Rudolf Brun and the revolution of 1336

The overthrow

Rudolf Brun is first mentioned in the Zurich sources in 1324. The son of Jakob Brun, himself a councillor, and of Mechthild, he was a knight and married Margaretha Fütschi, the daughter of a councillor.¹ A guild history records that his name first appears around 1330 in connection with a quarrel that earned him a substantial fine, a detail that sits well with what is known of his later temperament.² Brun was, in other words, an insider of the council class who had not been admitted to its inner circle. He found his instrument in the craftsmen.

The occasion was financial. According to the Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz, a reform of the coinage triggered the uprising.³ Changes to the coinage were a classic cause of urban unrest in the fourteenth century, since they affected wages, debts and the prices of daily goods. The craftsmen who lived from small transactions felt them directly. On 7 June 1336 artisans and shopkeepers stormed the town hall, whereupon the councillors fled, most of them to Rapperswil, a town on the upper lake under the lordship of a branch of the Habsburgs.⁴ The overthrow had been carefully prepared: the victors were able to present a new constitution within weeks, one modelled on the guild constitution of Strasbourg. Brun’s programme was summed up in a phrase preserved in the sources: he wished to introduce “ein zunft und ein nuwes gericht”, a guild and a new court.⁵

The purge of the old council followed immediately. On 18 July 1336, two days after the oath to the new constitution, twenty-two former councillors were declared unfit to hold office, and twelve of them were banished from the city for a period.⁶ Most of the banished were merchants, which confirms the character of the revolution as a coalition of a noble faction and the crafts against the commercial oligarchy.⁷ A charter of 1337 justified the changes in language that is still quoted: a great and dangerous uprising had welled up in the city of Zurich from the spring of injustice.⁸ The rhetoric of the new regime thus presented the revolution as the restoration of justice, the classic legitimation of medieval urban upheavals.

The first Geschworener Brief

Although the original of the first Geschworener Brief has not survived, the text is known from a contemporary copy held in the Zentralbibliothek Zürich and was printed in the eighteenth century in the Helvetische Bibliothek and in 1901 in Wilhelm Oechsli’s Quellenbuch zur Schweizergeschichte.⁹ Its opening sets out its purpose in the language of peace and common good: the citizens of Zurich had made these arrangements “dur vride und dur besserunge der stat”, for peace and for the betterment of the city.¹⁰

The constitution rested on three elements. The first was the new office of Bürgermeister. Brun received it for life, together with a salary and very extensive powers. The older literature speaks of an unlimited authority. The citizens swore a personal oath of loyalty to the mayor that took precedence over all other oaths.¹¹ The Historisches Lexikon compares the power Brun thus acquired to that of the tyrants of the Italian city states, a comparison that is apt: like the signori of Lombardy and Tuscany, Brun used the conflicts within the commune to raise himself above it.¹²

The second element was the council. The Richtebrief’s three councils were replaced by two, each serving for half a year: the Natalrat took office at Christmas and the Baptistalrat on the feast of St John the Baptist in June.¹³ Each council had twenty-six members. Thirteen came from the Constaffel, the new association of the urban upper class, among whom seven had to be knights. The other thirteen were the guild masters, the Zunftmeister, one for each of the thirteen guilds.¹⁴ The body was accordingly styled “Räte und Zunftmeister”, councillors and guild masters, a formula that preserved in its very name the distinction between the two components.¹⁵

The third element was the guilds themselves. The constitution grouped the city’s trades into thirteen guilds, which were at once economic, political and military bodies. Only through a guild, or through the Constaffel, could a citizen take part in public life. The guilds also formed the units in which the militia was raised. Several trades that had little in common were combined in a single guild, as in the case of the guild zur Meisen, which brought together innkeepers, saddlers and painters.¹⁶ The Geschworener Brief organised the crafts into banners responsible for the muster roll, mobilisation, inspection, drill and the dispatch of troops. In later centuries individual guilds owned their own guns, ammunition and powder, while fire-fighting and the watch were likewise organised by guild.¹⁷

