Zurich among the Reformed welfare orders

Wittenberg, Leisnig and Nuremberg

Zurich’s ordinance belongs to a wave of municipal welfare reforms that swept the cities of the Empire and the Low Countries between 1520 and 1530. The first Reformation-era begging ordinance came from Wittenberg, in the city and community ordinance of 24 January 1522, which the Basel church historian Martin Kessler describes as the product of a joint municipal and ecclesiastical deliberation that incorporated ideas of Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt.¹ In the small Saxon town of Leisnig, an ordinance of 1523 for a “common chest” (gemeiner Kasten), which Luther revised and published with a preface, placed the town’s church finances in the hands of ten lay administrators—two nobles, two councillors, three burghers and three peasants—each estate holding one of the four keys of the chest. The chest received the income of church property, confraternities and gifts and financed church buildings, schools and poor relief. It could be supplemented by a levy according to means, while begging within the parish was prohibited.²

Nuremberg’s ordinance of 1522 is the closest relative of Zurich’s. It placed the city’s alms under two councillors and ten citizens and required the administrators to be respected and numerate men who could not themselves be recipients. The ordinance prohibited begging in churches and streets, provided for inquiries to identify the “shamefaced poor” who would not beg in public, marked recipients with badges and financed the system from church collections supplemented by redirected foundation income.³ In 1524 Nuremberg too housed its alms office in a dissolved Augustinian friary.⁴ The parallels with Zurich are close: a lay administration with council oversight, the prohibition of public begging, the badge, the inquiry into need and the use of former religious buildings. Zurich’s ordinance drew on a common repertoire of urban poor policy that circulated among the Upper German and Swiss cities through printed ordinances, correspondence between reformers and the travels of merchants and students.

Strasbourg, Basel and Ypres

Strasbourg, which followed Nuremberg’s example in 1523, adds an instructive figure. In August 1523 the city appointed Lucas Hackfurt, a humanist known as Bathodius, as Schaffner des gemeinen Almosens, the administrator of public assistance, at a salary of twenty-five florins a year. Hackfurt kept a detailed register of his acts and of the decisions of the administrators of the common alms, which survives in the municipal archives. He reported to the council on the needs of the service during the famine years of 1529 to 1532 and, in November 1529, established with Catharina Zell a special fund, the Nebenstüre, for religious refugees seeking asylum in the city.⁵ The Strasbourg ordinance of 1523 has been the subject of a monograph by Werner Grams, published in 1975.⁶ The Strasbourg refugee fund anticipates, by some sixteen years, the Geneva Bourse française and shows how the new public alms offices could be supplemented by special-purpose funds for groups outside the resident population.

In Basel, Johannes Oecolampadius developed in March 1523, with reference to John Chrysostom, the view that public authorities should define the needy and distinguish between impostors and those who truly suffered. Basel planned its own poor relief reform in the year after Zurich’s, although its Reformation ordinance of 1529 reportedly left the question of poverty aside.⁷ Catholic cities took similar measures in the same years. Ypres in Flanders reorganised its poor relief in 1525, and Juan Luis Vives published his treatise De subventione pauperum in Bruges in 1526. An anonymous evaluation of the Ypres scheme, the Forma subventionis pauperum, appeared in 1531. Paul Spicker, who has translated both texts, presents them as early statements of methods of social administration, including placement in work, recognition of disability, and organised record-keeping and accountability.⁸

The simultaneity of these reforms across the confessional divide is an important corrective to any narrative that makes public welfare a Protestant invention. The HLS states it plainly: the Reformation maintained assistance policies similar to those of the Catholic authorities.⁹ What the Reformation added in Zurich was the scale and speed with which ecclesiastical capital became available to the municipal authorities, together with the theological case for applying it to the poor. The Catholic cities of the Low Countries had to finance their reforms largely from existing municipal resources, church collections and the voluntary cooperation of religious houses that remained in existence. Zurich could reach directly into the endowments of the dissolved convents.

