Old Swiss Confederacy


The Old Swiss Confederacy was a loose confederation of independent small states within the Holy Roman Empire. It is the precursor of the modern state of Switzerland.
It formed during the 14th century, from a nucleus in what is now Central Switzerland, expanding to include the cities of Zürich and Berne by the middle of the century. This formed a rare union of rural and urban communes, all of which enjoyed imperial immediacy in the Holy Roman Empire.
This confederation of eight cantons was politically and militarily successful for more than a century, culminating in the Burgundy Wars of the 1470s which established it as a power in the complicated political landscape dominated by France and the Habsburgs. Its success resulted in the addition of more confederates, increasing the number of cantons to thirteen by 1513. The confederacy pledged neutrality in 1647, although many Swiss served privately as mercenaries in the Italian Wars and during the Early Modern period.
After the Swabian War of 1499 the confederacy was a de facto independent state throughout the early modern period, although still nominally part of the Holy Roman Empire until 1648 when the Treaty of Westphalia ended the Thirty Years' War. The Swiss Reformation divided the confederates into Reformed and Catholic parties, resulting in internal conflict from the 16th to the 18th centuries; as a result, the federal diet was often paralysed by hostility between the factions. The Swiss Confederacy fell to invasion by the French Revolutionary Army in 1798, after which it became the short-lived Helvetic Republic.

Name

The adjective "old" was introduced after the Napoleonic era with Ancien Régime of Switzerland, retronyms distinguishing the pre-Napoleonic from the restored confederation. During its existence the confederacy was known as Eidgenossenschaft or Eydtgnoschafft, in reference to treaties among cantons; this term was first used in the 1370 Pfaffenbrief. Territories of the confederacy came to be known collectively as Schweiz or Schweizerland, with the English :wikt:Switzerland|Switzerland beginning during the mid-16th century. From that time the Confederacy was seen as a single state, also known as the Swiss Republic after the fashion of calling individual urban cantons republics.

History

Foundation

The nucleus of the Old Swiss Confederacy was an alliance among the valley communities of the central Alps to facilitate management of common interests and ensure peace along trade routes through the mountains. The foundation of the Confederacy is marked by the Rütlischwur or the 1315 Pact of Brunnen.
Since 1889, the Federal Charter of 1291 among the rural communes of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden has been considered the founding document of the confederacy.

Expansion

The initial pact was augmented by pacts with the cities of Lucerne, Zürich, and Berne. This union of rural and urban communes, which enjoyed the status of imperial immediacy within the Holy Roman Empire, was engendered by pressure from Habsburg dukes and kings who had ruled much of the land. In several battles with Habsburg armies, the Swiss were victorious; they conquered the rural areas of Glarus and Zug, which became members of the confederacy.
From 1353 to 1481, the federation of eight cantons—known in German as the Acht Orte —consolidated its position. The members enlarged their territory at the expense of local counts—primarily by buying judicial rights, but sometimes by force. The Eidgenossenschaft, as a whole, expanded through military conquest: the Aargau was conquered in 1415 and the Thurgau in 1460. In both cases, the Swiss profited from weakness in the Habsburg dukes. In the south, Uri led a military territorial expansion that would by 1515 lead to the conquest of the Ticino.
None of these territories became members of the confederacy; they had the status of condominiums.
At this time, the eight cantons gradually increased their influence on neighbouring cities and regions through additional alliances. Individual cantons concluded pacts with Fribourg, Appenzell, Schaffhausen, the abbot and the city of St. Gallen, Biel, Rottweil, Mulhouse and others. These allies became closely associated with the confederacy, but were not accepted as full members.
The Burgundy Wars prompted a further enlargement of the confederacy; Fribourg and Solothurn were accepted in 1481. In the Swabian War against Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I, the Swiss were victorious and exempted from imperial legislation. The associated cities of Basel and Schaffhausen joined the confederacy as a result of that conflict, and Appenzell followed suit in 1513 as the thirteenth member. The federation of thirteen cantons constituted the Old Swiss Confederacy until its demise in 1798.
The expansion of the confederacy was stopped by the Swiss defeat in the 1515 Battle of Marignano. Only Berne and Fribourg were still able to conquer the Vaud in 1536; the latter primarily became part of the canton of Berne, with a small portion under the jurisdiction of Fribourg.

