The Zähringer, imperial freedom and the rise of the council

Advocates and lords: Lenzburg and Zähringen

Ecclesiastical lordships required lay protectors. The advocates (Vögte) of the Zurich churches exercised on their behalf the high jurisdiction, which clerics could not wield, and represented them in secular affairs. From 976 the counts of Lenzburg served as advocates of the chapters.¹ In 1098 a settlement between the Staufer and the Zähringer, two of the great dynasties contending for the duchy of Swabia, gave the imperial advocacy over Zurich to the dukes of Zähringen. Duke Berchtold II renounced his claim to the Swabian duchy and received as a fief the imperial rights in Zurich together with the castle of Zähringen, from which the family took its name.² Their control nevertheless remained limited as long as the counts of Lenzburg-Baden held the advocacy over the churches. Only when the Lenzburg line died out in 1172 did the Zähringer become sole lords of the town, a position they held from 1173 until 1218.³

The Zähringer are best known in Swiss history as founders of towns, above all Fribourg and Bern.⁴ From 1127 they bore the title of rectors of Burgundy.⁵ Zurich, by contrast, was an old royal town which they administered as imperial advocates. Their rule nonetheless coincided with a period of urban growth. Berchtold IV, imperial advocate from 1173, is credited with founding the Hospital of the Holy Spirit.⁶ In the course of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the town was enclosed by fortifications while its settled area expanded to include the Rennweg and the Oetenbach convent on the left bank. Two bridges built in the first half of the thirteenth century linked the two halves of the town.⁷ The bridges deserve note: the crossing of the Limmat at Zurich was now served by fixed structures, which bound the market on the right bank, around the Grossmünster, to the quarters on the left bank around the Fraumünster and St. Peter.

The extinction of the Zähringer and imperial freedom (1218)

Duke Berchtold V, the last of the Zähringer, died in 1218 without male heirs. King Frederick II, the Staufer grandson of Barbarossa, reclaimed the ducal and most of the imperial rights that the Zähringer had held, and thereby prevented any other dynasty from consolidating power over their inheritance.⁸ For Zurich the consequence was decisive. Once the advocacy over the town and its two chapters had reverted to the Crown, the town, together with its ecclesiastical foundations, became immediately subject to the Empire. From 1218 Zurich possessed imperial immediacy, Reichsunmittelbarkeit, which was confirmed repeatedly by later rulers until 1512.⁹ In the same year Frederick II took the Fraumünster under his protection.¹⁰

The imperial advocate (Reichsvogt) who now represented the king in Zurich was, significantly, drawn from the citizenry. The Historisches Lexikon notes that after 1218 imperial advocates from the civic community exercised the advocacy over the two chapters and over the town, an office which in the thirteenth century came to be associated with the leadership of the council.¹¹ Imperial freedom, in other words, placed the king’s rights in practice in the hands of the leading families of the town itself, since the monarch was distant and preoccupied with the affairs of Italy and the Empire. Zurich’s later reputation as a self-governing republic has its legal root in this moment. The final step in this process came much later: in 1400 the city acquired the imperial advocacy itself, together with the high criminal jurisdiction.¹²

The decades after 1218 were turbulent. The struggle between the Staufer emperors and the papacy divided the towns of the Empire, and Zurich was no exception. The old centre of lordship on the Lindenhof, the castle built on the site of the palace, was destroyed by the townspeople in the early thirteenth century, long before 1271.¹³ Never rebuilt as a seat of lordship, the site became a public green planted with lime trees from the fifteenth century, the character it has retained to this day.¹⁴ The symbolism is hard to miss. The hill on which Roman customs officers, Carolingian administrators and Salian emperors had exercised public power became, in the age of civic self-government, an open space belonging to the community.

The emergence of the council

A council (Rat) is attested in Zurich from 1220.¹⁵ In the thirteenth century it comprised twelve members drawn from the knights and the burghers and served in three rotating sets through the year, known as the Lenten council, the summer council and the autumn council.¹⁶ The rotation served a practical purpose by distributing the burden of office among the members of a small elite. Politically, it prevented any single group from entrenching itself. The council was, however, drawn from a narrow circle. Its members belonged to the families of ministerial knights, originally in the service of the abbess or the king, and of wealthy merchants, in particular those engaged in long-distance trade, including the silk trade that the Historisches Lexikon documents from the thirteenth century.¹⁷

This was the Zurich patriciate: a mixed elite of knightly and mercantile families, bound together by intermarriage, landholding in the countryside, rents and credit relations, which governed the town from the early thirteenth century until the guild revolution of 1336. The Lexikon notes that long-distance trade required the presence of Jewish, Lombard and southern French moneylenders, whose activity in Zurich forms part of the story of credit told in Chapter A.IV.¹⁸ For the grain trade, a Kornhaus was established at the Weinplatz in the late thirteenth century, on the site where, a millennium earlier, the Roman public bath had stood.¹⁹ The elite of this period also produced one of the great monuments of medieval German culture. The Codex Manesse, the largest collection of Middle High German love poetry, is associated with the circle of the Zurich patrician Rüdiger Manesse and his son. Produced in Zurich around 1300, it testifies to the wealth, education and cultural ambition of the families who governed the town.²⁰

