The Almosenordnung of January 1525

The setting: December 1524

The ordinance was the administrative sequel to a sequence of decisions taken in the last weeks of 1524. After renouncing her rights on 30 November, the abbess of the Fraumünster, Katharina von Zimmern, executed on 8 December the deed transferring the abbey with all its assets and rights to the city. She received Zurich citizenship, the right to continue living in the abbey and a pension. In 1536 she gave up her right of residence against a payment of 520 pounds.¹ Within days the council closed the remaining religious houses of the city. The Dominican friary was dissolved on 3 December 1524, whereupon its buildings and income were assigned to the neighbouring Hospital of the Holy Spirit.² The Franciscan and Augustinian friaries were closed in the same year.³ With the exception of the Grossmünster chapter, which had been reformed in 1523 and survived as a corporation, all religious houses and chapters on Zurich territory were dissolved and their possessions and revenues secularised in the following years.⁴

The council thus found itself, within a few weeks, the owner or controller of the endowments of half a dozen urban houses, each with its own portfolio of lands, tithes, rents and claims. It also faced a theological argument, pressed by the preachers, about what these assets were for. In a tract published in December 1524 under the title Wer Ursache gebe zu Aufruhr (“Who gives cause for uproar”), Zwingli argued that tithes were in truth a levy for the poor and attacked those who used evangelical freedom as a pretext for enriching themselves.⁵ Behind this lay a proposition that runs through the early Reformed writings. Church property had been given by the faithful for the service of God. Once the mass and the religious life had been abolished, the only service of God that remained to be financed was the preaching of the Word, the education of preachers and the care of the poor. The ordinance of January 1525 translated that proposition into rules.

Authorship

Who wrote the ordinance is less clear than the tradition that calls it “Zwingli’s Almosenordnung” suggests. The Zurich Reformed Church’s own Zwingli lexicon, drawing on a study by Michael Funk, states firmly that Zwingli never prescribed concrete practices of poor relief and that the ordinance was not written by him, although it was inspired by his thought.⁶ The German-language encyclopaedic tradition nevertheless continues to speak of “Zwingli’s alms ordinance of 1525”, the name under which the Bernese institutions copied it in 1528.⁷ The most balanced view, and the one taken here, is that the text was a council ordinance drafted in the chancery with the participation of the preachers. Lee Palmer Wandel, whose dissertation and subsequent book remain the fundamental study of the subject in English, treats the “Zurich Poor Law” of 1525 as a distinct source from Zwingli’s sermons and writings and reads the two against each other. In her reading, the council sought to monitor and control the poor through the law, while Zwingli preached charity as the core of Christian ethics.⁸ The ordinance was in any case received into the corpus of Zurich church ordinances. The modern critical edition of these texts for the years 1520 to 1675, edited by Emidio Campi and Philipp Wälchli, deliberately includes regulations on schools, poor relief and welfare in its definition of church order.⁹

This question of authorship has more than antiquarian interest. If the ordinance is read as the work of a theologian, its provisions appear as applications of doctrine. If it is read as the work of a council that had been legislating on begging since at least 1520, the same provisions appear as the continuation of municipal policy by other means, now fortified by the religious argument and by the secularised endowments. The second reading fits the text better. Its tone is that of the council’s other mandates, with the orderly use of a fund as its main concern.

The content of the ordinance

The first and most visible rule was the prohibition of begging. According to the text quoted by Huonker from Egli’s edition, all begging in the city of Zurich was to cease, so that neither house-poor people, whether foreign or native, should beg in the streets or before the churches, on pain of having his or her alms withheld for eight days.¹⁰ The sanction is revealing. It presupposes that the offender is already a recipient of public alms, known by name to the officials, so that the punishment consists in the temporary suspension of a benefit. Begging ceased to be an occupation and became a breach of the conditions of a public entitlement.

