Reformation in Zürich

The Reformation in Zürich was promoted initially by Huldrych Zwingli, who gained the support of the magistrates of the city of Zürich and the princess abbess Katharina von Zimmern of the Fraumünster Abbey, and the population of the city of Zürich and agriculture-oriented population of the present Canton of Zürich in the early 1520s. It led to significant changes in civil life and state matters in Zürich and spread to several other cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy, and thus initiated the Reformation in Switzerland.

The city of Zürich, then mainly dominated by the ancient families of Zürich and the guild representatives in the Kleiner Rat (the executive) and Grosser Rat – after about the 1490s mainly an equivalent of present-day committees to assist – supported in the late European Middle Ages the then popular mendicant orders by attributing them free plots in the suburbs and asked to support the construction of the city wall in return, and the city's fortification those construction began in the late 11th or 12th century and further on.Fraumünster Abbey was established in 873 AD, and its abbesses were imperial representans, i.e. de facto the mistresses of the city republic of Zürich to 1524 AD.

Memorial measurements in Zürich usually had to be held until the 14th century at Grossmünster, because thus the most income was achieved. Until the Reformation in Switzerland, all income obtained with the funerals had also to be delivered to the main parish church. Within the city, the mendicant orders, namely Predigerkloster and Augustinerkloster in the 15th-century have been reduced to the function of area pastors, thus the orders supported regime of the Guilds of Zürich.

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