Reformation

The Reformation in Switzerland led to doctrinal division amongst the cantons. Zürich, Berne, Basel, Schaffhausen and associates Biel, Mulhouse, Neuchâtel, Geneva and the city of St. Gallen became Protestant; other members of the confederation and the Valais remained Catholic. In Glarus, Appenzell, in the Grisons and in most condominiums both religions coexisted; Appenzell split in 1597 into a Catholic Appenzell Inner Rhodes and a Protestant Appenzell Outer Rhodes.
The division led to civil war and separate alliances with foreign powers by the Catholic and Protestant factions, but the confederacy as a whole continued to exist. A common foreign policy was blocked, however, by the impasse. During the Thirty Years' War, religious disagreements among the cantons kept the confederacy neutral and spared it from belligerents. At the Peace of Westphalia, the Swiss delegation was granted formal recognition of the confederacy as a state independent of the Holy Roman Empire.

Early modern period

Growing social differences and an increasing absolutism in the city cantons during the Ancien Régime led to local popular revolts. An uprising during the post-war depression after the Thirty Years' War escalated to the Swiss peasant war of 1653 in Lucerne, Berne, Basel, Solothurn and the Aargau. The revolt was put down swiftly by force and with the help of many cantons.
Religious differences were accentuated by a growing economic discrepancy. The Catholic, predominantly rural central-Swiss cantons were surrounded by Protestant cantons with increasingly commercial economies. The politically dominant cantons were Zürich and Berne, but the Catholic cantons were influential since the Second War of Kappel in 1531. A 1655 attempt to restructure the federation was blocked by Catholic opposition, which led to the first battle of Villmergen in 1656; the Catholic party won, cementing the status quo. The problems remained unsolved, erupting again in 1712 with the second battle of Villmergen. This time the Protestant cantons won, dominating the confederation. True reform, however, was impossible; the individual interests of the thirteen members were too diverse, and the absolutist cantonal governments resisted all attempts at confederation-wide administration. Foreign policy remained fragmented.

Collapse

Attempting to gain control of key Alpine passes and establish a buffer against hostile monarchies, France first invaded associates of the Swiss Confederation; part of the bishopric of Basel was absorbed by France in 1793. In 1797, Napoleon annexed the Valtellina into the new Cisalpine Republic in northern Italy and invaded the southern remainder of the bishopric of Basel.
In 1798 the confederacy was invaded by the French Revolutionary Army at the invitation of the Republican faction in Vaud, led by Frédéric-César de La Harpe. Vaud was under Bernese control, but chafed under a government with a different language and culture. The ideals of the French Revolution found a receptive audience in Vaud, and when Vaud declared itself a republic the French had a pretext to invade the confederation.
The invasion was largely peaceful, and the collapse of the confederacy was due more to internal strife than external pressure. Only Bern put up an effective resistance, but after its defeat in the March Battle of Grauholz it capitulated. The canton of Bern was divided into the canton of Oberland and the canton of Léman.
The Helvetic Republic was proclaimed on 12 April 1798 as "one and indivisible", abolishing cantonal sovereignty and feudal rights and reducing the cantons to administrative districts. This system was unstable due to widespread opposition, and the Helvetic Republic collapsed as a result of the Stecklikrieg. A federalist compromise solution was attempted, but conflict between the federalist elite and republican subjects persisted until the formation of the federal state in 1848.

