Many coins, one market: currencies, conventions and money-changing

The plurality of currencies

Late medieval Zurich lived with monetary plurality. The local penny circulated alongside the coins of neighbouring mints, of which there were many: the bishops of Constance and Basel, the abbeys of St Gall and Einsiedeln at various times, the Habsburg dukes, the counts of Kyburg and Neuenburg, and the towns of Basel, Bern, Solothurn, Lucerne, Schaffhausen and St Gall. The curator of the coin collection of the Swiss National Museum notes that under the Ancien Régime all thirteen Confederate cantons with the exception of Appenzell Ausserrhoden had their own mints, while bishoprics, imperial abbeys, dukes and counts issued further coinages that circulated in Swiss territory.¹ In addition to these local coinages, foreign coins of higher value entered the region through trade: the Florentine gold florin, known in the German-speaking lands simply as the Gulden, the Venetian ducat, the French gros tournois and, later, Italian silver coins such as the testone.

The need for larger silver coins produced several new denominations in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The Angster, a double penny whose name has been derived, with some uncertainty, from a Latin word for narrowness or low value, is first documented around 1340 in the Basel region.² Worth two pennies, the Angster remained in use in German-speaking Switzerland for centuries. The last Angster was struck in Lucerne as late as 1847.³ The Plappart, a heavier silver coin introduced in Zurich around 1417, was defined in relation to gold: 26 pieces were to be equal to one gold gulden.⁴ The Plappart, which was also struck in Bern, gave its name to a local war: the so-called Plappart War of 1458, in which the young Hans Waldmann served, arose from a quarrel over a Plappart tendered by men from Lucerne and mocked as a “Kuhplappart” at a shooting festival in Constance.⁵⁶

Around 1500 two further silver denominations appeared in Zurich, the Dicken and the Batzen, both modelled on the system that Bern had developed.⁷ The Batzen had been struck first in Bern in 1492. Its name was probably connected with the Bernese bear (Bätz), although other explanations circulated, including one derived from its later devaluation.⁸ The Dicken, a heavy silver coin inspired by the Italian testone, answered the demand for a coin of intermediate value between the penny and the gold gulden. By the eve of the Reformation Zurich thus had a graduated silver coinage, but gold coins it could not strike on its own authority until the privilege of Emperor Charles V in 1521.⁹

This plurality of coins had a practical consequence which dominates the account books of the period: nearly every larger transaction required a conversion. Prices and debts were expressed in the unit of account, pound, shilling and penny, but settled in whatever coins were available, gold gulden for large sums and a variety of silver pieces for the rest. The rate between the gold gulden and the Zurich pound moved with the silver content of the local coinage. The MoneyMuseum booklet notes that the gulden was valued in Zurich’s accounting at 40 shillings, that is two pounds, at a certain point in the fifteenth century.¹⁰ Such equivalences were never stable for long. Every debasement of the silver coinage raised the price of gold in local money and redistributed wealth between debtors and creditors, between those who owed rents fixed in pennies and those who received them.

Coin conventions with other authorities

Because monetary plurality called for coordination, the authorities of the region responded with coin agreements, the Münzverträge or Münzkonventionen. The earliest Swiss coin treaty in the modern sense, which linked Austria, Zurich and Basel in 1344, is characterised by the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland primarily as an attempt by the Habsburg rulers to impose order.¹¹ A much larger agreement followed in 1377, with the participation of Duke Leopold III of Austria, the counts of Kyburg and Neuenburg, the lords of Krenkingen and the cities of Basel, Zurich, Bern and Solothurn. A further broad treaty followed in 1387.¹² These conventions fixed the weight and fineness of the pennies to be struck by the participants, the proportion of copper admitted in the alloy, and the rules on which coins were to be accepted. Their political content was as important as their monetary content: they bound the Swiss towns into a Habsburg-led monetary order at a time when the relationship between Austria and the Confederates was oscillating between alliance and war. The battle of Sempach in 1386 and the battle of Näfels in 1388 fell precisely in the years between the treaties of 1377 and 1387.

In the fifteenth century the pattern changed. In 1424 and 1425, at the moment when the city acquired Kyburg and received Sigismund’s confirmation of its mint, Zurich took part in monetary agreements with Lucerne, Uri, Schwyz, Unterwalden, Zug and Glarus, a grouping that corresponds to the Confederate alliance of the time. In 1424 Zurich, Schaffhausen and St Gall attempted to join the Swabian monetary union of Riedlingen, but withdrew. The contrast with Basel is instructive. Basel participated in the Rappenmünzbund, the monetary union of the Upper Rhine which lasted from 1399 to 1584 and which the Historical Dictionary describes as the longest-lasting agreement of its kind. Its durability is explained by the participation of important trading towns and of strong territorial rulers able to enforce the agreed standards.¹³ Zurich remained outside this union and oriented its coinage towards the Confederate towns and central Switzerland. The monetary geography of the region thus mirrored its political geography: Basel looked to Alsace and the Breisgau, Zurich to the Confederation.

The coin conventions are the late medieval ancestors of a long Swiss tradition of monetary cooperation between sovereign cantons. That tradition ran through the concordats of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the adhesion of Switzerland to the Latin Monetary Union in 1865 and, in a different form, the cooperation of central banks in the Bank for International Settlements at Basel. In each case the object was the same: to reduce the transaction costs created by a multiplicity of coinages without surrendering the sovereignty of the participants. Zurich learned early that its coinage was only as good as the agreements it could conclude with neighbours. Monetary policy, in other words, was inseparable from foreign policy.

