The Roman statio Turicensis and the Quadragesima Galliarum

Before Rome: the Celtic settlement on the Lindenhof

The Roman customs post did not arise in empty country. The shores of Lake Zurich had been settled since the Neolithic. Among the oldest traces of lakeside settlement in the area are the pile-dwelling remains on the former island of the Kleiner Hafner near today’s Bellevue, while Neolithic and Bronze Age occupation is documented at several sites around the lower end of the lake between roughly 4300 and 800 BCE.¹ From around 80 BCE a Celtic oppidum occupied the moraine hill of the Lindenhof, the elevated spur on the left bank of the Limmat which dominates the river where it leaves the lake.²

The most striking object from the Celtic period has a monetary character. Within the modern city a lump of more than 17,000 fused Celtic coins came to light, dating from about 100 BCE and deposited in a manner that suggests a ritual act.³ It would be anachronistic to read into this find the origins of Zurich’s later banking, since coins deposited as an offering to the gods were withdrawn from circulation for good. The find does, however, show that the inhabitants of the lower Limmat valley were already embedded in a monetised exchange economy before the arrival of Rome. It also reveals a site with a sacred as well as a commercial dimension. Recent excavations on the Lindenhof in 2014 investigated enigmatic pits dating from the late Celtic to the early Roman period, a reminder that the transition between the two was gradual.⁴

The Roman military post and the vicus

Roman military presence on the Lindenhof began around 40–30 BCE, that is before the Alpine campaign of 15 BCE by which Augustus’ stepsons Drusus and Tiberius brought the central Alps and the foreland under Roman control.⁵ Beneath the small early garrison grew up a civilian settlement, a vicus in Roman terminology, which never became a town with municipal status. It remained what the specialist literature calls a Kleinstadt, a small town without its own city charter.

Recent archaeological work has transformed our understanding of this settlement. In 2020 the cantonal archaeology service published Annina Wyss Schildknecht’s monograph Die mittel- und spätkaiserzeitliche Kleinstadt Zürich/Turicum. Eine Hafenstadt und Zollstation zwischen Alpen und Rheinprovinzen, a study of almost four hundred pages drawing on more than two hundred Roman find sites in the city.⁶ The title captures the two functions that defined Turicum: it was a port and it was a customs station. According to the city archaeology service, a harbour district emerged at the outflow of the Limmat around 70/75 CE. In the second and third centuries the settlement functioned as an important place of transshipment and a staging post.⁷ Harbour installations have been identified at the foot of the St. Peter hill and landing places on both banks of the river. An internal street network linked the quarters of the settlement, where a public fountain, thermal baths and religious buildings on the left bank indicate a population of some means.⁸

The public bath lay in the area of today’s Weinplatz and Thermengasse, where its remains can still be seen beneath a modern viewing structure. Temples or sanctuaries stood at the Storchengasse and at Oetenbach, while a sanctuary on the island of the Grosser Hafner in the lake was rebuilt in 122 CE as a round structure of wooden posts.⁹ A small circular cult building containing a large boulder received votive coins until the fourth century. Another building, which may have been an inn or an assembly hall and was destroyed by fire, preserved numerous graffiti on its walls, among them scenes of cockfighting and personal names such as “Lucianus”.¹⁰ A hoard of gold jewellery of the mid-second century, including serpent-shaped bracelets and engraved finger rings, found in the nineteenth century at the Oetenbachgasse, testifies to private wealth accumulated in the settlement.¹¹ Stone domestic architecture appears from about 70 CE.¹²

The picture that emerges is that of a modest but prosperous riverside community whose inhabitants lived from the movement of goods. The reason for that movement lies in geography. Merchandise travelling between the Rhine and the Alpine passes of Raetia could use the chain of waterways formed by the Walensee, the Linth and Lake Zurich. At the lower end of the lake, where the Limmat leaves it, goods had to be transferred from lake vessels to river boats or to carts for the onward journey towards Vindonissa (Windisch) and the Rhine. The Money Museum’s account of the customs station puts the point succinctly: because goods carried along the Walensee and Lake Zurich had to be reloaded at this spot, merchants could not avoid the checkpoint without considerable effort and expense.¹³ An overland route from Vindonissa through the Furttal and Kloten to Vitudurum (Oberwinterthur) also passed through the region, with Zurich serving as a customs post, while the lake and the rivers functioned as the principal transport corridors.¹⁴ A place where cargo must be unloaded is a place where it can be inspected, valued and taxed, and where those who handle it can earn fees for storage, carriage and credit. This is the first and most durable lesson of Zurich’s location.

