The abbess’s penny: the Zurich mint from the eleventh century to 1425

A royal right in the hands of an abbey

The history of Zurich money begins with the Fraumünster. King Louis the German founded the abbey on 21 July 853 as a royal house for his daughter Hildegard, endowing it with the royal court at Zurich, lands in Uri and the Albis forest, and placing it under royal immunity.¹ Over the following two centuries the abbey became the dominant lordship in the town. Around 1045, according to the prevailing view, it received from the Salian king Henry III the regalian rights of coinage, toll and market. By 1234 the abbess was counted among the princes of the Empire and appointed important town officials, including those responsible for the coinage.² The written evidence for the abbess’s minting right is later than the grant itself. A popular history of Zurich money published for the MoneyMuseum notes that the right is usually attributed to Henry III around 1045, but that it is first documented in writing in a charter of 1238.³

The coinage of the abbey consisted essentially of one denomination: the silver penny, the denarius or Pfennig. In the eleventh century it was struck as a thin two-sided coin, the so-called Dünnpfennig. From the twelfth century onwards the Zurich mint, like the other mints of the Upper Rhine and Lake Constance region, produced bracteates, pennies struck on one side only from a sheet of silver so thin that the image showed through as a negative on the reverse.⁴ The characteristic Zurich bracteate of the later period was a four-cornered piece showing the bust of the abbess with her veil, an image which proclaimed, on every coin that changed hands in the market, whose authority stood behind it.⁵ Coins of this kind were fragile, easily clipped and difficult to count in large sums. Larger payments were therefore expressed in units of account: the pound (Pfund) of 240 pennies, divided into 20 shillings (Schilling) of 12 pennies, and the mark of silver, a unit of weight. The Zurich mark weighed about 237 grams, slightly more than the Cologne mark used in much of the Empire.⁶

For the lord of a mint, coinage was a source of revenue. The difference between the value of the silver delivered to the mint and the face value of the coins struck from it, after deduction of the costs of minting, accrued to the minting authority as seigniorage (Schlagschatz). A mint lord who wished to increase this income could reduce the silver content of the coins until striking became profitable again. The practice of periodically recalling old coins and exchanging them for new ones at a discount served the same purpose.⁷ Since the coinage was thus from the beginning a fiscal instrument, the users of coins had every interest in controlling it. That interest was strongest among the merchants and craftsmen of the town, who received and paid the pennies every day and bore the losses of every debasement.

From lease to ownership: the city takes over the mint

The transfer of the mint from the abbey to the city was a gradual process of negotiation that extended over a century and a half. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland describes it as a gradual loss of regalian rights by the Fraumünster to an economically strengthened citizenry by way of time-limited grants of the minting right.⁸ As early as 1272 the council of the city was consulted on matters concerning the mint.⁹ In 1335, one year before the Brun revolution, the council issued a coinage ordinance that prohibited, under threat of high penalties, payment in the old Zurich currency. It also designated three official places of exchange, required anyone exchanging more than 120 pennies to go to the mint itself, and confirmed the mint’s exclusive right to trade in raw silver.¹⁰ The same ordinance listed foreign coins which could be accepted in Zurich, among them the pennies of Constance and Strasbourg, Venetian soldini, French gros tournois, Tyrolean Kreuzer and hellers, while excluding the coins of Bern, Burgdorf and Solothurn.¹¹ Whoever drafted this ordinance, it was the council that enacted it. The text shows a civic authority exercising control over the circulation of money in the town while the minting right still formally belonged to the abbess.

The next decisive step came in 1364, when the abbess concluded the lease of the mint directly with the burgomaster, the council and the guild masters.¹² From that point the city had practical control over the coinage, even though the abbey remained the formal holder of the right and continued to receive a share of the proceeds. The guild masters named in the lease were the representatives of the craft guilds created by the Brun constitution (see Chapter A.II). From the second half of the fourteenth century, the monetary policy of Zurich was therefore a matter for the same guild regime that governed trade, taxes and war.

By 1418 at the latest Zurich struck coins in its own name, a right that King Sigismund confirmed in 1425.¹³ Sigismund, who needed the support of the Swiss towns in his conflict with Duke Frederick IV of Austria and who had in 1415 invited the Confederates to occupy the Habsburg Aargau, was generous with privileges for cities that could pay for them or serve him. The confirmation of 1425 regularised a situation that already existed in fact. It also placed the Zurich coinage on the same legal footing as the other imperial rights that the city had accumulated since it had become an imperial city in 1218. The year 1425 has a certain symbolic neatness for the purposes of this chapter: in the same year Pope Martin V declared that annuities secured on real property and redeemable by the seller were compatible with canon law, a decision that gave the principal credit instrument of the age its theological licence (see section III below).¹⁴

