➔ 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 Concise History of Switzerland: Why I'm Reading This Book
I picked up this book because Switzerland confused me.
Tiny country in the middle of Europe. No coastline. Multiple languages. Surrounded by big powers that fought each other for centuries. Yet somehow Switzerland stayed neutral, stayed stable, and got really wealthy. None of that made sense to me.
I kept hearing about Swiss neutrality, Swiss banks, Swiss watches, Swiss chocolate. Nobody ever explained how any of it came together though. How do you build a country where four language groups actually get along? How does direct democracy work at scale? Why did nobody conquer them?