The tombstone of Lucius Aelius Urbicus

The direct evidence for the customs station comes from a single monument. On 18 May 1747, during levelling work on the Lindenhof and in the presence of the antiquarian Johann Kaspar Hagenbuch, workmen uncovered the tombstone of a small child.¹⁵ The stone measures about 130 centimetres in height, 62 in width and 37 in depth, with letters between five and eight centimetres high, and is today displayed in the permanent archaeological exhibition of the Landesmuseum in Zurich.¹⁶ Its short inscription has been reproduced and discussed by generations of Zurich historians. In the translation given by Ferdinand Keller in 1860 it reads, in substance: “To the spirits of the departed. Here lies Lucius Aelius Urbicus, who lived one year, five months and five days. Unio, freedman of the emperor, head of the Turicum post of the Gallic duty of two and a half per cent, and Aelia Secundina, the parents, to their dearly beloved son.”¹⁷

The decisive words are an abbreviated formula which is usually expanded as praepositus stationis Turicensis quadragesimae Galliarum: head of the Turicum station of the fortieth of the Gauls.¹⁸ The number XL is the Roman numeral forty, which makes the quadragesima the fortieth part, that is 2.5 per cent of the value of the goods. The monument is dated to around 200 CE on the basis of the names: the child bears the family name Aelius, which suggests that his father had been freed by an emperor of the Aelian house, meaning Hadrian or Antoninus Pius.¹⁹

Few small towns can point to a founding document that is at once so human and so precisely fiscal. The father, Unio, belonged to the familia Caesaris, the vast household of slaves and freedmen through which the emperors administered their revenues. As a former imperial slave, he was a professional revenue official in the direct service of the fiscus, stationed at a point on the frontier between two customs districts. The mother bears the name Aelia Secundina. When their son died in infancy, the parents chose to record, on his grave, the office that defined the family’s standing in the community. In a sense, the first citizen of Zurich whom we know by name is a customs officer. Even the first Latin name of the town appears as the designation of a revenue office.

The customs system of the Quadragesima Galliarum

To understand the significance of Unio’s post, one must look at the Roman customs system as a whole. The Roman Empire did not form a single customs union. It was divided into large districts, at whose boundaries a duty called portorium was levied on goods in transit. The district of the Gallic duty, the quadragesima Galliarum, covered at its greatest extent the three Gallic provinces of Lugdunensis, Aquitania and Belgica, together with Gallia Narbonensis, the two Germanic provinces and the Alpine regions. Its central administration was at Lugdunum (Lyon), where numerous inscriptions and lead seals attest to its activity.²⁰ According to the MoneyMuseum’s account, the duty was levied when goods crossed the boundary between the Illyrian and the Gallic customs districts. Noricum and Pannonia belonged to the Illyrian district, while Raetia was divided between the two.²¹

Turicum lay precisely on such a line. The Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz names three customs stations of the Gallic duty on the territory of modern Switzerland: Acaunum (Saint-Maurice) in the Valais, Genava (Geneva) and Turicum.²² The parallel with Geneva, subject of the companion volume to this book, is instructive. Both cities first enter the documentary record of their fiscal and commercial life as points of control on the internal frontiers of the Empire, at the outflow of a great lake into a river that carried goods towards the heart of Gaul or the Rhineland. Both would later build on this position as places of transit, fairs and credit. The difference, which will become significant in later centuries, is one of orientation: Geneva looked to the Rhône, Lyon and the Mediterranean, Zurich to the Rhine, the Swabian and Alsatian markets and, via the Walensee and later the Gotthard, to Lombardy.

The organisation of the customs service changed over the imperial centuries. In the first century the duty was farmed to private companies of publicani, supervised by imperial procurators. Under Trajan these companies were replaced in the western districts by individual contractors called conductores, until from the reign of Marcus Aurelius imperial procurators collected the duty directly, a transition completed under Commodus or Septimius Severus. The offices were staffed with imperial slaves and freedmen who acted as vilici or praepositi of the stations.²³ Unio, an imperial freedman heading the station around 200 CE, fits neatly into the last of these phases. He was a salaried servant of the imperial fisc, operating a small office with clerks, inspectors and guards, in a regime of direct state collection.

