Poor relief before the Reformation

Charity as an economy of salvation

The late medieval understanding of almsgiving rested on a reciprocity that seemed obvious to contemporaries. The rich gave, the poor prayed, and each helped the other towards salvation. Voluntary poverty was a Christian virtue and the poor person an image of Christ, even as ordinary poverty was also a condition of weakness, dependence and exclusion. The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz describes precisely this doubled meaning, in which donors’ alms and recipients’ prayers were assigned complementary roles in a single economy of grace.¹ The bishops had been responsible for the poor of their dioceses from the beginning, while the hospitals founded by bishops and religious orders were financed through gifts and legacies.²

The most important legal vehicle of this economy was the pious endowment for the soul, the Seelgerät. In its spiritual sense, the term denoted a store of good works laid up for the soul. In its legal sense, it meant a transfer of property to a church or religious house in return for recurring services, above all anniversary masses (Jahrzeiten) at which the donor’s name was read and his or her soul commended to God.³ The donor usually gave a productive asset, or a rent charged on one, whose annual yield financed the service. Very often the endowment also stipulated a distribution to the poor on the anniversary day: a quantity of bread, a sum of pennies, a meal. In economic terms, the Seelgerät was thus a perpetual income stream earmarked for a purpose. The late medieval churches of Zurich were full of them.

Two features of this system matter for what follows. First, the assets behind charitable giving were dispersed. They sat in the accounts of dozens of institutions—collegiate churches, convents of nuns, the houses of the mendicant friars, confraternities, the hospital—each administered under its own statutes and each answerable, at best, to its own superiors. Secondly, charity followed the logic of the donor. The endowment named the day, the altar and the form of the gift without asking whether the recipient was sick, idle, local or foreign. The poor who gathered at the doors on anniversary days were those who happened to be there. From this angle, the social historian’s complaint that medieval almsgiving was indiscriminate is simply a description of its legal structure.

The institutions of care in medieval Zurich

The oldest charitable institution of the city was the Hospital of the Holy Spirit, the Heiliggeistspital, which stood on the right bank beside the Dominican friary. It existed before 1204, when a papal letter took it under the protection of the Holy See, and was originally run by a lay brotherhood. Around 1300 its management passed to a civic hospital master, the Spitalmeister, after which it developed into an almshouse dependent on gifts and endowments, caring for the poor, the sick and travellers.⁴ The communalisation of the Zurich hospital followed a pattern visible across Europe after the Council of Vienne of 1311–1312 had ruled that hospitals should no longer be granted as benefices and that their direction should pass to communal authorities. In Zurich the result was a mixed regime: the city controlled the hospital’s finances and appointed its master, while the chapter of the Grossmünster retained spiritual oversight and the appointment of its clergy.⁵

Medieval hospitals were multi-purpose houses. They housed the poor, the old, the homeless, orphans, cripples, beggars and pilgrims alongside the sick. Many of their residents were paying guests. The Pfründer bought a lifelong right to lodging and food with a capital sum or a transfer of property, which made the hospital, in part, an annuity business. It took in capital and paid out maintenance for life, so that its solvency depended on the mortality of its purchasers and the yield of its estates. The same double character marked the leper house of St Jakob an der Sihl, outside the walls on the road to Baden, which is first documented in 1221. It had permanent residents who financed their stay as Pfründer and transient sick persons who lived by begging for alms.⁶

Around these institutions stood the religious houses of the city. The Benedictine abbey of the Fraumünster, whose abbess held the rank of an imperial princess, and the collegiate chapter of the Grossmünster had been the dominant landowners of Zurich since the Carolingian period (see Part A). The mendicant orders arrived in the thirteenth century: the Dominicans, whose friary was first mentioned in 1231, the Franciscans, attested in the 1240s, followed by the Augustinian hermits, whose convent dates from 1270. The Dominican nuns of Oetenbach, at their peak around 120 sisters, the Cistercian nuns of Selnau and the community of St Verena completed the picture within and just outside the walls.⁷ Each of these houses gave alms at its gate and held endowments whose yields were in part destined for the poor. Before the Reformation, a hungry person in Zurich could thus draw on a patchwork of sources: the hospital, the gate of a convent, the anniversary distributions of the collegiate churches, the confraternities and, not least, the street, where begging was an accepted, if increasingly regulated, occupation.

