Stewardship, frugality and discipline

The morals mandates and the marriage court

The Zurich ethics of wealth were not confined to rules on interest. They formed part of a comprehensive programme of moral discipline, embodied in the Sittenmandate. These mandates of the council regulated the behaviour of citizens and subjects since 1370, and all the more so after the Reformation. They covered clothing, jewellery, gifts and food, defined the permitted times and places for celebrations, and sought to regulate traditional customs. The last extension of this tradition, a holiday ordinance prohibiting cinema visits and dancing on major religious holidays, was abolished only in 2001.¹

The great morals mandate of 1530, Christenlich ansehung des gemeinen Kilchgangs, has been fully edited in the collection of Zurich church ordinances from 1520 to 1675 published by Emidio Campi and Philipp Wälchli in 2011. Later versions of the mandate can be traced throughout the period.² Among its provisions were the obligation of everyone without exception to attend church on Sundays and the prohibition of the Mass, altars and images. The mandate also laid down rules for inns, which were not to serve food or drink to local people before the Sunday sermon or admit them after nine in the evening. Games with cards, dice, boards, chess, skittles and wagers were prohibited altogether.³ The same excerpt records restrictions on the credit that innkeepers could extend, a small but characteristic detail: the regulation of consumption and the regulation of debt went together.

Enforcement lay in part with the marriage court (Ehegericht), created in 1525 in place of the episcopal court, which supervised compliance with the morals mandates and ecclesiastical ordinances and was composed of lay and clerical members.⁴ Bullinger repeatedly urged the council to implement and extend the mandates, notably in 1560 and 1566.⁵

Frugality as an economic virtue

The prohibition of gambling, the regulation of feasts and clothing and the limits on tavern credit expressed a view of wealth that historians have often described as frugal or even ascetic. Money was to be earned by labour and lawful trade, kept within the household, used for the support of the family and the relief of the poor, and not squandered on display, drink or play. Such rules had economic consequences. They restricted conspicuous consumption, encouraged saving, and reduced the demand for consumption credit, which was precisely the kind of credit most likely to become usurious. At the same time, they supported the formation of capital in the hands of households and public institutions, capital that could be lent at moderate rates to farmers, craftsmen and merchants.

The link between discipline and credit ran through the concept of the household. Bullinger’s work on Christian marriage, the Christlich Eestand of 1540, presented the household as the basic unit of Christian life and economic management.⁶ A well-ordered household lived within its means, kept honest accounts, paid its debts and dealt fairly with servants and neighbours. The good reputation of the household, its Ehre, was both a moral and an economic asset: it determined whether the household could obtain credit, whether its word would be believed and whether its members could marry into respectable families.

Poor relief and the use of wealth

The duties of wealth towards the poor were institutionalised in Zurich by the Almosenordnung of 1525, which is the subject of Chapter B.II. For the argument of this chapter, it suffices to note that Bullinger regarded the proper use of the confiscated church property for communal needs as a pastoral concern. The historian Esther Chung-Kim has shown that he expected the wealth of the dissolved foundations to be used for communal needs and believed that the magistrates needed the ministers’ guidance in poor-relief reforms. He pursued this concern consistently, she shows, from his theological writings of the 1530s through their application in the 1550s to the political support he obtained in the 1570s.⁷

The combination of a moderate doctrine of interest with an organised public poor relief is essential for understanding Zurich’s ethics of wealth. Because the poor who could not repay were in principle provided for by public alms, the credit market could be reserved for those who borrowed for productive purposes. The canonical prohibition had blurred charity and credit by treating every loan as potentially an act of charity. Their separation allowed each to be governed by its own rules: charity by the obligation to give, credit by the obligation to deal fairly and at a moderate rate. Bullinger’s distinction between productive and consumption loans and Zwingli’s poor-relief ordinance are two halves of the same design.

Reputation

In a small city where everyone knew everyone, reputation was the currency that made credit possible. The morals mandates, the marriage court and the pastoral supervision exercised through the parishes created a dense web of social control that was intrusive by modern standards, but that also produced information: about who worked, who drank, who gambled, who paid his debts. A lender in sixteenth-century Zurich could rely on this public knowledge to assess the creditworthiness of a borrower, who for his part had strong incentives to preserve his good name. The discipline of the Reformed community thus reduced the risks of lending and, in economic terms, lowered the cost of credit.

It would be anachronistic to see in the Zurich morals courts an early form of credit bureau. Yet the connection between moral conduct, public reputation and access to credit, which the Reformation reinforced, helps to explain why the city could sustain a relatively low interest rate with a relatively secure system of rents. The same connection, transposed to an international clientele, would later become one of the pillars of the Zurich financial centre: a reputation for reliability, discretion and solidity that allowed Zurich institutions to attract capital at favourable terms.

Notes

1. Thomas Ter-Nedden, “Sittenmandate”, zh-kirchenspots, Reformierte Kirche Kanton Zürich, https://www.zh-kirchenspots.ch/content/e1560/e1593/e1604/e4650. ↩
2. Wolfgang Dobras, review of Zürcher Kirchenordnungen 1520–1675, ed. Emidio Campi and Philipp Wälchli, Zurich: TVZ, 2011, in sehepunkte 12 (2012), no. 7/8, https://sehepunkte.de/2012/07/20353.html. ↩
3. “Das Zürcherische Sittenmandat 1530” (excerpt, after Hermann Meltzer, Kirchengeschichtliches Quellenlesebuch), glaubensstimme.de, https://www.glaubensstimme.de/doku.php?id=autoren%3Az%3Azwingli%3Azwingli-das_zuercherische_sittenmandat_1530_-_auszug. ↩
4. Stadt Zürich, “Beginn und Durchsetzung der Reformation in Zürich” (as cited above). ↩
5. Timmerman, review of Schriften zum Tage (as cited above). ↩
6. Heinrich Bullinger, Der christlich Eestand, Zurich 1540. On its wide reception and its English translation by Miles Coverdale (The Christen State of Matrimonye, 1541), see Christian History Institute, “Honorable and holy”, https://christianhistoryinstitute.org/magazine/article/honorable-and-holy-marriage, describing it as “one of the most popular books about marriage on both the Continent and in England”. ↩
7. Esther Chung-Kim, “Advocating for Poor Relief in Zurich: Heinrich Bullinger’s Contributions to Religious Ideals and Policy Reforms”, Church History 86 (2017), no. 2, pp. 311–338, abstract, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/church-history/article/abs/advocating-for-poor-relief-in-zurich-heinrich-bullingers-contributions-to-religious-ideals-and-policy-reforms/A1D754864AF1193989355D8CC304346A. ↩

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.