Hans Waldmann and the limits of power

From tanner to mayor

No figure illustrates the possibilities and the limits of the guild order better than Hans Waldmann. He was born around 1435 in Blickensdorf, in the parish of Baar in the territory of Zug, and came to Zurich in modest circumstances.¹ After apprenticeships as a tailor and a tanner he served as a mercenary, taking part in the Plappart War of 1458 and the conquest of the Thurgau in 1460, before entering the iron trade in the 1460s. His marriage, around 1462, to Anna Landolt, the widow of Ulrich Edlibach, made his fortune: he succeeded her late husband as administrator of the Zurich properties of the monastery of Einsiedeln, a lucrative office.²

Waldmann’s political career ran through the guilds. From 1473 he was guild master of the Kämbel, the guild of the petty dealers.³ His reputation was made in the Burgundian Wars: he commanded Zurich troops, was knighted at the battle of Murten in 1476, and took part in the campaigns of Nancy in 1477 and Bellinzona in 1478.⁴ He led Confederate embassies to Austria, France and Milan and received pensions from princes. Otto Sigg puts his fortune at around 18,000 gulden by 1489 and mentions pensions from France and Milan as well as profits from the salt trade.⁵ Chief guild master from 1480, he became Bürgermeister in the 1480s and held the office until his fall in 1489, although the sources differ on the exact year of his first election.⁶

Waldmann’s career was the ultimate proof that the guild order offered a path to the top for a man of humble origins. A tanner from Zug, entering Zurich through a craft guild, could become the most powerful man in the city and one of the most influential figures in Confederate diplomacy. It was the same path as Brun’s, travelled in reverse. Brun, the knight, had used the crafts to take power, whereas Waldmann, the craftsman, used war, commerce and princely patronage to rise into the elite.

Waldmann’s programme

In office Waldmann pursued a remarkably comprehensive programme of economic and social regulation, which Sigg describes as an attempt to reorganise the economy of the state around grain production and military capacity.⁷ According to Sigg, the measures revived a prohibition of 1415 on planting new vineyards, sought to concentrate crafts in the city and to restrict rural craftsmen, regulated the grain trade by controlling forestalling, the Fürkauf, and prohibited religious institutions from acquiring lands, tithes and perpetual rents. The last measure is of particular interest for the history of credit. Since the purchase of rents was the principal form of secured lending in the late medieval economy, in which the church was a major investor, Waldmann’s rule sought to keep the capital market in secular, and largely urban, hands. His moral mandates, the Sittenmandate, restricted drinking in taverns, limited the number of guests at weddings, prohibited games outside religious feasts and regulated jewellery and dress. He also subordinated the clergy to civil jurisdiction, curtailed aristocratic privileges and banned peasant assemblies.⁸

The programme was the logical extension of the guild economy into the countryside. It sought to reserve crafts to the city, to secure the grain supply for urban consumers and the militia, and to bring rural society under the regulatory authority of an urban government. It also concentrated power in Waldmann’s hands to a degree unknown since Brun. He governed through the college of guild masters, which he dominated, and pushed back the influence of the Constaffel.⁹

The fall

Resentment grew on several fronts. The execution in 1487 of the Lucerne mercenary captain Frischhans Theiling, who had insulted Waldmann, angered the Confederates. An understanding with King Maximilian I, negotiated partly through Waldmann’s former ward Ulrich von Hohensax, ran against Confederate policy, while in the Zurich countryside restrictions on village assemblies, a head tax and exclusion from the appointment of local officials and judges fed discontent.¹⁰ The spark was an order by the city that the peasants’ dogs be killed, to protect the game. In early 1489 armed countrymen, numbering some two thousand according to the Historisches Lexikon, gathered outside the city. Through the mediation of Confederate envoys, an agreement allowed the peasants to present their grievances. When Waldmann altered the negotiated settlement without authority, the civic community turned against him.

On 1 April 1489 the urban guild community elected a new council, the so-called Hörnerner Rat, with Heinrich Göldli as mayor, replacing Waldmann’s supporters.¹¹ Waldmann was arrested, imprisoned in the Wellenberg tower in the Limmat and tortured for several days. On 6 April 1489, after a trial conducted jointly by city and countryside, he was beheaded.¹² Sigg reports that three further guild masters were executed and Waldmann’s property confiscated, part of it being used to reimburse the peasants for the costs of their assembly.¹³

The settlement of 1489

The settlement that followed had two parts. On 9 May 1489 an arbitration court of Confederate representatives issued fourteen Spruchbriefe, arbitral awards that took up the concerns of the rural population while broadly supporting the urban authorities. The Historisches Lexikon notes that they acknowledged the concerns and interests of the countryside.¹⁴ According to Sigg, the awards restored rural rights concerning commons, woodland, wedding festivities and the freedom to practise crafts, while confirming the fiscal authority of the city. They became the reference point for relations between city and countryside for centuries.¹⁵ The countryside thus won back part of the economic freedom that Waldmann’s urban monopoly policy had sought to remove.

