November 18, 1525

On the same day that Blaurock, Grebel, and Mantz were sentenced to the New Tower in Zurich, several other Anabaptists also received judgments from the Zurich Council:¹

• Margaret Hottinger, a member of the Hottinger family that had been intimately involved in Zwinglian reform and then the Zollikon Anabaptist congregation since their earliest days  
• Martin Linck (Marti Lingg Weninger), a young man from the canton of Schaffhausen who had joined the Anabaptists and moved into the canton of Zurich 
• Michael Sattler, who journeyed to Zurich after leaving his monastery in the Black Forest and must have started meeting with Anabaptists there 
• Ulrich Teck, one of the residents of Waldshut who was baptized by Balthasar Hubmaier but came to Zurich after his expulsion from Waldshut for declining to participate in the city’s militia supporting the Peasants’ Revolt

Teck had been arrested in September in Grüningen along with Jakob Gross, his Anabaptist colleague who had also been banished from Waldshut for declining to support the militia.² They were both likely working in the area in collaboration with Grebel. No records exist about these other individuals’ arrests, so it is difficult to know how long they had been waiting in jail before receiving the Council’s judgment. While Margaret Hottinger had likely become familiar with the prisons of Zurich after her father and several of her brothers had been arrested on account of their Anabaptist activities, this appears to be her first time under arrest herself. It is possible that she was one of the women of Zollikon who refused to pay her fine for being rebaptized when officers attempted to enforce a mandate from the Zurich Council earlier in the spring; the officers sent back a report complaining of several other women, including the wife of Margaret’s relative Wishans Hottinger, who repelled their attempts to collect the fines with “shameful words, as if Milords were doing them an injustice” and “refused to answer whether they intended to pay their fines or not.”³

Since Linck, Teck, and Sattler were all foreigners from outside the canton of Zurich, the Council’s punishment of choice for them was banishment—consistent with its earliest treatment of non-citizens who were involved in the Anabaptist movement. For Sattler, who would have been a recent convert to Anabaptism, no sources survive that indicate he had taken up any leadership role among Anabaptists at this point. The Council’s judgement is, in fact, the first surviving Zurich source that identifies him by name, and its one-line order for his expulsion does not suggest that Sattler was of any special interest to the Council.⁴

Unbeknownst to the Council, though, the three men it banished on this day would each become uniquely effective leaders of the Anabaptist movement in other regions. Sattler journeyed northward again, heading to Strasbourg, where he made a positive impression on the leaders of reform there, even if they did not see eye to eye.⁵ Linck became an evangelist in the cantons of Bern, Solothurn, and Basel into the 1530s.⁶ Teck likely headed to the Aargau region of the canton of Bern but continued to teach clandestinely in the nearby regions of western Zurich.⁷

For Margaret Hottinger, a resident of the canton, the pressure to conform her conscience to the Council’s will was greater. The Council ordered that “she is to be spoken to and asked whether or not she intends to persist in Anabaptism and the teaching of Grebel and Mantz. And if she persists,” it stipulated, “she is to be imprisoned in the Wellenberg. But if she desists, she shall do penance…before she leaves the prison.”⁸ This order came after Hottinger had provided a terse recollection of her involvement in Anabaptist gatherings. “She cannot say who brought her into this affair,” the clerk at her interview recorded in the court notes, “for when Grebel and Mantz came to them in Zollikon and read to them there and spoken of these things, no one had yet accepted baptism.” Although she “accepted baptism” from Blaurock when he arrived in Zollikon, she claimed that she “knows nothing at all of strikes or pacts or schisms.”⁹ Although details are obscured by the clerk’s brief summary, Hottinger’s testimony seemed focused on disavowing aspirations for social or political change in her alliance with Anabaptism. It was, instead, simply a matter of her personal relationship with Christ. This relational orientation is consistent with the testimony that Zollikon resident Hans Murer provided authorities about the winter meeting in his home where Hottinger asked for rebaptism. As Murer recalled, after Blaurock had preached several townspeople “went forward with tears in their eyes and expressed their desire for the sign of baptism.”¹⁰ Margaret was spiritually and emotionally moved to make a personal commitment to follow after Christ.

Margaret now had a choice to make. But unlike her brother, who chose to renounce Anabaptist activities in order to gain his freedom—only to go back to them quite quickly afterward— Margaret chose consistency. She decided to “persist” and headed to the Wellenberg prison, a damp tower in the middle of the Limmat River. She would stay there through the cold winter months until authorities ramped up their pressure all the more in March 1526.¹¹ Her willingness to persist in her faith helps explain why the chronicler Johannes Kessler would later write (despite his opposition to her theology), that she “overcame many obstacles” through her “austere life” and came to be “deeply loved and respected” by her fellow Anabaptists.¹²

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. Judgment of the Zurich Council (Nov. 18, 1525), in The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents, ed. Leland Harder (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1985), 442. ↩︎
2. Landvogt Jörg Berger zu Grüningen an den Rat von Zürich (Sept. 10, 1525), in Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer in der Schweiz, vol. 1, eds. Leonhard von Muralt & Walter Schmid (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1952), 108-09. ↩︎
3. Nachgang über die Bezahlung von Bußen und Stellung von Pfändern (ca. Apr. 16, 1525), in Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer in der Schweiz, vol. 1, eds. Leonhard von Muralt & Walter Schmid (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1952), 77; C. Arnold Snyder and Linda Huebert Hecht, Profiles of Anabaptist Women Sixteenth-Century Reforming Pioneers (Waterloo, ON: Wilfred Laurier University Press, 1996), 44. ↩︎
4. Judgment of the Zurich Council, in Sources, 442. ↩︎
5. John Howard Yoder, The Legacy of Michael Sattler (Scottdale, PA: Herald Press, 1973), 19. ↩︎
6. Samuel Geiser, “Lingg, Martin (16th century),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1957), at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Lingg,_Martin_(16th_century)&oldid=146555. ↩︎
7. Samuel Geiser, “Teck, Ulrich (16th century),” Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online (1959), at https://gameo.org/index.php?title=Teck,_Ulrich_(16th_century)&oldid=145782. ↩︎
8. Judgment of the Zurich Council, in Sources, 442. ↩︎
9. Testimony of Margaret Hottinger, in Sources, 440. ↩︎
10. Testimony of Hans Murer (Feb. 27-March 11, 1525), in Quellen zur Geschichte der Täufer in der Schweiz, vol. 1, eds. Leonhard von Muralt & Walter Schmid (Zürich: Theologischer Verlag, 1952), 58-59. ↩︎
11. Harder, 548. ↩︎
12. Johannes Kessler, Sabbata, quoted in Harder, 548. ↩︎