The balance of the constitution needs careful assessment. Nineteenth-century historiography called the events of 1336 a “guild revolution”, a name that has stuck. The modern view is more sober: the Historisches Lexikon emphasises that the actual influence of the craft guilds remained rather limited and that the older label overstates the change.¹⁸ The Constaffel held half the seats, while the decisive voice belonged to a mayor who came from the old council class. The Constaffel, as the guild tradition itself acknowledges, together with Brun’s leadership, secured a majority for the new regime.¹⁹ Brun used his position to secure council seats for his allies, including members of the Brun, Mülner and Manesse families.²⁰ The changes of 1336 concerned the circle of families at the top and the structure through which power was exercised. The craftsmen gained a formal presence in the council, the right to organise, and, above all, a constitutional foothold that later generations could widen.

That foothold was the real innovation. Before 1336 Zurich’s law had prohibited political guilds, whereas after 1336 the guilds were the constitution. The city became what Swiss historians call a Zunftstadt, a guild town, in which manufacturers, craftsmen and merchants enjoyed constitutionally guaranteed political influence through their corporations. Zurich was the first of the four Swiss guild towns: Basel followed in 1337, St Gallen in 1354 and Schaffhausen in 1411.²¹ Bern, Lucerne and Fribourg developed into patrician cities in which the crafts had no comparable constitutional role. Geneva, the subject of this book’s companion volume, does not figure among the guild towns either: there the civic councils kept control over the trades, which never acquired a share of sovereignty.²² The distinction matters for the financial centre, because it established in Zurich a tradition in which economic interests were organised corporately and represented directly in the state.

Mordnacht, Rapperswil and the Confederation

The banished councillors did not accept their defeat. They found refuge in Rapperswil and support from the counts of Habsburg-Laufenburg. The conflict between the new regime and its exiles lasted, with interruptions, from 1336 to 1355. Brun repelled a first attempt at restoration in 1337 at the battle of Grinau, near the upper end of the lake.²³

The decisive attempt came in the night of 23 to 24 February 1350. The exiles, led by Count Johann II of Habsburg-Laufenburg, had arranged with sympathisers in the city to be admitted at night, to kill Brun and his followers and to restore the old council. Once the plot had been betrayed or discovered, the conspirators were overwhelmed after street fighting around the Münsterhof. Count Johann himself was taken prisoner and held in Zurich for some two years.²⁴ The traditions surrounding the night are coloured by later chronicles. The Bernese chronicler Tschachtlan, writing around 1470, tells how Brun escaped onto the roof of the town hall and raised the alarm with his shouting, an episode that, as a historian at the Swiss National Museum has recently pointed out, cannot be verified.²⁵ Zurich tradition attributes the defeat of the conspirators to the butchers, who fought with their cleavers, a role that the guild zum Widder, the butchers’ guild, still cherishes.²⁶

The repression was brutal, which is precisely the word the Historisches Lexikon uses.²⁷ The numbers given in the traditions vary. The guild tradition speaks of seventeen conspirators executed and thirty-five broken on the wheel. Other accounts give different figures, all of them derived from chronicles written generations later.²⁸ Brun then took the offensive. Zurich’s forces destroyed the town walls and castle of Rapperswil and the castle of Altendorf, a blow from which the Rapperswil line of the Habsburg-Laufenburg family never recovered.²⁹

Because the attack on Rapperswil brought Zurich into direct conflict with Duke Albrecht II of Austria, the head of the house of Habsburg, the city needed allies. On 1 May 1351 Brun concluded a perpetual alliance with Lucerne and the three Forest Cantons, Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden.³⁰ The treaty obliged the partners to mutual military help and served, from Brun’s perspective, to protect his constitution. Zurich reserved to itself the freedom to conclude other alliances, a reservation that allowed the city to pursue an independent policy within the league.³¹ The war with Habsburg and the Empire that followed included a siege of Zurich and ended with the peace of Regensburg in 1355.

