CHAPTER SEVEN: ZURICH

The Cantons of Switzerland - CHAPTER SIX ie 7 CHC

Great though Zurich be as a city, it is consistent with the plan of this book, which is on the cantons rather than on their capitals, to consider in the first place the countryside which was ruled in the name of the citizens of Zurich by its leading families from the date of entry into the confederation down to the end of the old regime. The relationship of town to country in Switzerland is subtle, and has changed over the centuries. In broad terms, until 1300 the town was struggling to emerge from the countryside. The next two centuries were a period of conflict, and from 1500 the capital city imposed itself on the countryside. But there were fluctuations, and in the eighteenth century the countryside regained a certain primacy. The nineteenth was the century of the medium sized country town, Winterthur for example, but in the twentieth the local mini-megalopolis has deprived both town and country of their distinctiveness. Nor is it only a question of primacy: there was a parallel development. Town and country followed the same implied rules and ran a parallel course. The idea of commune flickered between them, so did the idea of a nobility, and that of a servile or working caste. To consider country before town is automatic in most countries, it may be suggestive to do so here. After all, it is a common place that Swiss civilisation is rather strongly based on the peasantry. To handle this programme, one must choose a typical rural community. There can, in one sense, be no such thing; each village has a strong individuality, one could almost say, is unique : but if it were unique, one could not talk about it. In choosing Maur, canton Zurich, I am doing so partly because there is a good village history to hand: viz.Felix Aeppli. Geschichte der Gemeinde Maur, published by the Gemeinde, 1949. It is based on the voluminous manuscripts left by Pfarrer Gottfried Kuhn, who died in 1941. Because of the influence of the late Paul Klui and others still living, there are a number of excellent recent local histories, such as this, and not only in Canton Zurich. The details narrated here are meant as typical features, not detail for its own sake. A Gemeinde of the Swiss Mittelland: Maur, Canton Zurich To the north- east of the lake of Zurich there is a long, forested ridge, now suburbanised. North of this ridge stretches the old large parish of Maur as far as the small lake of Greifensee. There were half a dozen hamlets in the parish (which is now becoming a dormitory satelite of Zurich) of which the village and church of Maur are the centre, diminishing in size as in a family photograph. Each of these has a different history. Uesslingen, the largest and during most of our period about half the size of Maur, was doubtless, as the name suggests, the home of the men of Uoso (Ulrich), or some such name, presumably free Germanic tribesmen. In fact, freemen predominated there, as demonstrated in the records. In Maur on the other hand, significantly, all are serfs when records begin, and still pay servile dues in the l790's. The appellation is a 1

foreign word, Maur, a wall, and there is a wall in the foundation of the parish church which was part of a Roman villa. In writing about Maur, as with Zurich itself, I am equivocating between the capital village and the whole parish or modern Gemeinde. The modern boundaries of the Gemeinde seem in general extremely old, possibly pre-Roman, but are also rather modern, the creation of a reorganisation of local government boundaries in l927, an a straightening-out to look better on the map. In the intermediate period there have been for some purposes various small Gemeinden, Ortsgemeinden or Ortschaften. There is a further equivocation in that two different classifications, geographical and personal, are sometimes merged. In Roman times, and perhaps in Charlemagne's day, and in the eye of the church, and again in modern times, boundaries are geographical. But in early feudal times, the personal principle at times prevailed, and can be traced today. Two communities might be intermingled, owing allegiance to different lords and with different legal status, intermarrying only with permission. The turning point in the re-establishment of the modern geographical principle, the basis of the idea of State, came in the Swiss lands after Sempach, with the Pfaffenbrief of 1370. Both principles are present in the idea of cantonalism. It is modern Swiss practice to assimilate in some way the commune, Gemeinde, to that of a miniature canton in itself, and to use the rural form of government for its cities. Gemeinde sometimes means a community, sometimes a tumultuous public meeting, sometimes an area. Maur, like Uri, was granted to the Fraumnster of Zurich, in 853, or perhaps 814, by the Emperor. It must therefore have been part of the ancient royal estates administered from the Hof at Zurich, which went back to the good king Dagobert, that is to say, were of immemorial antiquity. Maur may have come into the King's hands by confiscation, but it may well have been an old royal estate going back to Roman times and a little beyond. Being situated to the north of the Limmat, a part of the great tithes accrued to the Grossmnster, the men's Canonry. Such gifts were statesmanlike as well as pious. To grant lands and serfs to an abbey made them exempt from the jurisdiction of the Count. The counts were proving difficult to control and impossible to remove, they had made themselves to a great extent hereditary. In the hands of a monastery of which the king was himself the protector the lands came once again under royal control. So under the Fraumnster, Maur was for long still being governed indirectly and exploited financially by the royal Vogt, as well as by the canonesses. The Fraumnster, under the king, enjoyed a sort of sovereignty, notably in Maur it held the High Jurisdiction (but did not exercise it, because as a religious foundation it could not shed blood; the king's Vogt did so on the abbey's behalf). To collect its dues, however, the noble Abbess had herself to appoint a Meier (reeve, bailiff) who could live in the village and himself exercise the lower jurisdiction and the patrimonial power over the serfs. At first the meier was himself a serf, farming the land alongside his fellow serfs, but the office tended to become hereditary. In 1145 the Meier of Maur can be found witnessing a document along with other free men; by the mid 1200's he has built himself a stone tower -- the only stone building apart from the church, and in 1257 he is grouped with those of knightly rank, ie, among the lowest grade of the Dienstadel, the service-nobility (see Aeppli, op. cit. p.41: the interpretation is probable but not quite certain). It seems that the freedom movement in Uri (and Schwyz) was led by this new noble-free group. As a consequence of the Meier having joined the ranks of the gentry, the abbess created another office, that of Kellerer, for a working farmer to look after the 2

