From shop to Verlag: trade links, Zanino and the silk enterprise

Retail beginnings and the Italian trade

The economic history of the Locarnesi in Zurich begins modestly, in rented shops. Aloisio Orelli, the founder of the Zurich line, is recorded in 1557 as the owner of a shop dealing in leather goods, hats, soap, tallow and candles. From 1558 he extended his range to silk fabrics, velvet and ticking.¹ The family tradition remembers him as having started a small grocery in rented premises, from which the Zurich line of the family grew.² His sons Franz and Johann Melchior Aloys Orelli began to export twisted thread and woollen and cotton textiles to northern Italy.³ By 1578 Johann Melchior (1543–1623) and his brother ran one of the largest enterprises in Zurich dealing in raw cotton cloth and ticking for export to Italy. Johann Melchior was also secretly involved in the manufacture of fustian and bombazine operated by Caspar Wüst, an activity from which refugees were at that time excluded.⁴

What distinguished the Locarnesi from the Italian merchants who had visited Zurich before was regularity. Weisz emphasises that they did not wait for occasional Italian traders to appear but brought cotton regularly to Zurich and Basel and bought up as much of the local light cotton cloth (Tüchli) as they could for sale in the south. They also shifted the geography of Zurich’s Italian trade. Previously that trade had run almost exclusively through Como and Milan, while merchants from Bergamo had come to Zurich only rarely, mostly to buy ticking or grain in years of dearth. The Locarnesi changed this decisively.⁵ From the middle of the sixteenth century Bergamo, a city of the Venetian terraferma with important fairs, developed intense relations with the Confederation and the Three Leagues. Zurich merchants obtained commercial privileges from Venice from 1564. Merchants from Locarno and St. Gallen settled in Bergamo, where Zurich families such as the von Cham, Kambli, Holzhalb, Bebia (Pebbia), Gosswyler and Schneeberger engaged in the silk and cloth trade there. The improvement of the access road to the San Marco pass, agreed in 1592 between the Three Leagues and Venice, turned the Via Priulana into a modern international trade route.⁶

The shift towards Bergamo and Venice was also imposed by politics. On 19 August 1564 the government of the duchy of Milan, then under Spanish rule, issued a mandate against heretics which barred those who had been expelled for their faith from the duchy. The Locarnesi became wholly dependent on Bergamo. A clarification followed on 17 December 1565, but full access to Milan was restored only in 1579. Milanese competitors used the situation: Evangelista Zanino was imprisoned at Como on charges of heresy and lost 200 scudi, after which a Milanese merchant let it be known that Zanino deserved to be treated as a traitor. When the Venetian authorities in turn ordered heretics to leave their territories on 22 May 1568, within fifteen days, Zurich arranged for merchants from the Grisons to act as front men in its transactions. In this situation the firm of Antonio Pestalozzi, allied with the Locarnese house of Lorenzo Pebbia, took over most of the Locarnese business with Milan, Como, Bergamo and Venice, with the result that both partners rapidly became rich.⁷

These episodes show the Locarnese merchants in a situation that modern practitioners would recognise. Their market access depended on the legal status of the persons conducting the trade. When sanctions imposed for confessional reasons excluded named categories of persons from important markets, the response was the interposition of intermediaries with a different legal status, whose commissions made them wealthy. The skills required to organise a business under such conditions (reliable correspondents, trusted agents, flexible partnership structures and a keen sense of legal risk) were exactly those on which later merchant banking would rest. Lyon completed the network: it served Zanino as a market for his velvets, whose proceeds could be used to buy Zurich cloth for export.⁸

