Creating the Swiss Confederacy: From Forest Cantons to European Power
Retelling of Chapter 2 from A Concise History of Switzerland by Clive H. Church and Randolph C. Head (Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-521-14382-0). If you find this interesting, grab the book. Well worth reading.
The setup
Around 1400, the Swiss Confederacy was still a loose collection of rural and urban communes. Some mutual defense pacts. A few battle victories. Nobody in Europe took them seriously as a political force.
A hundred years later, around 1500, this same group was negotiating treaties with Habsburg Emperors and French kings. They controlled territory from Lake Geneva to Lake Constance. They had one of the most feared infantry forces in Europe.
How? Short answer: wars, opportunism, and a lot of angry peasants with pikes.
Peasants who refused to stay peasants
The chapter starts with the Appenzell wars of 1403 to 1409. A new abbot tried to squeeze more money out of his peasant subjects. The peasants said no. They destroyed their bailiff’s castle, allied with Schwyz, and started winning battles against Habsburg forces. Other peasants in the region caught on fast. As one report from the time put it: “All the peasants would gladly be Appenzellers.”
Not a one-off thing either. In the upper Rhone valley, mountain communities kicked out regional lords. In the Grisons, communal alliances formed their own separate confederacy. Noble power was weak around 1400, and organized rural communities filled the vacuum.
One important detail the authors stress: these were not poor uneducated rebels. The leaders were local elites with connections to the existing system. They got their legitimacy from their communes, not from aristocratic titles.
Seizing the Aargau and building institutions
In 1415, the Swiss got a huge opportunity. Emperor Sigismund needed to punish a Habsburg duke, so he invited the duke’s enemies to grab his lands. Berne had been eyeing the Aargau region for years. They moved fast. The other Swiss cantons followed.
Big deal for two reasons. First, it closed the territorial gap between Berne and the eastern cantons, pulling the whole Confederacy closer together. Second, the Aargau became a shared subject territory, not a new member. The cantons had to figure out how to govern it jointly. They started meeting regularly in Baden to manage accounts and appointments. This became the Swiss Diet, the Tagsatzung. Unlike other European parliaments based on clergy, nobility, and commoners, this one was based on corporate states sending delegates with instructions from home.
A practical administrative problem accidentally produced their first real shared institution.
The Old Zurich War nearly destroyed everything
The 1436 to 1450 period was rough. When the last Count of Toggenburg died without an heir, Zurich and Schwyz both wanted his lands. Berne sided with Schwyz in arbitration. Zurich felt cornered and made a deal with the Habsburg Emperor: Zurich would get Toggenburg lands, and in exchange, the Habsburgs would get the Aargau back.
The other Swiss cantons saw this as straight-up betrayal. Years of fighting followed. The French even sent mercenaries. About 1,500 Swiss troops from Berne and Solothurn were nearly wiped out outside Basel in 1444. Brutal.
Eventually, exhaustion and Berne’s mediation brought peace. The key outcome: the Confederacy now had priority over any individual canton’s right to make separate alliances. Old alliance documents were even reissued with clauses protecting Habsburg authority quietly removed. The originals were destroyed. A loose network had become a binding partnership.
Burgundian Wars and the price of victory
The 1470s brought the Burgundian Wars. Duke Charles the Bold was trying to build a kingdom between France and the Empire. Berne was directly in his path. Through a complicated web of alliances (the Habsburgs and French both pushed the Swiss toward war with Burgundy), three major battles at Grandson, Murten, and Nancy destroyed Charles and his army.
At Murten, Charles lost 9,000 men against just a few hundred Swiss losses. At Nancy, he lost his life. Swiss military reputation became terrifying overnight.
Victory created problems though. Money from foreign powers flowed in, mostly to political insiders. Ex-soldiers from rural cantons marched on Geneva demanding unpaid wages. Social tensions between urban elites and rural populations grew sharp. Rich got richer. Poor got angrier.
The Stanser Verkommnis of 1481, brokered by the hermit Niklaus von Flue, patched things up. Fribourg and Solothurn joined the Confederacy. Unauthorized assemblies were banned. Each canton’s government got more authority over its own people. A compromise, not a solution.
Mercenaries, Italy, and the end of invincibility
After 1494, the Italian Wars turned Swiss mercenaries into Europe’s hottest military commodity. Thousands of young men went south, pushed by land scarcity at home and pulled by good pay. Swiss troops won battle after battle. For a moment, it looked like Milan itself might become a Swiss tributary.
Then came Marignano in 1515. French artillery tore through massed Swiss infantry. Nearly half the Swiss on the field died. Swiss battlefield dominance was over.
Swiss manpower was still valuable though. By 1521, the Confederacy had signed a lasting mercenary treaty with France. The French got up to 16,000 infantrymen. The Swiss got annual pensions, trade privileges, and access to French salt markets. A permanent peace with the Habsburgs followed.
Meanwhile, the William Tell story was being written down and printed for the first time. A mythology of noble peasants fighting tyrannical lords became the foundation of Swiss political identity. As Machiavelli noted: “The Swiss are most armed, and thus most free.”
By 1520, the Confederacy had 13 cantons, shared institutions, a European reputation, and growing social tensions. It was about to face something nobody expected: the Reformation.
This post is part of a series retelling A Concise History of Switzerland by Clive H. Church and Randolph C. Head, Cambridge University Press, 2013, ISBN 978-0-521-14382-0.