A city at the junction of waters

Lake Zurich and the Limmat

Zurich stands at the point where the Limmat leaves the northern end of Lake Zurich. While the lake, some forty kilometres long, reaches south-east towards the Linth plain, the river runs north-west through the city and on to the Aare near Brugg, and so to the Rhine. For a medieval merchant this meant that Zurich was a natural break of bulk. Goods arriving by lake boats from the south-east had to be transferred to river craft, or to carts and pack animals, for the journey onwards, whereas goods coming from the north had to be reloaded for the lake. The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz traces the city’s economic importance to its location at the intersection of navigable waterways and land routes, adding that market, toll and minting rights illustrate the importance of trade to the early town.¹

The lake itself was part of a long-distance axis. According to the HLS article on Lake Zurich, the lake formed part of the trade route that led from the Rhineland via Basel to Graubünden and Italy. The goods carried on it included salt, wine, iron from the Gonzen mine near Sargans, textiles, livestock and cheese.² Two categories of traffic were superimposed on the water. The first was local: market boats sailed from the villages along the shores to the city, typically twice a week, carrying grain, wine, fruit, dairy produce and wood, and returning with salt, iron and manufactured goods. The second was transit: bales of cloth, metal wares, spices and other merchandise in passage between the Rhine and the Alpine passes, for which the lake was simply the cheapest stretch of the road. The same article records that in the late Middle Ages the lake route from Zurich as far as the Sust in Horgen, opened in 1452, was also used for traffic to the Gotthard.³

Water transport was cheap. A modern account of Zurich as a medieval port town, based on the guild history of the Zunft zur Schiffleuten, stresses that the waterway was cheaper to maintain and therefore more economical than the road. With the same effort, it adds, a boat could move many times the weight that could be carried overland.⁴ For bulky goods such as salt, grain, wine and iron the difference between a lake crossing and a mountain track was decisive. For light and valuable goods such as silk, spices or fine cloth it mattered less, since these could bear the cost of pack animals over long distances. The medieval transit economy was shaped by this contrast: bulk commodities followed the water wherever they could, while high-value goods chose the safest and quickest route, which was not always the cheapest.

The lake was also a pilgrims’ road. A substantial part of shipping on the upper lake consisted of pilgrims travelling to the Benedictine abbey of Einsiedeln. The boatmen of the “Gesellschaft des Oberwassers” carried them from Zurich to Richterswil or Pfäffikon, from where they walked over the Etzel or via Schindellegi to the abbey. Documents of 1433, 1484 and 1514 regulated the rights of the boatmen of the lower and upper lake to particular pilgrim corridors.⁵ Because the pilgrim trade was a reliable, seasonal source of income that did not depend on the fortunes of long-distance commerce, it gave the Zurich boatmen an interest in peaceful relations with Schwyz, through whose territory the pilgrims walked. The politics of the fifteenth century repeatedly tested that interest. In 1426 the city council ruled that pilgrims could be solicited only by boatmen standing at their vessels, a small but characteristic example of the regulation of competition in a service trade.⁶

The upper lake was closed off at Rapperswil and Hurden, where a moraine ridge narrows the water to a shallow strait. Duke Rudolf IV of Habsburg had a wooden bridge built across it between 1358 and 1360, which remained the principal crossing until it was replaced in 1878 by the Seedamm, which also carried the railway.⁷ The bridge served the Habsburgs’ own purposes, linking their town of Rapperswil with the road to Schwyz and the pilgrims’ route, but it also created a point at which lake traffic could be observed and, in wartime, controlled. Legal title to the lake mattered as much as the physical structures. In the 1360s Emperor Charles IV granted Zurich a series of privileges which, according to one account of the city’s history, included fishing and navigation rights on the lake as far as Hurden.⁸ In the language of the time, the lake below Hurden was therefore a Zurich water whose traffic the city claimed to regulate the traffic on it.

