Church property becomes public property, 1523–1525

The scale of the transfer

The Reformation in Zurich transferred to the civic authority the largest body of property in the territory that was not already in private hands or in the hands of the city itself. The religious houses of the city and countryside owned land, farms, vineyards, mills, houses, tithes, ground rents (Grundzinsen), annuities and rights of lordship over villages. Their income, paid in grain, wine, poultry and money by thousands of peasant households, had been the material basis of a religious life of prayer, liturgy and hospitality. The HLS summarises the outcome of the Zurich Reformation with admirable economy. All the convents, abbeys and chapters of the canton were abolished, with the exception of the chapter of the Grossmünster. The city took over their property and created administrative offices to manage it. The revenue served to pay the costs of the church, to finance the care of the poor in accordance with the ordinances of 1525, to service the public debt and to buy lordships.¹ The four purposes named are worth reading closely. Two of them, the church and the poor, correspond to what the reformers demanded, whereas the other two, debt service and the purchase of territory, are purposes of state.

André Holenstein, in the HLS article on secularisation, describes the procedure. For each dissolved house the council established a Klosteramt under a civic official, the Amtmann, who collected the rents, paid the pensions of former monks and nuns and the salaries of pastors, and accounted to the council. In 1533 these offices were placed under a central supervision.² The central office was the Obmannamt, installed in the former Franciscan friary (the Barfüsserkloster), to which the individual offices transferred their surpluses. The first surviving account of the Obmannamt, for 1533, is bound in a discarded liturgical manuscript, a small material symbol of the conversion of sacred property into public revenue.³ After the Obmannamt had occupied the former friary for about three centuries, the building housed other government offices and is today the seat of the cantonal High Court (Obergericht).⁴ The continuity of the site from friary to treasury office to court of law is a fair emblem of what the Reformation did with church property in Zurich: it placed it under public administration and, ultimately, under the rule of law.

Holenstein also notes that the question of what the assets should be used for was contested. The reformers insisted that they should serve ecclesiastical and charitable ends, in the service of the church, poor relief, care of the sick and schools, while the magistrates were at times inclined to divert them to secular purposes.⁵ The tension between the two positions is familiar to any modern student of public finance. It is the tension between earmarked funds and the general budget, between the trust-like dedication of assets to a defined purpose and the fiscal authority’s wish to treat all revenue as fungible. Zurich resolved it in a characteristic way: the individual offices kept separate accounts for each former house, which preserved the identity of the endowments, while the council retained control over the surpluses. The arrangement had something of a modern fund structure with ring-fenced sub-funds under a single manager.

The Fraumünster handover

The most famous transfer was that of the Fraumünster, the royal abbey of Benedictine nuns founded in the ninth century, whose abbesses had for centuries held the right of minting and a position of lordship in the city (see Part A). Its last abbess, Katharina von Zimmern, born in 1478 at Messkirch in Upper Swabia and elected abbess in 1496, resigned her office at the end of 1524 and handed the abbey over to the city. Two documents recorded the transaction. In a renunciation dated 30 November 1524 she stated that she acted “um des Friedens willen”, for the sake of peace. By a deed of transfer dated 8 December 1524 she then handed the abbey with all its possessions to the burgomaster and council.⁶ The possessions included estates in some thirty villages, urban properties and mills on the Limmat and the Sihl.⁷

The terms were negotiated as a settlement between parties. Katharina received the right to continue living in the abbey buildings and a life pension that included, according to one account, twenty-five barrels of wine a year. In 1536 she gave up her right of residence in return for 520 pounds. Around 1525 she married Eberhard von Reischach, a recruiter and leader of mercenaries, who was killed at Kappel in 1531. She herself died in Zurich on 17 August 1547.⁸ The biography contains a small irony that the reformers did not comment on: the last abbess of Zurich married one of the mercenary entrepreneurs whose trade Zwingli had denounced.