Evangelista Zanino, entrepreneur

The central figure of the first phase of Zurich silk manufacture is Evangelista Zanino. Born around 1530 in Locarno, he died in Zurich in 1603. Like other refugees he began in the trade between Zurich and northern Italy, but he distinguished himself by moving from commerce into manufacturing, a rare step in view of the guild restrictions. In 1558 he began the weaving of silk satin, adding in 1565 the production of a cloth known as basin in the Milanese manner. With a loan from the Zurich council he established a dye works. The HLS describes his undertaking, which combined centralised production with work put out to households under the Verlag system and employed workers from northern Italy, as the first large industrial enterprise of German-speaking Switzerland. It failed, according to the same article, for lack of capital and because of speculative practices.⁹

Weisz’s account gives the details. In 1565 Zanino set up a silk throwing mill (filatoio) in the former convent mill of Oetenbach, later known as the Wollenhof, where Italian women spinners turned raw silk into thread for velvet weaving, although its output remained small and insufficient for local demand. In May 1565 his brother Paolo, who had learnt velvet weaving at Como, directed nine Italian journeymen in the velvet workshop. The production of bombazine, an imitation of fustian that was much sought after as women’s neckwear and, bleached, as a substitute for linen among poorer people, was in full swing by 1566. Zanino experimented with the cultivation of dye plants, woad and weld, from seeds obtained in the region of Bologna. In 1570 he proposed a fulling mill for woollen cloth in the Italian manner, which was built in 1571 despite the hesitation of the council.¹⁰ From 1566 he planted mulberry trees on the hospital meadow in the Selnau to produce raw silk locally and grew dye plants nearby.¹¹

Zanino’s enterprise was, in effect, an integrated textile concern. It covered sericulture, throwing, dyeing, weaving and finishing, combined a central workshop with outworkers and linked Zurich to the Italian markets for raw materials and finished goods. It was financed in part by Zurich money: loans from the council and capital from Zurich merchants. Heinrich Holzhalb, the son-in-law of the tax master Jakob Werdmüller, was his partner in the cloth business until 1575.¹² This dependence on local capital explains both the council’s willingness to grant him citizenship in 1567 and its readiness, later, to let him fall.

The velvet weavers’ ordinance of 1568 and the guild conflict

The guilds did not accept the new form of production without resistance. In 1568 the velvet weavers complained against Zanino’s Verlag. Their argument, as reported by Weisz, was that the Locarnese understood trade and profit but had never learnt weaving and understood nothing of it, so that unlearned masters organising production would damage the quality and reputation of Zurich cloth. The council’s answer was the velvet weavers’ ordinance of 22 April 1568, a compromise that limited ordinary masters to two looms but allowed Zanino, as an exceptional privilege and “for the benefit of our countryside”, to operate seven.¹³

The ordinance of 1568 is a small document with large implications. It shows the council recognising, for the first time, that a putting-out entrepreneur who organised production without being a master craftsman could be useful to the city. The guilds, for their part, are seen defending the craft principle by an argument about quality that anticipates the rhetoric of later professional regulation. The compromise, a limited privilege for the entrepreneur and a numerical cap protecting the masters, became the pattern for the next two centuries of Zurich industrial policy. Under that pattern the merchant-manufacturers (Fabrikanten) of the Saffron guild organised production in the countryside while the urban craft guilds protected their monopoly within the walls. The later disputes of the Locarnese velvet weavers confirm this pattern: in 1589 the council forbade them to hold separate assemblies or to take any decisions about their craft behind the backs of the guild masters, and restricted their meetings to the guild house.¹⁴

Zanino’s later years were a succession of conflicts with the authorities. In 1575 a Locarnese worker whom he had brought to Zurich without permission was immediately expelled. In 1581 the council demanded rent for the hospital meadow in the Selnau, which he maintained he had been promised free of charge in 1565. In 1582 the commune of Wiedikon exercised a right of pre-emption over a property he had bought. In 1585 the sale of his house to a German buyer was reversed and he was ordered to remove his mulberry trees from the hospital meadow. In the autumn of 1586 several creditors called in their loans at the same time, whereupon Zanino was declared insolvent.¹⁵ Weisz’s verdict is that Zanino achieved a coup of double significance for Zurich but ended poor and forgotten, because the pinpricks of the authorities cost him his profits.