Brun used the reservation almost at once. Having secured his regime with the help of the Confederates, he sought equilibrium with the Habsburgs. On 26 April 1356 he concluded an alliance with the dukes of Austria. Three years later, in 1359, Duke Rudolf IV made him an Austrian councillor with a pension.³² The alliance sits uneasily with the later image of Zurich as a steadfast member of the Confederation from its first day, but it is consistent with the logic of a merchant city that depended on open roads and good relations with every power along them. Brun died on 17 September 1360. His successor Rüdiger Manesse, of the family associated with the famous codex of courtly love poetry, became the last mayor for life. The guild masters curtailed his authority in 1370, four years before he survived proceedings in the Great Council to remove him for misuse of the city seal.³³

The episode left a double legacy that recurs throughout Zurich’s history. The city’s membership of the Confederation began as an instrument of internal politics, a guarantee of a particular constitutional settlement. At the same time, Zurich never regarded that membership as excluding its own diplomacy with the great powers. The same combination of loyalty to the Swiss framework and a readiness to deal independently with foreign powers would characterise the financial centre centuries later.

Notes

1. HLS, “Brun, Rudolf” (Martin Lassner), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/018053/. ↩
2. Zunft zur Letzi, “Geschichte Zürichs”, https://zunft-zur-letzi.ch/geschichte-zuerichs/. ↩
3. HLS, “Brun, Rudolf” (Martin Lassner), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/018053/. The coinage of Zurich, struck under the authority of the abbess of the Fraumünster, is discussed in Chapter A.IV. ↩
4. Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs, “Rudolf Brun”, https://www.sechselaeuten.ch/de/wissenswertes/geschichte/rudolfbrun, which describes the storming of the town hall by “Handwerker und Krämer”. ↩
5. Zunft zur Letzi, “Geschichte Zürichs”, https://zunft-zur-letzi.ch/geschichte-zuerichs/. ↩
6. Zunft zur Letzi, “Geschichte der Zünfte”, https://zunft-zur-letzi.ch/geschichte-der-zuenfte/. ↩
7. Nabholz, “Brun, Rudolf”, Neue Deutsche Biographie 2 (1955), pp. 675–676, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz6107.html. ↩
8. Monica Seidler-Hux, “Die Zürcher Zünfte”, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, April 2024, https://www.zb.uzh.ch/en/fokus/beitrag/die-zurcher-zunfte. ↩
9. Verfassungsgeschichte.ch, “Die älteste demokratische Verfassung von Zürich. 16. Juli 1336”, https://www.verfassungsgeschichte.ch/CH_1336_Verfassung%20von%20Zuerich.pdf, which records these editions and the loss of the original. ↩
10. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000 (2000), https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/politik-staat/recherche-im-staatsarchiv/z%C3%BCrcher-geschichte/zh_verfassungsgeschichte.pdf. ↩
11. Nabholz, Neue Deutsche Biographie 2 (1955), and Dändliker, Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie 3 (1876), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz6107.html; HLS, “Brun, Rudolf”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/018053/, mentions the salaried lifetime office. ↩
12. HLS, “Brun’sche Zunftrevolution” (Martin Illi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D30735.php. ↩
13. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000 (2000), https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/politik-staat/recherche-im-staatsarchiv/z%C3%BCrcher-geschichte/zh_verfassungsgeschichte.pdf. ↩
14. HLS, “Brun’sche Zunftrevolution” (Martin Illi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D30735.php; HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/, describes the thirteen Constaffel members as seven knights and six merchants. ↩
15. “Brunsche Zunftverfassung”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunsche_Zunftverfassung: “das neue Regierungskollegium wurde vielmehr als «Räte und Zunftmeister» bezeichnet”. The primary text was not consulted. ↩
16. Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs, “Rudolf Brun”, https://www.sechselaeuten.ch/de/wissenswertes/geschichte/rudolfbrun. ↩
