Zurich was an independent (reichsfrei) city or city-state from 1218 to 1798. The town was fortified with a city wall from the 13th to the 17th century, and with more elaborate ramparts constructed in the 17th to 18th century and mostly demolished in the 1830s to 1870s.
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There had been a first city wall dating to the 11th or 12th century. The existence of such an early wall had been suggested, but the mainstream view assumed that the town had been unfortified – the remains of the roman castle and a so called Kaiserpfalz on Lindenhof hill excepted – before the 13th century, until the chance discovery of remnants of the first wall during the 1990s construction work at the central library.
Following the extinction of the main line of the Zähringer family in 1218, Zurich became a free imperial city. Over the following decades, a city wall was constructed over a length of some 2,400 m.
From 1642, an impressive set of ramparts was built based on plans by Hans Georg Werdmüller and Johann Ardüser, at an immense cost and completed only in the second half of the 18th century. The ramparts included fifteen bastions, one of them built inside the Limmat river (the Bauschänzli, location of the former Ravelin Kratz).
The ramparts were mostly destroyed in 1834, but parts of the walls and the western moat remain visible.