The eastern corridor: Linth, Walensee and the road to Chur

From the upper end of Lake Zurich a second chain of waterways led eastwards. The Linth, joined by the Maag coming out of the Walensee near Ziegelbrücke, connected Lake Zurich with the Walensee. From the eastern end of the Walensee at Walenstadt a short land stage led via Sargans into the Rhine valley and up to Chur, the starting point for the Bündner passes. The HLS describes the waterway Limmat–Lake Zurich–Linth–Walensee as a trade route already in Roman times and, for the late Middle Ages, as a “royal or imperial waterway”.⁹ The main goods carried on it were salt, wine, iron from the Gonzen, cloth, stone, gravel, livestock, and wood, cheese, butter and Ziger from the Glarus valley.¹⁰

The Walensee itself was a narrow, steep-sided lake whose southern shore carried the axis Zurich–Sargans–Chur. For centuries it was a natural barrier that forced land traffic onto the water. Organised shipping on it is attested remarkably early: the Rhaetian land register of about 840 lists ten boats liable to dues at Walenstadt.¹¹ In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries the Habsburgs dominated navigation on the lake. Walenstadt, the eastern landing place, received market and town rights between about 1240 and 1280 and functioned as the point where water transport gave way to land carriage. Commerce and fishing there are documented as early as about 840.¹²

At the western end of the Walensee lay Weesen, which controlled the exit into the Maag and the Linth. After Glarus joined the Confederation in 1352, Weesen, as a Habsburg outpost, guarded the east–west traffic from Walenstadt to Rapperswil and Zurich. The Habsburgs had united the two parts of the settlement in 1283, placed it under their bailiwick of Windegg and developed Niederweesen as a fortified toll station.¹³ The fate of Weesen illustrates how exposed such places were. In the night of 21 to 22 February 1388 the inhabitants are said to have opened the gates to Austrian troops, who massacred the Confederate garrison. After the Habsburg defeat at Näfels in April 1388 the Confederates destroyed the town, whose reconstruction the peace of 1394 forbade.¹⁴ A transit station on a contested border was a source of revenue in peacetime and a target in war.

For Zurich the eastern corridor was vital in two ways. It was the city’s own route to the Bündner passes and so to Chiavenna, Como and Milan. It was also the route by which the Glarus valley, the Sargans region with its iron and the Walensee villages were supplied with grain and salt and by which their cattle, cheese and wood came to the Zurich market. Whoever controlled Weesen, Windegg in the Gaster, Uznach and Sargans controlled the corridor. That was the underlying geography of the conflict over the Toggenburg inheritance after 1436, to which section VII returns.

Downstream: Limmat, Aare and Rhine

Below the city the Limmat was a harder river to navigate than the lake. The HLS article on the Limmat notes that occasional voyages by Zurich boatmen as far as Koblenz, where the Aare joins the Rhine, are recorded in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.¹⁵ Downstream navigation was operated by the Niederwasser society of the boatmen’s guild, whose work was made difficult by steps in the terrain and by artificial obstacles such as weirs and fish traps.¹⁶ Because hauling a loaded boat back upstream was laborious, vessels were often sold at the end of the voyage, in Baden or even Basel.¹⁷ Traffic on the Limmat was therefore essentially one-way: the river carried goods and people north, while the return traffic moved by road.

An imperial privilege underlined the importance Zurich attached to this outlet. In 1447, in the middle of the Old Zurich War and during the city’s alliance with the Habsburgs, Frederick III, then King of the Romans and crowned emperor in 1452, granted Zurich the right to operate shipping down the Limmat and the Rhine free of tolls.¹⁸ How far such a privilege could be enforced against the many toll holders along the Rhine is another matter, because privileges of this kind served chiefly as negotiating assets in disputes with toll holders. The same HLS article records that, as river commerce declined, Zurich limited the number of Niederwasser masters in 1461 to sixteen and in 1509 to eight, a sign that the downstream trade was contracting in the later fifteenth century.

The Rhine below the Lake of Constance was itself a chain of sections, each controlled by its own boatmen. The Rhine Falls at Schaffhausen formed an insurmountable obstacle, so that goods, above all salt from Bavaria and Tyrol arriving via the Lake of Constance, had to be unloaded there and reloaded below the falls. Further down, the rapids at Laufenburg were negotiated by the local Laufenknechte, who held a monopoly on hauling boats through with ropes. Separate associations controlled the sections from Constance to Schaffhausen, from Schaffhausen to Zurzach, from Koblenz to the Aare confluence, and from Säckingen to Basel.¹⁹ Zurich’s river boats joined this system at Koblenz. The downstream route linked the city with the Zurzach fairs, with Basel and, beyond Basel, with Strasbourg and the middle Rhine. The famous Hirsebreifahrt, in which Zurich marksmen rowed to Strasbourg in a single day with a pot of millet porridge that arrived still warm, is associated with the years 1456 and 1576 and later became a civic legend. Johann Fischart celebrated the documented journey of 1576 by Johann Fischart in his poem Das glückhafft Schiff von Zürich.²⁰ Whatever the details, the story shows how present the downstream connection was in Zurich’s self-image.

