| Old Swiss Confederacy Alte Eidgenossenschaft |
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| The Old Swiss Confederacy in the 18th century | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| Capital | see Vorort[1] | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Political structure | Confederation | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| Legislature | Tagsatzung | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| History | |||||||||||||||||||||||
| - Death of Rudolf I of Habsburg |
15 July 1291 |
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| - Rütlischwur, Burgenbruch |
1307/1291 (traditional dates) |
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| - Charles IV's Golden Bull |
1356 |
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| - Battle of Marignano | 13–14 September 1515 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| - Wars of Kappel | 1529 and 1531 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| - Formal independence from the Holy Roman Empire | 15 May / 24 October 1648 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
| - French invasion | 5 March 1798 | ||||||||||||||||||||||
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| History of Switzerland | |
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This article is part of a series |
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| Prehistory | |
| Roman era (200 BC–400) | |
| Alemannia · Burgundy (400–900) | |
| Swabia · Burgundy (900–1300) | |
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| Growth (1291–1516) | |
| Reformation (1516–1648) | |
| Ancien Régime (1648–1798) | |
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| Napoleonic era (1798–1814) | |
| Restoration (1814–1847) | |
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| Federal state (1848) | |
| World Wars (1914–1945) | |
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| Military history | |
| Historiography | |
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Switzerland Portal |
The Old Swiss Confederacy (Modern German: Alte Eidgenossenschaft; historically Eidgenossenschaft, after the Reformation also République des Suisses, Republica Helvetiorum "Republic of the Swiss") was the precursor of modern-day Switzerland.
It was a loose confederation of largely independent small states called cantons which formed during the 14th century. From a nucleus in what is now Central Switzerland, the confederacy expanded to include the cities of Zürich and Berne by the mid 14th-century, forming a rare union of rural and urban communes, all of which had the status of imperial immediacy within the Holy Roman Empire.
This confederation of eight cantons (Acht Orte) persisted for more than a century, enjoying great political and military successes, culminating in the Burgundy Wars in the 1470s, which established it as a power holding its own in the complicated political landscape dominated by France and the Habsburgs. These successes resulted in the accession of more confederates, increasing the number of cantons to thirteen by 1513 (Dreizehn Orte). The confederacy pledged neutrality in 1515, and again in 1647, under the threat of the Thirty Years' War, even though many Swiss served privately as mercenaries in the Italian Wars and throughout 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. However, the Swiss Reformation divided the confederates in a Reformed and a Catholic party, resulting in numerous internal conflicts during the 16th to 18th centuries, and as a result the federal diet or Tagsatzung was often paralyzed by hostilities between the two factions.
The Swiss Confederacy finally fell to the invasion by the French Revolutionary Army in 1798, after which it was transformed it into the short-lived Helvetic Republic.
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The specification "Old" was introduced in retrospect, after the end of the Napoleonic era, alongside the term Ancien Régime, a retronym distinguishing the pre-Napoleonic from the restored confederation. Contemporarily, the confederacy was simply known as Eidgenossenschaft (Eydtgnoschafft) or "oath fellowship" in reference to the treaties between the individual cantons. This term was first used in the Pfaffenbrief of 1370. The territories of the confederacy came to be referred to collectively as Schweiz or Schweizerland (in contemporary spelling Schwytzerland, whence English Switzerland) beginning in the mid-16th century. From that time, the Confederacy came to be seen as a single state, and was also called the Swiss Republic (Republic der Schweitzer, République des Suisses, Republica Helvetiorum, so by Josias Simmler 1576), after the fashion of styling individual urban cantons as Republics (Republic of Zürich. Republic of Berne, Republic of Basel).
The nucleus of the Old Swiss Confederacy was an alliance between the communities of the valleys in the Central Alps to facilitate the management of common interests such as free trade and to ensure the peace along the important trade routes through the mountains. Traditionally, the foundation of the Confederacy is marked by the Rütlischwur, dated to 1307 by Aegidius Tschudi, or by the Pact of Brunnen of 1315. Since 1889, the Federal Charter of 1291 among the rural communes of Uri, Schwyz, and Unterwalden been popularly considered the founding document of the confederacy.[2]
This initial pact was gradually augmented with additional pacts with the cities of Lucerne, Zürich, and Berne. This rare union of rural and urban communes, all of which had the status of imperial immediacy within the Holy Roman Empire, was caused by them all being under pressure by the Habsburg dukes and kings, who once had ruled much of these lands. In several battles against Habsburg armies, the Swiss remained victorious and even conquered the rural areas of Glarus and Zug, which subsequently became independent members of the confederacy.[2]
From 1353 to 1481, this federation of eight cantons, known in German as the Acht Orte (Eight Places), consolidated its position. The individual members, especially the cities, enlarged their territories at the cost of the local counts in the neighbourhood, mostly by buying the judicial rights, but sometimes also by force. The Eidgenossenschaft as a whole expanded through military conquests. The Aargau was conquered in 1415, the Thurgau in 1460. Both times, the Swiss profited from a weakness of the Habsburg dukes. In the south, Uri led a military territorial expansion that would—after many setbacks—by 1515 lead to the conquest of the Ticino. None of these territories became members of the confederacy, though; instead, they had a status as condominiums, regions administered commonly by several cantons.