Secondly, the ordinance organised a daily distribution. The house-poor of the three parishes and the seven watches (wachten, the city’s wards) were to receive porridge (mus) and bread in the morning, when the bell of the Predigerkirche had been rung.¹¹ The place of distribution was the former Dominican friary, whose kitchen gave its name to the whole institution: the Mushafen, literally the porridge pot. The Early New High German dictionary defines the word first as the large pot in which porridge was cooked for the poor, and then, by extension, as the institution that fed them and the right to be fed by it. The porridge itself was a thick mash of barley, oat flour and pulses.¹² The Mushafen fed poor residents, needy students and schoolchildren, occasionally with meat as well as porridge and bread.¹³ By 1544 the demand was such that two large pots of porridge were distributed each day.¹⁴

Thirdly, the ordinance created a responsible administration. An almoner (Almosenpfleger) was placed at the head of the fund, with two further clergymen and the beggar-bailiff (Bettelvogt) under him and a committee of four councillors above him. The first holder of the office named in the sources is a cleric, Heinrich Brennwald.¹⁵ He is generally identified with the chronicler Heinrich Brennwald, formerly provost of the collegiate church of Embrach, a man of administrative experience and of the Zurich patriciate.¹⁶ The combination is characteristic. The churchmen brought knowledge of the persons concerned, drawn from pastoral work in the parishes. The councillors contributed the authority of the state and the habit of reviewing accounts, while the beggar-bailiff enforced the prohibition in the streets. Those who administered the fund swore an oath to distribute alms faithfully and without favour to anyone.

Fourthly, the ordinance defined its beneficiaries by residence. The house-poor of the city, those who lived in their own lodgings but could not support themselves, were its principal object. Foreign beggars and pilgrims were to receive brief hospitality and then move on. A supplementary ordinance of 15 June 1533 tightened the rules against foreigners without an official permission of residence, limited any support to them to eight days and threatened fines against citizens who harboured them. A small, fixed number of poor pupils from the city’s territory was admitted to support at each school. Those entitled to alms were to be recognisable by a sign.¹⁷

Taken together, these provisions amount to a coherent scheme. The ordinance identified a population of beneficiaries by residence and need, removed that population from the street and brought it to a single point of distribution. It placed the distribution under officials bound by oath and supervised by councillors and excluded or limited everyone else. The criteria of the “deserving poor” were implicit in the combination of residence, need and submission to the rules, to be applied case by case by persons who knew the neighbourhoods. This implicit standard would harden in the course of the century into the explicit distinction, familiar throughout the Confederation, between the “true” or “good” poor, who became needy through no fault of their own, and the “bad” poor, who were idle or fraudulent and were to be disciplined.¹⁸

Reading the ordinance as a financial instrument

It is instructive to read the ordinance with the eyes of a modern trust lawyer. Its elements correspond, with surprising precision, to the elements of a purpose trust or a charitable foundation. There is a fund, the Armengut, constituted by the transfer of existing assets. There is a purpose, the maintenance of the resident poor and of poor scholars. There is a class of beneficiaries defined by objective criteria, with a mechanism for admitting and excluding individuals. There is a governing body, the almoner and his colleagues, bound by an oath of loyalty to the purpose and forbidden to favour particular persons. There is a supervisor, the committee of councillors, which stands above the administrators and can call them to account. And there is a sanction regime, applied to beneficiaries who break the conditions of their entitlement.

What distinguishes the Zurich fund from a modern foundation is its public character. The fund had no separate legal personality in the modern sense. It was an office (Amt) of the city, supervised by the same council that had created it and that could amend its rules at will. This openness to political intervention would soon prove to be the weakness of the arrangement, as the next section shows. It was also, however, its strength. Because the fund was public, its administration was part of the ordinary machinery of government, subject to the same routines of appointment, oath-taking and account-rendering as the other offices of the city. Its continuity therefore did not depend on the fortunes of a founding family or a religious community. Zurich had created an administered capital, held in the public interest and managed by a bureaucracy—a model which, for better and for worse, would shape the relationship between wealth and the state in the canton for three centuries.

