Zurich

Zürich lies where the Limmat leaves the lake, on the site of the Roman customs post of Turicum, and its patron saints Felix and Regula were honoured in two royal foundations, the Grossmünster and the Fraumünster. After the Zähringen line died out in 1218, the city secured imperial immediacy. Yet its real overlord remained the abbess of the Fraumünster, who had been an imperial princess since 1245, until the Reformation. In 1336 Mayor Rudolf Brun, in the guild revolution, shared government between the old urban nobility and the craft guilds in a constitution that bears his name. In 1351 Zürich joined the Swiss Confederation as a defence against the Habsburgs, and with Bern became its leading place. In 1433 Emperor Sigismund guaranteed the city the rights it had won, and it built a territory of its own around it.

The Old Zürich War over the Toggenburg inheritance cost the city its place in the Confederation until 1450. From 1519 Huldrych Zwingli turned it into a Reformed Rome on the Limmat. His circle produced the Zürich Bible in 1524 and 1525, printed by Christoph Froschauer, and Anabaptists, who broke with Zwingli from 1523, were persecuted: Felix Manz was drowned in the Limmat in January 1527. Zwingli himself fell at Kappel in 1531, and Heinrich Bullinger then held the church together and took in Protestant refugees from Ticino, Italy, France and England, whose weaving and trade helped the city prosper.

In the 18th century a circle around Johann Jakob Bodmer made Zürich a literary city out of proportion to its size. The French invasion of 1798 ended the free republic and its rule over the countryside, and Zürich became the capital of a new canton.