The Constaffel and the thirteen guilds

The Constaffel

The word Constaffel, or Konstaffel, derives from legal terminology in which it designated the inhabitants of a castle, a town or a quarter of a town. In Zurich and in Strasbourg it became the name of a constitutional institution of the urban upper class, comparable to the Achtburger of Basel.¹ Brun created it in 1336 by uniting the members of the urban elite who had not been banished: the nobles and knights, the rentiers living from landed income and the wealthy merchants. A guild history lists its members more precisely as knights, nobles, rentiers, merchants, cloth dealers, money-changers, goldsmiths and salt dealers.² The list is revealing for the history of finance. The money-changers, the goldsmiths who handled precious metals and the salt dealers who controlled one of the most important staple commodities of the pre-industrial economy all belonged to the Constaffel. The occupations most closely connected with money, bullion and the wholesale trade were thus placed, from the beginning, in the body associated with the old elite, while the retail trades and the crafts were placed in the guilds.

The Constaffel was not a guild in the full sense during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Furnishing the cavalry, as befitted a body of knights and substantial burghers who could afford horses, it also provided half the council.³ A noble society within the Constaffel built the house zum Rüden on the river in 1348. Its stone ground floor served as the town hall, while the members met in the drinking room above. In 1401 the Constaffel members bought the building, which became the “Trinkstube der Herren zum Rüden”.⁴ The name refers to a hound, the emblem of the aristocratic right to hunt. In 1417 the “Gemeine Konstaffel” was established as a confraternity with military, charitable and religious functions.

The Constaffel’s original character did not last. In the late fourteenth century it declined through emigration, social descent and the extinction of leading families.⁵ The knightly families, which had given Brun his leadership and his allies, were a dwindling group in a city whose wealth came increasingly from commerce and from the purchase of rural lordships. By the end of the fifteenth century the Constaffel had become something different: after the Waldmann affair, the fourth Geschworener Brief of 1489 gave it the status of a political guild. From 1490 all inhabitants of the city who did not belong to a guild were assigned to the Gemeine Konstaffel. The body that had been the corporation of the elite thus became, in part, the residual electoral college for everybody else. After the Reformation the noble society zum Rüden separated from the wider drinking society, leaving a Constaffel that survived in this form until 1798.

The thirteen guilds and their trades

The thirteen guilds of 1336 grouped the city’s trades into bodies of sufficient size to form political constituencies and military units. They were ranked in a fixed order, which from 1361 until 1798 placed the Constaffel first and the guilds after it.⁶ In the version of the order recorded by the Zentralbibliothek Zürich, the guilds were: zur Saffran, of the shopkeepers and retail merchants, later also metal-workers, apothecaries and confectioners; zur Meisen, of the wine-dealers, innkeepers, saddlers and painters; zur Schmiden, of the smiths, locksmiths, later watchmakers, and barbers; zum Weggen, of the bakers and millers; zur Gerwe, of the tanners and parchment-makers; zum Widder, of the butchers and cattle dealers; zur Schuhmachern, of the shoemakers; zur Zimmerleuten, of the carpenters, joiners, masons and coopers; zur Schneidern, of the tailors, furriers and cloth-cutters; zur Schiffleuten, of the boatmen, carriers and fishermen; zum Kämbel, of the petty dealers in fruit, vegetables and butter; and zur Waag, of the wool and linen weavers and hatters. That makes twelve. The thirteenth in 1336 arose because the wool weavers and the linen weavers originally formed separate guilds, which were united as the guild zur Waag in 1440.⁷ From the late fifteenth century, therefore, Zurich counted twelve guilds and the Constaffel, a configuration of thirteen political bodies that lasted until 1798.

The names of the guilds deserve a word. Several refer to the trades themselves, as with the smiths, the shoemakers, the carpenters, the tailors and the boatmen. Others refer to the house in which the guild met or to an emblem: the Saffran to the precious spice that symbolised the internationally oriented trade of its merchants, the Meisen to a titmouse, the Widder to a ram, the Weggen to a bread roll, the Kämbel to a camel, the emblem of the petty dealers.⁸ The juxtapositions within some guilds, painters with saddlers and innkeepers, barbers with smiths, followed the logic of numbers and of related materials. Because the aim was to create political units, trades that were too small to stand alone were attached to others.

