ABSTRACT
Nowhere in Europe, perhaps, was the freedom to take purely local decisions on the issues raised by the Protestant Reformation greater than in the Republic of the Three Leagues in Graubünden. Some communities formally chose either Catholic or Reformed worship, while others, such as the district of the Four Villages near the region’s capital in Chur, allowed individual villages to decide which of the two confessions to follow. By the 1550s, three of the four main villages -Zizers, Trimmis, and Undervaz had voted to retain Catholic worship in their churches, while the fourth, Igis, had opted for Reformed worship. By 1614, the earlier confessional peace had given way to a series of tense standoffs, which were intensified by interventions on the part of powerful Catholic and Reformed actors from outside the Four Villages. Ultimately, high-level mediation led to negotiations in which the longing for communal unity confronted increasingly polarized separation in religion.
