Neighbours and partners: Constance, Basel, Schaffhausen, Upper Germany and Italy

The merchants of Zurich

Who were the Zurich merchants who used these routes? The HLS article on merchants gives the outline. In 1336 the wealthy long-distance merchants joined the Konstaffel, the society of the old ruling families, nobles and rentiers, which gave them a place among the city’s upper class. Regional traders belonged to the guilds of the Safran and the Meisen, while the small retailers were integrated into the guild system.¹ In the late Middle Ages, according to the same article, noble culture served as a model for merchants who had grown rich through trade.² This aristocratic orientation is one of the keys to the later history of Zurich’s trading class. After the Old Zurich War, according to one account, the leading families turned away from long-distance commerce towards careers in the city’s administration and in the offices of the territorial state, forming an administrative patriciate that depended on public office.³

Organised trading companies, which were the typical vehicle of large-scale commerce in Upper Germany and Italy, remained marginal in Zurich. The HLS article on trading companies states plainly that in Zurich such companies remained marginal because of guild restrictions, adding that a Nüwe Gesellschaft founded in 1520 lost its licence by 1523.⁴ Elsewhere in the Swiss area the picture was different. Fribourg had the Perroman company, active from 1396 to 1438 with a network reaching southern France. Basel had the Halbisen company of about 1415 to 1430, which traded in saffron and cloth with a capital of 25,000 gulden contributed by three partners, and St. Gallen had about fifteen trading companies in the fifteenth century, among them the Diesbach-Watt company, whose reach extended from Cracow and Warsaw in the east to Valencia in the west.⁵ Zurich’s guild constitution, which gave the craft guilds a decisive voice in the council, thus limited the scope for the capital-intensive partnership that elsewhere became the nursery of banking. This is one reason why Zurich’s later financial development followed a different path from that of the Upper German cities.

Constance and the Great Ravensburg Company

To the north-east lay Constance, the old episcopal city, which was both the seat of the diocese to which Zurich belonged and the commercial centre of the Lake of Constance linen region. The most important commercial organisation of the region was the Great Ravensburg Company, founded around 1380 by merchants from three families: the Humpis of Ravensburg, the Mötteli of Buchhorn and the Muntprat of Constance.⁶ The company maintained branches and factors across Europe, including Geneva, Milan, Genoa, Venice, Barcelona, Valencia, Saragossa, Lyon, Bruges, Antwerp and Frankfurt. Its early trade concentrated on regional linen and fustian and later extended to saffron from southern Europe, coral from North Africa and English wool.

The HLS article on the company, by Oliver Landolt, emphasises its Swiss connections. The company, active from about 1380 to 1530, worked particularly in St. Gallen, where it exported textiles and used bleaching fields. It also maintained agents in Bern, kept a factor in Geneva from 1454 and had important associates in Zurich and Lucerne. Exporting textiles, raw metals, hardware, furs and leather and importing spices, sugar, rice, southern fruits and precious stones, the company used its presence in the Swiss area to exploit the north–south transit axes.⁷ According to the same article, the company’s Swiss business suffered from the detachment of the Confederation from the Empire in the late fifteenth century and especially from the Swabian War of 1499.⁸

For Zurich the Ravensburg Company represented both an opportunity and a model that the city did not copy. Zurich merchants could participate as associates, and Zurich’s routes carried part of the company’s traffic to Italy. The city itself, however, produced no comparable enterprise. The capital and the management of the great Upper German trade remained in Ravensburg, Constance, Nuremberg and Augsburg, so that the Zurich participants stayed partners and service providers. In this respect the late medieval situation anticipated a recurring feature of Zurich’s economic history: the city prospered as a place through which the business of others passed and in which that business was served, stored, financed and insured.

Basel, Schaffhausen and the Rhine

To the north and west, the Rhine linked Zurich with Schaffhausen and Basel. Schaffhausen owed its commercial existence to the Rhine Falls, where goods from the Lake of Constance, above all salt, had to be unloaded and reloaded.⁹ Basel was the gateway to the Upper Rhine, Alsace and, via the Rhine, the Low Countries, and was the natural northern terminus of the Gotthard route. Toll tariff documents of 1401 show that merchants from Bern, Fribourg, Zurich and Lucerne took part in the Rhine traffic. Records from 1530 list steel, iron, livestock, hides, salt, cheese and wool, as well as luxury goods for Venetian and Milanese merchants, among the goods carried.¹⁰

Basel’s own experience with a large trading company is instructive. In the second half of the fifteenth century a “Great Company” was formed there whose monopolistic practices provoked opposition that culminated in a popular uprising in 1474.¹¹ The episode shows the political limits of concentrated commercial capital in the Swiss city republics, where the guilds could mobilise against a group of merchants seen to be enriching themselves at the expense of the craftsmen. Whereas Zurich’s guild regime prevented such concentrations from the outset, Basel allowed them and then had to contain them. Both cities thus learnt, in different ways, that commercial power in a republic depended on political consent.

