When the conquest-minded nations of Europe stretched their arms in the years following the Middle Ages, Switzerland became highly desirable as a buffer state. In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, military competence depended greatly on the number of fighting men and square footage available that a country had to offer (“Switzerland in Europe”). Switzerland, not the peaceful state of polemical neutrality it embodies today, was a major world power with the beginning of the 1300s and the first Swiss victory over the Habsburg Leopold I, Duke of Austria, at the Battle of Morgarten (“Europe: 1300-1400 A.D.”). After this war, Switzerland found its identity among the great European military powers and began to expand its borders to eventually encompass all of what comprises modern-day Switzerland in 1515 A.D. (“Switzerland in Europe”). Just like modern-day Israel, Switzerland was heavily influenced by her surrounding nations in wartime and peace, beginning with the struggle for her trade passages through the Alps and culminating with the still-polemic nature of Swiss neutrality that remains to this day.
In the late thirteenth century, craftsmen “specialized in production of high quality goods became more important… [as] did the roads crossing the Alps” (Jud). Because trade was increasingly valuable in a shrinking world, the peoples of the Swiss lands began to innovate ways to create trade routes. The most direct route was through the Schöllenen canyon (illustrated in the photograph to the left, though the bridges date to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) in the canton Uri. However, even after the technology was developed to cut into steep rocks and build catwalks and pipelines into the St. Gotthard pass circa 1200 A.D., the Swiss were unable to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Almost immediately after the completion of these trade routes, the Habsburg counts jealously began to eye the Swiss trade route through the Alps. The cantons of Switzerland, not yet bound by a formalized treaty of alliance, quickly fell prey to the taxes and exemptions of German king Friedrich II for his military aid in Italian wars encroaching on the Swiss lands. One downfall to the age-old dynastic system of monarchy was the transience of that monarch’s commands. Thus, “when King Rudolf of Habsburg, the first German Emperor from this house, died in 1291, people from Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden feared that the counts of Habsburg would try to regain influence in their territories” (Jud). This very fear of the Habsburg counts not only motivated the main cantons of Switzerland to stand in solidarity, but also provided the background for the legend of William Tell (Wilhelm Tell), who stood as a symbol of Swiss liberty and whose crossbow demonstrated a violent intent to secure peace even at the cost of the assassination of tyrannical rulers (Jud).
Most historians would agree that the communities of the Swiss lands had sworn oaths of alliance many years before the turn of the thirteenth century, but it was the Federal Charter of 1291 that first formally bound the three original cantons (Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden) of Swiss land together in a written document (“Switzerland in Europe”). While this written document created a more formidable force facing the Austrian Habsburgs that controlled much of Switzerland, the Habsburg rulers still aimed to maintain control over the newly opened St. Gotthard pass. In 1315 at the Battle of Morgarten, the tables turned when “a small Swiss army routed Austrian troops” (“Consolidation and expansion”). According to Presence Switzerland, this was a turning point in the history of Switzerland’s endeavors for independence. The victory at Morgarten also retains lasting importance because it truly bound the Swiss cantons together, much like the War of 1812 unified the United States. The author of “Consolidation and expansion,” representing Presence Switzerland, notes that “in the 40 years after [the Battle of] Morgarten, the Confederation gradually expanded. Lucerne joined in 1332, Zurich in 1351, Glarus and Zug in 1352, and Bern in 1353. The word “canton” was not used at this time…they were known [instead] collectively as the “Eight Old Places” (“Consolidation and expansion”). According to Danforth Prince, author of Frommer’s Switzerland, the “Eight Old Places” included the aforementioned five cities that joined the original “Perpetual Alliance” of the rural forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden (Prince 20). Though throughout Europe, many similar pacts and alliances were made within countries to provide solidarity and military defensibility, this Swiss Confederation remains unusual “in that [its] allied rural areas…which were its first three members [were not] eventually swallowed up [by] the rural members of the alliance” (“Consolidation and expansion”). Switzerland quickly consolidated its various groups of peoples in order to throw off the yoke of their Habsburg rulers, and would soon accumulate enough strength to be freed of the influence of the Holy Roman Empire.