Bern and Geneva

Within the Confederation, Zurich’s ordinance served as a direct model. Bern, which adopted the Reformation in 1528, established in the same year a Mushafen of its own in its dissolved Dominican friary, explicitly in response to Zwingli’s ordinance of 1525. The Bernese Mushafen fed the poor, needy students and pupils daily with porridge and bread, with beef on days fixed by donors. Until 1798 it was administered as a bailiwick of the fourth class by a Mushafenschaffner chosen from the Great Council.¹⁰ Its later history is a perfect illustration of the longevity of such funds. After the fall of the old Bernese state, the federal liquidation commission gave the Mushafen a new charter in 1803 that directed its income to the support of students. A settlement of 1841 between the city’s burgher community and the canton transferred its administration to the canton. By 1917 it financed scholarships at the University of Bern and prizes for grammar-school pupils, and on 5 May 2021 it was registered as an independent foundation, the Stiftung Mushafen, whose purpose is to support persons pursuing education without cantonal training grants, preferably resident in the canton of Bern.¹¹ A porridge kitchen founded in imitation of Zurich’s in 1528 thus exists today as a charitable foundation under Swiss civil law, almost five hundred years later.

Geneva, the subject of the companion volume and of Chapter B.IV, took a different institutional route to a similar end. In November 1535, as the city broke with its bishop, it founded the Hôpital général by consolidating all its medieval hospitals into a single institution, managed by procurators and, under Calvin’s church order, by deacons responsible for charity and the care of the sick.¹² The Bourse française, established towards the end of the 1540s thanks to the gift attributed to a wealthy refugee, supported French Protestant refugees with travel money, medical care and the placement of orphans.¹³ The Hôpital général survives as the Hospice général, which dates its foundation to 1535, separated its social mission from hospital care in 1869 and today operates in some sixty locations across the canton of Geneva.¹⁴ The difference in emphasis is characteristic of the two cities. Zurich built a system of public offices under direct council control, with the poor fund as one office among many. Geneva, by contrast, concentrated its assistance in a single, quasi-autonomous institution and relied, for the refugee population, on funds raised by the refugees themselves. Chapter B.IV develops the comparison.

Notes

1. “Zwischen Barmherzigkeit und Ärgernis”, Kirchenbote (St Gallen), https://kirchenbote-online.ch/artikel/?artikel=Zwischen-Barmherzigkeit-und-%C3%84rgernis&id=28314. ↩
2. Wikipedia (German), “Leisniger Kastenordnung”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leisniger_Kastenordnung. ↩
3. “Die Nürnberger Armenverordnung von 1522. Kontinuitäten und Wandel” (seminar paper), GRIN, https://www.grin.com/document/313551. The paper is used here only for the ordinance’s principal provisions, which are consistent with the other sources cited. ↩
4. Forum Nürnberger Werkstätten, “Die Ordnung des Bettel- und Almosenwesens”, http://alt.forum-nuernberger-werkstaetten.de/aktionen/ausstellung/mittelalter/bettelwesen.html. ↩
5. Jean Rott, “Hackfurt (Hachfurt, Hugfordius, Bat(h)odius), Lucas (‘meister Lux’)”, Nouveau dictionnaire de biographie alsacienne (1989), online at the Fédération des Sociétés d’Histoire et d’Archéologie d’Alsace, https://www.alsace-histoire.org/netdba/hackfurt-hachfurt-hugfordius-plus-connu-dans-le-milieu-humaniste-sous-son-nom-grecise-bathodius-lucas-meister-lux/. ↩
6. Dictionnaire historique des institutions de l’Alsace (DHIALSACE), “Assistance publique”, https://dhialsace.bnu.fr/wiki/Assistance_publique, citing Warnfrid Werner Grams, Die Strassburger Almosenordnung von 1523 (Karlsruhe, 1975). ↩
7. “Zwischen Barmherzigkeit und Ärgernis”, Kirchenbote, https://kirchenbote-online.ch/artikel/?artikel=Zwischen-Barmherzigkeit-und-%C3%84rgernis&id=28314. ↩
8. Paul Spicker (ed.), The Origins of Modern Welfare: Juan Luis Vives, De Subventione Pauperum, and City of Ypres, Forma Subventionis Pauperum (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2010), publisher’s description, https://www.peterlang.com/document/1051981. ↩
9. HLS, “Pauvreté”, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/fr/articles/016090/2015-05-11/. ↩
10. Wikipedia (German), “Mushafen (Bern)”, https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mushafen_(Bern), citing the holdings of the Staatsarchiv des Kantons Bern and the Burgerbibliothek Bern, including account books from 1535 to 1847. ↩
11. Stiftung Mushafen, “Geschichte der Stiftung Mushafen”, https://stiftung-mushafen.ch/geschichte/. ↩
12. Musée international de la Réforme, “La Genève réformée – Informations”, https://www.musee-reforme.ch/content/2files/ok-geneve-reformee-informations.pdf. ↩
13. Ibid. ↩
14. Hospice général, “Notre histoire”, https://www.hospicegeneral.ch/fr/notre-histoire. ↩

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.