**The celestial event over Basel on 7 August 1566. Pamphlet by Samuel Apiarius and Samuel Coccius.** Zentralbibliothek Zürich

The celestial event over Basel in 1566

A dazzling array of celestial phenomena occurred over the skies of Basel in July and August 1566. The spectacle was so unusual that it precipitated much public discussion and the publication of a leaflet which reflects a Switzerland grappling with deep social unease and tensions.

James Blake Wiener

James Blake Wiener is a world historian, Co-Founder of World History Encyclopedia, writer, and PR specialist, who has taught as a professor in Europe and North America.

Website: worldhistory.org

A peculiar display of spectacular sunrises, sunsets, and something that appeared to resemble an aerial battle shocked the citizens of Basel during the summer of 1566. The strange sightings began when what was a dimly-lit sunset suddenly turned vermilion on the evening of July 27, 1566. After a total lunar eclipse overnight, a bloody sunrise awoke worried Baslers as the phenomenon bathed the city in red throughout the day on July 28, 1566. After what seemed like a return to normality, a new aerial phenomenon appeared on the morning of August 7, 1566, as fiery and black circular objects – shaped like cannon balls – appeared to engage one another in battle formation and later disintegrate across the afternoon sky. The sightings stimulated a great deal of concern and speculation amongst local inhabitants, who struggled to understand the meaning of what had just occurred. One often forgets the extent to which people felt and expressed their inner turmoil and confusion in the sixteenth century. The theological divisions first sown by Luther and later cultivated by Zwingli and Calvin resulted in a Europe consumed by angst. Vitriolic disputes between Lutherans, Calvinists, Anglicans, and Catholics engendered mutual distrust and hatred as each attempted to gain the moral and political upperhand through conversion, diplomacy, and war. The shift in European social and cultural consciousness, as a result of the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation, was profound. Questions relating to doctrine, salvation, and morality moved out from the churches and cathedrals and into the realm of popular thought and imagination. This was therefore an era of deep apprehension typified by the witch trials, religious persecutions and mass expulsions, and deep dread of Islamic invasion from Ottoman Turkey or razzias undertaken by corsairs from the Maghreb. Protestant preachers and ministers fanned the flames of religious anxieties, while also tapping into the fears of their congregations by claiming that only a select handful would receive eternal salvation. Meanwhile, Catholic priests and religious orders began to encourage believers and initiates to explore their inner faith, wholly and without error, in the pursuit of spiritual ecstasy through the contemplation of Christ’s passion. It is little wonder then that European chroniclers during the 1500s wrote of people becoming “spiritual weepers” – persons disoriented and disquieted through the open acknowledgment of sin, and inhibited from finding any sense of comfort or certainty in their lives.

**A clergyman preaching to the congregation. Woodcut by Jörg Breu, around 1525.** © Kupferstich-Kabinett, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Foto: Andreas Diesend

Word of the preternatural manifestations in the skies over Basel spread orally from town to town throughout the Old Swiss Confederation. Although a tense peace prevailed between Catholics and Protestants in 1560s, many Swiss, regardless of confession, felt surrounded by a maelstrom of religious and political conflicts: intermittent civil strife between Catholics and Huguenots tore France asunder (1562-1598), while an wave of fervent iconoclasm, known as the “Beeldenstorm,” swept the Low Countries (1566); Ivan the Terrible declared himself the “hand of God,” authorizing the slaughter of innocents during Livonian War (1558-1583), while unleashing the Oprichniki to terrorize civilian populations at home (1565); and the Ottomans fought the Knights Hospitaller at the Siege of Malta (1565), while laying waste to vast swaths of Hungary (1566). In such troubled times, mass-produced leaflets, woodcuts, and broadsheets kept the anxious, downtrodden, and spiritually-hungry informed of news as they looked for signs from God in every facet of life.

**Leaflets from the collection of the Zentralbibliothek Zürich show various natural phenomena that are interpreted as divine signs.** Zentralbibliothek Zürich
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Samuel Apiarus (1530-1590) – a successful, peripatetic printer operating between Bern, Basel, and Solothurn – sensed the hunger for information and the desire for an explanation as to what had just occurred in Basel. He thus published a small broadsheet leaflet, measuring 18.2 by 23.8 centimeters, which memorialized the otherworldly events. Samuel Coccius (1548-1626), an artist and printer from Zürich, assisted Apiarius in the leaflet’s design. However, as neither man witnessed the strange manifestations over Basel first-hand, they relied on first-and-second-hand sources. The scene they choose to imprint mirrors the events of the third and final sighting. When gazing at the leaflet, one immediately recognizes the distinguishable Basler Münsterplatz and Basel Cathedral. Spectators in the lower third of the leaflet appear astonished and disturbed by the marvels unfolding above them. Both the sky and the sun are covered by whirling black and white spheres. Of special note is the sun, which is idiosyncratic by virtue of its intensity – its rays are wild and asymmetrical, and the sun’s facial expression is both perturbed and stern.

Accompanying the illustration is a succinct text that is explicitly Christian in tonality. Faithful believers of good moral standing are exhorted to see the phenomena over Basel as a sign from the divine, akin to the miracles mentioned the Bible. Moreover, those who lead a pure Christian life and who are free from sin in have nothing to fear in a period of immense tumult, while sinners shall be judged and condemned in the afterlife. At the time of the leaflet’s publication, many believed the phenomenon symbolized the need of the Swiss to not only seek repentance but also help from God against the looming Ottoman threat.

**The torments of hell were a popular subject in religious art, even in the 16th century. Depiction of hell in Hans Memling's triptych ‘The Last Judgment’, around 1470 (detail).** Wikimedia

The leaflet printed by Apiarus and Coccius conforms to a broad paradigm of countless broadsheets and woodcuts printed across Early Modern Europe en masse. Collectively, they underscore a fervent interest in unexplainable or curious occurrences in nature. Common subjects included puzzling omens in the skies, the birth of deformed or misshapen humans and animals, and other unexplained mysteries that foretold humanity’s doom, military defeat, or divine punishment. As points of comparison, the leaflet created by Apiarus and Coccius bears striking similarities to a one-sheet print created by the German printer Hans Glaser of a similar celestial manifestation over Nuremberg on April 14, 1561, the oil painting, “Vädersolstavlan” (“The Sundog Painting” in Swedish), which depicts the bizarre events that occurred over Stockholm on April 25, 1535, and an English woodcut reporting the fall of a large meteorite over Hatford on April 9, 1628. All of these works contain strong militaristic symbolism, thereby framing these celestial manifestations through the lens of war, civil conflict, or political change.

**The celestial apparition in Nuremberg on 14 April 1561. Leaflet by Hans Glaser.** Zentralbibliothek Zürich

**The oldest known picture of Stockholm from 1535 shows a celestial phenomenon comparable to those in Nuremberg and Basel.** Stockholm City Museum

Historians and scientists, nonetheless, are still left wondering what exactly caused the celestial event over Basel in 1566. In recent years, some have theorized that what occurred over Basel could even have been extraterrestrial in origin, but the majority of scholars affirm that natural phenomena likely caused the spectacular sightings. Meteor showers, a bolide, cometary movements, an aurora borealis, optical illusions caused by uncommon atmospheric conditions, like Sahara dust, or some other rare astronomical event, like a singular arrangement of planets, have all been proposed as hypothetical explanations.

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The celestial event over Basel in 1566

James Blake Wiener

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The celestial event over Basel in 1566

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Further posts

Switzerland’s rocky road to religious freedom

Switzerland elsewhere

A window on a supernatural helper