But the Swiss Confederation was not finished expanding its borders in 1350. Although the “Eight Old Places” would not add any new members to their alliance, they still conquered and resisted the Habsburgs for the rest of the fourteenth century (“Confederate Victories”). The victories at Sempach in 1386 and Näfels in 1388 “dealt a blow to Habsburg claims in ventral Switzerland from which they [the Habsburg counts] never recovered” (“Confederate Victories”). As the fifteenth century began, so did the Confederates put on a new face and they began to aggressively pursue the Austrians. The “Eight Old Places” took Aargau in 1415 and Thurgau in 1460: both of which make up exceedingly important northern borders of modern-day Switzerland. Finally, in an ultimate act to cut all ties with the Habsburg dynasty, the Swiss Confederation “broke free of the Holy Roman Empire in 1439” (Prince 20). However, even after formally declaring her independence from the Holy Roman Empire, the Swiss Confederation was far from polemical peace.
The next war that met the horizon of the “Eight Old Places” was the Swabian War at the end of the fifteenth century. In 1498 the Habsburg count Maximilian I “tried to introduce reforms that would bind the [Swiss] Confederates closer to the empire” (“The End of Expansion”). This caused a heavy backlash from the freedom-minded Confederates, who, “fearing this threat…made alliances with the three leagues which now make up the canton of Graubünden who also felt threatened by the Austrian [Habsburg counts]” (“The End of Expansion”). Fighting quickly ended with a resounding victory at Dornach, where the Treaty of Basel “implicitly recognized the Confederates’ independence of the [Holy Roman] Empire” (“The End of Expansion”). Presence Switzerland notes that while “Maximilian I…was the last Habsburg to have any realistic chance of reclaiming his family’s rights in what is now Switzerland…his attempts to bind them closer to the [Holy Roman] Empire provoked the Swabian War which gave them de facto independence” (“The End of Expansion”). Though the Confederation had formally declared independence 70 years prior, the Swabian War was what truly brought liberation from the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg dynasty.
After the Swabian War, the Swiss Confederation seemed unstoppable, having humiliated the greatest power in central Europe at the time. Because their reputation preceded them, the Swiss found that rendering mercenary services were greatly profitable, landing in the fray of the then ambitious territorial struggle over Italy. The Italian campaigns were a split bag for the Swiss people, as the Swiss initially supported the French, but then turned to help the Italian Papacy in 1510. Though this duplicity seemed to benefit the Swiss Confederation when they defeated the French at Novara in 1513, the tables turned in two years when the French and their Venetian allies (still hurt by the initial Swiss antagonizing of Italy) “[brought the Swiss Confederation’s] territorial ambitions to an abrupt and final halt” at the Battle of Marignano in 1515 (“The End of Expansion”). Besides ending the Swiss expansion, the Battle of Marignano also began the era of Switzerland’s “declared…complete neutrality” (Prince 20). Presence Switzerland wrote that though “the Swiss stopped fighting on their own account…instead [they] hired their services out to foreign powers” (“The End of Expansion”). Although Switzerland remained active in wartime via mercenaries, this neutrality paved the road for Switzerland to become the seat and crossroads of commerce and free thought it remains to this day.
The Battle of Marignano of 1515 unequivocally disqualified the Swiss Confederation’s formal involvement in European power struggles by putting an end to its seemingly unstoppable military force (“The End of Expansion”). The Swabian War of 1498 declared the de facto freedom from the Holy Roman Empire which the “Eight Old Places” had so desperately strived to achieve by solidarity in a written declaration of independence seventy years prior (“Confederate Victories”). This solidarity, however, was not spurred onward simply by a utilitarian effort to maintain political aloofness from the rest of central Europe, but was driven by an urge to unite Switzerland to become the greatest military power in Europe in the fourteenth century, though the unified confederacy was small in population and territory. This very unity, along with Switzerland’s formal declared neutrality was what created the atmosphere for philosophers and theologians alike to flee for sanctuary in the walls of Switzerland’s cities in the sixteenth century during the Inquisition and Reformation periods of the Roman Catholic Church (Tahoe). The formal neutrality of Switzerland actually cultivated the ground for a harvest of radical reform when John Calvin would enter the scene in Geneva in 1536, bringing the new ideas of the Christian Reformation to the outwardly peaceful but inwardly feverish “Eight Old Places.”
