Basil.

Title

Basil.

Description

Bird's eye view of the city of Basel on the Rhine with a baker and her cattle in the foreground.

ca. 1650

Artist

Anonymus

Historical Description

With the conquest of Gaul by Caesar around 52 BC, the Basel region also came under Roman rule. Thanks to the concentration of trade, crafts and rulership, the well-fortified settlement (the Romans called such fortified settlements oppida) functioned as a regional center. In the early 1st century AD, the vicus on the Münsterhügel extended over the ruins of the Celtic fortification wall to today's St. Alban's moat. From about 250 AD, a period of internal and external crises followed. Germanic peoples, such as the Alamanni, invaded the Roman provinces. At the end of the 5th century, Basel fell to the Franks, who settled in and around Basel. In the first half of the 13th century, municipal self-administration began through a council of knights and citizens, documented from 1185/90, which guided the fate of the community with a mayor (from 1253) and town clerk. After the Swabian or Swiss War in 1499, Basel turned to the Confederation. A change in the council constitution, which secured the supremacy of the guilds, took place in 1521. At the same time, the unilateral complete emancipation from the rule of the bishop took place, in that now the filling of offices was also formally made by the council. The humanist Erasmus of Rotterdam, who lived in Basel, had the Greek New Testament with its Latin translation printed here in 1516 and 1519. Both the German reformer Martin Luther and the English clergyman William Tyndale used the second edition as the basis for their Bible translations. Johannes Oekolampad worked with Erasmus from 1515 to 1516 and then returned to Basel in 1522 as a pastor and professor, where he became the city's most important reformer. In 1535, the persecuted John Calvin arrived from France and found refuge in Basel. He wrote his Institutio Christianae religionis (German: Unterricht in der christlichen Religion) here, one of the most effective Protestant writings of the Reformation period, printed in Basel in 1536. In 1648, the mayor of Basel, Johann Rudolf Wettstein, represented the Confederation at the Peace Congress in Münster and achieved recognition of the Confederation by the great powers of the time.