By 1529, the Protestant Reformation had major strongholds in both Germany and Switzerland, one of them being Zurich, where Zwingli was effectively both temporal and spiritual leader. Most reformers were content with being the power behind the throne (or civil power) but Zwingli was more content to be seen to be wielding the power: Zurich was to be a theocracy. Zwingli’s theology is now seen as fairly complex in detail, but for contemporaries, what really mattered was that he had come independently to the same conclusions about the state of the Church as Luther, and he quickly acquired a large following in Zurich, his influence spreading rapidly to several other Swiss cantons.
There was, however, a bitter difference between the two men over the nature of the Last Supper and the meaning of Holy Communion: Luther believed Christ was present during communion, whereas Zwingli saw communion as a memorial ceremony. Philip, Landgrave of Hesse – like many Protestant secular leaders – believed it would be a very good thing if the two great reformers could meet and settle their differences, thus establishing a united front of Protestant states against the Catholic menace.
Philip organised a meeting which was held at Marburg in 1529. The meeting was a disaster. Luther was never a trimmer (see 1521: Martin Luther and Frederick the Wise see each other at the Diet of Worms) and was in no mood to compromise his beliefs for the sake of an earthly alliance, especially one forcing him to embrace the views of a ‘fanatic’, as he called him, like Zwingli. For his part, Zwingli saw Luther as still essentially wedded to Catholic doctrine, a man unwilling to see where his arguments necessarily led. They didn’t agree, and didn’t like each other (Luther later went so far as to call Zwingli a ‘devil’). There was to be no alliance of the disparate German and Swiss states.
What Happened Next
Marburg was a political, spiritual and intellectual failure, but led directly to the Augsburg Confession of 1530, which was presented to the Emperor Charles V. The Augsburg Confession – the primary Lutheran confession of faith – solved the Marburg problem by getting Luther to write the confession but not taking him to Augsburg (he was kept secure at Coburg castle). Charles V had many problems at this time: his own army of Spanish Catholics and German Lutherans had sacked Rome itself in an orgy of rape and murder in 1527, and the Ottomans were encroaching on the empire; the Turks had besieged Vienna just a few months previously. In 1531, matters were simplified a bit when Zwingli fell in battle against the Catholic cantons. The future of Protestantism in Switzerland was to lie with neither Zwingli nor Luther, but with Calvin (see 1553: Calvin denounces Michael Servetus).