The Almosenamt and the management of endowment assets

From religious houses to public offices

The ordinance of January 1525 created the purpose and the distribution machinery. The assets had to be organised separately, and here the Zurich solution was pragmatic. The council kept the secularised properties apart and placed each suppressed house under the administration of a civic official, an Amtmann or Schaffner, who continued to collect its revenues, manage its estates and keep its accounts. As early as 1525 the council also set up an office of poor relief and assigned monastic revenues to it. In 1533 it created the office of the Obmann gemeiner Klöster, the director of the former religious houses, to supervise the whole.¹ The Staatsarchiv’s constitutional history describes the structure concisely: monastic offices (Klosterämter) were set up to manage the properties, which had to deliver their surpluses to the newly created central Obmannamt.²

The resulting map of offices is a small atlas of Zurich’s post-Reformation public finance. The estates of the Premonstratensian abbey of Rüti in the Zurich Oberland became the Amt Rüti, which administered the former monastic property from 1525 until about 1803. A member of the Zurich council served as its Amtmann. The office collected tithes and ground rents from fourteen incorporated churches and from properties scattered across the canton, from Dürnten and Fischenthal to Erlenbach and Fehraltorf, with some of these revenues continuing to flow to it until 1832. Its income served both poor relief and general administration.³ The Dominican nunnery of Töss near Winterthur, disestablished in 1525, saw its estates nationalised and devoted to the support of the needy of the canton and, after 1606, to a local school.⁴ Within the city, the former Franciscan friary became the seat of the Hinteramt, which served the poor until 1833, while the former Augustinian friary housed the Almosenamt and, from 1596, the city mint in its choir.⁵ The Dominican friary and its revenues went to the hospital, which thereby acquired the site on which the Mushafen stood and would later spread across the whole former convent.⁶ The abbey of the Fraumünster became the Fraumünsteramt, an office which initially simply continued the abbey’s management of its lands under a civic administrator.⁷

The juxtaposition of the mint and the alms office in the same former friary is a coincidence of urban property management, but it is a telling one. In Zurich after the Reformation, the buildings of the old Church became the physical infrastructure of the state’s economic functions: granaries in the Franciscan friary, the mint and the poor office among the Augustinians, the hospital and the porridge kitchen among the Dominicans.⁸ A modern visitor to the Obergericht on the Hirschengraben, to the Zentralbibliothek beside the Predigerkirche or to the Münzplatz walks across the footprint of this conversion.

The revenue base: tithes, ground rents and Gülten

The Klosterämter were, in economic terms, rentier offices. Their income consisted overwhelmingly of the three classic forms of agrarian revenue that Part A has described. The tithe (Zehnt) was a proportion of the harvest owed to the holder of the tithe right, usually a church or religious house, and collected in kind or commuted into money. The ground rent (Grundzins) was the fixed annual charge owed by the holder of a farm to the owner of the land. The Gült was a rent charge created by a purchase of rent. The buyer paid a capital sum to the owner of land and acquired a perpetual or redeemable annual income secured on it, a construction which allowed the Church to lend at interest without formally breaching the prohibition of usury (see Part A and Chapter B.III).

This composition shaped the character of the new public funds. A portfolio of tithes and rent charges yields a steady, largely inflation-sensitive income, because tithes in kind rise with prices while fixed money rents lose value. It requires a large administrative apparatus—collectors, granaries, cellars, account books, lists of debtors—and it binds the fund to the fortunes of agriculture. The Klosterämter therefore resembled the estate offices of great landowners, which is exactly what they had been before 1525. Their managers were men who understood harvest yields, grain prices and the solvency of peasant debtors. The characteristic risks of such offices were bad harvests, arrears and the slow erosion of fixed money rents by inflation. The poor relief of Reformed Zurich was financed, in the end, by the peasants of the Zurich countryside, who paid to the Amtmann of Rüti or Kappel what they had formerly paid to the abbot.

