Pensions and the finance of mercenary service, 1474–1516

Soldiers as an export and pensions as a revenue

In the last quarter of the fifteenth century a new source of money flowed into the Confederation and transformed its public and private finances: the payments of foreign powers for Swiss soldiers. The Historical Dictionary defines the term Reisläufer as men who “went to war” (Middle High German die reis louffen), that is, mercenaries serving foreign powers. Such men served the emperors and Italian states, Milan among them, as early as 1372–1373, after which their service developed with little control until the 1470s. From 1477 the authorities issued prohibitions against private and unauthorised foreign service, which proved largely ineffective.¹ The Burgundian Wars of 1474–1477 changed the scale of the phenomenon. The victories of Grandson, Murten and Nancy made the Swiss infantry the most sought-after in Europe. The French crown, which had financed the war against Charles the Bold, began to pay regular sums to the Confederates.

These sums were called pensions. The Historical Dictionary, in the article by Valentin Groebner, defines the pension of the early modern period as a sum paid at regular intervals by a sovereign, contractually and officially but often confidentially, to laymen and clergy, over and above ordinary remuneration. It distinguishes public pensions, paid into the treasuries of the cantons, from secret pensions paid to individuals. The first annual pensions in the Confederation it dates to the last third of the fifteenth century, in connection with the alliances against Charles the Bold.² The purpose of the payments was twofold: to influence the political decisions of the cantons and to secure the right to recruit Swiss soldiers. The Historical Dictionary’s article on public finance observes that through the alliance with France in the Burgundian Wars large sums of alliance money flowed into Switzerland, which turned the deficits of the cantonal budgets into substantial surpluses by the end of the century.³

For Zurich, the pensions and the soldiers’ pay were a new kind of money. It came from outside the local economy, in gold, in large amounts and at irregular intervals. Distributed through personal networks, it tied the city’s finances to the foreign policy of France, Milan, the Papacy and the Empire. The soldiers themselves were paid monthly wages: under the French alliance of 1521 the rate was four and a half Rhenish gulden a month per soldier, a sum well above the earnings of a craftsman at home.⁴ Captains who recruited and led companies received additional payments and could accumulate considerable fortunes. The mercenary system thus created, within the Confederate towns, a new class of military entrepreneurs whose wealth derived from the sale of military labour to foreign princes.

Hans Waldmann

The career of Hans Waldmann embodies this new world. Born around 1435 in Blickensdorf near Baar, he became a citizen of Zurich in 1452, trained as a tailor and tanner, served as a soldier in the Plappart War of 1458 and in the conquest of the Thurgau in 1460 before moving into the iron trade in the 1460s. Around 1462 he married a wealthy widow, Anna Landolt, through whom he obtained the administration of the Zurich property of the abbey of Einsiedeln.⁵ He led the Zurich contingent at Grandson and Murten in 1476, acquiring a reputation at the courts of Europe that led the French king and the duke of Milan to seek his services.⁶ On diplomatic missions to Austria in 1476, to France in 1477 and to Milan in 1479 he received pensions from princes. He became Obristzunftmeister in 1480 and burgomaster in 1483, displacing his rival Heinrich Göldli definitively in 1485.⁷

The Historical Dictionary’s article on pensions describes Waldmann as an unofficial agent who distributed pension money to his local clients, a system of patronage that was later associated with accusations of corruption. Waldmann’s regime combined an authoritarian domestic policy, including restrictions on rural gatherings and a subordination of the clergy to civil law, with a foreign policy oriented towards the paying powers. His fall in 1489, the Waldmannhandel, was triggered by a rural revolt against his ordinances. He was tortured and beheaded on 6 April 1489.⁸ The political dimensions of the affair, including the constitutional settlement that followed, are discussed in Chapter A.II. For the history of money, the essential point is that Waldmann was the first Zurich politician whose power rested visibly on foreign money distributed through a personal network. After his execution the Diet renewed its efforts to prohibit pensions.⁹

The Pensionenbrief of 1503 and the Italian wars

The attempt to regulate pensions culminated in the Pensionenbrief adopted by the Diet on 21 July 1503, with a supplementary decree of 30 August 1503. It prohibited individuals from accepting pensions without the approval of their authorities and made foreign military service subject to the consent of the cantonal authorities and the Diet. The text, which was accepted by all twelve cantons of the time together with St Gall and Appenzell, was intended to bring order into a chaotic and escalating system that threatened the unity of the Confederation.¹⁰ Enforcement failed. In 1508 the Diet once again left the regulation of pensions to the individual cantons.¹¹ The failure of the Pensionenbrief demonstrated the limits of Confederate law in the face of the money that the great powers were prepared to pay.

