The Dufour affairs had revealed how intimate a knowledge of Savoy’s difficulties
and the machinations of Duke Charles the elite of Fribourg possessed. In particular,
the council was aware of Charles’s designs upon Geneva, given the close familial
and commercial contacts between the two cities to which we have already alluded.
Even before Dufour perpetrated his fraud a leading syndic of Geneva, Pierre
Lévrier, father of the more famous Amé (whom we shall shortly encounter), was
organizing resistance to Charles’s interference in Geneva’s affairs. It was just as well
that Lévrier had earlier acquired citizenship in Fribourg, for after his arrest it was
only pressure from the Fribourg authorities which secured his release.279
Then, in 1513, half a dozen prominent Genevans, including Besançon Hugues
and Philibert Berthelier, who were at odds with the bishop, Jean de Savoie, followed
suit by taking out burgher’s rights in Fribourg. Berthelier himself was forced to flee
to Fribourg in 1517 in the wake of further arrests, only returning to his home city
when armed with a safe-conduct. Berthelier then persuaded another eighty-six
Genevans to acquire citizenship in Fribourg.280 These men became the nucleus of
the Eidguenot (i.e. Eidgenossen), or pro-Swiss, faction in Geneva, whose formation
culminated in the conclusion of a Burgrecht between the two cities in February 1519.
On his return to Geneva Berthelier was acquitted of sedition by the city syndics
but rearrested on the orders of the Savoy justiciar (vidomne) and executed.281 The
stage was set for a decade of increasingly bitter confrontation between Fribourg
and Savoy, in which Bern played a subordinate and restraining role.
Yet, familial and commercial ties apart, neither Fribourg nor Bern were obvi-
ous allies of Geneva. The latter had dragged its feet over paying the ‘ransom’
imposed on it by the Swiss after the Burgundian Wars. It is true that alongside
the Burgrecht which Duke Philibert had renewed with Bern and Fribourg in 1477
the city of Geneva and its bishop, Jean Louis de Savoie, also concluded a Burgrecht
with the two cities.282 But this was pure opportunism, born of the recognition
that the military might of the Swiss was the best insurance policy to preserve the
279 Henri Naef, Fribourg au secours de Genève 1525–1526 (Fribourg, 1927), 20–1. Lévrier was the
bishop of Geneva’s procurator-fiscal.
280 RCG, vol. VIII, ed. Théophile Dufour, Émile Rivoire, and Léon Gautier (Geneva, 1922), 290 n 1,
gives a list of the admissions to citizenship: 6 in 1513 (including Hugues and Berthelier) and as many
as 98 (including Geneva’s chronicler François de Bonivard) in 1519.
281 Naef, Fribourg, 21–3.
282 EA II, 707–8 (no. 920: 1; 2) (Nov. 1477). After the bishop’s death in 1482 his successor did not
renew this Burgrecht. Caesar, Pouvoir, 73.
20
Savoy Strikes Back