Against foreign money: mercenary service, pensions and the French alliance

The system Zwingli attacked

The political economy of mercenary service and pensions in the late medieval Confederation has been described in Part A. By the early sixteenth century the Confederates were the most sought-after infantry in Europe. The great powers competed for access to them through alliances that combined three kinds of payment: soldiers’ pay for the men recruited, public pensions paid annually to the treasuries of the cantons, and secret or private pensions paid to individual magistrates and captains who could influence the decisions of councils and assemblies. Valentin Groebner, writing in the HLS, distinguishes precisely between these public and secret pensions and shows how both served to influence political decisions and to secure access to recruits. Attempts to forbid private pensions, the most famous of them the Pensionenbrief of 1503, had failed.¹ The system corrupted political decisions, divided the ruling families into foreign parties, and exposed the young men of town and country to death and disease in wars that were not their own.

Zwingli attacked this system from the pulpit and in print with a vehemence that set him apart even among its critics. Groebner summarises his argument: pensions bred disloyalty and treason, made the Confederates effeminate and promoted vice, idleness and vanity.² The most sustained statement came in May 1522 in Eine göttliche Vermahnung an die Eidgenossen zu Schwyz, a printed exhortation addressed to the canton that had sent the largest contingent to the French and that was then mourning the heavy losses of the battle of Bicocca. Zwingli warned the magistrates and people of Schwyz against the deceptive promises of wealth and honour with which foreign lords recruited Swiss soldiers, argued that pensions blinded citizens to their own interests and undermined justice, and described how the returning soldiers brought home vice and luxury. He noted that he had composed, written and printed the text within three days.³ The phrase is a small document of the speed that the printing press gave to political argument.

The refusal of the French alliance, 1521

The decisive test came before the Reformation in the narrower sense had begun. After Marignano the Confederates concluded the Perpetual Peace with France in 1516. In 1521 King Francis I then sought a full military alliance that would give him the right to recruit Swiss troops. The treaty was agreed at Lucerne on 5 May 1521 and dated 7 May. It allowed the king to recruit between six thousand and sixteen thousand infantry, fixed the monthly pay at four and a half Rhenish guilders a man, raised the annual public pension of each canton from two thousand to three thousand francs and increased the pensions of the associated territories by half. In return the king promised military support if the Confederation were attacked and a war subsidy of twenty-five thousand gold crowns a quarter, to be made available at Lyons. The alliance was to last until three years after the king’s death. Every canton and every associated territory joined, with one exception: Zurich, “after a popular consultation”, stayed away.⁴ The HLS confirms that Zurich, which had signed the Perpetual Peace of 1516, alone refused the defensive alliance of 1521.⁵

The financial dimension of this decision should be spelled out. By refusing the alliance Zurich gave up a public pension of three thousand francs a year, the private pensions that would have flowed to its magistrates and the pay of the hundreds of men it could have sent into French service. It did so at a time when its neighbours accepted these revenues as a normal part of public finance. The choice was not purely a matter of principle, since Zurich in the same year still supplied troops to the pope under the older papal alliance, in a campaign that contemporaries mocked as the Leinlakenkrieg, the “bed-sheet war”, because the troops seemed to spend more time resting than fighting. Zwingli attacked the papal alliance too. The pope’s failure to pay the soldiers’ wages in full left outstanding claims that burdened relations for years.⁶ The decision of 1521 against France was nonetheless a turning point, and Zwingli’s preaching gave it a moral foundation that made it durable.

The pension ban and its enforcement

The council followed the refusal with a general prohibition. On 11 January 1522, after Zwingli had persuaded it to recall the Zurich contingents from foreign service, the council forbade foreign military service and the acceptance of pensions from foreign lords.⁷ Prohibitions of this kind had been issued before, in Zurich and at the level of the Confederation, and had been evaded as regularly as they had been proclaimed. What distinguished the Zurich prohibition of the 1520s was the willingness to enforce it against the city’s own elite. The most spectacular case was that of Jakob Grebel, a member of the council, a former supporter of Zwingli and the father of the Anabaptist leader Konrad Grebel. In 1526 he was tried and executed in Zurich on the charge of having accepted foreign pensions.⁸ Groebner’s careful word “allegedly” is a reminder that the trial took place in a heated political climate and that the charge served also to eliminate an opponent of the reformed party. The execution of a senior magistrate for taking foreign money nonetheless sent a signal to the whole city that the council took the ban seriously.

