Markets, fairs, weights and measures

The Zurich market and its monopoly

For most of its inhabitants and for the surrounding countryside, Zurich was first of all a market. Grain, wine, salt, iron, livestock, dairy products, wood and cloth were bought and sold there weekly. The market boats from the lake villages, the carts from the Glatt valley and the Knonau district, and the cattle drovers from the Alpine valleys all converged on the city. The HLS states that the city possessed a market monopoly and protected the activities of its craftsmen against outside competition: “Die Stadt besass das Marktmonopol und schützte die Tätigkeit der städtischen Handwerker gegen äussere Konkurrenz.” After the collapse of the silk export trade, it was this regional market, for daily necessities, grain, wine, salt and iron, that sustained the city.¹

The market monopoly had a territorial dimension. As Zurich acquired its rural territory in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, mostly by purchase or pledge, it sought to channel the trade of the countryside through the city. The HLS article on the canton summarises the process. Apart from the Freiamt conquered in 1415, the territory was acquired by purchase or pledge, beginning with Greifensee in 1402, Grüningen in 1408, Regensberg with Bülach in 1409 and Kyburg between 1424 and 1452, and continuing with Winterthur in 1467 and Eglisau in 1496.² Some rural places held their own market privileges, as Andelfingen, Pfäffikon and Uster did from the fourteenth century.³ The relationship between the city market and the rural markets was a recurrent source of tension. The city’s claim to be the obligatory market of its countryside resembles the policy of other Swiss cities that established a Bannmeile after the plague.⁴

The Zurzach fairs

Zurich had no great fair of its own. The fair of the region was held a day’s journey downstream at Zurzach on the Rhine, near the confluence of the Aare. The HLS explains the rise of the Zurzach fairs by two factors: the pilgrimage to the tomb of St. Verena, documented from the ninth and tenth centuries, and the location on a major trade route. The fairs are first documented in 1363, although they probably existed from the twelfth or thirteenth century. Held twice a year, at Whitsun and on St. Verena’s day, 1 September, they were counted in the sixteenth century among the most important fairs in the Upper German region.⁵ After King Ruprecht had extended each of the two fairs from one to three days in 1408, Emperor Sigismund added a Saturday market in 1433. The goods traded included agricultural products, leather, furs and cloth.⁶

The HLS survey of trade places the Zurzach fairs in a European perspective: from the middle of the fourteenth century they became permanent regional exchange centres and nodes in the network of German fairs, without reaching the European significance of the Geneva fairs.⁷ For the Zurich merchant, Zurzach was the nearest meeting place with merchants from Basel, Strasbourg, the Upper Rhine, Swabia and Lucerne, where debts were settled and new contracts concluded. The settlement of accounts at fixed dates created a rhythm of payments that linked the Zurich market into a wider credit network (see Chapter A.IV). The fair was also, for the Jews of the region, one of the few places where they could officially trade.⁸

The comparison with Geneva is instructive. The Geneva fairs, documented from 1262, combined commerce and credit and became a European centre for luxury goods and currency exchange through the networks of Italian merchants, above all the Florentines, before declining after 1460 in the face of competition from Lyon.⁹ Geneva thus experienced in the fifteenth century what Zurich never had: a phase as a genuine international money market, carried by foreign bankers and ended by a political decision of the French crown. Zurich’s trade, by contrast, was regional in its reach and native in its personnel. Its merchants frequented Zurzach and, beyond it, the Upper German and Italian markets, although the city was home to no great foreign banking house. The two cities thus entered the early modern period with different endowments: Geneva with the memory and the techniques of the international fair, Zurich with the habits of a regional market and transit city.

The Zurich pound: weights and measures

Every market requires measures, and control of measures was a mark of lordship. The HLS article on weights and measures explains that in the Middle Ages the right to set and supervise measures belonged, together with other rights of lordship, to the landlord and the holder of jurisdiction. As a result every substance and every measurable activity received its own measures, which at first bore only a limited relationship to one another.¹⁰ In Zurich this right was originally exercised by the abbess of the Fraumünster, who determined the measures along with the monetary standard.¹¹ From the fifteenth century the cities pursued systematic standardisation within their territories, requiring the use of public scales and the verification of private measures against official standards.¹²

Zurich’s contribution was remarkable. According to the HLS, the city established in the early fifteenth century the “Zurzach or old Zurich pound” as a commercial weight, which then spread “from the Rhine to Uri”.¹³ The double name is itself revealing: the Zurich weight was the weight of the Zurzach fairs, and so the weight in which a large part of the region’s wholesale trade was calculated. A more general account states that Zurich’s coins and measures became standard between the Upper Rhine and the Alps.¹⁴ For a modern reader the significance of this is easy to underestimate. A shared unit of weight reduces transaction costs, makes prices comparable, facilitates the calculation of tolls and freight, and allows contracts concluded in one place to be performed in another. The spread of the Zurich pound from the Rhine to Uri was an early form of regional standard-setting, which in its function anticipates the later role of Zurich institutions in defining benchmarks, clearing standards and market conventions.

Notes

1. Schultheiss, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, HLS (as above). ↩
2. Meinrad Suter, “Zürich (Kanton)”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/: “Mit Ausnahme des 1415 eroberten zürcherischen Freiamts wurde das Gebiet durch Kauf oder Pfandschaft erworben.” The financing of these acquisitions is discussed in Chapter A.IV. ↩
3. Suter, “Zürich (Kanton)”, HLS (as above). ↩
4. Dubler, “Märkte”, HLS (as above), on market monopolies and the Bannmeile of Bern and Lucerne after the fourteenth-century plague. ↩
5. “Zurzach”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/001851/: “zwei Zurzacher Jahrmärkte an Pfingsten und am Verenatag (1. September)”, which in the sixteenth century were among the “bedeutendsten Messen im oberdeutschen Raum”. ↩
6. “Zurzacher Messe”, German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zurzacher_Messe. Cited for orientation. ↩
7. Bergier, “Handel”, HLS (as above). ↩
8. “Zurzacher Messe”, German Wikipedia (as above), noting the fair’s “great significance for Jews in Switzerland”. ↩
9. Bergier, “Handel”, HLS (as above). ↩
10. Anne-Marie Dubler, “Masse und Gewichte”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013751/2011-03-31/: “Jeder Stoff, jede bemessbare Tätigkeit erhielt eigene Masse, die anfangs unter sich nur bedingt korrelierten.” ↩
11. Steinmann, “Fraumünster”, HLS (as above). ↩
12. Dubler, “Masse und Gewichte”, HLS (as above). ↩
13. Dubler, “Masse und Gewichte”, HLS (as above), referring to the “Zurzacher oder alte Zürcher Pfund”, which spread “vom Rhein bis Uri”. ↩
14. “Geschichte der Stadt Zürich”, German Wikipedia (as above). Cited for orientation. ↩

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.