The guilds were led by their masters. Each guild elected a Zunftmeister, who sat on the council by virtue of his office. According to the later arrangement, two masters were elected each year, one serving and one standing by, in step with the half-yearly rotation of the council.⁹ Around the master stood a small guild council and officers responsible for the craft, the Zunftpfleger and Handwerkspfleger. Election to the office of Zunftmeister required, as the former Zurich state archivist Otto Sigg has emphasised, a certain consensus among the ordinary members, which gave the guild master an authority rooted in his constituency.¹⁰

The guild houses, finally, were the physical centres of this world. Each guild had its Stube, a room or a house in which the members met, dined, voted, kept their banner and their silver, and settled disputes. The guild of the Saffran built its first guild house on the Limmat in 1418 on the site of two older houses. The present building, on a site the guild has owned continuously since 1418, dates from a reconstruction of 1719 to 1723.¹¹ The guild zur Meisen met originally in the Marktgasse and moved in 1757 into a new baroque city palace on the Münsterhof, built by David Morf in the French style with a small cour d’honneur, often described as the most beautiful guild house of the city.¹² The guild records paint a less decorous picture of daily life in the Stuben of the crafts, with fines for swearing, brawling, drawing weapons, gambling quarrels and excessive eating and drinking.¹³

Notes

1. HLS, “Konstaffel” (Martin Illi), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D10249.php. ↩
2. Zunft zur Letzi, “Geschichte der Zünfte”, https://zunft-zur-letzi.ch/geschichte-der-zuenfte/, listing “Ritter, Edelleute, Rentner, Kaufleute, Tuchhändler, Geldwechsler, Goldschmiede und Salzleute”. ↩
3. Zentralkomitee der Zünfte Zürichs, “Rudolf Brun”, https://www.sechselaeuten.ch/de/wissenswertes/geschichte/rudolfbrun. ↩
4. HLS, “Konstaffel” (Martin Illi), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D10249.php; Wikipedia, “Haus zum Rüden”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haus_zum_R%C3%BCden, for the sale in 1401. ↩
5. HLS, “Konstaffel” (Martin Illi), http://www.hls-dhs-dss.ch/textes/d/D10249.php. ↩
6. Monica Seidler-Hux, “Die Zürcher Zünfte”, Zentralbibliothek Zürich, April 2024, https://www.zb.uzh.ch/en/fokus/beitrag/die-zurcher-zunfte, giving the order of precedence from 1361 to 1798. ↩
7. Wikipedia, “Zünfte of Zurich”, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z%C3%BCnfte_of_Zurich, cited for orientation on the union of the weavers in 1440. ↩
8. Otto Sigg, “Zunftherrlichkeit” (1986), https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Zunftherrlichkeit.pdf, on the saffron plant as the symbol of “international ausgerichteten Handels”; the meaning of the other names is standard knowledge. ↩
9. “Brunsche Zunftverfassung”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brunsche_Zunftverfassung: the thirteen craft guilds each elected a guild master for the two council groups, “einen Regierenden und einen Stillstehenden”, with the Natalrat governing from 25 December and the Baptistalrat from 24 June. ↩
10. Otto Sigg, “Zunftherrlichkeit” (1986), https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Zunftherrlichkeit.pdf. ↩
11. Historical marker at the Zunfthaus zur Saffran, Limmatquai 54, transcribed at The Historical Marker Database, “Zunfthaus zur Saffran / Saffron Guild House”, https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=259179. ↩
12. Zunft zur Meisen, “Zunfthaus”, https://www.meisen.ch/zunfthaus; Zunfthaus zur Meisen, “History”, https://www.zunfthaus-zur-meisen.ch/en/zunfthaus-zur-meisen/history/. ↩
13. Otto Sigg, “Zunftherrlichkeit” (1986), https://www.zuerich-geschichte.info/pdfs/Zunftherrlichkeit.pdf, drawing on the ordinances of the shoemakers and tailors. ↩

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.