The Richtebrief

The most important legal monument of the patrician council is the Richtebrief, the first codification of the laws of the town. The Historisches Lexikon describes it as first drawn up around 1250 and as the oldest codification of the town’s statutes.²¹ The modern critical edition, prepared by Daniel Bitterli for the Collection of Swiss Law Sources, distinguishes several stages. An original compilation of about 1251 was followed by the so-called Leonhardbuch of about 1298, the Niklausbuch of 1304, compiled by the town scribe Niklaus Mangold, and the Konradbuch of about 1327.²² The 1304 version, the oldest fully preserved text, contains roughly 350 to 360 articles arranged in six books. These deal with homicide and violence, with feuds and the peace of the town, with the council and the courts, with the liberties of the town and its citizens, with crafts, gaming and contracts, and with the relations between clergy and burghers.²³ The manuscript of 1304, preserved in the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Zürich, is decorated with red highlighting of titles and passages, which places it in the same milieu of Zurich book production as the Codex Manesse.²⁴

According to Bitterli’s introduction, the Richtebrief arose out of civil conflict during the struggle between pope and emperor around 1250 and reflects the consolidation of the council’s power after the victory of the papal party in Zurich’s internal disputes. Initially a body of witnesses to transactions, the council transformed itself into a legislator, justifying its authority by the necessity of keeping the peace.²⁵ The statutes were enacted collectively by “the council and the burghers” (der rat und die burger). The citizens formed a legal community bound by mutual obligations of peace, in which those who broke the peace paid fines and those who failed to pay were banished until they had settled.²⁶ One article of the Leonhardbuch threatens anyone who sets himself against the council or its statutes with a fine of two marks: Der sich sezzet wider dem rate ald ir gesezzede … der git zwo march ze bůsse.²⁷

Another provision became famous in retrospect: the prohibition of guilds and sworn associations. The Leonhardbuch provides that no one shall form any guild or association, nor bind himself by oath: Das nieman kein zunft noch geselleschaft … noch kein sicherheit mit eiden machen sol.²⁸ The prohibition expressed the patrician council’s fear that the craftsmen would organise against it. That fear was justified: in 1336 the guild revolution led by Rudolf Brun overturned the patrician regime and introduced a constitution in which the guilds shared power with the Constaffel, the association of knights, merchants and rentiers. That story, with its lasting consequences for the political economy of Zurich, is the subject of Chapter A.II.²⁹

The Richtebrief was also economic legislation. It regulated market conduct, the production and sale of textiles, the sale of wine, contracts and credit practices.³⁰ Its existence demonstrates that by the middle of the thirteenth century the Zurich council had grasped that commercial prosperity required a stable, public and written legal order. The combination of a codified town law with the civic control of the market peace provided the institutional foundation on which merchants could rely. From the perspective of the modern financial centre, the Richtebrief is the first document in which Zurich’s governing class set out in writing, for the benefit of residents and visitors alike, the rules by which transactions would be judged. The value of legal certainty, so often invoked today as a competitive advantage of Swiss financial law, is here visible at its medieval origin.

