The city as borrower and taxpayer: public finance

From account books to a civic budget

Public finance in the modern sense requires written accounts. The Historical Dictionary of Switzerland dates the emergence of public budgets in the sources to the spread of written administration: the first account books appear in the fourteenth century and became standard practice in towns, monasteries and bishoprics in the fifteenth.¹ Zurich followed this pattern. Its treasury, headed by the Säckelmeister, kept accounts of receipts and expenditure, which the council audited. Separate officials administered specific revenues such as the toll, the mint, the salt trade and the indirect tax on wine and other goods (Ungeld). Cities acquired their revenues, in the words of the Historical Dictionary, through the purchase of legal titles, succession, war, imperial pledges, usurpation and confiscation. Their sovereign rights included weights and measures, coinage, tolls, jurisdiction and the power to tax.² Every one of these channels is visible in Zurich between 1336 and 1519.

The size of the community whose finances are at issue should be kept in mind. The Historical Dictionary gives a population of about 4,750 for the city of Zurich in 1467 and about 5,100 in 1529.³ Zurich was a medium-sized town by European standards, smaller than Basel and much smaller than the great cities of Upper Germany or northern Italy. Its financial capacity derived above all from the concentration in its hands of rights, revenues and territories, and from the ability of its council to mobilise credit on the security of those revenues.

The tax books

The most important sources for the social history of money in late medieval Zurich are the tax books, the Steuerbücher, which record the direct tax assessed on the property of the inhabitants of the city and, later, of its territory. They survive from 1357 and were edited in the early twentieth century by Hans Nabholz and Friedrich Hegi under the title Die Steuerbücher von Stadt und Landschaft Zürich des XIV. und XV. Jahrhunderts, published in Zurich from 1918 with the support of the Antiquarian Society and the state archives.⁴ The tax was a property tax (Vermögenssteuer), levied at a rate fixed by the council for each year of collection on the declared wealth of each household, which the taxpayer swore to under oath. Persons without sufficient assessable property could be charged a poll tax in its place.⁵

The tax books allow historians to reconstruct the distribution of wealth in the town with unusual precision. They show a society in which a large majority of households had little or no taxable wealth and a small group of rich families, merchants, rentiers and guild leaders, owned a large share of the assessed property. Anzidei, using the Zurich records, notes that around 1401 about ninety per cent of Christian taxpayers paid less than one pound a year, while a wealthy burgher such as Rudolf Kilchmatter paid 53 pounds.⁶ The concentration of wealth was typical of late medieval towns, but it had a specific consequence for credit: the rich minority were the natural buyers of annuities, whether sold by peasants, by nobles or by the city itself. The same families that dominated the council were therefore also the creditors of the city and of its territory, so that the line between public and private finance ran through their account books.

Direct taxes were not levied every year. The council resorted to them in times of need, in war or when extraordinary expenditure had to be covered. The years in which tax books survive correspond in large measure to such occasions. The ordinary revenue of the city came from indirect taxes, the Ungeld on wine and other consumption, from tolls and from the income of the city’s properties and rights. In this respect Zurich resembled the other towns of the Confederation, whose finances rested on a combination of regular indirect revenue and irregular direct taxation.⁷

Borrowing: annuities and short-term debt

When revenue did not suffice, the city borrowed. The instruments were those described in section III: the sale of redeemable and life annuities secured on the city’s revenues, and short-term loans from wealthy burghers, religious houses and, until the early fifteenth century, Jewish lenders. The debts of the city to its Jews in 1343, 1346 and 1348, amounting at one point to more than 1,700 marks, have already been mentioned. After 1349 and particularly after 1400, the sale of annuities became the principal means of public borrowing. The Historical Dictionary notes that by the late Middle Ages the annual accounts of Swiss public households typically closed with deficits, which were covered by borrowing.⁸ It also notes that the cities initially financed their expansion by borrowing, but in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries reduced their debts through tax revenues and themselves became creditors on the capital market.⁹ Zurich conforms to this pattern: a debtor in the age of territorial expansion, a creditor in the age of the Reformed state.

