简体 繁體 日本語 한국어 Bahasa Indonesia Русский Українська English Deutsch Français Español Português Tiếng Việt Türkçe العربية עברית

Zurich enters the Confederation (1351) and builds a territory

The alliance of 1351

The guild constitution of 1336 left Zurich internally divided. Members of the old council who had been expelled by Rudolf Brun found support among the nobility of the region, above all Count Johann of Habsburg-Rapperswil. In the night of 23 to 24 February 1350 the exiles attempted a surprise attack on the town, the so-called Mordnacht, intended to overthrow Brun’s regime. When the attempt failed, Zurich retaliated by devastating the count’s territory and destroying the castle of Alt-Rapperswil and part of Rapperswil itself, thereby provoking the hostility of Duke Albrecht II of Austria, the head of the house of Habsburg.1 Isolated and threatened, Zurich looked for allies.

On 1 May 1351 Zurich concluded a perpetual alliance with Lucerne and the three forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden.2 The alliance aimed, in the words of the Historisches Lexikon, to secure external peace through mutual military aid and internal peace through arbitration procedures and defined a specific area within which assistance was owed.3 For Zurich the alliance served above all to secure the new guild constitution against its internal and external enemies.4 The war that followed with Habsburg lasted until the Peace of Regensburg of 1355, under which Zurich undertook to restore conquered territories and to persuade its allies to do likewise, while preserving both its alliance with the forest cantons and its relations with Austria.5

It is important to avoid reading the alliance of 1351 through the lens of the modern federal state. The Confederation of the fourteenth century was a network of bilateral and multilateral treaties. As the Historisches Lexikon explains, the eight members of 1353 were connected through six separate alliances, and several of them were not directly sworn to one another.6 Zurich remained an imperial city, conducted its own foreign policy and regarded its alliances as instruments of its own interests. That independence of mind would, in the fifteenth century, bring Zurich into open conflict with its confederates.

The alliance also had an economic dimension that anticipates the themes of Chapter A.III. The partners of 1351 controlled the approach to the Gotthard pass, which had been opened to regular traffic in the thirteenth century and which linked the Rhine basin with Milan and Lombardy.7 The medieval Gotthard toll was, according to the Historisches Lexikon, of exceptional significance.8 Zurich, at the northern end of the route through Lake Zurich and the Linth or through Lucerne and the Reuss, had every interest in the security of the road. The connection with Uri, prefigured in the Carolingian endowment of the Fraumünster, thus acquired a new strategic meaning.

Building a territory by purchase and pledge

The most remarkable feature of Zurich’s development in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, from the perspective of a book on finance, is the manner in which the city built up its rural territory. It did so largely through purchase and through the acquisition of pledges (Pfandschaften). The regional nobility, many of them vassals or officials of Habsburg, were chronically short of money, whereas the city had money to lend. Rights of lordship over villages, courts and castles were pledged to the city as security for loans, and when the lords could not redeem them, the city kept them. The Historisches Lexikon lists the stages: before 1400 Zollikon (1358), Küsnacht, Meilen and Höngg (1384), Thalwil (1385) and Erlenbach and Wiedikon (1400), with Horgen following in 1406; after 1400 the major lordships of Greifensee (1402, from the counts of Toggenburg), Grüningen (1408, from the Habsburg officials of the Gessler family) and Regensberg with Bülach (1409); the county of Kyburg, held from 1424 to 1442 and again from 1452; Andelfingen (1434); Winterthur (1467) and Stein am Rhein (1484); and Eglisau (1496).9

In little more than a century, a town of perhaps five or six thousand inhabitants had acquired a territory comparable in extent to the present canton.1011 This was a territorial policy conducted with the instruments of credit. The city behaved as a creditor that converted the collateral of defaulting noble debtors into sovereignty. In an age before public debt markets in the modern sense, Zurich used its accumulated capital and its creditworthiness to extend its jurisdiction, its tax base and its control over the roads leading to it. The monetary and credit mechanisms involved, including the rents and annuities through which the city itself raised money, are treated in Chapter A.IV.

This expansion did not proceed without conflict. After 1430 Zurich pursued an independent policy as an imperial city. Its dispute with Schwyz over the inheritance of the last count of Toggenburg escalated into the Old Zurich War of the 1440s.12 In 1442 Zurich concluded an alliance with the Habsburgs, who had returned to the royal throne, and was defeated militarily. The confederates then undid this realignment and thereafter prevented any member from exercising a freedom of alliance at the expense of the Confederation as a whole.13 Zurich’s burgomaster Rudolf Stüssi fell in the battle of St. Jakob an der Sihl in July 1443, and under the peace of 1450 Zurich lost the Höfe on the upper lake to Schwyz.14 The lesson of the war, painfully learned, was that Zurich’s prosperity depended on its integration into the Confederation. Pursuing purely local advantage against the confederates carried a heavy cost. The later history of Zurich as the economic centre of Switzerland, and eventually as the country’s dominant financial centre, rests on that integration.