The formal end of the abbey’s rights came only with the Reformation. On 2 December 1524 the last abbess, Katharina von Zimmern, handed over the Fraumünster “with all rights and possessions” to the city, which administered the former abbey revenues through the Fraumünsteramt.¹⁵ By that date the coinage had been in civic hands for well over a century. The Zurich mint did not cease with the abbey. It remained a civic institution until the federal monetary reform of 1850 transferred the coinage to the new federal state. In the sixteenth century, after the secularisation of church treasures, it produced what the MoneyMuseum history calls the most significant coin issue in the city’s history.¹⁶

The lesson of this development for the later history of Zurich is not difficult to state. The coinage passed from an ecclesiastical lordship to a civic corporation by negotiation, lease and royal confirmation, each step documented and each step paid for. Zurich acquired its monetary sovereignty in the same way it acquired most of its territory, by contract and money. The modern Swiss franc, issued by a central bank that is a company limited by shares under a special federal act, with the cantons and cantonal banks among its shareholders, rests on a similar compromise between public authority and the interests of those who use money.¹⁷

Notes

1. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), “Fraumünster”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011612/. The HLS describes the foundation as the creation of a royal monastery which also served as an administrative centre for royal property around Zurich. ↩
2. HLS, “Fraumünster” (as above), which dates the grant of “Münz-, Zoll- und Marktrecht” to around 1045 and the princely status of the abbess to 1234. ↩
3. Ursula Kampmann, Die Zürcher und ihr Geld. Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung (Zurich: MoneyMuseum/Sunflower Foundation, 2006), https://www.moneymuseum.com/pdf/archiv/Die%20Zuercher%20und%20ihr%20Geld.pdf; the same account is summarised in the series “Die Zürcher und ihr Geld”, MünzenWoche, https://neu.muenzenwoche.de/nationen/einleitung-die-zuercher-und-ihr-geld-teil-1/. ↩
4. Kampmann, Die Zürcher und ihr Geld (as above), which describes both the eleventh-century Dünnpfennig and the bracteate of the later Middle Ages. ↩
5. Kampmann, Die Zürcher und ihr Geld (as above), refers to the “vierzipflige Brakteat” with the bust of the abbess; the MünzenWoche summary likewise describes the abbess’s veiled bust on the pennies. ↩
6. Marco Anzidei, “Zürich, die Juden und das Geld”, zurichstories.org (Schauplatz Brunngasse project), https://www.zurichstories.org/Brunngasse8/Marco_Anzidei/index.html, which gives 1 pound = 20 shillings = 240 pennies and weights of 233.8 g for the Cologne mark and 237.1 g for the Zurich mark. ↩
7. Kampmann, Die Zürcher und ihr Geld (as above): “Dem Prägeherrn fiel der so genannte Schlagschatz zu”; the booklet also describes the reduction of silver content “bis das Prägen lohnend wurde”. ↩
8. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/, which refers to “befristete Münzrechtsverleihungen” by which the abbey lost control over the coinage to the citizenry. ↩
9. “Die Zürcher und ihr Geld”, MünzenWoche (as above), which states that by 1272 the city council was consulted on the operation of the mint. ↩
10. Kampmann, Die Zürcher und ihr Geld (as above), which summarises the ordinance of 1335; its first paragraph “verbot bei Androhung von hohen Strafen, in alter Zürcher Währung zu zahlen”. ↩
11. Kampmann, Die Zürcher und ihr Geld (as above). ↩
12. Kampmann, Die Zürcher und ihr Geld (as above): “Im Jahr 1364 schloss die Äbtissin ihren Pachtvertrag direkt mit dem Bürgermeister, dem Rat und den Zunftmeistern.” ↩
13. Kampmann, Die Zürcher und ihr Geld (as above): “spätestens seit 1418 prägte Zürich in seinem eigenen Namen”; the confirmation by Sigismund in 1425 is also reported in the MünzenWoche summary (as above). ↩
14. HLS, “Wucher”, medieval section by Hans-Jörg Gilomen, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/017472/2014-11-18/, which records that Pope Martin V in 1425 held redeemable annuities secured on property to be permissible. ↩
15. HLS, “Fraumünster” (as above). ↩
16. “Die Zürcher und ihr Geld”, MünzenWoche (as above), which mentions the use of seized church assets after 1523 and the striking of more than nine million coins in 1555–1561; this later history belongs to Part B. ↩
17. Federal Act on the Swiss National Bank (National Bank Act, NBA) of 3 October 2003, SR 951.11, Art. 1 (“a joint-stock company incorporated by special act”), droit-bilingue.ch, https://www.droit-bilingue.ch/en-de/9/95/951.11-1-4.html; “Swiss National Bank”, Wikipedia (English), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swiss_National_Bank, reporting that 78.17% of the voting shares were held by public shareholders (cantons, cantonal banks and others) at 31 December 2021. ↩

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.