Works Cited:
"Confederate Victories Undermine the Power of the Nobility." Swissworld.org. Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, 2012.Web. 23 Feb. 2012.http://www.swissworld.org/en/history/middle_ages/the_nobility_undermined/?type=target%3D_sel%3F%3F%3F%3FZ%7B%3F
"Consolidation and expansion." Swissworld.org. Federal Department of Foreign Affairs,
2012.Web. 25 Feb. 2012. http://www.swissworld.org/en/history/middle_ages/consolidation_and_expansion/?type=target%3D_self
"Europe: 1300-1400 AD." History Central. MultiEditor, 2000.Web. 25 Feb.
2012.http://www.historycentral.com/dates/1300ad.html
"The end of expansion: the turn of the 16th century." Swissworld.org. Federal Department of
Foreign Affairs, 2012.Web. 27 Feb. 2012.http://www.swissworld.org/en/history/middle_ages/the_end_of_expansion/?type=target%2525253D_sel%2525253F%2525253F%2525253F%2525253F%2525253F%2525253F%25
"Switzerland in Europe." Swissworld.org. Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, 2012.Web. 15
Feb. 2012. http://www.swissworld.org/en/history/swiss_history/switzerland_in_europe/
Jud, Marcus G.. "A Short History of Switzerland." History of Switzerland. Confoederatio
Helvetica, 2012.Web. 25 Feb. 2012. http://history-switzerland.geschichte-schweiz.ch/swiss-history-summary.html
Prince, Danforth. Frommer's Switzerland. John Wiley & Sons, 2012. eBook.25 Feb.
2012.http://books.google.com/books?id=pxVyvLJ-RrMC&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=Switzerland+in+1300s&source=bl&ots=EkETBJQFWZ&sig=2fwPFoNlL_NXnNW71
Tahoe, Thomas J., Jose M. Duvall and Harold E. Damerow. "Renaissance." Faculty Research
Pages of Economics, Government, and History. Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1997.Web. 21 Feb. 2012.http://faculty.ucc.edu/egh-damerow/renaissance.htm
In the late thirteenth century, craftsmen “specialized in production of high quality goods became more important… [as] did the roads crossing the Alps” (Jud). Because trade was increasingly valuable in a shrinking world, the peoples of the Swiss lands began to innovate ways to create trade routes. The most direct route was through the Schöllenen canyon (illustrated in the photograph to the left, though the bridges date to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries) in the canton Uri. However, even after the technology was developed to cut into steep rocks and build catwalks and pipelines into the St. Gotthard pass circa 1200 A.D., the Swiss were unable to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Almost immediately after the completion of these trade routes, the Habsburg counts jealously began to eye the Swiss trade route through the Alps. The cantons of Switzerland, not yet bound by a formalized treaty of alliance, quickly fell prey to the taxes and exemptions of German king Friedrich II for his military aid in Italian wars encroaching on the Swiss lands. One downfall to the age-old dynastic system of monarchy was the transience of that monarch’s commands. Thus, “when King Rudolf of Habsburg, the first German Emperor from this house, died in 1291, people from Uri, Schwyz and Unterwalden feared that the counts of Habsburg would try to regain influence in their territories” (Jud). This very fear of the Habsburg counts not only motivated the main cantons of Switzerland to stand in solidarity, but also provided the background for the legend of William Tell (Wilhelm Tell), who stood as a symbol of Swiss liberty and whose crossbow demonstrated a violent intent to secure peace even at the cost of the assassination of tyrannical rulers (Jud). Most historians would agree that the communities of the Swiss lands had sworn oaths of alliance many years before the turn of the thirteenth century, but it was the Federal Charter of 1291 that first formally bound the three original cantons (Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden) of Swiss land together in a written document (“Switzerland in Europe”). While this written document created a more formidable force facing the Austrian Habsburgs that controlled much of Switzerland, the Habsburg rulers still aimed to maintain control over the newly opened St. Gotthard pass. In 1315 at the Battle of Morgarten, the tables turned when “a small Swiss army routed Austrian troops” (“Consolidation and expansion”). According to Presence Switzerland, this was a turning point in the history of Switzerland’s endeavors for independence. The victory at Morgarten also retains lasting importance because it truly bound the Swiss cantons together, much like the War of 1812 unified the United States. The author of “Consolidation and expansion,” representing Presence Switzerland, notes that “in the 40 years after [the Battle