The late medieval turn: regulating begging

The patchwork was under strain long before Zwingli preached in the Grossmünster. From the fourteenth century onwards, European cities began to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy poor and to reserve official assistance for the former. The HLS article on poverty states that a poor person regarded as responsible for his or her own situation was excluded from public support, that begging by strangers and vagrants was restricted and that forced labour and expulsion were threatened as sanctions.⁸ At the end of the Middle Ages, the conviction spread that poverty itself was an evil, which ceased to be seen chiefly as a condition favourable to salvation and came to be regarded as a danger to society.⁹ The research portal on the history of Swiss social security summarises the same development as a growing secular control over poverty in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, which the Reformation continued. It notes that urban authorities narrowed the circle of those entitled to support and reserved access to poor relief to holders of citizenship.¹⁰

Nuremberg offers the best-documented example north of the Alps. The imperial city issued a begging ordinance as early as 1370, which required official permission to beg, preferred local residents over outsiders and obliged authorised beggars to wear a visible token. An ordinance of 1518 then reserved weekday begging to those unable to work—the disabled, the lame, the blind.¹¹ Similar measures multiplied in the German and Swiss towns in the fifteenth century. Eberhard Isenmann’s recent survey of urban poor relief describes the sequence as a movement from restricting begging to prohibiting it outright. That step in turn forced cities to organise systematic assistance based on an inquiry into the causes of poverty and to impose a discipline of work on the able-bodied.¹²

In Zurich, the pressure was sharpened by the particular conditions of the early sixteenth century. Poor harvests, disease and rising prices pushed many families into destitution. The mercenary trade, which Part A has followed up to Marignano, sent young men abroad who too often came back maimed or not at all, leaving land unworked and households without breadwinners. Contemporary accounts describe organised bands of beggars besieging monasteries, farms and houses, and report the grim allegation that parents mutilated their own children to move the rich to pity.¹³ The Zurich council responded before the break with Rome was complete. The municipal archive dates a first alms ordinance, marking the beginning of public poor relief, to 1520, and describes that of 1525 as its renewal.¹⁴ The point deserves emphasis because it corrects a tempting narrative. The regulation of poverty in Zurich predates the Reformation, which gave an existing policy two things it had lacked, namely a theological justification for abolishing the religious economy of almsgiving and, far more concretely, a large and suddenly available pool of assets.

Notes

1. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), “Pauvreté” (French version of “Armut”), section on the Middle Ages and early modern period, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/016090/2015-05-11/. ↩
2. HLS, “Fürsorge”, section on the Middle Ages (Anne-Lise Head-König), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/025809/. ↩
3. Wikipedia (German), “Seelgerät”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seelger%C3%A4t (used for orientation on the concept and its link to the Jahrzeit). ↩
4. Medizinhistorisches Zürich (University of Zurich), “Das erste Zürcher Spital”, https://dlf.uzh.ch/sites/medizingeschichte/das-erste-zuercher-spital/. ↩
5. HLS, “Spital”, sections on the Middle Ages (Elsanne Gilomen-Schenkel) and the early modern period (Pierre-Yves Donzé), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/016579/2012-10-25/. ↩
6. Medizinhistorisches Zürich (University of Zurich), “Sondersiechenhaus St. Jakob”, https://dlf.uzh.ch/sites/medizingeschichte/sondersiechenhaus-st-jakob/. ↩
7. Wikipedia (German), “Kirchen und Klöster in der Stadt Zürich im Mittelalter”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchen_und_Kl%C3%B6ster_in_der_Stadt_Z%C3%BCrich_im_Mittelalter (used for orientation; dates cross-checked against the separate articles on the Predigerkloster, Barfüsserkloster and Augustinerkloster). ↩
8. HLS, “Pauvreté”, section on the Middle Ages and early modern period, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/016090/2015-05-11/. ↩
9. HLS, “Fürsorge”, section on the Middle Ages, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/025809/. ↩
10. Geschichte der Sozialen Sicherheit in der Schweiz, “Arme” (profile of affected groups), https://www.geschichtedersozialensicherheit.ch/akteure/profile-von-betroffenengruppen/default-85ad0625d1. ↩
11. Forum Nürnberger Werkstätten, “Die Ordnung des Bettel- und Almosenwesens”, http://alt.forum-nuernberger-werkstaetten.de/aktionen/ausstellung/mittelalter/bettelwesen.html. ↩
12. Eberhard Isenmann, “Individuelle Caritas und kommunale Armenfürsorge”, in: “Des Almosens vielleicht nicht wert, aber doch notdürftig” (Berlin/Heidelberg: J. B. Metzler, 2023), chapter abstract, https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-662-66840-5_2. ↩
13. Reformierte Kirche Kanton Zürich, Zwingli-Lexikon, “Armut” (after Michael Funk, 2002), https://www.zhref.ch/themen/reformationsjubilaeum/allgemeine-informationen/huldrych-zwingli/zwingli-lexikon-von-a-bis-z-1/lexikon-a/armut. Such reports should be read with the caution due to reforming polemic, which had an interest in painting pre-Reformation charity as both inadequate and corrupting. ↩
14. Stadt Zürich, Stadtarchiv, Wissensportal, “Beginn und Durchsetzung der Reformation in Zürich” (Max Schultheiss), https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/zuerichs-geschichte/stadtarchiv/wissensportal/reformation-in-zuerich.html. ↩

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.