Guilds, councils and the long road to merchant banking

The second generation and the patrician firms

The failure of Zanino and the success of the Werdmüller have often been read as proof that the Locarnesi merely prepared the ground for native entrepreneurs. The HLS article on silk expresses this view in its sharpest form when it states that the Locarnese silk workers were soon replaced by native merchants.¹ The judgement is accurate for the first generation of manufacturing. It overlooks the longer history of the refugee families as merchants, which unfolded over the seventeenth century and culminated in their admission to the ruling class of the city.

The Muralt are a case in point. The Zurich line descended from Giovanni Muralto. Within the family the silk firm Muralt an der Sihl grew into a prosperous business organised according to the Verlag system, with commercial connections to northern Italy and Flanders. In the seventeenth century the family established itself firmly among the merchants of the city. The German-language literature attributes the foundation of the firm on the Sihl to Johannes von Muralt (1577–1645) and records that Martino Muralto had invested in the velvet weaving and silk dyeing enterprise of Pariso Appiani.² Political recognition came late, and through the guild. In 1651 Caspar Muralt married the daughter of Hans Rudolf Wolf, guildmaster of the Saffron guild. He became the first member of the family in the Great Council in 1680 and in the Small Council in 1685, and until 1798 four further members of the family sat in the Small Council.³

The Orelli followed a parallel path. Johann Melchior Orelli and his descendants founded several silk trading houses in the seventeenth century, known by the names of the houses in which they were located: zum Mohrenkopf, im Tiefenhof, zum Spiegel, zur Sonne, zur Stelze and zum Gemsberg. Around 1700 these firms were among the leading commercial houses of Zurich.⁴ The business model consisted of buying raw silk in northern Italy, having it processed into fabric in and around Zurich and selling it in Switzerland and across Europe. Full citizenship in 1679 opened careers in the church and the army: six Orelli became Reformed ministers in the eighteenth century, others served as officers in the French and Dutch armies, and by 1798 six members of the family sat in the Small Council. Hans Heinrich Orelli (1714–1785) served as burgomaster of Zurich from 1778 to 1785.⁵

The Pestalozzi, finally, rose more slowly into political office. Although the family was wealthy from the late sixteenth century, it was initially excluded from the councils. Hans Jakob Pestalozzi (1711–1787) became the first member of the family to sit in the Great Council, in 1767. By the eighteenth century the family owned nine prestigious houses in the best quarters of the city, while one branch ran the Pestalozzi iron and steel trading firm, which existed for more than 250 years.⁶ The best-known member of the family, the educator Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, belongs to the cultural history of the city. His existence is nonetheless a reminder of how deeply the descendants of the Italian merchants of the sixteenth century had become rooted in Zurich life.

From silk to money: the path to merchant banking

The transition from silk trade to banking was gradual and grew out of the everyday practice of the trade. A merchant who bought raw silk in Bergamo or Milan, put it out to spinners and weavers around Zurich and sold the finished cloth in Frankfurt, Lyon or Leipzig had to finance each stage of a cycle that could last many months. He extended credit to his suppliers and customers, drew and accepted bills of exchange on the great commercial centres and held balances with correspondents in several currencies. It was a short step from settling one’s own bills to discounting those of others, from holding correspondents’ balances to accepting deposits and from lending to customers to investing surplus funds for clients. The Zurich case follows this well-known European pattern. Individual textile houses in Zurich began to act as banks in the middle of the eighteenth century, and until the middle of the nineteenth century the city’s financial sector remained closely linked with the textile and transport trades.⁷

The history of the house in the Thalhof illustrates the process in the families that concern us. The firm Pestalozzi im Thalhof, a silk trading house, evolved into a private bank by the early nineteenth century and traded as Orelli im Thalhof from 1891 until its acquisition by Bank A. Sarasin & Cie. in 1973.⁸ The HLS notes in general terms that in the nineteenth century members of the Orelli family were active in banking as well as in scholarship and state service.⁹ The Thalhof bank, with its two Italian refugee names and its final absorption by a Basel bank bearing the name of the Sarasin, one of the few refugee families admitted to Basel citizenship in the sixteenth century, sums up in one institution the migration history of Swiss private banking.¹⁰

The Muralt contribution to Zurich’s modern financial institutions came through public life. Hans Conrad von Muralt (1779–1869), a merchant, commanded the Zurich legion in 1813, became a federal colonel in 1830 and served as burgomaster of the canton of Zurich in 1831–1832 and again from 1839 to 1844. He was instrumental in founding the Neumühle cotton mill and engineering works that became Escher, Wyss & Cie, and in founding the Bank in Zürich in 1836. He also presided over the cantonal commercial directorate and the chamber of commerce.¹¹ The Bank in Zürich belongs to the history of the nineteenth-century financial centre discussed in Part C and later parts of this book. Here it is enough to note that one of its founders was a descendant of the surgeon who had crossed the San Bernardino in 1555.