17. Otto Sigg, “Zunftherrlichkeit: die Zürcher Zünfte 1336 bis 1798”, in the Festschrift of the Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs, 650 Jahre Zürcher Zünfte (Zurich 1986), pp. 12–32, https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Zunftherrlichkeit.pdf. ↩
18. HLS, “Brun’sche Zunftrevolution” (Martin Illi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D30735.php, which observes that “der tatsächliche Einfluss der Handwerkszünfte” remained limited. ↩
19. Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs, “Rudolf Brun”, https://www.sechselaeuten.ch/de/wissenswertes/geschichte/rudolfbrun. ↩
20. HLS, “Brun, Rudolf” (Martin Lassner), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/018053/. ↩
21. HLS, “Villes corporatives” (Anne-Marie Dubler, trans. Pierre-G. Martin), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/f/F9917.php. ↩
22. HLS, “Zünfte” (Katharina Simon-Muscheid), version of 3 February 2015, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013729/2015-02-03/: distinguishes the guild towns Zurich, Schaffhausen and Basel from “die Städte Freiburg, Luzern und Bern …, in denen sich ein Regiment patrizischer Geschlechter entwickelte und die Zünfte … keine oder keine beherrschende politische Funktion hatten”, and records that in Geneva the crafts formed guilds only at the end of the sixteenth century, under the control of the authorities from 1557, and that “diese Zünfte spielten aber keine politische Rolle”. The same article records that the crafts of Solothurn gained access to the council in 1344, which is why Solothurn is not listed here among the patrician cities. ↩
23. HLS, “Brun, Rudolf” (Martin Lassner), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/018053/; HLS, “Brun’sche Zunftrevolution” (Martin Illi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D30735.php. ↩
24. Wikipedia, “Johann II (Habsburg-Laufenburg)”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_II_(Habsburg-Laufenburg), cited for orientation; the capture of the count is standard in the literature. ↩
25. Adrian Baschung, “Das Lärmen der Waffen”, Blog zur Schweizer Geschichte, Schweizerisches Nationalmuseum, 14 February 2023, https://blog.nationalmuseum.ch/2023/02/das-laermen-der-waffen/. ↩
26. Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs, “Rudolf Brun”, https://www.sechselaeuten.ch/de/wissenswertes/geschichte/rudolfbrun, which says the plot failed “reportedly” owing to the intervention of the butchers’ guild. ↩
27. HLS, “Brun’sche Zunftrevolution” (Martin Illi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D30735.php. ↩
28. Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs, “Rudolf Brun”, https://www.sechselaeuten.ch/de/wissenswertes/geschichte/rudolfbrun; for divergent figures see Wikipedia, “Mordnacht von Zürich”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mordnacht_von_Z%C3%BCrich, which records that the sources vary. ↩
29. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/, which records that Zurich destroyed the Rapperswil castles; Wikipedia, “Johann II (Habsburg-Laufenburg)”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Johann_II_(Habsburg-Laufenburg), for Altendorf and the consequences for the family. ↩
30. Verfassungen.ch, “Verfassungen Zürichs”, https://www.verfassungen.ch/zuerich/leiste.htm (“Ewiger Bund der Stadt Zürich mit den vier Waldstätten”, 1 May 1351); Nabholz, Neue Deutsche Biographie 2 (1955), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz6107.html. ↩
31. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/, noting that the city “behielt sich … das freie Bündnisrecht vor”. ↩
32. Nabholz, Neue Deutsche Biographie 2 (1955), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz6107.html; HLS, “Brun, Rudolf”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/018053/, calls the Austrian dukes Zurich’s “most powerful partner”. ↩
33. HLS, “Manesse, Rüdiger VII.” (Martin Lassner), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/018090/2008-08-18/. The association of the Manesse family with the Codex Manesse is common knowledge. ↩

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.