Guild city and patrician republic; language and hinterland

Who ruled, and in whose interest

The constitutional difference outlined in section I had economic consequences. Zurich’s government was a government of guilds. The craft guilds held a guaranteed share of seats in the councils. Their members had a direct interest in protecting their trades against outside competition, in regulating prices and quality, and in restricting the admission of new citizens. The merchants and rentiers of the Constaffel and of the merchants’ guild shared power with bakers, tanners and smiths. That arrangement produced a stable, cautious and socially balanced policy. It gave the Zurich state a strong sense of responsibility for its citizens’ livelihoods, as the welfare ordinance of 1525 shows, but it also slowed the entry of foreign merchants and of new industries.

Geneva’s government was a government of an oligarchy of merchant and professional families, increasingly closed and increasingly co-opted, as the edict of 1570 illustrates. Its interest lay in the prosperity of the city’s trade and credit, in the security of the state against Savoy and France, and in the defence of the Reformed religion. The refugees, once they had become bourgeois, joined that oligarchy. Their descendants became the patrician families of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The social history of the Genevan financial centre is to a large extent the history of refugee families that became Genevan: the Turrettini, Calandrini, Micheli and Diodati in the sixteenth century, and the families of the second Refuge after 1685. The International Museum of the Reformation lists banking families such as the Sellon and the Mallet among the refugees whose descendants shaped the economy of the city.¹

Territory and hinterland

The two republics also differed in the size of their territories. Zurich governed an extensive rural territory, acquired by purchase, pledge and conquest in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries (see Part A), with villages on the lake, in the Knonauer Amt, the Zürcher Oberland, the Weinland and the region of Winterthur. Its tithes, rents and ground interests provided a broad fiscal base. Later, the peasants and rural artisans of the countryside would supply the labour for the putting-out system of the textile trade, as Part C describes. Zurich could live from its territory. Its capital accumulated in land credit, in Gülten and Schuldbriefe, and in the trade that connected the city with its countryside.

Geneva had almost no territory. Holding only a few scattered villages and jurisdictions after 1536, it was surrounded by Savoy, by the Bernese Pays de Vaud and by France. Savoy did not abandon its claims: the night attack of December 1602, commemorated every year as the Escalade, was its last serious attempt to take the city by force.² A city without a hinterland could not live from rents and tithes. It had to live from trade, manufacture and credit, while its capital had to find employment abroad. The city of Geneva’s official history of its financial centre states that by the seventeenth century Geneva had become one of the great centres of wealth accumulation in Europe and that its capital financed major enterprises abroad.³

Language and orientation

Language completed the difference. Zurich spoke German and looked north and east, to the Rhine, southern Germany and the Habsburg lands, and to the Swiss Confederation of which it was a leading member. Its commercial relations ran through Basel, Strasbourg, Frankfurt, Augsburg and Nuremberg, and across the Alpine passes to Milan and Venice. Geneva spoke French and looked west and south, to Lyon, Paris, the Rhône valley and the Mediterranean. It was not a member of the Confederation until 1815, although it was linked to Bern, Fribourg and, from 1584, Zurich by treaties of alliance.⁴ Its natural financial partner was the French crown and the French economy, the largest in Europe. The Genevan financier would, for three centuries, be a specialist in French affairs, lending to the French state and to French merchants and managing the fortunes of French families. The Zurich financier would be a specialist in the affairs of German-speaking Europe, of the Swiss Confederation and later of Swiss industry.

The interpretation offered in this section is simple, but it has considerable explanatory power. Geneva became a centre of international finance because it was a small, besieged, French-speaking republic without territory, governed by merchant families, reinforced by refugees with capital and connections, and adjacent to the largest state in Europe. Zurich became a centre of domestic and industrial finance because it was a larger German-speaking republic with a rich rural territory, governed by guilds, cautious towards immigrants, and embedded in the Confederation. Reformed doctrine, shared by both, legitimised moderate interest and disciplined commercial life. What each city did with that legitimacy was determined by its constitutional and geographical setting.

Notes

1. Musée international de la Réforme, “La Genève réformée – Informations” (as above). ↩
2. Archives d’État de Genève, “L’Escalade”, https://archives-etat-ge.ch/page_de_base/lescalade/, giving the night of 11 to 12 December 1602 and the Council’s contemporaneous record of the attack. ↩
3. Ville de Genève, “Genève, place financière”, https://www.geneve.ch/faire-geneve/decouvrir-geneve-quartiers/histoire-geneve/place-financiere. The same page mentions Genevan participation in the financing of the Dutch East India Company and the Bank of England; these claims are those of the city’s official history and were not further verified. ↩
4. Grand Conseil de la République et canton de Genève, 500 ans du Grand Conseil (chronology), https://ge.ch/grandconseil/data/courriers/500ansGC.pdf, under 1584: “Traité de combourgeoisie avec Berne et Zurich.” ↩

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.