Silk, linen and wool: Zurich’s first export trades

The silk of the Manesse era

Transit was one foundation of a merchant city, and production for export was another. What distinguished Zurich in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries from many other small towns on the routes was that it also produced a high-value export good: silk. The HLS article on the city states that the silk trade, documented from the thirteenth century, flourished in Zurich in the late Middle Ages and stood at the centre of extensive trade relations, supported by wool and linen weaving.¹ The general survey of trade in the HLS lists Zurich’s silks next to the woollens of Fribourg and the linen of St. Gallen as the textile products that found export markets through the fairs.²

What exactly was produced is less well documented than one might wish. The HLS article on silk, written by Liliane Mottu-Weber, speaks of a brief episode of the weaving of silk veils and ribbons in the thirteenth century, before turning to the sixteenth-century revival.³ A report on the exhibition Seidenglanz: 400 Jahre Seide in Zürich, held at the Zentralbibliothek Zürich in 2018, describes small workshops around 1300 producing silk veils or headscarves that were largely exported, to Vienna, Prague and France, and notes that under the city’s sumptuary rules only young unmarried women were allowed to wear silk in Zurich itself.⁴ The documentation prepared for the Swiss list of living traditions places the documented beginnings in the fourteenth century and states that from the second half of that century, owing to social changes and wars, luxury goods such as silk cloths and veils could no longer be exported.⁵

The sources thus agree on the product, light silk fabrics such as veils and ribbons, and on its destination, export markets to the east and west. They differ on the chronology of decline. The HLS article on merchants dates the collapse of Zurich’s silk trade to the end of the fourteenth century.⁶ The HLS article on the city links the collapse to the Old Zurich War of the 1440s, after which Zurich retained only its regional market for daily necessities, grain, wine, salt and iron.⁷ The two statements can be read together: the export trade in luxury silk, already weakened after the plague and the wars of the later fourteenth century, lost what remained of it in the war of the 1440s. The mid-fifteenth-century population figures given by the HLS are consistent with this picture of contraction: about 5,700 inhabitants in 1408, about 4,750 in 1467 and about 5,100 in 1529.

Silk weaving required raw silk or silk yarn, which could not be produced north of the Alps in this period and had to be imported, in all likelihood from Italy across the Alps.⁸ It also required a market of wealthy consumers and a group of merchants able to finance the purchase of raw material, the work of the weavers and the long voyage to the buyers. The silk trade thus linked the routes to the south, over which raw silk came, with the routes to the north and east, over which the finished goods went. It is in this sense that the HLS speaks of silk as standing at the centre of extensive trade relations. The same article refers, in the same context, to the presence of Jewish lenders and Lombard financiers in the city, and to the Lamparterturm, whose name recalls the Lombards. Their role belongs to Chapter A.IV.⁹

The silk era coincides with the high point of Zurich’s patrician culture. Around 1300, Rüdiger II Manesse and his son Johannes initiated the great collection of Middle High German courtly lyric that is known today as the Codex Manesse or Grosse Heidelberger Liederhandschrift. Its core, with 110 poets, was completed around 1300 and supplements were added until about 1330 or 1340. In all, the codex contains some 6,000 stanzas from 140 collections and 137 Gothic miniatures showing the poets in idealised courtly scenes.¹⁰ The Manesse family owed its wealth largely to landholdings. One of its members, Rüdiger V, endowed his memorial mass in 1328 with twenty silver marks, a sum equal to the annual income of the barons of Regensberg around 1310.¹¹ The codex is a literary monument whose link to the silk trade is indirect. It testifies to a city in which an urban elite had the means and the leisure to commission a luxury manuscript of European rank and in which the consumption and production of luxury goods were part of the same world. The oldest preserved version of Zurich’s town law, the Richtebrief compiled in 1304, contains regulations for the production of silk, wool and linen and bears witness to a flourishing textile trade and prosperous long-distance commerce in the late thirteenth century.¹²

Linen, wool and the Lake of Constance

Silk was the spectacular trade, whereas linen and wool were the steady ones. The HLS article on linen places the medieval eastern Swiss linen industry within a larger production area around the Lake of Constance, stretching from the Thur to the Danube and the Lech. Constance dominated this area until internal unrest weakened it around the middle of the fifteenth century, when St. Gallen took its place as the leading linen city, although linen weaving is attested in Zurich and Basel by the thirteenth century.¹³ The quality control of linen through the official Schau was developed first in Constance and adopted by St. Gallen before 1364.¹⁴ In the fourteenth century the region to the north-east, around Biberach, Memmingen and Kaufbeuren, began producing fustian (Barchent), a mixed fabric of linen and cotton, which drew cotton from the Mediterranean and so tied Upper Swabia to the Venetian and Genoese trade.

