The price of passage: tolls and the dazio

The fiscal logic of a transit road

A merchant who sent a bale of cloth from Basel to Milan in 1500 paid for the passage many times. He paid freight to the carriers of each stage, warehouse fees at each Sust, road and bridge money to the communities that maintained the road, and tolls to every lord and town whose territory the goods crossed. On the Gotthard route, the main toll points were Lucerne, Flüelen, the Leventina, Bellinzona, and at the southern end the duties of the Duchy of Milan, from which the capitulations exempted Confederate merchants as far as the moat of the city of Milan.¹ The sum of these charges determined whether the Gotthard could compete with the Grisons passes, the Brenner or the Simplon. Each authority had an incentive to raise its own toll and an interest in keeping the total low enough to retain the traffic. The history of the Gotthard tolls is therefore a history of bargaining between governments that depended on the same stream of goods.

Three types of charge must be distinguished. The first was the toll in the narrow sense (German Zoll, Italian pedaggio or dazio di transito), a charge on the passage of goods levied by the holder of a sovereign right. The second was the road and bridge money (Weggeld, Brückengeld, Italian pontatico), which financed the maintenance of the infrastructure and was often collected by the communities. The third was the market or consumption duty (Italian dazio della mercanzia, dazio del consumo), levied on goods sold or consumed in a town. In practice the three overlapped, the right to collect them was often leased for terms of one to twenty years, and in Italian usage the word dazio covered duties on import, export and transit as well as market duties.²

Lucerne and Flüelen

At the northern end the most important toll was the Lucerne Zentnerzoll, levied per hundredweight on goods passing through the town. Lucerne, which had grown around the Benedictine monastery of St Leodegar, gained its commercial importance from its position at the northern end of the Gotthard trade. Its Sust, with the scales installed in it, was the northern terminal of the route. According to Aloys Schulte, the revenue of the Gotthard toll between Hospental and Reiden exceeded that of all other important toll stations and even the entire tax revenue of the towns of the Swiss plateau.³ Goods were shipped across the lake by the boatmen of Lucerne and Uri to Flüelen, where the canton of Uri levied a toll that had originally been an imperial right. Uri took over this imperial toll in stages after 1360, and it became the canton's principal source of revenue.⁴ Uri also levied road money for the section to the pass, and Urseren collected its own charges for the passage through its valley. By the fifteenth century a merchant crossing from Lucerne to the pass had paid four or five separate charges before he reached the watershed.

Notes

1. HLS, art. "Zölle" (as above), on the Gotthard toll "zwischen Hospental und Reiden"; HLS, art. "Uri" (as above), on the toll of Flüelen; HLS, art. "Prato (Leventina)" (as above), on the Dazio Grande; HLS, art. "Bellinzona (Gemeinde)" (as above): "in B. wurde der grosse Wegzoll der Stadt Como erhoben"; HLS, art. "Mailänder Kapitulate" (as above), for the exemption of Confederate merchants "bis an den Stadtgraben von Mailand". Further literature: Schulte (as above), vol. 1; Glauser (as above). ↩
2. HLS, art. "Zölle" (Marco Polli-Schönborn, version of 03.02.2015), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013765/2015-02-03/, on tolls levied "als Brücken-, Fluss-, Markt-, Stadt- und Geleitzoll"; Italian version, art. "Dogane", https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/013765/, which distinguishes "i veri e propri dazi di importazione, esportazione e transito" from "i pedaggi su strade e ponti, i dazi di mercato e le tasse sui salvacondotti"; HLS, art. "Weggeld" (Anne-Marie Dubler, version of 11.01.2015), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/027297/2015-01-11/, on road and bridge money as a charge for the construction and maintenance of roads and bridges, collected by communes or private holders and leased for "ein Jahr, zehn, zwölf oder zwanzig Jahre". ↩
3. Wikipedia, "Lucerne", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucerne (consulted as a last resort), on the monastery of St Leodegar and on the city as "a strategically located gateway for the growing commerce from the Gotthard trade route"; HLS, art. "Susten" (as above), which lists Lucerne among the transshipment points with a Sust and notes that "mit der Sust in direkter Verbindung stand die dort installierte Waage"; HLS, art. "Zölle" (as above): "Laut Aloys Schulte überstiegen die Einnahmen des Gotthardzolls zwischen Hospental und Reiden nicht nur jene aller anderen bedeutenden Zollstellen [...], sondern auch das gesamte Steueraufkommen der Mittellandstädte". ↩
4. HLS, art. "Uri" (as above): "Le canton reprit par étapes, après 1360, le péage impérial de Flüelen, qui deviendra sa principale source de revenus." ↩

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.