The city sold life annuities to its own citizens and to buyers in neighbouring towns and bought annuities as an investment of surplus funds. The regest of 1401, in which the city resold a rent of 3 pounds 15 shillings for 63 pounds, illustrates the second activity.¹⁰ The Zurich treasury’s practice of lending on the security of pledged annuities and bonds, which the Historical Dictionary records, combined both: the city acted as a bank for its citizens, receiving deposits in the form of annuity purchases and making loans against securities.¹¹ The volume of the city’s debt in the fifteenth century varied with the course of war and territorial policy. The costs of the Old Zurich War (1439–1450), in which Zurich allied itself with Austria against the other Confederates and suffered defeat and devastation of its countryside, weighed on the city’s finances for years.¹² It is characteristic of the period that the city recovered from this crisis with the same instrument that had created it: by borrowing on the security of its revenues and by redeeming pledges when money became available.

The fiscal significance of Jewish taxes and extraordinary levies

The fiscal history of the Jewish community, described in section V, adds a further dimension to the public finances of Zurich. The special levies imposed on Jews were a form of revenue that required no consent from the taxpaying citizens and could be raised quickly in an emergency. The gift of 1,500 gulden exacted in 1402, which Anzidei describes as protection money, exceeded the entire ordinary tax contribution of the community in several years.¹³ The loss of this revenue after 1436 had to be compensated by other means. It may be no coincidence that the city’s reliance on annuity sales and on the income of its territories increased in the same period. The episode shows a pattern that recurs in the fiscal history of many states: a vulnerable minority whose wealth was treated as a reserve at the disposal of the authorities.

Notes

1. HLS, “Öffentlicher Haushalt”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026197/2013-12-10/. ↩
2. HLS, “Öffentlicher Haushalt” (as above). ↩
3. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/. ↩
4. Hans Nabholz and Friedrich Hegi (eds.), Die Steuerbücher von Stadt und Landschaft Zürich des XIV. und XV. Jahrhunderts, vol. 1 (Zurich: Beer, 1918), digitised at https://archive.org/details/diesteurbcherv01zruoft. ↩
5. HLS, “Steuern” (Stefan Altorfer, Ruedi Brassel-Moser), version of 24 January 2013, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013763/: the sum due rested on “der unter Eid abgegebenen Selbsteinschätzung des Vermögens, einem schon im Spätmittelalter üblichen Verfahren”. Poll taxes “waren die Ausnahme, wurden aber mitunter als Ersatz für die Vermögenssteuer von jenen Bürgern eingezogen, die über kein ausreichendes Vermögen verfügten”. ↩
6. Anzidei, “Zürich, die Juden und das Geld” (as above). ↩
7. HLS, “Steuern” (as above): direct property taxes were “meist zweckgebundene und befristete Steuern”, while indirect taxes “waren zunächst vor allem ein Instrument städtischer Fiskalpolitik”. HLS, “Ungeld” (Anne-Marie Dubler), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026199/: tolls and Ungeld were “diese beiden wichtigsten Einnahmen des spätmittelalterlichen Stadthaushalts”. ↩
8. HLS, “Öffentlicher Haushalt” (as above). ↩
9. HLS, “Kapitalmarkt”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013913/2010-02-18/, which states that the cities “im 16. und 17. Jahrhundert … ihre Schulden dann durch Steuereinnahmen … ab[bauten] und … selber in eine Gläubigerposition auf dem Kapitalmarkt [gerieten]”. ↩
10. Urkundenregesten des Staatsarchivs des Kantons Zürich, vol. 4, no. 4506 (as above). ↩
11. HLS, “Kredit” (as above). ↩
12. Wikipedia (German), “Alter Zürichkrieg”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alter_Z%C3%BCrichkrieg: Zurich emerged “klar als Verlierer”, lost control of the upper lake to Schwyz and the county of Kyburg “bis zum Rückkauf 1452”, and its countryside suffered continuous devastation. No war indemnities were imposed. The precise volume of Zurich’s debt is not given there. ↩
13. Anzidei (as above), which reports “gifts” of 148 gulden in 1393 and 1,500 gulden in 1402. ↩

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.