Charitable institutions develop, and an ideal of high morality is proposed - even sometimes imposed - with the Inhabitants of Zurich. Its influence gained other cantons, which faced the cantons remained catholic in 1531, with the battle of Kappel, where Zwingli was killed.  

Parallel changes take place in Strasbourg, where collaborate narrowly of the theologists like Martin Bucer (1491-1551) and of the executives of the city like Johannes Sturm. In Wittenberg even, the town of Luther, this last must take the risk to leave Wartburg to take again the direction of the innovations and to carry them out gradually. Indeed, a more radical tendency, influenced by the illuminism, had continued since 1522.

The failure of Thomas Münzer

The religious ruptures could thus be undertaken only in bond with the political power, or at least their success depended it partly on the support of the laic powerful Christians who were the princes and the representatives of the cities.

In the failure testifies to Thomas Münzer (1489-1525), who preached a theology spiritualistic founded on the participation in the sufferings of Christ (“Christ land-mark”, that he opposes to “soft Christ” - that which makes grace - of Luther). After tryhaving vainly tried to obtain, in particular in 1524, the support of certain princes, Münzer bind to the peasants in revolt with which the armed bands multiply and make exactions. Luther, after having tried a kind of arbitration, ends up condemning the movement, which will be crushed in Frankenhausen - and decapitated Münzer - by armies of catholic and Protestant princes.  

Thus, if Luther gave the initial impulse, it remains very little of time the only reformer: whereas it is put at the round of applause of the Empire, its action is quickly taken again by other moderators of the movement. While blaming of the transnational ecclesiastical institutions (such papacy, the council, religious orders), by binding its fate to the aspirations of revival expressed by temporal authorities, while translating and by diffusing the Bible in various vernacular languages, while finally refusing to reconstitute a single hierarchy, the Reform led to the construction of a plurality of Churches related to cultures and distinct territories.

Jean Calvin

From 1536, the old episcopal city of Geneva becomes Protestant and called upon Jean Calvin (1509-1564), who has twenty-seven years then, to organize the new Church. Its suggestions being refused, it leaves in 1538, but of new elected authorities recall it in 1541. It will transform the Genevese city into a kind of city-refuge and of spiritual capital of Protestantism. Geneva leave, in various countries of Europe, of the books and, thanks to the academy founded in 1559, of the pastors.  

Calvin exerts in particular an influence on young king d' Angleterre Edouard VI, son of Henri VIII, the sovereign who caused in 1534 a schism with Rome. The Anglicanism however will appear, starting from Elisabeth I Re (1558-1603), a moderated Protestantism, which one can summarily define as a Church théologiquement close to a Calvinism moderated within an ecclesiastical framework remained rather not very far away from Catholicism. Scotland, on the other hand, will be calvinist after 1560, under the influence of John Knox (1513-1572).  

Whereas in Germany the peace of Augsburg officialized the denominational division of the Empire, in the north of Europe, the Scandinavian countries adopted Protestantism in its form Lutheran. The Reform, in forty years, thus succeeded in being established in many territories.