Zurich stood at the edge of this great linen landscape. Its own linen and wool weaving, integrated into the guild system, served the regional market and some export. A modern overview of the city’s history describes a domestic textile industry that exported woollens, linens and processed silk products regionally, and speaks of connections to northern Italy and down the Rhine to Flanders and Holland.¹⁵ The more important consequence of Zurich’s position for this study is that the city was a natural transit point for linen from the Lake of Constance travelling south. St. Gallen linen, the Constance tela di Costanza and Upper Swabian fustian were among the principal export goods of the region to Italy and Spain, with the Walensee corridor and the Bündner passes as one of their main outlets.¹⁶

The limits of the export trades

It is important to state the limits of Zurich’s export trades plainly. The HLS survey of trade concludes that Swiss merchants occupied “a considerable, but internationally secondary place”.¹⁷ Zurich never developed a textile industry comparable to Florence, Ghent or even Constance. Its silk trade was a luxury specialisation that did not survive the crises of the later Middle Ages. The later great Zurich silk industry of the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries was a new creation, begun with the arrival of Protestant refugees from Locarno in 1555 and carried forward by families such as the Werdmüller, Muralt, Orelli and Pestalozzi.¹⁸ What the medieval silk episode left was a memory of export success, a set of commercial contacts, and the example of a small city finding a niche in luxury manufacturing for distant markets. The pattern would recur.

Notes

1. Schultheiss, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, HLS (as above): “Im Spätmittelalter blühte in Zürich das ab dem 13. Jh. belegte Seidengewerbe, das im Zentrum von ausgedehnten Handelsbeziehungen stand.” ↩
2. Jean-François Bergier, “Handel”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/014032/2011-04-07/. ↩
3. Liliane Mottu-Weber, “Soie”, in: DHS/HLS (French version), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/013965/: “Après un bref épisode de tissage de voile et de rubans de soie au XIIIe siècle …”. ↩
4. Claudia Mäder, “Die Zentralbibliothek zeigt, wie Zürich am seidenen Faden hing”, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, https://www.nzz.ch/feuilleton/eine-stadt-und-ihr-stoff-glaenzend-seide-zuerich-zentralbibliothek-ld.1394206, describing “seidene Schleier oder Kopftücher”, “grösstenteils exportiert”. ↩
5. Elisabeth Abgottspon, “Zürcher Seidenindustrie”, Lebendige Traditionen der Schweiz (Federal Office of Culture), June 2018, https://www.lebendige-traditionen.ch/dam/tradition/en/dokumente/tradition/zh/zuercher_seidenindustrie.pdf.download.pdf/zuercher_seidenindustrie.pdf: “Ab der zweiten Hälfte des 14. Jahrhunderts konnten aufgrund sozialer Veränderungen und Kriege die Luxusgüter wie seidene Tücher und Schleier jedoch nicht mehr exportiert werden.” ↩
6. Martin Illi, “Kaufleute”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/016380/2016-03-23/, section on the Middle Ages. ↩
7. Schultheiss, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, HLS (as above). ↩
8. Sebastian Brändli, “Wollishofer Seidengeschichte” (2024), Zurich Open Platform, University of Zurich, https://zop.zb.uzh.ch/bitstreams/9c64ff7a-b980-4353-8049-201b093ae4fc/download: silk came “zuerst in Byzanz und Persien, dann übers Mittelmeer nach Italien” and “gelangte … schliesslich in verschiedenen Formen über die Alpen”. The specific suppliers of medieval Zurich are not named there. ↩
9. Schultheiss, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, HLS (as above). ↩
10. Max Schiendorfer, “Manessische Handschrift”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011193/. ↩
11. “Manesse”, German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manesse. Cited for orientation. ↩
12. “Richtebrief”, German Wikipedia, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richtebrief. The original is kept in the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich. Cited for orientation. ↩
13. Marcel Mayer, “Leinwand”, in: HLS, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013958/2012-05-23/. ↩
14. Mayer, “Leinwand”, HLS (as above), referring to the “Schau der teils auf dem Land, teils in der Stadt gewobenen Rohleinwand”. ↩
15. “Geschichte der Stadt Zürich”, German Wikipedia (as above), section on commercial development in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Cited for orientation; the geographical range should be read as indicative. ↩
16. “Konstanz”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Konstanz: “Wichtigstes Handels- und Exportgut war rohe, gebleichte Leinwand, welche weithin bekannt war unter dem Namen Konstanzer Leinwand (tela di Costanza).” ↩
17. Bergier, “Handel”, HLS (as above): “einen beachtlichen, international aber einen zweitrangigen Platz”. ↩
18. Mottu-Weber, “Soie”, DHS/HLS (French version, 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.