The Italian connection: Milan and Como

At the southern end of the routes lay Lombardy. Milan was the great market for the goods of the north and the source of arms, fine cloth, spices, rice and, later, raw silk. Como, at the southern end of the lake route from Chiavenna, was the gateway to Milan for traffic from the Bündner passes. The documentary basis for this trade is unusually rich, because Lombard notaries recorded contracts of carriage, sale and credit involving merchants from north of the Alps. Werner Schnyder, the Zurich state archivist, spent the years 1964 to 1970 searching northern Italian notarial registers and published the results in his two-volume Handel und Verkehr über die Bündner Pässe im Mittelalter zwischen Deutschland, der Schweiz und Oberitalien (Zurich 1973–1975), which builds on the earlier work of Aloys Schulte and remains the fundamental source collection for the subject.¹²

From the fifteenth century onwards the Confederates, including Zurich, regulated their relations with the dukes of Milan through a series of treaties known as the Milanese capitulations. The HLS article on these treaties by Fritz Glauser lists nineteen known capitulations, including peace treaties of 1426, 1441, 1479 and 1503 and renewals in 1450, 1467, 1477, 1483, 1496, 1498 and 1512. Trade privileges formed a cornerstone of these agreements: they guaranteed toll freedom for Confederate merchants through Milanese territory, so that their goods paid no toll as far as the city moat of Milan.¹³ This was a remarkable privilege. It meant that political alliance and military service, which the Confederates supplied in abundance during the Italian wars, could be converted into commercial advantage for the merchants of the member cantons. The capitulations are an early example of a pattern that recurs in Swiss economic diplomacy: market access negotiated by treaty, in exchange for services that the other party valued.

The Italian connection also brought techniques. The HLS article on trading companies notes that such companies emerged in Italy before the year 1000, expanded significantly in the thirteenth century and appeared north of the Alps from the late fourteenth century.¹⁴ Double-entry bookkeeping, the bill of exchange, the commenda partnership and the notarial contract all came north along the same routes that carried spices and silk. Although their adoption in Zurich was slow and their full effect belongs to the early modern period, the conduit through which they would later arrive already existed.

Notes

1. Illi, “Kaufleute”, HLS (as above). On the Konstaffel and the guilds see Chapter A.II. ↩
2. Illi, “Kaufleute”, HLS (as above): “Im Spätmittelalter hatte die adelige Kultur Vorbildcharakter für die durch Handel reich gewordenen Kaufleute.” ↩
3. “Geschichte der Stadt Zürich”, German Wikipedia (as above), speaking of a “Verwaltungspatriziat”. Cited for orientation; the thesis is associated with the older Zurich historiography. ↩
4. Martin Illi, “Handelsgesellschaften”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/014175/. ↩
5. Illi, “Handelsgesellschaften”, HLS (as above): “von Krakau und Warschau im Osten bis Valencia im Westen”. ↩
6. “Große Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft”, German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gro%C3%9Fe_Ravensburger_Handelsgesellschaft. Cited for orientation; the foundational study is Aloys Schulte, Geschichte der Grossen Ravensburger Handelsgesellschaft 1380–1530 (1923), based on documents discovered at Salem in 1909. ↩
7. Oliver Landolt, “Ravensburg, Compagnie de”, in: DHS/HLS (French version), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/041662/. ↩
8. Landolt, “Ravensburg, Compagnie de”, HLS (as above). ↩
9. “Hochrheinschifffahrt”, German Wikipedia (as above). ↩
10. “Hochrheinschifffahrt”, German Wikipedia (as above). The 1530 evidence is slightly later than the period of this chapter and is cited to illustrate the composition of the traffic. ↩
11. Illi, “Handelsgesellschaften”, HLS (as above). ↩
12. Maultier-Mediathek, bibliographical note on Werner Schnyder, Handel und Verkehr über die Bündner Pässe im Mittelalter, https://mediathek.maultier.ch/produkt/handel-und-verkehr-ueber-die-buendner-paesse-im-mittelalter/, stating that the two volumes contain only about half of the source material collected; “Werner Schnyder”, German Wikipedia (as above), for the dates 1973/1975. ↩
13. Fritz Glauser, “Mailänder Kapitulate”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/017199/: “Zollfreiheit für die eidgenössischen Kaufleute”, goods that “bis an den Stadtgraben von Mailand keinen Zoll zu bezahlen hatten”. The capitulations also dealt with grain supplies from the Po valley, salt and road maintenance. ↩
14. Illi, “Handelsgesellschaften”, HLS (as 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.