The years that followed saw the Confederation at the height of its military power in Italy. In the Pavierzug of 1512, Swiss contingents took Cremona, Pavia and Milan, drove out the French and installed Massimiliano Sforza as duke of Milan. At Novara in 1513 the Confederates won a victory that secured their dominance over Milan for the time being. Later that year they marched on Dijon and obtained a draft capitulation recognising their Italian conquests, which Louis XII never ratified.¹² The Papacy, which had allied with the Confederates against France, rewarded them with privileges and with the honorific title of defenders of the liberty of the Church. The banners presented by Pope Julius II to the cantons in 1512 are still preserved in several Swiss collections.¹³ Every one of these campaigns was also a financial transaction. The Confederates were paid by Milan, by the Pope and by the Emperor, while the French crown paid those who could be won over. The territories of Lugano, Locarno and the valleys of the Ticino, which the Confederates retained after 1516, became common lordships whose revenues flowed to the participating cantons.¹⁴

Marignano and the price of peace

The Italian adventure ended at Marignano on 13 and 14 September 1515. Francis I crossed the Alps by an unexpected route and met the Confederates south-east of Milan. For the Confederates, the defeat meant the permanent loss of Milan and the end of Swiss military preeminence.¹⁵ Before the battle, the French king had offered the Confederates attractive terms in the Treaty of Gallarate of 9 September 1515, which Bern, Fribourg and Solothurn accepted, withdrawing their contingents. The remaining cantons, among them Zurich, fought and lost a battle in which more than ten thousand men died on both sides, the majority of them Swiss.¹⁶ The division of the Confederates at Gallarate was itself a monetary event: the French offer consisted largely of money, so that the cantons that accepted it chose the certain payment over the uncertain victory.

The Perpetual Peace concluded with France at Fribourg on 29 November 1516 converted the defeat into what the National Museum’s materials call a profitable peace.¹⁷ The French crown undertook to pay substantial sums: a report in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on the five-hundredth anniversary puts the lump sum at 700,000 crowns, equivalent to about 2.5 tonnes of gold, and the annual pension at 2,000 crowns for each canton.¹⁸ The Lucerne state archives describe the treaty as having opened the French royal treasury to the Swiss through war indemnities and annual pensions. They also record that the alliance of 1521 raised the pensions from 2,000 to 3,000 francs per canton.¹⁹ The treaty also granted Swiss merchants exemptions from customs at French borders and markets and access to French salt on favourable terms.²⁰ These commercial privileges, which were to matter greatly for the trade of Swiss merchants in Lyon in the following century, show how closely money, war and trade were bound together.

Zurich’s position at the end of this period was ambivalent. The city had profited from the pensions and from the Italian lordships, while its leading families had grown rich through military entrepreneurship. At the same time, resistance to the pension system was growing, fed by the losses of Marignano and by the perception that foreign money corrupted the political order. When the other cantons concluded the military alliance with France on 5 May 1521, Zurich stayed away after consulting its population.²¹ Zwingli, who had himself accompanied Glarus contingents to Italy as a field chaplain, preached against pensions and mercenary service from 1521. According to the Historical Dictionary, the Reformed cantons later enacted severe prohibitions: Jakob Grebel, a Zurich councillor suspected of accepting pensions, was executed in 1526.²²²³ The Historical Dictionary’s article on the Reisläufer credits Zwingli with the abolition of foreign military service in Zurich around 1520.²⁴ This development belongs to Part B, but its roots lie in the monetary experience of the decades before 1519.

