Consequences for public finance and economic life

A new public balance sheet

The Reformation changed the balance sheet of the Zurich state in a few years more profoundly than any event since the purchases of territory in the fifteenth century. On the asset side, the city acquired the land, rents, tithes, buildings and treasures of the religious houses. On the side of obligations, it took over the costs of the pastors, the schools, the poor relief and the care of the sick that the church had previously borne, together with the life pensions of the former monks and nuns and of the last abbess. It gave up, by its own decision, the revenue of foreign pensions and the pay of soldiers in foreign service. The net effect cannot be quantified from the sources consulted for this chapter, but the qualitative picture is clear. The HLS names debt service and the purchase of lordships among the uses of the secularised revenue, and Kampmann speaks of a multiplication of the city’s financial resources.¹ The Reformation made the Zurich state richer and turned it into the direct owner of a large share of the productive income of its territory.

The structure of that ownership deserves attention. The city kept the new assets in separate offices, each with its own accounts, officials and granaries, under the supervision of the Obmannamt. It thus preserved a form of fund accounting in which each former endowment remained identifiable. The council retained the power to decide on surpluses, but the separate accounts created a presumption that each fund served a defined purpose. This arrangement, which lasted until the end of the Ancien Régime, gave Zurich a class of officials experienced in the management of a diversified portfolio of rents and commodities and accustomed to accounting to a supervisory authority. The later reputation of Zurich for sound public administration and careful accounting, which the canton and the city still cultivate, has one of its roots here.

The accumulation of public wealth also created a problem that would occupy the city for centuries: what to do with surpluses. A state that owned granaries full of tithe grain and received a steady flow of money rents could lend. In the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the Zurich public offices became significant lenders to private individuals, communities and other states, while the city’s treasury accumulated capital that it invested at interest. That development belongs to the period after 1600 and is treated in Part C, but its precondition was the Reformation’s transfer of church property into public hands. It is one of the paradoxes of the Zurich Reformation that the movement which denounced foreign money and the traffic in masses also made the civic state into a capital owner of considerable size.

The economy of the city

The immediate effects on the urban economy were mixed. The abolition of the Mass, of processions, pilgrimages and the cult of saints destroyed a market for religious goods and services: candles, votive objects, altar painting and sculpture, vestments, liturgical books and the work of the many priests who had lived from altar benefices. Artists and craftsmen who worked for the church lost their customers. Some adapted, as the goldsmiths turned to secular plate and the painters to portraits and book illustration, while others left. The number of clergy in the city fell sharply, since the chaplains and monks were pensioned off or found other occupations. The pensions, the soldiers’ pay and the booty that had flowed into the city from the Italian wars dried up as far as Zurich was concerned.

Against these losses stood new activities. The printing industry, described in Section II, grew into an export trade of European reach. The public offices administering church property created employment for clerks, bailiffs, granary keepers and carriers. The sumptuary laws discouraged display and encouraged saving, while the moral mandates emphasised work, sobriety and the fulfilment of obligations. In the long run the most important development was one that Zwingli did not live to see: the arrival in 1555 of the Protestant refugees from Locarno, who brought the silk and textile trades that were to transform the city’s economy. Their admission, treated in Chapter B.V, was a consequence of the Reformation, since Zurich received them as fellow believers.

Interest, rents and the ethics of wealth

Zwingli’s teaching on the economic questions of his time is examined in detail in Chapter B.III, and only its general direction needs to be recalled here. He condemned greed and the exploitation of the poor, attacked monopolies and speculation in grain, and demanded that the rich use their wealth for the common good. He accepted interest and rents in principle, however. Following the distinction between divine and human justice, he held that contracts for annuities and rents, once lawfully concluded, bound the debtor. The magistrate, in his view, had the duty to regulate their terms and to prevent abuse.² In practice the Zurich authorities regulated the rate of interest on annuity contracts and limited the burdens on peasant land. A Zurich ordinance of the late 1520s is reported to have capped the rate at five per cent.³ The position combined moral severity with legal realism. It accepted credit as a necessary part of economic life and placed it under public supervision, which is the position that the Zurich authorities and, in a sense, Swiss law have maintained ever since.

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/; Kampmann, “Einleitung ‘Die Zürcher und ihr Geld’ Teil 1”, MünzenWoche, https://neu.muenzenwoche.de/nationen/einleitung-die-zuercher-und-ihr-geld-teil-1/. ↩
2. Stayer, MennLex V, https://www.mennlex.de/doku.php?id=art:zwingli_huldrych_ulrich, on Von göttlicher und menschlicher Gerechtigkeit. ↩
3. See Chapter B.III. ↩

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.