The Werdmüller brothers, Turrettini and the Seidenhof

The harvest was reaped by Zurich merchants. David Werdmüller (1548–1612), son of the miller Beat Werdmüller, and his brother Heinrich had taken over parts of Zanino’s cloth business in the 1570s and obtained his former works at Oetenbach in settlement of debts.¹⁶ In 1587 the two brothers founded, together with the refugee entrepreneurs Johann Jakob Dunus and François (Francesco) Turrettini, a company for the production of cloth, schappe yarn and floret silk. David Werdmüller built the Seidenhof in 1592, bought a silk mill at the Schipfe in 1594 and built there the Wollenhof cloth works. The HLS notes that the Werdmüller brothers were the first to work silk, wool and cotton in the same establishment and that they used the Verlag system for export production, becoming one of the largest textile enterprises in Zurich. David Werdmüller sat in the Great Council as a representative of the Saffron guild from 1601.¹⁷

The associates are significant. Johann Jakob Dunus (1540–1603) belonged to the Duno family of Locarno. Francesco Turrettini (1547–1628), a silk merchant from Lucca who had embraced the Reformed faith and had been condemned in absentia by the authorities of his native city in 1578, had travelled to Lyon, Antwerp, Geneva, Frankfurt, Basel and Zurich before settling in Geneva.¹⁸ In 1593 Turrettini founded in Geneva the Grande Boutique, a consortium of silk manufacturers and merchants that became one of the most important commercial enterprises of the Genevan Refuge. The Zurich floret silk company of 1587 thus stands at the junction of three refugee networks: the Locarnese in Zurich, the Lucchese in Geneva and the wider Italian Reformed diaspora across Lyon, Antwerp and Frankfurt.

The scale of the enterprise was, by Zurich standards, remarkable. The company is reported to have been founded with a capital of 24,000 gulden, to have employed more than a thousand spinners by 1591 and to have made a profit of 38,500 gulden over six years. The Seidenhof enterprise is said to have generated up to 55 per cent of Zurich’s customs revenue towards the end of the sixteenth century.¹⁹ Heinrich Werdmüller’s ledger for the years 1598 to 1608, the “Conntto Corentte”, survives as a rare record of the firm’s accounting. In 1606 a new Seidenhof with eight installations was built.²⁰ The buildings survived until the twentieth century, when the old Seidenhof was demolished in 1955 and replaced by the Jelmoli department store, while the name lives on in a hotel on the Sihlstrasse.

Products: velvet, taffeta, crêpe and floret silk

The product range of the early Zurich silk industry reflected both the Italian models and the constraints of a small inland city. The HLS names velvet, taffeta and gauze (Flor, the light, transparent fabric from which the later Zurich “Florhof” took its name) as the main products of the great sixteenth-century entrepreneurs, among whom it lists the Werdmüller, Muralt, Orelli and Pestalozzi. Velvet was the prestige product, requiring skilled weavers, complex looms and high-quality thrown silk. It was in this field that the Locarnesi and their Italian journeymen introduced techniques not previously practised in Zurich. Crêpe in the Bologna style (crespo di seta, detto di Bologna) came later: the HLS dates its introduction in Zurich to Heinrich Escher vom Glas from 1730.²¹

Floret silk (Florettseide) and schappe were of particular importance for Zurich’s commercial model. They are yarns spun from silk waste, the broken fibres and damaged cocoons that cannot be reeled into continuous filament, which were combed and spun like wool or cotton. Their production required much labour and little expensive raw material and could be distributed to spinners in the city and the countryside under the Verlag system. It suited a city that had no sericulture of its own, abundant rural labour and merchants able to procure waste silk cheaply in Italy.²² Zurich thus became a centre for the redistribution of raw silk imported from Italy and Spain, which was re-exported as yarn to Basel, France, Austria, Germany and England.²³ A panegyric of 1586 quoted by Weisz captures the new self-image of the city: silk and velvet were made with industry, woollens in the Italian manner, velvets, damasks and bombazine, and the finest linen cloth, all of it produced by the citizens themselves.²⁴ The last clause is telling. By 1586 the achievements introduced by the refugees had become the pride of the citizens.