Notes

1. Max Schultheiss, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, section on the economy from the High Middle Ages to the end of the eighteenth century, in: Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/. The article states: “Münzprägung, Markt- und Zollrecht illustrieren die Bedeutung von Wirtschaft und Handel.” ↩
2. Peter Ziegler, “Zürichsee”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/008651/2015-06-10/: “Der See war Teil der Handelsroute Rheinland-Basel-Graubünden-Italien.” ↩
3. Ziegler, “Zürichsee”, HLS (as above): “Im Spätmittelalter wurde der Seeweg von Zürich bis zur 1452 eröffneten Sust in Horgen auch für den Gotthardweg benutzt.” On the dating of the Horgen Sust see section II.2 below. ↩
4. “Als Zürich im späten Mittelalter noch Hafenstadt und Knotenpunkt von Wasserstrassen war”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, https://www.nzz.ch/zuerich/als-zuerich-im-spaeten-mittelalter-noch-hafenstadt-und-knotenpunkt-von-wasserstrassen-war-ld.1396398, reporting on Thomas Sprecher, Geschichte der Zunft zur Schiffleuten von Zürich, 2 vols. (2017). The article gives a ratio of forty to sixty times the weight transported by water compared with land for the same effort; such ratios are rough orders of magnitude and should not be taken as measured figures. ↩
5. Ziegler, “Zürichsee”, HLS (as above), section on shipping and pilgrim traffic. ↩
6. “Als Zürich im späten Mittelalter noch Hafenstadt …”, NZZ (as above), quoting the council’s ruling “dass nur noch am Schiff stehend um Pilger geworben werden dürfe”. ↩
7. Ziegler, “Zürichsee”, HLS (as above). ↩
8. “Geschichte der Stadt Zürich”, German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_der_Stadt_Z%C3%BCrich, section on imperial privileges 1362–1365. Cited for orientation; the underlying privileges are published in the Zurich collections of charters. ↩
9. “Linth (Fluss)”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/008770/2008-01-24/, describing the route as a “Königs- oder Reichswasserstrasse”. ↩
10. “Linth (Fluss)”, HLS (as above): “Haupttransportgüter waren Salz, Wein, Eisen vom Gonzen, Tuch, Steine, Kies, Vieh sowie Holz, Käse, Butter und Ziger aus dem Glarnerland.” ↩
11. Jakob Kuratli Hüeblin, “Walensee”, in: Dictionnaire historique de la Suisse (DHS/HLS, French version), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/008654/: “Sur la rive sud passe l’axe de communication Zurich-Sargans-Coire”; the article cites the ninth-century Rhaetian polyptych mentioning “dix bateaux assujettis à redevance”. ↩
12. Paul Gubser, “Walenstadt”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/001359/. ↩
13. “Weesen”, German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weesen. Cited for orientation. ↩
14. “Weesen”, German Wikipedia (as above), including the archaeological evidence of a burnt layer confirmed by excavations in 1993–1994 and 2008. ↩
15. Martin Illi, “Limmat”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/008761/2008-11-27/: “im 12. und 13. Jahrhundert sind gelegentliche Fahrten der Zürcher Schiffer bis nach Koblenz” documented. ↩
16. Illi, “Limmat”, HLS (as above): “Die Niederwassergesellschaft der Zürcher Schiffleutezunft betrieb die wegen Geländestufen und künstlichen Hindernissen (Wuhren, Fache) schwierige Schifffahrt.” ↩
17. Illi, “Limmat”, HLS (as above): “Am Ende der Fahrt, d.h. in Baden oder gar in Basel, wurden die Schiffe wieder verkauft.” The NZZ account (as above) adds that Limmat boats could reach some twenty-five metres in length. ↩
18. Illi, “Limmat”, HLS (as above): “1447 erteilte Kaiser Friedrich III. Zürich das Recht, die Schifffahrt limmat- und rheinabwärts zollfrei zu betreiben.” The guild’s own historical account describes the privilege as extending to the mouth of the Rhine: Zunft zur Schiffleuten Zürich, “Über uns”, https://www.schiffleuten.ch/%C3%BCber-uns. ↩
19. “Hochrheinschifffahrt”, German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hochrheinschifffahrt, which also notes that toll tariff documents of 1401 show the participation of Bern, Fribourg, Zurich and Lucerne in this traffic. Cited for orientation. ↩
20. “Hirsebreifahrt”, German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hirsebreifahrt. The 1456 voyage is reported in later tradition; the 1576 voyage is well documented. Cited for orientation. ↩

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 September 2025.