Grebel, Manz and Blaurock: the founders of the Swiss Brethren

Christopher asked for biographies of the three men who started the Anabaptist movement in Zurich in 1525: how they learned from Zwingli, why they broke with him, and what they did afterwards (2026-11-07).

Why they matter to this tree.

• Every Swiss line in it descends spiritually from the congregation these three founded: Ramseyer, Neuenschwander, Lehman, Sprunger, Mast, Hochstetler, Mishler and others (1525 First adult baptisms in Zurich).
• Manz’s and Blaurock’s hymns are in the Ausbund, which the Amish ancestors sang and the Amish still sing (1535 Anabaptist prisoners at Passau write the Ausbund hymns).
• None of the three is an ancestor. This is backdrop, so there are no person notes for them (vault rule 9).

At a glance

	Conrad Grebel	Felix Manz	George Blaurock
Born	c.1498, probably Grüningen (Zurich)	c.1498, Zurich	c.1491, Bonaduz (Graubünden)
Background	son of a Zurich patrician, bailiff of Grüningen and council member	born outside marriage to a Grossmünster cleric named Hans Mantz (a canon or a chaplain)	from a Graubünden farming family; Catholic priest, educated at Chur and Leipzig
Education	Zurich Latin school; universities of Basel, Vienna and Paris (no degree)	humanist schooling; Hebrew, Greek and Latin (Paris study claimed but not proven)	Latin school at Chur; seminary of St. Luzi, Chur; University of Leipzig (1513)
Joined Zwingli	1521 (study group)	after 1519; studied Hebrew alongside Zwingli	late 1524 (arrived already married)
Role in 1525	baptized Blaurock, 21 Jan 1525	the meeting was in his mother’s house	asked for baptism first, then baptized the others
Died	summer 1526, Maienfeld (Graubünden), probably of plague	5 Jan 1527, drowned in the Limmat, Zurich	6 Sep 1529, burned at the stake near Klausen (Tyrol)
Writings	69 letters (1517–25), including the 1524 letter to Thomas Müntzer; poems; a pamphlet on baptism	Protestation und Schutzschrift (defence of believers’ baptism to the council); an 18-stanza hymn in the Ausbund	a letter and two hymns from his last weeks, both in the Ausbund

The world that made them ready (c.1490–1525)

Christopher asked (2026-11-07) for the wider political setting of the places each man lived, and for the mood of the age that made them ready to hear Zwingli.

The age they grew up in

All three were born in the 1490s. They grew up in a world that felt unstable, corrupt, and newly open to question:

• Plague and death were normal. Plague came back again and again: Vienna 1518, Paris 1519, Zurich 1519 (Zwingli nearly died that autumn), Grebel’s death in 1526. Late-medieval piety was anxious and centred on death, purgatory and paying for masses for the dead.
• The Church looked like a business.
  • Rome sold indulgences; the great campaign of 1517 to pay for St Peter’s set off Luther.
  • Bishops sold benefices and dispensations.
  • Many parish priests lived openly with women. The Bishop of Constance, whose diocese included Zurich, charged them a fee for each child. Manz was one of those priests’ children.
  • Resentment of clerical wealth, tithes and church courts (“anticlericalism”) ran through town and country.
• Print and the humanists’ “back to the sources”.
  • Printing made books cheap.
  • In 1516 Erasmus published the first printed Greek New Testament, at Froben’s press in Basel.
  • The humanists taught that the corruptions of the present could be judged against the original texts. That one idea, applied to the Church, is the root of everything Grebel and Manz did.
• Luther’s news. The 95 Theses (1517), the Leipzig debate (1519), the burning of the papal bull (1520) and the Diet of Worms (1521) were reported, printed and reprinted in Basel and Zurich within months. Young men like Grebel read them as they appeared.
• Expectation of the end. Many people read the turmoil (the Turks advancing up the Danube, comets, plague, the split Church) as signs that the last days had come. That gave every choice an urgent, all-or-nothing edge.
• Peasants pushing back. Across south Germany and Switzerland, villages demanded relief from tithes, serfdom and lords’ new dues, and the right to choose their own pastors. This climaxed in the German Peasants’ War of 1524–25, in the very months of the first adult baptisms. The Anabaptists drew many followers from villages that were already in revolt (see Plague, Reformation and the Peasants’ War - where the family stands).