Notes

1. Wikipedia (English), “Aloisio Orelli” (cited above), citing H. Schulthess, Die von Orelli von Locarno und Zürich (1941). ↩
2. Nathalie Dürmüller, “Vom Migrationshintergrund der ‘Neuen Zürcher Zeitung’”, ref.ch, 15 November 2016, https://www.ref.ch/news/vom-migrationshintergrund-der-neuen-zuercher-zeitung/. ↩
3. HLS, Italian edition, Huber and Illi, “Orelli” (cited above). ↩
4. Wikipedia (English), “Johann Melchior Aloys von Orelli”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_Melchior_Aloys_von_Orelli, citing the HLS and Ulrich Pfister, Die Zürcher Fabriques (1992). ↩
5. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩
6. HLS, Italian edition, Bundi, “Bergamo” (cited above). ↩
7. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩
8. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). The refugee families’ connections with Como, Bergamo, Venice, Milan and Lyon are also emphasised by Dürmüller, “Vom Migrationshintergrund der ‘Neuen Zürcher Zeitung’” (cited above). ↩
9. HLS, French edition, Lassner, “Zanino, Evangelista” (cited above), relying on Ulrich Pfister, Die Zürcher Fabriques (1992). ↩
10. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩
11. Wikipedia (German), “Seidenhof (Zürich)”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seidenhof_(Z%C3%BCrich), citing Stefan G. Schmid, Gründer der Zürcher Seidenindustrie (2001). ↩
12. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩
13. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩
14. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). On the Zurich Verlag system of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries see Part C. ↩
15. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). The German-language Wikipedia article on the Seidenhof (cited above) states that the Werdmüller brothers acquired assets from Zanino’s bankruptcy in 1576; the relationship between the partnership of the mid-1570s and the insolvency of 1586 is not entirely clear from the available sources. ↩
16. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩
17. HLS, French edition, “Werdmüller, David”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/029421/. ↩
18. Lebendige Traditionen der Schweiz, “Zürcher Seidenindustrie” (cited above), for the life dates of Dunus and Turrettini and for Turrettini’s engagement by the Werdmüller in 1587; Ereticopedia, Dizionario di eretici, dissidenti e inquisitori nel mondo mediterraneo, “Turrettini, Francesco”, https://www.ereticopedia.org/francesco-turrettini. ↩
19. Wikipedia (German), “Seidenhof (Zürich)” (cited above), relying on Schmid, Gründer der Zürcher Seidenindustrie (2001). ↩
20. Lebendige Traditionen der Schweiz, “Zürcher Seidenindustrie” (cited above). The German-language Wikipedia article on the Seidenhof dates the old Seidenhof to 1587/1588 and the new one to 1608; the HLS gives 1592 for the building of the Seidenhof. The same Wikipedia article records the later fate of the buildings. ↩
21. HLS, Italian edition, Mottu-Weber, “Seta” (cited above). ↩
22. HLS, Italian edition, Mottu-Weber, “Seta” (cited above), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/013965/, which records that Zurich merchants engaged in the “filatura e tintura di trama, di organzino e di fioretto a partire da cascami”, that silk was carded and spun by hand or with water mills in small rural family workshops, and that Zurich became a “centro di ridistribuzione della seta greggia importata dalla Spagna e dall’Italia, poi riesportata sotto forma di filato”. The standard monograph is Adolf Bürkli-Meyer, Geschichte der zürcherischen Seidenindustrie (1884). ↩
23. HLS, Italian edition, Mottu-Weber, “Seta” (cited above). ↩
24. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited 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.