Structure

The Eidgenossenschaft was initially united not by a single pact, but by overlapping pacts and bilateral treaties between members. The parties generally agreed to preserve the peace, aid in military endeavours and arbitrate disputes. Slowly, the members began to see the confederation as a unifying entity. In the Pfaffenbrief, a treaty of 1370 among six of the eight members forbidding feuds and denying clerical courts jurisdiction over the confederacy, the cantons for the first time used the term Eidgenossenschaft. The first treaty uniting the eight members of the confederacy was the Sempacherbrief of 1393, concluded after victories over the Habsburgs at Sempach in 1386 and Näfels in 1388, which forbade a member from unilaterally beginning a war without the consent of the other cantons. A federal diet, the Tagsatzung, developed during the 15th century.
Pacts and renewals of earlier alliances reinforced the confederacy. The individual interests of the cantons clashed in the Old Zürich War, caused by territorial conflict among Zürich and the central Swiss cantons over the succession of the Count of Toggenburg. Although Zürich entered an alliance with the Habsburg dukes, it then rejoined the confederacy. The confederation had become so close a political alliance that it no longer tolerated separatist tendencies in its members.
The Tagsatzung was the confederation council, typically meeting several times a year. Each canton delegated two representatives. The canton where the delegates met initially chaired the gathering, but during the 16th century Zürich permanently assumed the chair and Baden became the seat. The Tagsatzung dealt with inter-cantonal affairs and was the court of last resort in disputes between member states, imposing sanctions on dissenting members. It also administered the condominiums; the reeves were delegated for two years, each time by a different canton.
A unifying treaty of the Old Swiss Confederacy was the Stanser Verkommnis of 1481. Conflicts between rural and urban cantons and disagreements over the bounty of the Burgundian Wars had led to skirmishes. The city-states of Fribourg and Solothurn wanted to join the confederacy, but were distrusted by the central Swiss rural cantons. The compromise by the Tagsatzung in the Stanser Verkommnis restored order and assuaged the rural cantons' complaints, with Fribourg and Solothurn accepted into the confederation. While the treaty restricted freedom of assembly, it reinforced agreements amongst the cantons in the earlier Sempacherbrief and Pfaffenbrief.
The civil war during the Reformation ended in a stalemate. The Catholic cantons could block council decisions but, due to geographic and economic factors, could not prevail over the Protestant cantons. Both factions began to hold separate councils, still meeting at a common Tagsatzung. The Catholic cantons were excluded from administering the condominiums in the Aargau, the Thurgau and the Rhine valley; in their place, Berne became co-sovereign of these regions.

List of territories

Cantons

The confederation expanded in several stages: first to the Eight Cantons, then in 1481 to ten, in 1501 to twelve, and finally to thirteen cantons.
were close allies of the Old Swiss Confederacy, connected to the union by alliance treaties with all or some of the individual members of the confederacy.

Closest associates

Three of the associates were known as Engere Zugewandte:
Two federations were known as Ewige Mitverbündete:
There were two Evangelische Zugewandte:
s were common subject territories under the administration of several cantons. They were governed by reeves delegated for two years, each time from another of the responsible cantons. Berne initially did not participate in the administration of some of the eastern condominiums, as it had no part in their conquest and its interests were focused more on the western border. In 1712, Berne replaced the Catholic cantons in the administration of the Freie Ämter, the Thurgau, the Rhine valley, and Sargans, and furthermore the Catholic cantons were excluded from the administration of the County of Baden.

German bailiwicks

The "German bailiwicks" were generally governed by the Acht Orte apart from Berne until 1712, when Bern joined the sovereign powers:
Several bailiwicks were generally referred to as "transmontane bailiwicks".
In 1440, Uri conquered the Leventina Valley from the Visconti, dukes of Milan. Some of this territory had previously been annexed between 1403 and 1422. Further territories were acquired in 1500; see History of Ticino for further details.
Three bailiwicks, all now in the Ticino, were condominiums of the Forest cantons of Uri, Schwyz and Nidwalden:
Four other Ticinese bailiwicks were condominiums of the Zwölf Orte from 1512:
Another three bailiwicks were condominiums of the Zwölf Orte from 1512, but were lost from the Confederacy three years later and are all now comuni of Lombardy:
Bern and Fribourg
Some territories were separate subjects of cantons or associates, Einzelörtische Untertanen von Länderorten und Zugewandten:

Uri