Notes

1. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)” (Andreas Motschi), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/, noting that the counts of Lenzburg served as advocates of the chapters from 976. ↩
2. HLS, “Zähringen, von” (Erwin Eugster), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/019504/2020-06-03/: in 1098 Berchtold II received “die Namen gebende Burg Zähringen sowie die Reichsrechte in Zürich” as a fief. ↩
3. HLS, “Zähringen, von” (Erwin Eugster), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/019504/2020-06-03/; HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/, stating that the Zähringer were sole lords of the town from 1173 to 1218. ↩
4. HLS, “Zähringen, von” (Erwin Eugster), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/019504/2020-06-03/, naming Freiburg and Bern as the dynasty’s principal foundation towns. ↩
5. HLS, “Zähringen, von” (Erwin Eugster), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/019504/2020-06-03/. ↩
6. “Geschichte der Stadt Zürich”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_der_Stadt_Z%C3%BCrich. ↩
7. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, section “Stadtanlage, öffentliche und private Bauten”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/: “Mit der Stadterweiterung entstanden auch das Kloster Oetenbach und der Rennweg links der Limmat. Die beiden Stadtteile verbanden zwei in der ersten Hälfte des 13. Jahrhunderts entstandene Brücken.” The Lexikon also notes that thirteenth-century fortifications replaced earlier defences. ↩
8. HLS, “Zähringen, von” (Erwin Eugster), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/019504/2020-06-03/. ↩
9. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, section on political development (Max Schultheiss), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/, noting that the city retained imperial immediacy after 1218 and that it was repeatedly confirmed. ↩
10. HLS, “Fraumünster” (Judith Steinmann), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/011612/2006-11-09/; MünzenWoche, “MenschenGesichter Teil 24”, https://muenzenwoche.de/menschengesichter-teil-24-eine-frau-als-herrin-von-zuerich/, which describes the grant of imperial immediacy by Frederick II in 1218 as meaning that only the emperor could give the abbess orders. ↩
11. HLS, “Reichsvogt” (Waltraud Hörsch), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026441/: “Reichsvögte aus der städtischen Bürgerschaft [übten] die Vogtei über die beiden Stifte und über die Stadt aus”. ↩
12. HLS, “Reichsvogt” (Waltraud Hörsch), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026441/, stating that Zurich obtained the Reichsvogtei in 1400 and that, as the cantons acquired the office in the fifteenth century, the Reichsvogt became the presiding or executive official of the blood court. ↩
13. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)” (Max Schultheiss), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/: “Das alte Herrschaftszentrum auf dem Lindenhof muss im frühen 13. Jahrhundert … von den Stadtbewohnern zerstört worden sein.” ↩
14. Stadt Zürich, Archäologie, “Lindenhof”, https://www.stadt-zuerich.ch/de/stadtleben/stadtportraet/zuerichs-geschichte/archaeologie/stadt/ausgrabungen-bauuntersuchungen/lindenhof.html, noting that the Lindenhof has been a public green space with lime trees since the fifteenth century. ↩
15. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)” (Max Schultheiss), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/: “Ein Rat ist in Zürich ab 1220 nachweisbar.” ↩
16. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)” (Max Schultheiss), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/: “Die zwölf Mitglieder umfassende Ratsrotte von Rittern und Bürgern teilte sich in einen Fasten-, Sommer- und Herbstrat.” ↩
17. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, section “Wirtschaft”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/: “Im Spätmittelalter blühte in Zürich das ab dem 13. Jh. belegte Seidengewerbe, das im Zentrum von ausgedehnten Handelsbeziehungen stand.” ↩
18. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, section “Wirtschaft”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/: “Der Fernhandel bedingte die Anwesenheit von jüdischen, lombardischen und südfranzösischen Geldverleihern.” ↩
19. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, section “Wirtschaft”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/: “Für den Getreidehandel wurde im späten 13. Jahrhundert das Kornhaus am Weinplatz eingerichtet.” The Roman bath is located in the area of the Weinplatz by the same article. ↩
20. “Codex Manesse”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codex_Manesse: “Ihr Grundstock wurde um 1300 in Zürich hergestellt, wahrscheinlich im Zusammenhang mit der Sammeltätigkeit der Zürcher Patrizierfamilie Manesse”, with reference to Johannes Hadlaub’s praise of the collection assembled by Rüdiger Manesse the Elder († 1304) and his son Johannes. ↩
21. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)” (Max Schultheiss), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/: “Der um 1250 erstmals abgefasste Richtebrief ist die älteste Kodifikation der städtischen Gesetze.” ↩
22. Daniel Bitterli (ed.), Zürcher Richtebrief, Sammlung Schweizerischer Rechtsquellen, Die Rechtsquellen des Kantons Zürich, Neue Folge, introduction, https://www.ssrq-sds-fds.ch/online/ZH_NF_I_1_1/ZH_NF_I_1_1.pdf. ↩
23. “Richtebrief”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richtebrief, giving approximately 350 paragraphs in six books and summarising their subject matter; the Bitterli edition (above) gives approximately 360 articles and confirms the arrangement in six books. ↩
24. “Richtebrief”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richtebrief. ↩
25. Daniel Bitterli (ed.), Zürcher Richtebrief, introduction, https://www.ssrq-sds-fds.ch/online/ZH_NF_I_1_1/ZH_NF_I_1_1.pdf. ↩
26. Daniel Bitterli (ed.), Zürcher Richtebrief, introduction, https://www.ssrq-sds-fds.ch/online/ZH_NF_I_1_1/ZH_NF_I_1_1.pdf. ↩
27. Daniel Bitterli (ed.), Zürcher Richtebrief, Leonhardbuch art. 38, as quoted in the online edition, https://www.ssrq-sds-fds.ch/online/ZH_NF_I_1_1/ZH_NF_I_1_1.pdf. The transcription of special characters follows the edition as rendered in the search extract and may differ slightly from the printed text. ↩
28. Daniel Bitterli (ed.), Zürcher Richtebrief, Leonhardbuch art. 84, https://www.ssrq-sds-fds.ch/online/ZH_NF_I_1_1/ZH_NF_I_1_1.pdf; “Richtebrief”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richtebrief, noting that craft guilds were prohibited until 1336. ↩
29. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)” (Max Schultheiss), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/, on the “Brun’sche Zunftrevolution” of 1336 and the first Sworn Letter (Geschworener Brief), which created a council of 26 members, 13 from the Constaffel and 13 guild masters. ↩
30. Daniel Bitterli (ed.), Zürcher Richtebrief, introduction, https://www.ssrq-sds-fds.ch/online/ZH_NF_I_1_1/ZH_NF_I_1_1.pdf; “Richtebrief”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richtebrief (fifth book on crafts, gaming and contracts, including market regulation, the wine monopoly and restrictions on lending). ↩

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.