The stationes at the district borders collected the principal duty, and interior posts could additionally levy local tolls.²⁴ What kind of goods passed through Turicum? The MoneyMuseum’s reconstruction mentions grain, the basis of Roman nutrition, incense for the daily offerings and luxury articles such as perfume from Sardis, observing that experienced traders preferred mixed cargoes in order to spread the risk of loss.²⁵ The Wikipedia article on the tombstone sums up the scholarly consensus that the inscription points to significant trade across the Alps with Cisalpine Gaul.²⁶

Two features of this Roman arrangement deserve emphasis for the later history of the financial centre. The first is that the Turicum post was a creature of public finance: it existed because the imperial treasury needed revenue and because this particular point on the map allowed that revenue to be collected efficiently. A place becomes fiscally significant when goods must stop there. The second is that the duty was calculated as a percentage of the value of the goods, which presupposes a practice of valuation, declaration and documentation. Customs officers had to know prices, to recognise merchandise and to resolve disputes with traders. The expertise required at a Roman customs station involved the assessment of value, the handling of coin, the keeping of accounts and the balancing of the interests of the treasury against those of the merchants. It is a distant but recognisable prefiguration of the skills that would later be exercised in Zurich’s counting houses, its customs offices and eventually its banks and insurance companies. No line of personal or institutional descent connects Unio with the merchants of the thirteenth century. The connection lies in the site and in the recurring discovery that its value consisted in the flows of goods and money which passed through it.

