Mercenaries, pensions and the Spanish alliance as capital flows

Soldiers as an export

For three centuries the most valuable export of the Catholic cantons was military service. Foreign princes recruited Swiss soldiers under contracts (capitulations) concluded with the cantons, which authorized recruitment in their territory, fixed the number of men, their pay, their officers and the conditions of service and stipulated what the prince would pay to the cantons themselves. The soldiers were recruited by captains and colonels, usually members of the leading families of the cantons, who raised the companies at their own expense and financed them through the pay that the prince owed for each man. A company was a business: the captain advanced the costs of recruitment, equipment and pay, received the lump sum agreed in the capitulation and kept the difference. Since the princes often paid late, the captains financed their companies on credit, and indebtedness became a normal means of financing military enterprise. In the merchant and officer families, wives, sisters and daughters often kept the accounts of recruitment and helped to raise the capital.¹

The Confederation's principal customers in the sixteenth century were the King of France, with whom the cantons concluded the Perpetual Peace of 1516 and the alliance of 1521, and the Spanish Habsburgs, who ruled Milan from 1535. The Papacy, the Duke of Savoy and the Republic of Venice also recruited. The confessional division after 1529 shaped these relationships. Reformed cantons were reluctant to serve the Pope and the Spanish king. The Catholic cantons served all Catholic princes. Their alliance with Spain of 1587 linked their military service with the defence of the Catholic religion and with the security of their supplies from Milan.²

The pension system

Besides the pay for the soldiers, the foreign princes made two kinds of payment that formed a permanent flow of capital into the Confederation. The first were public pensions paid to the cantons as such, under the treaties of alliance, in return for the right to recruit and for political friendship. The Perpetual Peace of 1516 promised each canton, as well as the Valais and the Three Leagues, an annual pension of 2,000 francs from the French crown, and the Spanish alliance of 1587 provided pensions for the Catholic cantons.³ The second were private pensions paid to individual magistrates, officers and notables who promoted the interests of the paying prince in the councils and assemblies. Private pensions were repeatedly prohibited by the cantons, for example in the Pensionenbrief of 1503, and were always paid. They were the cement of the foreign parties in the cantons, the "French" and the "Spanish" factions whose rivalry shaped the politics of the Catholic Confederation until the eighteenth century. In Zurich the Reformation turned against the system: Zwingli preached against pensions from 1521, and in 1526 the city executed Jakob Grebel for having accepted them. The Reformed cantons thereafter paid no public pensions to their officials, while French, Spanish, Venetian, Savoyard and Milanese pensions continued to flow to the Catholic cantons until the early eighteenth century. After 1710 only the French pensions remained. The French alliance was renewed for the last time in 1777.⁴

The economic weight of the pensions was considerable. In the Catholic cantons, foreign pensions at times amounted to more than half of regular public revenue. The small cantons of central Switzerland levied almost no direct taxes, so that the pensions financed a large part of their budgets and were in part distributed among the citizens. The private pensions and the profits of military entrepreneurship concentrated wealth in a small number of families. Some of them, such as the Zurlauben in Zug, the Reding in Schwyz and the Schmid in Uri, secured a local dominance that lasted for centuries by monopolizing the distribution of pensions, and they invested their wealth in land, town houses, country seats, offices and loans.⁵ Part of this wealth was invested in the Italian bailiwicks, where the officers of the ruling families served as landfogti and where the sale of offices allowed the purchase of a bailiwick as a financial investment, as Chapter A.II explains.

Notes

1. Philippe Henry and Philipp Krauer, "Servizio mercenario", in DSS, version of 31 October 2023, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/008608/ (captains and colonels as military entrepreneurs; "L'indebitamento divenne una modalità di finanziamento corrente"; the role of women of merchant families in accounting and raising capital). ↩
2. Henry and Krauer, "Servizio mercenario" (above), on the Perpetual Peace of 1516 and the alliance of 1521 with France as the framework of recruitment; Glauser, "Mailänder Kapitulate" (below), on the alliance of 1587. ↩
3. André Holenstein, "Pace perpetua (1516)", transl. Alberto Tognola, in DSS, version of 23 April 2026, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/008898/2026-04-23/ ("A ogni cant., al Vallese e alle Tre Leghe, oltre che ad altri suoi alleati, la Francia promise rendite annue di 2000 franchi"); Glauser, "Mailänder Kapitulate" (below), on the pensions under the alliance of 1587. ↩
4. HLS, art. "Pensionen", version of 3 November 2011, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/010241/2011-11-03/ (Pensionenbrief 1503; Zwingli's sermons 1521–1525; execution of Jakob Grebel in 1526; no public pensions to officials in the Reformed cantons; pensions after 1710 only from France; last renewal of the French alliance in 1777). ↩
5. HLS, art. "Pensionen" (as above): in the Catholic cantons pensions "zeitweise mehr als die Hälfte der regulären öffentlichen Einnahmen"; "Einzelne Familien sicherten sich durch die Monopolisierung von Pensionen-Verteilung [...] zum Teil jahrhundertelange lokale Dominanz (Zurlauben in Zug, Reding in Schwyz, Schmid in Uri)". ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.