Geneva

Geneva had already voted to live by the gospel and expelled its bishop before John Calvin arrived, which matters, because he never governed the city. He was a salaried preacher, an immigrant without citizenship until near the end of his life, and he was thrown out in 1538 and only invited back in 1541 on his own terms. Those terms were the Ecclesiastical Ordinances, which set out four offices for the church: pastors to preach, doctors to teach, elders to oversee conduct and deacons to care for the poor.

The instrument that made the arrangement famous was the Consistory, a weekly meeting of the pastors with a body of lay elders drawn from the councils. People were summoned before it over absence from sermons, quarrelling with neighbours, dancing, fortune telling, beating a wife, drunkenness, and marital disputes of every kind, and the surviving registers are among the richest sources anywhere for how ordinary sixteenth century people lived. Its usual outcome was admonition and reconciliation. Its ultimate sanction was exclusion from communion, and whether the church or the city council held that power was fought over for more than a decade before the pastors won it in 1555.

The result was not a theocracy in the modern sense, since the civil magistrates kept every coercive power and frequently overruled the ministers. It was something newer: a church with its own disciplinary jurisdiction, exercised by laymen and clergy together, inside a republic that was not itself the church. That model, more than any doctrine, is what the Reformed tradition exported.

Geneva's influence rested on people passing through it. Religious refugees arrived in thousands from France, Italy, Spain, England and Scotland, some fleeing persecution and others coming to learn, and the city's printing presses turned out Bibles, psalters and polemic for export. The English exiles produced the Geneva Bible, whose verse numbering, readable type and pointed marginal notes made it the household Bible of English Protestantism for two generations, carried to Scotland and to New England.

The Academy opened in 1559 under Theodore Beza and trained ministers who went back to serve congregations in France and the Netherlands at considerable risk. John Knox, who had preached to the English congregation in the city, called it the most perfect school of Christ since the days of the apostles, a phrase that has followed Geneva ever since.

The hardest fact in the same record is Michael Servetus. A Spanish physician who denied the Trinity and rejected infant baptism, and who had corresponded with Calvin and sent him an annotated copy of his own book, he escaped the Catholic inquisition at Vienne and passed through Geneva, where he was recognised at a sermon, arrested, tried by the city council and burned in October 1553 with his book chained to him. Calvin pressed the prosecution and asked, unsuccessfully, that he be beheaded instead. The execution was approved by other Protestant cities at the time, and it drew from Sebastian Castellio the reply that to kill a man is not to defend a doctrine but simply to kill a man. Geneva put up a monument of expiation in 1903.