ABSTRACT
The military orders profited hugely from the mechanisms when putting forward claims, with the support of the Catholic cantons, to keep their properties in the Protestant territories. During the Reformation the military orders of the Knights of St John and of the Teutonic Knights lost a number of their houses in the Protestant cantons of the Swiss confederation. In all three main centres of the Reformation in Switzerland, the cantons of Basel, Bern and Zurich, the Order of St John and the Teutonic Knights managed to continue or, resume their presence as the only Catholic institutions throughout the sixteenth century and beyond. The question of the survival of the military orders in the Protestant cantons was ultimately a matter of economics and of political control. The Reformation was, however, not the only threat to the military orders in Switzerland in the early sixteenth century.