Conrad Grebel’s worlds

The Swiss Confederacy.

• Thirteen sovereign cantons, loosely joined, had in practice won independence from the Holy Roman Empire in the Swabian War of 1499, the year after Grebel was born.
• Their wealth and fame came from war. Swiss pikemen were the best infantry in Europe and were hired out to France, the Pope, Milan and the Emperor.
• Leading families took “pensions”, retainers paid by foreign princes, to steer their cantons’ alliances. The Grebels were one such family.
• Mercenary service corrupted politics. Young men came home rich or crippled, or did not come home at all. In September 1515 at Marignano the Swiss were crushed by Francis I of France with thousands dead. Zwingli was there as chaplain to the Glarus troops.
• In 1516 the cantons made a Perpetual Peace with France, and French money flowed. Grebel’s Paris scholarship was part of it.
• Zwingli’s first cause in Zurich was against mercenary service and pensions. Zurich alone refused the French alliance of 1521 and banned pensions in 1522. That is the law Grebel’s father died under in 1526.

Zurich and Grüningen.

• Zurich was a city-state of about 5,000 people, governed by guild masters and patricians through a Small and a Great Council. It also ruled a large countryside through bailiffs.
• Grebel’s father was bailiff of Grüningen, a rural district east of the city, and Conrad grew up in its castle.
• Grüningen’s peasants were among the most restless in Zurich’s territory. They refused tithes and stormed the monastery of Rüti in 1525. In 1525 Grüningen became Grebel’s most successful preaching field, and the castle where he grew up became his prison. (Told in detail below.)

Grüningen in 1525: from tithe revolt to Anabaptist stronghold

The district.

• The bailiwick (Landvogtei) of Grüningen lay in the Zurich Oberland, between Lake Zurich and the hills: 17 castles, 2 religious houses and 13 parishes.
• Zurich acquired it (first as a pledge) in 1408 and ruled it through a bailiff in Grüningen castle. Conrad’s father had held the post, and in 1525 it was held by Jörg Berger.
• Its people were proud of their old rights. In 1489 they had successfully resisted Zurich’s attempt to impose uniform law on them.

Why the anger fell on Rüti.

• The Premonstratensian abbey of Rüti (founded 1206) was the great landlord and church patron of the district. It owned the rights to 14 parish churches, collected their tithes, and appointed and paid their priests.
• The new reform-minded preachers (Prädikanten) in those parishes complained that the abbot was a miser who left them barely enough to live on. In May 1524 the priests of Dürnten and Gossau were in open dispute with him.
• Many preachers took the radical line: Zwingli’s Reformation should be carried through completely, and tithes should be abolished as unbiblical. Their preaching turned the peasants’ grievances against the abbot.
• In the canton as a whole, the Zurich council had already ordered all its monasteries dissolved on 15 November 1524. The abbot of Rüti was a firm opponent of the Reformation and was resisting.

The storming, April–May 1525.

• The trigger: in April 1525 the abbot slipped away secretly, trying to get the abbey’s valuables to Catholic Rapperswil. The peasants found out, chased him and took some of his horses, which they handed to the bailiff. Berger put armed guards in the abbey and reported to Zurich.
• 22–23 April: peasants broke into the abbey and plundered it, the wine cellar included. They also plundered the nearby house of the Knights of St John at Bubikon.
  • When Berger ordered them out, they feared they were too few to hold the abbey and called out the countryside.
  • About 1,200 men gathered at Rüti.
• The 27 articles: with deputies from the Zurich council, Berger persuaded the crowd to go home after they had written their grievances down.
  • Demands: an end to tithes and serfdom, the abolition of many dues, and more freedom for the communes.
  • The fight over the last clause: a radical leader called “the Girenbader” (the bath-keeper of Girenbad) wanted to leave off the closing clause, in which the peasants humbly asked the council to grant what it could “according to the word of God”. Berger forced a vote by show of hands, and the Girenbader got only ten votes.
• The unrest went on. On 12 May Rüti was attacked again. Gossau sent twenty men to a general peasants’ assembly at Kloten, and more assemblies were called at Dürnten and Gossau.
  • Berger advised the council to hold firm and not negotiate further.
  • He had the pastor of Hombrechtikon, who had stirred up the peasants, arrested.
• Zurich’s response:
  • Zurich occupied Rüti and Bubikon. The abbey was formally dissolved in June 1525, and its lands became the Zurich “Amt Rüti”.
  • The council refused the main demands. Tithes stayed, and in late 1525 Grüningen people who refused them were fined. Berger asked that those who gave in be fined five pounds instead of ten, to make peace easier.

