Boatmen, warehouses and tolls in the city

The Schiffleute and the organisation of the waterways

The men who worked Zurich’s waterways were among the first groups to be organised in the new constitutional order of 1336. The HLS article on the lake records that in 1336 the city’s boatmen joined together in the Zurich guild of the Schiffleute, which exercised regulatory authority, issued ordinances and enforced them over lake traffic.¹ The guild’s own account dates its constitutional recognition to 16 July 1336, when the Brun constitution elevated the guilds to constitutional rank after a period in which they had been prohibited.² The guild united fishermen and boatmen with carters, rope-makers and porters, trades that together formed the transport and supply sector of the town.³

Two sub-associations reflected the two waters. The fishermen of the lower water, the Limmat, and those of the upper water, the lake, each had their own Einung. The boatmen were similarly divided into an Oberwasser company serving the lake and a Niederwasser company serving the river. The guild’s historical account notes that boatmen and fishermen, after periods of separation, reunited in a common guild house in 1498.⁴ Officials appointed by the council inspected boats before they left the landing places, such as the Schipfe below the Lindenhof or St. Leonhard.⁵

The organisation of the boatmen had three effects that deserve attention. First, it made transport a regulated public service with fixed tariffs, turns and liability, which merchants could calculate in advance. Second, it gave a group of citizens a vested interest in the volume of traffic passing through the city, and so a voice in the council whenever routes, tolls or wars were discussed. Third, it tied the transport trades into the guild constitution, with the result that later innovations in the carrying trade, such as the formation of large forwarding companies, had to be negotiated with an established corporation. The city’s eastern waterway was later governed by agreements with its neighbours. In 1498 Schwyz, Glarus and Zurich established shipping ordinances for freight on the Linth and the Walensee, and from 1532 the three cantons formed an association for upper-water shipping that ran a weekly regulated service until 1798.⁶ The route that had been fought over in the 1440s thus became, after the Reformation, the object of an intercantonal service agreement.

The landing places, the Kornhaus and the Kaufhaus

Physically, Zurich’s trade was concentrated along the river and the lake shore. Boats landed at the Schipfe on the left bank below the Lindenhof, at the lakeside quarter around the Kratz near the Fraumünster, and along the right bank. The Kratz quarter, a tight cluster of houses between the Fraumünster and the lake, took its name from a word for a tightly woven basket, and was defended by the Kratzturm, built in 1293, which projected into the lake.⁷ The Wasserkirche and the Helmhaus stood on the river between the two parts of the town. The HLS records that the Helmhaus at the Wasserkirche served textile quality control and toll collection, while the grain market was regulated through the Kornhaus at the Weinplatz, established in the late thirteenth century.⁸

The Kornhaus deserves particular emphasis. Grain was the commodity on which the city’s food security and its political relations with the grain-deficit Alpine valleys depended. Grain from the Zurich countryside, from Thurgau and from Swabia was brought to the city, stored and sold under official supervision. The Kornhaus was thus at once a warehouse, a market hall and an instrument of policy. The same building that fed the city could also be used to starve its neighbours, as the grain embargo of 1438 against Schwyz and Glarus showed.

More generally, the late medieval period saw the spread of the public Kaufhaus in Swiss market towns. According to the HLS article on markets, market towns built public market halls from the late Middle Ages onwards as mandatory places of trade and storage. Serving as obligatory sale locations, weighing stations and toll collection points, these halls were the instruments by which the authorities enforced market law.⁹ Market law included the obligation to trade only at the official time and place, “keinesfalls ausserhalb des obligatorischen Marktplatzes”, as well as the obligation to use the public scales.¹⁰ In medieval Zurich these functions were distributed among several places, with the Kornhaus serving grain and the Helmhaus serving cloth, while salt sellers and wine carriers were organised within the guild of the Kämbel.¹¹ The sources consulted for this chapter do not allow the history of a single central Kaufhaus in Zurich before 1519 to be traced with precision. Indeed, the name Kaufhaus is documented for the former Kornhaus building only after 1839.¹² The principle, however, was already established before 1519: goods entering the city for sale passed through public hands, were weighed and inspected, and paid their dues.

Tolls and their administration

Tolls were the most direct way in which a medieval authority turned traffic into revenue. The HLS article on tolls distinguishes transit tolls, bridge tolls, water tolls, market tolls, road money and escort charges. It also stresses a principle that deserves to be remembered in any discussion of public finance: the legal right to levy taxes, tolls and dues obliged the authority to provide services in return.¹³ In theory the bridge toll was destined for the maintenance of the bridge, while the market toll was justified by the security of the market and the escort toll compensated for safe passage. A toll was therefore understood as the price of a public service, which gave merchants an argument when they complained of excessive or unjustified charges.

In Zurich the market, toll and mint rights were originally royal rights exercised by the abbess of the Fraumünster. The HLS article on the abbey states that around 1045 the abbey received the regalian rights of mint, toll and market. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the article continues, the abbess repeatedly granted mint and toll rights to citizens, determined the monetary standard and measures, and administered the penny die.¹⁴ In practice, therefore, the collection of tolls in the city passed into the hands of citizens and of the council long before the abbey formally surrendered its rights, with all its possessions, to the city on 2 December 1524.¹⁵ The pattern is characteristic of Zurich: formal title remained with an older authority, while the operational control and the revenue moved step by step to the civic government through lease, pledge and custom.