Historians have debated whether Katharina acted from conviction or from pragmatism. The two motives are not exclusive. Educated, in contact with humanist circles and sympathetic to reform, she also understood that the council intended to control the process and that resistance would have exposed the abbey to the kind of violence that befell other houses in 1525. The church historian Irene Gysel has called the handover a stroke of luck for the city and the “material breakthrough” of the Reformation. The phrase is apt. The Fraumünster’s rights and revenues passed intact to a new public office, the Fraumünsteramt, which administered them until 1803. In its account of the jubilee, the Catholic Church in the canton of Zurich notes that the assets became an important financial source for the state, used for social welfare, schools and government, including military expenditure.⁹ The abbey buildings themselves were demolished in 1898 to make way for the Stadthaus, the seat of the municipal administration.¹⁰ In 2024 the city marked the five-hundredth anniversary of the handover with exhibitions, sermons, an oratorio and a temporary tower of five hundred fabric bands honouring notable women.¹¹

The other houses

The other religious houses of the city followed in quick succession. The Dominican nuns of Oetenbach and the Cistercian nuns of Selnau were dissolved in 1523 or soon after, followed by the Franciscan and Augustinian friaries in 1524 and the beguine house of St. Verena in 1525. Each building found a public use. The Augustinian friary received a wine press and, from 1525, the marriage court. It also became the seat of the poor-relief administration, the Almosenamt, which was later merged with the administration of the former abbey of Rüti. The Dominican friary (Predigerkloster) passed to the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, with parts of it serving as wine press and granary. Oetenbach housed the grain office, later an orphanage and a prison.¹² The map of the city’s public institutions for the next three centuries was drawn in the buildings of the dissolved monasteries.

In the countryside the pattern was similar. The Cistercian abbey of Kappel am Albis, whose last abbot Wolfgang Joner had in 1523 brought the young Heinrich Bullinger to teach in the monastery school, removed its images on 9 March 1525, abolished the Mass on 4 September 1525 and handed the monastery over to the city in 1527. The former monks continued to run a school there.¹³ The Premonstratensian abbey of Rüti in the Zurich Oberland had a less peaceful end. On 22 April 1525, with peasant unrest spreading, its abbot Felix Klauser fled to Rapperswil with documents, money and treasure. After the house had been formally secularised on 17 June 1525, its possessions in some 185 localities were administered as the Amt Rüti by an official of the city until 1798.¹⁴ Rüti illustrates the scale of the assets involved. A single abbey held rights in almost two hundred places. The administration of such a portfolio of rents and tithes, collected in kind, stored in granaries and sold on the market, was a substantial economic enterprise. The officials who ran it acquired skills in accounting, estate management and commodity trading that the city could use for other purposes.

The Grossmünster exception and the church silver

One institution survived. The chapter of canons at the Grossmünster, to which Zwingli himself belonged, was reformed and kept, together with its property and its self-government. According to the HLS it continued to head the Reformed church, while Holenstein emphasises that it remained both an institution and an economic entity after 1523.¹⁵ An agreement of 29 September 1523 between the council and the chapter converted a number of prebends into salaries for teachers and scholars, a reform from which the theological school of the Prophezei emerged in 1525.¹⁶ The chapter’s endowment was thus kept together and redirected to education and the ministry. It was not dissolved until 1832, shortly before the new liberal canton founded the University of Zurich in 1833, for which the chapter and its library became the nucleus.¹⁷

The treasures of the churches followed a different path. The gold and silver vessels, reliquaries and ornaments of the Grossmünster, the Fraumünster and the other churches were melted down on the council’s orders and turned into coin. The numismatist Ursula Kampmann summarises it: the council claimed the administration of church property, including the “huge quantities” of altar vessels of precious metal, which it had melted and minted. The conversion of sacred objects into money is the most literal expression of the transfer of wealth from church to state. It also had a monetary consequence. Zurich had received the right to strike gold coins from Charles V only in 1521. In the decades after the Reformation its mint was very active: between 1555 and 1561 two mint masters struck more than nine million coins for the city, a figure that Kampmann links to the multiplication of the city’s financial resources through the confiscated church property.¹⁸ Since the chronology suggests that the coinage of the 1550s had several causes, the attribution to church property should be read as a general statement about the city’s enlarged means. The point remains that the Reformation gave Zurich a stock of bullion and a flow of revenue that strengthened its position as a monetary authority, a theme that Chapter A.IV traced for the medieval mint and that later chapters will follow into the modern period.