abbey's interests. The big farm appertaining to his office survives, as does the memory of the Meier's tower. The owners of the Meier's tower and farm, and the Kellerer, were the only three culivators who were not in form serfs, Leibeigene, down to the end of the old regime: serfdom sounds terrible, but it came to mean little more than an annual hen or two hens, paid to the Vogt, and a fine on marriage or inheritance. In 1398 the family of the Meiers von Maur died out in the male line. The fief fell back to the Abbess who granted it to successive burghers of Zurich, probably not townsmen, but out-burghers, peasant families of the village who found it profitable to buy the protection of the city and take the oath to it. It was a troubled time, it was dangerous to refuse the oath, or to take it. When the garrison of nearby Greifensee, in the Vogtei of which Maur lay, surrendered to the Schwyzers in l444, the men were taken to the Field of Blood and decapitated. Among the 64 young men thus killed, three were men of Maur who had taken the oath to Zurich. The Vogtei of Greifensee intruded itself between the Abbey and its Meier in Maur. It was in essence a de facto power, a sort of renewal of feudalism: in return for physical security, small landholders took oaths of submission to a local lord powerful enough to afford military protection. In the case of most inhabitants of the parish of Maur, it was to the counts at Kiburg (as heirs to the counts of Rapperswil) that they submitted, and the castle at Greifensee protected them. The Vgte exercised the blood jurisdiction, more effectively than the abbess had, without elaborate procedures, and also Dieb und Frevel, theft and riot. This did not quite exclude the old legitimate power of the Abbess, but in daily practice superseded it. The meiers, in turn, had practically taken over from the abbess the lower and the middle jurisdictions, Zwing und Bann, and that over the civil law inheritance of land, Erb und Eigen,(where the meier was assisted by an assembly of freeholders in open-air court). The sovereignty of the Fraumnster had nearly been reduced to a financial interest, notably ground rents and tithes, but an important source of revenue. The dividing line between the Vogt and the Meier (later called the Gerichtsherr) was undetermined. But when Zurich stood behind the Vogt, he prevailed. This Vogtei was an object of property like other rights. The last Count of Toggenburg mortgaged it in 1402-4 to the town of Zurich, and the pledge was never redeemed, or intended to be. The city placed one of its burghers for a term of years in the count's shoes, to reside in the castle of Greifensee (or in the city until the castle was rebuilt in 1505) as Landvogt, to exercise the Vogt's de facto blood jurisdiction. A better title to the Gaugraf's legitimate blood jurisdiction came with the final acquisition of Kiburg from Austria in l452, also by way of pawn for an unredeemed mortgage in 1452. By then the war with Schwyz had ended and Zurich had been readmitted to the Confederacy. Some years later, Zurich took the (doubtless unwilling) men of the vogtei, including Maur henceforward, into oath. When the Confederacy was called in to arbitrate between the city and its rebellious subjects in l489, the "Waldmann Arbitration", the rights which Greifensee and other protectorates claimed against Zurich, and Zurich's rights over them, were recorded and guaranteed by the cantons and Diet as federal law. It will be seen that when the various titles of Zurich over Maur are sorted out, upper jurisdiction by way of the protectorate over the Abbess, middle and lower jurisdiction via the Abbey and the Vogtei, the rights of the inhabitants, the Church, the Gerichtsherr ( Meier), and the rights over private Burghers of the town who had rights in Maur, and all taken together and with a certain amount of accepted usurpations, it is not possible to gives a straight answer to the question, when did Maur become fully 3

Zurichois or Swiss? One might reasonably say, not till the Reformation, or much less persuasively, until l777, when the Gerichtsherrschaft was purchased. With the Reformation, Zurich's hold over Maur was certainly consolidated. Landeshoheit ripened into sovereignty. In the first place, the Abbess of the Fraumnster, in the name of the great college of noble canonesses which had once created and ruled Zurich as sovereign, surrendered the rights, in return for a life pension. The rights of jurisdiction passed to the the city. The lands and goods of the abbey formed part of a fund managed by the Obmannamt (see Handbuch der Schweizer Geschichte, p.453) which had been intended by Zwingli to be used for education, the poor, and the new church. As with disestablishment elsewhere, much of it found a devious path to help support the rich and powerful. In this ignoble way, the abbey as a corporation ceased to exist and its property and sovereignty merged into that of the state and of its ruling families. The tithes became an important part of state income, and thus indirectly supported the new church which it sustained. Secondly, the Church itself not only had new doctrines and services, but a new structure. It was henceforward governed in the name of the Burgomaster, Council and citizens of Zurich, through a semi-independent corporation, the Antistes and Synod of Preachers. The parson was in the eyes of the state its official. Maur (rather exceptionally) had a Gerichtsherr (successor in title of the Abbess's Meier), who held the patronage and the Lower Jurisdiction, and thus controlled some of the consequences in civil life of the activity of the Pfarrer. There was also potential conflict of both Pfarrer and Gerichtsherr with the Vogt at Greifensee. Thirdly, the state itself, in usurping the right to reform the Church, had taken over a full responsibility for Sittlichkeit, civic morality. It had assumed the jus politiae. In continental parlance, it had become no longer a Justizstaat, but a Polizeistaat (the word has no reference to the village constable, Polizei is an abstract word derived from Greek through Latin, polity). In this book, the Policy Staat in Switzerland is further discussed in the second chapter on Canton Berne. The first expression of this new obligation and authority was Zwingli's Ehe und Sittengericht. This was his most influential contribution to world history, because the institution passed by way of Basle and Strasburg to Calvin's Geneva, where it acquired a democratic content and passed to Scotland, France, parts of Germany and North America. On the level of the large-parish of Maur, this court appeared as the Ehegericht ( in French-speaking Switzerland, Consistory Court) eventually composed of the village office-holders, such as the four Untervgte, and (later) the school master of Maur itself, and the church officers, the two Kirchmeiers (churchwardens) and two Ehegaumers -the latter nominated by the city to spy on the morals of villagers and delate them to the court -- and other elders nominated from the congregation, no doubt the richer farmers. The Pfarrer presided, but eventually was not considered a voting member of the Court, as this double capacity was seen as invidious. The court received its final statutory form in l628. Because they were asked to remain in the church after the sermon, the members were collectively called the Stillstand. Their former seats can still be seen ranged round the choir of most protestant churches. The task of the court was to enforce the Proclamations (Mandaten) of the Council. Its primary function was to supervise the Christian institution of Marriage, but this included all aspects of sexuality, and by extension, the family. Additionally it enforced the sumptuary laws, what clothes should be worn by which class of society and when, the prohibition of dancing, swearing, blasphemy, etc. This institution, very 4

important in its forming of the Swiss character, is again considered under the (second) chapter on Berne, and also under Vaud and Geneva. In Maur, the Gerichtsherr was ex-officio a member. At first this may have added to the terror of the Court, and saved the lord of the manor from its embarrassing attentions, but later on was a salutary check on its zeal, a civilised gentleman of anti-clerical tendency, and no believer in witchcraft. The Landvogt at Greifensee was probably in theory an ex-officio member if he chose to attend. Being superimposed on an existing system. the church court overlapped existing, feudal, jurisdictions, notably of the Landvogt and the Gerichtsherr, leading to quarrels. As the political influence of the clergy declined, both these lay dignitaries came to form a needed check to rural tyranny. In England, it will be remembered, a similar development under James I was checked by the Royal Courts, the Justices of the Peace, and, eventually, by a Parliament which claimed a monopoly of legislation. In Scotland, and New England, a kindred institution left an enduring mark. The history of the Stillstand after the sixteenth century also bears some analogy to that of the Vestry as a civil institution in an English parish. The Gemeinde: elements of popular sovereignty The Gemeinde, commune, civil parish, is understood in Switzerland today as the building brick of Swiss democracy, and the courts protect its measure of autonomy as against the cantonal government. It is a much less ancient institution than usually thought, and in its modern sense, dates only from 1798 or even later. However, there are some vestigial elements of manorial customary law which are of vast antiquity. But the substance of what was to become the modern popular sovereignty on the Gemeinde level starts as an unexpected consequence of the Reformation. The documentation for the medieval governance of Maur is fairly complete, as is often the case in places where a monastic foundation owned rights. In Felix Aeppli's book, cited above, are the texts of an arbitral decision of 1260, the Burg-urbar of around 1350, and the village Constitution, the Dorf-offnung of l543, which records the customary law of a century and a half before, of which the original record is lost. The English equivalent would be the Customs of the Manor. The Offnung is in the name of the Hofjunger, the attenders at the court of the Meier, das ganze Gemeind zuo Mur. It has a certain celebrity in that it acknowledges the right of the Meier, if he and his wife should come to the wedding feast and contribute a quarter of a back of pork, to lie with the bride on her first night, unless the bridegroom should redeem her for five shillings and fourpence (i.e. somewhat less than the value of the pork). There is no record of a bride not so redeemed: the picture that comes to mind is of a Breughelesque pre-Reformation wedding feast with bawdy suggestions from the Hofjunger. For our purpose we see here evidence of the village meeting exercising some sort of sovereignty in free acknowledgement of age-old custom (Aeppli, op. cit. p. 304).The assembled village men also acted as Court in conjunction with the Gerichtsherr, notably in matters of Erb und Eigen, ie civil jurisdiction in first instance: this also looks like an extremely ancient institution, perhaps pre-feudal. The Reformation itself caused an increase in the sovereignty of the parish over its own affairs. In theory, the "congregation" in Church, also called Gemeinde, decided on the Reform by public majority show of hands by the Kilchhoeri, the parishioners. It did so, one might say, by the Grace of God. It also did so by the authority of the Council of 5

Zurich, the Obrigkeit, the Powers that Be, but in reformation theory the appeal to the sovereignty of the individual soul was at least equally fundamental. In the local history here followed there is no record of a ceremony of raising hands at the bidding of the Landvogt. In Maur, the Priest himself accepted the Reformation, and stayed in office (l493- ca 1542). In l530 he married his housekeeper, and in the same year was displaced from his pulpit, though not from his living, by a curate appointed by the Town Council. Had he remained catholic, he would still, probably, have retained his living, but a curate would at once have taken over, with, say, half the salary; and the incumbent would likewise have lived out his days on the remaining income, forbidden to interfere or to say Mass in public. The parishioners of Maur, for their part, spontaneously burnt the church ornaments in public on 24 June 1524: the city did not burn its own images until a fortnight later. They were probably induced to accept the new ways by an expectation that greater and lesser Tithes would be abolished: in this they were disappointed, together with all Church dues and other burdens. Perhaps they even understood that the Mass would be retained. The retention of Tithes was one reason for the Swiss peasant revolt of 1525. The men of Maur and other villages held an unauthorised open air meeting (also called Gemeinde) in Greifensee, and formulated a petition in 29 Articles, including the abolition of serfdom (Leibeigenschaft) and feudal burdens, demands that were still being made in the Articles of Stfa in l794-5. On Whitmonday of the same year a larger Gemeinde was held at Tss, with four thousand peasants participating. They were outwitted by the local Landvogt, and the trouble subsided. Meanwhile professional soldiers hacked and slaughtered the peasants of Germany. In canton Zurich, no blood was shed: the time had not yet come when the city regarded the countryside as rightless subject territory. Zwingli must be given the credit for this moderation, when Luther lost his nerve. Organisation of the rural Ortsgemeinde Within each of the component villages or hamlets of the old great-parish of Maur, the principal officer was the Untervogt, locally called Vogt, while the term Landvogt was reserved for the viceroy in Greifensee. The Untervogt was appointed by the Zurich Council from among the village householders, normally from among the principal families, and usually held office for life. He was assisted by a Treasurer, elected by the village Versammlung, and by two Dorfmeiers and others who formed a committee, supervising subordinate officers, notably the village Watchmen. As in England, they saw to ways, ditches, hedges, woods, common fields, grazings and wastes, and the supervision of the poor. The subordinate functionaries were entitled to raise money or contributions in kind from the landholders for their remuneration. As in England too, the step from the old manorial organisation to the new Gemeinde was made through the new obligation of the lay authority to care for the resident poor. With this came a new practice of restricting settlement in the village. Article Ten of the Dorfoffnung of 1543 (Aeppli,305) prescribes that whoever lived in the village (hushablich) for a year and a day had as much right and share as any other householder, but whoever left the village to live elsewhere lost all rights. There is no suggestion of a hereditary status of citizen (Burger) of the village Gemeinde. But already by 1550 there is an Einkaufsgebhr, a new settler has to buy himself in, but in return for that has the claim to be maintained if he should become a pauper, he and his 6

descendants for ever (Aeppli,116). At first this cost 5 in local money, perhaps a quarter of the price of an ox, but gradually throughout the old regime the cost was raised. By 1782 it was 120 for foreigners to the canton, but 60 for Zuricois from another village -- up till 1875 it was necessary to acquire the village citizenship in order to own a house there. The newcomer had to be accepted by the community as a whole, which meant food and drinks all round. The Gemeinde had become exclusive. Unlike the rest of Western Europe, this exclusivity remains to the present day, and gives a Swissness to Switzerland. Rights to wood and grazing might have to be purchased by an additional fine. Even for a member of an established family to build a new house required repurchase of such rights, for a low sum. As for those who remained in the Gemeinde territory without these rights, they were tolerated as Hintersaessen, or expelled as beggars. A new class of native proletarians had been created, the disagreeable aspect of privilege. Their presence helped the industrial revolution of the 18th century and the development of textile industries, carried on at first in the home, and in the l9th century in factories. With the Reformation came, especially among protestants, a new public self consciousness of religion, and with this a care for education. The first recorded payment for a schoolmaster in Maur is in 1571. A permanent school in the village of Maur itself started in l628, a school building is recorded from l727: in l797 in the whole newly created district of Uster , which included Maur, there were 30 schoolmasters, but only nine school buildings. Psalms were taught, by heart, and printed letters of the alphabet, but only a quarter of the pupils learned to write. Presumably numbers were taught too. As to the success of these studies, in l646 there were l5 households in the parish with Bibles out of a total of 116 (Aeppli,111): the peasant Gerichtsherr and the schoolmaster himself did not own one of these. In 1646 there were 15, in 1658 21 . By the end of the l8th century it was much better, only three households had no Bible in the village of Maur itself. The schoolmaster was paid by the parents of the pupils, the amount for the whole winter was the value of some twelve or fourteen one-pound loaves of black bread, but only about half of the households could afford as much. The children mostly only attended when very young. They were required to work at home on the loom: the schoolmaster's family also had to weave, often in the same room while lessons were going on. During the summer, the schoolmaster worked at a trade or in the fields, and no school was held. If he was paid in cash by the village, the sum was deducted for his house: after the mid-17th century he received sacks of corn in kind, a quarter of it from the village (Ortsgemeinde, which has been called hamlet here), and half from the fund administering the Fraumnster property, and a quarter or so, eventually, from the Maur church funds. Each child brought a handful of wood, every day if it could be obtained, for the fire in winter. When the outlying hamlets obtained a school, there was later some assistance from cantonal funds. All this description is from Aeppli's book already cited, pp 109-113. In examining in such detail the commune of Maur, we are making one village stand for three thousand. The plan of this book makes it necessary for a single biography to stand for many more. Most of these brief biographies are of rulers, because this book is on the political structures of aristocratic republics, and this is also convenient, because such lives are documented and have been studied, and the studies have been printed. The complex structures of cantonal constitutional life become intelligible in terms of a particular official career, and the rewards and difficulties of 7

government become apparent -- systems are devised to reward politicians as well as to serve the governed and the State. The flavour of a particular canton sometimes comes out clearly in the case of an individual's life, and also the flavour of a particular period. The tension between the assertions that men differ in different periods and states, and that all men are the same and resemble ourselves, also becomes manifest. The Landvogt of Greifensee Salomon Landolt, 1741-1818, must be accounted the most famous of Landvogts, on account of Gottfried Keller's delightfully written Novelle describing an incident (loosely based upon an actual case) during the period from from 1780 to 1786 when Landolt acted as Landvogt of Greifensee. In real life he was a familiar figure in the salons of Lavater and Gessner, a small plump figure strapped into a green and black uniform of his own design, with sword, spurs and riding boots. In this capacity he was introduced to Goethe and to others of that group, at a time when admiration of the cultivated circles of Zurich was an acceptable way of criticising the lesser monarchies of Germany. The first discoverable Landolt is assumed to have come from Glarus and settled in Thalwil, taking the oath to Zurich which made him an Ausburger, an external- citizen. In 1566 a later Landolt purchased the full citizenship of the town; he had made a fortune in the wool-trade and as innkeeper and, having inherited from two wives, he acquired the supreme republican merit of marrying, thirdly, a daughter of the reigning Burgomaster. His descndants were enrolled in leading guilds, Znfte, and rose to be Twelvers within the guild, and members of the Council of 200. It was a good year to become citizen. A generation previously one might have lost foothold on account of the Reformation, and a generation later it would have been hard to buy oneself in, and unlikely that one would rise so quickly within the hierarchy. By the fourth generation the Landolts by virtue of marriages, were accepted within the inner circle of patricians, the circle of those who termed themselves Junkers, were members of the Constaffel and of the Schneckenstube within that super-guild, the class of those who had purchased or inherited manorial jurisdictions and intermarried with ancient families. As such they had a claim on the really large and remunerative Vogteien, such as Kiburg, and a claim on the very profitable colonelcies of mercenary soldiers in the service of France, or in this case, the Netherlands. Such dignitaries could count on a seat in the Two Hundred on their retirement from military service, and a share in the good things of government. They formed a class of gentry, a little on the English, or Virginian, model, based as much on the countryside as the Town. Like the English county gentry, they were recognised, for nearly all purposes, as their colleagues and equals by genuine continental nobilities: their hands were bloodstained, and their pockets contained some, but not much, money. In the relaxed social climate of the 18th century, their free manners were eminently acceptable. They paved the way for republicanism to be considered fashionable, even legitimate, as in North America. They, and their equivalent class in the Free Imperial Cities of Germany proper (such as Frankfurt or Hamburg) provided a traditional bridge between the High Middle- Class and the caste of accredited nobles. For themselves, the republican patricians were clear that they had purified their blood by the exercise of sovereignty, never intermarrying or having social contacts as between equals with "subjects", Untertanen. It was a complaint against the Helvetic Society that they admitted not only German royalty, but Swiss "subjects" to their meetings. Indeed, the impression remains 8

that Swiss patricians were more inflexible than the aristocracies of France and Prussia, and they were slightly laughed at for this, but by the mid-eighteenth century arrogance had gone out of fashion. They cultivated a pleasant man-to-man way of speaking to their inferiors. Salomon Landolt spent his formative years of childhood in the castle of Wellenberg in Thurgau, where his father was administrator, Obervogt, of a lordship belonging to Zurich. He paid long visits to Schloss Wlflingen, where his mother's raffish family lived: she was a Hirzel, and her mother an Escher, married to a von Meiss -- the greatest families of Zurich. This gave him tastes and views somewhat above the pocket money passed on by his family. It was difficult to find a job for him, he wouldn't perservere in his training as an artillery officer in Metz, at this period he only had a good amateur's talent as painter , and he found training as an architect overtaxing. But a quiet post was found for him in Zurich as a judge, where common sense would be of value, and in l770 at last he inherited a modest independence from his father's estate. At the same time he found his avocation, forming a company of light- infantrymen. These were soldiers of a new sort, Jaegers, trained to be resourceful and to think, a suitable force for rough terrain and a citizen army, though it also showed up the weakness of the old regime in Switzerland, the helot labourers in the fields of the Swiss Mittelland were not yet suited to the militia of the free man; only the chartered freemen of the towns and the rich peasantry were. An army of drilled soldiers flogged into battle was unsuited to Swiss republicanism and mountainous terrain, and had brought the Confederation under the protectorate of France. The ethos of the light infantryman was to open the way to Swiss independence and neutrality in the next century. Salomon and his brother, who had won some money in a lottery, now travelled to neighbouring countries, notably Prussia, to observe modern foreign armies. Frederic the Great wrote a charming note to young Monsieur de Landolt, his admirer, and received him personally, but did not in the event offer him a commission or a sufficient salary. After his return to Zurich, Salomon was advanced to Lieutenant Colonel of the whole Corps of Zurich Jaegers, and he was elected a Twelver of his Znft zum Schafen, and membership of the 2OO. When the Landvogtei of Greifensee fell vacant, in 1781, Landolt was the sole candidate: he was so popular that no-one stood against him. On arrival at Greifensee Landolt set about turning the Vogt's estate into a model farm, with potato culture, clover, and stall- fed cattle to furnish manure for the fields, and with a scientific ratio of ploughland to meadow in each farm unit. This stall feeding changed the design of the farm, and the greater number and higher yield of the cattle would in the future require new markets for export in the form of cheese. It also opened the possibility of enclosing and cutivating the rough common grazing, until then used for wintering the cattle, and, as a system, was to tend towards abolition in each Ortsgemeinde of the open-field system of agriculture. On his own account, Landolt purchased run-down farms, and made them pay. He did everything an enlightened ruler or colonial District Officer (or charitable development agency) should, and he made roads, drains, a harbour on the lake, etc. Landolt's intentions were to profit the state by making its subjects richer and more contented, but like colonial governors everywhere, he identified with the natives, though he only had a six-year tenure of his prebend. The historical raison d'tre of the Vogtei so far as the city was concerned was not to upset or better the subject inhabitants, but to enrich the city and the ruling families by the profits of justice, and to provide men for war to protect the city, or for sale to foreign monarchs as mercenaries. The effects must have 9

profoundly disturbed an age old social and economic system, and brought forward a new, rather cruel, economic and political system, enriching the rich peasants, and driving the poor ploughmen and day labourers into home-industry and, eventually, into textile factories, in which the domination by a different social milieu, also located in Zurich, continued in a different form. This is the problem of progress, faced, and ignored, by colonialism, by development aid, elsewhere and at all times. As president of his criminal court, Salomon's maxim (but not the policy of the city) was "the stick is sovereign", or "the categorical imperative". A public beating of twelve strokes cured many troubles, a punishment equal for rich and poor, which did not lead a whole family into temporary starvation as a fine would. As a bachelor, the income from fines was not required, nor did he exact bribes in lieu of beatings, as other Vogts did. A brisk palm-tree justice was the order of the day, and can be illustrated from his treatment of forester Jud from Maur. Now that the manorial court had been repurchased by the city from the Gerichtsherr, Maur was fully within the Greifensee jurisdiction. Jud had been fined by the Vogt for ploughing into his neighbour's land, and brought a counterclaim, vexatiously but not quite unjustifiably alleging that his neighbour had himself infringed his land. Knowing this counterclaim to be mischievous, Salomon sentenced Jud to be flogged, twelve strokes, publicly, the village being summoned by the church bell to witness it. Jud replied that he would appeal to Zurich. Salomon said "Appeal you can, but you will have your punishment first". So it happened. The Petty Council censured Landolt, who requested to be allowed to resign from the Vogtei, an act of insubordination which drew a refusal and further censure. Again, in retrospect this arbitrary injustice by a Vogt seems to us no way to exercise power, a contempt of law, and no training for freedom, a primitive sort of early colonialism or oriental despotism, insufficiently redeemed by the censure of the appeal court. Keller's story is also quietly horrifying. It explains to us what the Revolution was about, and why it was necessary. In this way also, Landolt's reversion to a style of justice which was already superseded as regards free men in the middle ages. Regarded as colonialism, I find myself impressed by Landolt's style, as depicted in his biography by David Hess (1770-1843, also a Zurichois of patrician family) but not as depicted by Keller (I have not formed my own judgement from the archives or checked the records). As a District Officer, Landolt served not only his Raj, but his Zemindars and cultivators, to use the appropriate language of Kipling, but with the inevitable ambiguity, a paternalism which was destructive of the system of paternalism, indeed, irresponsible in that it led towards a goal which was unforeseen by himself and his masters, and weakened the village hierarchy by being even-handed as between rich and poor. Those peasants and the Councillors who distrusted him were, it seems to me, in their own terms in the right. Landolt probably did not foresee, even in l786, that the end of the Raj was nigh. Time caught up with him. In 1795, he received another Vogtei, Eglisau. Here he found a seditious attitude among the professional class of the small rural town, more in tune with the times than he, but a faithful peasantry in the backward Rafzerfeld to which his heart warmed. He assimilated in his mind the new disobedience to the traditional difficulties, and laid about him with the stick. After three weeks he was commanded to lead his militia to suppress the weavers, labourers, and discontented middle classes of Stfa, both backward- and forward- looking, who had had the impertinence to petition for freedoms, and for freedom. 10

Landolt, to his disgust, found his own soldiers reluctant and insubordinate, but by personal authority and unqualified courage managed to lead them, obtain their respect, and perform his task. It was to no avail: within two more years Landolt's subjects expelled him courteously from his castle, and prepared to welcome the French invaders as liberators from the oligarchy of the city, their colonial masters. A year later, Landolt showed the other side of the same spirit, when he in his turn welcomed the Austrians (and later the Russians) into his home outside Zurich, showing them where to place their pickets and how to smooth relationships with the authorities of the local villages. In times of civil war, patriotism becomes subjective. Landolt went precipitately into exile when the French armies occupied Zurich, but returned after two years, living quietly on his tiny estate or as guest of friends. He held minor office under Napoleon's Mediation, and survived to see the Restoration in l8l4. Very unusually for his class and century, he never married.
ZURICH: Part Two

The City of Zurich A convenient point to start the epic of the history of the city of Zurich is the Richtebrief of around 1290-l3OO. This is a collation of customs and decisions, from which a picture of the origins of the self-government of the town can be formed, and which provides a stage from which to look forward and backward. It is the custom and good usage of a borough with an origin in common law, situated on the lands of a sovereign ecclesiastical foundation which is a tenant in chief of the Empire. In this town, in 1290, there are still vestiges of a pre-Abbey time when the Emperor, king of Germany, owned the whole estate, land and people. Before the time of the Richtebrief, the town itself had acquired some sort of legal personality, sufficient to be recognised and to obtain further rights. The Emperor had recognised it as a free city without thereby diminishing the rights of the Abbess, but slightly increasing them. Zurich as described in the Richtebrief seems not yet fundamentally different from a village in structure, but in reality it had already become so: such documents are out of date when written. Zurich was already a free imperial city. It had been called a town in the beginning of the tenth century, and in that century there is a mention of resident merchants, which implies a market and a new settlement on the right bank of the river, the present Altstadt, which was then a suburbium, Vorburg, Faubourg, of the oldest (and the twentieth century) city. This oldest city was built on the south bank between the Lindenhof and the Fraumuenster. It was probably in the early tenth century that walls were built enclosing the two ecclesiastical foundations, the men's foundation, Grossmuenster, on the right (north) bank of the river and the noble ladies foundation on the left bank. This wall enclosed also the houses of the town-dwellers, mostly serfs of the abbess, and the merchants. Because of these walls, the monastery of Dissentis sent its valuables to Zurich in 940, to be safe from the raids of the Saracens. The dedication of the two abbeys to Saints Felix and Regula supports continuity of settlement from late Roman times, and the dedication of the parish church of the town on the left bank to St Peter may be earlier still. The Romans had found a celtic tribal capital at the feet of the Lindenhof, a natural citadel, and had made a way-station there (and at Tuggen) on the route to the Walensee. Later, when the Rhine became the northern frontier of the Empire, they established a castellum at Zurich: the name itself 11

is pre-Roman. Swiss place name specialists concur in dissociating the name from the tribe mentioned by Caesar as the Tigurini, and from the river T(h)ur as in Thurgau, and allow the connection with the Celtic dwr for Zurich but not for the other two names. Government During the ninth and tenth centuries Zurich was often visited by Emperors, who established there a residence . In the eleventh century it came briefly to the King of Burgundy, who struck coins there, and thereafter it came to the Duchy of Swabia and into the hands of the Dukes of Zaehringen as Rectors of Burgundy, a fief of the Empire. When this dynasty died out in 1218, Zurich came again into the hand of the Emperor, who appointed a Vogt, a moveable official, to look after the royal interests as regards the two abbeys and also, now, as regards the townsmen, a new factor. These latter already had a Council on the Italian model after 1220. By 1225, contemporaneously with Berne, Basle, and Fribourg, they had a seal, Sigillum Consilii Thuricensium. By a gradual progression, documents were issued in the name of council and citizens, and after 1338, of citizens. The Council, which later became the Petty Council, consisted of twelve councillors at any one time, rotating among a larger number of permanent councillors -- there were thirty-six at the time of the Brun rebellion -- probably recruited in practice by co-option without much interference by the Reichsvogt or the abbess. By the time of the Richtebrief, the Council was half city-nobles and half Merchants, but soon afterwards two thirds were merchants. At the time of the death of Rudolf of Hapsburg in 1291, the city had faced a choice between three destinies. The nobles represented the world of chivalry. As knights they led horsemen into battle, as churchmen they supported the diocesan clergy and the ancient abbeys against the new orders of mendicant friars, in their leisure they followed the culture of the Minnesingers, and they ornamented their stone houses with heraldry. They intermarried with the local nobility and competed with them for prebends in the church. Under their rule, Zurich became a centre of the silk industry and other luxury fabrics. They were loyal to the Empire, and to the Hapsburgs, of whose domains Zurich was a member. It might have been Zurich's destiny to be the residence of a court The interest of the merchants, trading to Strasbourg and the Netherlands, and into Italy and to the East, was more sober and pragmatic. They were on the side of the Empire against the church, and wished to employ the Inner Swiss only as a counterbalance to, and on occasion against, Austria, though they were much concerned to keep open the Gotthard pass. Left to themselves, both the merchants and the nobles had an interest in maintaining the Austrian connexion, envisaging the destiny of Zurich as a trading and manufacturing town within Vorder-Oesterreich, linking Austria with Burgundy, not as capital of a self-sufficient colonial empire. The idea of self-sufficiency is destructive of the idea of a trading city. The policy of the guilds, the unenfranchised handworkers in the city, was alliance with the Swiss confederates against the Hapsburgs. Guilds were outlawed by the whole tendency of the Richtebrief.The guilds saw the destiny of the city as mastery of the local countryside, a source of foodstuffs and of foot- soldiers, using the city as a market town, with a commercial and manufacturing monopoly. Their ideology was directed against the idea of nobility, their religion in sympathy with the begging- monks.

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The Guild Revolution In 1336, some disaffected town nobles realised that it would be possible to employ the rising power of the guilds against the merchants, the Reich and the abbess, and to establish an urban tyranny on the model of, say, Verona, in which the old town nobility could retain its leadership. Rudolf Brun, and Rudiger von Manesse (owner of the famous manuscript collection of the South German minnesingers), stormed the Council at the head of the Guilds. The councillors narrowly escaped with their lives, and took refuge in Rapperswil. Zurich became a commune, united by oath, accepting a new Constitution, the Geschworener Brief. Brun was received as Master of the Burghers, ie, of the guildsmen, for life. A council was established composed as to one half of the Twelve (or thirteen) Guilds, and as to the other half of the old ruling council, now called the Constaffel, which was itself organised as a super-guild and contained the nobles, the merchants and the noble trades ( such as goldsmiths), as well as the outsiders to the guild organisation. In this, the model of Strasbourg was followed. The dictatorship which Brun assumed was taken from Italy. The refugees established a sort of government-in-exile, under the protection of the count of Rapperswil, and indirectly of the Duke of Austria, then in conflict with the non-Hapsburg Emperor. Austria eventually became reconciled to the Emperor, but the policy of the new Emperor, Charles IV, continued to be in favour of Zurich, which obtained legitimation of its control over the Lake and set about purchasing the reversion of mortgaged noble estates bordering it. In Zurich, the legitimate patriciate essayed a coup d'etat in l35O, led by exiles from Rapperswil who had smuggled themselves into the city. The rising had been betrayed, and Brun suppressed it with Italian ruthlessness. The wounded rebels were left to die where they fell in the streets with no-one permitted to move them for three days, and those arrested had their bones broken and were woven through the spokes of a wheel hung outside the walls of their own houses, alive, likewise during three days and nights. The terror of life inside the walls of a free city is dramatically illustrated. The city walls were destroyed by liberal governments in the last century, but the Old Town on the right bank retains its medieval character. The story of the Guild Revolution is known to those who have received schooling in the canton, and the memory of it is freshened by statues and street names, and by the whole appearance of the old town. The history of Zurich, is not local history, like the history of Manchester, but national in the sense of cantonal, and national, in the sense of federal-Swiss, history. German towns (Cologne, for example) have similar histories and are aware of them, but they are more submerged by larger histories. In a Swiss canton histories are state-forming, even official, myths. Their very cruelty helps to imprint them. There is also present in Zurich an anti-national strain of political allegiance, which surfaces today as anti-militarism or "Green" politics: this also finds something in cantonal history with which to identify itself. It is the essence of Myth that thinking about politics couches itself in events supposed to be historical Zurich joins the Confederacy Brun now felt the need of allies. There were negotiations with Austria, which fell through, then in l351 the draft of the Austrian treaty found a new use, it formed the basis of a treaty of accession to the Swiss union. Zurich had already entered into a Landfrieden 13

with Schwyz and Uri (supposedly in l291, it is undated) which lasted some two years, ie until the Emperor-elect had established himself as effectual ruler in Germany. On the death of any ruler, accession was not then automatic, he had to establish himself de jure and de facto. In the meanwhile, the whole basis of descending sovereignty temporarily disappeared. A new sovereignty had to be built up from below, by means of oath. Many of these oath-associations lasted longer than envisaged: the Swiss confederacy itself is usually claimed as one of these. After internal peace had been secured by oath of all free men within the community, the communities standing directly under the Empire themselves joined their neighbours in oath fellowships, until the king came again with his army to Basle, or an indeterminate period,"for ever". On the death of Rudolf of Hapsburg, Zurich, Schwyz and Uri entered into temporary confederacy, to escape the law of the wolf and being swallowed by other neighbours, notably the Hapsburgs. In 1351 the emergency was of a different sort, but Zurich and the confederates, claiming to be free communities under the Reich and with the right of war and peace, formed an alliance, with the three cantons and Lucerne, reserving the rights of the Emperor and existing treaties, but taking precedence of all future treaties. There was little unusual in all this, and indeed there is a certain congruity between revolutionary Zurich and the revolutionary origin of the three cantons. The terms of the alliance are not sufficiently dissimilar from those of the treaty of 1353 made with Berne, and already discussed, to merit much further attention here. There was a specific guarantee by the contracting parties of each others' internal constitutions, notably of the Guild constitution of Zurich and the personal rule of Lord Rudolf Brun, knight. The guarantee further specified that the freedoms and charters of each town, Land, village and estate, with their courts and good customs were to be preserved in their entirety. This raised the rights of subject territories of Zurich to the rank of federal law, limiting the city's sovereignty, and was to give trouble later. The same procedure for arbitration as for Lucerne and, later, Berne, was spelled out. This was seldom to be followed in every detail, but was to prove the germ of the Federal Tagsatzung, of which Zurich was to be Vorort or president. Already in the treaty of accession, Zurich takes precedence of Lucerne and the three cantons, and retains this precedence when Berne joins. There is no evidence of an intention on Zurich's part to treat the union as permanent. Within two years the emergency which gave rise to the union had passed; Zurich, Lucerne and the three cantons made peace with the Duke of Austria, to whom Zug and Glarus were abandoned. In the last year of his life, 1360, Brun was granted a pension by the Duke, secured on lands within Glarus. It is necessary to remember that the expression "Zurich joined the Confederacy" conceals the reality that one party within Zurich was on the side of the Swiss, the other party on the side of Austria. Something like this is true of all the cantons. In return for the alliance, the confederacy was prepared to support its own party inside the canton by force of arms, and thus to perpetuate its rule. Until 1453, when the treaty of accession was revised and backdated by a century, Zurich was frequently on the Austrian side against the Swiss, but good fortune, and the diplomatic adroitness of Lucerne, ensured that at the important junctures, such as Sempach (1386) and the seizure of the Aargau oin 1415, Zurich was sufficiently on the side of the Confederates to gain a share of the loot. During this period, Zurich extended its influence into East Switzerland, dominated 14

Thurgau, laid the basis of its future influence in Appenzell and St Gallen, and lost the Hoefe and Pfaeffikon to Schwyz, and the monopoly over the Walensee route to the Grisons passes. The countship of Kibourg, representing nearly half the area of countryside subject to Zurich was briefly obtained l424-1442, and finally in 1452. The acquisition of Winterthur in 1467 was almost the end of territorial expansion. The town had opted to be a sort of corporate country squire, a miniature imperial power, rather than a centre of trade and industry, and only started to reverse this role in the eighteenth century, and after l798. The Waldmann Affair Hans Waldmann (1435-1489), like several other great figures in Zurich history before the seventeenth century, Stssi for example, or Zwingli himself, was not by birth a citizen of Zurich, but he came from the Zug countryside, and was therefore not "a subject" but, as a free man in a republican state, potentially qualified to exercise sovereignty in his homeland. His mother, a poor widow, brought him to Zurich. Hans was apprenticed to a tailor and leatherworker, and with his brother obtained the citizenship of the city in 1452 and membership of a relatively humble guild. But he married a very rich widow, and with her capital started making a fortune in old iron. At the same time he also made a reputation as a soldier, and became a captain in the mercenary service. Through the influence of his wife's family he obtained he became administrator of the lands of the abbey of Einsiedeln located in the territory of Zurich, in effect the ambassador of Einsiedeln in Zurich, a respected office of profit that brought with it the tenure of a noble residence in the city, and which would qualify him for membership of the Constaffel, the knights' society (a knight could not join a Zunft called such) . Either as such, or perhaps as Zunftmeister of the Guild of the Camel, which was then at the other end of the social ladder, he became a member of the Council. Waldmann's military career was outstanding, and he was knighted at or shortly before the battle of Morat (1476), where he, like other heads of the cantonal republics, performed his duties in the field: in his case, his task was to safeguard the confederacy's position in Fribourg. The casus belli only arose when the Burgundians crossed the Bernese frontier, and the battle was postponed for a day to allow the Zurich force to arrive by a famous forced march by night along rain-sodden roads. In parallel with military activity a his diplomatic career in the service of Zurich and the Confederacy. Waldmann was involved in the negotiations for the treaty, the Ewige Richtung, which made lasting peace between Austria and the Confederacy (1474). After the battle of Morat, with Bubenberg of Berne and Imhof of Uri, he represented the Confederacy at a mission to the court of Louis XI, (to decide, or as it turned out, to sell, the future of the Franche-Comte which would have dearly like to join itself to the Swiss)and was thenceforth in receipt of a pension from the king of France, indeed, pensions from Austria and Milan also descended upon him, a practice which then only drew adverse comment when an upstart such as Waldmann benefited from it. The nature of Waldmann's power compelled him to pass on his fortune to his followers. The years between the victory at Murten and the defeat at Marignano (1515), the time of das Thorichte Leben, la Vie Folle, form a period when a moral judgment on Switzerland must be suspended by historians. It was a time when Switzerland could do as she liked, one's heart beats, but one's stomach turns, an age of worldly glory, a 15

mis-spent youth, when Switzerland dissipated the chance of becoming a unitary state and the liberator of the German peasantry. Zurich (with Berne and Uri) attempted to lead this age, and Waldmann for a time led Zurich. The theme of this book is confined to the idea of the State, and to the Canton as State. Although this mad period is a closed one, lessons about the nature of the state can be drawn: they fit into Macchiavelli's schema. Waldmann's career follows point by point that of the sixth and eighth chapters of The Prince. Of ignoble origin, he ascended by manly courage (Virtu) and Fortune to a republican Principality by infamous means, made new Laws and created a state. His achievement did not last, and is condemned by history. From our own standpoint of historical retrospection, we may judge that Zwingli, a generation later, did the same thing, but better. He provided a more coherent ideology, and formed a better power base both in the city and among the richer peasantry in the villages. Zwingli's state, in many particulars, survived him. Within Zurich, Waldmann had been elected Obristzunftmeister in l480, and thus became a member of the Petty Council, and probably of a Secret Council of Three with absolute powers. In l483.he arranged the arrest and trial of a German knight, Richard of Hohenburg, who had bought himself into the citizenship of Zurich and the friendship of Waldmann, to obtain the towm's assistance in a lawsuit: his opponents had obtained the support of Strasbourg. Hohenburg was compelled to admit under torture the crime of sodomy (a confession which he immediately retracted) and was publicly burnt alive, a ceremony which Waldmann watched with a drinking party from the balcony of the Constaffel, jeering. Employing the terror of his power, Waldmann was elected Third Burgomaster, a new post created especially for him. Under his influence, the constitution, the Geschworene Brief, was changed in favour of the tradesmens' guilds, the Constaffel taking a place equal to a single Zunft. The policy of the tradesmen was to assert the salt and market monopoly of the town, and its control over textile and other manufacture, which was spreading ito the countryside, and to assert the political dominance of townsmen over peasantry. This was especially in question in military affairs: countrymen had enisted as mercenary soldiers in foreign pay, and the master-weapon, the halberd was cheap and widely diffused among those with the skill to use it On the federal level also the town cantons were in dispute with the Landsgemeinde cantons To master these difficulties, Zurich issued a great Sittenmandat, a proclamation to reform, and to police, morality, in twentieth- century analysis to impose urban-style capitalist, monetary, attitudes upon a countryside organised by immemorial tradition and exchange of services. It was colonialism without the benefit of missionaries (until the time of Zwingli), and based on direct rule. The nobility had been destroyed, its castles burnt during the wars with Schwyz and its jurisdiction usurped by the city and undermined by the city's wealth. The pre-Swiss organisation of the Landschaft was still remembered, and the big peasants who controlled village society had not been squared, on the contrary, their newly acquired hunting rights as free men were attacked by the Mandat. The countrymen rose in rebellion, organising themselves in their traditional county meetings or Landsgemeinden. In March 1489, they camped beneath the walls of the city. Neighbouring cantons, bound by the terms of the Union to support the governors of the city, sent representatives to perform the not- unpleasant task of mediating between town and subjects. Waldmann was disliked by the democratic cantons on ideological grounds, and by Lucerne as having kidnapped and then beheaded Frischans Tilling. The 16

confederates imposed a compromise solution, favourable to the countryside (whose legal position was sound). Waldmann delayed carrying out this decision, and took a brief vacation to the warm springs of nearby Baden, when he entered into friendly, perhaps treasonable, conversation with the representatives of the Emperor. On his return, he found his enemies in charge. Waldmann's chief of police was assassinated, the Great Council met to hear the views of the ambassadors of the other cantons. A crowd armed with spear and halberd surrounded the Town Hall, and the representative of Lucerne agreed with them and those inside the besieged Town Hall to hand over Waldmann , and his supporters as Masters of Guilds, to the crowd, and to their imprisonment in the the Wellenburg tower. After, or while, being tortured, Waldmann confessed treason. He had expected a terrible death, but was only beheaded, along with several other guild masters, and his property confiscated. The country districts received new charters, guaranteed by Berne, who had been a spectator, and by the other cantons. In 1525, the peasant rebels demanded that the city observe them, in vain. At the end of the century the charters, the Waldmannbriefe, were all confiscated, and became forgotten. Zwingli's Reformation had succeeded where Waldmann had failed.

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