The second part was the fourth Geschworener Brief of 1489, followed by the fifth in 1498. As described above, the Constaffel became a political guild and the merchants, goldsmiths and rentiers gained the free choice of guild.¹⁶ The constitutional lesson drawn from Waldmann’s rule was that power must not again be concentrated in the college of guild masters under a single dominant leader. The new arrangements dispersed authority among the corporations and gave the wealthy families of the Constaffel and the merchant guilds a more secure place in the councils.

Waldmann’s memory has been contested ever since. For some he was a tyrant, for others a victim of intrigue by the old families and of peasant revolt. The equestrian statue by Hermann Haller that stands today near the Münsterbrücke shows that the twentieth-century city was prepared to honour him as a military hero.¹⁷ For the purposes of this book, the lesson of 1489 lies elsewhere. Twice within a century and a half, in 1336 and in the 1480s, Zurich had experienced government by a single strong man who used the guilds to build personal power, and twice the city had reacted by dispersing authority. The distrust of concentrated power that characterises Zurich’s institutions, from the collegial city government to the governance of its banks, has deep roots in these experiences.

Notes

HLS, “Waldmann, Hans” (Martin Lassner), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D18054.php. ↩
HLS, “Waldmann, Hans” (Martin Lassner), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D18054.php; Otto Sigg, Hans Waldmann, der 1489 hingerichtete Zürcher Bürgermeister (1989), https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Hans_Waldmann.pdf. ↩
HLS, “Waldmann, Hans” (Martin Lassner), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D18054.php. ↩
HLS, “Waldmann, Hans” (Martin Lassner), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D18054.php; Christophe Vuilleumier, “Hans Waldmann, der Tyrann von Zürich”, Blog zur Schweizer Geschichte, Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, 26 October 2020, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2020/10/der-tyrann-von-zuerich/. ↩
Otto Sigg, Hans Waldmann (1989), https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Hans_Waldmann.pdf. ↩
HLS, “Waldmann, Hans” (Martin Lassner), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D18054.php; the Nationalmuseum blog (Vuilleumier, 2020) and Otto Sigg, Hans Waldmann (1989), give 1483, while the tourism office Zürich Tourismus, “Hans Waldmann – Heerführer und Zürcher Bürgermeister”, https://www.zuerich.com/de/hans-waldmann, gives 1480. ↩
Otto Sigg, Hans Waldmann (1989), https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Hans_Waldmann.pdf. ↩
Christophe Vuilleumier, “Hans Waldmann, der Tyrann von Zürich”, Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, 2020, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2020/10/der-tyrann-von-zuerich/. ↩
Otto Sigg, “Zunftherrlichkeit” (1986), https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Zunftherrlichkeit.pdf, on Waldmann’s centralisation of power through the guild masters; Otto Sigg, Hans Waldmann (1989), on the charge of undermining the Constaffel. ↩
HLS, “Waldmann, Hans” (Martin Lassner), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D18054.php; HLS, “Waldmannhandel” (Christian Sieber), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026844/; Christophe Vuilleumier, “Hans Waldmann, der Tyrann von Zürich”, 2020, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2020/10/der-tyrann-von-zuerich/. ↩
HLS, “Waldmannhandel” (Christian Sieber), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026844/. Göldli, a Constaffel councillor and mercenary leader knighted at Grandson, is described by the HLS as having played “eine tragende Rolle beim Sturz Waldmanns”: HLS, “Göldli, Heinrich” (Martin Lassner), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/018071/2005-09-09/. ↩
HLS, “Waldmannhandel” (Christian Sieber), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026844/; HLS, “Waldmann, Hans”, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D18054.php; Vuilleumier, Nationalmuseum blog, 2020, for the Wellenberg. ↩
Otto Sigg, Hans Waldmann (1989), https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Hans_Waldmann.pdf. ↩
HLS, “Waldmannhandel” (Christian Sieber), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026844/. ↩
Otto Sigg, Hans Waldmann (1989), https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Hans_Waldmann.pdf. ↩
HLS, “Konstaffel”, http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D10249.php; HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/. ↩
Zürich Tourismus, “Hans Waldmann – Heerführer und Zürcher Bürgermeister”, https://www.zuerich.com/de/hans-waldmann. ↩

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.

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