Notes

1. HLS, “Zurich (canton)”, “La Réforme et l’Eglise d’Etat” (Meinrad Suter), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/007381/2017-08-24/. The same passage adds that the property of the parish churches remained with the parishes and paid for the pastor, the school and local poor relief. ↩
2. HLS, “Säkularisation” (André Holenstein), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013102/: “der Rat für jedes aufgehobene Kloster ein Klosteramt unter der Leitung eines städtischen Amtmanns”. ↩
3. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000 (Zurich 2000), https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/politik-staat/recherche-im-staatsarchiv/z%C3%BCrcher-geschichte/zh_verfassungsgeschichte.pdf, on the Klosterämter, the Obmannamt and its first account of 1533. ↩
4. Kanton Zürich, media release “Vom Franziskanerkloster zum Obergericht” (2014), https://www.zh.ch/de/news-uebersicht/medienmitteilungen/2014/05/franziskanerkloster.html. ↩
5. HLS, “Säkularisation” (André Holenstein), as above: the reformers demanded use for “kirchlichen und christlich-karitativen Zwecken (Kirchendienst, Armenfürsorge, Krankenpflege, Schulen)”. ↩
6. HLS, “Zimmern, Katharina von” (Barbara Helbling), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/026577/. ref.ch, “Zürich feiert seine Äbtissin”, https://www.ref.ch/news/katharina-von-zimmern-jubilaum-fraumunster-zurich-abtissin/; “Katharina von Zimmern”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_von_Zimmern, which gives both dates. ↩
7. Katholische Kirche im Kanton Zürich, “Katharina von Zimmern übergibt das Fraumünsterkloster”, https://www.zhkath.ch/kirche-aktuell/kirche-im-kanton/katharina-von-zimmern-uebergibt-das-fraumuensterkloster. The same page dates the handover to 1525, which is contradicted by the documents of 1524 cited in the preceding note. ↩
8. “Katharina von Zimmern”, Wikipedia, as above, relying on Christine Christ-von Wedel, Die Äbtissin, der Söldnerführer und ihre Töchter (2019). ref.ch, “Zürich feiert seine Äbtissin”, as above. HLS, “Zimmern, Katharina von” (Barbara Helbling), as above, which describes Reischach as a “recruteur de mercenaires”. ↩
9. Katholische Kirche im Kanton Zürich, as above. ↩
10. “Kirchen und Klöster in der Stadt Zürich im Mittelalter”, Wikipedia (German), as above, also for the continuation of the Fraumünsteramt until 1803. ↩
11. ref.ch, “Zürich feiert seine Äbtissin”, as above, for the quotation from Irene Gysel and the jubilee events. ↩
12. “Augustinerkloster Zürich”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinerkloster_Z%C3%BCrich. “Kirchen und Klöster in der Stadt Zürich im Mittelalter”, Wikipedia (German), as above, for the dates of dissolution and the later uses, including the marriage court’s move into the Augustinian friary (“1525 zog das Ehegericht ein”). ↩
13. “Kappel Abbey”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kappel_Abbey. ↩
14. “Rüti Monastery”, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R%C3%BCti_Monastery. ↩
15. HLS, “Zurich (canton)”, “La Réforme et l’Eglise d’Etat” (Meinrad Suter), as above; HLS, “Säkularisation” (André Holenstein), as above. ↩
16. “Prophezei”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prophezei, dating the council mandate on the chapter to 29 September 1523. ↩
17. Wikipedia (German), “Grossmünster”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grossmünster: “Nach der Aufhebung des Stifts 1832 wurden die Gebäude verkauft …” and “Das Stift und seine Bibliothek wurde zur Keimzelle der heutigen Universität Zürich (gegründet 1833), die in ihrem Siegel immer noch auf das Grossmünster verweist.” ↩
18. Ursula Kampmann, “Einleitung ‘Die Zürcher und ihr Geld’ Teil 1”, MünzenWoche, https://neu.muenzenwoche.de/nationen/einleitung-die-zuercher-und-ihr-geld-teil-1/: “welche der Rat einschmelzen und zu Münzen ausprägen ließ”; “Zwei Münzmeister prägten zwischen 1555 und 1561 im Auftrag der Stadt mehr als 9 Millionen Münzen” and “Durch die beschlagnahmten Kirchengüter hatte die Stadt Zürich ihre finanziellen Ressourcen vervielfacht.” ↩

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.