Notes

1. Wikipedia (English), “Katharina von Zimmern”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katharina_von_Zimmern, citing Christine Christ-von Wedel (2019) and the council records and transfer deed. ↩
2. Wikipedia (English), “Predigerkloster”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predigerkloster; the date of 3 December 1524 is also given in Wikipedia (German), “Predigerkloster Zürich”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predigerkloster_Z%C3%BCrich. ↩
3. Wikipedia (English), “Barfüsserkloster”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barf%C3%BCsserkloster, and “Augustinerkloster Zürich”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Augustinerkloster_Z%C3%BCrich. ↩
4. 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. ↩
5. Institut für Schweizerische Reformationsgeschichte, University of Zurich, Huldrych Zwingli Werke, Werk 42, “Wer Ursache gebe zu Aufruhr usw.” (7 and 28 December 1524), https://www.irg.uzh.ch/static/zwingli-werke/index.php?n=Werk.42. ↩
6. Reformierte Kirche Kanton Zürich, Zwingli-Lexikon, “Armut” (Michael Funk, 2002), https://www.zhref.ch/themen/reformationsjubilaeum/allgemeine-informationen/huldrych-zwingli/zwingli-lexikon-von-a-bis-z-1/lexikon-a/armut. ↩
7. Wikipedia (German), “Mushafen (Bern)”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushafen_(Bern). ↩
8. Lee Palmer Wandel, “Images of the Poor in Reformation Zurich” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 1985), abstract, https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/handle/2027.42/160743?show=full; the study was published as Always Among Us: Images of the Poor in Zwingli’s Zurich (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990). ↩
9. Review of Emidio Campi and Philipp Wälchli (eds.), Zürcher Kirchenordnungen 1520–1675, 2 vols. (Zurich: TVZ, 2011), in sehepunkte 12 (2012), no. 7/8, https://www.sehepunkte.de/2012/07/druckfassung/20353.html. ↩
10. Huonker, “Bemerkungen zur Reformation in Zürich”, p. 16, https://www.thata.ch/bemerkungenzurreformationinzuerich.pdf, quoting the ordinance after Egli, Actensammlung, pp. 270–274. ↩
11. Huonker, “Bemerkungen zur Reformation in Zürich”, pp. 16–17, https://www.thata.ch/bemerkungenzurreformationinzuerich.pdf, quoting the phrases “den husarmen lüten, in die drü kirchspel und siben wachten in unsrer stadt gehörend” and “muos und brod am morgen, so man die predigergloggen verlütet hat”. ↩
12. Frühneuhochdeutsches Wörterbuch, s.v. “mushafen”, https://www.fwb-online.de/lemma/mushafen.s.0m, citing Schweizerisches Idiotikon vol. 2, col. 1014. ↩
13. Wikipedia (German), “Mushafen”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushafen. ↩
14. Huonker, “Bemerkungen zur Reformation in Zürich”, p. 17, https://www.thata.ch/bemerkungenzurreformationinzuerich.pdf. ↩
15. Huonker, “Bemerkungen zur Reformation in Zürich”, pp. 16–17 (also for the officials’ oath), https://www.thata.ch/bemerkungenzurreformationinzuerich.pdf: “1525 wurde das Almosenamt eingerichtet. Ihm unterstanden die Verwaltung des Armenguts und der Betrieb der ‘Mushafen’ genannten Beköstigungs- und Beherbergungsstätte für Arme im aufgehobenen Predigerkloster.” ↩
16. Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), “Brennwald, Heinrich”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/018691/: Heinrich Brennwald (1478–1551), presented by the Zurich council to the provostship of Embrach in 1518, administered it until the secularisation of the house in 1524 and was Almosenobmann in Zurich from 1525 to 1528. ↩
17. Huonker, “Bemerkungen zur Reformation in Zürich”, pp. 16–17, https://www.thata.ch/bemerkungenzurreformationinzuerich.pdf, summarising the provisions on foreigners, the supplement of 15 June 1533, poor scholars and the beggar’s sign (“bettler zeichen”). Huonker’s text and the passages quoted from it differ on whether four or eight pupils per school were envisaged; the precise figure is left open here. ↩
18. HLS, “Fürsorge”, section on the Ancien Régime, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/025809/. ↩

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.