of] Morgarten, the Confederation gradually expanded. Lucerne joined in 1332, Zurich in 1351, Glarus and Zug in 1352, and Bern in 1353. The word “canton” was not used at this time…they were known [instead] collectively as the “Eight Old Places” (“Consolidation and expansion”). According to Danforth Prince, author of Frommer’s Switzerland, the “Eight Old Places” included the aforementioned five cities that joined the original “Perpetual Alliance” of the rural forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden (Prince 20). Though throughout Europe, many similar pacts and alliances were made within countries to provide solidarity and military defensibility, this Swiss Confederation remains unusual “in that [its] allied rural areas…which were its first three members [were not] eventually swallowed up [by] the rural members of the alliance” (“Consolidation and expansion”). Switzerland quickly consolidated its various groups of peoples in order to throw off the yoke of their Habsburg rulers, and would soon accumulate enough strength to be freed of the influence of the Holy Roman Empire.
But the Swiss Confederation was not finished expanding its borders in 1350. Although the “Eight Old Places” would not add any new members to their alliance, they still conquered and resisted the Habsburgs for the rest of the fourteenth century (“Confederate Victories”). The victories at Sempach in 1386 and Näfels in 1388 “dealt a blow to Habsburg claims in ventral Switzerland from which they [the Habsburg counts] never recovered” (“Confederate Victories”). As the fifteenth century began, so did the Confederates put on a new face and they began to aggressively pursue the Austrians. The “Eight Old Places” took Aargau in 1415 and Thurgau in 1460: both of which make up exceedingly important northern borders of modern-day Switzerland. Finally, in an ultimate act to cut all ties with the Habsburg dynasty, the Swiss Confederation “broke free of the Holy Roman Empire in 1439” (Prince 20). However, even after formally declaring her independence from the Holy Roman Empire, the Swiss Confederation was far from polemical peace.
The next war that met the horizon of the “Eight Old Places” was the Swabian War at the end of the fifteenth century. In 1498 the Habsburg count Maximilian I “tried to introduce reforms that would bind the [Swiss] Confederates closer to the empire” (“The End of Expansion”). This caused a heavy backlash from the freedom-minded Confederates, who, “fearing this threat…made alliances with the three leagues which now make up the canton of Graubünden who also felt threatened by the Austrian [Habsburg counts]” (“The End of Expansion”). Fighting quickly ended with a resounding victory at Dornach, where the Treaty of Basel “implicitly recognized the Confederates’ independence of the [Holy Roman] Empire” (“The End of Expansion”). Presence Switzerland notes that while “Maximilian I…was the last Habsburg to have any realistic chance of reclaiming his family’s rights in what is now Switzerland…his attempts to bind them closer to the [Holy Roman] Empire provoked the Swabian War which gave them de facto independence” (“The End of Expansion”). Though the Confederation had formally declared independence 70 years prior, the Swabian War was what truly brought liberation from the Holy Roman Empire and the Habsburg dynasty.
After the Swabian War, the Swiss Confederation seemed unstoppable, having humiliated the greatest power in central Europe at the time. Because their reputation preceded them, the Swiss found that rendering mercenary services were greatly profitable, landing in the fray of the then ambitious territorial struggle over Italy. The Italian campaigns were a split bag for the Swiss people, as the Swiss initially supported the French, but then turned to help the Italian Papacy in 1510. Though this duplicity seemed to benefit the Swiss Confederation when they defeated the French at Novara in 1513, the tables turned in two years when the French and their Venetian allies (still hurt by the initial Swiss antagonizing of Italy) “[brought the Swiss Confederation’s] territorial ambitions to an abrupt and final halt” at the Battle of Marignano in 1515 (“The End of Expansion”). Besides ending the Swiss expansion, the Battle of Marignano also began the era of Switzerland’s “declared…complete neutrality” (Prince 20). Presence Switzerland wrote that though “the Swiss stopped fighting on their own account…instead [they] hired their services out to foreign powers” (“The End of Expansion”). Although Switzerland remained active in wartime via mercenaries, this neutrality paved the road for Switzerland to become the seat and crossroads of commerce and free thought it remains to this day.