Comparative figures show the order of magnitude of toll revenue. The HLS reports that in Schaffhausen, another Rhine city with a transit function, tolls averaged about fifteen per cent of consumption tax receipts in the late Middle Ages, with considerable fluctuation caused by war, epidemics and disruptions of trade. Lucerne, which controlled the lake route to the Gotthard, had levied Gotthard transit tolls before it received a formal privilege from King Sigismund in 1415. Its earliest known toll tariff dates from 1390 and covers textiles, metals and fish.¹⁶ For Zurich, the documentary basis for such questions was assembled by the later state archivist Werner Schnyder, who published Quellen zur Zürcher Wirtschaftsgeschichte in 1937 and a collection of medieval Swiss toll tariffs in 1938.¹⁷

A particular form of toll was the Pfundzoll, an ad valorem levy calculated on the value of the goods. The name derives from the pound as a unit of account: a fixed number of pennies was charged per pound of value. First documented in Mainz in 1310, the Pfundzoll was used in the Hanseatic cities and in Swiss and South German cities from the Middle Ages into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In Basel a “new Pfundzoll” was introduced in 1451.¹⁸ Its significance for fiscal history is that it presupposes a declaration or assessment of value. A specific toll, levied per bale, cartload or animal, can be collected by a gatekeeper who counts, whereas an ad valorem toll requires valuation, records and trust in the declaring merchant or an inspection regime that can test his declaration. The spread of value-based tolls in the fifteenth century therefore went hand in hand with written administration, standard units and the appearance of professional officials, all of which prepared the ground for more sophisticated fiscal and financial institutions.

For the transit merchant, tolls were one cost among many. Carrier fees, Sust fees, weighing charges, escort money, losses through damage and theft, and the costs of waiting for a boat or a mule train all added up. The HLS article on transit traffic stresses that the passes developed into transit routes precisely because their infrastructure of hospices, inns, carriers and tolls could be relied upon.¹⁹ Reliability, which in modern language would be called legal certainty and predictability of charges, was the good that the authorities along a route sold to the merchant. Zurich, which lived from that sale, had an interest in being predictable.

Notes

1. Ziegler, “Zürichsee”, HLS (as above): “1336 schlossen sich die städtischen Schiffleute in der Zürcher Schiffleutezunft zusammen.” ↩
2. Zunft zur Schiffleuten Zürich, “Über uns”, https://www.schiffleuten.ch/%C3%BCber-uns. On the Brun constitution and the political role of the guilds see Chapter A.II. ↩
3. “Als Zürich im späten Mittelalter noch Hafenstadt …”, NZZ (as above), naming “Seiler, Karrer und Träger”; Zunft zur Schiffleuten, “Über uns” (as above). ↩
4. Zunft zur Schiffleuten, “Über uns” (as above), citing the “Eynunge der Vischer in dem nideren Wasser” and the “Eynunge der Vischer in dem oberen Wasser”; Zentralbibliothek Zürich, “Die Zürcher Zünfte”, https://www.zb.uzh.ch/en/fokus/beitrag/die-zurcher-zunfte, describing the guild as comprising shipmasters working on the Niederwasser (Limmat) and Oberwasser (Lake Zurich), rope-makers and fishermen. ↩
5. “Als Zürich im späten Mittelalter noch Hafenstadt …”, NZZ (as above). ↩
6. “Linth (Fluss)”, HLS (as above): the cantons “schlossen sich zur Einung der Oberwasserschifffahrt zusammen”. Kuratli Hüeblin, “Walensee”, HLS (French version, as above), adds that the boatmen of Weesen and Walenstadt and the Zurich boatmen’s guild retained the privilege of transport. ↩
7. “Dä Chratz: ‘Züri West’ des Mittelalters”, Zürcher Geschichten, University of Zurich blog, https://dlf.uzh.ch/sites/zuerchergeschichten/2019/05/20/dae-chratz-zueri-west-des-mittelalters/. ↩
8. Schultheiss, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, HLS (as above), section on the economy. The later Kornhaus near the Fraumünster, built 1616–1619 and demolished in 1897, replaced the medieval building at the Weinplatz after the collapse of the lower bridge under a heavy grain cargo in 1615: “Kornhaus (Zürich)”, German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kornhaus_(Z%C3%BCrich). ↩
9. Anne-Marie Dubler, “Märkte”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013739/. ↩
10. Dubler, “Märkte”, HLS (as above). ↩
11. Zentralbibliothek Zürich, “Die Zürcher Zünfte” (as above), listing among the members of the Kämbel guild shopkeepers, salt-sellers, wine draymen, wine importers and butter merchants. ↩
12. “Kornhaus (Zürich)”, German Wikipedia (as above). ↩
13. Marco Polli-Schönborn, “Zölle”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013765/2015-02-03/: “Der Rechtsanspruch, Steuern, Zölle und Abgaben einzufordern, verpflichtete indessen zu Gegenleistungen.” ↩
14. Judith Steinmann, “Fraumünster”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011612/: the abbess “verlieh das Münz- und Zollrecht immer wieder an die Bürger, bestimmte Münzfuss und Masse und verwaltete den Pfenningstempel”. On the mint see Chapter A.IV. ↩
15. Steinmann, “Fraumünster”, HLS (as above). ↩
16. Polli-Schönborn, “Zölle”, HLS (as above). ↩
17. “Werner Schnyder”, German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Schnyder, listing Quellen zur Zürcher Wirtschaftsgeschichte (1937), Mittelalterliche Zolltarife aus der Schweiz (1938) and Die Steuerbücher von Stadt und Landschaft Zürich (1941–1958). The present chapter has not been able to consult these editions directly. ↩
18. “Pfundzoll”, German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pfundzoll, which gives for Zurich in 1757 a rate of two Heller per pound or four Heller per gulden of value. Cited for orientation. ↩
19. Schiedt, “Transitverkehr”, HLS (as above). ↩

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.