The Orelli also left their mark on an institution that is today part of the infrastructure of the Swiss currency. In 1735 Conrad Orell and Hans Rudolf Füssli took over the printing house that went back to Christoph Froschauer, the printer of Zwingli, who had held Zurich citizenship since 1519.¹² The firm, soon known as Orell Füssli, expanded into publishing and, as early as 1848, printed a first banknote for the Leih- und Sparkasse des Seebezirks. Orell Füssli is today the printer of the Swiss National Bank’s banknotes, a function that gives the name of a Locarnese refugee family a quiet presence in the wallets of the whole country.¹³ The Swiss National Museum draws the same line when it mentions the Orelli, later Germanised as Orell, as stakeholders in a Protestant printing company that eventually became the Orell Füssli bookshop.¹⁴

Guilds, councils and the limits of openness

The conflicts between the refugees and the guilds form a thread that runs from the 1550s to the late seventeenth century. Xenophobia played its part, as the language of the Great Council about vindictive “welsch” blood shows. At their core, however, these were conflicts about the economic constitution of the city. The guild order of Zurich rested on the principle that each craft was reserved to its masters and that the number of workshops and looms was limited, so that each master could make a living. The Locarnese entrepreneurs represented a different principle: the organisation of production by a merchant who supplied materials, controlled quality and sold the product, and who could expand his operations as far as capital and markets allowed. The complaint of the velvet weavers of 1568 and the prohibition of separate assemblies of Locarnese weavers in 1589 are episodes in a long confrontation between the craft economy and the merchant economy.¹⁵

The council resolved this confrontation in characteristic Zurich fashion, by incorporating the merchant economy into the guild constitution. The Saffron guild became the institutional home of the merchant-manufacturers, and the refugees who obtained citizenship joined it. In the seventeenth century the merchants organised themselves further in the Kaufmännisches Direktorium, a body which represented the interests of the city’s trading houses and administered commercial institutions such as the postal service.¹⁶ In this way the conflict between refugees and guilds contributed to the formation of an economic order in which a merchant patriciate, organised within the guild system but distinct from the crafts, governed the city’s commercial life. The descendants of the Locarnesi became part of that patriciate. By the time Hans Conrad von Muralt presided over the commercial directorate in the nineteenth century, the refugee origin of his family had become a matter of family pride and civic ceremony. In 1855 an official document celebrated the three hundred years of contributions of the Locarnese families to Zurich’s commerce, public life, state, church and science.¹⁷

Notes

1. HLS, Italian edition, Mottu-Weber, “Seta” (cited above). ↩
2. Wikipedia (German), “Muralt (Adelsgeschlecht)” (cited above). The HLS article connects the foundation of the firm with Johannes Muralt and a Barbara Muralt; the genealogical details differ between the sources. ↩
3. HLS, Italian edition, Illi, “Muralt” (cited above). ↩
4. HLS, Italian edition, Huber and Illi, “Orelli” (cited above). ↩
5. Martha von Castelberg Stiftung, “Familie von Orelli” (cited above). ↩
6. HLS, Italian edition, “Pestalozzi (ZH)” (cited above). ↩
7. Limmattaler Zeitung, “Einst wichtigster Zürcher Industriezweig: Wie aus der Seidenweberei ein Finanzplatz entstand”, https://www.limmattalerzeitung.ch/limmattal/einst-wichtigster-zurcher-industriezweig-wie-aus-der-seidenweberei-ein-finanzplatz-entstand-ld.1498481. ↩
8. Martha von Castelberg Stiftung, “Familie von Orelli” (cited above). ↩
9. HLS, Italian edition, Huber and Illi, “Orelli” (cited above). ↩
10. HLS, Italian edition, Tosato-Rigo, article on Protestant refugees (cited above), which names the Bernoulli, Legrand and Sarasin as refugee families that obtained Basel citizenship. ↩
11. HLS, Italian edition, “Muralt, Hans Conrad von”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/007317/. ↩
12. Andrej Abplanalp, “Vom Bibel- zum Banknotendruck”, Swiss National Museum blog, 22 February 2019, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2019/02/die-geschichte-von-orell-fuessli/. ↩
13. Orell Füssli, “History”, https://orellfuessli.com/en/history: in 1848 a 10-guilder note was printed for the “Leih- und Sparkassa des Seebezirks” in Uznach (today Bank Linth), and in 1914 Orell Füssli printed the first banknotes for the Swiss National Bank. ↩
14. Swiss National Museum, blog, “The Protestants of Locarno” (cited above). ↩
15. Weisz, “Die wirtschaftliche Bedeutung der Tessiner Glaubensflüchtlinge” (cited above). ↩
16. The Kaufmännisches Direktorium, a seven-member body, was newly created in 1662; see Wikipedia (English), “Pestalozzi family”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pestalozzi_family, on the election of Johann Anton Pestalozzi to it in that year; Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, fonds D, “Archiv des Kaufmännischen Direktoriums”, https://suche.staatsarchiv.djiktzh.ch/detail.aspx?ID=259089, which dates the Directorate to 1662–1834 and lists records of its postal operations. Its history belongs to Part C of this book. ↩
17. Dürmüller, “Vom Migrationshintergrund der ‘Neuen Zürcher Zeitung’” (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.