The Pfalz on the Lindenhof and royal presence

A royal palace on Roman foundations

Kings in the early and high Middle Ages governed by travelling. Having no fixed capital, they moved with their court from one place to another, lodging in episcopal cities, royal abbeys and palaces. Such palaces, palatia or sedes regiae, were representatively designed seats of government and administrative centres at which the king conducted business when he was present and at which royal officials resided in his absence.¹ In Zurich the palace stood on the Lindenhof, within the area of the late Roman fort. Excavations exposed the foundations of a monumental building interpreted as a Carolingian palace. The excavation of 2008 then revealed walls and floors of palace buildings of both the ninth and the eleventh centuries.²

The choice of the Lindenhof was no accident. The Roman walls offered a ready-made enclosure on the best defensive site in the town, commanding the river and the landing places. The Carolingian palace thus continued, in a new form, the function of the Roman fort as the seat of public power at the crossing of the Limmat. The historian Thomas Zotz has characterised Zurich as a Salian palace site on a Carolingian basis, in a study whose title quotes the twelfth-century description of Zurich as “the most noble town of Swabia”.³

Kings and dukes on the Lindenhof

After the decline of the Carolingian dynasty, Zurich became part of the duchy of Swabia, which emerged in the early tenth century. The battle of Winterthur in 919, in which Duke Burchard II of Swabia defeated King Rudolf II of Burgundy, put an end to Burgundian expansion eastwards and confirmed Zurich as one of the principal centres of the Swabian duchy.⁴ It was in this ducal context that the first coins were struck in Zurich. According to the MoneyMuseum, Duke Hermann of Swabia was the first to mint coins in Zurich on behalf of the German king, producing silver denarii around 929.⁵ The same account remarks that in 853 Zurich had still been too insignificant to require coins of its own.

Royal visits to Zurich are attested from the mid-tenth century onwards and increased markedly under Henry III in the eleventh century.⁶ Henry III stayed in Zurich six times between 1045 and 1055 and expanded the palace into a residence with a two-storey hall and a chapel.⁷ Zurich became, under the Salian kings, a place for imperial business of more than regional significance: diets were held there, including an assembly at Pentecost 1052, and at Christmas 1055 the betrothal of the young Henry IV was celebrated there.⁸ It is sometimes said that Henry III’s hall was modelled on the palace at Goslar, the favourite residence of the Salians in Saxony.⁹

The royal presence brought with it a flow of people, goods and money. A king travelling with his court required food, fodder, lodging, cloth, horses and services, as did the bishops, abbots, counts and envoys attending him. Each visit was a concentrated burst of demand to which local producers and merchants could respond. It is no coincidence that the grant of market, toll and coinage rights to the abbess of the Fraumünster, discussed in the next section, falls into the reign of Henry III, the most frequent royal guest of the town. The Pfalz period thus reinforced the commercial function of Zurich and gave it a place in the political geography of the Empire that far exceeded its size.

In the twelfth century, after Zurich had lost its function as a royal palace site, Bishop Otto of Freising, uncle of Frederick Barbarossa and one of the most learned historians of the Middle Ages, still described it as the most noble town of Swabia, nobilissimum Sueviae oppidum.¹⁰ Otto also reported an inscription above the gate of the town: Nobile Turegum multarum copia rerum, “noble Zurich, rich in an abundance of many things”.¹¹ The phrase became the motto of the city in early modern prints, among them engravings by Conrad Meyer and Johann Meyer in the seventeenth century that carry it as their title.¹² It is hard to imagine a more appropriate epigraph for a book on a financial centre. The abundance celebrated at the gate of twelfth-century Zurich was that of goods brought to market. Today the city is known for an abundance of capital. The self-image, however, is the same: a town whose nobility consists in the plenty of what passes through it.

Notes

1. HLS, “Pfalzen” (Thomas Zotz), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/009835/2010-09-28/. ↩
2. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)” (Andreas Motschi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/: “Auf dem Lindenhof freigelegte Fundamente eines Monumentalbaus sind als Reste eines karolingischen Pfalzgebäudes zu deuten”; Stadt Zürich, Archäologie, “Lindenhof”, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/zuerichs-geschichte/archaeologie/stadt/ausgrabungen-bauuntersuchungen/lindenhof.html. ↩
3. Thomas Zotz, “Turegum nobilissimum Sueviae oppidum. Zürich als salischer Pfalzort auf karolingischer Basis”, Frühmittelalterliche Studien 36 (2002), pp. 337–354, bibliographic record at FreiDok plus, Universität Freiburg, https://freidok.uni-freiburg.de/data/3355. ↩
4. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)”, section on the Carolingian and post-Carolingian period (Renata Windler), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/, on the “Schlacht bei Winterthur 919”. ↩
5. MoneyMuseum Zürich, “Zürcher Geldgeschichte”, https://www.moneymuseum.com/de/for-sunflower/zuercher-geldgeschichte-117. The date of 929 is given in this popular account; the chronology of the earliest Zurich coinage is discussed in the numismatic literature and is treated in Chapter A.IV. ↩
6. HLS, “Pfalzen” (Thomas Zotz), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/009835/2010-09-28/, on confirmed royal visits from around the mid-tenth century and their increase under Henry III, who probably commissioned the reconstruction of the palace. ↩
7. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)” (Andreas Motschi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/. ↩
8. “Geschichte der Stadt Zürich”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_der_Stadt_Z%C3%BCrich, mentioning the assembly of Pentecost 1052 under Henry III and the betrothal of Henry IV at Christmas 1055. These dates follow the royal itinerary as reconstructed in the literature. ↩
9. “Geschichte der Stadt Zürich”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_der_Stadt_Z%C3%BCrich, reporting that Henry III reportedly built a palatial hall modelled on Goslar. ↩
10. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/: “Nach dem Verlust der Funktion als Pfalzort beschrieb Otto von Freising in der Mitte des 12. Jahrhunderts Zürich immer noch als vornehmste Stadt Schwabens”; the Latin wording is given in Zotz’s title (above) and in “Zürich”, Mittelalter-Lexikon, https://www.mittelalter-lexikon.de/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich. ↩
11. “Zürich”, Mittelalter-Lexikon, https://www.mittelalter-lexikon.de/wiki/Z%C3%BCrich, attributing to Otto of Freising (1158) the report of the gate inscription “Nobile Turegum multarum copia rerum”. The passage is usually located in the Gesta Friderici, book I. ↩
12. Conrad Meyer, Nobile Turegum multarum copia rerum (c. 1675), digitised on e-rara, https://www.e-rara.ch/zuz/doi/10.3931/e-rara-53414; Johann Meyer, Nobile Turegum Multarum copia rerum. Zu Gott mein Hoffnung (between 1655 and 1712), e-rara, https://www.e-rara.ch/zuz/content/structure/14561476. ↩

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.