Lindau

In Lindau, the Reformation prevailed relatively early on. The clergy already adopted Luther’s writings at the beginning of the 1520s and preached his doctrine in 1522. The theologians Michael Hug (d. 1524) and Sigmund Rötlin (d. 1525) were the protagonists of these early years. Thomas Gassner (d. 1548) eventually took their place – he is regarded as the most important reformer of Lindau.

In 1525 the first evangelical ceremony of the Lord’s Supper took place in the parish church of Saint Stephan, in 1528 the traditional mass was abolished. Gassner’s redesign of the Lindau system of worship was initially closely oriented towards the Swiss direction of the Reformation which Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) had founded. This redesign happened, however, without Gassner’s rejection of Luther’s theology. In 1530, in Lindau, one of the infamous “iconoclast storms” occurred, in which Gassner had all the pictures removed from the parish church of Saint Stephan.

The city council had supported the Reformation since 1523 and thus made a decisive contribution to its success. Lindau was one of the co-signatories of the “Protestant” protest on the diet of Speyer in 1529 which was to coin the term. However, because of disputes over the issue of the Lord’s Supper, the council decided to support the “Confessio Tetrapolitana” in 1530, rather than the “Confessio Augustana”.

In collaboration with Thomas Gassner, the town council institutionalised the Reformation in the 1530s by publishing new marriage and baptismal records and by redesigning the educational system. The foundation of the important library of the imperial city in 1538 is also a “product” of Reformation currents.