Notes

1. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, section on prehistory (Andreas Motschi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/. The article dates the earliest traces of human presence in the municipal area to the Mesolithic (flint tools at the Katzensee). ↩
2. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, section on the late Celtic and Roman periods (Andreas Motschi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/. The city archaeology service likewise describes an early fortified Celtic settlement (oppidum) on the Lindenhof: Stadt Zürich, Archäologie, “Lindenhof”, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/zuerichs-geschichte/archaeologie/stadt/ausgrabungen-bauuntersuchungen/lindenhof.html. ↩
3. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, section on the late Celtic period (Andreas Motschi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/, which describes the find as a cache of more than 17,000 fused Celtic coins of around 100 BCE, probably ritually deposited. The precise find spot and circumstances of discovery are discussed in the specialist archaeological literature. ↩
4. Stadt Zürich, Archäologie, “Lindenhof” (overview of excavations of 1937–1938, 2008, 2014 and 2020), https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/zuerichs-geschichte/archaeologie/stadt/ausgrabungen-bauuntersuchungen/lindenhof.html. ↩
5. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)”, section on the Roman period (Beat Horisberger), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/, stating that after the Alpine campaign of 15 BCE the region came under Roman rule and that Turicum developed from a military post on the Lindenhof established before the conquest; HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)” (Andreas Motschi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/, dates the beginning of Roman military presence to around 40–30 BCE. ↩
6. Kanton Zürich, press release “Turicum: eine römische Hafenstadt und Zollstation” (February 2021), https://www.zh.ch/de/news-uebersicht/medienmitteilungen/2021/02/turicum-eine-roemische-hafenstadt-und-zollstation.html, presenting Annina Wyss Schildknecht, Die mittel- und spätkaiserzeitliche Kleinstadt Zürich/Turicum. Eine Hafenstadt und Zollstation zwischen Alpen und Rheinprovinzen, Monographien der Kantonsarchäologie Zürich 54 (2020), 388 pages; the project was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation. ↩
7. Stadt Zürich, Archäologie, “Turicum II – Die mittel- und spätkaiserzeitliche Kleinstadt Zürich/Turicum”, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/zuerichs-geschichte/archaeologie/stadt/auswertungen-themen/turicum-2.html, describing Turicum as “ein wichtiger Umlad- und Etappenort”. ↩
8. Kanton Zürich, press release of February 2021 (see above), https://www.zh.ch/de/news-uebersicht/medienmitteilungen/2021/02/turicum-eine-roemische-hafenstadt-und-zollstation.html. ↩
9. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, section on the Roman period (Andreas Motschi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/; Stadt Zürich, Archäologie, “Turicum II”, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/zuerichs-geschichte/archaeologie/stadt/auswertungen-themen/turicum-2.html (public bath of the second century in the Thermengasse area; round temple on the Grosser Hafner). ↩
10. Stadt Zürich, Archäologie, “Turicum II”, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/zuerichs-geschichte/archaeologie/stadt/auswertungen-themen/turicum-2.html; Kanton Zürich, press release of February 2021, https://www.zh.ch/de/news-uebersicht/medienmitteilungen/2021/02/turicum-eine-roemische-hafenstadt-und-zollstation.html. ↩
11. Kanton Zürich, press release of February 2021, https://www.zh.ch/de/news-uebersicht/medienmitteilungen/2021/02/turicum-eine-roemische-hafenstadt-und-zollstation.html; Stadt Zürich, Archäologie, “Turicum II” (dating the jewellery to the mid-second century). ↩
12. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, section on the Roman period (Andreas Motschi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/. ↩
13. MoneyMuseum Zürich, “Station 2 – Die Zollstation von Turicum” (series Die Zürcher und ihr Geld), https://www.moneymuseum.com/pdf/ZuiG/Station%2002.pdf. An English version appeared as “The People of Zurich and Their Money 2: The Customs Station of Turicum”, CoinsWeekly. ↩
14. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)”, section on the Roman period (Beat Horisberger), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/. ↩
15. MoneyMuseum Zürich, “Station 2 – Die Zollstation von Turicum”, https://www.moneymuseum.com/pdf/ZuiG/Station%2002.pdf (date of discovery 18 May 1747); “Grabstein des Lucius Aelius Urbicus”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grabstein_des_Lucius_Aelius_Urbicus (discovery in 1747 during levelling work on the Lindenhof in the presence of Johann Kaspar Hagenbuch; the exact find spot is unknown). ↩
16. “Grabstein des Lucius Aelius Urbicus”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grabstein_des_Lucius_Aelius_Urbicus. The inscription is published as CIL XIII 5244. ↩
17. English rendering based on the German translation by Ferdinand Keller (1860) reproduced in “Grabstein des Lucius Aelius Urbicus”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grabstein_des_Lucius_Aelius_Urbicus. ↩
18. Transcription with expansions in “Zürich”, Ostia-Antica.org, https://ostia-antica.org/switzerland/zh/zurich.htm: “P(rae)P(ositus) STA(tionis) TVRICEN(sis) XL G(alliarum)”, translated there as “head of the office in Turicum of the fortieth of the Gauls”. The expanded formula praepositus stationis Turicensis quadragesimae Galliarum is also given in “Grabstein des Lucius Aelius Urbicus”, Wikipedia (German), as above. ↩
19. “Grabstein des Lucius Aelius Urbicus”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grabstein_des_Lucius_Aelius_Urbicus (dating to about 200 CE on the basis of the name, which indicates manumission by an emperor of the Aelian family); HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)” (Andreas Motschi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/, likewise dates the tombstone to around 200 CE and identifies the statio Turicensis as a customs station of the Gallic duty. ↩
20. Ostia-Antica.org, “The district of the Quadragesima Galliarum et Portus Lirensis” (portorium presentation), https://www.ostia-antica.org/dict/topics/portorium/presentation/gaul.htm. ↩
21. MoneyMuseum Zürich, “Station 2 – Die Zollstation von Turicum”, https://www.moneymuseum.com/pdf/ZuiG/Station%2002.pdf. ↩
22. HLS, “Zölle”, section on the Roman period (Marco Polli-Schönborn), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013765/2015-02-03/, naming Acaunum (Saint-Maurice), Genava (Geneva) and Turicum (Zurich) as stations of the quadragesima Galliarum, the “Vierzigstel-Steuer” of 2.5 per cent. ↩
23. Ostia-Antica.org, “The customs administration” (portorium presentation, based on S. J. de Laet and later literature), https://www.ostia-antica.org/dict/topics/portorium/presentation/administration.htm. ↩
24. Ostia-Antica.org, “The customs administration”, https://www.ostia-antica.org/dict/topics/portorium/presentation/administration.htm. ↩
25. MoneyMuseum Zürich, “Station 2 – Die Zollstation von Turicum”, https://www.moneymuseum.com/pdf/ZuiG/Station%2002.pdf. The examples of goods are illustrative; they are drawn from the general evidence on Roman trade. ↩
26. “Grabstein des Lucius Aelius Urbicus”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grabstein_des_Lucius_Aelius_Urbicus, referring to “alpenquerender Handel mit Gallia cisalpina”. ↩

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.