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The abbess’s regalia: coinage, market and toll

The grant of the regalia

Around 1045, in the reign of Henry III, the Fraumünster received the rights of coinage, toll and market.1 These were regalia, rights that in principle belonged to the king and could be exercised by others only by royal grant. The right of coinage permitted the holder to strike money and to profit from the difference between the metal value and the face value of the coins. Under the right of market, the holder could hold a market, guarantee its peace and levy dues on transactions, while the right of toll entitled the holder to charge duties on goods passing through or offered for sale. Together they formed the legal infrastructure of a medieval commercial centre. In the words of the Historisches Lexikon, coinage and the rights of market and toll illustrate the importance of economy and trade in Zurich.2

The abbess could exercise these regalia directly. She could grant the minting and the collection of tolls to citizens and determined the monetary standard.3 In practice, the operation of the mint was leased to private entrepreneurs, who worked the silver, struck the coins and took a share of the profit, while the abbess retained ownership of the right. This separation between the holder of a public right and the private operators who exploited it on terms is a pattern that recurs throughout the history of Zurich’s public finance.4 It is also a pattern familiar to the modern lawyer: the concession, the lease of a public monopoly, the outsourcing of a state function to regulated private actors.

The Zurich penny, struck under the authority of the abbess, became one of the principal currencies of the region. From the early fourteenth century the abbess had herself represented on the coins, in some types as a frontal bust wearing a veil or hood with the legend ZVRICH.5 According to the MoneyMuseum, Abbess Elisabeth von Spiegelberg had herself depicted on bracteates around 1300.6 A numismatic commentator has pointed out, with some irony, that the abbess began to appear on the coins at precisely the moment at which her real political power was declining, so that the portraits served a symbolic function.7 The history of the Zurich coinage in the late Middle Ages, including the transfer of the mint to the city and the development of the regional monetary unions, is the subject of Chapter A.IV. Here it suffices to note that the right to create money in Zurich was, for several centuries, held by a woman: a remarkable fact in the history of European finance which deserves a place in the self-understanding of a financial centre.

The abbess as lady of the town

The rights of the Fraumünster went beyond the regalia. By 1234 the abbess held the rank of a princess of the Empire (Reichsfürstin).8 She appointed the Schultheiss, the town’s principal judicial officer, influenced the selection of other officials and exercised the right of asylum.9 Originally a lay abbess drawn from the royal family, the head of the convent was from the twelfth century elected by the nuns themselves. In 1218 King Frederick II took the convent under his protection and promised never to alienate it from the Empire.10 The most influential of the medieval abbesses was Elisabeth von Wetzikon, who governed from 1270 to 1298 and under whom the convent reached the height of its standing.11

The formal lordship of the abbess over Zurich is therefore a matter of record. Its practical content, however, diminished steadily from the mid-thirteenth century as the civic council took over the day-to-day government of the town. The editor of the modern edition of the Richtebrief summarises the position: the abbess retained formal authority but lost practical power after the middle of the thirteenth century and was obliged to accommodate the wishes of the council.12 In the fifteenth century the citizenry exercised increasing influence over the management of the convent’s property and its administration.13 The final act lies outside the period of this chapter: in 1524 the last abbess, Katharina von Zimmern, surrendered the convent with all its rights and possessions to the city, which established the Fraumünsteramt to administer its revenues for church, school and poor relief.14

The trajectory of the Fraumünster’s rights, from royal endowment in 853 through the regalia of about 1045 and princely rank in 1234 to gradual absorption by the civic community and final surrender in 1524, is a paradigm of the way in which public rights migrated in medieval Zurich. Rights granted by the king to an ecclesiastical lord were exercised through lay agents drawn from the town, then progressively controlled by the town, and finally transferred to it. At no point was there a revolutionary break, because the transfer took place through negotiation, lease, purchase and the slow pressure of practice. This mode of institutional change, incremental, contractual and respectful of formal title, is one of the most characteristic features of Zurich’s political culture and has left its mark on the city’s approach to financial regulation to this day.

Notes

  1. HLS, “Fraumünster” (Judith Steinmann), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011612/2006-11-09/, dating the acquisition of “Münz-, Zoll- und Marktrecht” to around 1045; MoneyMuseum Zürich, “Zürcher Geldgeschichte”, https://www.moneymuseum.com/de/for-sunflower/zuercher-geldgeschichte-117, attributing the grant to Emperor Henry III in 1045. ↩
  2. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, section “Wirtschaft”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/: “Münzprägung, Markt- und Zollrecht illustrieren die Bedeutung von Wirtschaft und Handel.” ↩
  3. HLS, “Fraumünster” (Judith Steinmann), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011612/2006-11-09/. ↩
  4. 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: in 1238 the abbess had leased her minting right to private entrepreneurs (“an private Unternehmer verpachtet”), and in 1272 she consulted the Zurich council to obtain its consent to the choice of the lessees of her mint. The lessees were entitled to part of the seigniorage (Schlagschatz). Further details in Chapter A.IV. ↩
  5. MünzenWoche, “MenschenGesichter Teil 24: Eine Frau als Herrin von Zürich”, https://muenzenwoche.de/menschengesichter-teil-24-eine-frau-als-herrin-von-zuerich/. ↩
  6. MoneyMuseum Zürich, “Zürcher Geldgeschichte”, https://www.moneymuseum.com/de/for-sunflower/zuercher-geldgeschichte-117. ↩
  7. MünzenWoche, “MenschenGesichter Teil 24”, https://muenzenwoche.de/menschengesichter-teil-24-eine-frau-als-herrin-von-zuerich/. ↩
  8. HLS, “Fraumünster” (Judith Steinmann), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011612/2006-11-09/; “Fraumünster”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraum%C3%BCnster, which names Abbess Judenta von Hagenbuch as the holder of the title in 1234. ↩
  9. HLS, “Fraumünster” (Judith Steinmann), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011612/2006-11-09/. ↩
  10. HLS, “Fraumünster” (Judith Steinmann), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011612/2006-11-09/. ↩
  11. “Fraumünster”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraum%C3%BCnster, describing Elisabeth von Wetzikon (1270–1298) as a particularly influential figure. See also the HLS article “Wetzikon, Elisabeth von”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013096/2021-04-16/ (not consulted in full). ↩
  12. Daniel Bitterli (ed.), Zürcher Richtebrief, Sammlung Schweizerischer Rechtsquellen, Abteilung I: Die Rechtsquellen des Kantons Zürich, Neue Folge, introduction, online PDF at https://www.ssrq-sds-fds.ch/online/ZH_NF_I_1_1/ZH_NF_I_1_1.pdf. ↩
  13. HLS, “Fraumünster” (Judith Steinmann), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011612/2006-11-09/. ↩
  14. HLS, “Fraumünster” (Judith Steinmann), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011612/2006-11-09/, which dates the surrender to 2 December 1524; the German Wikipedia article gives 30 November 1524. See Part B. ↩

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.

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