2 The Swiss and Their Neighbours, 1460–
European stage, and the period in which the Confederation is supposed to have
achieved a degree of institutional consolidation (analogous to, but distinct from,
the evolution of the Empire as a whole described by Peter Moraw).
Yet there is a tension running through many of the recent accounts. On the one
hand it is recognized that the Confederation was erected upon and sustained by a
network of leagues, alliances, and pacts of mutual assistance which had stamped
the medieval centuries within the German-speaking lands and beyond: the urban
leagues of Germany and Italy, the Hanseatic League of merchants, the nobles’ asso-
ciations in southern Germany, the Alsatian Decapolis, or the Swabian League of
1488 combining cities, princes, and then the emperor himself. These leagues form
a major theme of Peter Wilson’s new survey of the Empire spanning one thousand
years, Heart of Europe.5 On the other hand there have been attempts, not so much
to construct a spurious ‘modernity’ for Switzerland, as to emphasize parallels with
other composite polities elsewhere in Europe, especially by comparing Switzerland
and the Dutch United Provinces as early modern republics, whose republicanism
represented the transcendence or rejection of medieval monarchism.6 Whether
Dutch republicanism had much in common with the enclosure of the Swiss civic
patriciates, republican in name but aristocratic in practice (and culture), is, how-
ever, a theme not yet fully explored.
Within Switzerland itself historians have questioned how in the mid-sixteenth
century what was famously described as a ‘league of discordant members’ managed
to survive: where is the balance to be struck between political and institutional
achievements over against cultural and mental attitudes? In this regard, the flower-
ing of a heroic Swiss historiography contained in the chronicles of the later fifteenth
century, coupled with the increasing animosity between Swiss and Swabians (that
is, south Germans in general), must be weighed against the development of the
Confederal diet, in which the administration of the so-called common lordships,
ruled by the cantons collectively, took up much of its business.
It is here that the present essay begins. It presents two contrasting case-studies.
The first examines the common lordship of the Thurgau in Konstanz’s hinterland,
which the Swiss occupied in 1460. The Thurgau, far from serving as an exemplar
of political and administrative cooperation, became something of a legal night-
mare for the Swiss, poisoning relations between the cantons themselves, with the
city of Konstanz, and more broadly with the Habsburgs and their feudatories and
clients in southern Germany, whose jurisdictions and estates straddled the Rhine.
Though the Swiss (or Swabian) War of 1499 had its origins in remote conflicts over
sovereignty between the Austrian Habsburg Tirol and the prince-bishopric of
Chur, subsequently potentiated by Emperor Maximilian’s search for safe military
5 Peter H. Wilson, Heart of Europe: A History of the Holy Roman Empire (Cambridge, MA, 2016).
The original title of the British publication was The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe’s
History. See also Marquardt, Alte Eidgenossenschaft, 40, who points out that, although three such
leagues existed into the early modern period (Decapolis to 1678; Hanseatic League until 1669), only
the Helvetic Confederation survived after 1678.
6 André Holenstein, Thomas Maissen, and Maarten Prak (eds), The Republican Alternative: The
Netherlands and Switzerland Compared (Amsterdam, 2008).