170 THE SWISS REFORMATION.
offered before each meal ; psalms, hymns, and national songs resounded in the tents ; no oath was heard ; gambling and swearing were prohibited, and disreputable women excluded ; the only exercises were wrestling, casting stones, and military diill. There can be little doubt that if the Ziirichers had made a timely attack upon the Catholics and carried out the plan of Zwingli, they would have gained a complete victory and dictated the terms of peace. How long the peace would have lasted is a different question ; for behind the Forest Cantons stood Austria, which might at any time have changed the situation.
But counsels of peace prevailed. Bern was opposed to the offensive, and declared that if the Ziirichers began the attack, they should be left to finish it alone. The Ziirichers themselves were divided, and their military leaders (Berger and Escher) inclined to peace.
The Catholics, being assured that they need not fear ah attack from Bern, mustered courage and were enforced by troops from Wallis and the Italian bailiwicks. They now numbered nearly twelve thousand armed men.
The hostile armies faced each other from Cappel and Baar, but hesitated to advance. Catholic guards would cross over the border to be taken prisoners by the Ziirichers, who had an abundance of provision, and sent them back well fed and clothed. Or they would place a large bucket of milk on the border line and asked the Ziirichers for bread, who supplied them richl}^ ; whereupon both parties peacefully enjoyed a common meal, and when one took a morsel on the enemy's side, he was reminded not to cross the frontier. The soldiers remembered that they were Swiss confederates, and that many of them had fought side by side on foreign battle-fields.^ " We shall not fight," they said ; " and pray God that the storm may pass away without doing us any harm." Jacob Sturm,
^ Similar episodes of kindl}' intercourse occurred between the Confederate and Union soldiers during the civil war in the United States.
§ 43. THE FIRST PEACE OF CAPPEL. 171
the burgomaster of Strassburg, who was present as a mediator, was struck with the manifestation of personal harmony and friendship in the midst of organized hostility. " You are a singular people," he said ; " though disunited, you are united." •
§ 43. The First Peace of Cappel. June, 1529.
After several negotiations, a treaty of Peace was concluded June 25, 1529, between ZUrich, Bern, Basel, St. Gall, and the cities of Miihlhausen and Biel on the one hand, and the five Catholic Cantons on the other. The deputies of Glarus, Solothurn, Schaffliausen, Appenzell, Graubiinden, Sargans, Strassburg, and Constanz acted as mediators.
The treaty was not all that Zwingli desired, especially as regards the abolition of the pensions and the punishment of the dispensers of pensions (wherein he was not supported by Bern), but upon the whole it was favorable to the cause of the Reformation.
The first and most important of the Eighteen Articles of the treaty recognizes, for the first time in Europe, the principle of parity or legal equality of the Roman Catholic and Protestant Churches, — a principle which twenty-six years afterwards was recognized also in Germany (by the Augshurger Religionsfriede of 1555), but which was not finally settled there till after the bloody baptism of the Thirty Years' War, in the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), against which the Pope of Rome still protests in vain. That article guarantees to the Reformed and Roman Catholic Cantons religious freedom in the form of mutual toleration, and to the common bailiwicks the right to decide by majority the question whether they would remain Catholics or become Protestants.^ The
^ The Swiss German text of the first Article of the first Landsfriede of Cappel is as follows (Bluntschll, II. 257) : " Des ersten von ivagen des Gottlichen icorts, dieivyl und niemun zum glouhen bezwungen sol werden, das dann die ^funff art und die iren, des selben ouch nitt genutiget. Aber die zugewandten und vogthien, ivo man mitt einandern zii beherschen hat, belangend, wo die selben die mess ahge-