The traditional idea according to which there is an intrinsic connection between the ‘Reformed Churches’ led by the likes of Zwingli, Bucer or Oecolampadius and the Anabaptists is broadly correct. Switzerland, south Germany and the Netherlands were the home territories of both Reformed and Anabaptists, while Anabaptists and other nonconformists were less prominent in Lutheran lands. Lutheran churches tended to be organised by secular rulers, while in Zurich, Strassburg and Basel long-established structures of guild government legitimised the popular pressure that accompanied the Reformation. It was easier to establish nonconformist conventicles where the commoner’s initiative in the church could not be totally denied than in places where he was expected to be an obedient subject in this as in all other matters. The communal elements in the ‘Zwinglian’ version of the Reformation made it generate ‘sects’ in a way that authoritarian Lutheranism did not. To this extent the old debate about whether Anabaptism began in Saxony in 1521 or in Zurich in 1525 was correctly settled in favour of Zurich.

Religious radicalism, however, was endemic in all regions of the early Reformation, in the years between the Diet of Worms (1521) and the Peasants’ War (1525). During this time the princes who later organised Lutheran territorial churches still evaded responsibility for the Reformation. To fill the vacuum created by the interacting conservatism of Luther and the princes, radical figures like Andreas Carlstadt and Thomas Müntzer took the lead in implementing changes in religious practice and articulating a non-Lutheran theology. They made it a matter of principle that there should be no ‘tarrying for the magistrate’ in the reform of the church.