This observation explains a structural feature of Zurich poor relief that would persist into the nineteenth century: the tension between city and countryside. Although the Almosenamt was a city office whose Mushafen served the city’s residents, the revenues that sustained it came largely from rural tithes and rents. The rural parishes developed their own arrangements. There the Stillstand, a small committee of two to four men who stayed behind after the sermon to deal with community matters, came in time to administer local poor funds, while the city office supplied rural communities with bread, money and winter clothing from the late sixteenth century until 1839. In 1692, to take one documented example, the parish of Höngg received forty-three loaves a week from the Almosenamt, together with cash and shoes for its poorest residents.⁹

Accounting and supervision

The supervisory structure that the Zurich council built around these funds had three layers. At the bottom stood the officials of each office—the almoner and his clerical colleagues for the poor fund, the Amtmann for each former monastery, the Spitalmeister for the hospital—who collected, spent and kept books. Above them stood committees of councillors who audited the accounts and approved expenditure, as the four councillors placed over the almoner did from 1525. At the top, from 1533, stood the Obmann, who received the surpluses of the Klosterämter and gave the council a consolidated view of the former ecclesiastical property.¹⁰

This structure should be seen alongside the council’s broader programme of administrative rationalisation in the 1520s. In the same year as the alms ordinance, 1525, the council created the marriage court (Ehegericht), composed of two city pastors and two members each of the Great and Small Councils. The court took over matrimonial jurisdiction from the bishop of Constance and, through its village agents, became an instrument of moral supervision throughout the territory. The council’s mandates, which regulated money, weights, measures and markets, became an essential instrument of political direction and were supplemented after the Reformation by morals mandates grounded in religion.¹¹ The Almosenamt was part of the same movement. It brought a field previously governed by the Church and by private piety under the ordinary legislative and administrative authority of the council by means of a standing office with accounts.

The account books of these offices record, year by year, the receipts from each tithe district and each debtor, the quantities of grain and wine stored, the payments to pastors, schoolmasters and the poor, as well as the surpluses remitted to the centre. For the historian of finance, they document the emergence of a public accounting culture in which the use of earmarked funds had to be justified line by line to a supervisory body. For the practitioner, they are a reminder that the fiduciary discipline expected today of a foundation board—segregation of the fund, accounting to a supervisor, application of income to the purpose—was practised in Zurich by civil servants almost five hundred years ago.

The temptation of the treasury: diversion and protest

Zurich did not escape the obvious weakness of a fund supervised by the same authority that controls the state treasury. The secularised revenues were in theory reserved for ecclesiastical purposes and for the poor. In practice, the municipal archive notes, they were also used to repay state debt and to acquire territorial rights, a diversion against which Zwingli’s successor Heinrich Bullinger later protested repeatedly and without success.¹² The constitutional history of the Staatsarchiv likewise observes that surpluses from the former church property also served fortifications and the state treasury and were thus not used exclusively for their original charitable purposes.¹³

The pressure appeared almost at once. In February 1526, to avert a threatening financial collapse, the council decided to sell or melt down the precious metal of the churches and to have it struck into coin. In a tract of 1527 against those who accused the reformers of robbing the chalices, the young Bullinger asserted in good faith the opposite of what was happening. Thousands of gulden from church property were, according to the same account, applied to the purchase of lands and lordships.¹⁴ The Fraumünster case shows how the charitable character of the property could also be constructed after the fact. Although Bullinger, writing some fifty years after the event, claimed that Katharina von Zimmern had stipulated that the abbey’s wealth should serve the poor, the deed of transfer contains no such condition. The abbey’s wealth in fact became an important source of money for the state, financing social assistance and schools but also military obligations and the purchase of rights of government.¹⁵

Bullinger’s persistence on the point deserves to be recognised. Esther Chung-Kim has shown that he regarded poor relief as a pastoral responsibility despite the separation of religious and political spheres, that he consistently advocated the use of confiscated church property for community needs and that his engagement ran from theological articulation in the 1530s through practical application in the 1550s to political support in the 1570s.¹⁶ His argument had a precise structure that a modern foundation lawyer would recognise. The property had been given for a purpose, which survived the abolition of the mass in transformed shape as preaching, teaching and care of the poor. The magistrate who had taken the property had therefore taken it subject to that purpose. The council, as trustee, was not free to treat the funds as general revenue. The claim was moral and political, since there was no court before which Bullinger could enforce it. It nevertheless formulated, in the language of the sixteenth century, the principle that the modern law of foundations enforces through supervision: assets dedicated to a purpose must be used for that purpose. The HLS notes that Reformed apologists defended secularisation as the restoration of ecclesiastical property to its original Christian purpose, a line of argument that served both to answer Catholic accusations of theft and to bind the magistrate.¹⁷