From tithe strike to Anabaptism (summer–autumn 1525).

• Not the Anabaptists’ doing: the April rising was not caused by them, though Zurich’s chronicler Bullinger later blamed them for it. It was a tithe revolt fed by the radical wing of Zwingli’s own preachers.
  • Hans Brennwald, pastor of Hinwil, preached hard against tithes and joined the march on Rüti, but rejected rebaptism.
  • To counter it, he began a register of baptisms. Its first entry is dated 3 July 1525, one of the earliest parish baptism registers in Switzerland. Baptism registers made it possible to see who was not having their children baptized. The Bern registers in the family archive, begun after 1528, served the same control.
• Grebel arrives: on 2 July 1525 Grebel preached at Hinwil. The villages that had just been refused relief from tithes were ready to hear that the Church itself had to be rebuilt from the Bible.
  • The local preachers began to lean towards the Anabaptists after contact with him.
  • Even the Girenbader went over to the baptizers.
• The request for a hearing: in September people baptized in the district asked for a court hearing or a public disputation to defend their baptism. The district’s twelve judges at first approved the fines, then agreed.

The arrests at Hinwil, 8 October 1525. Berger’s own report to the council describes the scene:

• Blaurock (“Jörg vom Haus Jakob, called Blaurock”) took over the pulpit of Hinwil church on Sunday morning. The pastor rode to Grüningen to complain.
• Berger rode over to arrest Blaurock, but the people of Hinwil refused to help. He and his servant had to act alone, with the crowd following them.
• Blaurock began to sing, and the people wanted to hold an assembly. Grebel and Manz were there too and tried to address the crowd. Berger: “and I was astonished at them.”
• He fetched men from a nearby village, who caught Grebel. Manz escaped (he was found again on 31 October).
• Grebel and Blaurock were taken up to Grüningen castle, where Grebel had grown up. Berger: “and [we] had a strange day.”

What followed.

• A disputation: Berger advised that only a disputation would calm the district. Zurich held one on 6–8 November 1525, with twelve observers from Grüningen. Zwingli was declared the winner. The Anabaptists complained that he did not let “honest folk get a word in”.
• Imprisonment: Grebel, Manz and Blaurock were sentenced in Zurich to prison on bread and water.
  • On 7 March 1526 the council made rebaptism punishable by drowning.
  • On 21 March 1526 they escaped from the tower, and probably went back to Grüningen.
• The district stayed loyal to them: Grüningen remained an Anabaptist stronghold for years. The movement drew deep support there, and its people complained into 1527 that Zwingli “chokes a poor fellow’s words in his throat”.

Why it matters for the family story.

• Rural tithe-payers, quarrels with absentee church landlords, a demand for communes to run their own churches, and a bailiff trying to keep order: this is the pattern that repeated in the Bernese Emmental and Oberland. Most of the family’s Anabaptist ancestors came from there.

