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Stampfer and the Zurich thaler
Stampfer and the Zurich thaler
The Zurich goldsmith Jakob Stampfer revolutionised the minting of coins - not only of Switzerland, but of the whole known world at that time. A triple thaler from 1559, which Künker will auction on 2 February 2023, illustrates how he did it.
After reading this article you know:

  • What the historical development of coinage and the rolling mint looks like.
  • What the Zurich mass minting is.
  • What the impact and success of the Zurich mint was.
1.
The revolution of coinage

It was not a new idea to mint coins by machine rather than by hand. In Augsburg, clever mechanical engineers had developed the first minting machines for the French royal court, with which Henry II (1547-1559) had representative showpieces minted. But these machines did not catch on. There were economic and social reasons for this, as we learn from a memorandum with which Reinhard the Elder, Count of Solms, tried to convince Ferdinand I to buy the rolling mill he had developed with the help of Augsburg technicians. Reinhard saw the greatest advantage of the new technology as being that it would finally be possible to replace the demanding and costly mint masters together with their overpaid journeymen with simple smiths. And that was precisely why all the craftsmen of traditional mints boycotted any new, more efficient form of coinage: they feared losing their privileged position. 

And so it is not surprising that it was not a mint master who used a functioning rolling mill for the first time, but a Zurich goldsmith and politician.

Oldest reliable depiction of the Grossmünster and the Wasserkirche, end of the 15th century, by Hans Leu.
2.
The historical background

But first we have to ask ourselves why such an extensive mass coinage was necessary in Zurich in the 1550s. To do this, we have to go back in history a scant twenty years: In 1531, the Zurich Council placed the secularised church properties under its own administration. What was supposed to be used to maintain the poor was, in the eyes of the pious councillors, much better suited to pay off the debts the city had incurred from the Second Kappeler War. When these were paid off, the council used the income between 1540 and 1550 to buy up manorial rights and territories in the surrounding area of Zurich. In his unpublished dissertation of 1946, Hans Hüssy determined the sums involved and found that in ten years over 100,000 pounds flowed into the expansion of power. 

These pounds were not coined coins, but a currency of account. One pound was equivalent to 8 theoretical bats or 20 theoretical shillings, and the exchange rate against the real bats and the real shilling fluctuated, depending on how much the price of silver rose or fell. Nonetheless, even if we convert the 100,000 pounds into bill shillings, we are at an impressive 2 million that was spent on the increase in power. And this means for us, conversely, that the Zurich Council made a surplus of an average of 10,000 pounds or 200,000 bill shillings every year from the confiscated church goods. 

Around 1550 there seems to have been nothing left to buy, and so the Zurich Council decided to hoard most of this surplus in the sacristy of the Grossmünster, in good talers to be minted according to the Reichsmünzordnung of 1551. The remaining silver was to be minted into high-quality small coins in order to promote Zurich's trade with the good coinage.

3.
Jakob Stampfer and the mass coinage of Zurich

The city of Zurich engaged an experienced craftsman to mint the coins, Hans Gutenson, a mintmaster from St. Gallen. In the six years of his work, he produced 984,772 thalers and 60 million groschen, plus 2.6 million smaller coins, with the help of 58 journeymen minters. But our attention is not on him, but on the lateral entrant who at the same time shaped not only thalers, but monetary history with his rolling mint: Jakob Stampfer. 

Jakob Stampfer was born around 1505/6 as the son of a Zurich goldsmith. After an initial apprenticeship in his father's workshop, he probably went to Augsburg to complete his itinerant years there. Even though we have no archival proof of Stamper's stay in Augsburg, stylistic and logical reasons speak in favour of a journeyman's period in this South German centre of goldsmithing. Now we have already heard that people in Augsburg were experimenting with roller embossing. Stampfer could therefore have seen prototypes, drawings or models of roller embossing works in Augsburg. 

In 1530 Jakob Stampfer returned to Zurich and made a career for himself. In 1533 he became master of the Zurich guild zum Kämbel. In 1539 he was given the office of taster. In 1544 he was a member of the Great Council, in 1555 of the Small Council. And already since 1553 - a year before Gutenson was appointed - Stampfer sat on all the high-calibre commissions that dealt with coinage matters. Sometime around 1558, Stampfer also began to mint coins on behalf of the city of Zurich. We do not have a certificate of appointment like that of his colleague Gutenson. But Stampfer's products have characteristics that clearly show us that they were not produced with the hammer of journeymen minters but by means of a rolling mill.

Zurich. Triple Talerklippe 1559. Probably the only specimen in commerce. Lightly worked on the areas outside the motif, very fine to excellent. Reserve price: CHF 30.000,-. From Auction Künker 380 (2 February 2023), No. 445.
Detail of the reconstructed rolling mill in Hall: Between the two rollers, a long zain was stamped with the coin motif on both sides under great pressure. The Hall mint, developed by Hans Vogler, was a further development of Jakob Stampfer's invention. Photo: KW.