The Battle of Marignano of 1515 unequivocally disqualified the Swiss Confederation’s formal involvement in European power struggles by putting an end to its seemingly unstoppable military force (“The End of Expansion”). The Swabian War of 1498 declared the de facto freedom from the Holy Roman Empire which the “Eight Old Places” had so desperately strived to achieve by solidarity in a written declaration of independence seventy years prior (“Confederate Victories”). This solidarity, however, was not spurred onward simply by a utilitarian effort to maintain political aloofness from the rest of central Europe, but was driven by an urge to unite Switzerland to become the greatest military power in Europe in the fourteenth century, though the unified confederacy was small in population and territory. This very unity, along with Switzerland’s formal declared neutrality was what created the atmosphere for philosophers and theologians alike to flee for sanctuary in the walls of Switzerland’s cities in the sixteenth century during the Inquisition and Reformation periods of the Roman Catholic Church (Tahoe). The formal neutrality of Switzerland actually cultivated the ground for a harvest of radical reform when John Calvin would enter the scene in Geneva in 1536, bringing the new ideas of the Christian Reformation to the outwardly peaceful but inwardly feverish “Eight Old Places.”
Works Cited:
"Confederate Victories Undermine the Power of the Nobility." Swissworld.org. Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, 2012.Web. 23 Feb. 2012.http://www.swissworld.org/en/history/middle_ages/the_nobility_undermined/?type=target%3D_sel%3F%3F%3F%3FZ%7B%3F
"Consolidation and expansion." Swissworld.org. Federal Department of Foreign Affairs,
2012.Web. 25 Feb. 2012. http://www.swissworld.org/en/history/middle_ages/consolidation_and_expansion/?type=target%3D_self
"Europe: 1300-1400 AD." History Central. MultiEditor, 2000.Web. 25 Feb.
2012.http://www.historycentral.com/dates/1300ad.html
"The end of expansion: the turn of the 16th century." Swissworld.org. Federal Department of
Foreign Affairs, 2012.Web. 27 Feb. 2012.http://www.swissworld.org/en/history/middle_ages/the_end_of_expansion/?type=target%2525253D_sel%2525253F%2525253F%2525253F%2525253F%2525253F%2525253F%25
"Switzerland in Europe." Swissworld.org. Federal Department of Foreign Affairs, 2012.Web. 15
Feb. 2012. http://www.swissworld.org/en/history/swiss_history/switzerland_in_europe/
Jud, Marcus G.. "A Short History of Switzerland." History of Switzerland. Confoederatio
Helvetica, 2012.Web. 25 Feb. 2012. http://history-switzerland.geschichte-schweiz.ch/swiss-history-summary.html
Prince, Danforth. Frommer's Switzerland. John Wiley & Sons, 2012. eBook.25 Feb.
2012.http://books.google.com/books?id=pxVyvLJ-RrMC&pg=PA3&lpg=PA3&dq=Switzerland+in+1300s&source=bl&ots=EkETBJQFWZ&sig=2fwPFoNlL_NXnNW71
Tahoe, Thomas J., Jose M. Duvall and Harold E. Damerow. "Renaissance." Faculty Research
Pages of Economics, Government, and History. Kendall/Hunt Publishing Co., 1997.Web. 21 Feb. 2012.http://faculty.ucc.edu/egh-damerow/renaissance.htm
Originally I had planned to end with the beginning of the Reformation (as it affected Switzerland, circa 1500 and onwards), but procrastination got the best of me; thus, the very brief introduction of where Zwingli and Calvin would enter God's stage in Switzerland in the 16th century.
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