The Historical Dictionary draws a general conclusion from the history of pensions that is directly relevant to the theme of this book: the pension system reveals the oligarchic character of the pre-modern Confederation and shows that the Alpine regions were integrated into international military and financial networks, contrary to the nineteenth-century narratives that portrayed Swiss history as uniquely independent.²⁵ Zurich before the Reformation was a participant in the financial politics of Europe, a recipient of foreign subsidies and a place where the loyalty of political leaders could be bought. The Reformation’s rejection of pensions was, among other things, a decision about the kind of money the city was willing to accept.

Notes

1. HLS, “Reisläufer”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/008607/2011-05-19/. ↩
2. HLS, “Pensions”, by Valentin Groebner, French version, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/010241/. ↩
3. HLS, “Öffentlicher Haushalt” (as above). ↩
4. Staatsarchiv Luzern, “Die französische Soldallianz 1521”, https://staatsarchiv.lu.ch/schaufenster/quellen/Soldallianz, which gives the pay as “viereinhalb rheinische Gulden im Monat”. ↩
5. HLS, “Waldmann, Hans”, by Martin Lassner, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/018054/. ↩
6. Christophe Vuilleumier, “Hans Waldmann, der Tyrann von Zürich”, Swiss National Museum blog (26 October 2020), https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2020/10/der-tyrann-von-zuerich/. ↩
7. HLS, “Waldmann, Hans” (as above). ↩
8. HLS, “Waldmann, Hans” (as above); Vuilleumier (as above) gives the date of execution as 6 April 1489. ↩
9. HLS, “Pensions” (as above). ↩
10. HLS, “Pensionenbrief”, by Hans Stadler, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/009806/. ↩
11. HLS, “Pensionenbrief” (as above). ↩
12. HLS, “Mailänderkriege”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/008893/2011-02-17/. ↩
13. “Juliusbanner”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juliusbanner, on the title ecclesiasticae libertatis defensores granted on 5 July 1512, the banners handed over by the legate Matthäus Schiner and the originals preserved in Zurich (Landesmuseum), Schwyz, Altdorf, Obwalden and elsewhere. ↩
14. HLS, “Mailänderkriege” (as above), which lists Locarno, the Maggia valley, Lugano and Mendrisio as retained by the Confederation. ↩
15. HLS, “Mailänderkriege” (as above). ↩
16. Swiss National Museum, 1515 Marignano, teaching materials for the exhibition of 27 March to 28 June 2015, https://www.landesmuseum.ch/landesmuseum/ihr-besuch/schulen/2015/1515-marignano.pdf. ↩
17. Swiss National Museum, 1515 Marignano (as above); for the date and place, see Staat Freiburg, “Ewiger Frieden 1516–2016”, https://www.fr.ch/de/kultur-und-tourismus/kulturerbe-0/ewiger-frieden-1516-2016. ↩
18. “Als die Eidgenossenschaft nach Westen kippte”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung (2016), https://www.nzz.ch/schweiz/500-jahre-ewiger-frieden-zwischen-der-schweiz-und-frankreich-als-die-eidgenossenschaft-nach-westen-kippte-ld.118696. ↩
19. Staatsarchiv Luzern, “Die französische Soldallianz 1521” (as above). The unit is given there as francs (livres), whereas the NZZ report speaks of crowns; the difference reflects the variety of units of account in which the French payments were expressed. ↩
20. “Frankreich und Schweiz feiern 500 Jahre ‘Ewigen Frieden’”, swissinfo.ch, https://www.swissinfo.ch/ger/politik/historische-beziehungen_frankreich-und-schweiz-feiern-500-jahre-ewigen-frieden/42479186. ↩
21. Staatsarchiv Luzern, “Die französische Soldallianz 1521” (as above): “Zürich nach einer Volksbefragung fernblieb”. ↩
22. HLS, “Pensions” (as above). ↩
23. “Huldrych Zwingli”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huldrych_Zwingli, stating that Zwingli, as field preacher, took part in the Italian campaigns from 1512 to 1515, in particular in the battle of Marignano. ↩
24. HLS, “Reisläufer” (as above). ↩
25. HLS, “Pensions” (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.