called it winckel predigen,⁵ literally “corner preaching.” In contrast to those clergy who had recognized institutional authority to preach from the center chancel of the parish churches, these men lurked in the corners or fringes of the community, bidding people to come over and hear their dissent or out-of-the-mainstream views. Itinerant preaching became such a concern for Zwingli and the clergy who aligned with him in the Swiss cantons that Zwingli published in mid-summer a tract “On the Office of Preaching.”⁶ In it, he portrayed itinerant preaching as a defining trait of Anabaptism, along with rebaptism—thus identifying it as a key difference between state-supported Christianity and free-church Christianity that would have repercussions in political theory down to the Stuart Restoration in England, the Great Awakening in New England, and the drafting of the American Constitution. An upcoming post in this series will explain why.

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. Chur an Zurich; Auslieferung von Felix Mantz (July 18, 1525), in Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer in der Schweiz, vol. 1, eds. Leonhard von Muralt & Walter Schmid (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1952), 92-93. ↩︎
2. Christian Neff, “Blaurock, Georg (ca. 1492-1529),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1953), at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Blaurock,_Georg_(ca._1492-1529)&oldid=172015. ↩︎
3. Jakob Hottinger to the Zurich Council (June 1525), in The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, ed. Leland Harder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 411-412. ↩︎
4. See Harder, Sources, 412-22. Bosshart was the son-in-law of Ruedi Thomann, who provided a meeting place in his home for early Anabaptist services in Zollikon. Ibid., 530. Along with Bosshart, Zurich also arrested rearrested Fridli Schumacher and Hans Ockenfuss, who had been released in March after agreeing to desist from Anabaptist activities. ↩︎
5. Chur an Zurich, in Quellen I, 92. ↩︎
6. Ulrich Zwingli, “On the Office of Preaching” (June 30, 1525), in Harder, Sources, 385-409. ↩︎