Sources for this section:

• “Jörg Berger (Schluss)”, Zwingliana, PDF. Based on Berger’s letters in the Zurich State Archives (Egli, Aktensammlung zur Geschichte der Zürcher Reformation, nos. 539–1209).
• German Wikipedia: Herrschaft Grüningen, Kloster Rüti, Ritterhaus Bubikon.
• NZZ: “Täufer und Bauernrevolte: warum 1525 für Zürich ein Schicksalsjahr war” (summary via search; the abbot’s flight, 23 April, the June dissolution).
• Hinwilpedia: Reformation (the peasants’ assembly at Rüti on 25 April).
• Sattler College: “Grebel and Blaurock are arrested at congregational services, while Mantz escapes arrest”.
• Classic study: Hans Nabholz, Die Bauernbewegung in der Ostschweiz 1524–25 (1898).

Basel, Vienna and Paris (1514–1520).

• Basel was the publishing capital of humanism, home of Froben and of Erasmus himself.
• Vienna was the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian I’s university town. In the summer Grebel arrived, 1515, Maximilian staged the Congress of Vienna, the double wedding that later brought Bohemia and Hungary to the Habsburgs. The Swiss circle there, around Vadian, was humanist and reform-minded.
• Paris was the capital of Francis I, the victor of Marignano, at the height of his power.
  • The king had just won wide control over the French Church from the Pope in the Concordat of Bologna (1516).
  • The Sorbonne’s theology faculty was the conservative heart of Catholic learning. It condemned Luther in 1521, the year after Grebel left.

Felix Manz’s world

A priest’s son in a church town.

• Zurich’s Grossmünster was a collegiate church run by a chapter of canons, with chaplains living in “benefice houses” in the streets around it. Manz’s mother lived on one of those streets.
• Clerical concubinage was so common that it was taxed rather than punished. Zwingli himself had a scandal at Einsiedeln over a barber’s daughter. In 1522 he petitioned the bishop to let priests marry, and that year he secretly married the widow Anna Reinhart.
• For a clever boy like Manz, born to a priest, the Church offered an education but no legitimate place. The reformers’ attack on celibacy and on the clergy’s privileges was personal to him.

The artisan circle.

• The movement in Zurich was not only scholars. Its rank and file were craftsmen: the bakers Heinrich Aberli and Bartlime Pur, the weaver Lorenz Hochrütiner, and others.
• They met in the Castelberger reading circle, Bible classes led by the bookseller Andreas Castelberger.
• They were the men who in 1522 broke the Lenten fast at the printer Froschauer’s house (the “Affair of the Sausages”), interrupted friars’ sermons, and smashed images in 1523.
• To them Zwingli’s preaching was a call to act now, not when the council was ready. Manz’s Bible school in his mother’s house belonged to this world.

Zurich’s politics, 1519–1525.

• The council decided. Zwingli’s Reformation went forward by public disputations (January and October 1523, and the January 1525 debate on baptism), after which the council decided what was biblical and binding.
• The radicals’ objection: that model, with the city council as the final judge of faith, is what Manz and Grebel rejected. Once the council had ruled on baptism, the Anabaptists were not just dissenters but lawbreakers.
• The penalty: in March 1526 the council made rebaptism punishable by death.

George Blaurock’s worlds

Graubünden: the Free State of the Three Leagues.

• Blaurock’s homeland was not then part of the Confederacy but an ally of it: a federation of three leagues (the Grey League, the League of God’s House and the League of the Ten Jurisdictions).
• It was made up of largely self-governing valley communes, among the most democratic polities in Europe.
• Its chief lord was the Bishop of Chur, and the communes were busy stripping him of power. The Ilanz Articles of 1524 and 1526 took away much of his secular authority, cut tithes and church dues, and gave each commune the right to choose and dismiss its own pastor.
• Blaurock, a village vicar in those years, came from a culture where the local community, not the bishop, decided church matters. The Anabaptist idea of a congregation that governs itself was natural to him.

Leipzig (1513).

• Leipzig belonged to Duke George of Saxony, a firm Catholic. It was a strong scholastic university.
• Blaurock studied there four years before the 95 Theses. Luther’s famous debate with Johann Eck took place there in 1519, after he had gone home.

Tyrol (1527–1529).

• After his banishment from Switzerland, Blaurock went into the County of Tyrol, ruled by the Habsburg Archduke Ferdinand, brother of Emperor Charles V.
• Mining wealth: the silver and copper mines around Schwaz, financed by the Fuggers, drew thousands of miners, who were mobile, literate and receptive to new preaching.
• Revolt: in 1525 the Tyrolean peasants and miners rose under Michael Gaismair, who dreamed of a Christian peasant republic. Gaismair had been in contact with the ideas of Manz and Blaurock. The revolt was put down, and the Habsburgs then treated any lay religious movement as rebellion.
• Persecution: Ferdinand’s mandates against the Anabaptists from 1527 made the Tyrol one of the deadliest places in Europe to be one. Hundreds were executed.
• Klausen, where Blaurock was burned in 1529, lay in the Eisack valley, in lands of the Prince-Bishop of Brixen.
• The Tyrolean congregations Blaurock led went on, under Jakob Hutter, to become the Hutterites.

Why they were ready to hear Zwingli

1. The humanist method. All three were schooled in “back to the sources”. Zwingli gave them that method applied to the Bible itself: preaching straight through Matthew in 1519, Greek and Hebrew study from 1521.
2. A Church they already distrusted.
   • Manz: a priest’s son.
   • Blaurock: a village priest who had broken his vow of celibacy.
   • Grebel: a patrician’s son who had watched his family take church and foreign money.
   • All three saw the old Church’s corruption up close.
3. The Swiss habit of communal self-rule. Whether in Zurich’s guilds, Grüningen’s villages or the Grisons’ communes, people expected the community to decide. The radicals simply extended that from the town to the congregation of believers.
4. The mercenary crisis. Zwingli’s preaching against the pension system and the slaughter at Marignano gave his reform a moral and patriotic edge. The Anabaptists carried it further: no sword at all, for any master.
5. Urgency. In plague, the Turkish advance, the peasants’ rising and the sense of the last days, waiting for a city council to set the pace looked like faithlessness.

Sources for this section:

• German Wikipedia: Konrad Grebel, Felix Manz, Jörg Blaurock
• Wikipedia: Swabian War · Battle of Marignano · Swiss mercenaries · Affair of the Sausages · Three Leagues · Michael Gaismair · German Peasants’ War · Novum Instrumentum omne (Erasmus’s Greek New Testament) · Concordat of Bologna · First Congress of Vienna (1515)
• Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz: Ilanzer Artikel · Pensionen · Grüningen
• Vault: 1519 Zwingli begins the Zurich Reformation, 1528 Bern adopts the Reformation and outlaws Anabaptists, Plague, Reformation and the Peasants’ War - where the family stands

Learning from Zwingli (1519–1523)

Zwingli’s Zurich.

• Huldrych Zwingli came to the Grossmünster in Zurich on 1 January 1519 (1519 Zwingli begins the Zurich Reformation).
• He preached straight through the Gospel of Matthew, verse by verse, instead of following the Church’s set readings. Scripture was his only authority.
• He drew a circle of bright young humanists.

The study group (from 1521).

• Zwingli taught them to read the Bible in its own languages: the Greek New Testament (Erasmus’s new edition), the Hebrew Old Testament and the Latin classics.
• Grebel and Manz met here and became close friends.
• What they learned:
  • The method: go to the text, and judge every church practice by it.
  • The conviction: anything without biblical grounds (the Mass, images, fasting rules, tithes) should go.
• After his conversion in 1522, Grebel became one of Zwingli’s most eager supporters.

The break: the Second Disputation, October 1523.

• Zwingli argued in public that the Mass and images were unbiblical. When the city council would not yet abolish them, he left the timing to the council and went on saying Mass until it was abolished in 1525.
• To Grebel and Manz this was obeying men rather than God. Their view was that the church should be a gathered community of committed believers, not the whole population of a city run by its magistrates.
• From that question everything else followed. Infant baptism made every newborn a church member, so it had to go too.
• Zwingli himself admitted in 1525 that he had once leaned the same way on infant baptism, before deciding it was needed for a Christian city.

1524: looking for allies.

• About fifteen men met for Bible study outside the official church.
• Grebel wrote to Andreas Karlstadt, Martin Luther, and in September 1524 to Thomas Müntzer. He agreed with Müntzer against Luther but urged him not to take up the sword. That is an early statement of Anabaptist nonresistance. The letter never reached Müntzer.
• Some parents, Grebel among them, stopped having their babies baptized. Grebel’s newest child was not: English Wikipedia names her Isabella, German Wikipedia lists his children as Theophil (1522), Josua (1523) and Rachel (1525).
• Manz submitted his Protestation und Schutzschrift to the council.

January 1525.

• 17 January: a public disputation on baptism. The council declared Zwingli the winner, banned the group’s meetings, and ordered all unbaptized infants baptized within eight days, on pain of exile.
• 21 January: the group met anyway, at the house of Felix Manz’s mother near the Grossmünster. After prayer, Blaurock asked Grebel to baptize him on confession of faith. He then baptized the others.
• They promised to live as disciples, separated from the world. That evening is counted as the founding of Anabaptism.
• Within days a congregation formed in the farming village of Zollikon, the first Anabaptist congregation.

Conrad Grebel (c.1498–1526)

Life before Zwingli.

• Grebel was a patrician’s son. His father, Junker (Hans) Jakob Grebel, was the bailiff (Landvogt) of Grüningen, and Conrad grew up in Grüningen castle. In 1525 he would be held prisoner in the same castle.
• The family moved to Zurich in 1511. Jakob sat on the Small Council and represented Zurich at the federal Diet more than 30 times in 1521–25. He was open to reform but opposed Zwingli. He was executed in 1526 on a charge of taking foreign pensions, probably unjustly.
• He studied at Basel under the humanist Glarean (Heinrich Loriti), at Vienna, where he became a friend of Joachim Vadian of St. Gall, and at Paris. He ran wild in Paris and left with no degree when his father cut off his money. (The Paris years are told in detail below.)
• He married on 6 Feb 1522 against his family’s wishes, and was converted that spring.

The student years, 1514–1520: Basel, Vienna and Paris

Basel (1514–15).

• In October 1514, about 16, Grebel enrolled at the University of Basel. Erasmus was in the city that winter.
• Arts students had to live in a supervised boarding house (bursa). Grebel chose the one run by the Swiss humanist Glarean.

Vienna (1515–18).

• His father obtained an imperial stipend from Emperor Maximilian, and Grebel spent three years at Vienna.
• There he joined the circle of Swiss students around Joachim Vadian, the humanist professor from St. Gall. Vadian became his “dearest teacher and most faithful friend”. About 56 letters from Grebel to him survive.
• Vadian married Grebel’s sister Martha in 1519, so Grebel’s mentor became his brother-in-law.
• In June 1518, with plague in Vienna, Vadian went home to St. Gall and Grebel left with him, his studies unfinished.

Paris (autumn 1518 to 1520).

• The scholarship: his father secured one of the French king’s scholarships for Swiss students. One account says the king gave only two to each canton; they were part of the money France paid the Swiss under their 1516 peace and alliance.
• Lodging: in September 1518 Grebel went to Paris and again lodged in Glarean’s bursa, which had moved there.
• The falling-out with Glarean:
  • The two quarrelled within months, and Grebel left or was put out of the house.
  • One account says the quarrel was so bitter that Glarean left Paris for a year. That account is secondary and unchecked.
• The brawls:
  • Grebel was involved in fights with other students.
  • In one street fight, Swiss students from Glarean’s house beat two Parisians to death, shortly before Grebel’s dismissal from the bursa.
  • No source found says Grebel himself killed anyone. These accounts are secondary; the details are in his letters (see below).
• Plague: in summer 1519 plague closed Paris and the students had to leave the city for about six months.
• Illness: his health broke down. His own letters keep mentioning an illness that the sources do not name. Some writers blame his “loose living”; none names the disease for certain.
• Money and debts:
  • Reports of his conduct reached Zurich. His father cut off his allowance and ordered him home.
  • Vadian threatened to end their friendship.
  • Most English accounts date his return to Zurich to summer 1520; one says 1519, and German Wikipedia says about 1521.
  • He then worked for about two months as a proofreader for the printer Andreas Cratander in Basel, before going back to Zurich.
• What it added up to: six years at three of Europe’s best universities, and no degree.

Back in Zurich (1520–22). Grebel was in his early twenties, in debt, unwell, and at odds with his parents.

• What he had gained: good Latin, Greek and probably some Hebrew, and a humanist’s habit of going back to the original sources.
• Religion: nothing in his letters yet shows any concern with it.
• Zwingli: in 1521 he joined Zwingli’s Bible study group.
• Marriage: on 6 February 1522 he married a woman named Barbara, whose family name is unknown. She was probably a novice at the Dominican convent of Oetenbach in Zurich, where one of Grebel’s sisters was a nun, and she was already pregnant.
  • His parents were unhappy with the match but took the couple in. The young family lived in the Grebel house until 1524.
• Conversion: that spring he went through the conversion his later letters describe.
• His father’s fate: Junker Jakob Grebel was beheaded in Zurich on 30 October 1526 for secretly taking foreign pensions. Zwingli had campaigned hard against such pensions. Some historians link the charge partly to money received for Conrad’s studies; that link is reported, not checked here.

A historian’s view. The German historian Hans-Jürgen Goertz calls Grebel’s a “provisional life”:

• restless and intemperate;
• quick to break with people: his teachers, his parents, Glarean, Vadian and finally Zwingli;
• unable to settle into a career.
• Goertz’s point is that the zeal of the convert and the impatience of the dropout were the same temperament.

Sources for this section:

• Wikipedia: Conrad Grebel, “Education”.
• Leben: Conrad Grebel, a son of the Reformation and the father of the Anabaptists: the royal scholarship, the Glarean quarrel, the plague, Vadian’s threat.
• Amish Mennonite in Europe blog: Conrad Grebel, founder of the Anabaptists: the brawl that killed two Parisians, and the dismissal.
• Plough: Conrad Grebel: return in 1519.
• Hans-Jürgen Goertz, “Conrad Grebel – A Provisional Life”, Conrad Grebel Review 17:3 (1999).
• Best primary source: Grebel’s own letters to Vadian, 1517–1525, in English translation in Leland Harder, ed., The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents (Herald Press, 1985). The Paris letters are there in full.

After 1525.

• Too well known to work in Zurich, Grebel took the movement on the road:
  • Schaffhausen in February 1525, where he baptized Wolfgang Ulimann of St. Gall in the Rhine.
  • St. Gall, where he and Ulimann preached to large crowds in the spring.
  • The Grüningen district in the summer.
• He was arrested in October 1525. In prison he wrote a defence of believers’ baptism.
• He escaped in March 1526, got his pamphlet printed, and went to Maienfeld in Graubünden, where his sister lived.
• He died there in the summer of 1526, aged about 28, probably of plague. His ministry as an Anabaptist lasted about 18 months.

Legacy.

• His letters are the main record of how the movement was born.
• Conrad Grebel University College (Waterloo, Ontario) is named after him. A plaque marks his family’s house at Neumarkt 5, Zurich.

Felix Manz (c.1498–1527)

Life before 1525.

• A chronicle calls Manz the son of “Hanns Mantz the canon”. That was either Johannes Mantz, provost of the Grossmünster, or a chaplain of the same name. Either way he was a priest’s son, born outside marriage, which shut him out of a church career.
• Whether he studied at Paris is disputed. His application for a scholarship survives, but his name is not on the lists of Swiss students there.
• He studied Hebrew alongside Zwingli under the scholar Johann Böschenstein. He later ran a small Bible school in his mother’s house, teaching the Old Testament and basic Hebrew.
• He was the best linguist of the group, at home in Hebrew, Greek and Latin.
• He followed Zwingli from 1519 and studied with him from 1521.

After 1525.

