Buying a territory: pledges and the price of Kyburg

The Pfandschaft as an instrument of territorial policy

Between the middle of the fourteenth century and the end of the fifteenth, Zurich built one of the largest city states north of the Alps. The Historical Dictionary lists its principal acquisitions: Zollikon in 1358; Küsnacht, Meilen and Höngg in 1384; Thalwil in 1385; the large lordships of Greifensee in 1402, Grüningen in 1408 and Regensberg in 1409; Kyburg from 1424 to 1442 and again from 1452; Andelfingen in 1434; Eglisau in 1496; and the towns of Winterthur and Stein am Rhein in 1467 and 1484, which retained their privileges.¹ These territories were acquired, in the words of the same article, by purchase or by pledge (Kauf oder Pfandschaft).²

The pledge (Pfandschaft) was the typical form in which late medieval lords raised money on their rights of lordship. A lord who needed money, the Habsburg dukes above all, transferred a lordship, a bailiwick or a set of rights to a creditor as security for a loan, whereupon the creditor exercised the rights and collected the revenues until the debt was repaid. Although the lordship remained redeemable in legal form, the Historical Dictionary observes in its article on land pledges that redemption often proved impossible in practice, so that indebted lords lost entire lordships to wealthy cities.³ The imperial pledges (Reichspfandschaften), by which kings pledged imperial rights to towns and lords, were an especially important source of civic revenue and power. The Historical Dictionary lists them among the principal channels through which cities acquired their revenues.⁴ For Zurich, the pledge had two advantages. It allowed the city to acquire territory without the violence and political cost of conquest, while creating a legal title that the city could defend in the courts of the Empire and before the Confederate diet.

The financing of these acquisitions required large sums in gold. The city raised them through the instruments described above: extraordinary taxes, the sale of annuities secured on its revenues, and loans from its wealthier citizens. The newly acquired territories then served as the security for further borrowing, with their revenues (tithes, rents, court fines and tolls) paying the interest. Territorial expansion was thus a leveraged operation, whose risk lay in the possibility that the pledgor might redeem the pledge or that war might deprive the city of its revenues.

Kyburg, 1424

The purchase of the county of Kyburg illustrates this mechanism. The county, the largest lordship in the region, had passed to the Habsburgs after the extinction of the older counts of Kyburg in the thirteenth century. The dukes of Austria pledged parts of it around 1370 to their local advocate at Kyburg castle. In 1384 the entire pledge passed to the counts of Toggenburg, from whom it came by inheritance to Countess Kunigunde of Montfort, née Toggenburg.⁵ On 9 February 1424 Zurich acquired the pledge by paying 8,750 gulden to Countess Kunigunde, a single transaction with which the city roughly doubled its territory. On the following day it also purchased the bailiwick of Rümlang from the lords of Rümlang.⁶

The acquisition of Kyburg was a transaction in credit. What Zurich bought was the position of the pledgee, the right to hold the county until the Habsburgs redeemed it. The sum of 8,750 gulden was the amount of the Habsburg debt that the pledge secured. The city’s title was therefore precarious, as the following twenty years demonstrated. During the Old Zurich War, Zurich concluded an alliance with King Frederick III of Habsburg in 1442, under which the parts of the county of Kyburg north of the Glatt were to pass to Frederick III. The Historical Dictionary accordingly dates the first period of Zurich rule over Kyburg from 1424 to 1442.⁷⁸ After the war, in 1452, Zurich recovered the county: according to the Opfikon account, it did so by forgiving the Duke of Austria a debt of 17,000 gulden as the new pledge sum.⁹ The price of Kyburg had almost doubled in thirty years, a measure both of the rising value of the lordship and of the cost of the war.

Kyburg became the largest of Zurich’s bailiwicks and remained so until 1798, governed by a bailiff (Landvogt) resident in the castle. Zurich also reorganised the smaller districts acquired with Kyburg and Rümlang into separate bailiwicks, later called Obervogteien, including Schwamendingen, Rümlang and the Neuamt.¹⁰ The Habsburgs never redeemed the pledge. Over time, and certainly by the sixteenth century, the pledged county had become in practice the property of the city, so that the distinction between a pledge and a sale lost its significance.

Winterthur, 1467

The acquisition of Winterthur followed the same pattern. The Habsburg town, loyal to Austria, was pledged to Zurich by Duke Sigmund of Austria in 1467 for 10,000 gulden.¹¹ The records of the Zurich state archives include both the deed of pledge of 31 August 1467 and a bond of the city of Zurich in favour of Winterthur on behalf of the duke of 14 September 1467.¹² Duke Sigmund, chronically short of money and burdened by his conflicts with the Confederates, raised cash by pledging a town he could no longer defend. Zurich, for its part, extended its rule over the second town of its territory without war. The Winterthur transaction shows the dual character of these arrangements: the city was simultaneously the creditor of the prince and the new lord of the pledged subjects, while its bonds circulated as part of the settlement.

The significance of these transactions for the later history of Zurich is considerable. The city state of Zurich was, in large part, a creation of credit. Its territorial sovereignty was acquired through a sequence of loans to impecunious lords, secured on their rights of lordship and never repaid. When modern observers describe Switzerland as a country in which financial power and political sovereignty are closely intertwined, they describe a relationship that in Zurich goes back to the fifteenth century.

Notes

1. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)”, section on territorial formation by Meinrad Suter, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/. ↩
2. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)” (as above). ↩
3. HLS, “Grundpfandrecht” (as above). ↩
4. HLS, “Öffentlicher Haushalt” (as above). ↩
5. Stadt Opfikon, “Vogtei, Recht und Gericht”, https://www.opfikon.ch/geschichte/2377. ↩
6. Stadt Opfikon, “Vogtei, Recht und Gericht” (as above), which states that Zurich acquired the pledge “durch die Bezahlung von 8750 Gulden an Gräfin Kunigunde”. ↩
7. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)” (as above), which gives Kyburg as “1424–1442 und wieder 1452”. ↩
8. “Alter Zürichkrieg”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alter_Z%C3%BCrichkrieg: under the treaties sealed at Aachen on 17 June 1442, Zurich was to hand over the parts of the county of Kyburg north of the Glatt to Frederick III, who in return undertook to acquire the Toggenburg and the county of Uznach for Zurich; Kyburg returned to Zurich by repurchase in 1452. ↩
9. Stadt Opfikon, “Vogtei, Recht und Gericht” (as above). ↩
10. Stadt Opfikon, “Vogtei, Recht und Gericht” (as above). ↩
11. HLS, “Winterthur” (Meinrad Suter), version of 28 August 2015, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000157/2015-08-28/: “Für 10'000 Gulden verpfändete sie Herzog Sigismund von Habsburg 1467 an die Stadt Zürich”. ↩
12. Staatsarchiv Zürich, C I, Nr. 3153 (“Verpfändung der Stadt Winterthur an die Stadt Zürich durch Herzog Sigmund von Österreich”, 1467.08.31) and C I, Nr. 3165 (“Schuldverschreibung der Stadt Zürich gegenüber der Stadt Winterthur für Herzog Sigmund von Österreich”, 1467.09.14); catalogue titles seen in a search listing of suche.staatsarchiv.djiktzh.ch, the detail pages themselves being blocked for automated retrieval. ↩

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.