At the same time, the eight cantons gradually increased their influence on neighbouring cities and regions through additional alliances. Not the Eidgenossenschaft as a whole, but several (or only one) individual cantons concluded pacts with Fribourg, Appenzell, Schaffhausen, the abbot and the city of St. Gallen, Biel, Rottweil, Mulhouse, and others. These allies, called the Zugewandte Orte, became closely associated to the confederacy, but were not accepted as full members.
The Burgundy Wars prompted a further enlargement of the union with new members. Fribourg and Solothurn were accepted into the confederacy in 1481. In the Swabian War against emperor Maximilian I, Holy Roman Emperor, the Swiss again remained victorious and were exempted from the imperial legislation. The previously associated cities of Basel and Schaffhausen joined the confederacy as a direct result of that conflict. Appenzell followed in 1513 as the 13th member. This federation of thirteen cantons (Dreizehn Orte) constituted the Old Swiss Confederacy until its demise in 1798.
The military expansion of the confederacy was stopped by the loss of the Swiss in the battle of Marignano in 1515. Only Berne and Fribourg were still able to conquer the Vaud in 1536, which mostly became part of the canton of Berne, with only a small part coming under the rule of Fribourg.
The Reformation in Switzerland led to a confessional division amongst the cantons.[2] Zürich, Berne, Basel, Schaffhausen, as well as the associates Biel, Mulhouse, Neuchâtel, Geneva, and the city of St. Gallen became Protestant, the 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 confessional division led to civil war — the wars of Kappel — and separate alliances with foreign powers of the Catholic and Protestant factions, but the confederacy as a whole continued to exist. A common foreign policy was blocked, though, by the stand-off of the two equally strong camps. In the Thirty Years' War, the deep religious disagreements among the cantons kept the confederacy neutral and spared it from all belligerent devastations. At the Peace of Westphalia, the Swiss delegation was granted formal recognition of the confederacy as an independent state, separate from the Holy Roman Empire.
Growing social differences and an increasing absolutism in the city cantons during the Ancien Régime of Switzerland led to various local popular revolts. Only the uprising in 1653, during the post-war depression after the Thirty Years' War, escalated to the general Swiss peasant war in the territories of Lucerne, Berne, Basel, Solothurn, and in the Aargau. The revolt was put down by force with the help of the other cantons.
The religious differences were increasingly accentuated by an ever-growing economic discrepancy. The Catholic and predominantly rural central Swiss cantons were surrounded by Protestant cantons with increasingly commercial economies. The politically dominant cantons were Zürich and Berne, both Protestant, but, in the common agencies of the confederation, the Catholic cantons had the upper hand since the second war of Kappel, in 1531. An attempt in 1655, led by Zürich, to restructure the federation was blocked by a Catholic opposition, which led to the first war of Villmergen in 1656, which the Catholic party won, cementing the status quo. But the problems remained unsolved and erupted again in 1712 in the second war of Villmergen. This time, the Protestant cantons won, and thenceforth dominated the federation. A true reform, however, was not possible: the individual interests of the thirteen members were too diverse and the absolutist cantonal governments resisted all attempts at centralisation or at introducing a federation-wide administration or a modern bureaucracy. The foreign politics remained fragmented.
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. The invasion proceeded largely peacefully, since the Swiss people failed to respond to the calls of their politicians to take up arms, and the collapse of the Confederacy was not so much due to external pressure than to the internal division between sovereign cantons and subject territories. The Helvetic Republic was proclaimed on 12 April 1798 as "one and indivisible", abolishing all cantonal sovereignty and feudal rights, reducing the cantons to the status of mere administrative districts. But this system was unstable, as there was federalist opposition not only among the urban elite but also in the rural cantons, and the government of the Helvetic Republic soon collapsed in its turn as a result of the Stecklikrieg. A federalist compromise solution was attempted, but the latent conflict between federalist elites and republican subjects persisted until the formation of the modern federal state in 1848.