• Manz translated scripture and his own writings into everyday German and preached across the countryside, often with Blaurock.
• He was arrested again and again. With Blaurock he was taken while preaching in the Grüningen district and held in the Wellenberg, the prison tower in the Limmat.
• On 7 March 1526 the Zurich council made rebaptizing punishable by drowning: a mock “third baptism”.

Death.

• On 5 January 1527 Manz became the first Anabaptist executed by a Protestant government (1527 Schleitheim Confession and the drowning of Felix Manz).
• He was taken by boat into the Limmat, bound with a pole behind his knees, and drowned. His mother and brother called to him from the bank to stand firm.
• His last words are recorded as “Into thy hands, O God, I commend my spirit.”

Legacy.

• His 18-stanza hymn of praise is in the Ausbund.
• A plaque at the Schipfe on the Limmat in Zurich, put up in 2004, remembers the Anabaptists drowned there. The Zurich Reformed Church took part in a public act of reconciliation with the Mennonites that year.

George Blaurock (c.1491–1529)

Life before Zurich.

• His real name was Jörg Cajacob (“George of the House of Jacob”), son of a farmer, Luzi Cajacob, of Bonaduz in the Grisons.
• He went to the Latin school at Chur, trained for the priesthood at the seminary of the St. Luzi monastery there, and enrolled at Leipzig in 1513.
• By 1516 he was vicar of Trin, a village west of Chur. He was a secular priest, not a monk, as is often said.
• By 1524 he had joined the reform movement, given up celibacy and married. Late in 1524 he came to Zurich with his wife to see Zwingli. Disappointed by their talks, he joined Grebel and Manz.
• “Blaurock” was a nickname. At the baptism disputation of 17 January 1525 he spoke up from the audience. Someone asked who the speaker was and got the answer “the one in the blue coat” (der im blauen Rock).
• He was a fiery, physically bold preacher. In 1525 he interrupted a sermon at Zollikon to ask what the preacher was doing there.

After 1525.

• Blaurock worked alongside Manz until the drowning. On the same day he was stripped to the waist, beaten through the streets of Zurich, and banished for good.
• He kept preaching around Switzerland: Bern, Biel, the Grisons and Appenzell. Biel is next to Pieterlen, the Sprungers’ parish.
• After his fourth banishment, in April 1527, he left Switzerland for the County of Tyrol.
• In 1529 he took over the church in the Adige valley after its pastor, Michael Kürschner, was burned. He baptized many and founded congregations whose shared living fed into the later Hutterites.

Death.

• He was arrested in August 1529 with Hans Langegger, tortured, and burned at the stake near Klausen on 6 September 1529.

Legacy.

• Two hymns he wrote in prison, Gott führt ein recht Gericht and Gott, dich will ich loben, are in the Ausbund.

What happened next

• February 1527: the Schleitheim Confession gave the scattered Swiss Brethren a shared order: believers’ baptism, the ban, the Lord’s Supper, separation from the world, pastors, nonresistance, no oaths. It was drafted by Michael Sattler, burned that May.
• 1528: Bern adopted the Reformation and outlawed the Anabaptists (1528 Bern adopts the Reformation and outlaws Anabaptists). Their history from here on is the history of the family’s Emmental and Oberland ancestors.
• 1693: the Amish split from the Swiss Brethren (1693 The Amish split). They kept Schleitheim’s strict separation, and still sing Manz’s and Blaurock’s hymns.

Links

• Wikipedia: Conrad Grebel · Felix Manz · George Blaurock
• GAMEO (Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia): Grebel, Conrad · Manz, Felix · Blaurock, Georg
• Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz: search “Grebel” · search “Manz” · search “Blaurock” (article numbers not checked)
• Further reading:
  • Leland Harder, ed., The Sources of Swiss Anabaptism: The Grebel Letters and Related Documents (1985)
  • Harold S. Bender, Conrad Grebel (1950)
  • William R. Estep, The Anabaptist Story

Record compiled 7 November 2026.

About this research

Supporting documentation is linked throughout. This project is an exercise in AI-assisted research and development, and I haven’t manually verified every link or conclusion. All transcriptions and translations of Swiss parish records were made with AI, and their accuracy should be treated accordingly.