What was fundamentally new about the roller mint? Well, stretching mills, on which coins could be rolled out to an exact thickness, had been known to mints for a long time. What was new were the two rollers into which the coin image was cut in such a way that it was stamped into a long zain on both sides under the great pressure developed by such a stretching mechanism. In a second step, the coin was punched out of the zain with a punching iron. 

Our triple Talerklippe, which will be offered in the coming Künker auction on 2 February 2023, was struck on such a rolling mill. Characteristic of it is the even pressure that was exerted. Despite the thick blank and the finely cut die, one can see the coin design in all its details. No journeyman minter, no matter how skilled, was able to produce a comparably evenly struck coin with a hammer.

A strip of wood minted by the replica rolling mill, which has no flowing properties, shows how compressed the coin images must be cut on the roller in order to be correctly reproduced in the coin image. Photo: KW.
Zain minted on the replica rolling mill: We see that nubs were engraved in the roller to facilitate the steady passage of the zain through the rolling mill. Photo: KW.

The great art of Jakob Stampfer was to adjust the rollers so that the obverse and reverse sides were really exactly opposite each other, and to cut the coin images in such a way that the metal flow resulting from the minting process was taken into account. Stampfer succeeded in both. He was a master of his craft, which we can also see in the high artistic quality of his work. 

The processing of the edge areas of the cliff outside the coinage should not surprise us in this piece. During the processing, the imprints of the knobs were removed, which served on the roller to draw the zain on slowly and evenly. We can assume that the cliff with its heavy weight was intended as a diplomatic gift. And that, of course, should be as beautiful as possible. On some other cliffs, by the way, such a burl pattern has certainly survived; occasionally it was even used as a decorative element.

Peterhofstatt in Zurich; the Haus zur Mugge, where Stampfer lived, is the house with the shop window. Incidentally, Johann Caspar Lavater lived in the house on the far left. Photo: KW.
4.
The Zurich rolling mill and its impact

We do not know exactly where Jakob Stampfer's rolling mill was located. Certainly, Stampfer did not emboss in his residence with the beautiful name zur Mugge, which was located on Peterhofstatt and much too far from the Limmat. After all, rolling mills, like mills, were powered by water. Therefore we may assume that Stampfer's rolling mill was built down on the banks of the Limmat. 

In 1561, Hans Gutenson's contract expired. From then on, Stampfer was solely responsible for the minting of Zurich coins. At this point the mass minting was over; we can only guess why. Perhaps Zurich also suffered from the first harbingers of the Little Ice Age, which drastically reduced all agricultural yields. Perhaps the harvests of the confiscated church estates simply no longer brought in enough to generate large reserves. 

In any case, Jakob Stampfer probably no longer had enough orders for his rolling mill. That is why he gathered around him - sometime in the years 1562/3 - a consortium to help him market his invention to foreign princes. It was known that there was interest. So in 1561 the Milanese gubernator wrote to the Zurich council to inform them of the experience they had had with Stampfer's rolling mill. In 1563, high administrative officials from Innsbruck travelled to Zurich to see for themselves the efficiency of the machine. 

Nevertheless, Stampfer did not enter coin production on a large scale. This could well have been because too many people wanted to make big money with his invention. Although none of them owned a mint, they developed a great talent for intrigue and deprived Stampfer of his lucrative orders with their unrealistic dumping offers to foreign princes. Stampfer had to take legal action again and again to protect his rights. At some point he probably lost interest in his invention. 

In 1566 he took over the Zurich bailiwick of the Neuamt. Three years later he was appointed bailiff of Wädenswil. It must have been much more pleasant to earn his money as a Zurich administrator. Stampfer died on 2 July 1579. 

It was not Jakob Stampfer, but a member of his consortium, who was responsible for the fact that Zurich technology eventually spread throughout the world. Hans Vogler succeeded in installing a functioning rolling mill in the Tyrolean mint of Hall, which became the model for all the Habsburg rolling mills that soon also minted silver in Spain and the New World. Vogler himself earned nothing from it. He had set his price much too low. 

Literature: 

Emil Hahn, Die Zürcher Münzausprägung in den Jahren 1555 bis 1561. SNR 18 (1912), S. 314-333 

Emil Hahn, Jakob Stampfer, Goldschmied, Medailleur und Stempelschneider von Zürich 1505-1579. Zürich (1915) 

Rainer Henrich, Vom Luftikus zum Münzwerkregierer. Die Karriere Hans Voglers d. J. von Zürich (1524-1574/5). In: Hans Ulrich Bächtold (Hg.), Von Cyprian zur Walzenprägung – Streiflichter auf Zürcher Geist und Kultur der Bullingerzeit. Zug (2001), S. 71-104 

Ursula Kampmann und Kurt Wyprächtiger, Jakob Stampfer und die Anfänge der Walzenprägung. In: Stadt Hall in Tirol und Hall AG (Hg.), Zentrum der Innovation – Die Münze Hall in Tirol. Internationales Symposium Hall in Tirol am 12. Oktober 2012. Hall (2013), S. 12-25

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