Money-changing

Where many coins circulate, someone must exchange them. In Zurich this function was from an early date subject to public regulation. The ordinance of 1335 designated three official places of exchange and reserved larger transactions and the trade in raw silver for the mint.¹⁴ The purpose was twofold. The council wished to ensure that the silver that entered the town passed through the mint, where it could be converted into local coin with a profit for the minting authority. It also wished to prevent the circulation of prohibited or debased foreign coins. The money-changer at the official exchange was thus both a service provider and an agent of monetary control.

The combination of exchange and credit was characteristic of the period across Europe. The money-changers of Italian and southern French towns had developed the bill of exchange, which allowed merchants to transfer funds between fairs and cities without carrying coin, and which concealed an interest charge in the exchange rate between two currencies. In Zurich there is little evidence of an indigenous exchange business of this sophistication in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Because the town’s trade was regional, its merchants used the exchange facilities of the fairs of Geneva, Frankfurt and Nördlingen and of the great commercial centres of Upper Germany (see Chapter A.III). The contrast with Geneva is marked: its fairs in the fifteenth century were among the leading exchange markets of Europe before the transfer of much of their business to Lyon after 1463, a development described in detail in the companion volume on Geneva.¹⁵ Basel, too, went further than Zurich: from 1504 it operated a public exchange bank, the Stadtwechsel, which the Historical Dictionary describes as a hub of the regional capital market.¹⁶ The Historical Dictionary adds that such municipal exchange offices also practised pawn credit. In Zurich, it notes, the treasurer (Säckelmeister) himself officially conducted lending against pledged annuities and bonds, using the annual surpluses of the city’s accounts.¹⁷ This observation, which concerns mainly the sixteenth century, points to a feature of Zurich’s financial history that recurs throughout the following centuries: in Zurich, credit was very often administered by public bodies.

Notes

1. Christian Weiss, “The Swiss franc and its predecessors”, Swiss National Museum blog, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/en/2020/08/swiss-franc/. ↩
2. Weiss, “The Swiss franc and its predecessors” (as above), who describes the Angster as a double pfennig “first evidenced around 1340 in the Basel area”. ↩
3. Wikipedia (German), “Angster (Münze)”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angster_(M%C3%BCnze): “1 Angster = 2 Pfennig = 4 Haller”, first attested in the fourteenth century (for example 1362 in Basel); “Die letzte Prägung fand 1847 in Luzern statt.” ↩
4. Kampmann, Die Zürcher und ihr Geld (as above): the Plappart was a coin “von dem 26 auf einen Goldgulden gehen sollten”. ↩
5. HLS, “Waldmann, Hans”, by Martin Lassner, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/018054/, mentions Waldmann’s service “im Plappartkrieg 1458”. ↩
6. HLS, “Plappartkrieg” (Erich Trösch), version of 26 November 2009, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/008880/: “An einem Schützenfest in Konstanz im Aug. 1458 soll ein Konstanzer einen Plappart von Luzernern als ‚Kuhplappart‘ zurückgewiesen haben.” Lucerne then led some 4,000 men against Weinfelden. Through the mediation of the bishop of Constance the conflict ended with payments of 3,000 gulden by Constance and 2,000 gulden by Bertold Vogt. ↩
7. Kampmann, Die Zürcher und ihr Geld (as above), and MünzenWoche summary (as above): Dicken and Batzen were adopted around 1500 following Bern’s system. ↩
8. Weiss, “The Swiss franc and its predecessors” (as above), who states that the Batzen was “first minted in Bern in 1492” and discusses the derivation from “Bätz”, the bear, and the derogatory name “Rollbatzen” after a devaluation of 21 per cent. ↩
9. MünzenWoche summary (as above), which dates the grant of the right to strike gold coins to 1521 under Charles V. ↩
10. Kampmann, Die Zürcher und ihr Geld (as above), which describes the gold gulden as valued at 40 shillings in Zurich’s accounting. ↩
11. HLS, “Münzvereine und Münzkonkordate”, by Martin Körner and Benedikt Zäch, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D13653.php. ↩
12. HLS, “Münzvereine und Münzkonkordate” (as above). ↩
13. HLS, “Münzvereine und Münzkonkordate” (as above). ↩
14. Kampmann, Die Zürcher und ihr Geld (as above), which records that the ordinance established three official exchange locations and that exchanges above 120 pennies had to be carried out at the mint. ↩
15. Guillaume Lamy, “Histoire de Lyon : Lione, place bancaire de l’Europe”, Lyon Capitale, 19 July 2020, https://www.lyoncapitale.fr/?p=213976, on Louis XI’s letters of 8 March 1463 authorising four fairs at Lyon; “Medici Bank”, Wikipedia (English), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medici_Bank, on the gradual transfer of the Medici branch from Geneva to Lyon, completed in 1466, because of the reduction in traffic at the Geneva fairs and the establishment of the fairs at Lyon. ↩
16. HLS, “Kapitalmarkt”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013913/2010-02-18/, which states that the Basel city exchange functioned “ab 1504 als Drehscheibe für den Kapitalmarkt”. ↩
17. HLS, “Kredit”, by Martin Körner and Richard Schwertfeger, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013893/2011-11-10/. ↩

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.