Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration Before the Enlightenment

6. Religious Coexistence and Confessional Conflict in the Vier Dörfer: Practices of Toleration in Eastern Switzerland, 1525–1615

6 Religious Coexistence and Confessional Conflict in the VierDorfer: Practices of Toleration in Eastern Switzerland, 1525-1615 Randolph C. Head AFTER NEARLY A CENTURY of religious quiet, the prosperous villages of Undervaz, Trimmis, and Zizers outside the city of Chur, Switzerland experienced a series of conflicts about religious confession beginning in 1611 that rapidly escalated to riots, hostile raids from neighboring towns, and vandalism and harassment between the Catholic majority and a minority of Reformed Protestants. Although the villages enjoyed theoretical sovereignty and independence in religious matters, outside parties soon joined the fray, and the bitter dispute was still going more than thirty years later, despite war, plague, famine, and several shifts in the balance of power in the meantime. The villages had tolerated some kinds of religious diversity throughout most of the sixteenth century, and liberty of conscience and liberty of worship never became the key issue at stake during the troubles that followed at the end of the century. Instead, the inhabitants of Undervaz , Trimmis, and Zizers fought about which of several possible sets of social and institutional practices were most appropriate for regulating the terms of their religious coexistence. Before 1600, the dominant pattern had combined local majority rule about which faith to profess with an individual right to abstain from collective worship, and even to attend church elsewhere. Starting after 1600, however, the minority Protestants demanded a proportional share of the 146 The Long Sixteenth Century material and social resources of the villages' churches, thus challenging the terms that had kept the villages peaceful for nearly a century. The final outcome was a bitter stalemate between Catholics and Protestants that continued well into the next century, in which each party tolerated the other in a narrowest sense of the word: each put up, legally and socially, with practices it felt to be an affront to God and an obstacle to desirable communal unity. The conflicts described here were thus not simply matters of tolerance versus intolerance, but rather show how crucial local context is for understanding the meaning of toleration as practiced in any particular society. The study of religious toleration in pre-modern Europe often regards its subject in light of relationships between magistrates who are intent on religious orthodoxy, on the one hand, and dissident groups, whether aminority or a majority of the population, on the other. John Locke's Letter on Toleration, for example, which is sometimes seen as the first systematic defense of toleration in this context, takes it for granted that there is a civil magistrate whose duties are defined in such a way as to limit religiously motivated persecution.1 Certainlythe view that sees the main sourceofpersecution in orthodox princes applies to much of early modern European history, both before and after the Reformation. The Spanish Inquisition's efforts to trace down alleged crypto-Judaismafter the state-ordained expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492 is one clear example, as is the fining of recusants and the execution of priests in Elizabethan England or the expulsion of the Huguenots from France by Louis XIV. In such situations, any call for religious toleration had to explain to the prince why the imposition of religious uniformity was either unchristian,imprudent, or impossible. In other parts of Europe, however, the problems of religious coexistence were more complicated. Despite the principle of "cuius regio, eius religio" that was enshrined at Augsburg in 1555, the Holy Roman Empire presents a quite different situation. Not only was official biconfessionalism established in certain Imperial cities by the ordinance of 1555, but many Catholic, Calvinist, and Lutheran princes had to cope with subjectpopulations of mixed religious adherence, while cities sought to balance economic and political interests against the maintenance of religious uniformity, or at least harmony, at home.2 On the margins of the Empire, from Poland to Switzerland, even more complex constellations developed in the absence of strong central governments and religiously homogeneous populations.3 A historical approach to the issue of toleration should not regard areas like Central Europe, where tolerance or intolerance had to be nego- Head / Practices of Toleration in Eastern Switzerland 147 tiated in light of local circumstances, as atypicalor as deviations from the simple model of the orthodox magistrate and the persecuted minority. To the contrary, analyzing the historical complexities involved not only contributes to a deeper understanding of the real obstacles to both religious uniformity and religious peace...