Bern’s reluctance to offer Geneva any practical support—a policy from which the
city’s magistrates did not deviate until late 1535—has largely been disregarded by
those historians who have assumed that Bern’s eagerness to see Reformed doctrines
prevail in Geneva overrode considerations of diplomatic caution or military cost.
In fact, the Bernese council found itself caught between religion and politics. It was
committed to the triumph of Reform in Geneva—any hesitancy came largely from
within the ranks of the Genevan elite itself555—but it had to bear wider geopolitical
implications in mind. The Bernese council had less room for manoeuvre than
traditional historiography has assumed.
Leonhard von Muralt believed that Bern had a palpable interest in the Vaud,
based on a conscious attempt to revive the dukes of Zähringen’s strategic network
of fortresses in the Vaud plateau with Bern at its centre which they had constructed
three centuries earlier.556 However fanciful such a notion, Geneva, one hundred
miles distant, clearly lay outwith that radius and stretched Bern’s lines of commu-
nication and defence to the limit,557 a fact which the rapid conquest of the Vaud
in 1536 and the onward march into the western Chablais must not be allowed to
disguise. Although Bern was relatively sheltered in comparison with the eastern
Reformed cities from reprisals by the Catholic cantons, the earlier revolt in the
Bernese Oberland, which was abetted by Unterwalden, was a reminder of the
precarious balance of confessional allegiance within the Confederation. Bern had
every reason to take seriously rumours in March 1535 that an imperial army was
mustering in Piedmont with the aim of capturing Geneva before subjugating
the other Reformed cities—Bern, Zürich, and Konstanz. In those circumstances
Geneva had to recognize that Bern’s first priority was to look to its own defence
before Geneva’s.558
Nor could Bern afford to snub those allies with whom it had long-standing
Burgrechte, namely Fribourg and Solothurn, even if the latter had chosen to remain
Catholic. In January 1534, even before the formal severance of ties with Geneva,
Fribourg and Solothurn had entered into an alliance with the Catholic cantons
555 Monter, Calvin’s Geneva, 53–4; Monter, ‘De l’Évêché’, 134.
556 Von Muralt, ‘Berns westliche Politik‘, 90.
557 As late as 27 December 1535, when war could no longer be avoided, Bern was still complaining
to its administrative districts (Ämter) about unpaid war costs and that a new war would be too costly!
SABE, Teutsche Missiven-Buch 24 W, pp. 104–6 (27 Dec. 1535). By the 1530s it can hardly be
argued that Bern’s commercial ties to Geneva were of decisive importance, given both the decline of
the Genevan fairs and the enfeebled condition of Geneva’s economy, racked by blockades.
558 EA IV, 1c, 479–80 (no. 260: 3, 1) (March 1535).