This study uses recent work on communications and social networks to interrogate customary accounts of the urban Reformation (‘from above’, ‘from below’, ‘a communal Reformation’), taking as its canvas eastern Swabia. The economic and political pull exerted by the leading cities – Augsburg, Ulm, and in Franconia Nuremberg – upon their lesser neighbours within regional spheres of influence, reinforced by familial and business ties between urban elites, was extended up to 1550 by attempts to introduce evangelical doctrines into the smaller cities, or even villages. These efforts were complicated and on occasion frustrated by three factors: (1) Competition for allegiance between Lutheranism and south German Reformed Protestantism, as in the case of Donauwörth, lying on the border between Swabia and Franconia, which veered towards Nuremberg's model of Wittenberg Reform, not least in order to escape more direct pressure from Augsburg; (2) The presence of dissident religious minorities, such as the Anabaptists and Schwenckfelders of Kaufbeuren, enjoying the covert support of some magistrates, who were reluctant to follow the dictates of Augsburg's Zwinglianism; (3) The judicial rights of overlords, as in the jurisdictionally fragmented margraviate of Burgau, where Augsburg's plans to install an evangelical preacher in the village of Mindelaltheim fell foul of the high justice held by the Habsburgs. The leading cities consulted frequently (sometimes face-to-face), even forming a Three Cities' League to co-ordinate policy and defence, and sent out or exchanged pastors between cities or in the localities. But attempts to get smaller communities such as Donauwörth or Kaufbeuren to join the Schmalkaldic League foundered on their impecunity, their fear of attack from surrounding Catholic powers – and their disinclination to be sucked into political alliances in which their voice was likely to be ignored. Alas, a policy of ‘neutrality’ was no guarantee of being left in peace, as Donauwörth found to its cost, surrendering first to Augsburg's ‘protective’ garrison and then to Catholic imperial troops. In the end, there were clear limits, both geopolitical and strategic, to what a ‘negotiated Reformation’ could hope to achieve, even if the regional system of urban spheres of influence upon which it rested survived the confessional divide.