Notes

1. HLS, “Secolarizzazione” (Italian version of “Säkularisation”), section on the Reformation, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/013102/2012-06-20/; the same sequence is given in Wikipedia (English), “Secularization of Church property in Switzerland”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secularization_of_Church_property_in_Switzerland. ↩
2. Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich (ed.), Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000 (Zurich, 2000; authors Agnes Hohl, Otto Sigg, Meinrad Suter, Thomas Weibel, Reto Weiss, Josef Zweifel), p. 30, https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/politik-staat/recherche-im-staatsarchiv/z%C3%BCrcher-geschichte/zh_verfassungsgeschichte.pdf. ↩
3. Wikipedia (German), “Amt Rüti”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amt_R%C3%BCti. ↩
4. Wikipedia (English), “Töss Monastery”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T%C3%B6ss_Monastery. ↩
5. Wikipedia (German), “Kirchen und Klöster in der Stadt Zürich im Mittelalter”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kirchen_und_Kl%C3%B6ster_in_der_Stadt_Z%C3%BCrich_im_Mittelalter; on the Augustinian friary also Wikipedia (English), “Augustinerkloster Zürich”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinerkloster_Z%C3%BCrich, which notes that the administration of the Rüti office may also have been conducted there from 1537. ↩
6. Wikipedia (English), “Predigerkloster”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predigerkloster. ↩
7. Felix Reich, “Katharina von Zimmern übergibt das Fraumünsterkloster”, forum/reformiert, 4 July 2024, reproduced by the Katholische Kirche im Kanton Zürich, https://www.zhkath.ch/kirche-aktuell/kirche-im-kanton/katharina-von-zimmern-uebergibt-das-fraumuensterkloster. ↩
8. On the Franciscan friary’s later use as a granary and eventually as the seat of the cantonal court (Obergericht), Wikipedia (English), “Barfüsserkloster”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barf%C3%BCsserkloster. ↩
9. “«… und schon zweimal unehelich geboren …»”, Höngger, local history article on poverty in Höngg, https://hoengger.ch/geschichte-armut-in-hoengg/. ↩
10. Stadt Zürich, Stadtarchiv, Wissensportal, “Beginn und Durchsetzung der Reformation in Zürich”, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/zuerichs-geschichte/stadtarchiv/wissensportal/reformation-in-zuerich.html, which dates the creation of the Obmannamt to 1533 and describes its function as the separate administration of the former monastic assets. ↩
11. Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000, pp. 29–30, https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/politik-staat/recherche-im-staatsarchiv/z%C3%BCrcher-geschichte/zh_verfassungsgeschichte.pdf. ↩
12. Stadt Zürich, Stadtarchiv, Wissensportal, “Beginn und Durchsetzung der Reformation in Zürich”, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/zuerichs-geschichte/stadtarchiv/wissensportal/reformation-in-zuerich.html. ↩
13. Kleine Zürcher Verfassungsgeschichte 1218–2000, pp. 29–31, https://www.zh.ch/content/dam/zhweb/bilder-dokumente/themen/politik-staat/recherche-im-staatsarchiv/z%C3%BCrcher-geschichte/zh_verfassungsgeschichte.pdf. ↩
14. Huonker, “Bemerkungen zur Reformation in Zürich”, p. 17, https://www.thata.ch/bemerkungenzurreformationinzuerich.pdf, relying on Andreas Mühling’s introduction to Heinrich Bullinger, Schriften, vol. VI (2006), pp. 17–20. ↩
15. Felix Reich, “Katharina von Zimmern übergibt das Fraumünsterkloster”, 4 July 2024, https://www.zhkath.ch/kirche-aktuell/kirche-im-kanton/katharina-von-zimmern-uebergibt-das-fraumuensterkloster. ↩
16. Esther Chung-Kim, “Advocating for Poor Relief in Zurich: Heinrich Bullinger’s Contributions to Religious Ideals and Policy Reforms”, Church History 86, no. 2 (2017), 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. ↩
17. HLS, “Secolarizzazione”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/it/articles/013102/2012-06-20/. ↩

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.