Zurich’s abstention from the French alliance proved remarkably durable. When the alliance came up for renewal on the deaths of successive French kings, the Zurich authorities reconsidered their position, consulted the clergy and the citizens and each time stayed away. Only in 1614 did Zurich join the French alliance.⁹ Almost a century of self-denial, maintained against the example of every other canton, is the clearest evidence that the Reformation had changed Zurich’s political economy. The Catholic cantons, by contrast, continued to draw substantial public revenue from foreign pensions into the eighteenth century. The Confederation thus divided along confessional lines into cantons that financed part of their public expenditure through the sale of military access and cantons that did not. The latter had to find their revenues elsewhere, in taxes on trade, in the income of secularised church property and in the productive economy. The search for such revenue is one of the threads that lead from Zwingli’s pulpit to the commercial and financial development of Reformed Zurich.

The Zurich stance also shaped its relations with the other cantons. Zwingli hoped to extend the ban to the whole Confederation. In the negotiations that ended the First Kappel War in 1529 the Reformed side pressed for a general prohibition of pensions. The peace treaty included a clause requesting the five Catholic cantons to abolish foreign service and pensions, but a further article, which stipulated that no one could be punished for pensions until the authorities had formally forbidden them, deprived the request of practical effect.¹⁰ The suspicion of foreign money that bought political influence became a lasting feature of Zurich’s self-understanding, although it was never shared across the whole Confederation.

Notes

1. HLS, “Pensionen” (Valentin Groebner), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/010241/2011-11-03/, on public and secret pensions and on the failure of the Pensionenbrief of 1503. ↩
2. HLS, “Pensionen” (Valentin Groebner), as above, on Zwingli’s campaign of 1521–1525. ↩
3. Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte, Universität Zürich, Huldrych Zwingli Werke online, “Eine göttliche Vermahnung an die Eidgenossen zu Schwyz” (Z I, Nr. 10), dated 16 May 1522, https://www.irg.uzh.ch/static/zwingli-werke/index.php?n=Werk.10, quoting: “Ich hab alle ding muessen in dryen tagen erylen, dichten, schryben, lassen trucken.” ↩
4. Staatsarchiv Luzern, “Die französische Soldallianz 1521”, https://staatsarchiv.lu.ch/schaufenster/quellen/Soldallianz, for the date, the parties, the terms and the statement that Zurich stayed away after a consultation of its people. ↩
5. HLS, “Zurich (canton)”, “La Réforme et l’Eglise d’Etat” (Meinrad Suter), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/007381/2017-08-24/. ↩
6. “Schweizer Truppen in päpstlichen Diensten”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schweizer_Truppen_in_p%C3%A4pstlichen_Diensten, section on 1521, which also reports, on the basis of Bullinger, Zwingli’s remark that one should have pierced a hole in the pope’s alliance letter and hung it on the messenger’s back. ↩
7. The date of 11 January 1522 for the Zurich prohibition of foreign service is given by Sanderson Beck, “Zwingli, Calvin, and the Swiss”, https://san.beck.org/9-2-ZwingliCalvin&Swiss.html. ↩
8. HLS, “Pensionen” (Valentin Groebner), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/010241/2011-11-03/: “wegen angeblicher Annahme von Pensionen”; “Pensions (Old Swiss Confederacy)”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pensions_(Old_Swiss_Confederacy), describing Grebel as Zwingli’s former supporter. ↩
9. Hans Rudolf Fuhrer and Christian Moser, Der lange Schatten Zwinglis: Zürich, das französische Soldbündnis und eidgenössische Bündnispolitik, 1500–1650 (Zurich: NZZ Libro, 2009), as summarised at Perlentaucher, https://www.perlentaucher.de/buch/hans-rudolf-fuhrer-christian-moser/der-lange-schatten-zwinglis.html. HLS, “Pensionen” (Valentin Groebner), as above, noting that pensions remained an important source of revenue, especially in the Catholic cantons, until the eighteenth century. ↩
10. Andreas Zecherle, introduction to “Erster Kappeler Landfrieden (26. Juni 1529)”, Europäische Religionsfrieden Digital, http://diglib.hab.de/content.php?dir=edoc%2Fed000227&distype=optional&metsID=edoc_ed000227_erster_kappeler_landfriede_einleitung&xml=einleitungen%2Ferster_kappeler_landfriede_einleitung.xml&xsl=einleitungen%2Feinleitung.xsl, on articles 3 and 4. The HLS article “Kappelerkriege” (Helmut Meyer), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D8903.php, notes that Zwingli failed to achieve a general ban on mercenary service. ↩

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.