This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
John Calvin first arrived in Geneva in 1536 at the urging of the reformer Guillaume Farel, was expelled by the city council in 1538 after disputes with its magistrates, and returned in 1541 only because the council itself invited him back to finish the work he had begun. His 1541 Ecclesiastical Ordinances created the Consistory, a body of pastors and elders charged with maintaining moral and doctrinal discipline across the city, restructuring Geneva's church government on lines that would spread far beyond Geneva itself.
In 1559 Calvin and his eventual successor Theodore Beza founded the Genevan Academy, opened on 5 June that year, to train Reformed pastors rather than simply preach to Geneva's own citizens. Those pastors carried Calvin's teaching back out across France, the Netherlands, Scotland and England, turning one city's own church discipline into a doctrinal and organisational template exported across half of Reformation Europe.
What this changed for Christianity's spread was Geneva's transformation from a single Swiss city expelling an unwanted foreign preacher into the training ground for an entire international Reformed movement. The Consistory's model of pastors and elders sharing church discipline, and the Academy's export of trained ministers, gave Calvinism a reproducible institutional shape, letting it take root in the Netherlands, Scotland and beyond within a single generation of Calvin's own return.