The century ended with an internal crisis that showed the tensions produced by the growth of a city-state. The Waldmann affair of 1489, in which the powerful burgomaster Hans Waldmann was overthrown and executed after his mandates had provoked resistance in the rural territory, revealed the difficulty of governing a large peasant hinterland from a small civic centre.15 By the eve of the Reformation, when Zwingli arrived at the Grossmünster in 1519, Zurich was a city-state of considerable territorial extent, a commercial town whose council controlled the market, the toll, the fortifications and the courts. The coinage was also passing firmly into civic hands: from about 1504 the city struck large silver pieces inscribed MONETA NOVA THURICENSIS, followed from 1512 by the large silver coins known as Guldiner, the forerunners of the thaler.16

Notes

  1. Hans Nabholz, “Brun, Rudolf”, Neue Deutsche Biographie 2 (1955), online at Deutsche Biographie, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz6107.html. ↩
  2. Hans Nabholz, “Brun, Rudolf”, Neue Deutsche Biographie 2 (1955), https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz6107.html (date and partners); HLS, “Eidgenossenschaft” (Andreas Würgler), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026413/2012-02-08/; HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)” (Meinrad Suter), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/, stating that Zurich allied itself in 1351 with the Waldstätten Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden. ↩
  3. HLS, “Eidgenossenschaft” (Andreas Würgler), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026413/2012-02-08/. ↩
  4. HLS, “Eidgenossenschaft” (Andreas Würgler), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026413/2012-02-08/, on Zurich’s wish in 1351 to secure military backing for its newly established guild constitution. ↩
  5. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)” (Meinrad Suter), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/, on the war until the 1355 “Regensburger Frieden”; Hans Nabholz, “Brun, Rudolf”, NDB, https://www.deutsche-biographie.de/sfz6107.html, dating the treaty to 23–25 July 1355 and describing its terms. ↩
  6. HLS, “Eidgenossenschaft” (Andreas Würgler), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026413/2012-02-08/. ↩
  7. “Gotthardpass”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotthardpass, dating the Twärrenbrücke in the Schöllenen gorge to about 1220 and the first wooden Devil’s Bridge to about 1230, and describing the thirteenth-century mule track used by some 12,000 travellers a year. The route is treated further in Chapter A.III. ↩
  8. HLS, “Zölle”, section on the Middle Ages (Marco Polli-Schönborn), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/013765/2015-02-03/, citing Aloys Schulte on the exceptional yield of the Gotthard toll. ↩
  9. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)”, section on the territorial acquisitions of the city (Meinrad Suter), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/, which also notes that around 1300 Habsburg held the principal lordship rights in much of the later canton. The HLS gives Wiedikon under 1400 and 1491. ↩
  10. HLS, “Zürich (Gemeinde)”, population table, https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/000171/2015-01-25/, giving about 5,700 inhabitants in 1408 and about 5,100 in 1529. ↩
  11. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)”, section “Der Erwerb der Landschaft durch die Stadt Zürich” (Meinrad Suter), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/: from 1350 to the Reformation the city secured “ein Territorium, das im Wesentlichen dem späteren Kanton entsprach”, acquired by purchase or pledge except for the Freiamt conquered in 1415. Some acquisitions, such as Winterthur, were initially pledges. ↩
  12. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)” (Meinrad Suter), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/. ↩
  13. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)” (Meinrad Suter), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/: Zurich “1442 ein Bündnis mit den auf den Königsthron zurückgekehrten Habsburgern schloss, militärisch aber unterlag”; HLS, “Eidgenossenschaft” (Andreas Würgler), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/026413/2012-02-08/. ↩
  14. “Geschichte der Stadt Zürich”, Wikipedia (German), https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geschichte_der_Stadt_Z%C3%BCrich (Stüssi killed at St. Jakob an der Sihl on 22 July 1443; peace of 1450 with the cession of the Höfe). ↩
  15. HLS, “Zürich (Kanton)” (Meinrad Suter), https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/007381/2017-08-24/, on the “Waldmannhandel” of 1489 as a crisis over government mandates encroaching upon traditional local authorities. Waldmann’s execution in 1489 is a well-known fact of Zurich history. ↩
  16. MoneyMuseum Zürich, “Zürcher Geldgeschichte”, https://www.moneymuseum.com/de/for-sunflower/zuercher-geldgeschichte-117, stating that the “Dicken” of about 1504 with the legend MONETA NOVA THURICENSIS show that the right of coinage lay with the city, and that from 1512 the city struck Guldiner. See Chapter A.IV. ↩

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.

Setting up or expanding in Switzerland?

Helvetica Register is an information portal. It explains what companies and entrepreneurs from around the world, and in particular from Greater China, Central Asia and the Caucasus, the rest of Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Latin America, need to know about doing business in Switzerland: company law, commercial contracts, licences, banking, tax and residence.

Legal advice in Switzerland is provided by Ressos Legal, a Zurich law practice advising on all areas of Swiss law under the direction of Dr Alexander Ressos. Further information is available at www.ressos.ch.

Your project in Switzerland Speak to Dr Alexander Ressos Company formation, shareholder and commercial agreements, acquisitions, licences, bank accounts, tax and residence permits: I advise on Swiss law and coordinate with your lawyers in your home country, as well as local counsel in other jurisdictions as required.