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. Prologue At the time of the reformation, the city of Zürich was mainly dominated by the ancient families of Zürich and the guild representatives in the Kleiner Rat and Grosser Rat. The Kleiner Rat was equivalent to the executive branch of government. After about the 1490s, the Grosser Rat was mainly an equivalent of present-day committees to assist. Those dominating Zürich supported, in the late European Middle Ages, the then popular mendicant orders by attributing them free plots in the suburbs. The mendicant orders were asked to support the construction of the city wall in return. The city's fortification's construction began in the late 11th or 12th century and further on. Fraumünster Abbey was established