Initially, the Eidgenossenschaft was not united by one single pact, but rather by a whole set of overlapping pacts and separate bilateral treaties between various members, with only minimum liabilities.[3] The parties generally agreed to preserve the peace in their territories, help each other in military endeavours, and defined some arbitration in case of disputes. Only slowly did the members begin to understand the federation itself as a unifying entity. In the Pfaffenbrief, a treaty of 1370 among six of the eight members (Glarus and Berne did not participate) that forbade feuds and that denied clerical courts any jurisdiction over the confederacy, the cantons referred for the first time to themselves using the singular term Eidgenossenschaft. The first treaty uniting all of the then eight members of the confederacy became the Sempacherbrief of 1393. This treaty was concluded after the important victories over the Habsburgs at Sempach and Näfels (1386 and 1388) and declared that no member was to unilaterally begin a war without the consent of the other cantons. Subsequently, a kind of federal diet, the Tagsatzung, developed in the 15th century.
Other pacts and renewals or modernizations of earlier alliances between some of the members reinforced the confederacy. Yet the individual interests of the cantons clashed in the Old Zürich War (1436 – 1450), which was caused by a territorial conflict among Zürich and the central Swiss cantons over the succession of the Count of Toggenburg. Zürich even entered an alliance with the Habsburg dukes, but finally re-joined the confederacy. The confederation had grown into a political alliance so close that it no longer tolerated separatist tendencies of its members.
The Tagsatzung served as the council of the confederation and typically met several times a year. Each canton delegated two representatives; including the associate states, who, however, had no vote. Initially, the canton where the delegates met chaired the gathering, but in the 16th century, Zürich permanently assumed the chair (Vorort), and Baden became the sessional seat. The Tagsatzung dealt with all inter-cantonal affairs and also served as the final arbitral court to settle disputes between member states, or to decide on sanctions against dissenting members. It also organized and oversaw the administration of the condominiums; the reeves were delegated for two years, each time by a different canton.[4]
An important unifying treaty of the Old Swiss Confederacy was the Stanser Verkommnis of 1481. Conflicts between the rural and the urban cantons and disagreements about the repartition of the bounty of the Burgundian Wars had led to several skirmishes. The city states of Fribourg and Solothurn wanted to join the confederacy, but were met with distrust by the central Swiss rural cantons. The compromise of the Tagsatzung in the Stanser Verkommnis restored order and accounted for the rural cantons' complaints; Fribourg and Solothurn were accepted into the federation. While the treaty also restricted the freedom of assembly (many skirmishes were caused by unauthorised expeditions of groups of soldiers from the Burgundian Wars), it also reinforced the agreements amongst the cantons of the earlier Sempacherbrief and Pfaffenbrief.
The civil war during the Reformation brought about a stalemate. The victorious Catholic cantons could block any decisions of the council, but due to their geographic and economic situation could not overcome the Protestant cantons. Both factions began to hold separate councils, but still met at a common Tagsatzung, even though this common council remained effectively blocked by the disagreements of the two factions until 1712, when the Protestant cantons reversed the situation after their victory in the second war of Villmergen. The Catholic cantons were excluded from the administration of the condominiums in the Aargau, the Thurgau, and the Rhine valley; in their place, Berne became a co-sovereign of these regions.
The confederation expanded in several stages: first to the Eight Cantons (Acht Orte), then in 1481 to ten, in 1501 to twelve, and finally to thirteen cantons (Dreizehn Orte).[5]
Associates (Zugewandte Orte) 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.
Three of the associates were known as Engere Zugewandte:
Two federations were known as Ewige Mitverbündete:
There were two Evangelische Zugewandte:
Condominiums (German: Gemeine Herrschaften) were common subject territories under the administration of several cantons. They were governed by reeves (Vögte) 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 ("Free Districts"), the Thurgau, the Rhine valley, and Sargans, and furthermore the Catholic cantons were excluded from the administration of the County of Baden.[3]
The "German bailiwicks" (German: Deutsche Gemeine Vogteien, Gemeine Herrschaften) were generally governed by the Acht Orte apart from Berne until 1712, when Berne joined the sovereign powers:
Several bailiwicks (Vogteien) were generally referred to as "transmontane bailiwicks" (German: Ennetbergische Vogteien, Italian: Baliaggi Ultramontani). 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 (the original 13 cantons, minus Appenzell) 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:
Some territories were separate subjects of cantons or associates, Einzelörtische Untertanen von Länderorten und Zugewandten: